he Johnson-Forest Tendency

One important moment of recognition of the reality of autonomy is to be found in the work of the so-called Johnson-Forest Tendency, which arose within the Trotskyist movement in the 1940s and then split from it in 1950. (90) The Johnson-Forest Tendency took its name from the pseudonyms J. R. Johnson and F. Forest taken by C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, respectively, during that period. The struggle by those in the Tendency for the recognition of workers' self-activity and against the Leninist party concepts of What Is to Be Done? took place on many levels. A black from Trinidad, James seems to have come to his position through his participation in, or ties to, a variety of workers' struggles, for example, the independence movement in Trinidad and the struggles of American blacks in the South and in the auto factories of Detroit. From the late 1930s on, he argued for the recognition of the vitality and importance of the independence of black struggles in the United States and against any attempt to subsume them within a leftist party. Indeed, by the late 1940s, James argued that black workers constituted "the vanguard of the workers' struggles" in the auto industry and elsewhere. (91)

However, the recognition of autonomy by those in the Tendency went beyond that of black workers. They also recognized the autonomy of the working class itself, from capital and from its "official" organizations: the Party and the unions. This stands out clearly in their treatment of developments in the United States and in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s. During the 1940s both James and Dunayevskaya carried out intensive studies of the nature of the system in the Soviet Union and its relation to Western capitalism as part of their attempts to understand that period of class struggle and the meaning of World War II. As their analysis proceeded, they came into increasing conflict with the orthodox Trotskyist analysis of the situation in the United States and of the USSR as a "degenerate workers' state," as well as with the conceptions of correct political directions these analyses implied. In a series of articles, pamphlets, and statements, they set out their own positions on these issues. Perhaps the most important of the documents of this period, because it was the culminating one, was State Capitalism and World Revolution, which seems to have been written primarily by C. L. R. James and submitted to the 1950 Convention of the Socialist Workers party. (92) It was shortly after this convention that the Tendency officially split away to reconstitute itself in 1951 as the Correspondence Publishing Committee.

In State Capitalism and World Revolution, James analyzed the mode of production in the United States and argued that the rise of Taylorism and Fordism heralded a new phase in the class struggle. Like those of the Frankfurt School, though without any direct connection that I can find, he saw that the new technologies constituted new methods of domination. Unlike them, he also saw workers' power and he was well aware of the fundamental importance of this recognition.

Taylorism, he argued, had moved from a pre-World War I phase of experimental application to become a "social system" wherein the factory is "laid out for continuous flow of production, and advanced planning for production, operating and control." (93) And then Fordism, between 1924 and 1928, added a further "rationalization of production" associated with "the constantly growing subdivision of labor, decrease in the need of skills, and determination of the sequence of operations and speed by the machine." (94) This new organization of production provided the ground of modern totalitarianism not only in the United States but also in Germany and the Soviet Union. "Ford's regime before unionization," he wrote, "is the prototype of production relations in fascist Germany and Stalinist Russia." (95) But where James and the Johnson-Forest Tendency differed radically from others who also saw domination was in their equal insistence on the power of workers to oppose these new forms: "But -- and without this, all Marxism is lost -- inextricably intertwined with the totalitarian tendency is the response of the working class. A whole new layer of workers, the result of economic development, burst into revolt in the CIO." (96)

When he then analyzed the subsequent period, in which the union bureaucracies were turned against the workers and transformed "into an instrument of capitalist production," he again saw more than simple domination. He saw instead autonomous rank-and-file revolt against both speedup and the union: "But along with this intensification of capitalist production and this binding of the worker for five years [with the contract] must go inevitably the increase of revolt, wildcat strikes . . . That is precisely why the bureaucracy, after vainly trying to stop wildcat strikes by prohibiting them in the contract, has now taken up itself the task of repressing by force this interruption of production." (97)

The critique of the Soviet Union by James and Dunayevskaya was also similar to that of the Frankfurt School. They argued that the Soviet Union was state-capitalist and basically only a variation in the present historical phase of capitalist development. (98) "The Stalinist bureaucracy," James wrote, "is the American bureaucracy carried to its ultimate and logical conclusion, both of them products of capitalist production in the epoch of state-capitalism." (99) As with Friedrich Pollock's work, this conclusion was based on a study of the organization of production in the Soviet Union. James traced the pattern of introduction of unpaid labor, piecework, and the Taylor system. But, despite the Stalinist success and the defeats of workers in this period, he argued that they were only temporary and that workers would once again gain the initiative. The organization of that initiative would not come, in his view, through traditional Leninist organizations. "The proletariat," he wrote, "always breaks up the old organization by impulse, a leap. . . . The new organization, the new organism will begin with spontaneity, i.e., free creative activity, as its necessity," (100) Moreover, as workers develop new forms of "disciplined spontaneity," he argued, it would mean the destruction of the Communist parties which had become agents of capital. When revolt did break out in 1956, James supported the Hungarian workers' councils against Soviet intervention. As long as the Johnson-Forest Tendency remained a faction of the Trotskyist movement, there were limitations on the clarity with which their rejection of the old formulas of organization cold be set out. Once they split, however, they addressed this question very clearly indeed. In the Preface to the second edition (1956) of State Capitalism and World Revolution, the attack on Leninism was direct: "The political conclusions of this economic analysis can be summed up in its total repudiation of the theory and practice of the Leninist theory of the Vanguard Party for our era." (101)

As to the nature of new organizational forms which would be appropriate to the new era, James and those holding similar positions looked to the workers' movements themselves:

The great organizations of the masses of the people and of workers in the past were not worked out by any theoretical elite or vanguard. They arose from the experience of millions of people and their need to overcome the intolerable pressures which society had imposed upon them for generations. [. . .] the new organizations will come as Lilburne's Leveller Party came, as the sections and popular societies of Paris in 1793, as the Commune in 1871 and the Soviets in 1905, with not a single soul having any concrete ideas about them until they appeared in all their power and glory. But once we have a clear historical perspective we can see outlines of the future in the rising in Eastern Germany in 1953, the great strike in Nantes in 1955, the general strike against Reuther of the UAW [. . .] the incredible 10 year struggle of the British dockers, and now, as we write, the Coventry workers. [. . .] All these struggles, varied as they are in scope and significance, have this in common, that they all embody formations and activity which over-ride, bypass or consciously aim at substituting new social forms for the traditional workers' organizations. However high they soar they build upon shop floor organizations and action on the job. (My emphasis) (102)

This emphasis on the initiative of workers at the base, of the rank-and-file, grew out of studies of and contacts with factory workers by those in the Johnson-Forest Tendency and then in the Correspondence Publishing Committee and was the hallmark of the political tendency they represented. From this point of view, perhaps the most important of their publications were those which presented and analyzed struggles of rank-and-file workers against both management and unions. These included such essays as The American Worker (1947) dealing with daily struggles in an automobile plant, Punching Out (1952) on factory life, and Union Committeemen and Wild Cat Strikes (1955) on the 1955 wildcats in auto and the role of radical union committeemen. (103) Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, they kept alive the politics of workers' self-activity through study, writing, and active intervention into workers' struggles. (104)