>I'll take your word on this, Lou - and Trotsky himself was no fool, for
>sure. But what happened? Why did Trotskyist groups - all Marxist groups
>did, but it seems to be most extreme among Trot formations - show such a
>prediliction for rigidity, cultishness, and schism? Why have they been
>reduced to citing formulas and refighting the same ancient battles for the
>last 30 to 60 years?
>
>Doug
TROTSKYISM
In the aftermath of the 1928 world congress of the Comintern, Bukharin lost
power to Stalin. Stalin then unseated Jay Lovestone, Bukharin's supporter
and leader of the American Communist Party, and turned over party
leadership to William Z. Foster, a Stalin loyalist.
There was another American Communist leader by the name of James P. Cannon
who went his own way and aligned himself with the Trotskyist Left Opposition.
Cannon was born in Rosedale, Kansas in 1890 and joined the Socialist Party
in 1908. He then also joined the anarcho-syndicalist IWW three years later.
In the IWW Cannon worked with Vincent St. John, "Big Bill" Haywood and
Frank Little as a strike organizer and journalist. He switched allegiance
to the newly formed Communist Party in September 1919 and won an election
to the Central Committee in 1920. He served on the Communist International
Presidium from 1922 to 1923. Next he headed the International Labor Defense
from 1925 to 1928.
After he declared for Trotskyism, the CP expelled him. Along with Max
Shachtman and Martin Abern, he went on to form the Communist League of
America, the first American Trotskyist group. This group eventually
developed into the contemporary Socialist Workers Party, a tiny group that
has disavowed any connection with Trotskyism.
Cannon set the sectarian tone of American Trotskyism at its infancy. In a
speech to the New York branch of his movement, on December 23, 1930, Cannon
defined the relation of the opposition to "class" and "vanguard".
1. The Communist Party was still the vanguard, but the Trotskyist
opposition was the "vanguard of this vanguard."
2. The task of the opposition was to make the "opposition line the line of
the proletarian vanguard."
Cannon invoked Trotsky's words to support his approach. "The revolutionary
Marxists are now again reduced (not for the first time and probably not for
the last) to being an international propaganda society....It seems that the
fact that we are very few frightens you. Of course, it is unpleasant.
Naturally, it would be better to have behind us organizations numbering
millions. But how are we, the vanguard of the vanguard, to have such
organizations the day after the world revolution has suffered catastrophic
defeats brought on by the Menshevik leadership hiding under the false mask
of Bolshevism? Yes, how?" ("The Militant", 1929)
Has there ever been an "ideological" vanguard, Trotskyist or otherwise? The
answer is no. This is an idealistic conception of politics that has been
disastrous for Trotskyism throughout its entire existence. A vanguard is a
goal, not a set of ideas. The goal of the vanguard is to coordinate the
revolutionary conquest of power by the workers and their allies. Building a
true vanguard will require correct ideas but these ideas can only emerge
out of dialectical relationship with mass struggles. To artificially
separate a revolutionary program from the mass movement is a guarantee that
you will turn into a sectarian.
As I have stated, Lenin had a totally different concept of a vanguard, but
his idea was nothing new. It merely represented mainstream thinking in
Russian and European Social Democracy. George Plekhanov, eighteen years
before the publication of "What is to be Done?" stated that "the socialist
intelligentsia...must become the leader of the working class in the
impending emancipation movement, explain to it its political and economic
interests and also the interdependence of those interests and must prepare
them to play an independent role in the social life of Russia." In 1898,
Pavel Axelrod wrote that "the proletariat, according to the consciousness
of the Social Democrats, does not possess a ready-made, historically
elaborated social ideal," and "it goes without saying that these
conditions, without the energetic participation of the Social Democrats,
may cause our proletariat to remain in its condition as a listless and
somnolent force in respect of its political development." The Austrian
Hainfeld program of the Social Democrats said that "Socialist consciousness
is something that is brought into the proletarian class struggle from the
outside, not something that organically develops out of the class
struggle." Kautsky, the world's leading Marxist during this period, stated
that "socialism and the class struggle arise side by side and not one out
of the other; each arises under different conditions. Modern socialist
consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge."
However, a vanguard in Lenin's view is not something that a cadre declares
at the outset on the basis of correct ideas. This notion was alien to
Lenin's approach. It did, however, become the orthodoxy of world Communism.
Both Stalinists and Trotskyists shared this interpretation. For the
Stalinists, the American Communist Party represented the vanguard because
it came closest to representing the ideas of Stalin on American soil. Since
Stalin prevailed over actually-existing socialism, how could anybody
question this definition? The Trotskyists, of course, challenged Stalin as
a fountainhead of correct, revolutionary ideas. They saw Leon Trotsky as
the ultimate authority. They traced his legacy through Lenin, who after all
proposed that Trotsky become CP general secretary instead of Stalin, and
then back to Engels and Marx. This concept of revolutionary continuity
based on ideology is a mistake in either Stalinist or Trotskyist packaging.
There was an inevitability to American Trotskyists embracing this sectarian
approach. Lenin had died and there was nobody left of any stature in the
Communist movement who could challenge it. Trotsky had never been a
Bolshevik and so was in no position to clarify ideas to his followers that
he did not possess. This false notion of a vanguard persisted well into the
postwar era and it is only breaking down today for reasons related to the
collapse of both the Soviet Union and the Fourth International.
American Trotskyism advanced fitfully through the 1930's. Its "entryist"
tactic into the Socialist Party was a defining moment for its sectarianism.
Trotsky had noticed that the Socialist Parties worldwide were once again
becoming a pole of attraction for radicalizing workers because many of
these workers could not stomach the brutal, totalitarian Stalin regime. He
advised his followers to enter the SPs as a bloc, capture the left-wing
and then engineer a split in order to build Trotskyism and smash Social
Democracy. The American Trotskyists were quite successful. They did wreck
American Social Democracy and did expand their sect. After the success of
the "entryist" tactic, American workers had 2 choices: 1) the CP 2)a
Trotskyist party that would feature articles in its newspaper advising
working-people to "vote Trotskyist." The loss of the SP as a left-wing
alternative to the CP partially explains the weakness of American socialism
today.
Another key element of Trotskyist sectarianism is its tendency to turn
every serious political fight into a conflict between worker and
petty-bourgeoisie. Every challenge to party orthodoxy, unless the party
leader himself mounts it, represents the influence of alien class
influences into the proletarian vanguard. Every Trotskyist party in history
has suffered from this crude sociological reductionism, but the American
Trotskyists were the unchallenged masters of it.
Soon after the split from the SP and the formation of the Socialist Workers
Party, a fight broke out in the party over the character of the Soviet
Union. Max Shachtman, Martin Abern and James Burnham led one faction based
primarily in New York. It stated that the Soviet Union was no longer a
worker's state and it saw the economic system there as being in no way
superior to capitalism. This opposition also seemed to be less willing to
oppose US entry into WWII than the Cannon group, which stood on Zimmerwald
"defeatist" orthodoxy.
Shachtman and Abern were full-time party workers with backgrounds similar
to Cannon's. Burnham was a horse of a different color. He was an NYU
philosophy professor who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He
reputedly would show up at party meetings in top hat and tails, since he
was often on the way to the opera.
Burnham became the paradigm of the whole opposition, despite the fact that
Shachtman and Abern's family backgrounds were identical to Cannon's. Cannon
and Trotsky tarred the whole opposition with the petty-bourgeois brush.
They stated that the workers would resist war while the petty-bourgeois
would welcome it. It was the immense pressure of the petty-bourgeois
intelligentsia outside the SWP that served as a source for these alien
class influences. Burnham was the "Typhoid Mary" of these petty-bourgeois
germs.
However, it is simply wrong to set up a dichotomy between some kind of
intrinsically proletarian opposition to imperialist war and petty-bourgeois
acceptance of it. The workers have shown themselves just as capable of
bending to imperialist war propaganda as events surrounding the Gulf War
show. The primarily petty-bourgeois based antiwar movement helped the
Vietnamese achieve victory. It was not coal miners or steel workers who
provided the shock-troops for the Central America solidarity movement of
the 1980's. It was lawyers, doctors, computer programmers, Maryknoll nuns,
and aspiring circus clowns like the martyred Ben Linder who did.
Furthermore, it would be interesting to do a rigorous class analysis of the
Shachtman-Burnham-Abern opposition. Most of its rank-and-file members were
probably Jewish working-class people who more than anybody would be
susceptible to pro-war sentiment during this period. When the Nazis were
repressing Jews throughout Europe, it's no surprise that American Jews
would end up supporting US participation in WWII.
With Trotsky's help, Cannon defeated the opposition. Burnham shifted to the
right almost immediately and eventually became a columnist with William F.
Buckley's "National Review". Shachtman remained a socialist until his final
years, but like Lovestone who preceded him, eventually embraced a
right-wing version of socialism that was largely indistinguishable from
cold-war liberalism. Unreconstructed Trotskyists might point to the
trajectory of Shachtman and Burnham and crow triumphantly, "See it was
destined to happen! The middle-class will always betray socialism."
History often moves in wayward directions, however. The next big fight in
American Trotskyism began in the early 1950's around the question of
whether Stalinist parties were moving to the left under the impact of world
events. The European Trotskyists said they were and urged their co-thinkers
everywhere to join the CP's. The American Trotskyist leadership saw this as
an attack on the purity of Marxism-Leninism-Trotskyism and opened up
ideological warfare on the Europeans.
Of course, the Europeans were completely correct on this question. Their
main leader was an individual named Pablo. SWP leaders never mentioned his
name without attaching the epithet "revisionist" to it. The CP did the same
thing with Franco, except in that case the epithet was "butcher", and it
was accurate.
The fight had culminated in a split in the world Trotskyist movement. The
Europeans appeared totally vindicated in 1956, when the Krushchev
revelations caused the CP's to go into a total crisis. Krushchev, the
leader of the Communist Parties internationally, seemed to share the
critique of Stalin that the Trotskyists had been advancing for decades.
(The European Trotskyists have always been much more in touch with
political reality and the mass movement than the Americans. In the global
regroupment process that is taking place today, the European Trotskyists
can conceivably play a vanguard role in fighting "vanguardism".)
CP'ers would have given Marxists a real hearing, if they were comrades
instead of sideline critics. Cannon, however, would have nothing to do with
the CP's. He preferred to remain pure in his little Trotskyist cathedral
wagging his finger at the evil Stalinists. His sectarianism was palpable.
The SWP did manage to recruit a few disillusioned CP'ers in the late 1950's
and early 1960's. Nobody was able to forge a new left wing movement out of
these important openings unfortunately.
A minority faction in the SWP supported the European perspectives. Did a
new group of middle-class wastrels in top-hats and tails mount such an
attack on the working-class vanguard perspective of revolutionary Marxism?
No, this time the opposition was working-class to the bone. The leader was
UAW veteran Bert Cochran, who had participated in some of the biggest
organizing fights in the late 1930's. He was in Detroit and his supporters
were industrial workers like himself. How did Cannon explain this anomaly?
This was simple. The Cochranites were simply "petty-bourgeoisified"
workers. Here was Cannon's verdict:
"Since the consolidation of the CIO unions and the 13-year period of war
and postwar boom, a new stratification has taken place within the American
working class, and particularly and conspicuously in the CIO unions. Our
party, which is rooted in the unions, reflects that stratification too. The
worker who has soaked up the general atmosphere of the long prosperity and
begun to live and think like a petty bourgeois is a familiar figure in the
country at large. He has even made his appearance in the Socialist Workers
Party as a ready-made recruit for an opportunist faction."
There you have it. Whether you are on an assembly-line or own a bagel shop,
you can succumb to the dreaded "petty bourgeois" illness. It seems that the
only prophylactic is to be a party full-timer. When Burnham refused
Cannon's invitation to work for the party full-time, Cannon commented, "We
deemed it unworthy of the dignity of a revolutionary leader to waste his
[sic] time on some piddling occupation in the bourgeois world and wrong for
the party to permit it. We decreed that no one could be a member of the
Central Committee of the party unless he [sic] was a full time professional
party worker, or willing to become such at the call of the party." There is
little doubt in my mind that Burnham would have remained Burnham had he
remained at NYU or had gone to work in the SWP apparatus. This mechanical
conception of consciousness has nothing to do with Marxism. It is the
crudest sort of economic determinism.
The SWP stumbled along throughout the 1950's and early 60's while a new
radicalization was in preparation. This time the radicalization did not
occur in the factories. It occurred on the university campus and in the
civil rights movement.
The SWP had by then shrunk to a small cadre of aging factory-workers and
full-timers, so Cannon's successors eagerly sought to replenish its ranks
with some fresh blood. A number of students from Carleton College in
Minnesota supplied this fresh blood just in the nick of time. Cannon's
followers groomed Jack Barnes, the most promising of these students, for
party leadership. Barnes was a bright, ambitious youth who knew how to
articulate Trotskyist orthodoxies in terms acceptable to the older
leadership. He had absolutely no roots in the mass movement, however. His
detachment from a mass movement has marked his stewardship of the SWP since
the 1960's. Except for a brief period during the late 60's and early 70's,
this group has remained just as much of a purist church as it ever was
under Cannon's leadership.
During this period, the American Trotskyists seemed to be making some kind
of connection to the living mass movement. They participated in the Vietnam
antiwar movement and began to recruit radicalizing students. Some of the
older factory-based cadre grew nervous at the sight of all these young
people in purple bell-bottomed jeans. What would a factory worker think if
he or she saw such strange people? The only solution to this problem was to
send the middle-class students into the factories where they would be
"proletarianized". Of course, most of these students came from the
primarily working-class based state colleges and universities. The Maoists
tended to recruit the elite students from private institutions.
A faction fight broke out once again. On one side you had most of the older
party leadership and the new generation under Barnes' leadership. They
lined up against a small number of older cadre and their young supporters
who had just left places like Harvard and MIT to get union jobs. These
younger supporters tended to have nothing to do with the "petty-bourgeois"
antiwar movement.
In the ensuing struggle, an older party leader named George Breitman who
had impeccable proletarian credentials presented some interesting arguments
against the workerist opposition. He said, "In the 1930s, some of us
thought that the unions would play a central role in the revolution,
perhaps even a role like that which the soviets played in the Russian
Revolution of 1917. Today it seems less likely, because of the changes that
have have occurred in the unions and in their relations with the capitalist
state, because of the way they have been incorporated or integrated into
the state apparatus."
Breitman saw the unions as part of a broad struggle involving the black and
woman's liberation movement. He was very sensitive to the black struggle
and was one of the Trotskyists who had noted early on the revolutionary
implications of Malcolm X's black nationalism. Breitman was an unusually
gifted political analyst who broke with Barnes in a few short years.
Breitman's enthusiasm for the mass movements, while well-intentioned,
seemed short-sighted in retrospect. Most of these non-union based
movements, and most especially the antiwar movement, went into a steep
decline in the mid-70's. The Barnes leadership despaired. What would it do
with all of the middle-class students who had joined in the recent period
and who threatened to unleash alien class influences into the proletarian
vanguard?.
Barnes concluded that they were a threat to the party. He urged a "turn
toward industry" that would transform these latter-day James Burnhams and
Bert Cochrans into solid, loyal proletarian party activists. It was similar
to getting an inoculation against a fatal disease. By working inside a
steel mill or coal mine, a party activist could fight off alien class
influences more effectively.
In order to motivate this turn, Barnes described an American political
landscape that was about ready to erupt into major class struggles. He saw
the American unions as hotbeds of radicalism. This was during the period so
memorably captured by Michael Moore in "Roger and Me", a time when laid-off
workers were thinking more about raising rabbits for food than proletarian
revolution.
Barnes decided that the industrial unions would be the focal point for all
political struggles. He said, "Our turn is putting us where we must be to
apply our strategy in light of these changing conditions. That's where we
are winning influence for our ideas, educating ourselves and our
co-workers, taking on our political opponents. The industrial workplaces
and unions are our arena to build support for the fight against nuclear
power and weapons, for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, against
racial discrimination, and around the other major political issues
confronting our class. This is the central arena for all our party campaigns."
This was one of the great ultraleft mistakes in history, clearly on a par
with Stalin's third period phase in the early 1930's. To assume that the
industrial unions would be the place where all major political struggles
took place was an act of faith bordering on madness. He presented this
analysis without even subjecting the Breitman view to a thorough-going
critique. As we know, the 1980's were not a time when the unions moved to
center-stage in American politics. It was, on the other hand, a time when
the capitalist ruling-class moved to center-stage and dealt the union
movement powerful blows. Resistance to this onslaught is only first
beginning appear today.
Thousands of people left the SWP during this period. Many of them went on
to become activists in the Central America solidarity movement or other
grass-roots movements. They worked closely with many ex-Maoists who had
gone through identical experiences. You might even say that this
unorganized movement of ex-Trotskyists and Maoists is the largest group on
the left today. What is interesting is that a regroupment process has
brought this milieu into contact with ex-CP'ers who have launched the
Committees of Correspondence. This organization and Solidarity, another
loosely structured group that rejects "vanguardism" are promising new
formations on the American left.
Louis Proyect
