Reply to Mark on self-censorship, the party organ, and the PMP Mark’s final post reduces the disagreement between us considerably, and I would like to begin by noting the convergence before moving on to what remains.
His definition of revolutionary defeatism—withholding political support from one’s own government, persisting with independent class struggle in the face of the “national emergency,” regarding one’s own capitalist class as the principal enemy—is essentially the position I ascribed to Draper in my last post. That’s the standard we agree on. If that’s All the rest of the disagreement is in his final caveat that 'independent class struggle changes according to conditions.' True, and also the sentence where every historical capitulation has settled down. So the question is: what is invariant, and what may vary? Here, I think Mark has fallen into a contradiction. I want to state it precisely because it is the crux. In the same post Mark makes two points. First, he devalues the trial testimony as evidence by stating that the party organ “was the weekly expression of the party position to all who read it.” His own standard is that the party's position publicly exists not in the courtroom but in the Militant, and I accept that. It would also have been prudent, he writes, to self-censor by not repeating in the paper the very same slogans that just got 16 party members sentenced to prison, while insisting the position itself was never changed or modified in any way. Both of these statements cannot be true. If the position is what the paper says weekly, then not saying it in the paper on a systematic basis is changing the position as it exists publicly. It is not a preserved position in a different wrapper, a line that remains untouched in internal resolutions while the public organ falls silent. It is the very thing which the classical critique of opportunism depicts. Bear in mind that opportunism has very seldom shown itself in the form of program amendments. SPD never repealed the Erfurt Program. Kautsky never lost a thesis. The program was still on the books, formally, but had gone dark in agitation. Mark's distinction, "I never said soften, only self-censor," does not work against the 1914 analogy. It is a repetition of its mechanism. That also answers his question, "What principle action are we talking about?" The principle involved is the unity of program and public agitation. Mark’s prudential distinction precisely severs that unity, which is why the analogy to 1914 keeps coming back no matter how often he asks what it has to do with anything. That does not detract from the Browder point. Palmer's account is right: forced illegality devastated the early CP, and no serious person wants a party to volunteer for destruction. But that is explicitly a prudential argument, and prudential arguments require limiting principles. So let me ask the question directly: when does prudent self-censorship become adaptation? If Mark cannot name the boundary, the argument licenses Ebert. The SPD leadership in August 1914 also faced ready arrest lists and an army eager to use them. If he can do that, we finally have the terms of a real debate, not an evidentiary standoff, and I would welcome that, genuinely. Mark asks a good question on the PMP: Was there internal opposition to Trotsky’s proposal? And it has an answer that I think complicates his hypothesis. In September 1940 there was virtually no organized opposition inside the SWP to the policy, but the reason is important: the Shachtman split had taken place that April and removed in advance the wing most likely to oppose the policy. Rather, the lack of internal debate indicates the condition of the party after the faction fight, not that the policy was uncontroversial among Trotskyists. The serious opposition was external and international: the Workers Party attacked the PMP as capitulation to the war mobilization; Munis and the Spanish group opposed it; the majority of Greek Trotskyists rejected it, with Stinas and Karliaftis condemning the wartime politics of the American, British, and French sections—Karliaftis taking up Minneapolis in particular. More importantly, Mark's argument that the PMP was adopted because it 'operationalized revolutionary defeatism' turns the historical debate on its head. This is the SWP's own retrospective justification of the policy. The charge of the present critics was just the reverse: that it put into operation a concession to defensiveness. And as Broué points out in his Revolutionary History essay on the Trotskyists and the war, Vereeken and his co-thinkers had already accused Trotsky himself of abandoning defeatism before the PMP was even drafted—which confirms the point I made last time. The PMP debate is between Trotsky and not just Cannon, and you cannot solve it by appealing to him on either side. -- Finally, the citations, since Mark says he has read Cannon's testimony but not the Munis side of the exchange. 1. Munis’s original criticism is in the 1942 pamphlet Defense Policy in the Minneapolis Trial. A Criticism by Grandizo Munis— 2. James P. Cannon, An Answer, digitized and posted by the University of Central Florida in the Van Sickle Leftist Pamphlet Collection: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/prism/734/ The full text of Cannon’s rebuttal, “Political Principles and Propaganda Methods,” is appended to the same marxists.org edition of Socialism on Trial that Mark is using. (It appears as the later chapters on that index page.) The critique written after the war was developed in El SWP y la guerra imperialista (1945) and Le Trotskysme et le Défaitisme Révolutionnaire. The critique Mark keeps asking for evidence of was made in print in 1942 by a participant who supported the defense campaign. Cannon answered at length. His stated objection, worth noting, was that the defense made concessions to defensism and social patriotism. The evidence question is settled. The political assessment of the exchange is what remains. Mark suggests that we “do "both"—read the texts and continue to check the newspaper record. Agreed, with one caveat: the newspaper timeline can only be judged once we agree on what would constitute adaptation (and the Munis–Cannon exchange is where those criteria were originally debated). Let’s start there. Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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