The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  Wilson devoted more than six years to writing To the Finland Station and read more than a thousand books, including Michelet’s twenty-seven volume Histoire de France (1833-67). In addition, he learned Russian and German in order to read the Marxist classics in the original. He also spent six months in the Soviet Union where he nearly died of scarlet fever.78

  His efforts resulted in To the Finland Station, which has earned a permanent reputation as one of the most outstanding collective biographies of this century.79 Wilson approached his subject with both the strengths and weaknesses of a literary critic and an imaginative writer. Most noteworthy was his presentation of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialist movement as a class-conditioned development and his vivid portraits of its leaders. The work was also unusual in its treatment of the literary styles of the principal communist theoreticians, an approach that brings to mind the writing of the German Marxist biographer Franz Mehring. Moreover, as a skillful popularizer and experienced exegete, Wilson brought many pivotal historical problems of the socialist movement to the present as contemporary burning issues.

  To the Finland Station aspires to probe the central sources of Marxism and Bolshevism from the perspective that a revolutionist is one who aims to consciously intervene in the historical process but can do so only by understanding its laws. Wilson’s study begins with an examination of the life and work of the French scholar Jules Michelet (1789-1894). He describes Michelet’s discovery of the work of Giovanni Battista Vico, the Italian author of Principles of a New Science (1795). Vico was one of the first to reject the view of history as biography or as a god-directed process, preferring instead to search for its patterns of development. Michelet assimilated Vico’s project and linked it to the impulse of the ideals of the French Revolution. Michelet’s work is described by Wilson, who with masterful artistic skill, employs a poetic use of myth and symbols to capture and concretize abstract ideas: “Michelet succeeds in dominating history like Odysseus wrestling with Proteus, by seizing it and holding onto it through all its variety and metamorphoses.”80 Yet, as the revolutionary impetus passed from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat in the nineteenth century, historians who followed Michelet proved unable to enlarge his accomplishments. The conservative French scholars Joseph Ernest Renan (1823-92) and Hippolyte Taine (1828-93) retained aspects of Michelet’s achievement, yet the dynamic thrust of their writing progressively disintegrated. Finally, the skeptical, superficial Anatole France emerged, embodying the dimming of the Enlightenment spirit altogether. “With his dressing gown, his slippers and his La-rousse,” he reduced the plight of humankind “to the level of entertaining conversation.”81

  The second section of To the Finland Station returns to the French Revolution and traces the more advanced line of thought that followed upon its achievements and limitations, the socialist movement as developed through the contributions of Gracchus Ba-beuf, Due de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, and Prosper Enfantin, among others. This phase of his study culminates in an examination of the utopian movement that flourished in the United States during the 1830s and 1840s.

  The young Marx, whose portrait is most lovingly drawn by Wilson, is presented as an idealistic and romantic poet. His early lyrics disclose an affinity for the myth of Prometheus, while the depths of his consciousness are haunted by a Luciferian temperament. Wilson recalls the close relationship between the young Marx and his father Heinrich as the rebellious student follows a reckless course at the University of Bonn, which climaxes in a duel in 1836. Then, at the University of Berlin, Marx undergoes a transformation and becomes fascinated by Hegelian philosophy, the major intellectual preoccupation of the times. With much enthusiasm and a paucity of evidence, Wilson also roots Marx in the Judaic tradition, contending that he was on the path to becoming the great secular rabbi of his day—”the pride and independence, the conviction of moral superiority, which gave his [Marx’s] life its heroic dignity, seems to go back to the great days of Israel.”82

  After the reactionary wave of the 1830s in Germany ruled out an academic career, Marx began writing for the Rheinische Zeitung, which eventually led to his crossing paths with the young Frederick Engels. Together they would perform “the thought of all great thinkers in summing up an immense accumulation of knowledge, in combining many streams of speculation, and in endowing a new point of view with more vivid and compelling life.”83

  The political and intellectual peregrination of Marx and Engels is but a prelude to Wilson’s finale, in which Lenin and Trotsky bring the Marxist tradition to culmination in the twentieth century. Wilson’s account terminates just prior to the Revolution of 1917, when Lenin having arrived at the Finland Station stands “on the eve of the moment when for the first time in the human exploit the key of a philosophy of history was to fit an historical lock.”84

  Wilson’s anti-Stalinism had led him to a firsthand reexamination of the Marxist-Leninist tradition, but he chose to divest the tradition of its scientific basis in order to laud its moral vision. Stemming from his own inveterate alienation, Wilson felt a compatibility with the personalities of intellectual exiles such as Marx and Trotsky; accordingly, he evidenced a greater sympathy for the men than for their ideas. To the Finland Station is pivotally concerned with personalities and relationships, and Wilson often becomes idiosyncratic when he departs from his narrative in order to theorize. His disdain for the scientific foundation of Marxism and his preoccupation with personalities often results in a distorted approach to various of his subjects, such as his paying far too much attention to the fascinating but rather unimportant Prosper Enfantin. It is also evidenced in his reiteration of Eastman’s claim that “from the moment that they [Marx and Engels] admitted the dialectic into their semi-materialist system, they had admitted an element of mysticism.”85 But Wilson went even further than Eastman in his attempt to discredit dialectics by tracing the Hegelian triad (thesis/antithesis/synthesis) to its alleged origins in Christianity, and, before that, to symbols deriving from the male sex organs. Hegelian dialectics, Wilson claimed, has nothing to do with Plato’s dialectics, which was a method of arriving at the truth by reconciling two opposite statements. Hegel’s dialectics was rather a vehicle for bedevilment and oversimplification which polarized phenomena into antagonists and protagonists.

  Engels was equally condemned by Wilson for deriving examples of the laws of dialectics directly from Hegel’s Logic (1812-16). The dialectic was not a method of thought derived from objective reality but merely a rationalization of a wish. Marx desired the victory of the proletariat and therefore set up a mechanical theoretical construct that guaranteed such an outcome. Similarly, Wilson argued, the labor theory of value has no scientific basis; it was yet another result of Marx’s projecting his own desires onto reality: “Karl Marx, who was not only on the side of the worker but wanted to see him inherit the earth, asserted that all value was created by labor.”86

  Wilson’s inability to grasp complex totalities and his recourse to simplistic theories (such as charging Marx with psychological projection) was not restricted to his consideration of Marxism. To the Finland Station also provides a very meager analysis of the ideology of the Enlightenment, which is at the center of the book’s first section. Even with his enormous talents, Wilson seems to have suffered from the hyperspecialization of the society in which he was educated, which locks even its professional intellectuals and most creative artists in a constrictive division of labor. Despite his aspirations toward developing a consistent historical methodology, Wilson rarely transcends his preoccupation with personalities and surface phenomena, although his imaginative insights can often lend an aura of brilliance to his work. Wilson located the source of the victorious October Revolution in the “historical imagination” rather than in the necessities of the class struggle and the comprehension of the laws of social change. This was no small error. The central claim of Marxists to political relevance is an ability to grasp the general trends of history and to projec
t requisite means for intervening in its processes.

  Wilson, following Eastman, showed little interest in Hegel, and To the Finland Station is deformed as a consequence. In a study intended to probe the theoretical roots of the Bolsheviks’ success, Michelet is allotted disproportionate space (five chapters), while Hegel is not only maligned but barely even discussed. In assessing influences on the development of Marx’s thought, Hegel rather than Michelet unquestionably deserves center stage. Moreover, far more attention should have been devoted to Feuerbach and the young Hegelians, Bruno Bauer, Moses Hess, and Max Stirner. The theory that led to the Russian Revolution was not produced simply by the transmission of moral fervor and historical imagination from one thinker to the next but through the elaboration of a program and outlook determined by scientific methods. Most important, that program was informed by a critical synthesis of classical German philosophy, French socialism, and English political economy. German philosophy and English political economy are clearly slighted in Wilson’s study, apparently because of his antipathy to both the dialectical method and the labor theory of value.

  It is not surprising that Wilson’s rejection of dialectics is accompanied by a glib dismissal of the labor theory of value. The dialectical method was necessary to Marx’s defense of the theory that labor is the source of all value. Moreover, Marx traced the development of the contradictions of capitalism to their roots in the dual nature of labor—a duality that he called “concrete” and “abstract,” which stood at the very heart of the capitalist economic system. The point is that Marx might not have been able to penetrate the mysteries of capitalism without employing the dialectical method, a method that is based upon the recognition of the contradictory essence of all things and a study of their modes of development. This dismissal of the Hegelian component of Marxism may be part of the reason why the attempts of Eastman and Wilson to “modernize” Marxism simultaneously embodied strong anti-Marxist implications that unfolded progressively during the demoralization and disillusionment of the radical intellectuals during the late 1930s, although in Wilson’s case it led to an eccentric leftism.

  The literary and political peregrination of the Partisan Review from 1934 to 1939 also reflects an attempt by its editors to resolve various problems in a creative manner at the same time that the magazine abandoned certain aspects of classical Marxism. Often this contradiction was expressed through literary criticism. For example, even though the editors originally held that the modernist aesthetic advances of the 1920s were ambiguous, by 1939 Rahv began to assess them as having been overwhelmingly positive. Modern literature, he affirmed, essentially involves a dispute with the modern world. To a large degree the modern artist’s introversion and privacy are necessary for survival under capitalism, because only in this way can artists defy commodity fetishism and “remain the masters instead of the victims of their products.” Considering the evolution and character of the Popular Front alliance of Communist and liberal writers and their return to literary patriotism, Rahv concluded: “In view of what has happened, is it not clear that the older tradition was a thousand times more ‘progressive’—if that is to be our criterion—was infinitely more disinterested, infinitely more sensitive to the actual conditions of human existence, than the shallow political writings of our latter days?”87

  Such a view, which flourished at the decade’s end, was decidedly influenced by the ambiguous impact of the Moscow trials; the Partisan Review’s break with Stalinism probably also implied more of a repudiation of certain aspects of Marxism than was immediately apparent at that time, even to Rahv and Phillips themselves. That the trials were a watershed for the entire decade was nowhere more eloquently revealed than in Rahv’s essay “Trials of the Mind.” The trials called into question the whole significance of the Soviet experiment, which had been such a powerful factor in motivating American writers to become part of the communist movement. They also had served as a trial and a test for various aspects of classical Marxist theory, and Trotsky had arisen as the great defender of Marxism-Leninism against the epigones in Moscow.

  But for Rahv the trials had special significance for intellectuals— both for those who were on trial in Moscow and for those in the United States, many of whom remained silent throughout the duration. Rahv frankly admitted that despite his early questioning of Communist Party policy he was surprised and shaken by the trials, this “massacre of the firstborn of the October Revolution.” Rahv’s beliefs were threatened far beyond his loss of faith in the Soviet Union: “We were not prepared for defeat. The future had our confidence, which we granted freely, sustained by the tradition of Marxism. In that tradition we saw the marriage of science and humanism. But now, amidst all these ferocious surprises, who has the strength to reaffirm his beliefs, to transcend the feeling that he has been duped? One is afraid of one’s fear. Will it soon become so precise as to exclude hope?”88 Thus a process of doubt and skepticism had begun. For Rahv the trials had undermined the classical model of proletarian revolution altogether, hence his preoccupation with the alienated literary intellectual, which had always been present, reemerged stronger than ever. It had, in fact, become central in his transitory attraction to Trotsky.

  Although the Partisan Review editors were never really Trotskyists, Trotsky’s influence on them was substantial. It was scarcely a passing fad or symbol, as one recent historian has implied.89 In 1973, F. W. Dupee reminisced that “there’s no question that Leon Trotsky definitely influenced me more than any American did. Many liberal-radical intellectuals in the 1930s worshipped FDR, but I never did.”90 But Trotsky’s influence was incomplete, and Phillips and Rahv in particular relied upon their own independent critical thought, reinforced by their negative experience with Stalinism, to keep their distance.

  Trotsky and his ideas were a vehicle by which radical intellectuals like Phillips and Rahv, whose primary concern was literary inquiry rather than constructing political organizations, could break with Stalinism and still remain for a while within the Marxist left. Trotsky’s incisive critique of Stalinism broadened their horizons far beyond their own personal experience with the Communist Party’s subordination of literary judgments to political expediency. As they followed Trotsky’s analysis of political events, their own modes of thought and analysis undoubtedly were affected by his polemical sharpness and historical breadth.

  And above all, Trotsky personally incarnated the ideal of the revolutionary intellectual in excoriating the exploitation of capitalism, warning against the tragic degeneration of the Russian Revolution, and standing alone in Coyoacan before the world, defiant of the Kremlin’s executioners. But in the view of the editors of the Partisan Review, Trotsky ultimately failed to build a viable political movement and paid for his failure with his life. After his death, and the start of World War II, the editors’ journey away from the original goals of the 1937 reorganized Partisan Review was more direct and unimpeded.

  Chapter 6. Cannonites and Shachtmanites

  Men’s vices, it has long been known, are for the most part bound up with their virtues.

  —Lenin1

  PARTY LEADERS AND PARTY POLITICS

  James P. Cannon (1890-1974) and Max Shachtman (1904-72) were two of the most able and important Marxists active during the Great Depression, despite the small size of the organizations that they co-led from 1928 to 1940. The American Trotskyist movement had an impact on virtually an entire generation of New York-based intellectuals, a surprising number of whom held membership in its organizations and youth groups. It also managed to break out of the confines of internal theoretical debate, playing a significant role in several major unions such as the Teamsters and the United Auto Workers, and it organized at least one major mobilization against domestic fascists in the late 1930s. Unfortunately, in recent times historians who have had little firsthand knowledge of the problems inherent in constructing a socialist organization have tended to ridicule the two founders of American Trotskyism. Cannon and Shachtman have been
caricatured in score-settling autobiographies written by several spiteful ex-followers and tragically misrepresented by a number of self-proclaimed disciples.2

  Serious, capable men, neither Cannon nor Shachtman were without their political flaws or defects of character. But the records of their organizations during the 1930s and for several decades afterward—built and sustained without the backing of any government, the support of any substantial group of union officials or “establishment” luminaries, or the financial assistance of more than a handful of maverick businessmen—testify to the power of their ideas and their personal commitment to building a revolutionary socialist movement against overwhelming odds.

  The two typified certain virtues of the Trotskyist movement, virtues shared by many of its secondary leaders and rank and file. Cannon was an educated worker, with a good understanding of the practical side of Marxism, a passion for organizational stability and continuity, and a feeling for the reality of the working class in the United States.3 Shachtman was a revolutionary intellectual from a plebeian background who had attended college for only a few months (he referred to himself modestly as a “semi-skilled intellectual”). Attracted to theory, he had a colorful personality and a flair for witty, incisive prose.4 Both were superb orators in their respective genres: Cannon as the popularizer of basic socialist concepts and guardian of his party’s historical heritage, Shachtman as the dazzling elocutionist, who soared through historical analogies and political parallels, replete with quotations from the Marxist masters. Throughout the 1930s, despite episodic feuds and mutual suspicions, they formed an attractive team. In the decades after their political split in the spring of 1940, the former stood fast to his principles in a world where imminent Marxist predictions were refuted by events or realized in unexpected ways, while the latter progressively abandoned the convictions of his youth and political insights of his middle years, becoming by the 1960s one of the very “renegades” from revolutionism that he had so colorfully excoriated for years.