Johnson-Forrest Tendency

The Johnston-Forrest Tendency got its name from its two main leaders: C.L.R. James, who used the pen name J.R. Johnson, and Raya Dunayevskaya alias Freddie Forrest. They met in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (USA).

However the Johnson-Forrest Tendency first appeared as an organised grouping in the Workers Party which had been founded by Max Shachtman and other former members of the SWP in 1940. The new group rapidly cohered around politics which were very similar to those of the SWP with certain limited differences of which the most important was the position of the WP on the question as to the class nature of Russia. Shachtman and the majority of the WP holding that it should be designated a bureaucratc collectivist society. The Johnson-Forrest Tendency by way of contrast held that it was state capitalist.

Both were involved theortically and practically with the so called "Negro Question". They also shared the conception that Russia was a not a workers state but rather state capitalist. This view was at odds with the normal Trotskyist position, and indeed Trotsky's own position that the USSR was a "deformed" workers state.

Reaching the conclusion that there was no socialist society existing any where 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 deaply emersed in both Marx's and (being a Russian speaker), Lenin's writings in Russian.