Unfinished Leninism

Proyect tells a story from the late 1960s of his discussion with an older veteran of the Trotskyist movement when both were members of the SWP. After a Maoist friend had challenged him, the young recruit asked what the SWP’s program was. The old-timer “waved his hand in the direction of our bookstore and replied, ‘It’s all there.’” It is interesting to consider Proyect’s interpretation of this—that it “meant having positions on everything from WWII to Kronstadt. Becoming a ‘cadre’ meant learning the positions embodied in over a hundred pamphlets and books and defending them in public.” This was, in fact, the conception of many (not all) comrades of that time—but there is another, quite different way of understanding the old comrade’s comment.

It is not the case that SWP bookstores were simply stocked with pamphlets and books outlining positions on everything from the Second World War to the Kronstadt uprising of 1921. Rather, they contained a rich array of material—accounts of labor struggles, antiracist struggles, women’s liberation struggles, the history of the revolutionary movement, writings by Marx and Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher, Ernest Mandel, Che Guevara, Malcolm X (in some cases, also Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett, Sheila Rowbotham), as well as some of the most creative thinkers in the SWP—not simply James P. Cannon (worth reading despite the criticisms made of him), but people like George Breitman and Joseph Hansen who developed insights and innovative formulations incompatible with any closed “orthodoxy.