David, this is the right example to put on the table, and the WWII reconstruction is largely correct, so let me agree with the history and then say where I think it does not carry the strategic weight you want it to.
On the facts I have no quarrel. The SWP did drop overt defeatist propaganda after Pearl Harbor while keeping its analysis of the war as imperialist; it did get cadre into defense plants rather than into uniform where it could, and the place the PMP was actually lived out was Britain and the Home Guard, not the United States. That gap between formal adoption and practice is itself telling, and you are right to name it. The American party "ranked," as you put it, without admitting it ranked, and the WWII conjuncture, with a working class welded to a base anti-fascism after Pearl Harbor, is exactly the case the third-camp critique has always found the hardest. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But notice what the Home Guard case actually shows, because it is narrower than the PMP as a doctrine. British workers training with arms to fight an occupying Wehrmacht is not the PMP's distinctive content. It is the wholly general proposition that revolutionaries go where their class is and take up arms alongside it against an invader. No third-camp socialist opposes that. Fighting an occupation, arming the class to resist invasion, and joining a militia raised against a foreign army on your own soil—all of that is common ground. If that is all the PMP means, then it is unobjectionable and also not a distinctive policy, because it collapses into ordinary revolutionary practice in a war of resistance. The PMP claimed more. Its specific content was a positive transitional demand on the bourgeois state's own military machine: trade union control of military training, officers elected by the ranks, and military schooling funded by the state but controlled by the workers' organizations. That is the part that is not reducible to "fight the occupier." And that is the part that is hard to quarantine from what happened to Cannon, because once you are making demands for the better organization of your own ruling class's war apparatus, you have accepted that apparatus as a thing to be improved rather than subverted, and the slope from there to social-patriotism is the one the SWP actually slid down. The Home Guard does not test that claim, because resisting invasion needs no transitional demand on Churchill's army to justify it. It justifies itself. So I would separate two questions you have fused. Should revolutionaries in Britain have armed and trained to fight a German invasion? Yes, obviously, and opposing that would be sectarian idiocy. Does that vindicate the PMP as a general military policy, a standing demand to be raised on one's own imperialist state in imperialist wars? No, because the Home Guard was a war of resistance against occupation, the one case where the class line and the national defense line genuinely converge, and you cannot generalize from the limit case to the rule. The PMP wanted to apply that logic to imperialist war as such. That is precisely where it broke and where the American party either avoided the draft or, when it engaged, drifted toward the patriotism it had sworn off. Which is also why Korea and Vietnam are not really PMP. Going in to build the antiwar movement from within, GI organizing, and refusing to flee to Canada because the fight is among the conscripted ranks—none of that requires a transitional demand on the army's training. It is defeatist work inside a mass army, which is what socialists have always done and what I have no objection to. The SWP and WWP did good work there. But they did it by organizing soldiers against the war, not by demanding workers' control of the officer corps. Calling that the PMP keeps the name alive by quietly emptying it of the content that made it controversial. So my answer to "why would anyone oppose this" is that I do not oppose the Home Guard, and I do not oppose GI organizing. I oppose the inference from those cases to a standing positive demand on the imperialist state's military, which is the only thing the PMP added and the only thing in genuine dispute. In solidarity, Tony -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42225): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42225 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/119987077/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
