****************************************************** Draft: Reply to Pröbsting on Cannon, the SWP, and 1941 ******************************************************
Michael is half right, and the half he gets right is worth conceding without embarrassment. Mark's defense of the SWP resembles a prudential excuse. Repression is real. The masses are enraged. Therefore, soften the line. That structure is content-neutral. It works for the SPD in August 1914. It works for the SFIO facing an actual German invasion. It works for any leadership at any time that prefers survival to clarity. Michael is correct that the leaders of the Second International invoked exactly this logic, arrest lists in hand, to justify capitulation. He is also correct that "material conditions" does illegitimate work in Mark's post. Pearl Harbor produced grief and rage. The conversion of grief and rage into pro-war consciousness was a political achievement of the American state and its press, not a mechanical output of the attack. Consciousness is made, not secreted. And the Hamas aid was a gift Michael was always going to pocket. Concede all of it. Now the half he gets wrong. The SPD analogy fails at the class line. The SPD voted war credits. It entered the Burgfrieden. It gave positive political support to its bourgeoisie's war and policed the working class on its behalf. The SWP did none of these things. It never supported the war. It never voted for anything. Its eighteen leaders went to Sandstone and Danbury under the Smith Act for refusing to support the war. There is a categorical difference between capitulation and a dispute over agitational pitch conducted under federal indictment. Michael's method requires collapsing that difference, because he converts every tactical question into a question of principle and then convicts the defendant of 1914. But if refusing political support to the imperialist war is not the criterion, then what is? Is there a stridency quotient in the party press? Measured by whom? The Bolshevik analogy fails at history. The Bolsheviks did not choose the underground in 1914. They had built a clandestine apparatus over fifteen years because tsarist autocracy made legal existence impossible. Illegality was their default condition, not their wartime tactic. The SWP had roughly two thousand members in a bourgeois democracy where the party press remained legal throughout the war. The Militant kept publishing. The party kept functioning. "Why did Cannon not go underground" is theater posing as strategy, and the tell is that Michael never says what the underground SWP would have done that the legal SWP could not. An underground press to print what, exactly? The party's positions were already in print, above ground, with the leadership's names attached. That is what the indictment was for. And if the Duma faction trial is the heroic standard, Michael should remember how it went. Kamenev distanced himself from defeatism in the dock. The Bolshevik record under fire includes prudence, evasion, and worse. It survived those episodes because the political line was right, not because every cadre recited the catechism under oath. Which brings me to the actual problem, the one both Mark and Michael share. Both accept that "revolutionary defeatism" is the measure of principle. They differ only on whether the SWP met the standard or was excused from it. However, the standard itself is confusing. Hal Draper demonstrated fifty years ago that the defeat slogan was a polemical improvisation from 1914 and 1915, aimed at Kautsky and the center, which Lenin himself effectively abandoned by 1917 and never applied in practice. The third camp position does not require wishing military defeat on your state. It requires refusing political support to the imperialist war, maintaining the class independence of the proletariat, and continuing the class struggle without regard for its consequences for the war effort. By that criterion, the one that actually operated in 1917, the SWP passed. It refused support. It kept the class line. It went to prison. By that criterion, the real historical debate about the SWP also comes into focus, and it is not the one Michael wants to engage in. The serious question is the Proletarian Military Policy and the conduct of the Minneapolis defense. Munis pressed Cannon on exactly this. Not on whether The Militant repeated indictable slogans often enough, but on whether the trial testimony conceded too much to bourgeois legality and whether the PMP's demand for trade union control of military training adapted to the workers' patriotic frame rather than cutting against it. Cannon answered in "Defense Policy in the Minneapolis Trial. " That exchange is substantive. Reasonable revolutionaries can and did disagree about it. I have my criticisms of the PMP, which bent the stick toward the war camp in the name of meeting workers where they were. But that debate is about program and strategy. Michael's version focuses on liturgy, arguing that the sin is insufficient repetition of the defeat formula in the party organ. One correction for the record, since the thread is accumulating errors. The FBI did not install "the US Italian mob" in Local 544. Tobin placed the local under IBT receivership and used gangster muscle to enforce it, while the federal prosecution served the convergent interests of Tobin and the Roosevelt administration. The distinction matters, because the actual story is worse for the state and better for the analysis: the bourgeois democratic state and the labor bureaucracy collaborated openly to behead a class-struggle leadership. That is the lesson of 1941. Not that Cannon lacked nerve, or that nerve was inadvisable, but that the American state, given a war, will treat revolutionary opposition as sedition while the official labor movement holds its coat. So: yes to Michael's critique of the excuse logic. No to the litmus test. The SPD capitulated politically. The SWP did not. Whether it fought as well as it could have is a real question, and Munis asked it. Reciting "defeatism" at it answers nothing. -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42326): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42326 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]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
