by Alan M Wald
In 1955 Dunayevskaya had a falling out with James and established her own organization which published News and Letters. The remaining supporters of James included James Boggs, who published The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook (1963) and Racism and the Class Struggle (1970), and Martin Glaberman, author of Wartime Strikes (1980). But in 1961, Boggs broke with James, eventually establishing the National Organization for an American Revolution. Glaberman continued to promote James’s ideas in Facing Reality for several years but disbanded his organization in the 1970s.90 With the rise of the New Left, James’s writings began to have considerable influence on many black and white activists, and his reputation continued to grow through the republication of several volumes of his work in the late 1970s and early 1980s. All of this came as a considerable surprise to many of James’s former associates in the Workers Party, a number of whom had misjudged him as nothing more than an ultraleftist with the ability to inspire a small cult of followers.
Perhaps the Marxist scholar most successful at blending party intellectual work with literary production accessible to a broader public was George Novack, a close associate of Vanzler.91 He had been born Yasef Mendel Novograbelsky in Boston in 1905. Novack’s father soon simplified the family name for business reasons, and Novack himself anglicized his first and middle names when he began school. A bright, attractive high school student, with a trim figure, blond hair, and blue eyes, Novack was doted on by his mother to the extent that he desired nothing more than to escape her clutches. His father, who ran a Turkish bathhouse, was more easygoing and tolerant but gambled professionally and led an irregular life.
While at Harvard, Novack led an active social life in Jewish circles and devoured books on philosophy. His closest friend of those years, the poet Stanley Kunitz, recalled Novack as a thin and fairhaired young man with even, classical features. He seemed “better read and informed than other Harvard students on modern literature” and was congenial, socially at ease, and rather easygoing.92 Yet an underlying restlessness, combining his disappointment with the elitist mode of teaching at Harvard and his need to get out from under his mother’s jurisdiction, induced him to run away several times. Once he hitchhiked across the country and on another occasion he found a job in New York. He finally left Harvard without a degree in 1927 to launch a career in publishing and public relations. By 1928 he was working for a major lecture bureau in New York. He then moved to the advertising department of Doubleday and Company; finally he became advertising manager of E. P. Dutton, which had the largest advertising budget in the business. Well known among the younger publishing crowd. Novack might have gone on to become president of a publishing house, but the stock market crash reoriented his thinking entirely. By 1932 he had studied Marx and, under the influence of Herbert Solow, Elliot Cohen, the Trillings, and others from the Menorah circle, he became anxious to devote himself full-time to revolutionary political activity. After publishing a book of witticisms, Who’s Whoey (1932), he began to free-lance. At times he was supported by his wife, Elinor Rice, who ran a bookshop.
As the 1930s progressed, Novack found himself progressively isolated from his associates, including Rice, who had begun breaking with the radical movement. In addition to serving as secretary of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, Novack’s main accomplishment during these years was a steady stream of articles written for the Trotskyist press. These began in late 1934 with a series of polished and erudite critiques of non-Marxist theories of social change called “Passports to Utopia” and published under the pseudonym “John Marshall.”93 Then came a three-part study of the response of intellectuals to the Great Depression, still among the best work on the subject, and nearly a dozen essays interpreting aspects of American history from a Marxist point of view.94 These historical essays, even if somewhat dated in the wake of subsequent research, provided a clear and striking perspective on the course of social development in the United States and bristled with excitement. They portended what might have been a major achievement. Novack, in fact, devoted the last part of the 1930s to original research for a projected three-volume history of the American civil war. Unfortunately, the first volume, focusing on the New York City antidraft riots, was rejected by many publishers and the manuscript of the other two volumes was lost in a fire.
When the conflict between Cannon and Shachtman began, Novack at first sympathized with Shachtman on the question of Soviet policy in eastern Europe. But as the debate deepened, he switched over to Cannon’s side and undertook the task of defending dialectical materialism in the debates that ensued. Following the split, Novack gave a series of lectures on the subject that were collected and published in many editions, and, later, in several languages, as Introduction to the Logic of Marxism (1942). But the isolation of the 1940s and 1950s took its toll on much of Novack’s work. The creative brilliance of his early writing was never fully replicated, although he wrote competently on a wide range of subjects and, whenever he turned to American history, the result was almost always an impressive blend of scholarly meticulousness with a creative application of theory. Yet Novack regarded his writings on Marxist philosophy as his paramount contribution, and most of these tended to be popularizations, similar to the efforts of Communist writers such as August Thalheimer and Maurice Cornforth. Novack competently defended orthodox Marxism albeit somewhat polemically, but he tended to repeat his major point (usually a defense of Engels), which, even if correct, resulted in a certain circularity of argument.
His culminating work, Pragmatism versus Marxism: An Appraisal of John Dewey’s Philosophy (1975), however, presents an impressively systematic argument about how the two philosophies differ. The strength of the book is its attempt to situate pragmatism in American society. In opposition to the vulgar Marxist view that portrays pragmatism as an ideology of monopoly capitalism and a legitimator of imperialism, Novack argues that it is the work of human agents in a precise social setting:
The traits and tenets of a philosophical school reflect the psychology and sentiments of a specific set of people imbued with a definite collective will and animated by hopes, fears, sympathies, antipathies, and illusions of a specific kind. Their forms of consciousness, their passions, their inclinations have grown out of the social surroundings which molded them as individuals and conditioned their development in particular ways. These in turn form part of their total response to that environment.95
His conclusion—that pragmatism is the view of middle-class intellectuals—is perhaps incomplete, since features of pragmatism are shared by other social strata and the overall ideology of bourgeois society in general. But he provides a cogent demonstration of how Dewey’s metaphysics, especially his conception of the indeterminacy of existence, facilitated the view that class struggle was incidental rather than endemic to capitalism.96
Under the impact of the radicalization of the 1960s, Novack was stimulated to undertake a major work, Democracy and Revolution (1971), which was a remarkable tour de force, demonstrating a stunning ability to cogently integrate large amounts of complicated data and to diligently assimilate a wide variety of political and historical texts. During these years Novack was indefatigable in his literary production, editorial work, and in the education of young Marxists of the new generation, enjoying considerable respect as one of the few revolutionary survivors of the 1930s left-wing intelligentsia.
But if the intellectuals drawn to orthodox Trotskyism could evidence genuine creativity under the impact of changed social conditions, the limitations of orthodoxy could reassert themselves in a time of crisis for the left. Novack, like Vanzler before him, had undergone a certain experience that convinced him that his appropriate arena of activity was as a technician of the revolutionary movement. He believed that there were boundaries of authority beyond which he could not step and still retain his position as a leading party intellectual. In 1953, during the political crisis that tore apart the Fourth International, Novack had been in Europe
working on behalf of the SWP, and he developed a sympathy for the new line then being promulgated by the majority of the Fourth International and its central leader, Michael Raptis, who was more widely known under the party name “Pablo.” Returning to the United States, Novack set out to persuade James P. Cannon that Pablo’s ideas, while not fairly represented by the Cochran-Clarke faction, were correct. Soon recognizing his inability to influence the situation, he fell into a deep depression, separated from his wife, and relocated to Los Angeles. After a failed suicide attempt he underwent psychoanalysis in which he came to see that the interparty conflict was analogous to a feud within a family, brother against father, and that isolation from the family was tantamount to death.97
Within a year Novack was on the road to recovery, but certain limits on his intellectual work had clearly been established. Preservation of his status as a respected party leader had become a psychological as well as a political necessity. In a certain sense he placed himself in confinement; his intellect and emotions could not be permitted to pass a certain point of disagreement with the party leadership. Thus twenty-five years later, when the SWP, in the hands of a new leadership comprised of former college students, began to renounce Trotskyism and purged almost all the surviving founders of the party, Novack remained tragically complicit by his silence.
If orthodox Trotskyism was imperfect in the way that it sustained an anti-Stalinist Marxism based on anticapitalist premises, at least it preserved the Marxist tradition in some form during the long postwar hiatus of radical activity in the United States. James P. Cannon’s evolution provides a dramatic contrast to Max Shachtman’s. After serving thirteen months of a sixteen-month prison sentence at the Sandstone Federal Penitentiary in 1944–45 for violation of the Smith Act, Cannon resumed his position as national secretary of the SWP. In 1954, after moving to Los Angeles, he became the party’s national chairman and played an increasingly lesser role until his death in 1974. During these years the SWP published a number of his books, most of which were collections of letters and speeches.
Like Shachtman, Cannon at the end of his life was fully aware that the unanticipated persistence of Stalinism after World War II had made the issue of democracy more central than ever for socialists. Unlike Shachtman, however, he refused to embrace a conception of an abstract “democracy” devoid of precise social content, for he knew, as Shachtman had once known, that such a gambit was often the first step on a road that would lead to the abandonment of a Marxist program and practice altogether. Cannon left a testament of sorts in a letter written at the time of the Cuban Revolution, which he enthusiastically supported despite the fact that its leaders had not yet announced themselves as socialists. He affirmed his belief that “the fullest democracy in the transition period [to socialism], institutionalized by forms of organization which assure the participation and control of the working people at every stage of development, is an indispensable part of our program.” He said that this is what “distinguishes us from and puts us in irreconcilable opposition to ‘economic determinists’ and totalitarians. It is the condition for the most efficient and rapid development of the new productive process [because a] planned economy will not automatically lead to a society of the free and equal.”98
As a socialist leader, Cannon may have made episodic errors in one direction or another that allowed his political enemies to charge him with either “adapting to Stalinism” (the Workers Party point of view from 1940 onward), or succumbing to “vulgar anti-Stalinism” (the charge of Bert Cochran’s faction in the early 1950s). In reality, however, an admitted “mortal fear of conciliation to Stalinism” rendered him immune from the first course, and his careful assimilation of the lessons learned through observation of the apostates from Marxism during and after the late 1930s kept him free of the second.99 By and large, Cannon’s small party managed to chart an honorable course through the difficult World War II and Cold War years avoiding the Scylla of Stalinism and the Charybdis of imperialism better than any other American radical group of its time.
A cogent analysis of the apostates from anti-Stalinist Marxism in the 1940s and 1950s has hitherto been blocked by two obfuscating perceptions. One depicts their retreat to previously discredited ideas, euphemistically renamed, as an advance to new ground; the other caricatures their recoil from an enormously difficult historical situation as a bald-faced “sellout.” The first is a naive apology, the second a moralistic oversimplification. What is objectionable on the part of the New York intellectuals is not at all their rethinking of Marxism in the postwar era; such a rethinking was obviously required by the persistence of Stalinism, the restabilization of American capitalism, and the failure of the Trotskyist or any other revolutionary movement to grow in numbers. Rather, the behavior of the New York intellectuals is suspect because of the hastiness with which Marxism was entirely abandoned in the absence of a viable alternative theory of society; the falsification of past history so as to erase the revolutionary anti-Stalinist tradition; the blind spot exhibited in regard to U.S. imperialism; the dissipation of militant anger against domestic racism and class exploitation; and the gross insensitivity to the costs of the McCarthyite witch-hunt. Moreover, there is a direct line of continuity between many of the New York intellectuals engaged in the American Committee for Cultural Freedom and subsequent right-wing developments culminating in the neoconservative campaign of the 1970s against affirmative action and feminism, coupled with a new cultural elitism and a foreign policy somewhat to the right of Ronald Reagan. These are the aspects of the New York intellectuals’ behavior in the 1950s that give credibility to Rahv’s charge that the liberal anticommunism of the time was the ideological rationale for embourgeoisement.
The so-called true believers in Marxist or Trotskyist orthdoxy, on the other hand, insulated themselves from the pressures of the larger social reality through the protective shield of party life. Of course, those who left the orthodox fold—by choice, as in the case of the Shachtman group, or by expulsion, as with the Cochran group—failed miserably at building an organized movement to the left of social democracy. At best they left a legacy of books and publications requiring critical assimilation. Still, the alternative legacy of orthodoxy, while by no means a preposterous aberration of rational thought, is insufficient as a subtle and complex appreciation of the reality of late capitalism. The true disciples of Trotsky’s prewar perspective maintained their revolutionary and anti-imperialist outlook, passing down an honorable record of struggle against domestic racism, class exploitation, and political repression. Yet those associated with the Socialist Workers Party produced theorizations of Stalinism and the prospects for social revolution with many schematic features. They waged bitter internal factional struggles that resulted in hyperbolic charges and countercharges and assumed a rather rigid attitude toward “orthodox Trotskyism” that only began to break down with the influx of new forces in the 1960s. The left-wing anti-Stalinist tradition suffered blows and underwent a disorientation in the 1950s from which it has never fully recovered. In short, anticommunism was the death of anti-Stalinism.
Chapter 10. The Cul-de-sac of Social Democracy
What would happen if men remained faithful to the ideals of their youth?
—Pietro Spina in Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine1
PORTRAIT: IRVING HOWE
For the New York intellectuals, the consequences of Cold War anticommunism extend far beyond the 1950s. The transformation in ideology and political consciousness consolidated in the early 1950s definitively and perhaps permanently shifted the axis of anti-Stalinism from its revolutionary anticapitalist premise, creating a movement that discredited more than it assisted the far left. Indeed, the behavior of the bulk of the New York intellectuals in the 1950s undermined the validity of the whole anti-Stalinist current of thought and even somewhat redeemed the Communist, fellow-traveling, and progressive liberals who acted heroically by comparison.
After all, in the face of the political repression�
�the first real test for the generation that came of age in the 1930s—most of the anti-Stalinists not only denuded themselves of past radicalism but developed sophisticated rationalizations for tolerating the essence if not the precise McCarthyite form of the witch-hunt. Responsibility for the bulk of the resistance among intellectuals, as well as for antiracist and anti-imperialist political activity, was handed over to the Communists, fellow travelers, and progressive liberals. These women and men may have suffered persecution at the time, but they achieved near martyrdom in the eyes of the next generation of left-wing intellectuals. Ignorance on the part of 1960s New Leftists was not the sole reason that apologists for Stalinism such as Lillian Hellman, Paul Robeson, and the Hollywood Ten were resurrected as moral beacons; their rehabilitation was the logical by-product of the dismal record of all but a few of the founders of the intellectual anti-Stalinist left.
Factors such as political vision and sustained membership in socialist organizations seem to have been more important than age in determining whether or not one accommodated to the witch-hunt and the foreign policy it was intended to legitimize. Moreover, the course taken by most of the generation of radicalized students who had come to anti-Stalinist Marxism during the middle and the late 1930s parallels that of the founders. Those who held membership in or were closely allied with the Trotskyist movement in the New York and New Jersey area comprised an impressive range of future intellectuals: Irving Howe, literary critic and editor of Dissent; Melvin Tumin, sociologist and anthropologist; Lawrence Kradar, anthropologist; Martin Diamond, political scientist; Gertrude Himmelfarb, historian; I. Milton Sacks, political scientist; Morroe Berger, sociologist; Peter Rossi, sociologist; Seymour Martin Lipset, sociologist; Philip O. Selznick, sociologist; Leslie Fiedler, literary critic; Irving Kristol, journalist; and Melvin J. Lasky, editor of Encounter. Of this generation, almost none considered themselves as socialists of any variety after the Cold War began, and a fair number subsequently evolved considerably to the right. Among the exceptions was Irving Howe, perhaps the most significant and capable radical literary critic of our time.