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The Bulletin in Defense of Marxism (BIDOM) began publication in December 1983, and for most of its existence was published eleven times a year – monthly, with July-August being a double issue. By the end of 1994, the magazine’s publication schedule shifted, increasingly, to a bi-monthly schedule, terminating with issue 142, July-August 1998. At that point it transitioned to a publication called Labor Standard (which was soon produced entirely online, going out of existence in 2019). BIDOM reflected a revolutionary Marxist orientation derived from what had been the mainstream of the US Trotskyist movement headed by James P. Cannon, which for many years had been represented by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). For most of its existence, it was associated with an organization called the Fourth Internationalist Tendency (for more on this group, see essays by Paul Le Blanc and Steve Bloom that can be found, with related materials, at https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/fit.htm).
Origins, Structure and “Who We Are”
It was Frank Lovell, former SWP trade union director, who initiated and originally oversaw the publication of BIDOM, describing it as a publication of expelled members of the Socialist Workers Party. This was done in consultation with George Breitman, a working-class intellectual who oversaw the editing and publication of the writings of Leon Trotsky and was well-known for helping publicize the speeches and ideas of Malcolm X. Later in 1984, after these expelled members formally cohered into the Fourth Internationalist Tendency (FIT), it became a publication of that small organization, produced by a small editorial committee answerable to the FIT. (More on the political background is offered in a post script below, but especially see Steve Bloom’s discussion in his introductory comments for this collection of the issues of Bulletin in Defense of Marxism.)
The 1980s were part of an era before the proliferation of a global computer culture. Hence, this editorial committee – which soon consisted of members living in various parts of the United States – was in ongoing communication through regular mail, telephone calls. Soon the use of frequent conference calls and fax machines, enhanced the possibility of a truly collective and democratic process in thinking through and producing BIDOM. For much of the time, from 1984 to 1992, Steve Bloom played a key role in helping to coordinate its work, though with increasing backup from others.
From December 1992 until July-August 1994, after the dissolution of the FIT, Paul Le Blanc served as BIDOM’s managing editor, functioning as part of a still active and vibrant editorial committee. From September 1994 onward, the managing editorship was shared by George Saunders (whose actual last name was Shriver) and Tom Barrett (whose actual last name was Bias), and the editorial committee increasingly assumed a less active, more consultative role. Tom was a typographical worker who not only served on BIDOM’s editorial board for many years, but also typeset its many hundreds of articles and oversaw the magazine’s design; a dedicated trade union activist, he had a keen understanding of U.S. working-class realities, international affairs, and more. George was an internationally renowned translator, who helped make accessible for millions of English-language readers the works of Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, Roy Medvedev, Rosa Luxemburg, and others.
For most of its existence, BIDOM carried a “Who We Are” statement on its inside front cover, providing a brief description of what BIDOM was, how it saw itself, what it sought to accomplish. A key element of that statement was, initially, a commitment to winning the Socialist Workers Party back to a revolutionary Marxist perspective, associated with the Fourth International that had been established by Leon Trotsky and others in 1938. (There have, since the 1950s, been a proliferation of groups claiming to be or claiming to favor a Fourth International – but BIDOM, the FIT, and the SWP up to the 1980s, identified with the largest and longest-lasting of these, associated with Ernest Mandel, Livio Maitan, and others.)
When the SWP announced in 1990 that it had formally broken from the Fourth International, the magazine’s purpose shifted to reunifying Fourth Internationalists in the United States, who existed in different groups. After various negotiations, in 1992 the FIT decided to dissolve (with a majority of its members joining an organization called Solidarity, containing an amorphous FI Caucus), with BIDOM continuing to exist – in large measure – to press for the unity of all Fourth Internationalists in the United States.
The hoped-for Fourth Internationalist unity never came to pass, and a majority of FIT members who joined Solidarity did not remain in that organization for long (although some did continue to identify with and support BIDOM). But what seemed a promising development was taking place in the labor movement in the early-to-mid-1990s – the impressive growth of Labor Party Advocates, which involved thousands of trade union militants, including the leaderships of several unions, who favored the development of a Labor Party, under the slogan “the bosses have two political parties – we need one of our own.” Believing that this could provide a context within which revolutionary Marxism could have powerful relevance, those still around BIDOM emphasized as their central goal building the Labor Party. Soon after, Bulletin in Defense of Marxism renamed itself Labor Standard. When it became clear that, for a variety of reasons, such a Labor Party would not actually be coming into being, the magazine lost its sense of animating purpose.
A Vibrant Content
Included in the “Who We Are” statement were these words: “We have dedicated this journal to the process of clarifying the program and theory of revolutionary Marxism – of discussing its application to the class struggle both internationally and here in the United States. … In addition, our members are involved in the class struggle.” What this added up to is that for fifteen tumultuous years, in the pages duplicated here, we find a few dozen people engaging with, reporting on, reflecting over, and analyzing what is happening around them. The result is an incredibly rich and multifaceted sense of a considerable amount of history.
We find here a vibrant writers’ collective in which all members of the FIT plus many who are not are encouraged to participate. It spreads across the country and the world, involving people of more than one gender and sexual orientation, with various educational levels (with high levels of self-education), intergenerational, multiracial – taken together, an entity that is abundantly experienced and highly cultured. They are overwhelmingly of the working class – blue-collar industrial workers, white-collar service employees, some retired, some marginally employed, with many different skill levels. The internal culture of this collective causes facilitates working together and learning from each other (learning, as well, from the realities around them), placing a high premium on making up one’s own mind rather than simply following along, at the same time animated by shared reference-points, and by a sense of common purpose and hope for the future.
Whether one finds the various articles here to be persuasive or satisfactory, they tend to be informative, interesting, challenging, and useful as one seeks to make sense of the realities of 1983-1998, as well as large swathes of earlier history.
There is serious attention, of course, to labor struggles – in many cases involving first-hand knowledge from those laboring, organizing, and struggling, at the workplace but also in the community and in the larger society. It has become a commonplace in some left circles to emphasize the evaporation of working-class consciousness and struggles in the 1980s and 1990s, and while there is some truth to this, it is hardly the entire truth. One finds here in-depth reports and analyses, and often first-hand accounts, that give a sense of the countervailing currents of radical ferment within the U.S. working class. These came from people who knew something about it, including Frank Lovell, Dave Riehle, Bill Onasch, Melanie Benson, Jerry Gordon, Tom Barrett, as well as several who needed to use such pen-names as David Williams, Richard Scully, and Charles Walker.
Another distinctive feature is the ongoing and intensive consideration of the realities, and the struggle against those realities, of all forms of oppression involving race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Often explicit attention is given to the interplay of such things as “race, class, and gender” – to what in today's parlance might be referred to as “intersectionality.” Interweaving with this, as well, are fairly high levels of economic and political analysis.
Also running through BIDOM's pages is a consistent internationalism. Substantial reports and documents from various countries, and informed analyses about a variety of countries could be found in every issue of the journal: Afghanistan, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Chile, China (including Hong Kong), Cuba, El Salvador, France, Germany, Grenada, Haiti, India, Italy, Iran, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Jamaica, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Philippines, Poland, South Africa, Turkey, the USSR (and its later fragments), Yugoslavia (and its later fragments). This list is far from complete.
Regarding the crises and internal opposition developing in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in this period of time, BIDOM was fortunate to be able to share in-depth eyewitness reports, as well as fascinating primary materials gathered by David Seppo/David Mandel and Marilyn Vogt-Downey in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Marilyn had also acquired the massive memoir of a former Left Oppositionist, Mikhail Baitalsky, who was able to share to story of his life from the time he was a young Communist in the early 1920s through his arrest during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and survival, which we serialized in BIDOM as “Notebooks for the Grandchildren” (later gathered into a book of the same name).
Among the activists and revolutionary leaders from around the world who frequently found their way into BIDOM’s pages were such figures of the Fourth International as Ernest Mandel, Livio Maitan, Michael Löwy, and others. On can also find expressions of different points of view in the magazine’s pages. This involves not simply polemical articles aimed at individuals or groups with which the FIT had disagreements, nor simply of patient editorial responses to critical letters to the editors. Space was made for more substantial critical interchange among BIDOM’s readers and writers.
We can find a critique by a leader of the U.S. socialist group Solidarity, Joanna Misnik, of an article by Bill Onasch regarding the best approach to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. We can find a sharp challenge by Myra Tanner Weiss (onetime prominent figure in the SWP and three times its Vice-Presidential candidate) regarding Tom Barrett’s analysis of China in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre. There is a no less sharp criticism by Lloyd D’Aguilar of Paul Le Blanc’s analysis of the Sandinista defeat in Nicaragua (particularly in regard to the “mixed economy” and the Sandinistas’ failure to follow “the Cuban road to socialism”).
Around the question of black nationalism, we can find contending positions of Roy Rollin, Peter Johnson, Steve Bloom and Claire Cohen, as well as Evelyn Sell. BIDOM regulars Samuel Adams and Steve Bloom debated the political trajectory of Poland’s oppositional trade union movement, Solidarność, and the extent to which revolutionary socialists should have a critical attitude toward it. Extensive discussion and debate was also initiated around Paul Le Blanc’s two-part essay “Notes on Building a Revolutionary Party,” which had utilized an analysis of underlying issues explaining the decline of the SWP and implications this should have for future party-building efforts (utilizing the concept of “labor-radical subculture”) This discussion stretched through six issues, drawing critical comments from four BIDOM supporters: Tom Barrett, Steve Bloom, Peter Johnson, and Mary Scully (the latter asserting, in a two-part polemic, that Le Blanc was equating Leninism with sectarianism).
Every challenge raised was responded to with attention and respect, with the aim of accepting useful corrections, of clarifying differences, and of encouraging critical thought and helping advance ongoing struggle.
An Evolving Publication
The comments above regarding changes in the “Who We Are” statement give some sense of how BIDOM evolved, but more can be said about other aspects of its development.
One can see, over the years, distinctive changes in the appearance of the magazine – especially evident beginning with issue #51 – with a striving toward a somewhat more professional and visually appealing look. The increase in graphics and illustrations was enhanced, at a certain point, with an effort to infuse BIDOM’s design with a more dramatic flair, especially pushed for by editorial committee member Roy Rollin. From issue #100 at least through issue #121 there was also (often stressed in brief “Editor’s Notes” – another innovation) something described in issue #116 as: “a ‘focus’ in each issue – several articles concentrating on a particular topic. To an extent, there has been a pendulum-like quality to the shifts in focus: dealing variously with struggles bound up with class, race, gender, then back to the central reality of class; from international issues to domestic issues and back again; from present day realities to historical perspectives and back again.” In its final years, too, one can see a proliferation of increasingly bulky double-issues, reflecting the busy schedules of the overworked editors, but also reflecting the editors’ desire to pack in as much as possible of what they found to be compelling and important. While some readers may have felt overwhelmed, others were surely appreciative of the cornucopia of material that was being shared with them.
A constant feature of BIDOM, however, was the way it dealt with the death of those who had been companions in the struggle. Running through its pages are obituaries and commemorations of the fallen – remembering those who died many years before, but especially the more immediate passing of older (but also some younger) comrades. Even in regard to those with whom there had been political differences, there was an attempt to honor and draw inspiration from their valuable contributions and to learn from their political efforts. In this way the deaths would also contribute a pulsating life-energy to those who continue the struggle. This too can be a valuable source both for scholars and activists who want to understand something of the revolutionary movements, struggles and aspirations of the late twentieth century. Readers will note that the final issue of Bulletin in Defense of Marxism begins with a substantial obituary of its founder, Frank Lovell.
Post Script on Some of the Political Background
More extensive discussion of the political background can be found in introductory contributions by Steve Bloom and Frank Lovell to this collection of the issues of Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, as well as in suggested readings at the conclusion of this section. It is hoped that the following summary comments may also be helpful.
For many years, the Socialist Workers Party and its predecessors had played a significant role in the working-class movement and a variety of social struggles in the United States.
From the late 1950s through the 1970s, the SWP was revitalized by a powerful radical resurgence, particularly among youth, and the aging leadership of the SWP worked conscientiously to bring about a leadership transition that would help ensure the continuing relevance of U.S. Trotskyism.
Headed by Jack Barnes, a younger layer of comrades had assumed SWP leadership in the mid-1970s. By 1981, however, the Barnes leadership was secretly engineering a fundamental political shift in the organization, away from Trotskyist perspectives, and away from the Fourth International that Trotsky had founded. This was being replaced with an orientation toward what Barnes perceived as a more revolutionary “new international” that would presumably be crystallizing around Fidel Castro and the Cuban Communist Party, reflected in a revolutionary wave that was observable in Central America and the Caribbean in the late 1970s and early 1980s. (As things turned out, crystallization of this revolutionary “new international” was something that never actually came to pass).
There were several oppositional groups that formed within the SWP in response to this development. Focus here will be in the grouping that would bring into being the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism.
Inclined to be critical supporters of the Cuban Revolution, these comrades were convinced that the decision of the new SWP leadership to jettison Trotskyist perspectives, and to carry this out through undemocratic manipulation, would cause irreparable damage to the SWP and the revolutionary socialist movement. In order to push through its new orientation, the Barnes leadership was already carrying out a grotesque tightening of the organization (falsely claiming this as “Leninism”) and preparing a wave of expulsions in 1983-1984, on trumped up charges, that swept hundreds of actual and potential oppositionists out of the SWP. An informal grouping known as “the Breitman caucus” came into being which had a formal reflection on the party National Committee in the form of the Fourth International Caucus created by Frank Lovell and Steve Bloom. After a final wave of expulsions was carried out by the party leadership in January 1984, George Breitman, George Shriver, and Naomi Allen formally declared the formation of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency (FIT).
The FIT was the smallest of the formations organized by those driven out of the SWP (its numerical highpoint was about 70 members). One short-lived current around Peter Camejo, the North Star Network, sought to build a broad left current without reference to or connection with Trotskyist perspectives. In contrast, Socialist Action (initiated under the leadership of Nat Weinstein, Lynn Henderson, and Jeff Mackler) launched a new Trotskyist organization, of about 200-300 members, with an orientation consistent with that of the pre-1979 SWP. A substantial break-away from Socialist Action merged with two other small socialist groups to form Solidarity (which would contain a rather passive caucus for those wishing to maintain ties with the Fourth International). With about 200-300 members, Solidarity also saw itself as an alternative to the SWP.
The FIT, guided politically by the thinking of Breitman and Lovell (with practical matters initially in the hands of Steve Bloom, Bill Onasch, and Evelyn Sell), rejected the notion of building itself as an alternative to the SWP. Instead, it sought to do three things: (a) defend Trotskyist perspectives by using them – with critical creativity – to analyze and explain the evolving realities around us; (b) develop a documentation and explanation of how and why the SWP had degenerated, drawing lessons from that; and (c) bring together all Fourth Internationalist groups and individuals in the United States (including the SWP) in order to carry out a serious political discussion and debate, and, on the basis of such political clarification, reconstitute a unified section of the Fourth International.
Further Reading:
A considerable amount of material on the Fourth Internationalist Tendency can be found in this section of the Marxist Internet Archive’s Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On Line (ETOL), accessible through this link. At that site are three related volumes on the SWP crisis, expulsions, and aftermath, under the rubric of “In Defense of American Trotskyism,” edited by Paul Le Blanc and Sarah Lovell.
For an overview, see George Breitman, Paul Le Blanc, Alan Wald, Trotskyism in the United States: Historical Essays and Reconsiderations, Second Edition (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016). A documentary trilogy covering much of the tradition can be found in Paul Le Blanc, Bryan Palmer, et al, eds., US Trotskyism: Emergence, Endurance, Resurgence 1928-1965, 3 volumes (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019).
Also relevant is a two-volume work by Barry Sheppard, The Socialist Workers Party 1960-1988: A Political Memoir, available through Marxist Internet Archive’s Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On Line (ETOL), through this link, and also Peter Camejo, North Star, A Memoir (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010).
A source providing some information on the hoped-for Labor Party which seemed about to materialize in the 1990s, but never really did, is Les Leopold, The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Co., 2007), pp. 433-488.
Last updated on 25 May 2020