Dear Mark and Tony,
thanks for your responses. It seems to me that we have now exhausted the
discussion where we partly agree and partly agree to disagree. In any
case, this has been a constructive and useful debate! I will therefore
reply only very briefly to some issues.
Mark says about Lenin’s remarks for the delegation at the The Hague
conference: “/"Illegal organizations" are mentioned, I suppose, because
the above piece was for RSDLP delegates./”
No, these were instructions for the communist delegates at an
international trade union conference with mainly European reformist
trade unions in attendance. In general, combining legal and illegal work
was obligatory for all communist parties in Europe – particularly in
relation to the army and militarism. Such wrote Lenin in the famous 21
Conditions on the Terms of Admission into the Communist International
which were adopted at the 2^nd Comintern Congress:
“/In countries where a state of siege or emergency legislation makes it
impossible for Communists to conduct their activities legally, it is
absolutely essential that legal and illegal work should be combined. In
almost all the countries of Europe and America, the class struggle is
entering the phase of civil war. In these conditions, Communists can
place no trust in bourgeois legality. They must everywhere build up a
parallel illegal organisation, which, at the decisive moment, will be in
a position to help the Party fulfil its duty to the revolution./
/Persistent and systematic propaganda and agitation must be conducted in
the armed forces, and Communist cells formed in every military unit. In
the main Communists will have to do this work illegally; failure to
engage in it would be tantamount to a betrayal of their revolutionary
duty and incompatible with membership in the Third International./”
(Lenin: The Terms of Admission into the Communist International, 1920,
LCW Vol. 31, p. 208)
Tony is of course right to point to the different conditions between
Tsarism in 1914 and the U.S. in 1941. I did not mean that the SWP should
have gone completely underground. If I remember correctly, I used the
formulation semi-legal work. This means that the party retains legal
existence as much as possible and carries out the full defeatist
propaganda in illegal publications. Realistically, some leaders would
have needed to go abroad but it does not make much sense to speculate
now about this 80 years later. In any case, the full program – including
a defeatist line with saying the main enemy is at home (i.e. in the
U.S.) – must have been defended.
Comrades are right to point to the need to use Aesopian language in
legal publications (and also at trials). My point was and is only that
this alone is not enough. Of course, the Bolsheviks were never able to
say everything in their “Prawda“ and other legal publications before
1917. But this is exactly the reason why they always combined such legal
with illegal publications (leaflets issued by their local underground
committees, their paper “Sotsial Democrat”, etc.).
Best wishes,
Michael
Am 08.07.2026 um 21:27 schrieb Anthony Teso via groups.io:
Michael,
On the question of objective reality, I don't think we actually
disagree. I never doubted that Pearl Harbor happened or that the fear
it caused was real. What matters is what happened politically
afterward, not whether the event itself occurred. The same applies to
the Hague letter's point that "the overwhelming majority of the
working people will inevitably decide in favor of their bourgeoisie."
That is exactly what happened in 1941, and I don't think anyone here
has said otherwise.
Regarding my earlier point about Lenin and defeatism, I checked the
original texts before replying because I wanted to be sure, not just
rely on Draper's summary. You are correct that the December 1922 Hague
notes mention "defeatism." But that passage is actually Draper's main
evidence for his argument. In his chapter on this (section VI, "After
Lenin: Revival and Reinterpretation"), Draper finds that Lenin only
mentions the defeat slogan three times between the November Revolution
and his death. The Hague note is the third, and Draper calls it
"ambiguous"—it is just a short instruction to explain the historical
language of the World War to a delegation preparing for a possible
future one, not a new order to revive the "wish for the defeat of
one's own government" as an active slogan. Draper also examined the
Comintern's first four congresses, draft programs, Zinoviev's
war-period writings, and the Comintern's monthly journal through 1923
and found no sign of defeatism as doctrine in any of them. Draper
argues that defeatism was reintroduced as "a principle of Leninism" in
1924 by Zinoviev, after Lenin's death, to use against Trotsky.
So I overstated it when I said Lenin "moved away from this concept."
That makes it sound like he abandoned the term, which isn't exactly
Draper's point, and the Hague note doesn't prove that either. Draper
says what really changed was the specific 1914-15 idea of "wishing for
the military defeat of one's own country." This idea stopped making
sense once the Bolsheviks became the government and had to negotiate
the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. After 1917, Lenin never brought up or
defended that idea again, even though he still talked about "turning
the imperialist war into civil war" and "the main enemy is in your own
country." The Hague note doesn't change this; it's just the one
ambiguous case Draper already discusses. I should have said "moved
away from the concept," and I appreciate you pushing me to be more
accurate. It also helps clarify my main point to Mark: "revolutionary
defeatism" isn't a fixed slogan with the same meaning in 1914, 1917,
and 1941. Its meaning changed over time, and treating it as a single,
unchanging doctrine is what lets people apply 1914 ideas to 1941
without question.
Sources, since you'll want to check my reading against the primary
text rather than my summary: Lenin, Notes on the Tasks of Our
Delegation at The Hague
<https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/04b.htm>, and
Draper, The Myth of Lenin's "Revolutionary Defeatism," Ch. VI
<https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1953/defeat/chap6.htm>.
On isolation and "swimming against the stream," I fully agree with the
principle: the way to deal with isolation is through organizational
preparation, not by changing your position just to avoid being
isolated. But it's important to think about what that means in
practice. The Hague letter advised people facing total repression,
like under Tsarist or fascist regimes, to "preserve existing and form
new illegal organizations." In 1941, the SWP was working under a
bourgeois-democratic government that prosecuted and jailed people
under the Smith Act but did not ban the party itself. That situation
is more like facing a tough prosecutor than living under an autocracy.
So "prepare for illegal existence" needs to be adapted to that context
rather than taken literally. Deciding what that adaptation should have
looked like—legal defense strategies, what to publish, how to use
resources—is really the main issue in the Munis-Cannon debate I
mentioned to Mark.
On the evidence, I agree with you. Just to be clear, I never doubted
that you had sources for the charge against Cannon and the SWP. What I
told Mark was that Munis's 1942 pamphlet is a stronger source to show
him because it was written at the time, is detailed, and comes from
someone who supported the defense campaign and read the trial
transcript. That makes it harder for Mark to dismiss it as just
looking back and settling old scores. My point was only about which
citation is more effective with Mark, not that your sourcing was wrong.
I also agree about the "shades in between." I've said that from the
start. Not keeping a consistent defeatist position is not the same as
Ebert signing the war credits, and I don't think ignoring that
difference helps anyone in this discussion.
About the Anschluss, I agree. Let's leave it out. It doesn't add
anything, and the German and Austrian Trotskyists' refusal to take
sides was a different situation. That was an inter-imperialist
territorial dispute, not a case where either side could really claim
"defense of the fatherland," so it doesn't relate to the American issue.
--
Tony
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#42383): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42383
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]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
