Johnson-Forest Tendency internal bulletin

The Johnson-Forest Tendency was a Marxist-Humanist tendency, first of the Workers Party and then of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) founded by C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya. In the late 1930s, a minority faction of the SWP began to reject Trotsky’s definition of the Soviet Union as a “degenerated workers’ state” which warranted “unconditional defense” from Soviet-sympathizing organizations. In 1940, James and Dunayevskaya left the SWP with other members of the minority faction led by Max Shachtman to form the Workers Party. The majority in the Workers Party, led by Shachtman, believed that the class structure of the Soviet Union could be characterized by “bureaucratic collectivism,” whereas a minority led by James and Dunayevskaya, along with Grace Lee Boggs, believed the Soviet Union was capitalist. This dissenting view led the minority to rejoin the SWP in 1947, where the tendency maintained its minority identity by advocating for an emphasis on Marxism within the Trotskyist SWP. The tendency remained in the SWP until 1950 when it left to establish its own organization called Correspondence. The Johnson-Forest Tendency was named after C.L.R. James’s pseudonym, J.R. Johnson, and Raya Dunayevskaya’s pseudonym, Freddie Forest.

Bibliography:

Goldner, L. (2004). Introduction to the Johnson-Forest Tendency and the Background to “Facing Reality.” Break Their Haughty Power. https://web.archive.org/web/20041201071446/http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/johnson.html

The “Johnson-Forest Tendency.” Marxist Humanism and the “New Left”, Marxist Internet Archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20040823044508/http://marx.org/subject/humanism/index.htm