Marv, The gravestone line is a fitting one, and what Cannon had to put up with included eighteen months in Sandstone under the Smith Act, so no one in this thread doubts his seriousness. But two moves in your post need to be separated.
The first is the authorship defense. If Cannon was an opportunist, you say, then so was his mentor. Agreed, and so what. Discovering that Trotsky wrote the PMP does not settle the question of whether it was a principled development of the movement's war policy or an adaptive concession. My tradition parted ways with the orthodoxy on exactly this point, the willingness to say the Old Man could be wrong, and said so about Poland and Finland while he was alive to answer. Trotsky's authorship relocates the question. It does not answer it. The second move is the realism contest, and here your post gives the game away. You write that the PMP was never accepted by the masses of workers and soldiers and that the revolutionary crisis expected to arise from the war never arrived. But the PMP had no justification apart from those two expectations. Read the passage you quote. The whole case is key: it shows us how to reach the masses without alienating them and how to get ready for the next step. The policy was sold as realism. On your account it delivered neither the approach nor the second step. The party got the isolation and the repressions Trotsky predicted, and the Minneapolis defendants got convicted for the defeatist content that survived in their program, as the trial record shows. A policy that is defended solely on the basis of its realism but ultimately fails to meet realistic standards cannot subsequently succeed in a competition of realism against its rivals. The rival you describe is not accurate. Revolutionary defeatism was never a proposal that the SWP defeat the Roosevelt administration and take state power amid the patriotic explosion. That confuses a political line with an insurrectionary timetable. Lenin's position in 1914 was not a prediction that the Bolsheviks would shortly seize power. It was a refusal, under conditions of total isolation, to extend political confidence to his state's war and an insistence that the class struggle continues through the war rather than being suspended. Liebknecht cast his vote alone. On the test you propose, could this tendency have taken power that year? Lenin and Liebknecht are LOL material too. The measure of a line held by a small minority is not its immediate feasibility, which was equally zero for the PMP, but whether it keeps the political independence of the class intact for the moment when the minority becomes the majority. That is precisely what "our army, our officers, loyal to us" put at risk, because it framed the workers' task as running the defense better rather than refusing the defense of the bourgeois state altogether. Note also what Trotsky's passage actually rejects: "a purely abstract pacifist position." Defeatism is not the same as pacifism. The quote does not fulfill the purpose you intend for it. Last, since you filed this under Michael P.'s mentor, my objection to the PMP is not the RCIT's. I think Cannon's crime was bold. I think the PMP's demands, trade-union control of military training, and state-financed workers' military schools located the lever of workers' power inside the bourgeois state's own military apparatus, which is backward from a from-below standpoint, and I think its one non-negotiable premise, a mass conscript army as the terrain of working-class life, has not existed in this country since 1973. The realistic option for a small revolutionary minority in 1940 was the same as it is now: independent class opposition to the state's war, meeting defense feelings in the class with class demands rather than with endorsement. That is not a bolder policy. It is just not a borrowed one. -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42257): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42257 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]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
