In 1922 Eastman went to Soviet Russia to see the experiment for himself. There he met the leading Bolsheviks, including Trotsky, who agreed to help Eastman write his biography. In 1924, Trotsky and the Oppositionists provided Eastman with the text of Lenin’s still-secret political testament, which Eastman then published in the West, creating a sensation. In the aftermath, Trotsky felt compelled to disavow Eastman in order to placate Stalin, but thereafter the two men were closely identified in the West, even before Eastman became his translator.
That explains why Trotsky was so disturbed by Eastman’s public repudiation of the dialectic, a principle of change conceived by Hegel in the early nineteenth century. Hegel believed that history unfolds in a logical process of inner conflict, in which change occurs because antagonistic forces collide and their antagonism is resolved in new, higher forms. Marx applied Hegel’s concept to human society, where this inner conflict takes the form of class struggle.
In Marx’s theory, the material base determines the relations of pro-duction—technology, inventions, systems of property—and these in turn determine the philosophies, governments, laws, cultural tastes, and moral values that dominate a society. As material conditions evolve, tensions build up until a point is reached where quantitative changes have qualitative consequences. That, said Marx, was how society advances. The great breakthroughs took the form of revolutions, which he called “history’s locomotives.” Marx labeled his philosophy “historical materialism” the term “dialectical materialism” was introduced after Marx’s death by Engels to denote an extension of dialectics beyond society to the world of nature.
Even before he went to Soviet Russia, Eastman was puzzled by the connection between Marx’s social theory of class struggle and the concept of the dialectic, which Marx claimed made his philosophy scientific and proved the inevitability of socialism. If that were the case, Eastman thought, then all one had to do was sit back and wait for socialism to arrive. Yet Eastman knew that Marxism was about changing the world, not just understanding it. Otherwise, why did Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, call upon the workers of the world to unite and throw off their chains? And why did Lenin, in the seminal pamphlet What Is to Be Done? published in 1902, call for a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries? Surely Lenin did not believe in socialism’s inevitability?
In Moscow, Eastman sat down in the library of the Marx-Engels Institute and applied his as yet rudimentary Russian to a study of the influence of the Hegelian dialectic on Marxism and on Bolshevism. To his dismay, he discovered that the Bolshevik leaders, Lenin included, were indeed true believers in the “science” of dialectical materialism as a universal law of motion, despite the fact that it was based on no empirical observation and, as Eastman saw it, belonged to the realm of metaphysics or religion rather than science.
Leaving the Soviet Union for the West, Eastman became obsessed with the idea of exposing Hegelian dialectics as a pseudo-scientific fraud. He made his case in a 1927 book called Marx and Lenin: The Science of Revolution, a work that predictably came under attack from the left. Eastman’s most formidable and relentless critic was Sidney Hook, a protégé of John Dewey, ally of the Communist Party, and Marxist professor of philosophy at New York University. Hook and Eastman were Dewey’s “bright boys” and two tenacious combatants, and their dispute over Marxist theory continued for several years.
Trotsky monitored the Eastman-Hook debate from Turkey. As he saw it, both men were afflicted with that peculiarly American disease, a pragmatist conception of empirical science. It was no mere coincidence, he thought, that both men were students of Dewey, one of pragmatism’s founding philosophers. In Trotsky’s eyes, Hook’s attempt to reduce Marxism from a science to a social philosophy was bad enough. Much worse, though, was Eastman’s outright dismissal of Hegel’s dialectic as an example of pre-Darwinian speculation and wishful thinking.
This is what provoked Trotsky’s fury when Eastman visited Prinkipo. As Eastman describes the action, “he became almost hysterical when I parried with ease the crude clichés he employed to defend the notion of dialectic evolution. The idea of meeting my mind, of ‘talking it over’ as with an equal, could not occur to him. He was lost.” For Trotsky there could be no meeting of the minds about Marxism. Those who sought to revise Marxist theory, he said, wished “to trim Marx’s beard.” Eastman was trying to decapitate him.
Not long after their face-off in Prinkipo, Trotsky published a letter in the American Trotskyist paper The Militant calling attention to Eastman’s “petty-bourgeois revisionism.” Eastman’s translation of the History was brilliant, of course, and Trotsky had thanked him for it. “But as soon as Eastman attempts to translate Marxian dialectics into the language of vulgar empiricism, his work provokes in me a feeling which is the direct opposite of thankfulness. For the purpose of avoiding all doubts and misunderstandings I consider it my duty to bring this to the knowledge of everybody.”
Four years later, Trotsky was still performing this duty. “When Shachtman and George Novack met his ship in Tampico in January 1937 and escorted him on the train to Coyoacán, they found him fixated on the subject of Eastman’s heresy. While Trotsky was pleased to learn that Dewey was one of his defenders, he expressed grave concerns about the dangers of Dewey’s pragmatism as manifested in Eastman’s revisionism. His vehemence took Shachtman and Novack by surprise. Here was a man who had just landed in a new world after being refused asylum by all the countries of Europe. Hunted by the Soviet secret police, only hours earlier he had been reluctant to disembark his ship out of fear for his life. Yet here he was, carrying on as though his real nemesis was not the tyrant Stalin but the infidel Eastman. “There is nothing more important than this,” he exhorted his two comrades. “Pragmatism, empiricism is the greatest curse of American thought. You must inoculate the younger comrades against its infection.”
Nor, meanwhile, had Eastman forgotten the Prinkipo face-off and Trotsky’s subsequent public rebuke. At the time Trotsky was vilifying him on the train from Tampico, Eastman had recently completed a translation of The Revolution Betrayed, a book he discussed in an article in Harper’s in March 1938. He endorsed its damning description of Stalin’s USSR, but he could not accept its argument that the Revolution’s betrayal was the result ultimately of Russia’s backwardness and isolation, an interpretation Trotsky supported by invoking dialectical materialism. Where had Trotsky been all these years? wondered Eastman. Had he learned nothing about the human condition from modern psychology, biology, or sociology? “It is not a question, as Trotsky thinks, of being ‘frightened by defeat’ or ‘holding one’s positions.’ It is a question of moving forward or being stuck in the mud. No mind not bold enough to reconsider the socialist hypothesis in the light of the Russian experiment can be called intelligent.”
Eastman had now added insult to heresy. Furious, Trotsky turned to Burnham and urged that Eastman be dealt with “mercilessly.” It appears that Trotsky was unaware that Burnham himself had for years been displaying symptoms of the American disease. Burnham was prepared to defend the October Revolution and Marxism, but not dialectical materialism, because it falsely guaranteed the inevitability of socialism. Trotsky woke up to this fact at a moment when a number of American intellectuals began to distance themselves from Marxism, among them Hook, who now decided that the dialectic belonged to mythology after all, and Dewey, who saw in Marxism’s Hegelian origins a strain of theology. Edmund Wilson, at work on a monumental history of socialist and communist thought from the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution, weighed in with an essay in Partisan Review called “The Myth of the Dialectic.”
For Trotsky, this was a disturbing trend, but for him the “greatest blow” came from Shachtman and Burnham in their rebuttal to the revisionists, a major article published in the January 1939 issue of New International called “The Intellectuals in Retreat.” Instead of attacking Eastman, Hook, and the others head on, the authors limited their criticisms to the re
alm of politics, and allowed that dialectical materialism was not essential to Marxist theory or practice. Trotsky was scandalized. This was, he scolded Shachtman, “the best of gifts to the Eastmans of all kinds.”
Burnham’s slide continued in spring 1939 with an article in Partisan Review that likened the dialectic to a human appendix: what Marxism needed was the intellectual equivalent of an appendectomy. Hansen wrote to inform Trotsky about this latest act of desecration, and also to report that there was much confusion throughout the party’s ranks concerning dialectical materialism, especially among the youth. Few comrades even professed to understand its meaning. Hansen passed along the remark of a comrade to the effect that “Trotsky does not write on the dialectic or on philosophy because he is incompetent to do so.” This must mean that Trotsky does not actually use the dialectic and that it really was a “metaphysical trapping,” just as Eastman said.
Hansen’s baiting letter helped convince Trotsky, once the factional fight in the Socialist Workers Party got under way, that the struggle against the opposition must be waged as a defense of Marxism’s core principles against the insidious American infection.
Events in Europe in the autumn of 1939 served to deepen the factional divide among the American Trotskyists. As the Red Army completed its occupation of eastern Poland, the Soviet government demanded from Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia the right to establish military and naval bases and garrison troops on their soil. By mid-October, all three Baltic states had acquiesced. In New York, the Trotskyist Minority, led by Shachtman and Burnham, insisted that the party condemn these Soviet moves as acts of aggression, and they proposed a referendum on the unconditional defense of the USSR. Cannon rejected the idea and Trotsky backed him up. At a meeting of the party’s Political Committee on November 7, the vote was eight to four in favor of the Majority.
Then came the Soviet invasion of Finland, which followed the Helsinki government’s refusal to grant the territorial concessions demanded by Moscow. The Soviets first staged a series of border incidents accompanied by a loud propaganda campaign. The Red Army attacked on November 30. The Finns put up a stiff defense and battled the initial five-pronged Soviet assault to a stalemate. The Soviets then regrouped and concentrated their offensive against the Mannerheim Line, in southern Finland facing Leningrad: eighty-five miles of defensive fortification—snowbound trenches, pillboxes, and reinforced concrete structures—spanning the Karelian Isthmus, from the Gulf of Finland to Lake Ladoga. The Finnish defenders, donning white camouflage suits and employing mobile units on skis, had the initial advantage over the underprepared and underequipped troops of the Red Army, but everyone understood that time was not on their side.
In the United States, the cause of “little Finland” drew enormous public sympathy. Trotsky’s followers once again looked to Coyoacán. Surely the Finnish events would force their leader to revise his thinking about the USSR. Three weeks after the invasion, Trotsky’s analysis arrived in New York in the form of a long and scathing polemical article titled “A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party.” Its entire first half was devoted to dialectical materialism and related theoretical questions, framed as an attack on Burnham and the revisionists. Taking Hansen’s cue, Trotsky included a primer on theory called “The ABC of Materialist Dialectics.”
Even those few party members who claimed to understand Trotsky’s discussion of the dialectic were not sure how it related to current debates. There was also considerable skepticism about Trotsky’s decision to emphasize the “petty-bourgeois” nature of the Minority: that there were too many clerical workers and too few factory workers in its ranks. Industrial workers, Trotsky observed, had a natural “inclination toward dialectical thinking.” That explained why the Majority held the correct position on the basic theoretical questions: “Cannon represents the proletarian party in the process of formation.”
Trotsky at his desk in his study, winter 1939–1940.
Alexander H. Buchman Papers, Hoover Institution Archives
Trotsky’s focus on Marxist theory and sociology elicited much head-scratching among comrades in both factions. But it was his analysis of the Finnish events that raised eyebrows. According to Trotsky, the Red Army in Finland was engaged in the expropriation of the large landowners and the introduction of workers’ control in industry, a preliminary step toward the expropriation of Finland’s capitalists. A Finnish civil war was now beginning, Trotsky contended, with the Red Army on the side of the workers and peasants, and the Finnish army on the side of the exploiters. In view of all this, Trotsky said, the Bolshevik-Leninists must continue to lend the USSR their “moral and material support.”
This interpretation of the Soviet invasion of Finland struck most comrades as utterly fantastic—even many in the Majority camp, although they could not say it openly. The notion of a civil war breaking out in Finland contradicted the known facts. So did the idea that the Red Army was imposing workers’ control over Finnish industry: everyone knew that the Russian workers themselves did not have that. And if the Finnish masses were rising up in support of the Red Army, why was the Soviet Union losing the war? A member of the Minority said privately what many other comrades were thinking: the Old Man had gone “completely haywire.”
Trotsky’s oddly timed preoccupation with the dialectic seemed designed to divert attention away from the inconvenient facts about the events in Finland. From New York, Sherman Stanley, whose allegiance to the Minority had cost him an assignment as secretary-guard in Coyoacán, complained directly to Trotsky. He was appalled by Trotsky’s argument that because the Soviet Union had nationalized the means of production, its “rape of Finland” was worthy of support. “Is not this the most monstrous and shameful non-sequitur in the history of our movement? Is not this worthy of the brazen ‘dialectical’ twisting so familiar in the history of Stalinism?”
Stanley and the Minority comrades were indignant that Trotsky had characterized them as “petty-bourgeois,” a time-honored Bolshevik term of abuse that Stalin had used to censure Trotsky during their struggle for power. To criticize party comrades this way, effectively labeling them class enemies, seemed unforgivable. Manny Garrett, of Brooklyn, called Trotsky’s article “disloyal, inaccurate, dishonest, and false to the core. L.D. has laid the gauntlet. We are ready to reply in kind.”
When Trotsky learned of these reactions he wrote to Cannon that the Minority comrades were now behaving like “enraged petty-bourgeois.” And since Cannon routinely circulated the texts of Trotsky’s letters at party headquarters, this comment was inflammatory, as was Trotsky’s remark about the need to unmask “Stalinist agents working in our midst” to provoke a split.
In fact, Trotsky was doing well enough on his own. Both factions interpreted his article as laying the basis for a split, an assumption that seemed confirmed by a statement he made to Shachtman: “I believe that you are on the wrong side of the barricades, my dear friend.” Yet farther along in the same letter, Trotsky indicated that he had not yet given up on Shachtman: “If I had the opportunity I would immediately take an airplane to New York City in order to discuss with you for 48 or 72 hours uninterruptedly. I regret very much that you don’t feel in this situation the need to come here to discuss the questions with me. Or do you?”
Instead, Shachtman carried on the debate in New York with Hansen, who was generally regarded as Trotsky’s proxy and whom the Minority reviled as an enforcer for the “Cannon clique.” Hansen’s recent articles and speeches had earned him a reputation for heavy-handed sarcasm, pompous irony, and a vulgarized Marxism. Cannon decided it was time to dispatch Hansen to the Bronx, Shachtman’s stronghold, where the Minority outnumbered—and outshouted—the Majority two to one. Cannon called this mostly Jewish rabble “declassed kibitzers” and “petty-bourgeois smart alecks.” After his first appearance, Hansen described the scene to Trotsky as a “madhouse.” “Where’s the civil war in Finland?” was the favorite Bronx jeer. Howls of laughter greeted his every mentio
n of the dialectic, as if he had told a hilarious joke. And every reference to Minneapolis ignited an outbreak of heckling. In the Bronx, Hansen explained, the Minneapolis comrades were considered “provincials, blockheads, stupid yokels who don’t know anything but trade-union work and whose hands fly up like semaphores on a railroad whenever Cannon passes by.”
In Coyoacán, Trotsky gritted his teeth. He had lived in the Bronx during his brief sojourn in America in 1917, residing in a small row house on Vyse Avenue, in a working-class neighborhood that was home to Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants. This experience now gave his mind’s eye a vivid picture of the problem. “The oppositionists, I am informed, greet with bursts of laughter the very mention of ‘dialectics.’ In vain,” Trotsky thundered, sounding eerily like a visitor from the Red Planet sent to warn the earthlings that resistance was futile. “This unworthy method will not help. The dialectic of the historic process has more than once cruelly punished those who tried to jeer at it.” He urged that “the Jewish petty-bourgeois elements of the New York local be shifted from their habitual conservative milieu and dissolved into the real labor movement.”
As for the “petty-bourgeois disdain” directed at the Minneapolis comrades, Trotsky offered a little history lesson. “At the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democrats in 1903,” he recollected, “where the split took place between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, there were only three workers among several scores of delegates. All three of them turned up with the majority. The Mensheviks jeered at Lenin for investing this fact with great symptomatic significance. The Mensheviks themselves explained the position the three workers took by their lack of “maturity.” But as is well known it was Lenin who proved correct.” The behavior of the Minority, Trotsky cautioned, bore a strong resemblance to the struggle of the Mensheviks against Bolshevik centralism.
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