Sam Marcy

Sam Marcy (1911–February 1, 1998) was an American Marxist of the post-World War II era. In 1959, a group he led founded the Workers World Party.

After the first issue of the Workers World newspaper was published, Marcy started applying his view of Marxism to contemporary issues. Selections of his works have been translated into many languages, including Persian, Spanish, Turkish, Korean, French and German.

Marcy was born in Russia of Jewish parents. He emigrated to the United States in his childhood. In the 1930s, he joined the Young Communist League, the youth movement of the Communist Party. He would later join the Trotskyists in the 1940s and early 1950s, building a branch of the Socialist Workers Party in Buffalo. He left the Trotskyist movement after the Soviet military intervention in Hungary in 1956 (Marcy supported the intervention). In 1959, he set up his own organization, Workers World, which was supportive of the various socialists governments in the world (the Soviet Union and its allies, China, Albania, North Korea, etc) putting forward a theory known as the "Global Class War."

Marcy's writings included extensive works on socialism, the Cold War era and the rise of the powerful military-industrial complex. He also wrote about the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War, the economic forces behind capitalist downsizing and the impact of the scientific-technological revolution. [http://www.workers.org/marcy/cd/]

His writings show a strong support for Mao Zedong and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, though he continued to defend China against imperialism following the reforms of Deng Xiaoping. Marcy defended China and also the Soviet Union against the charge of imperialism even while disagreeing with some policies and practices of the Communist party leadership of both countries.

In addition to his writings, Marcy was one of the organizers of the first demonstration in the United States against the Vietnam War, a demonstration whose importance was noted by Ho Chi Minh in an interview published in the National Guardian newspaper.

External links and references

* [http://www.workers.org/marcy/cd/ Selected works of Sam Marcy at the Workers World Party website]
* [http://www.workers.org/marcy/cd/samtrib/marcybio.htm Biography by Deirdre Griswold at the Workers World Party website]
* [http://www.wsws.org/polemics/1998/feb1998/marcy.shtml An obituary critical of Marcy] .