Mark, let me correct my own shorthand before it does more harm than the point deserves, because "the drift shows up in the trial testimony" was sloppy and you'd be right to pull the transcript on me.
The testimony does not show Cannon ranking the imperialisms. Under direct questioning he does the opposite. Asked whether the party favored a U.S. defeat by Germany or Japan, he says plainly they are not pro-German and not for an Axis victory over the United States. That is the symmetrical defeatist line, stated defensively under oath by a man facing a sedition conviction, which is your Smith Act point, and it stands. He went to prison because the line was defeatist enough to convict. I'm not going to pretend the testimony reads as social patriotism, because it doesn't. So let me say what I actually think the problem is, because it's narrower and it survives the transcript. The exposure isn't a ranking of states. It's two other moves. First, the accommodation to legality and mass sentiment: the party declares it will not obstruct the war "in a military way," that it submits to the majority, that there's no agitation in the army even about the food. That's a propaganda-method retreat, and it's exactly what Munis attacked and what Cannon defended in "Political Principles and Propaganda Methods" — consciously, as a choice about how to speak to a working class that was, in Cannon's own words from May 1942, accepting the war and acting with the bourgeoisie rather than with the party. You can defend that retreat as Cannon did. But it is a retreat, and calling it anything else is the double-talk you rightly don't want to accuse Gramsci of. Second, and this is the part that bears on the PMP: the formula is "Hitlerism can be destroyed only through a war led by the workers." Notice the structure. It keeps "destroy Hitlerism" as the shared, unquestioned goal and contests only the agent—we can defeat fascism; the capitalists can't. That is not a ranking of states. It's something subtler and, for my argument, worse: it accepts the enemy's defeat as the premise and disputes only who delivers it. That's the PMP's own logic — meet the anti-fascist mass sentiment where it is, fight over method — and it's the same structure I've been pinning on Pröbsting's campism, where the goal (defeat the greater power) is conceded and only the instrument is in dispute. So I withdraw "The testimony is where the drift shows." The testimony is where the defeatism shows, which is why it convicted. The drift is in the method-not-goal framing, and it's a tendency the PMP makes likely rather than a betrayal the testimony records. That's a smaller claim than I made yesterday, and a truer one. In comradeship, Tony -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42236): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42236 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]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
