hola, > On Jul 7, 2026, at 07:25, Anthony Teso via groups.io > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > ... > 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? >
One obvious variant is the level of repression. The party might choose not to sell its paper at the factory gate or college campus if members would be arrested for doing so. We might write pamphlets in a code to avoid certain words or phrases. Lenin referred to it as "Aesopian language." The party might go completely underground, and it might take weeks for a party member to find other party members. A different example: Portland, Oregon has a six-mile long oil terminal that sits on a liquefaction zone, which will liquify in an earthquake and send hundreds of tanks of oils into the Willamette River and eventually into the Columbia River. This could create a dead zone in the river, at least where the Willamette empties into the Columbia; it could possibly ignite nearby Forest Park, one of the largest urban forests in the US at over 5000 acres. As this catastrophe is unfolding, bridges may collapse and emergency services overwhelmed by the effects of the not-unexpected major earthquake. This problem is compounded by a vendor who imports crude oil by train from Bakken and the Canadian Oil Sands into the facility for reshipment out of state. Oregon has no refineries. The oil trains put at risk the poorer working-class neighborhoods adjacent to the route. This trans-shipment practice has generated significant opposition. Dozens of people have blocked the oil trains in the past. If dozens of people decide to rip up the tracks to stop the trains, however, that would be futile, the action would be quickly stopped, the protesters would be arrested, and we should oppose the adventure from the start. If tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of people began ripping up the oil-train tracks, then "class struggle changes according to conditions." This is one of Cannon's central points in https://stars.library.ucf.edu/prism/734/. > 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, > In the message we're discussing, I wrote "There are two different things. One is the defense presentation at the sedition trial, which most people in and around the party likely did not read at the time. [MB: after doing some reading on the topic, I might be wrong about that] The other is the party organ, which did represent the party's position on a weekly basis to everyone who reads it." > and I accept that. > But I didn't write that the public position did not exist in the courtroom. So you are accepting a straw-man argument. Anyway, I don't think this is an important point. > 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. > When the US Communist Party of America and the US Communist Labor Party of America went underground during the Palmer raids, 1919-20, they both ceased publishing the paper altogether. Did that mean their positions have changed? If they have semi-legality with certain things that could not be written without prosecution, it doesn't change the programme if the paper tread very carefully around those topics. It does not necessarily compromise principle to avoid having the party stripped of the resources it will need when it can function openly during an upsurge in struggles as happened after WWII. > 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. > Did Gramsci's position change in his Prison Notebooks? Or Lenin's when publishing works according to Czarist guidelines? > 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. > I'm Ebert? I thought Cannon was Ebert. So I am in good company. But I would wait until we get through the Cannon/Munis debate before we start labeling each other as opportunist or ultra left, &c. > That also answers his question, "What principle action are we talking about?" > The principle involved is the unity of program and public agitation. > What does that mean when an organization cannot do public agitation without having their members jailed or party resources seized by an enthusiastic government? Does it mean that the organization does not have a program if it cannot freely present it during an unfavorable conjuncture? Did the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks have programs when they could not agitate in public? > 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. > The "unity argument" assumes an atmosphere where the party can operate openly and is nonsense when it cannot. > 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 an underground organization has compromised its principles? > So let me ask the question directly: when does prudent self-censorship become > adaptation? > When the masses of workers are ready to oppose the capitalist war and the party refuses to lead them. That would be one case. There are other cases as well. But this was far from the case in the US in 1941. In fact, I believe Cannon's points that the US population was freaked out by European and Asian countries being taken over by Germany and Japan. As unlikely as that was to happen, our working class wasn't populated with geopolitical analysts. Roosevelt wasn't going to tell them. The great mass of the US working class wanted to fight before the US was invaded, and they overwhelmingly supported Roosevelt, who was prosecuting the SWP'ers and Local 544 activists for interfering with his war plans. > 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. > How did I do? > 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. > Whose fault is that? Should we consider this incessant splitting of parties a Trotskyist characteristic, or is it Comintern Leninism? There seems to be no shortage of MList groups these days. > Rather, the lack of internal debate indicates the condition of the party > after the faction fight, not that the policy was uncontroversial among > Trotskyists. > Practically any policy of one Trotskyist group will likely be controversial among some other 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. -- > How would you operationalize revolutionary defeatism? > 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. > I read the Munis critique and the Cannon response. I'd like to hear your thoughts on it. Having read your posts and articles, Tony, it surprises me that you would side with Munis in that debate. Mark p.s. I will be traveling for five days at the end of the week and my responses to you (and Michael) may be delayed. Particularly if you keep handing out reading assignments. But they are good reads, on the whole. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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