Pathfinder Press
PATHFINDER PRESS. The publishing arm of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the Pathfinder Press succeeded Merit Publishers in 1956 and before that Pioneer Publishers, launched in 1930 by the Communist League of America, predecessor of the Socialist Workers Party.
Pathfinder published books and pamphlets on historical and theoretical matters as well as contemporary world events including Marxism, American labor history, the Black struggle, women’s liberation, the Cuban revolution, Vietnam, and radical student movements. During its heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s, an editorial staff as well as translators, an art department, promotional staff, and a business office were able to keep up with brisk demand on campuses and elsewhere for these works. SWP branches across the country sold Pathfinder titles on literature tables at demonstrations and public events. Volunteers from the SWP and its youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance, would supply Pathfinder books and pamphlets to wholesalers, bookstores, and classrooms. A cadre of volunteers supplemented the in-house staff and assisted with proofreading galleys or first printed copies. Among these were Jim Kutcher whose story, The Case of the Legless Veteran, was published by Merit and reprinted in 1973 by Pathfinder.
In the early 70s, the party leadership sought a channel to the broader culture and society, with the short-lived goal of becoming a publisher of the wider American left, and for that reason decided to branch out a bit from strictly Trotskyist writings to more general material. In this vein, Pathfinder published books by Andre Breton, Frank Kofsky, and Maxime Rodinson, among others, a book of Black prison poetry, a volume of feminist plays and appreciations of John Coltrane and Lenny Bruce.
Pathfinder’s many topical pamphlets included Ernest Mandel’s Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory (1964), a perennial best-seller. Other popular titles notably included Malcolm X’s speeches, and likewise the speeches of W.E.B. DuBois, Eugene Debs, and Che Guevara. In some years, Pathfinder produced up to thirty books and as many pamphlets, including some of the earliest volumes on women’s liberation. George Novack, one of Pathfinder’s chief editors, early perceived the revolutionary implications of the new wave of feminism. The Origins of Private Property, the Family and the State (1972), the Marxist classic by Engels, appeared with an introduction by the feminist anthropologist Evelyn Reed, herself married to Novack. Other titles of these years included a history of the Haymarket martyrs in Chicago; a volume on Black soldiers in the Civil War; SWP founder James P. Cannon’s testimony as a defendant in the first Smith Act trial; a book on Watergate; a volume on Salvador Allende’s overthrow in Chile; and Art Preis’s Labor’s Giant Step (1972) on the rise of the CIO.
In 1972 the SWP created the nonprofit Anchor Foundation, with an eye to attracting outside money to the publishing project. Tax-free donations to the Anchor Foundation allowed the SWP to publish additional books, in this case through the dedicated Monad Press. The foundation and the press were the brainchild of Novack, who himself named Monad Press, choosing an arcane word from philosophy meaning an elementary or basic unit reflecting the order of the world.
Having two publishing entities resulted in an uneasy division between money raised by the nonprofit Anchor Foundation and money raised through the SWP’s usual partisan fundraising efforts. The source of the funds was the sole factor in determining which press would publish which title. Leon Trotsky’s The Spanish Revolution (1931-39) (1973), for example, was published by Pathfinder, while Leon Trotsky on China (1976) and Leon Trotsky on France (2001) were published by Monad. All the titles were distributed by Pathfinder, which also published and distributed a small book, Cointelpro: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom (1975), exposing a wider audience to the extent of government harassment, disruptions, infiltrations, and assassinations directed against the entire left, from communists to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King to the anti-Vietnam war movement, Students for a Democratic Society, Latin American solidarity groups, environmental activists, Black Panthers, Young Lords, and others.
Novack personally raised the money for the publication of Teamster Rebellion (1972), written by participant Farrell Dobbs, recounting the two 1934 Minneapolis general strikes led by the Trotskyists in the Teamsters union. Eventually, the experience led to a four-volume Teamster history series.
The SWP distinguished itself by publishing Trotsky’s works in varied formats. In the early 1970s, the SWP leadership agreed to a plan devised by George Breitman, another chief editor and in contrast to Novack, a former Dewey student, a self-educated party leader. He urged the party to begin a Trotsky publishing project: to publish in one series everything by Leon Trotsky that existed in English. This became possible when Breitman was contacted by the Scottish Trotsky scholar Louis Sinclair, then laboring to produce a bibliography of Trotsky’s published writings in all languages. In this pre-internet age, the two men kept up an almost daily correspondence, with copies of brittle newspaper clippings in which Trotsky was quoted, yellowed manuscripts, and long-out-of-print pamphlets flying across the Atlantic in both directions. Their collaboration led to the publication of the Writings of Leon Trotsky series (14 volumes covering the years 1929-1940), and the three volumes of The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1923-28), all edited by Breitman and Naomi Allen, as well as collections of Trotsky’s writings on specific countries or topics.
Pathfinder shrank along with the popular movements in the 1970s. A demoralized SWP leadership turned its back on Trotskyism to make possible closer ties with the Cuban leadership. Of the “three Georges,” Breitman and Weissman found themselves expelled from the party in 1983, along with many others. Since that time, Pathfinder has mostly offered reprints old titles with new covers and new introductions.