Murry Weiss Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 28, 12 July 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Nominating speech by Murray Weiss of Farrell Dobbs at the 13th National Convention of the SWP
Comrades, we nominate differently, we nominate different people, different kinds of people, we are, as Comrade Trotsky put it, a different kind of a party. There has never been a party like ours in history before. We are the Bolshevik type of party, a party founded on principles and on people Who take their principles so seriously that their whole lives become action and thought to carry through these principles consistently to the very end.
In nominating Farrell Dobbs, and contrary to the mockery of nomination speeches and traditions of bourgeois parties, we don’t leave the name until the end, although everybody knows it in the beginning. In nominating Farrell Dobbs, I think it is more than a phrase to say that we are nominating a symbol, an individual who is a symbol of our ideas, our methods, and our way of life. Not an individual who suits his principles and his declarations on political questions to the needs of a political career, but an individual symbolizing the whole current thought in history of our movement, whose whole life has been devoted to carrying out the central ideas of emancipating revolutionary socialism.
Comrade Farrell’s name is associated with two crucial episodes in the history of American Trotskyism. The first episode that I refer to is the test of the ideas and the powers of American Trotskyism in the field of the American working class mass movement – the Minneapolis Strikes, where we demonstrated to the hilt we were not sectarian phrase-mongers, that our principles were not text book ideas, but living doctrines and guides to revolutionary action, and could be applied to the given stage of the American working class movement with the greatest skill, with revolutionary innovation, with boldness, sincerity, and determination. We showed a model of leadership in the class struggle that has already made history in the class struggle.
The second episode, and just as important, complementary to the first, was shown when Comrade Farrell along with the 17 other leaders of our Party stood up under the test of class fire, the fire of the ruling class, headed by Roosevelt and all the other war-mongers, the united political opposition of the bourgeoisie and their trade-union lackeys, who directed the fire properly against our party and its leaders at the beginning of the 2nd World War. We showed them, Comrade Dobbs among the others showed then, that not only could we unfold our ideas in the class struggle, win positions of influence and prestige in the mass movement, but we could take all this influence and prestige and officialdom and power that went with it and throw it into the waste basket when it came to a test of principle, integrity, revolutionary doctrine in the face of the bourgeois war, of the imperialist world slaughter.
I think in these two episodes alone, one needs go no further, we have in Comrade Dobbs, and I think in the next nominee as well, a worthy representative of the cause of American Trotskyism, and cause of the Socialist Workers Party. And I formally nominate Comrade Farrell Dobbs as the presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party.
Murry Weiss Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 2 November 2022