Operation Hugo Oehler

This is another comment of mine on Hugo Oehler and the Oehlerites, originally published at another forum. 

“Fighting Worker” was a leftist journal published in Chicago during the 1930´s and 1940´s. It described itself as the “Central Organ of the Revolutionary Workers League, U.S. (affiliated to the Provisional International Contact Commission for a New Communist (4^th) International”. The RWL was the result of a split within the American Trotskyist movement. Its central leader, Hugo Oehler, had rejected Trotsky´s “French turn”, a tactical maneuver under which Trotskyists were expected to (temporary) join the Social Democratic parties to recruit new supporters. Since Trotskyists tend to take everything Trotsky said or did as holy gospel, all Trotskyist group habitually denounce the “Oehlerite sectarians” to this very day, the same way certain Christians condemn the depravity of the Jebusites. This is richly ironic, since many contemporary Trotskyist groups are just as sectarian as the Oehlerites (or even more so). That being said, I can´t say I particularly *like* the Oehlerites.

This issue of “Fighting Worker” was published in September 1941. Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, had started but the United States had not yet entered the war. The RWL, while condemning both the Western Allies and the Axis powers, did defend the Soviet Union (despite their political opposition to Stalin and Stalinism). This led the RWL into a number of embarrassing contradictions, such as support for the Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland (despite its obvious coordination with the Nazi invasion of Western Poland). They also supported the Soviet occupation of Iran, despite the fact that it was carried out together with the British!

RWL´s positions on Western aid to the Soviet Union is even more muddled, on the one hand condemning it as “counter-revolutionary”, on the other hand admitting that the Soviets can´t stop the Nazis without such aid (one of the reasons why the Soviets intervened in Iran was to secure a gateway for Western aid).

I admit that my wryer side found this amusing…

The rest of the magazine deals with labor and African-American struggles, for which I do have more sympathy. Nobody seems to know exactly when the RWL dissolved, but the last issue of “Fighting Worker” I´ve found on the web was dated 1950. According to rumor, Hugo Oehler later became a conspiracy theorist obsessed by the JFK assassination, which he claimed to have solved, but unfortunately I don´t know who he thought was responsible…

For a more positive appraisal of the RWL, see the book “Unrepentant Radical” by Sid Lens, an ex-Oehlerite.