Archive of approximately 85 letters, memoranda, meeting minutes and other documents relating to the activities of the Leninist League/Workers League for a Revolutionary Party

George Marlen (a pseudonym for George Spiro) joined the Trotskyite opposition led by Cannon and Shachtman shortly before Trotsky’s decision to have his international groups (initially the French) join the old Socialist International, which prompted the Oehler-Stamm faction to bolt from the Workers Party and form the Revolutionary Workers League. Marlen soon split with Oehler on “the basic question of evaluating Stalinism as a conscious counter-revolutionary movement and chief obstacle in the path towards emancipation of the working class,” and in 1937 formed his own organization, initially known as the Leninist League of the United States and subsequently as the Workers League for a Revolutionary Party. Marlen undertook to analyze political events based on ferreting out of memoirs, newspaper clippings, and other sources little noticed items that revealed the “game of nations,” an analytical method much admired and later applied by Noam Chomsky. The Marlenites stood “in irreconcilable antagonism to the Stalinist political system and all its satellites, the Cannon, Shachtman and other Trotskyist and semi-Trotskyist groups, as well as against the Socialist Party and all the rest of the so-called labor organizations whose fundamental position and function is to support capitalism.” It was, accordingly, a splinter of the splinter, but an interesting one which focused on the challenge of developing a “correct political program.” Virtually all the correspondence in this collection deals directly with ideological matters.