The Struggle for Marxism in the United States: (iv) American Trotskyism without Trotsky

[p041] Marxism in the United States by Tim Wohlforth 83 iv) American Trotskyism without Trotsky A. AMERICAN RADICALISM REASSERTS ITSELF—1940-1945 Within a few short months of the fundamental split with the Shachtman-Burnham-Abern faction in 1940, the Socialist Workers Party was to receive another severe blow, the death of Trotsky. This was a particularly difficult blow to the movement, for it came precisely at a time when Trotsky was beginning to make what could have been his most important contribution to the development of the American Trotskyist movement. While his role in the 1940 factional struggle was essential in order to save the movement, his role after the split was becoming critical to the process of developing that which was saved. But this learning process was terminated by Stalin’s axe and the party was forced to carry on as best it could on its own resources— not the least of these being what it had learned from Trotsky in the preceding period. It was not an easy period in which to learn, for World War II was going full blast and the United States was being drawn increasingly into the bloody battle. The American movement was largely cut off from active collaboration with Trotskyists in other parts of the world and virtually the entire responsibility for the continuation of the Fourth International fell on to its shoulders. Nor was the situation within the United States an easy one. The war boom was beginning to eat at the militancy of the working class, and pro-war chauvinism was rampant in the country as a whole. Soon the party itself was to feel directly the weight of state persecution. No, it was not an easy time to learn, but revolutionaries are not revolutionaries if they cannot survive difficult times. Forced to rely on its own resources, it is quite natural that that element in American Trotskyism, most specifically reflected in Cannon himself and those close to him, which was both the strength and the weakness of the American movement, should re-assert itself—American radicalism. American radicalism, as we have seen, is not a homogeneous tradition but rather a combination of some quite contradictory outlooks. The two most important of these are populism, the struggle of ‘democracy’ against plutocracy, and syndicalism, the elemental class-consciousness of an emerging working class. We will see the various ways these divergent

[p042] 84 radical traditions reflected themselves through the SWP as it was put to some very severe tests during the war period. Soon after Trotsky’s death the Federal Govern- ment began the prosecution under the Smith Act of 18 leaders of the party and of the Minneapolis Teamsters. Clearly, its aim was to remove an obstacle within the labour movement to its drive to rally the workers behind its imperialist war aims. The Minneapolis Trial was a very serious challenge to the Party which threatened its very legal existence in the United States. It would be foolhardy to underestimate the responsibility for the protection of the Party which fell upon the shoulders of the SWP leadership. But the situa- tion faced by the American Trotskyists was by no means a unique one for Trotskyists during World War II. In other so-called ‘democratic’ coun- tries the Trotskyists also faced persecution, and in occupied Europe Trotskyists were forced into illegal existence where they were hounded by the Nazis, the ‘democratic’ imperialists, and the Stalinists. Important cadres of our movement lost their lives. The dual task facing the American Trotskyists was both the preservation of the party’s legality to the extent this was possible and the. political exposure of the American capitalists and the international imperialist war as a whole. It had both to preserve the existing cadres and to lay the political basis for the growth of the American and international movement as disillusionment with the war grew in the world working class. The SWP leadership saw its role as a dual one though posing it somewhat differently. Cannon states it this way: From the first moment after the indictment was brought against us in the Federal Court at Minneapolis last July we recognised that the attack had two aspects, and we appraised each of them, we think, at their true significance. The prosecution was designed to outlaw the party and deprive it, perhaps for a long time, of the active services of a. number of its most experienced leaders. At the same time it was obvious that the mass trial, pro- perly handled on our part, could give us our first real opportunity to make the party and its principles known to wide circles of workers and to gain a sympathetic hearing from them.! While Cannon sees a dual role in the SWP’s approach to the trial, the propaganda aspect of the trial is seen only in narrow American terms. Cannon does not see the role of the SWP as the spokesman for Trotskyism internationally during the critical war period. Rather he states: ‘At the FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 trial we had the opportunity, for the first time, to speak to the masses—to the people of the United States.’2, But without the SWP speaking for the world movement, the world movement was to have no real voice during the Second Imperialist War. This is pretty much the way it worked out. Seeing the trial as a forum from which to address American workers, the SWP’s trial pre- sentation was deeply influenced by its own con- ception of the American working class at that particular time. ‘We,’ Cannon states, ‘dealt with a specific trial and attempted to explain ourselves to the workers as they are in the United States in the year 1941.3 This is how Cannon saw the American working class in 1941: The forty million American workers, casting an almost solid vote for Roosevelt, remain in the first primitive stages of class political development; they are soaked through and through with bourgeois democratic illusions; they are discontented to a certain extent and partly union conscious but not class conscious; they have a fetishistic respect for the Federal government as the government of all the people and hope to better conditions for them- selves by voting for ‘friendly’ bourgeois politicians; they hate and fear fascism which they identify with Hitler; they understand socialism and communism only in the version disseminated by the bourgeois press; and are either hostile or indifferent to it; the real meaning of socialism, the revolutionary Marxist meaning, is unknown to the great majority.4 Seeing the workers thus as ‘primitive’, ‘fetishistic’ about democracy and ‘hostile to socialism’, the SWP clearly had a rather difficult task of propa- ganda ahead of it during the trials. This explains the relatively primitive level of the exposition by Cannon during his trial testimony. The question remains as to whether Cannon accurately portrays the American working class in 1941; whether his aim at the trial should have been to reach the class as a whole or its more advanced militant section; further, whether his aim should have been to reach the class as it was at that moment or to lay the basis to reach the class as it could and shortly in part did become. The Mexican Trotskyist Grandizo Munis wrote a very harsh criticism of the SWP’s trial defence policy in 1942. As was to be true of virtually all disputes in the Trotskyist movement after the 1. Cannon, James P. ‘Political Principles and Propa- ganda Methods’, Defense Policy in the Minneapolis Trial (Pioneer Publishers, New York, 1942), page 5. 2. Ibid., page 16. 3. Ibid., page 19. 4. Ibid., page 20.

[p043] STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. death of Trotsky there was more than a grain of truth in Munis’s criticisms and in Cannon’s defence of SWP policy, also written in 1942. Munis showed little regard for the very real problem of the defence of the legality of the party and thus of the need for careful defensive formulations during the trial. Cannon correctly defends himself on this with ample quotations from ‘the Marxist masters’. However, at the same time Munis made some very telling criticisms of the SWP which Cannon was unable to really answer. Here is the essential thrust of Munis’s criticism: It was there (he is referring to Cannon’s testi- mony), replying to the political accusations—struggle against the war, advocacy of violence, overthrow of the government by force—where it is necessary to have raised the tone and turn the tables, accuse the government and the bourgeoisie of a reactionary conspiracy; of permanent violence against the majority of the population, physical, economic, moral, educative violence; of launching the population into a slaughter also by means of violence in order to defend the Sixty Families. On the contrary, it is on arriving at this part that the trial visibly weakens, our comrades shrink them- selves, minimise the revolutionary significance of their ideas, try to make an honourable impression on the jury without taking into consideration that they should talk for the masses. For a moment they border on a renunciation of principles.5 The basic reason for this defensive political pose of the SWP, as distinguished from legally defensive formulations, is directly related both to the SWP’s failure to view its propaganda tasks as_ inter- national in scope and its assessment of the working class in the United States. The SWP had a political responsibility in 1941 similar to that of Trotsky in his trial following the 1905 Revolu- tion and Karl Liebknecht during World War I. Trotsky, despite the failure of the 1905 Revolution dnd his own personal jeopardy, defended openly in the Czarist Court the aims of the 1905 Revolu- tion and turned the court proceedings into a trial of Czarism itself. Appropriately his famous speech to the trial was called ‘In Defence of Insur- rection’. Liebknecht defended the revolutionary struggle against war and turned prosecutions against him into rallies against the bourgeois government both in his trial before the war and in his action during the war. The responsibility that fell upon the shoulders of the SWP was to turn this prosecution of the SWP into a political prosecution of capitalism which had imposed the miseries of depression on the people for the past decade and was at that very 85 moment perpetrating the greatest bloodbath history has seen. The trial was in fact a beautiful platform for putting capitalism on trial in a concrete way for what it was doing that very moment. Even from the point of view of risk to the party it was not such a difficult period, as the United States had not yet actually entered the war and anti-war sentiment was still a real factor in the country. Most important of all, by launching an offensive on this issue the SWP would have reached the very heart of the reason for the prosecution of the party itself—that is, the capitalists’ desire to discipline the working class in preparation for the war. The SWP could have raised as a central propaganda issue the prediction that the war would be run at the expense of the working class and would be used to hold down and discipline the class. Thus it would have prepared the class for the events that were to come. What the SWP did do was to sidestep this kind of political offensive which would have meant a sharper head-on confrontation with the capitalists. It did this by what was to become a favourite way of evading concrete political tasks—by treating the trials as an opportunity for a general socialist propaganda campaign. Thus Cannon’s testimony was a basic exposition of the ABC of socialism, as was Goldman’s summation. Socialism on Trialé and In Defence of Socialism? were very appropriate titles. Cannon’s testimony in par- ticular became a basic pamphlet for classes to educate raw recruits for many years to come. While there is nothing wrong with general socialist propaganda—a task which must always be carried out—it cannot be a substitute for the presentation of socialist ideas in a concrete way which counter- poses them to the current action of the ruling class. For years the Socialist Labour Party in the United States has carried out general socialist propaganda on a very extensive scale, in fact pro- paganda of the most uncompromising ‘revolution- ary’ sort. But when the time came for the US Attorney General to draw up a list of ‘subversive’ organisations he saw no need for putting such a harmless organisation as the SLP on the list. There was a much more important use to which the Minneapolis Trials could have been put than the publication of a socialist propaganda pamphlet. 5. -Munis, Grandizo. ‘A Criticism of the Minneapolis Trial’, Defense Policy ..., op. cit., page 5. 6. Cannon, James P. Socialism on Trial (Pioneer Publishers, New York, Third Edition, 1949). 7. Goldman, Albert. In Defense of Socialism (Pioneer Publishers, New York, 1942).

[p044] 86 Now let us take a short look at the nature of the general socialist propaganda the SWP did produce, viewing it even within the narrow confines of a propaganda attempt to reach the American workers. The weak and defensive nature of this propaganda is closely related to Cannon’s assessment of the American working class and in fact Cannon’s only real defence against this aspect of Munis’s criticism is his assessment of the American working class. The problem is not so much that Cannon is only speaking for the benefit of the jury but that he does not see any great difference between the jury and the working class. Cannon sees a working class domi- nated by a fetishism of democracy and in fact in large part he gives in to this fetishism. Under such circumstances he seeks to picture the SWP as being respectable to the eyes of a bourgeois democrat. Thus as Munis correctly points out he sees the ruling class acting in an undemocratic way only at that point when the revolutionary party has the support of the majority of the population. He implies acceptance of the United States of 1941 as a really democratic country. No attempt is made to show how the ruling class subverts demo- cracy with its economic power; how it has bought up both major parties; how it denies even the phoney democracy of the bourgeois ballot to the Negro people in the South; how it resorts to violence every time the working class asserts itself in strike actions; how it forces the working class to work for it on its terms or starve, through its undemocratic control of the means of production; how it perpetrates world war and the slaughter of millions in order to protect its violent domination of society. Even in his answer to Munis, Cannon sees the bourgeois democratic forms as being very real and meaningful, and even goes so far as to state: ‘Free speech and free press, obliterated or reduced to travesty in other lands, have been virtually unrestricted here.’ But the working class well knows that when it goes on strike this ‘free press’ to a man supports the capitalists, that this ‘free press’ in reality has been bought by the ruling class. In our opinion the working class in 1941 had a somewhat more realistic conception of the real meaning of bourgeois democracy than Cannon gives them credit for. This is the working class which had just gone through the great strike battles of the 190s. It still remembered. True it had not developed class-consciousness and it therefore voted for Roosevelt. But it tended to FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 vote for Roosevelt with a good dose of cynicism, a certain feeling of ‘lesser evilism’—not because it felt that Roosevelt truly represented the American worker. If there is one common charac- teristic of American workers, throughout the. twentieth century at least, it is a deep suspicion of political parties and the whole political appa- ratus; a certain feeling of alienation rather than identity with government. FDR never fully broke that down. Even assuming, however, that the American workers in 1941, after the great struggles of the 1930s, were as primitive as Cannon makes them out to be, the question still remains to what extent it is proper for revolutionaries to give in to that primitiveness. If we see that primitiveness as a transitory phenomenon then our propaganda should be aimed at the more advanced elements among the workers and at the workers as they will inevitably emerge as time passes. We would then see our propaganda tasks as preparation for reaching the mass in the period ahead. As it worked out in history this ‘primitive’ and chauvinist working class was to fight against the no-strike pledge and for the continuation of the class struggle despite the war, only two or three years from the time of Cannon’s gloomy assessment of the class. Cannon and the SWP did not see their role as that of spokesmen for an international movement which, while persecuted in the present, would grow throughout the world in the future on the basis of the political capital of its principled stand in the present. Rather it sought to reach the mass of American workers at the time by partially giving in to their own illusions, or illusions the SWP imagined them to have, on democracy, by seeking to picture the SWP within the framework of bourgeois democracy. This gave the propaganda in Socialism on Trial a populist tinge. Defensive formulations shifted over into a defensive pose in which the opponent is seen, at least at present, as democratic and peaceful, and we must prove to our opponent—and the working class which is seen as agreeing with our opponent—that we also are democratic and peaceful. While it is clear that the party did not bow to the ruling class during the Second World War there can be no doubt that in the early period it did bend a bit. And above all it acted as simply an American radical party and did not assume the leadership of the international movement thrust upon it by Trotsky’s death. 8. Cannon, James P. ‘Political Principles .. .’, op. cit.. page 19.

[p045] STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. What was true about the party’s propaganda was even more true so far as concrete trade union work was concerned. Everywhere the watchword was ‘caution’ and the task was to preserve the precious trade union cadres gathered by the work of the 1930s. While a good deal of caution was indeed necessary for revolutionaries during such a period this conservative attitude continued even into the 1944-45 period when the working class was developing important struggles against the no- strike pledge and the wage freeze. The party held back from giving leadership to these struggles. For instance A. Winters, a working-class com- rade from Bayonne, New Jersey who ended up with Goldman and Morrow but who began his struggle in the party largely against the conservatism of its trade union work, raised some very modest proposals in late 1944, Urging only participation in concrete struggles of the class and not direct leadership of caucuses he comments: ‘When workers do begin to move on a mass scale, should they follow anyone who did not previously supply some type of leadership? How would a young comrade ever gain his leadership experience and confidence while sitting it out?’? He further states: ‘Everywhere the workers are growing increasingly restless. More and more progressive formations are taking shape as an expression of this fact. We must learn how to inject ourselves in these limited struggles in this period not with the perspective of leading the workers in struggle, but of winning cadre elements to the party.’10 In June 1940 Trotsky warned the American Trotskyists of the dangers of adaptation to the backward layers of the working class. But as soon as the Minneapolis Trial started it was clear that the SWP leadership had not heeded Trotsky’s warnings. In its propaganda during the Trial it adapted in part to the backward prejudices of the class.. In its concrete work in the trade unions the comrades concerned themselves primarily with protecting themselves rather than assisting the working class in its struggle, which soon came to the fore. Having the responsibility of the whole international thrust upon it by the death of Trotsky, the SWP spoke and acted almost exclu- sively as leader of an American radical group, not as the leading spokesmen for an _ international political tendency, the only tendency which could overthrow the capitalist system and bring real peace to the world. There was another aspect of the life of the Socialist Workers Party during the war. The 87 death of Trotsky left the SWP with a deep void which it had great difficulty in filling. In part, as we have seen, it filled this void by returning to ‘American radicalism’ and to basic socialist pro- paganda—something which it felt fully confident about. This turn led to its neglect of its inter- national responsibilities and to a blunting of its struggle against American imperialism in the early critical stage of World War II. But there was another part to the life of the SWP, a part which helped to obscure for the rank and file the real political and theoretical weaknesses of the party— orthodoxy. With Trotsky’s death Cannon could no longer bloc with Trotsky. As a substitute he and the rest of the SWP leadership sought to maintain a bloc with the corpse of Trotsky. That is to say, they became the first and foremost defenders of everything Trotsky ever wrote and did. They upheld all the old positions of the Fourth Inter- national. This is, of course, a necessary task. Those who foolishly discard past theoretical achievements can never seriously build anything. But a simple repetition of past positions is no guarantee that one has really assimilated these positions and can now apply the method which produced these positions to new events in the world. Those who rely on orthodoxy alone always end up bowing before revisionism when it comes to an understanding of a changing reality—and reality always changes. During the war both Trotsky’s and Cannon’s contributions to the 1940 discussion were printed as books and studied throughout the party. In addition Cannon gave a series of lectures on the history of the movement and these were published as the book, History of American Trotskyism. Warde was assigned to the task of educating the party in the dialectic. He also gave a series of lectures on the question which were later issued as a mimeographed study guide.!! This guide was a very competent summation of the basic ideas of dialectical logic. There is no doubt but that this educational work strengthened the SWP. However, it is one thing to pedagogically outline the basic elements of the dialectic in classes throughout the party 9. Winters, A. ‘Review of Our Trade Union Policy’, Internal Bulletin, Vol. VI, No. 9 (Socialist Workers Party), page 33. 10. Ibid., page 35. 11. Warde, William F. An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism (Pioneer Publishers, New York, Revised Edition, 1953).

[p046] 88 and it is quite a different thing to develop a party capable of applying a dialectical approach to the political tasks which confront it. The SWP during World War II seemed to be trying to solve its deep need for theoretical development in an organi- sational way. That is, Warde was assigned to lecture the party on dialectics, the local branches were assigned to organise classes around this lecture series, etc., etc. This educational task FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 properly assigned to the proper and competent people, the SWP then proceeded to proceed in its basic party work in the United States in the old way—that is, it stumbled along empirically from task to task on the basis of impressions of the American working class at the moment. Dialectics remained in the classes while empiricism domi- nated the decisive sections of party work. B. INDIAN SUMMER—1945-1950 The immediate post-war period was a very decisive one for the SWP . A short, but highly favourable, period of productive work in the class struggle opened for it in 1945 and 1946. Relations were re-established with the Trotskyist movement in Europe. Matters were finally settled definitively with the Shachtmanites. Then the post-war pros- perity set in and the cold war and witch-hunt accompanied it. On the surface it may appear that nothing really fundamental changed in the SWP during this period. In reality it was a highly important formative period for the SWP. It was a period in which the second great crisis in the SWP, the split with the Cochranites internally and the Pabloites internationally, was being prepared. In many ways this interim period of temporary growth and the beginning of long-term retrench- ment was more critical than the actual period of struggle with the Cochranites and Pabloites. It was a period in which certain things were done, and more importantly, certain things not done, which made the 1952-1953 struggle inevitable. We will seek to get to the heart of the political processes going on inside the SWP by dealing with three separate but concurrent political develop- ments: (1) the resurgence of American radicalism in an almost oppositional form to that expressed in the Minneapolis defence; (2) the strange re- petition of the 1940 struggle with the Shachtman- ites in a weakened form; (3) the new arrangement between the SWP and the international movement and the nature of the SWP’s political participation in the international. It is important for the reader to keep in mind that these developments occurred simultaneously in time and weaved to- gether in a special way to create a fabric of a party soon to go into deep crisis. As early as 1944 the American working class began to assert its strength on the economic front despite the war. By 1945, when it was clear that the war was to be won by the U.S., economic struggles increased even more. In the wake of the war they received another tremendous boost as workers began demanding that the promises of the war period now be fulfilled. It was a period of considerable radicalisation throughout the working class of the world, including the United States. It was a good healthy period for a revolutionary party. While the SWP responded only slowly to the new militancy in the class, by 1946 a new mood of confidence in the class dominated the party, and party cadres were deeply involved in all forms of mass struggles including trade union struggles, youth demonstrations, anti-fascist demonstrations, Negro actions, etc. The political expression of this new mood was the ‘Theses on the American Revolution’ written by James P. Cannon and passed by the 12th National Convention of the party, November 15-18, 1946.12 This was the convention which reported the recruitment of over 1,000 new members to the party—almost doubling the party membership in one. year. The ‘Theses’ is in many ways a very important document. Its positive side is its expression of the party’s deep conviction in the revolutionary potential of thé American working class. It ex- presses that positive strain in American Trotsky- ism, that aspect of Cannon which led to his original break from the American Communist Party. What is especially important is that the picture of the American working class in the ‘Theses’, written by Cannon, stands in sharp con- trast with the picture of that same class given only four years earlier by the same Cannon. While the propaganda of the Minneapolis Trial seemed almost in the populist tradition of American radicalism, the ‘Theses’ was definitely in the class struggle traditions of the WW. 12. Cannon, James P. ‘Theses on the American Revolution’, The Coming American Revolution (Pioneer Publishers, New York, 1947), page 8 ff.

[p047] STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. In 1942 Cannon saw the American workers ‘in the first primitive stages of class political deve- lopment’. In 1946 this class is seen as ‘in many respects the most advanced and progressive in the world’.!3. While it ‘has not yet taken the road of independent political action on a mass scale’ it is stressed that ‘this weakness can be swiftly over- come’.!4 In 1942 this class is seen as being ‘soaked through and through with bourgeois democratic illusions’ but in 1946 it is stated: ‘the American workers have the advantage of being comparatively free, especially among the younger and most militant layers, from reformist prejudices’.15 In 1942 it is stressed that the workers ‘understand socialism and communism only in the version disseminated by the bourgeois press; and are either hostile or indifferent to it; the real meaning of socialism, the revolutionary Marxist meaning, is unknown to the great majority’. But in 1946 this is seen as no real problem: ‘given an objectively revolutionary situation, a proletarian party—even a small one—equipped with a precisely worked out Marxist programme and firm cadres can expand its forces and come to the head of the revolution- ary mass movement in a comparatively brief span of time’.16 ; The contrast between the two Cannons is extremely revealing and important for the light it sheds on Cannon’s method and the method of those who shared the leadership with him. In 1942 Cannon could see only that surface conser- vatism of the American working class, its political backwardness, its illusions. In 1946 Cannon sud- denly sees its revolutionary potentialities and correctly expresses confidence in how quickly illusions can be shed as objective conditions change, and how Marxists despised in one period can lead great masses in the next. But Cannon’s assessment of 1946 completely undercuts the whole rationale of the Cannon of 1942. More important, while the Cannon of 1942 became the Cannon of 1946 when the objective situation changed for the better, it was also possible that the Cannon of 1946 could become the Cannon of 1942 once again—and even go further—once the working- class struggle receded. The problem is one of method. Cannon’s con- fidence in the American working class was empirically derived and lacked the enrichment of a réal understanding of Marxist theory and method. Thus while a favourable empirical deve- lopment could bring out Cannon’s positive quali- ties he was hopeless in dealing with an unfavour- able situation. There is another aspect of the ‘Theses’ which 89 also is extremely important—its essentially provincial outlook. The Theses were based on a totally false understanding of the objective situation in the world economy at the time as well as of the relationship of American capitalism to the world capitalist system. According to the ‘Theses’ the temporary restabilisation of capitalism, already clearly apparent in 1946, would be only a mere episode of far, far shorter duration than the decade of prosperity that followed World War I. In fact Cannon states: ‘From the point of view of our theses it makes no difference whether the deep- going crisis begins early in the spring of 1947, as many bourgeois economists are predicting; or six months later, as many others think; or even a year or two later, as is quite possible in my opinion.”!7 Thus a deep-going crisis and pre- revolutionary situation was seen as coming into existence in the United States in two years at the very latest. Furthermore this crisis was seen as developing despite the stabilisation of capitalism in Europe and the rest of the world following the failure of proletarian revolution—quite apparent by this time —throughout the rest of the world. Come hell or high water the American system was going to collapse shortly and the SWP was to be catapulted into the vanguard of the revolution. With such a perspective Cannon could very well state, as he did, that the main task of the SWP was to come to power shortly and in this way help the Fourth International. In the interim the development of the FI could not be of any great importance to it. But the world of 1946 was not as Cannon pictured it. Cannon completely underestimated the tremendous significance of the betrayal of the post-war revolutionary wave, by the Stalinists in particular. World capitalism was clearly once again stabilising itself with the help of the Kremlin, and everywhere in the world the revolutionary tide was subsiding. This international stabilisation was essential to the stabilisation of American capitalism, which emerged from the war more dependent than ever on the rest of the world. The failures in Europe could not be brushed aside. These failures had prepared the way for an inter- national situation which would shortly dry up the revolutionary actions of the American workers as 13. Ibid., page 14. 14. Ibid., page 14. 15. Ibid., page 15. 16. Ibid., page 15. 17. Cannon James P. ‘The Coming American Revolu- tion’, op. cit., page 26.

[p048] 90 well as seal the party off from serious class struggles for the next decade and a half. No, an American revolutionary orientation cannot be maintained through simply asserting it despite the rest of the world. It must flow from a full understanding of the development of capi- talism as a world system. Such an understanding could only have shown the SWP leadership the extreme importance for it to assume its proper share of the leadership of the International movement, for the failures and successes of this movement would have a very direct bearing on its own failures and successes. But the Cannon of 1946 still thought in the narrow provincial terms of the Cannon of 1926. This was to be central to the future problems of the movement. This perspective of the American Theses was carried over, at least in part, to the party’s concept. of its concrete tasks for work in the mass move- ment. This is to be found in an accompanying resolution passed at the same convention ‘From a Propaganda Group to a Party of Mass Action’.!8 The basic idea of this resolution was that the SWP was to act as a sort of small mass party. It was to play a role in the leadership of the broad masses of workers in concrete struggles. Of course, the party was able to do this to some extent in the 1946-47 period because of the generally more radical objective situation. Such work, in addition to long-term propaganda and work in mass organi- sations, is always essential to a revolutionary formation, however small. There was, however, another side to this kind of outlook. There was a tendency to feel that the SWP, as it was at that moment in 1946, was capable of being catapulted into the leadership of the revolution if only it could show the workers its ability to lead them in this or that mass action. Thus the party tended to minimise two important obstacles to its leadership of the masses—the Communist Party and the trade union bureaucracy. The Communist Party emerged from the war as no small formation, with around 100,000 members as compared to the Socialist Workers Party’s 2,000 or so. It had a periphery of a good haif- million and solid bases in a whole number of CIO unions. While a good section of its mem- bership were petty-bourgeois it also had many, many thousands of trade unionists, many of whom were motivated by genuine radical sentiments. The SWP in 1946 had a responsibility to both reach those in the CP it could reach and to deepen the internal crisis in the CP, so as to remove it as an obstacle from its path. The CP was in deep crisis, for this was the period when Foster ousted FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 Browder and then turned around and ousted his own left wing. It was also a period when the developing cold war was forcing the Communist Party to break its relations with its war-time liberal allies and to take more militant stands. While the above-mentioned resolution noted the crisis in the CP the party did little to intervene in that crisis. Trotsky had urged a special orien- tation towards the Stalinist workers in 1940 when the turn io the left of the Stalinists was far more unstable and temporary and there was no sign of any deep internal crisis within the Stalinist ranks. In this period the Progressive Citizens of America, the Stalinist-led liberal coalition, broke up and the Stalinists began their drive which led to the formation of the Progressive Party. This was an extremely opportune time for our move- ment to intervene directly in that crisis, urging the Stalinist workers to break definitively from popular frontism, and to run a national electoral campaign on a class basis, rather than on the phoney and suicidal ‘progressive’ basis it was run, The SWP should have offered as early as 1947 to give critical support to such a campaign and to withdraw its own candidates if the Stalinists ran on a class line. The challenge to the party in the trade union movement was even greater than from the CP. This was a period when the ‘progressive’ caucuses, which had fought the Stalinists during the latter part of the war essentially on sound trade union lines, were now settling down to their bureau- cratic control of the unions and establishing their relations with the capitalist government and its cold war drive. Faced with this situation the SWP trade unionists were in a very difficult situation. They could not support their allies of the previous period, they were wary of seeking any relationship with the Stalinist workers who were being witch-hunted in the unions, and they did not have the strength to throw up independent third trade union caucuses. Their inability to so function was itself a sign of the unreality of the SWP’s proclaiming itself to be a small mass party to vie with the Stalinists and the reformist bureaucrats for leadership of the American work- ing class. The real relations of the party in the trade unions are shown clearly in the automobile industry. The auto fraction was the party’s strongest trade union fraction and the UAW was one of the 18. ‘From a Propaganda Group to a Party of Mass Action’, Fourth International (New York, January, 1947).

[p049] STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. most important unions in the United States. The party auto fraction had supported the Reuther caucus against the Stalinist-backed Thomas-Addes caucus in the closing days of the war when Reuther favoured a more militant trade union policy than did the Stalinists. This relationship with the Reuther group continued into 1946 and early 1947, when it was becoming increasingly apparent that the Reuther formation was _ be- coming more conservative and was engaging in the most virulent forms of red-baiting against the Thomas-Addes caucus. In 1947 there developed serious differences within the party leadership over whether or not to switch support to Thomas- Addes. Swabeck and Dunne (with Cannon’s backing, Cochran insisted later) favoured con- tinuing support for Reuther, while Cochran and the auto fraction pushed for a turn to Thomas- Addes. Neither side considered a third formation realistic. The auto fraction finally supported Thomas-Addes but at a time when the Stalinists were losing control of the caucus. This support did not lead to any significant contact or work with the Stalinist workers, something Cannon was later to see as a virtue.!9 While on the surface it would appear that Cannon’s ‘American Theses’ would lead to a real break of the party’s trade unionists from pro- gressive caucuses of one sort or another and a development of an independent course in the unions, this did not happen, as such a course was clearly unrealistic. In actual fact the evolution of the party’s trade union work had the following pattern to it. In the late ’30s the party formed an alliance with Rooseveltian progressives in the unions against the Stalinists on the basis of trade union militancy. The early war period brought a deep isolation to the party’s trade unionists, who could not really function with either the Roose- yeltians or the Stalinists. These two forces had joined hands to subordinate the trade unions to the capitalist war drive. There was also no real basis for an independent opposition in the unions. Consequently, little caucus work as such was done in the unions. In 1944 and 1945 the party slowly began to form an alliance once again with the Rooseveltian elements and dissident Stalinists who displayed greater independence from the bourgeois state than did the Stalinists. So a partial alliance was once again established with the same kind of progressive elements that Trotsky speaks of in 1940. This alliance soon petered out as the liberals in the unions turned to witch-hunting and the cold war, and turned against all radicals including the SWP. The Stalinists were now in 91 opposition but being Stalinists their opposition was very weak and spineless. However, the party was unable to make a clean break with the pro- gressives and to turn towards these Stalinist workers, urging upon them a more militant opposition. By 1948 trade union work began to take on once more the character of a retrenchment as the party participated in few caucuses and prepared to ‘sit out’ the unfavourable domestic climate for the next decade and a half. Thus no sharp political break with progressive liberal trade union circles ever took place. Rather when collaboration was impossible the party’s trade unionists simply pulled into their shells and awaited a time. when alliances could once more be formed. The trade unionists who entered the dark period of the 1950s entered in pretty much the same shape they entered the war period. They were not much different from the trade unionists Trotsky criticised in 1940. This was to become crystal clear when the next great crisis shook the party. One other important aspect of the party work on the American scene in the post-war period deserves mention—the Negro struggle. In the 1944-46 period a number of highly valuable Negro militants came into the party, partly out of trade union work and partly out of the party’s direct participation in Negro struggles. This was an important advance for the party and showed that it had attempted to alter the serious situation in relation to the Negro worker that Trotsky pointed out in 1939, In the 1947-48 period, with the receding of the mass movement, the party lost a large part of these valuable cadres. As Johnson reported to the 1948 Convention: ‘Now the fact remains that a great number of Negroes who came into the party left.’”29 Most of those remaining in the party by 1948 were to leave in the next couple of years. The party had been unable to assimilate the bulk of these militant Negro workers and hold them in a period when mass action was no longer really possible for the party except in isolated cases. This failure is understandable considering the short duration of the party’s direct experience in Negro work and considering that the over- whelming majority of the party came from a more privileged layer of the working class who in their 19, Cannon, James P. ‘Some Facts About Party History—and the Reasons for its Falsification’, Internal Bulletin, Vol. 15, No. 19 (Socialist Workers Party, 1953), page 11 ff. 20. Meyer, J. (J. R. Johnson) ‘The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States’, Bulletin of Marxist Studies No. 4, op. cit., page 32.

[p050] 92 daily lives had little contact with Negroes. In- teresting in this regard is the fact that the bulk of the Negroes who stayed with the party at least into 1948 were Negroes integrated into trade union fractions of the party. An important theoretical gain was made by the party in the 1948-50 period. In this period, J. R. Johnson, a Negro intellectual of West Indian origin, made a substantial contribution to the party’s theoretical understanding of the Negro question in the resolution, ‘Negro Liberation Through Revolutionary Socialism’.2! Johnson was an extremely erratic intellectual capable of the most inconsistent and oppositional theoretical notions, and highly unstable. However, he did develop a very sound understanding of the American Negro movement under Trotsky’s tute- lage in the late 1930s, and he was able to enlarge on this through the party’s experience in the middle forties. It is interesting that this contri- bution—the only really original contribution to the understanding of an American, not to mention an international question the party was to produce —was to come from a strange individual with no real roots in the party, someone who was to spend only two years in the party. Along with the Negro militants a greater number of young white workers were recruited to the party in the 1945-46 period. These white workers also found it difficult to stay in the party as the mass movement receded. The great bulk of the 1,000 new recruits reported at the 1945 Convention were no longer in the party by the 1948 Con- vention. No attempt was made to reach the radicalised students and intellectuals, some of whom went to the Shachtmanites but the bulk of whom were recruited into the CP. The 1940 experience had simply soured the party on any work among students and intellectuals. What intellectuals there were in the party were left from the 1930s, like John G. Wright and William F, Warde. The party which entered the 1950s was very much like the party which entered the war period—except that its leading cadres were older, and more precious time had slipped by without any appreciable qualitative theoretical development of the movement. By 1948 the unreality of the predictions and perspectives of the ‘Theses on the American Revolution’ were clear to all in the party. The party’s membership was on the decline, its ability to manoeuvre in the trade unions was narrowing, the Negro struggle had lost much of the steam it had had two years earlier, the Stalinists had thrown off the super-Fosterites and were deep in FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 their non-working class ‘progressive’ campaign. So the SWP turned once again to general socialist propaganda. This time it took the form of the 1948 presidential election campaign. This campaign ignored the Stalinists and other concrete problems facing the party and addressed itself in the most general terms to the broad masses of the population. Once again the party had no real concrete assessment of the situation in the United States and no real strategy for the building of the party under what were to become increasingly difficult conditions. ONCE AGAIN WITH SHACHTMAN Considering the depth of the struggle in 1940 it does appear strange that five years later the Shachtman group (Workers Party) and the SWP should be engaged in unity negotiations. What makes this even stranger was that the political evolution of the Shachtmanites since the 1940 split had been further and further away from Trotsky- ism. But this is what happened. Even more, groups developed within each formation which ended up joining the other. One could only conclude from this that the 1940 split was not as definitive as it appeared to be at the time. Cannon himself admits this when he states that the 1940 split ‘was by no means as definitive and final as is the split today’.22 He was referring to the split with the Pabloites, which proved to be anything but ‘definitive and final’. The question we must seek to answer is, why was not the split in 1940 as definitive as it, in our opinion, should have been? We must first look at the evolution of the Shachtman group since 1940. During the 1940 struggle the minority had no clear position on the Russian question. While Burnham’s bureaucratic collectivism set the tone for the group, Shachtman remained non- committal on the question and Abern upheld a degenerated workers’ state theory. Soon after the split Burnham resigned from the WP but Shacht- man then picked up Burnham’s thesis and declared in December 1940 that Russia was a bureaucratic collectivist state. He picked up Burnham’s thesis rather gingerly and saw bureaucratic collectivism as a sort of mutation or aberration in just one country on earth rather than as a whole stage in the deve- lopment of mankind, The 1941 resolution of the 21. Ibid., pp. 35 ff. 22. Cannon, James P. ‘Factional Struggle and Party Leadership’, Fourth International (New York, Nov.- Dec. 1953), page 116.

[p051] STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. WP on the question stated: ‘Bureaucratic collecti- vism is a nationally-limited phenomenon, appear- ing in history in the course of a singular con- juncture of circumstances.’3 By 1946, however, the world situation had changed and Stalinism expanded its control over the areas which made up a buffer to the East and West against the capi- talists. This defensive expansionism of the Stalin- ists was seen as evidence of Stalinism as an ex- panding imperialist force supplanting the role of the working class in replacing capitalism. In 1946 the Shachtmanites stated: ‘It is this fact that gives to the emergence of the new Russian empire a significance much more fundamental than merely a recrudescence of Russian power. Bureaucratic collectivism is the source of the new Russian imperialist power as early capitalism was the source of British imperialist power.’24 During the war the WP had done a good deal of trade union work. It accomplished this by sending its young petty-bourgeois youth into the trade unions. But it was unable to root them there, and by 1946 the party was once again pre- dominantly petty-bourgeois in social composition. Ernest Erber, a WP leader, frankly describes the situation thus: We were a party with a predominantly petty- bourgeois membership. The war gave us the opportunity to place our petty-bourgeois member- ship in industry. Their presence there had a time limit on it—‘for the duration’, We had to make use of this time to recruit and hold enough indus- trial workers to change the character of our party We failed in this. The end of the war dumped our petty-bourgeois members out of industry. This is the root of the problem. This is the long and short of it.25 Essentially then the WP in 1946 was an organisa- tion which had developed systematically all its methodological errors of 1940 and further had failed to root itself in the class. Its development was clearly and profoundly to the right. During the war period there developed a small minority inside the SWP which began to move more and more in the direction of the WP poli- tically. This minority was led by Felix Morrow, and, interestingly enough, Albert Goldman, who had been the lawyer in the Minneapolis Trial. Warde in 1946 des¢ribes the background of Morrow and Goldman in the 1940 fight in the following terms: Both opposed and fought Shachtman’s political positions, including his unprincipled bloc with Burnham. But at the same time they believed with Shachtman that Trotsky had arbitrarily and un- 93 justifiably injected the question of philosophicai method into what should have remained a purely political dispute. They shared Shachtman’s view from somewhat different standpoints. Goldman was more or less indifferent toward the philosophic foundations of Marxism; Morrow was at odds with them,726 The evolution of the Goldman-Morrow group was another warning to the SWP leadership on the critical importance of the understanding of the Marxist method. There is, however, little in- dication that they took this warning any more to heart than they had taken the last one. Flowing from their political position of grow- ing sympathy with the views of the WP, growing dissatisfaction with the Cannon ‘regime’, and complete lack of concern as to the critical im- portance of the Russian question and of the question of method, the Goldman-Morrow group quite naturally began a campaign for reunification with the Shachtmanites. The Shachtmanites naturally enough supported this campaign, seeing it as a way to win over the Goldman-Morrow group. The SWP leadership, also naturally enough, reacted with extreme coolness to these advances seeing in them only manoeuvres to split the party. After considerable manoeuvring and a number of exchanges of letters the SWP finally formulated its position by insisting that a discussion of 11 key points precede any actual reunification.27 These points began with an evaluation of the 1940 split and included such critical questions as Marxist method, the Russian question, etc. The WP rejected this approach, seeing such a proposal as simply an evasion of unity. Finally the SWP pre- pared its own answer to the 11 points in a statement, written by Cochran, entitled ‘Revolu- tionary Marxism or Petty-Bourgeois Revisionism? ’28 Goldman soon split from the SWP and joined the WP, Morrow was expelled and the first stage of 23. ‘The Russian Question’, New International (New York, October 1941). 24. New International (New York, April 1946). 25. Erber, Ernest. City Committee Bulletin (Workers Party, New York, 1945). 26. Warde, Wm. F. ‘A Note on the Ideological Degeneration of Goldman, Morrow and_ Logan’, Internal Bulletin, Vol. VIII, No. 11 (Socialist Workers Party, 1946), page 12. 27. Goldman, Albert. The Question of Unity (Workers Party, New York, 1947) Appendix D, E, F, G. 28. ‘Revolutionary Marxism or Petty-Bourgeois Revisionism?’, Internal Bulletin, Vol. VIII, No. 10 (Socialist Workers Party, August 1946).

[p052] 94 WP-SWP unity negotiations came to an ignomi- nious conclusion. In our opinion the basic approach of the SWP to the question of unity was correct. Given the character of the WP—that is its nature as a rightward moving centrist formation—it would be incorrect to simply proceed to unification on the basis of some organisational formula. Rather it was essential to first probe the possibilities of a political basis for unity and then proceed to organisational points. The SWP document ‘Revolutionary Marxism or Petty-Bourgeois Revisionism?’ deserves some attention. Basically it was a very good and solid statement and what it has to state about the Shachtmanites was correct. It had, however, one interesting weakness. It was essentially a state- ment of the differences the two organisations had on a series of concrete political questions. The titles to the sections of the resolution itself give an indication of this. They refer to divergent ‘posi- tions’, ‘evaluations’, ‘tactics’, ‘concepts’, ‘attitudes’. What is missing is the essential difference—the difference in Marxist method. All these important political and even theoretical divergences were produced by a basic divergence in method. The Shachtmanites proceeded with the method of empiricism, and political views were but an em- pirical reflection of surface reality around it. The SWP positions were essentially positions they had inherited from Trotsky. Trotsky had produced them by applying the method of Marxism to the reality around him. The document did, of course, have a small sub- section entitled ‘Marxist Principles and Methodo- logy’. This section was short and in no sense posed the question of method as essential to all the divergences that existed between the two parties. Furthermore, it saw Marxist methodology in a very narrow way. It referred to ‘the Marxist methodo- logy, i.e., the class criterion’.2? It is true that Shachtman’s approach to the Finnish events can be considered an abandonment of a class analysis. But at the same time this was not true of Burn- ham. Burnham applied a class criterion to these events but it was the wrong one—he saw Russia’s role as the imperialist intervention of a new bureaucratic collectivist class. The _ essential methodological point in dispute in 1940 was the importance of the dialectic itself. But this re- ceives only the attention of a passing reference to an abandonment of ‘dialectical materialism’ in another section.20 In 1940 Trotsky stressed this question to such an extent that he was forced to resort to an FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 elementary exposition of the dialectic in the course of his polemics. In 1941 the party reacted em- pirically to the negative moods of the class with disorienting effects. In 1946 the party reacted empirically to the positive moods of the class. Again the effects were disorienting and the cadre did not really develop qualitatively. In 1946 when faced again with the problem of Shachtmanism the party was to see it essentially in empirical terms as a series of divergent positions on a series of political questions. It missed entirely the central cause of this divergence—a divergence in method. It little realised that its own positions were posi- tions developed by Trotsky with a different method from those who were now defending those posi- tions. Such a contradiction must in time break through. Hardly had the ink dried on Cochran’s denun- ciation of the Shachtmanites as petty-bourgeois revisionists than new manoeuvres were to begin. This time the boot was on the other foot—a minority had emerged inside the WP sympathetic to the SWP. This minority, the Johnson-Forrest group, had no common methodological or theore- tical basis for its pro-SWP evolution. It upheld a state capitalist theory of the USSR and utilised a method as crassly empirical as was Shachtman’s. It did share with the SWP a similar assessment, empirically arrived at, of the American scene. It also was more proletarian in its composition and was quite restless in the petty-bourgeois atmos- phere of the WP. Largely because of this minority the SWP entered once more into negotiations for unity with the WP. This time it conveniently forgot its insistence on a political discussion to precede unification and proposed an organisational solu- tion whereby the WP would be allowed to enter the SWP as an organised faction without any preceding discussion. Much to everybody’s sur- prise the Shachtmanites accepted the proposal, and in February of 1947 both the Militant and Labor Action published the joint statement on unification. The difficulty with organisational manoeuvres which lack a firm political basis is that someone might take them seriously. So was the situation both the SWP and WP leadership faced until a slip occurred. Cannon wrote an internal letter referring to the agreement as a ‘capitulation on the Shachtmanites’ part’. It was leaked to Shachtman and Shachtman factionally denounced the Cannon- ites. The Cannonites in turn denounced the 29. Ibid., page 3. 30., Ibid., page 4.

[p053] STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. Shachtmanites and unity was off, to everyone’s relief.3! Soon thereafter Johnson simply announced to change in party affiliation of his faction and went over to the SWP with little fanfare. The Johnson entry, as much as the proposed WP entry, was not prepared politically by serious discussion nor was it followed. by much theoretical effort to win over the group. It was empirically based on a momentary common coming together of the two groups on American perspectives, and the Johnson group was soon to split when the turn in the international situation around Korea brought the defence of the Soviet bloc countries once again strongly to the fore. There is an important general lesson to be gained from this whole series of almost farcical developments. Unifications empirically arrived at, unless followed by a deepening of methodological agreement, cannot last, and splits empirically arrived at, unless also followed by a deepening of an understanding of the methodological roots of the split, are not permanent. In this respect history was shortly to repeat itself. THE INTERNATIONAL BLOC We have seen that the SWP gave no real leader- ship to the Fourth International during the war period. Of course, it saw itself as a part of the Fourth International politically, despite the Voorhis Act, but it did not see itself in any sense as the real leadership of the Fourth International. In any event the war period was a difficult one for an international movement and the party was cut off from most of its international co-thinkers. It would thus be in the immediate post-war period that the real challenge to the SWP would arise. There is no doubt that the SWP emerged from the war as the most solid, most stable Trotskyist formation in the world, with a very considerable proletarian base. In addition the SWP leadership had collaborated extremely closely with Trotsky during the last five years of his life. This colla- boration was deepened by a common struggle against revisionism in 1940, the most important internal struggle in the history of the whole world movement. The SWP in 1946 was therefore the natural party to assume an important and direct responsibility for the political leadership of the International. —_—- The need for such leadership was very great, and there was really no other stable formation in the International which could supply it. The British and French sections, the largest in Europe, were led by extremely unstable and politically unreliable vetty-bourgeois elements. Neither group had yet 95 really developed into a stable revolutionary com- munist formation. The Ceylonese LSSP was in Asia and quite distant from the important Euro- peon political centres. More important, it had always been a quite provincial party, wrapped up in its own affairs in Ceylon, and never did very much to give leadership to the Trotskyist move- ment even in Asia. The SWP, however, saw its relationship to the International in a very different light. It was almost totally preoccupied with the American scene, where it hoped it would soon emerge in the leadership of the revolutionary struggle and in this way contribute to the International. Outside of this it saw its role as a supporting one. It would assist materially the International leadership and lend its advice here, or there where needed— especially on practical problems of strategy and tactics in party building. To support and assist —that was the role the SWP cut out for itself. So in 1946 the SWP turned over the inter- national leadership to a group of talented intellec- tuals who had never had much experience in practical work in a healthy movement. The most prominent of these were Michel Pablo and Ernest Germain. Having turned things over to these men the SWP sat back and waited for this new group of young leaders to supply it with a political line much as Trotsky once had done. In this manner the international bloc which was to dominate the Fourth International until 1953 was established. The SWP offered its moral and material support to this new leadership and in return expected the new leadership to ‘handle’ international questions and supply the world move- ment with a political line. Thus the identical pattern was established with Germain and Pablo that the party had established with Trotsky. The problem however was not simply that Germain and Pablo were not Trotsky, but that the old relationship itself had broken down in the 1940 fight. Precisely because the SWP leadership had not developed theoretically in the 1930s it lost nearly 50 per cent of its membership. Further, those members it retained were largely saved by Trotsky’s intervention in the 1940 fight, during which Trotsky was forced to supplant the Cannon leadership as the real leadership of the SWP. In the six years since these events the SWP had not yet learned the critical importance of its own theoretical development. Once again it looked 31. See: ‘Speeches on Unity Question by Two SWP Leaders’, Bulletin, Vol. II, No. 4 (Workers Party, May 27, 1947), page 24 ff.

[p054] 96 for a crutch—and this time it found a very weak crutch at that. No sooner had an international leadership estab- lished itself, than it was faced with a theoretical challenge of the most serious nature. The USSR emerged from the war in military control of the whole East European region. In addition, a Stalinist-led movement controlled a huge section of China on its Eastern buffer. As the brief post-war honeymoon between the USSR and the imperialists broke down Stalin began to structur- ally transform these regions in order to secure a safe buffer between the USSR and the capitalist world. As long as capitalism existed in these regions they could easily become bases for im- perialist attacks on the USSR. Thus Stalin began a highly contradictory social transformation of these countries from on top. This process raised the most difficult of theoretical challenges to the Trotskyist movement. If not properly understood this defensive expansionism of Stalinism could be seen either as proof of the Shachtmanite thesis, that Stalinism was a new imperialist ruling class, or lead to pro-Stalinist illusions about the ‘revolu- tionary’ role of Stalinism in a changed world situation. Germain began to tackle this theoretical challenge in 1946, and his early work was quite solid.32, Noting that these areas remained at the time still capitalist countries he also took into consideration a tendency towards their structural assimilation into the USSR. In this latter respect he based himself on Trotsky’s work on Finland and Poland in 1940. This remained the theoretical assessment of East European developments through the Second World Congress in 1948.33 The SWP, of course, supported this assessment though it contributed nothing to its development. In 1949 developments had reached a point in Eastern Europe where a serious deepening of the theoretical understanding of the world movement was demanded. Contrary to Germain’s predictions the bulk of the buffer was being transformed into workers’ states, but these states were not being formally incorporated into the USSR. In addition, one of these states, Yugoslavia (which had been the earliest to be socially transformed), broke with the Kremlin and began to move to the left. At this point a dispute of great importance broke out in the European leadership of the FI. Germain continued to try to apply in a mechanical way the basic analysis which Trotsky had applied to Finland and Poland in 1939-40, and thus insisted that these states were still capitalist states because they had not been formally incorporated FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 in the USSR.** Pablo threw all this to the wind and struck out in a new direction. Workers’ states were seen arising everywhere under the leadership of Stalinists. This Stalinist leadership, while capable of bringing the workers to power by establishing a workers’ state, would however de- form or distort the resultant state. Thus he fore- saw ‘centuries of deformed workers’ states’ created by Stalinist parties under the pressure of the masses. This left no role for the Fourth Inter- national; and so, consistently, he began to urge the Trotskyist movement to enter the Stalinist parties in the hopes that we too would be swept to power through this means.35 Having abandoned a Marxist method in analys- ing the workers’ states, Pablo had ended up with a thesis which meant the very liquidation of our movement. All this was quite clearly expressed by 1950. Germain on the other hand sought to resist Pablo’s liquidationism through a narrow orthodoxy. That is, he sought to apply Trotsky’s early analysis in a mechanical way to these post-war events and thus came right up against events he could not really explain. This weakness of Germain soon led to his capitulation to Pablo.%6 How did the SWP relate to this whole theore- tical crisis which dominated the International in 1949 and 1950? Needless to say it was not in a position to offer any independent theoretical solu- tion to the dilemma. Its whole failure in the previous two decades to develop itself theoretically prevented it from so doing. Rather it sat on the sidelines and commented on the discussion as it evolved, supporting this position of Pablo’s and that of Germain’s. Cochran and Hansen emerged on the Political Committee as supporters of Pablo’s whole line, while Cannon, Stein and John G. Wright tended to sympathise with Germain. The result was a completely confusing theoretical situation in the top leadership of the party. The complete theoretical paralysis which had 32. See: Ernest Germain. ‘The Soviet Union After the War’, International Information Bulletin, Vol. I, No. 2 (Socialist Workers Party, 1947). 33. ‘USSR and Stalinism—-Theses adopted by the Second World Congress’, Fourth International (New York, June 1948). 34. Germain, Ernest. ‘The Yugoslav Question, The Question of the Soviet Buffer Zone, and Their Implica- tion for Marxist Theory’, International Information Bulletin (Socialist Workers Party, May 1950). 35. Pablo, Michel. ‘Yugoslavia and the Rest of the Buffer Zone’, International (Socialist Workers Party, 1950). 36. This occurred at the Third World Congress. Information Bulletin

[p055] STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. seized the party was shown clearly in the party’s initial response to the Korean war. The Korean war was the most important contest between the workers’ states and the imperialists in the whole post-war period. There was an extreme need for revolutionaries to understand it and to defend unconditionally North Korea and China against the imperialists. This is the way the Cochranites were later to assess the party’s initial reaction to the Korean war: ‘The first reaction of the weekly paper, operating under the immediate direction of the Political Committee, to the Korean war was a Third Camp position calling down a plague on both houses, the Kremlin and American imperial- ism. Our position was not dissimilar from that of the POUM and the Yugoslav CP, and not too far from that of the Shachtmanites.’37 Cannon denied that the Militant took a ‘third camp’ position, but he did this by stating that a Third Camp position meant ‘support for the imperialist camp’, and the Militant clearly denounced imperialism. He did not deny that while denouncing imperialism the Militant for several weeks did not clearly defend North Korea. In fact he reports that he himself was so upset about the Militant that he urged an immediate Plenum to settle the question, and ended up flying in from Los Angeles for the sole purpose of discussing this question.38 Art Preis, who was in New York at the time, furnishes some more information on these events. He claims that ‘six Political Committee members— . Stein, Breitman, Wright, Hansen, Bartell, and Clarke—acting hastily and without waiting for adequate information, took a wrong position on North Korea, although sound on American im- perialism, South Korea, and the Kremlin’39 He insists that this position, which we can only surmise was a ‘plague on both your houses posi- tion’, never actually got expressed in the Militant. However, he documents that a number of Political Committee members were so confused that they insisted that the Militant say nothing which would indicate actual defence of North Korea for a few weeks while they tried to straighten out their thinking. The picture this whole process gives us is not simply that this or that member of the Political Committee was a ‘Stalinophobe’. Clearly leading Cochranites were found among the confused, and Cannon’s intervention seems wholly on the proper side. Rather what comes out is a picture of a national leadership almost totally confused in its theoretical development, and thus paralysed in coming out with a clear-cut political position when 97 a new event of great importance took place. This theoretical confusion is further documented by the formal position the SWP National Committee took on the theoretical struggle then taking place between Germain and Pablo. The majority of the National Committee came down firmly in support of—both sides. The SWP was able to accomplish this by insisting on a separation of two questions —the nature of the buffer excluding Yugoslavia and the nature of Yugoslavia. It held a special plenum on the former question in February of 1950 in which Morris Stein reported for the majority of the Political Committee. Stein’s pre- sentation was essentially a very good summary of Germain’s views.40 Another plenum was held in December of 1950 on the Yugoslav question. This time Murry Weiss was the reporter for the Political Committee and the whole position of Pablo on Yugoslavia was endorsed.4! But the two positions adopted by the SWP were completely antithetical to each other. The Germain position, while incorrect, was at least an attempt to deny to Stalinism a revolutionary role. It was understood in this light by the world movement and it was because of this that the party leadership was attracted to it. The Pablo analysis of Yugoslavia was more than an analysis of Yugoslavia. It was a defence of the thesis that a Stalinist party, under the pressure of the masses, could come to power and establish a workers’ state. This position was the very heart of Pablo’s ‘centuries of deformed workers’ states’ thesis. It undermined completely the whole approach taken at the February plenum on the rest of the Buffer. The SWP’s participation in this critical discus- sion shows very clearly the method of the SWP in this period. In the first place it had nothing original to offer to the theoretical discussion. At best all it could do was pick and choose at a table laid by others. Secondly, it did its picking and choosing empirically. It gave Stalinism one 37. Andrews, J. et. al. ‘The Roots of the Party Crisis —Its Causes and Solution’, Internal Bulletin, Vol. 15, No. 8 (Socialist Workers Party, April 1953), page 16. 38. Cannon, James P. ‘Some Facts .. .’, op. cit., page 14. 39, Preis, Art. ‘The “Proof” of Our “Stalinophobia” ’, Internal Bulletin, Vol. 15, No. 9 (Socialist Workers Party, April 1953), page 13. 40. Stein, M. ‘The Class Nature of the Buffer Coun- tries in Eastern Europe’, Discussion Bulletin No. 3 (Socialist Workers Party, June 1950). 41. Weiss, Murry. ‘Report on Yugoslavia’, Discussion Bulletin No. 6 (Socialist Workers Party, January 1951),

[p056] 98 character in Eastern Europe as a whole, but when it crossed the border into Yugoslavia Stalinism suddenly acquired another character. Such a glaring inconsistency is itself an expression of an empirical method which compartmentalises theoretical work. One theory is empirically arrived at for this area, and another for that area, and the connection, the unity of the developments is lost. Here we have another example of the method which could project a revolutionary course for the United States despite the consolidation of capitalism as an international system. There can be no doubt that the SWP had the best of intentions in all this. It had a deep feeling of the essential need for a revolutionary party. It had the greatest respect for the views of Trotsky and considered itself, above all others, to be an orthodox Trotskyist formation. When a piece of orthodoxy was laid on the table by the inter- national leadership it quickly and hungrily grabbed for it. This explains its warmness towards Ger- main in this whole struggle. However, when the party faced a real revisionist trend it was prostrated before it; it was incapable Black-eye bean A dry bean, roughly The width of a finger nail. Its skin is tight, grained with crinkles tightly drawn towards its belly. And round some of them, split slightly. Its underside is almost flat And on this, a black oval eye Unites the skin’s seam; its centre Is a white, blind eyeball Dry and ridged, like a tumour. It is a complete object. For the curious, curious; and for the hungry Many must be boiled To placate the angry, or diffident human belly. It strength strengthens. It remains dry, even when cooked Or ground up, and retains Its certain quality. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 of countering it. Pablo, as much as Burnham and Shachtman, had abandoned the very method of Marxism. Pablo, as much as Burnham and Shachtman, had developed a theoretical position which meant the very liquidation of our movement unless countered. But Pablo’s revisionism was based on an assessment of new events which could not be handled simply by repetition of old Trotskyist orthodoxies. This Germain had at- tempted to do and failed. What was. needed was the application of the basic method of Trotsky to a new process which emerged in the post-war period. This the SWP was incapable of doing. Trotsky was not around to do it for the SWP leadership. So the game went on as usual. The SWP con- tinued to give Pablo and company material and moral aid. It even endorsed his views (as well as those of his opponent). The leading cadre was uncomfortable, unhappy, but as long as Pablo left the United States to Cannon, Cannon was more than willing to leave the rest of the world to Pablo. So things stood up to the time that George Clarke returned from the Third World Congress in 1951. (To be continued) A feeder, not for itself only, Although some must be left For the plant to continue its yield Dry, and with little taste. Drier, much drier, or dried Than the burned flesh of the family Their flesh dried by burning From the bomb that severely burns the flesh That moistens the bean, in the mouth, And in the stomach; Slowly, with passion, Until it is too ill To eat the bean’s flesh. Some survive. The bean survives In the flesh. The dead Strengthen the living tissue Every way that can be thought of. Jon Silkin.

[p057] DOCUMENTS 99 Cuban Revolution in Danger IDEL CASTRO, speaking before the assembled delegates of the Havana ‘Triconti- nental Conference’ at its closing session on Janu- ary 15, made a vicious attack on the Fourth In- ternational. This attack, made in the worst tradi- tion of Stalinist vilifica- tion, was delivered with- out any possibility of discussion or debate. Its purpose was quite different: the attack repre- sented a carefully directed blow at the left, carried out on behalf of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Kremlin and its counter-revolution- ary collaboration with the US imperialists. A condition of the suc- cess of the Stalinists’ policy is the defeat of any attempt at the construction of an international revolutionary leadership of the working class. Fidel Castro carried out this service for the Kremlin bureaucracy, who have become his political masters at this stage. The conditions for the de- fence and development of the Cuban revolution, on _ the other hand, are the intensifica- tion of the revolutionary struggle against imperialism everywhere, especially in the remainder of Latin America, the building of working class parties to lead this struggle, and the replacement of the Cuban bureaucratic state machine by workers’ councils. Revisionists in the camp of Marxism who fostered illusions that these steps would be taken by Castro himself, and the Cuban Communist Party which he leads, are now dumbfounded by Castro’s denunciation of Trotskyism. They appeal to him to rectify his errors. We do no such thing. The International Committee of the Fourth International warns the international working-class movement that these attacks represent the most serious warning, that Castro has taken the road of liquidation of the Cuban Revolution. His dependence on the Soviet bureaucracy is the mechanism for his capitulation to the American imperialists. This is the meaning also of his bitter public attacks, before and after the Havana Confer- ence, against the government of China. Castro particularly accuses the Fourth International of subverting the revolutionary guerrilla movement in Guate- mala, and working on behalf of US imperialism. Castro said: “Yankee imperialism used one of its most subtle tac- tics in order to liquidate a revolutionary movement, a tactic which consisted of in- filtrating into the movement agents of the Fourth Inter- national, who—because of the ignorance, the political ignorance, of the main leader of the movement (Yon Sosa) —got the movement to adopt nothing less than that discredited thing, that anti- historical thing, that fraudu- lent thing emanating from elements notoriously in the service of Yankee imperial- ism, the programme of the Fourth International.’ and further: ‘Through the intermediary of an individual, a business- man, placed in charge of the political side of the move- ment, the Fourth Inter- national arranged it so that the leader (Yon _ Sosa), ignorant as he was of politics and of the history of revolutionary thought, permitted this agent of Trot- skyism—which for all of us is, without the _ slightest doubt, an agent of imperial- ism—to edit a journal which copied word for word the programme of the Fourth International. The Fourth International has committed a veritable crime against the revolutionary movement by isolating it from the people and from the masses, by contaminating it with stupi- dities, in bringing upon it the discredit connected with the repugnant and nauseating thing which Trotskyism re- presents in the political world today. (Applause.) Be- cause if, at a certain period, Trotskyism represented a position, certainly a wrong position, but all the same a position coming into the domain of political ideas, Trotskyism later became a vulgar instrument of im- perialism and reaction.’ As always, the attack on Trotskyism is to cover up capi- tulation, just as Stalin used it. The hand-picked delegations to Havana were encouraged tc return to their countries and

[p058] 100 return to a Stalinist witch-hunt of truly revolutionary elements in the liberation movements, and particularly Trotskyists, in the best Stalinist style. Inside Cuba, any working- class opposition will receive the same treatment, facilitated by the disarming of the militias last year and the concentration of the forces of repression. ' Castro’s attack on China, and his references to ‘internal subversion’ by the Chinese, have the same purpose. Thus the London ‘Times’ commented that latin America ‘can now breathe more freely’. Castro has signalled to the im- perialists that he accepts the anti-revolutionary strategy of the Stalinist bureaucracy with all its implications for a re- newal of relations with US im- perialism. Thus he must strike out against the left. Castro’s distortions, quoting as he does from isolated indi- viduals and insignificant group- ings whom he chooses to call Trotskyist, are not a result of any misunderstandings, but are part of the classical Stalinist method. All those who have wel- comed Castro as a ‘natural Marxist’ and even as the suc- cessor to Lenin and Trotsky (1), have now shown the -counter-revolutionary implica- tions of their revisionism. Castro has in fact carried out a special task, using his special place in the sympathies of revolutionaries in many countries, to carry out an attack on Trotskyism which the Stalinist bureaucracy itself would not have been able to do effectively. Those who have distorted Marxism to create illusions in Castro have prepared the way for this division of labour be- tween the Kremlin and Castro, Silence on his real position today, pleas that he should come to his senses, constitute a betrayal of the present and future interests of the revolu- tion in Cuba and _ Latin America. Castro strikes out above all against the independent work- ing-class character of the Fourth International. It is this above all which we defend and prize. It is on the basis of this independence that the Trot- skyists have been first in line in the defence of the Cuban re- volution against imperialism, despite our independent line against the petty-bourgeois clique which prevents. the accession of the workers them- selves to power in Cuba. This same defence requires an implacable struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy, which can be carried out only by Trotskyists. Thus the alliance of slanderers and liars which has been made. Castro prepares a right-turn of enormous danger. The repatriation of relatives of exiles to the United States, the disarming of the Militia [a decision which Castro has never explained publicly] and the virtual silence of the Cuban press and radio on the brutal imperialist intervention in Santo Domingo as well as the ‘disappearance’ of Ché Guevara—all these things show clearly, indubitably, the direc- tion in which the Cuban national revolutionary move- ment is being steered. As if to emphasise this trend and tacitly warn imperialism, Castro has utilised the cut in Chinese trade and assistance to sharply separate himself from China and identify him- self with his Soviet masters. Nationally and internation- FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 ally Castro is pursuing his right-wing policy—a_ policy aimed against the interests of the Cuban and _ international working class. For this reason it is neces- sary to re-state our attitude on the activities of all those who, in the name of Marxism, consciously and_ deliberately evaded or covered up _ the bureaucratic, anti - socialist policy of Castro and his clique. Foremost amongst these stands the United Secretariat and its principal defender, the Socialist Workers’ Party of America. For five years these people apologised for all the reaction- ary features of the Castro regime. While defending the Cuban revolution from imperialism they exceeded all the tradi- tional norms of Trotskyism in supporting Castro and accepted, without cavil or condition, the anti-Marxist ideas and prac- tices of this Cuban petty- bourgeois dictator. When supporters of the Posadas tendency were arrested by Castro’s_ secret police and jailed for the crime of publishing Trotsky’s works, these revisionists did not raise a protest. On the contrary, they kept silent and even alleged that the main task was. not to exaggerate the jailings of left-wing oppositionists but to defend and amplify the con- crete achievements of the Cuban revolution! When these opponents were released—after signing capi- tulatory pledges to Castro— Hansen, by no means the most obnoxious of these apologists, attributed the release to ‘the struggle . . . by the Fidelista leadership against bureaucrat- ism’, and that ‘a miscarriage of justice in relation to the Posa-

[p059] DOCUMENTS das group was rectified’. The same method, it might be said, was employed by Khrushchev to ‘explain’ the excesses of the Stalin regime. This kind of ‘support’, far from advancing the interests of the working class and poor peasants, in fact, as recent events prove, leads to the strengthening of bureaucracy and capitalism in Cuba. If yesterday Hansen was un- able to defend the Posadas group from victimisation, then today he is equally incapable of defending Ché Guevara. This is the best measure of the bankruptcy of the revisionist- apologists of the United Secre- tariat. In the Socialist Workers’ Party the same process of de- generation became so malig- nant that any criticism of Castro became automatically a cause for expulsion or dis- ciplinary action. In the Cuban missiles crisis of November 1962, Cannon, one-time leader of the SWP, completely endorsed the coun- ter-revolutionary policy of the Kremlin with the statement: ‘What else could Khrushchev do?’ Even the attack launched by Castro has failed to move or excite these philistines in the leadership of the Socialist Workers’ Party. The most important conclu- sion they draw fromthe Tri- ~Radio, Science, Technique continental Conference is not the attack against Trotskyism, but the fact that all the dele- gates endorsed the idea of ‘armed rebellion’. Yes, alas, even the Emperor of Ethiopia who, periodically hangs en masse _ Somali peasants who trespass into Ethiopia, is not opposed to ‘armed rebellion’. Nor is Gamal Nasser who imprisons Com- munists and tortures political opponents in the United Arab Republic. Nor, for that matter, is General Nasution, butcher of half a million Indonesian workers and peasants. He too, believes in ‘armed rebel- lion’ in Malaysia—but not in Indonesia! In the name of ‘armed rebel- lion’ all manner of crimes are being committed against the working class. But the greatest blow struck by the SWP and its mentor in Paris—is the abandonment of the Transi- tional Programme of the Fourth International and the repudia- tion of the idea of the Bolshe- vik party and the revolutionary international. ‘Armed rebellion’ which is not led by a Marxist working class party must lead inevitably (as Algeria has demonstrated already) to counter-revolution- ary coups and severe repres- sion of the trade union and labour movement. In fact the prospect for such struggles is and Society A speech delivered on March 1, 1926, as the inaugural address at the First All-Union Congress of the Society of Friends of Radio. A brilliant anticipation of the major advances of nuclear science and inter-planetary flight. Price: One shilling military-police dictatorship and not socialism, Either the dic- tatorship of the capitalist class or dictatorship of the working class. There is no middle path—nor will there ever be. Revolutions and _ counter- revolutions mercilessly unmask every form of charlatanry in the workers’ movement. The United Secretariat and the SWP cannot escape this inex- orable law. All those who mistakenly support these opportunist char- latans must take heed from this latest attack by Castro and turn decisively away from re- visionism towards the Interna- tional committee: the only leadership that fights imperial- ism and Stalinism uncompro- misingly. In conclusion the Interna- tional Committee rejects out of hand the slanders of Castro, recognising in them the neces- sary counter-revolutionary de- fence measures of the Stalinists and petty-bourgeois nationalists everywhere, as the working class now threatens to take ad- vantage of imperialism’s inter- national crisis. It is the leadership of the Fourth International in that struggle which Castro attacks, and which we are determined to continue building. International Committee of the Fourth International, February 13, 1966. Culture and Socialism -~ and a Manifesto , Art and Revolution An article compiled by the author from a talk he gave to a Moscow club on February 3, 1926, and a number of other addresses. The Manifesto, appearing in 1938 under the signatures of Andre Breton and Diego Rivera, was in fact drawn up in collabora- tion with Trotsky. Price: Two shillings and sixpence NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS LTD., 186a CLAPHAM HIGH STREET, LONDON, S.W.4 Printed by Plough Press Ltd. (T.U.), r/o 180 Clapham High Street, London, $.W.4

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