Markin comment on this series:
No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.
When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.
So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
**********
Carl Davidson's "Left in Form, Right in Essence:Origins of U.S. Trotskyism"
The Trotskyists have been known – both historically and in the present period – as “wreckers and splitters” of the people’s organizations and movements.
While they vociferously deny the charge, an examination of their history demonstrates that they have earned it. The Trotskyists themselves even celebrate their wrecking and splitting tactics as high points in their theoretical development.
This conclusion becomes particularly obvious in view of certain aspects of the history of the Trotskyists in the U.S.: their initial break with the Communist party and their “entry” into the Socialist party.
The Trotskyists were first organized in this country as a secret faction within the CP. They were led by James P. Cannon, active in the party’s defense work and a member of its central committee.
What was unique about this faction – and undoubtedly required its secrecy – was that it was formed after Trotskyism has been repudiated by the Communist International as a petty bourgeois trend, a variety of Menshevism. The question was discussed within the CPUSA as well. Cannon and his followers, however, never presented their views, but worked surreptitiously toward a split in violation of the basic democratic centralist norms of party organization. In his History of American Trotskyism, written in 1942, Cannon tries to justify this by pleading ignorance at the time.
“Someone may ask,” he writes, “‘why didn’t you make speeches in favor of Trotsky?’ I couldn’t do that either because I didn’t understand the program.”
This was in 1928, after he had voted in favor of resolutions against Trotskyism. Yet in the same book, Cannon states that in 1926 he had read Trotskyist documents attacking Soviet relations with British trade unions and agreed with them.
“It had a profound influence on me,” he said. “I felt that at least on this question ... the Oppositionists had the right line. At any rate. I was convinced that they were not the counter- revolutionists they were pictured to be.”
Why didn’t Cannon speak out on this point he was sure about? The answer he gives is instructive. It reveals the Trotskyist view of inner-party life, their contempt for criticism and self-criticism as a “self-denigrating” practice borrowed from the Catholic Church. It also shows why there are so many Trotskyist splinter groups today.
“A serious and responsible revolutionist,” says Cannon, “cannot disturb a party merely because he becomes dissatisfied with this, that or the other thing. He must wait until he is prepared to propose concretely a different program, or another party ... Of course, if one had no responsibility to the party, if he were a mere commentator or observer, he would merely speak his doubts and have it over with. You can’t do that in a serious political party. If you don’t know what to say, you don’t have to say anything. The best thing is to remain silent.”
But Cannon didn’t maintain his false naivete for long. As a delegate to the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928, he claims to have come across a basic document of Trotsky’s, to which he was instantly converted. Still, he kept his mouth shut.
“We didn’t begin the fight in Moscow,” writes Cannon, “although we were already thoroughly convinced ... We couldn’t have best served our political ends by doing so.”
What were those ends? “The task was to recruit a new faction in secret before the inevitable explosion came, with the certain prospect that this faction, no matter how big or small it might be, would suffer expulsion ...”
By the time of his return to the U.S., Cannon’s activities had raised suspicions within the party. When a resolution against Trotskyism was raised within a party caucus in order to determine where his group stood, Cannon brags about his group’s deceitful methods in skirting the issue:
We objected on the ground...that the question of Trotskyism’ had been decided long ago, and that there was absolutely no point in raising this issue again. We said we refused to be a party to any of this folderol ...
They nourished the hope – oh how they hoped! – that a smart fellow like Cannon would eventually come to his senses and not just go and start a futile fight for Trotsky at this late day. Without saying so directly, we gave them a little ground to think that this might be so ...
Cannon’s ruse exposed
Cannon’s ruse didn’t last long. Within a few weeks he was exposed, brought to trial under the party’s rules and expelled.
Thus began American Trotskyism. At first there were only three: Cannon, Martin Abern and Max Shachtman. Within the next months, they only gathered a few dozen people around them. Through political propaganda and organizational measures, the CP had effectively isolated them as renegades.
“A wall of ostracism separated us from the party members,” says Cannon, “We were cut off from our old associations without having new ones to go to. There was no organization we might join, where new friends and co-workers might be found ... We lived in those first days under a form of pressure which is in many respects the most terrific that can be brought to bear against a human – social ostracism from people of one’s own kind.”
Cannon’s description of his movement’s “dog days” are a back-handed tribute to the CP’s political work and hegemony within’ the movement at the time. But his account also reveals the mistakes that were made – primarily the use of violence to disrupt the tiny Trotskyist meetings – and how these turned around to help the Trotskyists build their organization.
“We came back stronger after every fight,” Cannon writes, “and this attracted sympathy and support. Many of the radical people in New York, sympathizers of the Communist party, and even some members, would come to our meetings to help protect them in the interest of free speech. They were attracted by our fight, our courage, and revolted by the methods of the Stalinists. They would then start reading our material and studying our program ... We built these little groups in various cities, and soon we had the skeleton of a national organization.”
Nonetheless the Trotskyists remained a tiny sect. At this point they called themselves the “Communist League of America (Opposition).” In their view, they were not a party and engaged in no mass work, but an unofficial faction of the Communist party. All their propaganda work – which was all they did – was aimed at the CP rank and file and aimed at dividing them from their leadership.
They had little success. The progress of socialist construction in the Soviet Union, in the midst of capitalist crisis and proletarian upsurge throughout the world, attracted millions of people to the parties of the Communist International. The struggle against right opportunism within the movement also took its toll of the “opposition.”
“By this maneuver,” states Cannon, “they dealt us a devastating blow. Those disgruntled elements in the party, who had been inclined toward us and who opposed the opportunism of the Lovestone group, became reconciled to the party. They used to say to us: You see, you were wrong. Stalin is correcting everything. He is taking a radical position all along the line in Russia, America and everywhere else.”
Then Cannon adds: “We were utterly isolated, forced in upon ourselves. Our recruitment dropped to almost nothing ... Then, as is always the case with new political movements, we began to recruit from forces none too healthy ... Freaks always looking for the most extreme expression of radicalism, misfits, windbags, chronic oppositionists who had been thrown out of half a dozen organizations-such people began to come to us in our isolation, shouting, ‘Hello Comrades.’ I was always against admitting such people,. but the tide was too strong.”
Recruit from the right
Rebuked in their efforts to recruit from the left, the Trotskyists had only one place to go – recruit from the right. The victory of fascism in Germany had exposed the treachery of the leadership of the social-democratic parties of the Second International. Splits were developing. discontent was growing among social- democratic workers and many groupings among them were looking more and more to the leadership of the Communists. This was especially true following the Seventh Congress of the Comintern. which corrected a number of “left” errors in its call for the united and popular front against fascism.
The main historical responsibility for the victory of fascism in Germany had been placed squarely on the Social-Democrats. The main trend was toward unity with the Communists. What did the Trotskyists do? Exactly the opposite. They declared the Communists responsible for fascism, denounced the Comintern as hopelessly counter-revolutionary and moved to join the parties of the Second International.
In the United States this was accomplished in two steps, through the Trotskyist tactics of “fusion” and “entryism.” The first step consisted of joining with a group of reformist trade unionists led by A.J. Muste and forming the “Workers party.” After a short time it was decided that this group was too “sectarian” in its opposition to the Socialist party, which was even further to the right.
Actually the Trotskyists were intent on dissolving the Workers party into the Socialist party and destroying both organizations in the process, hoping they would raid enough recruits to form their own party after the dust had settled.
As in their break with the CP, the Trotskyists were completely dishonest in their approach. “We had join individually,” states Cannon, “because they wanted to humiliate us, to make it appear that we were simply dissolving our party. humbly breaking with our past and starting anew as pupils of the ‘Militants,’ caucus of the SP. It was rather irritating, but we were not deflected from our course by personal feelings. We had been too long in the Lenin school for that. We were out to serve political ends.”
What ends? Cannon mentions two. One was to recruit a liberal, petty-bourgeois base to defend Trotsky in the international arena from a platform of “respectability.” The other was to oppose developments toward a united front between the CP and the SP.
“We had stirred up the rank and file of the Socialist party,” Cannon says, “against the idea of unity with the Stalinists. This blocked their games and they took it out in increased resentment against us.”
But even serving these political ends was not necessary to justify the Trotskyist tactics. Cannon comments on Trotsky’s evaluation of the action “when we were talking with him about the total result of our entry into the Socialist party and the pitiful state of its organization afterward. He said that alone would have justified the entry into the organization even if we hadn’t gained a single new member.”
The Trotskyists did gain a number of recruits, however, and doubled their size. This still did not break their isolation from the working class. Their attitude toward the trade union struggle and the Afro-American people guaranteed that, despite their ensuing formation of the Socialist Workers party.
No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.
When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.
So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
**********
Carl Davidson's "Left in Form, Right in Essence:Origins of U.S. Trotskyism"
The Trotskyists have been known – both historically and in the present period – as “wreckers and splitters” of the people’s organizations and movements.
While they vociferously deny the charge, an examination of their history demonstrates that they have earned it. The Trotskyists themselves even celebrate their wrecking and splitting tactics as high points in their theoretical development.
This conclusion becomes particularly obvious in view of certain aspects of the history of the Trotskyists in the U.S.: their initial break with the Communist party and their “entry” into the Socialist party.
The Trotskyists were first organized in this country as a secret faction within the CP. They were led by James P. Cannon, active in the party’s defense work and a member of its central committee.
What was unique about this faction – and undoubtedly required its secrecy – was that it was formed after Trotskyism has been repudiated by the Communist International as a petty bourgeois trend, a variety of Menshevism. The question was discussed within the CPUSA as well. Cannon and his followers, however, never presented their views, but worked surreptitiously toward a split in violation of the basic democratic centralist norms of party organization. In his History of American Trotskyism, written in 1942, Cannon tries to justify this by pleading ignorance at the time.
“Someone may ask,” he writes, “‘why didn’t you make speeches in favor of Trotsky?’ I couldn’t do that either because I didn’t understand the program.”
This was in 1928, after he had voted in favor of resolutions against Trotskyism. Yet in the same book, Cannon states that in 1926 he had read Trotskyist documents attacking Soviet relations with British trade unions and agreed with them.
“It had a profound influence on me,” he said. “I felt that at least on this question ... the Oppositionists had the right line. At any rate. I was convinced that they were not the counter- revolutionists they were pictured to be.”
Why didn’t Cannon speak out on this point he was sure about? The answer he gives is instructive. It reveals the Trotskyist view of inner-party life, their contempt for criticism and self-criticism as a “self-denigrating” practice borrowed from the Catholic Church. It also shows why there are so many Trotskyist splinter groups today.
“A serious and responsible revolutionist,” says Cannon, “cannot disturb a party merely because he becomes dissatisfied with this, that or the other thing. He must wait until he is prepared to propose concretely a different program, or another party ... Of course, if one had no responsibility to the party, if he were a mere commentator or observer, he would merely speak his doubts and have it over with. You can’t do that in a serious political party. If you don’t know what to say, you don’t have to say anything. The best thing is to remain silent.”
But Cannon didn’t maintain his false naivete for long. As a delegate to the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928, he claims to have come across a basic document of Trotsky’s, to which he was instantly converted. Still, he kept his mouth shut.
“We didn’t begin the fight in Moscow,” writes Cannon, “although we were already thoroughly convinced ... We couldn’t have best served our political ends by doing so.”
What were those ends? “The task was to recruit a new faction in secret before the inevitable explosion came, with the certain prospect that this faction, no matter how big or small it might be, would suffer expulsion ...”
By the time of his return to the U.S., Cannon’s activities had raised suspicions within the party. When a resolution against Trotskyism was raised within a party caucus in order to determine where his group stood, Cannon brags about his group’s deceitful methods in skirting the issue:
We objected on the ground...that the question of Trotskyism’ had been decided long ago, and that there was absolutely no point in raising this issue again. We said we refused to be a party to any of this folderol ...
They nourished the hope – oh how they hoped! – that a smart fellow like Cannon would eventually come to his senses and not just go and start a futile fight for Trotsky at this late day. Without saying so directly, we gave them a little ground to think that this might be so ...
Cannon’s ruse exposed
Cannon’s ruse didn’t last long. Within a few weeks he was exposed, brought to trial under the party’s rules and expelled.
Thus began American Trotskyism. At first there were only three: Cannon, Martin Abern and Max Shachtman. Within the next months, they only gathered a few dozen people around them. Through political propaganda and organizational measures, the CP had effectively isolated them as renegades.
“A wall of ostracism separated us from the party members,” says Cannon, “We were cut off from our old associations without having new ones to go to. There was no organization we might join, where new friends and co-workers might be found ... We lived in those first days under a form of pressure which is in many respects the most terrific that can be brought to bear against a human – social ostracism from people of one’s own kind.”
Cannon’s description of his movement’s “dog days” are a back-handed tribute to the CP’s political work and hegemony within’ the movement at the time. But his account also reveals the mistakes that were made – primarily the use of violence to disrupt the tiny Trotskyist meetings – and how these turned around to help the Trotskyists build their organization.
“We came back stronger after every fight,” Cannon writes, “and this attracted sympathy and support. Many of the radical people in New York, sympathizers of the Communist party, and even some members, would come to our meetings to help protect them in the interest of free speech. They were attracted by our fight, our courage, and revolted by the methods of the Stalinists. They would then start reading our material and studying our program ... We built these little groups in various cities, and soon we had the skeleton of a national organization.”
Nonetheless the Trotskyists remained a tiny sect. At this point they called themselves the “Communist League of America (Opposition).” In their view, they were not a party and engaged in no mass work, but an unofficial faction of the Communist party. All their propaganda work – which was all they did – was aimed at the CP rank and file and aimed at dividing them from their leadership.
They had little success. The progress of socialist construction in the Soviet Union, in the midst of capitalist crisis and proletarian upsurge throughout the world, attracted millions of people to the parties of the Communist International. The struggle against right opportunism within the movement also took its toll of the “opposition.”
“By this maneuver,” states Cannon, “they dealt us a devastating blow. Those disgruntled elements in the party, who had been inclined toward us and who opposed the opportunism of the Lovestone group, became reconciled to the party. They used to say to us: You see, you were wrong. Stalin is correcting everything. He is taking a radical position all along the line in Russia, America and everywhere else.”
Then Cannon adds: “We were utterly isolated, forced in upon ourselves. Our recruitment dropped to almost nothing ... Then, as is always the case with new political movements, we began to recruit from forces none too healthy ... Freaks always looking for the most extreme expression of radicalism, misfits, windbags, chronic oppositionists who had been thrown out of half a dozen organizations-such people began to come to us in our isolation, shouting, ‘Hello Comrades.’ I was always against admitting such people,. but the tide was too strong.”
Recruit from the right
Rebuked in their efforts to recruit from the left, the Trotskyists had only one place to go – recruit from the right. The victory of fascism in Germany had exposed the treachery of the leadership of the social-democratic parties of the Second International. Splits were developing. discontent was growing among social- democratic workers and many groupings among them were looking more and more to the leadership of the Communists. This was especially true following the Seventh Congress of the Comintern. which corrected a number of “left” errors in its call for the united and popular front against fascism.
The main historical responsibility for the victory of fascism in Germany had been placed squarely on the Social-Democrats. The main trend was toward unity with the Communists. What did the Trotskyists do? Exactly the opposite. They declared the Communists responsible for fascism, denounced the Comintern as hopelessly counter-revolutionary and moved to join the parties of the Second International.
In the United States this was accomplished in two steps, through the Trotskyist tactics of “fusion” and “entryism.” The first step consisted of joining with a group of reformist trade unionists led by A.J. Muste and forming the “Workers party.” After a short time it was decided that this group was too “sectarian” in its opposition to the Socialist party, which was even further to the right.
Actually the Trotskyists were intent on dissolving the Workers party into the Socialist party and destroying both organizations in the process, hoping they would raid enough recruits to form their own party after the dust had settled.
As in their break with the CP, the Trotskyists were completely dishonest in their approach. “We had join individually,” states Cannon, “because they wanted to humiliate us, to make it appear that we were simply dissolving our party. humbly breaking with our past and starting anew as pupils of the ‘Militants,’ caucus of the SP. It was rather irritating, but we were not deflected from our course by personal feelings. We had been too long in the Lenin school for that. We were out to serve political ends.”
What ends? Cannon mentions two. One was to recruit a liberal, petty-bourgeois base to defend Trotsky in the international arena from a platform of “respectability.” The other was to oppose developments toward a united front between the CP and the SP.
“We had stirred up the rank and file of the Socialist party,” Cannon says, “against the idea of unity with the Stalinists. This blocked their games and they took it out in increased resentment against us.”
But even serving these political ends was not necessary to justify the Trotskyist tactics. Cannon comments on Trotsky’s evaluation of the action “when we were talking with him about the total result of our entry into the Socialist party and the pitiful state of its organization afterward. He said that alone would have justified the entry into the organization even if we hadn’t gained a single new member.”
The Trotskyists did gain a number of recruits, however, and doubled their size. This still did not break their isolation from the working class. Their attitude toward the trade union struggle and the Afro-American people guaranteed that, despite their ensuing formation of the Socialist Workers party.
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