Johnson-Forest Tendency

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The Johnson-Forest tendency, sometimes called the Johnsonites, refers to an American radical left tendency associated with Marxist theorists C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, who used the pseudonyms J.R. Johnson and Freddie Forest respectively. They were joined in by Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese-American woman who was considered the third founder and the theoretician of the “Johnson-Forest tendency.”

Much of the story of the Johnson-Forest tendency relates to disputes between various factions of the Trotskyist parties in the USA. James and Dunayevskaya first met in the Socialist Workers Party. From 1939–1940, there was a bitter fight amongst the members of the Socialist Workers Party, and in 1940, James, Dunayevskaya, and Max Shachtman, among others, split to form the Workers Party. James and Dunayevskaya set up a study group within the Workers Party to work on the idea of State Capitalism, and were soon joined by Lee.

While this new group rapidly cohered around politics which were very similar to those of the Socialist Workers Party, there were certain differences which eventually led to the formation of the Johnson-Forest tendency. The majority of the Workers Party members believed as did Shachtman, that the class nature of the Soviet Union was that it should be designated a bureaucratic collectivist society. The minority opinion, held by James, Dunayevskaya, and Lee, held that it was state capitalist. Further, James was unhappy with the WP's lack of interest in Black activism. This resulted in their secession from the Workers Party.

Their disgruntlement with the Shachtmanite majority led Johnson-Forest in 1947 to rejoin the Socialist Workers Party. It was during this time that the Johnson-Forest tendency reached the conclusion that as they felt there was no true socialist society existing anywhere in the world, they called for a return to Marxist philosophy. Their return to Hegel's philosophy as being the foundation of Marx's philosophy was largely due to Dunayevskaya, who was deeply immersed in both Marx's and Lenin's writings. Johnson-Forest remained in the Socialist Workers Party until 1950, exiting with the book co-authored by James and Dunayevskaya, State Capitalism and World Revolution. In the three years Johnson-Forest remained in the Socialist Workers Party, James also participated in party discussions on the American “Negro question” (as it was then called), arguing for support for separate struggles of blacks as having the potential to ignite the entire U.S. political situation, as they in fact did in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Finally leaving the Socialist Workers Party, Johnson-Forest founded their own organization for the first time, called Correspondence. However, tensions that had surfaced earlier presaged a split, which took place in 1955. Through his theoretical and political work of the late 1940’s, James had come to the conclusion that the revolutionary party was no longer needed because its truths had been absorbed in the masses. In 1956, as Facing Reality states, he would see the Hungarian Revolution as confirmation of this. However, James was not sure what would replace the revolutionary party. Dunayevskaya had agreed that the Leninist vanguard party was outdated, but, in contrast to James, felt the need for some kind of revolutionary organization. In 1953, James was deported from the U.S. to Britain for the lack of a visa, and the polemic continued. The split was consummated in 1955, when Dunayevskaya and her faction founded the group News and Letters Committees. Grace Lee remained with the Johnsonites who founded Facing Reality as well as a newsletter based in Detroit of the same name. When Lee moved away from the group in the early 1960’s, the continuity of the Johnsonite tradition was maintained by Martin Glaberman until Glaberman's death in 2001.