"Introduction to the Johnson-Forest Tendency
and the Background to Facing Reality"
Loren Goldner, Break Their Haughty Power
[Loren Goldner notes: The following text was written as a preface to a German translation of the 2002 text (cf. below)
to situate the background of the book Facing Reality and to present a short history of the Johnson-Forest
Tendency for the German context where it, as well as James, Dunayevskaya and Lee, are largely unknown.
It should therefore be understood as "Johnson-Forest For Beginners". I thank 6-7 friends and comrades who vetted the rough
draft for factual errors and omissions. Comment and critique are invited.]
While C.L.R. James (“Johnson”) (1901-1989) has become an academic fashion in the U.S. in the past 15 years (1), and is widely known in Britain and in the Caribbean, his name evokes little recognition in most of continental Europe except perhaps as the author of the classic history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins (1938).
Raya Dunayevskaya (“Forest”) (1910-1987), intimately associated with James from ca. 1940 until 1955, is still less known, aside from translations of her books Marxism and Freedom, Philosophy and Revolution, and Rosa Luxemburg.
Least known of all is Grace Lee Boggs, (1915- ), a Chinese-American woman who was the third founder and theoretician of what came to be known as the “Johnson-Forest tendency” of the Workers’ Party and the Socialist Workers’ Party in the U.S., a tendency whose influence has rippled far beyond its original small forces within two American Trotskyist groups before, during and after World War II.