The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  In 1919 Eastman was catapulted to fame as an outstanding agitator opposed to allied military operations against the newly founded Soviet state. This prominence came from Eastman’s dramatic revelation of the contents of secret letters, purloined from the under secretary of state, to an audience described by the New York Times as “6,000 shouting Reds at Madison Square Garden.”37 Six years later Eastman gained an international reputation as well. After a sojourn in the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924, he released to the world press the contents of Lenin’s last two letters to the Bolshevik Party, which became known as the “Suppressed Testament.” In this explosive document the dying leader of the Russian Revolution called for Stalin’s removal from his post as party secretary and praised Trotsky as the most able member of the central committee. Quickly Eastman became known as the Western world’s foremost champion of Trotsky in the crucial factional struggle then convulsing the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This reputation was reinforced by Eastman’s publication of Since Lenin Died (1925), a political analysis, and the biography, Leon Trotsky: Portrait of a Youth (1926).

  In 1928 the German-born Marxist Ludwig Lore introduced Eastman to a Russian member of the International Left Opposition named Eleazer Solntstev, who was working at the Soviet Embassy in New York. Lore had already been expelled from the American Communist Party on charges of Trotskyism, based mainly on the fact that he had associated with Trotsky during Trotsky’s brief stay in New York in 1917. A circle was initiated that included Max and Eliena Eastman (his Russian-born wife, the sister of Justice Commissar Nikolai Krylenko), Solntstev, and Antoinette Konikow, a socialist doctor from Boston who had formed the first Trotskyist group in the United States, the Independent Communist League.38

  Although Eastman was unwilling to assume organizational responsibilities, Solntstev persuaded him to translate and publish some documents of the Russian Opposition. They appeared as The Real Situation in Russia (1928). Shortly after the publication of the volume, the man known as the foremost radical in the United States was isolated by the Communists and transformed into a pariah. The American public viewed Eastman as a dangerous revolutionary, while the Communists denounced him as a “Trotskyite disrupter.” In the 1930s Stalin personally defamed Eastman as a “Gangster of the Pen,” and during the Moscow trials the Daily Worker published a story slandering him as a “British agent.”39

  From his rural home in Croton, New York, Eastman continued to support the cause of Trotskyism until the mid-1930s. He gave financial support (the proceeds of The Real Situation in Russia were used to launch the Militant newspaper), produced a magnificent translation of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (1932–33), and published a searing indictment of the Stalinists’ cultural policy called Artists in Uniform (1934). Daniel Eastman, his son from an earlier marriage to Ida Rauh, was a member of the Trotskyist party for a few years in the mid-1930s.

  However, in books and left-wing journals, including the Trotskyists’ New International, Eastman argued that Marxism was an unscientific philosophy requiring the purgation of its religious elements, especially the Hegelian dialectic. On several occasions Trotsky expressed dismay over Eastman’s rejection of dialectical and historical materialism, suspecting that it might be the precursor of a political break. Consequently, Trotsky urged his American followers to undertake a thorough critique of American philosophy, and especially of the influence of John Dewey.40

  Eastman’s relations with Trotsky had not always gone smoothly. They first became acquainted when Eastman was in the Soviet Union for a year and nine months during 1922–24. When Eastman made references to Stalin’s suppression of Lenin’s “Last Testament” in Since Lenin Died, Trotsky was forced for tactical reasons to repudiate Eastman, later writing him a letter of apology.41 Nine years after their initial meeting, the Eastmans became more intimate with Trotsky when they spent twelve days with him at Prinkipo, the Turkish island to which he had been exiled. They passed the days fishing and in casual conversation. Trotsky even proposed that they collaborate in writing a drama about the American Civil War, combining Trotsky’s firsthand military experience and Eastman’s imaginative powers. Then they had an unpleasant quarrel over Eastman’s handling of an article on Stalin, during which Trotsky insinuated that Eastman was incompetent and indicated that he would replace Eastman as his literary agent.

  Nevertheless, Trotsky was anxious for the Eastmans to stay on for a few more months and seemed to be unaware of the developing tensions. But Eastman had come to the view that no real meeting of minds could take place, and the Eastmans left Prinkipo with some unpleasant memories. Eastman felt that Trotsky lacked the “gift of mutuality,” by dominating in any intellectual interchange. He was also appalled by the drab condition of Trotsky’s home, concluding that Trotsky only appreciated art when it appeared in books.42

  But the only differences of any importance to Trotsky were those in the area of Marxist philosophy, which Eastman had expressed as early as 1916 in the Masses. Indeed, Eastman’s admiration for Lenin had been partly based on the conviction that Lenin, like himself, was not a “true believer” in dialectical materialism. Thus he was surprised to discover how seriously Marxism was taken in postrevolutionary Russia. With typical aplomb, he took it upon himself to make a contribution to the revolution by explaining Marxism’s fallacies. Feeling something like a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s court, Eastman marched into the Marx-Engels Institute to do the research that resulted in his book, Marx, Lenin and the Science of Revolution (1926).

  At the time Eastman merely thought certain ideological elements of Marxism were impeding the revolution, which had basically made an auspicious beginning. A decade and a half later he would rewrite the book as Marxism: Is It a Science? (1940), in which, instead of counterposing Lenin’s practicality to Marx’s religion, he would find strong links between Stalinist tyranny and Leninist precepts. He would reduce Lenin’s contribution from having engineered an epoch-making revolution to providing a strategy for the seizure of power by an elite.

  Eastman’s criticisms of Marxism were dispersed through a variety of essays and reviews and developed at length in the two aforementioned books and The Last Stand of Dialectical Materialism (1934), a polemic against Sidney Hook’s Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx (1933). In his works Eastman advanced the argument that Marxism was not truly scientific but metaphysical and religious: “Marxism was a step from Utopian socialism to a socialist religion, a scheme for convincing the believer that the universe itself is producing a better society and that he has only to fall in properly with the general movement of the universe.”43 Eastman agreed with Engels’s explanation that Marx had turned the Hegelian system on its head by rooting the dialectical method in material reality. However, Eastman claimed that Marx had erred in positing an “animistic materialism,” a world of matter moving inexorably on its own, like a robot, toward ultimate perfection. Eastman charged Marx with having substituted this concept for Hegel’s notion of idealistic reason which also moved of its own accord toward ultimate perfection. Marx, like Hegel, was a German Romantic who committed the mistake of projecting his own subjective desire for socialism onto the machinations of reality. To Eastman, “it was Marx and not history that was determined to produce a social revolution.”44 Therefore, a true follower of Marx must have faith in a self-acting world.

  Eastman asserted that Marx contradicted his own beliefs by actively intervening in social strife and his stated desire not to be a philosopher by actually writing philosophy. Eastman felt that Marx had made an important contribution in his discovery of the class struggle, a discovery that Eastman equated with Darwin’s achievements, but he argued that the scientific must be extracted from religious nonsense. Eastman attributed Lenin’s success to his flexibility in ignoring Marx’s fatalism, whether or not Lenin would admit it.

  Eastman’s views had a considerable impact on Edmund Wilson, who argued a similar position in his chapter “The Myth of the Dialectic” in To the Finland
Station (1940) and acknowledged a personal debt to Marxism: Is It a Science? George Lichtheim’s harsh estimation of this aspect of Eastman’s work, however, seems closer to the truth: “[Eastman’s] reflections on Marx, Lenin, Communism . . . are not merely trite; they are trite in a peculiarly amateurish sort of way. It is regrettably evident that in all the years when he preached the doctrine he later came to renounce, he really had no notion of what he was talking about.”45

  Among the many who locked horns with Eastman during the 1930s were Louis Boudin, Waldo Frank, Sidney Hook, and James Burnham. All were astounded by Eastman’s claim that Marx had posited a theory of “animistic materialism” that maintained in a mechanical manner that socialism was inevitable. Burnham, for example, argued in the New International that, although they described history as operating according to scientific laws, Marx and Engels never contended that social development was completely self-acting and self-operating. What Marx argued was that the wills of individual humans are not decisive factors; history provides a general context for and defines the scope and limitations of human action. While it is true that Marx and Engels saw direction in history, they did not inscribe their moral preferences into its laws of development. Rather, they saw such a historical development in terms of the growth of the means of production. Marxists base their projections for action and social change on their understanding of reality. It was, in fact, the utopian socialists against whom Marx polemicized, who posed an abstract moral idea as a goal. It was not Marx who read his own subjective views into history but rather those who advocated medieval and agrarian solutions. And here, it was not a question of whether these ideas were morally wrong, Burnham asserted, but rather that they were impossible to realize.46

  All of Eastman’s detractors, and even his admirer Edmund Wilson, noted many methodological weaknesses in his critique of Marxism—Eastman, they claimed, focused on abstractions, phrases, and concepts torn from time and context. Moreover, he exaggerated the role of individual quirks, padding his ad hominem attacks with unscholarly insinuations, such as in his claim that Marx spent years in the British Museum because he was compelled to accumulate evidence to prove his previously assembled “religious” convictions.47

  Hook and Burnham attributed Eastman’s much-emphasized “inevitability” theory to the epigones, not the originators, of Marxism. They argued that expectations for socialist transformation were and remained based on the real development of production and that the probability of revolution continues to be high if partisans of the working class act effectively and with sufficient resolve. Burnham enumerated the objective conditions for socialist transformation that had begun to emerge in Marx’s time and continued to obtain to the present. They included such features as the centralization of industry; the increasing level of technology; the socialization of labor; the occurrence of extremes of economic dislocation and social unrest; the fact that socialization remained the only way that the full powers of production generated under capitalism could be realized; and the continuing existence of individuals and organizations who desired a social transformation, since productive forces by themselves could not accomplish such a change.48

  The venomous language exchanged in the Eastman-Hook debates as well as between Eastman and other opponents parallels the language found in the most vituperative factional fights within Marxist organizations. This suggests that, whatever kept most of these intellectuals aloof from party commitment, it could hardly have been a revulsion against abusive polemics. After describing Eastman’s views as “pluralistic pragmatism,” Waldo Frank denounced him for “philosophic opportunism.”49 Hook ridiculed Eastman’s “emasculated instrumentalism.”50 Ironically, only Burnham refrained from such excesses. He emphasized that Eastman rendered a service to revolutionists by attacking various unfortunate distortions of Marxism; what was regrettable was that Eastman erred in attributing those very distortions to Marx himself.51

  The dilemma of the Trotskyists in dealing with Eastman’s contributions was exemplified by their attitude toward his Artists in Uniform (1934), in which he once again offered an irritating combination of positions they found alternately agreeable and abhorrent. Elliot Cohen wrote in the New International that Eastman’s arguments always seemed to boil down to his own little hobbyhorse and not much else. He thought that Eastman went too far in his acceptance of the autonomy of art: to be against all restrictive uniforms is one thing, but Eastman was advocating total nudity! In a subsequent review of Art and the Life of Action (1934), Cohen agreed that Eastman was correct in arguing for artistic independence of revolutionaries from any parties, but wrong in suggesting that art was self-justified and self-maintaining. He noted that when Eastman asserted that the sole end of art was to heighten consciousness, he was not talking about art as a reality but about some intangible essence of art that he had concocted. Eastman was simply disorienting himself in imputing a single function, evocation of awareness, to art. From the Marxist point of view, art has as many functions as might arise. Cohen concluded that perhaps Eastman had allowed himself to be provoked into overreacting by the vulgar Marxist excesses of writers such as Mike Gold. But what distressed Cohen was that the implications of Eastman’s stark opposition of art, identified with expression, to science, identified with control, might theoretically lead in a totalitarian direction—that is, it seemed to justify the separating out from the rest of society a leadership fixated on practical control.52

  MARXISM AND PRAGMATISM

  The Eastman debates typified an important aspect of the intellectual life of the anti-Stalinist left of the early 1930s, animated first by conflicts about Marxist philosophy and later by disputes over the relationship of Leninism to Stalinism and the social nature of the postrevolutionary society in the Soviet Union. The philosophical exchanges were fiercely conducted by skilled polemicists with boundless confidence and interminable arguments; but in the end they may not have been as productive as they seemed at the onset. Unlike the dispute with the Communists over “proletarian culture” and modernism, the philosophical altercations, although they raised many important issues, failed to advance theory or provide a legacy that could be assimilated by future generations, with the one possible exception of the writing of Sidney Hook in the early 1930s. Certainly none of the defenders of classical Marxism developed their arguments into a book or article that enjoyed widespread currency on the left, then or now; by and large their efforts were restricted to a restatement of basic principles.

  One of the best defenders of classical Marxism was Rubin Gotesky, a young philosophy instructor at Long Island University, who wrote a three-part critique of Hook’s Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx that was published in the New International.53 The essay is remarkable for its lucid and sophisticated restatement of the methodological tenets and doctrinal conclusions of classical Marxist philosophy. Born in Poland in 1906, Gotesky was the son of a labor organizer and joined the Communist Party in New York.54 Discovered reading a book by Trotsky in a library, he was expelled for Trotskyism and joined the CLA in 1931. Yet only two years after completing his thoughtful defense of Marxist principles, Gotesky left the Trotskyists and returned to graduate school at New York University to pursue his doctorate. In a pattern that would become all too familiar, he retained from his Trotskyist experience only an admiration for Trotsky’s “capacity to see what was and is rotten in actual socialist [sic] states.”55 In 1940, when the New York City Board of Higher Education held hearings following the Rapp-Coudert investigation of Communist professors, Gotesky testified for the prosecutors at every single trial as an “expert witness” on the question of the Communist Party’s advocacy of force and violence to overthrow the government.

  As for the critics of Marxist orthodoxy, at a certain point they simply reached an impasse—their attempt to “modernize” Marxism had become transformed into a full-scale repudiation of the Marxist doctrine and method. Ten years later not a single one of the modernizers or critics of classical Marxism, and scarcely
more than a handful of its defenders, could still be classified as a “Marxist” in any meaningful sense of the term. What had transpired, despite its auspicious beginnings, proved to be an embarrassing dis ruption of the development of Marxist thought in the United States that would leave the indigenous radical movement almost wholly dependent on European thought for stimulation and inspiration in future decades.

  The problem was not that the participants in the debate had meager intellectual resources or were especially ill-informed, particularly compared with those who made pronouncements on philosophical matters for the official Communist movement, such as V. J. Jerome and Earl Browder. More decisive was that the Marxist culture in which such debates might have flourished was impoverished in the United States because of the same complex historical factors that had retarded working-class self-organization and consciousness.56 In Marxist philosophy there had been no influentual American progenitor of the caliber of Plekhanov in Russia or Labriola in Italy; only the curious figure of William English Walling, whose superficial attempt to combine Marxism and pragmatism was a harbinger of the debates that occurred during the depression years.

  A complicating factor was that some of the modernizers and critics of classical Marxism in the 1930s were themselves undergoing personal transformations because of rapidly changing events even as they launched their polemics. Consequently, various philosophical positions might inadvertently become instruments of political differentiation, or, more likely, rationales for maintaining arm’s-length relationships with the organized left or abstaining and/or withdrawing from it. What appeared to be a penetrating philosophical insight one moment might become justifiably suspect the next, as a theoretican’s overall position was reworked to rationalize a political shift. Such shifts were almost always to the right although occasionally they were preceded by a brief spurt of left-wing purity.