The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)
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Trotsky himself set the tone for the debate by publishing the most forceful and coherent exposition of the question. His argument, set forth in his book The Revolution Betrayed (1937) and in various articles collected later in In Defense of Marxism (1941), derived logically from his earlier views. He had devoted a major portion of the last seventeen years of his life to fighting “Stalinism,” which he defined as the political expression of a bureaucratic caste that had come to rule the Soviet Union. He conceived of this caste as a parasitic social layer that played no essential role in the context of the new property relations and forms of production established by the October Revolution. Trotsky frequently wrote about the “dual nature” of the Soviet Union and of the bureaucracy, by which he meant its contradictory character. On the one hand, the Soviet economy was based on nationalized property relations that had been established by the revolution. Trotsky believed that these nationalizations, which had been brought about by a massive, democratic workers’ upheaval, were the Soviet Union’s most progressive feature. If the Soviet social formation were attacked from without, the bureaucracy would most likely mobilize to defend it. On the other hand, the Stalinist bureaucracy had usurped from the workers all political power, thereby constituting a reactionary political and ideological current that was capable of functioning in a counterrevolutionary manner in the international socialist movement.
The Hitler-Stalin Pact followed by the Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland and Finland in 1939–40 brought to a head the debate in the American Trotskyist movement over this issue. Shachtman did not at the time offer an opinion on the nature of the Soviet Union, but, after the SWP split in 1940, he adopted a version of Burnham and Friedman’s theory of “bureaucratic collectivism,” which he modified several times during and after World War II.
In his much-debated analysis of the war, Trotsky had carefully distinguished between the reactionary aims and actions of the Soviet bureaucracy and what he considered to be the revolutionary significance of the transformation of property relations in the territories newly occupied by its armed forces. Trotsky’s method had certain analogies with Marx’s analysis of the French Revolution in its Napoleonic phase. Although Napoleon’s dictatorship was politically counterrevolutionary vis-à-vis the original aims of the revolution, the march of his troops through Europe overturned existing feudal property relations, thereby helping to create the preconditions for the emergence of a more advanced bourgeois order. The central issue, as Trotsky and Cannon and their supporters saw it in 1939–40 was the question, Had or had not the Stalinist bureaucracy rolled back the conquests of the October Revolution in the realm of production? Because Trotsky believed that the Stalinist bureaucracy had not done this, he advocated the use of the slogan “Defend the Soviet Union,” because he was opposed to the imperialist powers intervening in the Soviet Union to reinstate capitalist property relations. By the formula “Defend the Soviet Union,” Trotsky also meant that the Russian working masses should pursue an intransigent political opposition to the Stalinist bureaucracy and its policies, which he believed disarmed the Soviet workers, rendering them more vulnerable to assault by the fascist powers and betrayal by the imperialist “allies.”
The problem for the contemporary student of these historical debates is that the Soviet Union, perhaps even more than other social formations, is so complex that it is enormously difficult for a single theory, especially one formulated forty years ago in a relatively condensed manner, to explain every facet of its dynamic satisfactorily. Trotsky himself admitted at one point that the theory that held that the Soviet Union was “state capitalist” could admirably explain certain specific features of the Soviet Union. He also thought the “bureaucratic collectivist” interpretation might have some plausibility if his prediction of global revolution were not realized in the postwar period.34 In fact, virtually every serious, well-researched, or nuanced interpretation seems to make some useful point about the nature of the Soviet Union or of Stalinism, regardless of whether the interpretation is advanced under the aegis of the theory of state capitalism, bureaucratic collectivism, or Trotsky’s postcapitalist state in transition. However, the weight of contemporary scholarship—in particular, the monumental studies of the Soviet Union by Isaac Deutscher and E. H. Carr—seem to support Trotsky’s “transitional” analysis as the best guide to an overall assessment of the Soviet Union. Moreover, adherents of the transitional-society approach, such as the Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel, have been most successful in outlining laws of motion (economic, social, and political) peculiar to that society.
It should be noted, however, that Deutscher, as well as several others who shared his perspective, did not necessarily reach the same political conclusions as did Trotsky. Indeed, it has not been uncommon for those who agreed with Trotsky’s “degenerated workers’ state” theory to develop illusions about the Soviet Union, which led them to reject several of his most important conclusions: that “defense” of the Soviet Union meant only the defense of certain of the Soviet Union’s residual economic features from outside attack; that the need to fight the totalitarian Stalinist bureaucracy was so exigent that it should have been sustained even while the Soviet Union was at war; that new seizures of territory by the Soviet Union should be opposed; and that one must subordinate the whole question of defense of the Soviet Union to the needs of the international socialist movement.35 Without such qualifications, Trotsky’s theory might be interpreted in such a way as to justify rather than oppose Stalinism; for example, by arguing that this or that oppressive action by the Soviet Union was necessary to defend the nationalized economy against the restoration of capitalism. Trotsky’s “degenerated workers’ state” theory is also problematic because its terminology can be confusing; workers have no political power whatsoever in the Soviet “workers’ state.” In addition, certain aspects of Trotsky’s theory have never been fully developed, such as his implication that the Soviet Union was moving backward toward a restoration of capitalism as early as the mid-1930s.36
Burnham and Shachtman, in contrast, had failed to see any lasting progressive effects of many accomplishments of the October Revolution because of the eventual loss of political power by the workers, and this approach seems to have had an extraordinarily disorienting effect on many would-be revolutionary socialists. Burnham himself provides a dramatic example of one such outcome. At the end of the faction fight in 1940 he attended the meeting which launched the new Workers Party and then dropped a letter off with the secretary at the Workers Party headquarters to resign from the party. In the letter he stated that he really had not been a Marxist for some time and that he had no confidence in the organization he had just founded.37 Within a year he published The Managerial Revolution (1941), which offered the thesis that various forms of a new postcapitalist “managerial society” now existed in the Soviet Union, in Hitler’s Germany, and in the United States as embodied in Roosevelt’s New Deal. The “managerial revolution” was the trend of the future. The postwar world, Burnham predicted, would be divided among the victors: Germany, Japan, and United States. Following this imaginative flight, in his essay “Lenin’s Heir,” that appeared in the Partisan Review in 1945, Burnham proclaimed the very view he had refuted so many times—that Leninism had created Stalinism. Soon after, he was advocating that the Western powers launch a preventive atomic war against the Soviet Union.38
Shachtman would follow a less extreme but similar course, although more slowly and painfully, and without ever openly abandoning Marxism. Near the end of his life he even invoked “Marxist” arguments to support conservative AFL-CIO leader George Meany.39 First Schachtman modified his theory, then his politics. A year after he founded the Workers Party, Shachtman declared that the Soviet Union was a new class society but one more advanced than capitalism and worthy of defense if attacked. In this instance he was countering not only Trotsky’s theory but also the view that the Soviet Union was “state capitalist,” promoted by a tendency in his own organization
led by C. L. R. James, a West Indian who had become a Trotskyist in England where he wrote World Revolution (1937). In 1938 James published The Black Jacobins and moved to the United States. Called “Nello,” short for “Lionel,” one of his middle names, he wrote under the pseudonym “J. R. Johnson” and was over six feet tall, slim, athletic, and unbelievably handsome. A speaker who could rival Shachtman and Cannon, James enthralled audiences for hours with no notes, no podium, and without hesitating on a single word.
When the Soviet Union was attacked by Germany in June 1941, Shachtman altered his views. He now argued against defending the Soviet Union on the grounds that the Soviet Union, then allied with England, was merely a partisan belligerent in an international war between two imperialisms. By the late 1940s Shachtman had declared that bureaucratic collectivism was the very barbarism that revolutionaries such as Rosa Luxemburg had warned about if the socialist revolution failed to spread. It was probably this particular analysis more than the general hypothesis about a “new class” in the Soviet Union that led him, by 1960, to give “critical support” to capitalism and imperialism as the only means of fighting the spread of the new “barbarism.”
In this context Shachtman’s call for revolutionary socialists to establish a “Third Camp” took on a new significance. The term had been briefly used by the Socialist Workers Party to mean a refusal to support neither the Stalinist leadership nor the capitalist powers but only genuinely independent struggles of workers and poor peasants throughout the world. In the framework of the theory of bureaucratic collectivism, however, especially its latter manifestations, the possibility of a Third Camp of any kind became illusory. The imperialist countries drove their victims into collaboration with Stalinist regimes, who doled out aid for their own reasons, thus intertwining independent nationalist movements with various shades of Stalinism. Thus the concept of a Third Camp had the potential for becoming redefined in unrealistic terms, with some of Shachtman’s followers implicitly demanding that revolutionaries in the dependent nations refuse assistance from their only available ally. For Shachtman and many of his followers, the whole concept collapsed in the face of the real world of political struggle by the late 1950s.
Shachtman finally conceived a strategy for “realignment,” which counseled socialists to enter the Democratic Party where they could coalesce with those within the party who were interested in fighting for “democracy.” Within a short time, however, he gravitated to the right wing of the Democratic Party. He supported the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, America’s intervention in South Vietnam, and the decision to bomb North Vietnam, making a mockery of his onetime boast that “I will support American imperialism when hair grows on the palm of my hand!” In the 1960s he drew close to George Meany, the conservative president of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organization (AFL-CIO), and became an informal but important consultant to I. W. Abel and Albert Shanker as well as to such influential Democrats as Henry Jackson and Hubert Humphrey. Only a few of his followers who broke with him in 1960 remained militantly anticapitalist. In the 1972 Democratic Party primaries, those led by Michael Harrington and Irving Howe supported McGovern, but those still loyal to Shachtman backed Jackson. In the November election, Shachtman led the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation grouping that gave tacit support to Richard Nixon. Such a course was by no means preordained, but it was a degeneration from Shachtman’s earlier practices that may well have been facilitated by Shachtman’s “new class” theory of the Soviet Union. In the end, Shachtman had come to the same position as the New Leader, only it took him many decades longer.
Why was this the case? Unlike many others on the anti-Stalinist left who were primarily writers, philosophers, or intellectuals within the context of established institutions, Shachtman throughout the 1940s and 1950s remained the outstanding recognized leader of an organized political tendency. The existence of such an organization, as well as Shachtman’s decades-long commitment to working-class socialism, was a check on the acceptance of right-wing conclusions, even for a decade after the formulation of his very disorienting “Stalinism is barbarism” thesis. It is reasonable to speculate that, even in its poorly organized, demoralized, and rightward drifting state in the 1950s, Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League created a context for a voluntary but very real political and intellectual discipline. As long as the Independent Socialist League continued, those who aspired to shift their allegiance in the direction of supporting the “democratic” imperialist foreign policy of the United States had to break from the organization. Once the organized political tendency ceased to exist, the speed with which Shachtman moved to the far right of social democracy appalled not only many of his associates but even those who had previously left his group.
Thus the schism that tore apart the SWP in 1939–40 had a broader significance than might have seemed the case at the time. The positions of Shachtman and Burnham, despite the sincerity of their followers and the usefulness of some of the political points they made about various aspects of the Soviet Union and the application of Leninism to conditions in the United States, tended to parallel the evolution of the deradicalizing anti-Stalinist left as a whole. Of all the intellectuals grouped in or around the Socialist Workers Party in 1940, with the exception of a handful who remained members such as Harold Isaacs, Felix Morrow, George Novack, and Joseph Vanzler, only James T. Farrell and Meyer Schapiro agreed with Cannon and Trotsky on the issues in dispute. By 1946 only Novack and Vanzler still agreed with Cannon. The others, if they retained any socialist convictions, felt closer to the Shachtman-Burnham position on the Soviet Union, and in various ways and at different rates were traveling the same general trajectory to the right.
Herbert Solow, Albert Goldman, John McDonald, and Leon Trotsky during the hearings of the John Dewey Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, Coyoacan, Mexico, 1937. (Photograph by Albert Glotzer, courtesy of Cassandra Johnson)
Three snapshots from the Dewey Commission hearings. Top left: Herbert Solow and Leon Trotsky. Top right: Herbert Solow, Leon Trotsky, and John McDonald. Bottom right: John Dewey, Albert Goldman, Herbert Solow, John McDonald, and Pearl Kluger (photograph by Albert Glotzer, courtesy of Cassandra Johnson)
Herbert Solow. A politically astute and charismatic journalist, Solow was a Trotskyist in the early 1930s and later became a respected member of the editorial board of Fortune magazine. (Sylvia Salmi Collection)
Herbert Solow. (Sylvia Salmi Collection)
Elliot Cohen. A brilliant editor, Cohen led a circle of young writers toward the Communist Party when he was managing editor of the Menorah Journal in the late 1920s, then toward virulent anticommunism when he founded Commentary in the 1940s. (Sylvia Salmi Collection)
Tess Slesinger. Married to Herbert Solow in the late 1920s, Slesinger was author of the 1934 novel The Unpossessed, which satirized the flirtation of the Menorah Journal writers with Communism. (Peter Davis Collection)
John McDonald. A close friend of Herbert Solow, McDonald joined him in the journey from Trotskyism to Fortune magazine. (Sylvia Salmi Collection)
James Rorty. A poet and left-wing journalist in the 1930s, Rorty wrote scripts on “The Communist War Against Religion” for the Voice of America in the early 1950s. (University of Oregon Library)
James Rorty. (University of Oregon Library)
Felix Morrow. A protégé of Elliot Cohen in the 1920s, Morrow became a leading Trotskyist who was sent to prison under the Smith Act in the 1940s; in the 1950s and 1960s he consummated a new career as a highly successful publisher of mysticism and the occult. (Sylvia Salmi Collection)
Lionel Trilling. A member of Cohen’s Menorah Journal circle in the 1920s, Trilling passed through phases of sympathy for Communism and Trotskyism before establishing his reputation as one of the foremost literary scholars in the United States. (Sylvia Salmi Collection)
Sidney Hook. A prolific writer and indefatigable polemicist, New York
University philosophy professor Hook devoted much of the 1930s to an effort to build an alternative revolutionary communist movement to the official Communist Party. (Sylvia Salmi Collection)
Davis Herron. The painter was the son of a famous Social Gospel minister and the brother-in-law of Elliot Cohen. In the early 1930s he was active in radical politics on the Columbia University campus and in 1933 visited Trotsky in Prinkipo. (Sylvia Salmi Collection)
Carlo Tresca and Margaret de Silver. Tresca, an Italian-American anarchist who was assassinated in 1943, and de Silver, widow of the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, were intimates of Herbert Solow and others in the anti-Stalinist left. (Photograph by Harry de Silver, Sylvia Salmi Collection)
William Phillips. A young writer who supported the Communist Party until 1936, Phillips collaborated closely with Philip Rahv in transforming Partisan Review into the main literary organ of the anti-Stalinist left. (Boston University Photo Service)