Marcyites Call for “Peaceful Reunification” … of the “Global Class War!”

[First printed in Workers Vanguard #125, 17 September 1976]

The Workers World Party (WWP) and its more substantial youth auxiliary, Youth Against War and Fascism (YAWF), have long trumpeted the North Korean Stalinist bureaucracy as the most intransigent and militant fighter in the so-called “global class war” against U.S. imperialism. But last month, when the confrontation between North Korea and the U.S. occupation forces propping up the Pak Jung Hi (Park) regime in Seoul reached another flash point at Panmunjom. WWP/YAWF suddenly forgot the “global class war” along the 38th parallel and parroted its Stalinist mentors’ prattle about “peaceful reunification” of Korea!

In his article on the Panmunjom skirmish (Workers World,  27 August) WWP/YAWF leader Sam Marcy begs the U.S. imperialists to abide by the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and recognize the democratic will of the world community on Korea:

“Little has been said in the US about the Colombo conference of non-aligned nations. All 86 voted to demand the withdrawal of US troops from Korea. Eighty-six! Together with the Soviet Union and China, that’s the bulk of humanity.

“Here in this Bicentennial year no document has been quoted more frequently than the Declaration of Independence. which calls for a ‘decent respect for the opinions of mankind.’ Well, here we have the overwhelming majority of the human race demanding the withdrawal of the US military from Korea.”

Tailing the North Korean bureaucracy the WWP/YAWF is reduced to “demanding” that the U.S. imperialists, who dropped the atom bomb on Japan and carpet-bombed Vietnam, observe a “democratic” foreign policy in line with the views of Thomas Jefferson!

Ever since its inception as a political tendency the Marcyites have used the “global class war” dogma to justify capitulation to the Stalinist bureaucracies and assorted “progressive” nationalist formations in the “Third World,” arguing that these forces have been pitted against the imperialist camp since the Korean War in an inexorable and epochal struggle. However, the Stalinist bureaucracies, from Russia to China to North Korea, are not committed to “global class war” but rather to global class collaboration — “peaceful coexistence” and “detente.” Thus, the USSR and China both advocate “peaceful reunification” of Korea to appease the U.S. imperialists, while each seeks to bloc with the imperialists against the other.

The “global class war” thesis was first formulated by Marcy during the Korean War of 1950-53 as an impressionistic reaction to the Cold War policy of “containment” of the then seemingly monolithic Sino-Soviet states. Marcyism represented a pro-Stalinist tendency, most despicably revealed by its open support to the Russian suppression of the workers uprising against Stalinism in Hungary in 1956.

Following in the footsteps of the “iron-willed” Kim II Sung, the WWP/YAWF can offer nothing more than peaceful reunification … of both sides of the “global class war.” As against these Stalinoid cheerleaders, the Spartacist League insists that it is not the counterrevolutionary bureaucracies but only the proletariat led by the Trotskyist party of world socialist revolution that can open the road to the communist future of humanity.

• American troops out! For military defense of the North Korean deformed workers state against U.S. imperialism and its South Korean puppets!
• For revolutionary reunification of Korea through social revolution in the South and political revolution in the North!