---------------- Reply to Michael ---------------- Michael,
Thanks for the detailed response. I'll address your points sequentially. *On the "lesser evil" (your point 4).* You insist there was no confusion in Lenin's formula, only in Draper's mind, and you ask: if Lenin thought tsarist Russia was the worst power for all Marxists , why didn't he openly advocate a German victory? However, this question inherently contradicts your position. Lenin advocated neither victory nor defeatism in 1914–17 because it was reciprocal. Each proletariat worked for the defeat of its own government; the German Left was to oppose Berlin exactly as the Russian Left opposed Petrograd. "Turn the imperialist war into civil war" was addressed to both camps at once. That is the whole content of the position. What you've done is quietly convert that reciprocal defeatism into a unilateral defensism : practical support for the "lesser evil" state's war effort. Then you backdate the substitution to Lenin and treat his refusal to cheer for Berlin as proof he secretly ranked a Russian defeat as the lesser evil. He did no such thing. His refusal to advocate a German victory and his ferocious attacks on the German social democrats are perfectly consistent—they are the same defeatism applied on both sides of the front. You need the asymmetry to license the campist tactics that follow. Lenin doesn't give it to you. *On the genetic fallacy (your point 5).* You concede the principle—"people who say something wrong about one issue can be right about another"—and then, in the very next sentence, violate it: "I did show that Draper was wrong on war since the 1940s, so I doubt he was qualified to understand Lenin's policy in 1953/54." That is the fallacy restated, not answered. Whether Draper read Lenin correctly in 1953–54 stands or falls on the 1953–54 text, not on a demerit assigned for the 1940s. You've granted the rule and broken it in the same breath. *On Cannon and the SWP (your point 3).* Here I think you've handed me the argument. Your indictment of Cannon is that he deviated from defeatism —that his "we oppose the war only because American capitalism can't defeat Hitler" formulation abandoned Liebknecht's "the main enemy is at home." "You're right that it did. But notice what kind of error that is. Cannon approached the evaluation of the war by focusing on which power could defeat the other—based on the interstate balance of forces—rather than considering the independent interests of the working class. That is precisely the capitalist temptation. And it is the same logic that produces your own "military support, no political support" for this or that semi-colonial state: the war is evaluated on the axis of state-versus-Great-Power, and working-class independence becomes the thing subordinated to it. You've correctly named the disease in Cannon. You haven't noticed you're carrying it. *On "platonic anti-imperialism" and the list of wars (your point 6).* Your move is to say that my support for Solidarność, the Iranian uprisings, and the South African Black trade unions "misses the point" because those aren't struggles against Great Powers—and that only refusing to pick a side in the interstate conflicts constitutes real anti-imperialism. I reject the frame outright. The criterion for socialist support is not the state-versus-Great-Power axis you keep insisting is "decisive." The criterion is working-class self-emancipation. Where I can identify an independent movement of the exploited and oppressed—Solidarność, the mass uprisings in Iran, and the Black unions—I support them. Where the "anti-imperialist" struggle is led by a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois force whose victory would consolidate the very class relations that keep the masses subordinate, I refuse to lend that leadership my support, and I say so plainly. Your analogies reveal the truth. If Chiang Kai-shek slaughtered the communists, then you'd have us "side with him" against Japan. The trade union bureaucrat betrays the members, then commands their support the moment he calls a strike. You recognize that the leadership is an enemy of the masses, then ask the workers to support it. This situation exemplifies the subordination of class independence that third-camp politics aims to reject. "Practical support, no political support" does not resolve the contradiction; it merely allows for the continuation of practical support for the class enemy at the head of the column, masking the underlying issue. And the same answer covers your Iran 2022-versus-2026 challenge. Backing the masses in the streets in 2022 is consistent with refusing to hand the regime our support in 2026. What has changed is not my criterion, but rather who is fighting and for what purpose. The regime that shot the protesters in 2022 does not become the vehicle of Iranian self-liberation because Israeli or American bombs are falling in 2026. You call the category "semi-colony" and treat that as settling the tactical question. It does not. A country's state of oppression due to imperialism helps us understand the world system; however, it does not imply that the bourgeois state governing that country enables its people to achieve freedom. You accuse me of formally accepting the term "semi-colonial" while rejecting its underlying meaning. What it expresses is a relation , not a side. Reading a side of a relation is the whole campist error in miniature. *The statement "you break with the tradition of Marxism" reflects what anarchists assert.* The statement appeals to authority, but it relies on unproven assumptions. Yes, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky sided with particular national struggles against specific Great Powers. However, their tradition distinguished between genuinely progressive national movements and inter-imperialist conflicts disguised as national struggles, as well as between wars that expanded opportunities for working-class organization and those that undermined it. You have flattened those distinctions so that any semi-colonial state at war with a Great Power qualifies for support. That flattening is not the tradition; it is the thing Draper and Shachtman broke from when they watched "defense of the oppressed nation" become defense of Stalin's state and, later, defense of every regime that could wave an anti-imperialist banner. Invoking the lineage does not resolve the issue when the lineage itself is the subject of dispute. *On the record of sacrifice (your point 6, the comrades).* I want to be careful here, because Eliseev's fourteen years, Schwartz's arrests, Quevedo's three months, and your own two convictions are real, and they are serious. I accept them, and I will continue to do so. But these experiences support the beliefs of those in the position; they don't prove the position is right. A belief is validated by the suffering of its followers; if not, we would have to credit many rejected political ideologies. So I honor the sacrifices and set them aside from the argument, which is where they belong. Ultimately, our disagreement is not about courage or the reality of imperialist oppression, both of which I grant. It is about whether the class character of the leadership and the independent capacity of the masses are the decisive questions, or whether the state-versus-Great-Power axis overrides them. You say the latter is "decisive." I say that is precisely the move that has, again and again, delivered socialists into the service of one ruling class in the name of opposing another. Best, Tony -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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