US Trotskyism 1928–1965 Part II: Endurance: The Coming American Revolution [2] 1642590576, 9781642590579

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US Trotskyism 1928-1965 Part II: Endurance The Coming American Revolution Dissident Marxism in the United States, Volume 3

Edited by Paul Le Blanc Bryan Palmer Thomas Bias

Haymarket Books Chicago, IL

First published in 2018 by Brill Academic Publishers, The Netherlands © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NY, Leiden, The Netherlands

Published in paperback in 2019 by Haymarket Books P.O. Box 180165 Chicago, IL 60618 773-583-7884 www.hayrnarketbooks.org ISBN: 978-1-64259-057-9 Distributed to the trade in the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution (www.cbsd.com) and internationally through Ingram Publisher Services International (www.ingrarncontent.com). This book was published with the generous support of Lannan' Foundation and Wallace Action Fund. Special discounts are available for bulk purchases by organizations and institutions. Please call 773-583-7884 or email [email protected] for more information. Cover design by Jarnie Kerry and Ragina Johnson. Printed in the United States. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

Contents 1

Introduction: the Coming American Revolution

1

Paul Le Blanc 2

Dawn of the American Century 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1o 11

3 Challenging Racism 1

2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

21

Paul Le Blanc Joseph Hansen, 'March of Military Events' 27 Terence Phelan (Sherry Mangan), 'How Paris Fell' 43 John G. Wright (Joseph Vanzler), 'Class Relations in the Soviet Union' 54 Marc Loris (Jean van Heijenoort), 'Europe Under the Iron Heel' 65 Joseph Hansen, 'On the War Fronts' 78 Art Preis, 'America's Sixty Families and the Nazis' 89 George Breitman, 'Wartime Crimes of Big Business' 102 James P. Cannon, 'The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki' 115 William F. Warde (George Novack), 'The Big Five at London' 122 E.R. Frank (Bert Cochran), 'The Great Strike Wave and Its Significance' 131 James P. Cannon, 'The Coming American Revolution' 144 159

Paul Le Blanc and Tom Bias Albert Parker (George Breitman), 'The Negro March on Washington' 162 Albert Parker and John Sanders (George Breitman and Arthur Burch), 'The Struggle for Negro Equality' 169 Carl Jackson (Edgar Keemer)-, 'The Case of Milton Henry' 209 Carl Jackson (Edgar Keemer), 'Government Policy on Race Equality' 212 Carl Jackson (Edgar Keemer), 'How to Win the Struggle for Negro Equality' 214 Robert Birchman, 'The Case of James Hickman' 224 Freddie Forest (Raya Dunayevskaya), 'Industrialization of the Negro' 227 J. Meyer (C.L.R.James), 'Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States' 236 George Breitman, 'The Bomb Murder of Harry T. Moore' 256 George Breitman, 'When Anti-Negro Prejudice Began' 275

VI

CONTENTS

4 Dissensions

1 2

3 4

283

Paul Le Blanc Felix Morrow, 'The Political Position of the Minority in the swp' 288 Albert Goldman, 'Minority Statement on Joining the Workers Party' 298 Johnson-Forest (C.L.R.James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Grace Lee), 'State-Capitalism and the World Revolution' 303 [C.L.R.James ], 'The Balance Sheet Completed: Ten Years of American Trotskyism' 327

5 Coping with the Cold War, Global and Domestic 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

340

Paul Le Blanc James P. Cannon, 'American Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism' 343 James P. Cannon, 'The Treason of the Intellectuals' 383 E.R. Frank (Bert Cochran), 'The Kremlin's Satellite States in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, Marxist Theory, and Our Perspectives' 388 Joseph Hansen, 'The Problem of Eastern Europe' 414 Li Fu-jen (Frank Glass), 'China: A World Power' 453 Tom Kerry, 'The Political Meaning of the CIO-AFL Merger' 464 James P. Cannon, 'Socialism and Democracy' 476

6 Confrontations Internal and International 488 Bryan Palmer 1 Michel Pablo, 'Where Are We Going?' 506 E.R. Frank (Bert Cochran), 'Notes on Our Discussion' 522 2 3 Michel Pablo, 'On the Duration and the Nature of the Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism' 530 4 George F. Clarke, 'A Milestone in Internationalism' 538 5 Mike Bartell (Milton Zaslow), 'The New York Local - Report and Tasks' 543 6 D. Stevens (David Weiss) and Harry Ring, 'Perspectives for the Period Ahead' 555 7 Farrell Dobbs, 'For an Independent Party Based on a Proletarian Orientation' 570 8 Bert Cochran and George Clarke et al., 'The Roots of the Party Crisis Its Causes and Solution' 596 9 Michel Pablo, 'The Post-Stalin 'New Course" 630 10 James P. Cannon, 'The Six Points of Cochranism' (Letters to Farrell Dobbs) 640 11 Bert Cochran, 'American Tasks' 644

VII

CONTENTS

12 13 14 15 16 17

Genora Dollinger, 'Where I Stand' 665 James P. Cannon, 'Internationalism and the SWP' 674 Socialist Workers Party National Committee, 'Against Pabloist Revisionism' 687 James P. Cannon, 'The 25th Anniversary Plenum of the SWP' 720 George Breitman and Ernest Germain (Ernest Mandel), 'Trotskyism vs. Pabloism': Correspondence 739 Sam Ryan, 'The Bolivian Revolution and the Fight Against Revisionism' 781

Bibliography 805 Index 815 Dissident Marxism in the United States

836

CHAPTER I

Introduction: the Coming American Revolution Paul Le Blanc

This is the second of three volumes gathering together documentary materials on the us Trotskyist movement, a small but sometimes influential political current, arising out of the earlier Socialist and Communist movements. It was a political current powerfully influenced by such global revolutionaries as Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and especially Leon Trotsky, whose ideas the authors of the writings presented here did their best to utilize for the purpose of understanding and changing the world around them.1 To understand the nature of a revolutionary organization, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci once speculated on how the history of such an organization might be written. 'A simple narrative of the internal life of a political organization' - focusing on the first groups that bring it into being, 'the ideological controversies through which its program and conception of the world' are formed - will provide only an account of 'certain intellectual groups' or even 'the political biography of a single personality', but will not provide an adequate understanding of the political party. To develop such an understanding, much more is required: The history will have to be written of a particular mass of men who have followed the founders of the party, sustained them with their trust, loyalty and discipline, or criticized them 'realistically' by dispersing or remaining passive before certain initiative&. But will this mass be made up solely of members of the party? Will it be sufficient to follow the congresses, the votes, etc., that is to say the whole nexus of activities and' modes of existence through which the mass following of the party manifests its will? Clearly it will be necessary to take some account of the social group of which the party in question is the expression and the most advanced element. The history of a party, in other words, can only be the history of a particular social group. But this group is not isolated; it has friends, kindred groups, opponents, enemies. The history of any given party can only emerge from the complex portrayal of the totality of society and

1 See Le Blanc 2016a, and Le Blanc 2015.

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State (often with international ramifications too). Hence it may be said that to write the history of a party means nothing less than to write the general history of a country from a monographic viewpoint, in order to highlight a particular aspect of it. A party will have had greater or less significance and weight precisely to the extent to which its particular activity has been more or less decisive in determining a country's history. 2 This volume provides some of the raw materials for such an account, and historians of the us Left may want to make use of it as they seek to develop such historical monographs. At the same time, it could be argued that much of the writing reproduced here can - simply taken by itself - shed some light on the history of the United States, as well as the history of the world, with insights that might be useful in understanding aspects of our own times, and perhaps even future possibilities. In the first half of the period reflected here, many of the American Trotskyists are convinced (though a growing number are beginning to doubt) that 'the coming American revolution' is actually about to unfold, if not already in the process of unfolding. The second half of the period covered in this volume reflects the consequences of that failed perspective. Many have scoffed at the very notion of a 'coming American revolution' as a utopian delusion. At the end of his life, in 1974, James P. Cannon was interviewed by Sidney Lens, an independent left-wing writer and activist (and himself a one-time Trotskyist ). Lens challenged: 'Do you anticipate a revolution in America in the near future?' Cannon responded, 'It depends on what you mean by near', and then added: 'I say anything is possible in this century in the years that are left of it. That's 26 years'. When Lens commented that this did not sound very optimistic, Cannon said: 'I don't want to make any categorical statements, but I say we're living in a time when capitalism is plunging toward its climactic end'. To which Lens asked: 'Didn't you say that in the thirties?' Cannon responded: 'I did, yes'. Lens: 'And in the forties?' Cannon: 'And in the forties'. At which point Lens commented: 'I mean, that must sound like something peculiar when you say it every decade'. To which Cannon countered: 'But when you stop to think, the history of humanity is a very long one, isn't it? And a quarter of a century is only an instant in the history of the human race .... I see one crisis piling upon another. I don't think the capitalists have ever been in such a jam in this country as they are right now, both politically and economically'. 3

2 Gramsci 1971, pp. 150-1. 3 Cannon 1974, p. 42.

INTRODUCTION: THE COMING AMERICAN REVOLUTION

3

The certainty of the coming revolution, however, seemed far more vibrant to many in the early-to-mid-194os. The freshness of 1930s radicalism had not yet faded, and Trotsky's prediction of militant upsurges that the Second World War would bring still echoed, with genuine urgency, in comrades' ears. And to those who lost heart and could no longer believe in 'the coming American revolution', the stubborn adherents could respond that one must be guided by 'the long view of history'. The attentive reader will note that Chapter 6 in this volume is not like the others - it is much, much longer and includes more excerpted and abridged material than usual. The chapter deals with a relatively momentous split in the SWP and the Fourth International in the early 1950s - a development which sheds much light on the nature and development of the Trotskyist movement, and one about which conflicting interpretations and bitter polemics have swirled for years. Rather than devoting an entire volume to it, or offering an overly truncated account, we are seeking a middle path. This is thanks to the immense labors of Bryan Palmer, who has sought to provide a representative sampling of these highly revealing documents (of those excerpted or abridged, most can be found in their entirety online ). Given the complexity and centrality of this rupture, it makes sense that Bryan also presents this material with a more substantial interpretive introduction than is the case with the other chapters. Naturally, more than one interpretation can be gleaned from the material he presents (which is always the case with a serious historian). Readers should bear in mind the concluding comment from the first volume of this documentary trilogy: 'Naturally, although all of the editors share a common sympathy for the us Trotskyist movement, there are different "takes" one or another of us may have on both minor and major questions, and in our signed introductions none of us presumes to speak for all of us'. That holds for all three volumes - including the present introductory essay.

The Long View of History4 The development of American capitalism has always been intimately bound up with international developments: from the first European explorers representing the tentative probe of a rising merchant-capitalism, to the establishment in the Americas of the European great powers' rival colonial mercantile

4 This ,section and the next draw substantially from my essay 'Leninism in the United States and the Decline of the Socialist Workers Party', in Breitman, Le Blanc and Wald 2016.

4

CHAPTER 1

empires, to the development of the slave trade that was a key element, as well, in the triumph of the Industrial Revolution (slave-based cotton plantations supplying the English textile industry's 'dark Satanic mills'). Both the American Revolution of 1775-83 and the American Civil War of 1861-65 were part of the global sweep of 'bourgeois-democratic' revolutions. Industrialization and trade connected and transformed increasing numbers of peoples and cultures on all inhabited continents. The American working class was composed, and periodically recomposed, of immigrant waves generated by the 'push-and-pull' dynamics of the world capitalist economy. Capitalist developments and class struggles in the British Isles, FriJnce, Gennany, and elsewhere had an impact on and found reflection in what was happening in the United States. And the United States, as it grew into the foremost industrial and imperial power, itself had a profound impact on international developments. The understanding of such international dynamics resulted in the creation of the first three working-class internationals - the International Workingmen's Association (1864-76) led by Karl Marx, the Socialist International (1889-1914), and the Communist International (1919-43). In each case, momentous developments of international importance provoked crises that resulted in decline but also created the basis for new advances. The revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871, and the brutal repression generated by this heroic but ill-fated workers' government, frightened away trade union moderates and led to a furious split between anarchists and socialists in the First International. On the other hand, a self-consciously socialist Second International, representing mass parties and left-wing trade unions, soon took shape. The weaknesses and divisions within this increasingly reformist-dominated Second International became evident when the eruption of the First World War literally tore it apart. But revolutionary Marxists and working-class militants, in the wake of the devastating world war, and deeply inspired by the creation of a Soviet Republic in Russia, built the Third lnternational. 5 These three internationals - and also the world historic events with which they were connected - had a profound impact on the development of the left wing of the workers' movement, and on the development of class consciousness, in the United States. The degeneration and collapse of the Third International as a revolutionary force, and the realities with which this was connected, had no less of an effect. The accumulation of working-class defeats in Europe (Italy, Hungary, Germany, Austria, Spain) and in China, coupled with the rise of fascism and Nazism, combined with the murderous, totalitarian cor-

5 See Braunthal 1967, Braunthal 1980, Abendroth 1972, Eley 2002.

INTRODUCTION: THE COMING AMERICAN REVOLUTION

5

ruption of Stalinism in the USSR and the world Communist movement, and the approach of a new, more massive round of imperialist slaughter that was the Second World War - all of this necessarily undermined the strength of the us working-class left, just as surely as revolutionary victories of the Chinese, German, or Spanish workers' movements would have generated soaring morale and renewed self-confidence. 6 The seeming collapse of capitalism in the 1930s did not result in the working class coming to power in any country of the world, but the Great Depression did generate working-class upsurges in many countries - in some cases forcing through important social reforms beneficial to working people (such as the right to form unions, the winning of higher wages and other employment benefits, as well as unemployment insurance, social security, etc.). It also helped the more powerful capitalists to eliminate less efficient practices and competitorsresulting in a strengthened capitalism. More than this, it encouraged the competing capitalist classes to expand their overseas operations, compelling them to harmonize their different interests - or, when this proved impossible, to tum to militarism and war. The Stalinist and Social Democratic leaderships of the labor movements in the 'democratic capitalist' countries of Western Europe and North America led the workers' organizations into a far-reaching alliance with their countries' capitalist classes during World War 11. 7 Small groups of workers and intellectuals throughout the world sought to preserve perspectives that had infused the revolutionary wing of the young Second International and the original founders of the Third International. They joined with Trotsky to form the Fourth International, which was formally proclaimed in 1938. Four years earlier Trotsky had expressed his hopes and fears regarding the future Fourth International: 'It may be constituted in the process of the struggle against fascism and the victory gained over it. But it may also be formed considerably later, in a number of years, in the midst of the ruins and the accumulation of debris following upon the victory of fascism and war'. After the founding of this 'world party of socialist revolution', Trotsky optimistically predicted that the coming Second World War would generate an even

6 These realities are movingly captured by the revolutionary novelist Victor Serge in: Serge 20141 Serge 2011, and Serge 1946 - read in this order, moving from 1934 to 1940. 7 Gains won in this period through struggles by us workers are indicated in Preis 1972, and in Bernstein 1960, Bernstein 1969, and Bernstein 1985. Also relevant are Mills 2001 and Goldfield 1989. On World War II, see Mandel 1986. On the reformist left-labor alliance with the bourgeoisie during the war, see Lichtenstein 1987. The evolution of Communist Party trade union policy from the 1930s to the early 1950s is covered in Cochran 1977. The Trotskyist approach during the years of the Great Depression and World War II is clearly documented in Dobbs 1972, 1973, 1975, and 1977.

CHAPTER 1

6

greater wave of militant working-class insurgency than had been the case with the First World War. Working-class revolutions would sweep away Stalinism in the USSR and would also break the power of the capitalists in the advanced industrial countries. 'The new generation of workers whom the war will impel onto the road of revolution will take their place under our banner', he asserted on the eve of his death in 1940. 8

Things Turned out Differently

The devastation of World War II did generate revolutionary upsurges throughout the colonial and semi-colonial countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But Stalinism took a renewed hold on life in the postwar period. It seemed as solid as ever in the USSR, given the immense authority gained through 'the Great Patriotic War' which drove back and destroyed the Nazi aggressor. Stalinism also took advantage of radical ferment in Eastern Europe to establish its hold on this area, setting up Communist Party dictatorships loyal to the ussR, to form a buffer zone between the USSR and its erstwhile wartime allies of the capitalist West. In the capitalist countries of Western Europe, devastated by war, masses of workers flocked to the already existing Communist, Social Democratic, and Labour parties. To prevent the 'loss' of these lands, the unquestioned new world power the United States of America - established the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economies of Europe on a firm capitalist basis; a North Atlantic Treaty Organization was fashioned to prevent the Soviet Red Army from expanding further westward, but also - and no less important - to prevent indigenous revolutionaries from replacing weakened bourgeois regimes with new workers' republics. The reformist Social Democratic and Labour parties still loyal to a reconstituted Second International decided to forge a firm alliance with what was left of their own capitalist classes, and with us imperialism, as the Cold War set in. The world seemed divided between capitalist versus 'Communist' superpowers: the 'Free World' bloc (which included many right-wing dictatorships) led by the us versus the 'Iron Curtain' countries (with Stalinist dictatorships but post-capitalist economies) led by the USSR. Anti-imperialist and anti-colonial ferment in the 'third world' countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America created an equivocal and more-or-less leftnationalist 'neutralist' bloc. The revolutionary stirrings in the third world and

8 Trotsky 1974b, p. 85; Reissner 1973, p. 344.

INTRODUCTION: THE COMING AMERICAN REVOLUTION

7

the renewed power of Social Democratic and Labour parties in Western Europe (not to mention massive Communist parties in Italy and France) gave many hope that positive possibilities existed to move beyond capitalism. But this was largely overshadowed by the fact that world politics appeared to be locked into a grim 'superpower' confrontation that threatened to spiral into a new world war - an especially devastating prospect since both sides had developed nuclear weapons. 9 This complex situation - combined with the obvious incorrectness of Trotsky's prediction regarding postwar realities - generated sharp controversies inside the Fourth International, and also among Trotskyists in the United States, where two major Trotskyist formations had come into being in 1940 the Socialist Workers Party led by James P. Cannon, and the Workers Party (wP) led by Max Shachtman. Shachtman's group had argued that the Soviet Union under the Stalin regime had been transformed into a new oppressive social system - bureaucratic collectivism - which was no better than capitalism, requiring that the workers and oppressed must cohere into a revolutionary 'third camp' independent of both systems. The SWP, on the other hand, continued to argue for Trotsky's position - that the social system in the Soviet Union contained progressive features won by the 1917 revolution (the foundations of a nationalized and planned economy) that must be defended from both imperialist threats posed by world capitalism and also the corrupt and murderous Stalinist bureaucratic dictatorship, ultimately through a political revolution inside the USSR. But both the Workers Party and the Socialist Workers Party shared the view that a post-World War II revolutionary upsurge would set things right, bringing a global revolutionary upsurge that would sweep away Stalinism, imperialism, and capitalism. A majority of the WP quickly perceived that a super-power Cold War confrontation was pushing Trotsky's revolutionary scenario to the margins. Elements within the Shachtman group, and finally Shachtman himself and a majority of his comrades, concluded that the bureaucratic-collectivist tyranny was not 'no better' than capitalism, but in fact was worse, with no impending revolutionary wave to dislodge it. This generated a drift into social-democratic reformism and a reluctant but increasingly firm alignment with the antiCommunist 'West'. Within the SWP, an initial fissure opened up as a small group that included Albert Goldman, Felix Morrow and Trotsky's secretaryJean van Heijenoort (using various pseudonyms) perceptively challenged the initial us imperialism see Williams 2009, and Magdoff 1978. Mills 1960 brilliantly describes the confrontation of the 'superpowers' at the height of the Cold War, elaborated in LaFeber 2006, and Heller 2006.

9 On the development of

8

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revolutionary optimism to which the party majority still adhered. They pointed to the actual developments that were beginning to unfold, and they pulled in a direction similar to that of the Shachtman current. In fact, however, for them it soon led to an abandonment of revolutionary politics altogether. It was in resistance to such pressures that Cannon and his co-thinkers staked out an orientation that rejected such adaptations to the non-revolutionary developments - reflected in his 'The Coming American Revolution'. 10 Within the Shachtman group, a distinctive and remarkable cluster that had gathered around C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya (known as the Johnson-Forest tendency) responded with enthusiasm to this stance, breaking from the WP in order to throw themselves into the SWP. Their own analysis of the Soviet Union - that its socio-economic formation was actually a form of capitalism (state capitalism) - had cut across the theoretical dynamic at work among the Shachtmanites, but it also differentiated them from their new-found comrades in the SWP. What's more, the harsh realities behind the pessimistic devolution of the Goldman-Morrow group continued to bear down on the SWP. There were multiplying pressures to choose sides in the global Cold War confrontation, and the 'orthodox' position calling for critical defense of the Soviet Union inevitably stirred internal polemics, as did a growing inertia in the face of the seeming evaporation of revolutionary or class-struggle possibilities within the United States. Within four years the Johnson-Forest group fled from the SWP, breaking explicitly and definitively from Trotskyism, with high expectations - only to find themselves blocked and fragmented by the overarching political and socio-economic realities afflicting the world Trotskyist movement. Those who remained in that world movement continued to wrestle with the question of how best to apply their revolutionary principles and convictions to the often confusing and increasingly difficult swirl of reality, as the 1940s gave way to the 1950s. Some of the European leaders of the Fourth International (the central one being Michel Pablo) predicted a third world war, with the Stalinist-led labor movement and bureaucratized workers' states on one side and us imperialism on the other. In such a situation, they believed, the Fourth International must critically support the Stalinists. Trotskyists should recog-

1o

'In retrospect it is clear that the theses and Cannon's report created the impression that a revolutionary situation could develop in the us "in our epoch", surely before the close of the 20th century', his comrade Frank Lovell commented in the 1980s. 'This has not happened and seems unlikely at this late date. But careful reading also reveals that Cannon sensed (as did Morrow and Goldman at the time, and as others would later) the stultifying pressures of mighty us capitalism bearing down on working class culture and institutions'. (Lovell, in Le Blanc and Barrett 2000, p. 161).

INTRODUCTION: THE COMING AMERICAN REVOLUTION

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nize, they asserted, that the path to socialism would probably lie through an extended period of Stalinist-led 'deformed workers' states' which would eventually become democratized partly through the work, on the 'inside', of the Trotskyists. They argued that Trotskyists should not maintain an independent, 'sectarian' small-group existence, but instead should carry out a 'deep entry' into the mass workers' movements led by either the Stalinists or the Social Democrats. Seeking to impose a fairly rigid conception of 'international democratic centralism', some of these leaders attempted to bring all the parties of the Fourth International into line with this general outlook. The world Trotskyist movement was split by this issue. A minority in the SWP - in part agreeing with Pablo's perspectives, but in part feeling deeply demoralized by the disappointment of earlier revolutionary expectations initiated a factional struggle in the us which resulted in a large section of the party's trade unionists and other valuable cadres leaving the organization. The SWP majority, led by Cannon, helped to spearhead a struggle inside the Fourth International against what they saw as Pablo's adaptation to Stalinism and tendency to liquidate the program and organization of the world Trotskyist movement. This crisis and the 1953 fissure in the Fourth Internationalist forces - both in the us and worldwide - greatly weakened the morale and capacity for effective political action of us Trotskyists. Even after the reunification of the Fourth International in 1963, scars and partly unhealed wounds remained from the 1953 split.11

The Rise and Fall of 'High Stalinism'

Decisive in the split and partial reunification were the rise and fall of what has sometimes been characterized as 'high Stalinism' or 'late Stalinism'.12 The USSR under the bureaucratic dictatorship whose central figure was Joseph Stalin had not only survived the German Nazi onslaught of 1941-2 (which killed over 25 million people out of a population of 200 million), but from 1943 to 1945 broke the back of Hitler's war machine. The Soviet Red Anny, combined with heroic underground resistance forces indigenous to the various occupied countries, among whom native Communists were a major force, liberated Eastern and

11 12

Some of this ground is covered in Frank 1979 and Alexander 1991. More information can be found in Conner, Evans and Keny 1973, and Feldman 1974On 'high Stalinism' or 'late Stalinism', see respectively McAuley 2003, pp. 73-86 and Suny 1998, pp. 363-84. A survey of the development of global Stalinism during this period is included in Claudin 1975. Also useful is Ali 2013.

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Central Europe from the Nazi occupiers. Stalin's authority and power soared, as the Soviet Union rebuilt itself in the post-war period. Along with and in confrontation to the United States, the USSR became a global super-power, as Communist Party dictatorships assumed control of East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Albania, and Yugoslavia. In Asia, Communist-led revolutions and take-overs also triumphed in China, North Korea, and North Vietnam. Communist parties became influential and often politically powerful in a variety of other countries - in France, Italy, India, Indonesia, in the Middle East, in Latin America, and even in parts of Africa. For many workers, peasants, students and intellectuals, the Stalinist variant of Communism was seen as an unstoppable force for human liberation. On the other hand, the bureaucratic-authoritarian and often brutal and murderous qualities of Stalinism had the opposite impact on many workers, peasants, students and intellectuals, some of whom had initially responded to Communism's positive appeal.13 Within the USSR itself, 'high Stalinism' was generating irrationalities and crises (economically, culturally, politically) from which - after the tyrant's death in 1953 - his erstwhile comrades sought to free themselves. In the wake of Nikita Khrushchev's semi-secret/semi-open denunciation of some of Stalin's crimes in 1956, policies of 'liberalization' and greater openness were initiated - although strictly within the parameters of maintaining bureaucratic control and Communist Party dictatorship. The collision of rising popular expectations with these authoritarian limits (perhaps most dramatically punctuated by the Hungarian revolution of 1956, brutally repressed by Soviet military forces), contributed to an ongoing crisis, and a long-term fragmentation and erosion, of the world Communism that had been shaped under Stalin's reign. As is evident in the pages of this volume and the next, such complex and contradictory developments powerfully impacted on us Trotskyists, among whom there developed divergent perspectives on how to interpret and respond to what was happening.

13

This phenomenon was highlighted in the late 1940s by Crossman 2001, with case studies for East Germany provided in Heym 1978, and for Hungary by Aczel and Meray 1960, plus Fryer 2001; more general sources are offered in Stillman 1959.

INTRODUCTION: THE COMING AMERICAN REVOLUTION

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Social Process of De-radicalization

There were additional problems that undermined the ability of the us Trotskyists to realise much of the potential that had been evident in the 1930s and '40s. One obvious reflection of the Cold War was the development of a far-reaching campaign of domestic anticommunism. During the Second World War, Social Democratic and Stalinist currents in the us, both of which enjoyed substantial influence in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (cro), had helped to rally militant and socially conscious working people to a broad patriotic, class-collaborationist war effort against an expansionist 'foreign menace' of German fascism and Japanese imperialism; this was facilitated by the earlier support which both had given to the Democratic Party's 'New Deal' coalition for social reform headed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Any notion that us capitalism was also imperialist and expansionistic, fostering a foreign policy counterposed to the interests of the workers, was not then consistently voiced by any organized force in the workers' movement except for the small number of Trotskyists. Developments during the New Deal and the Second World War periods fraught as they were with left-wing and radical elements and potentialities set the stage for a long-term de-radicalization process. Frank Lovell, who lived through it, later reflected that World War I I 'was like a chasm caused by an earthquake of unimaginable force', 14 elaborating: The war changed the world. It changed almost everything about the world that we had known. It changed class relations among people around the world. And of course it left vast destruction and devastation in its wake. But this was the very condition needed for the recovery and expansion of the capitalist system. Capitalism as a world system gained renewed strength from the process of rebuilding. 15 The mind-set fostered during the New Deal and the Second World War facilitated the enlistment of the bulk of organized labor into a 'bipartisan' crusade against a new 'foreign menace', the USSR and the world Communist 'conspiracy'. The moderates and Social Democrats inside the labor movement took the lead in advancing this perspective, while the trade unionists of the Commun-

14 15

Lovell, in Le Blanc and Barrett 2000, p. 135. Lovell, in Le Blanc and Barrett 2000, p. 133.

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ist Party - which for more than a decade had failed to build a working-class socialist base politically independent from the (now fiercely anticommunist) Democratic Party liberals - suddenly found themselves isolated. Anticommunist hysteria and purges swept the labor movement, workplaces, educational institutions, and cultural life throughout American society, wrecking the organizations and obliterating the influence not only of the Communist Party but also of other left-wing currents, including the Trotskyists. Working people were intimidated, in many different ways, from giving serious consideration to any and all left-wing perspectives. 16 This dovetailed with a double erosion of the radical working-class base that was also taking place. One aspect of the erosion was the fading out of immigrant radicalism, and of the vibrant working-class ethnic subcultures, that had been so important to labor's left wing since the mid-nineteenth century. The closing off of immigration in the 1920s combined with powerful cultural-assimilationist dynamics. This, in tum, combined with another significant change - the fact that the working-class struggles which had been led by radicals helped to make capitalist society a better place to live for many workers so that, in fact, they came to have much more to lose than simply the 'chains' of capitalist oppression. A Communist Party organizer with significant experience among foreign-born workers, Steve Nelson, described the realities he found in the late 1940s in a way that merits substantial quotation: We asked ourselves what was happening to the foreign-born in this country. Were they becoming integrated into American society? ... It was a fact of life - the older generation was not pulling the younger into the [Communist] movement. Increasingly, first and second generations not only spoke different languages but also opted for different lifestyles.... World War II was a watershed. Sons who went to high school and then served in the armed forces thought in far different terms than their fathers. Daughters who worked in the shipyards and electrical plants were a world away from their mothers' experiences with domestic service and boarders. Industrial workers after the war were no longer just pick and shovel men. Machine tenders who enjoyed the security provided by unions with established channels for collective bargaining could not appre-

16

Preis 1972, Lichtenstein 1987, and Cochran 1977 indicate the Stalinists made essential contributions to their own defeat and to that of labor's left wing. On the post-World War 11 anti-red campaign in the United States, see Caute 1978.

INTRODUCTION: THE COMING AMERICAN REVOLUTION

13

ciate the chronic insecurity of the pre-c Io era. Life was changing, and we had to urge the old ones to understand and accept it. But despite our recognition of these changing cultural patterns, we were limited in what we could offer, for we were still trying to present a socialist vision based on the model of the Soviet Union. The sons and daughters of immigrants, often far better-educated than their parents, couldn't accept our claim that the Soviet [i.e. Stalinist] model represented a better life ... Although I experienced the changes in working-class values and culture primarily in terms of the foreign-born community and their children, I can see now that the entire American working class was undergoing a transformation during and after the war. I was to learn this with a vengeance during the [anti-Communist hysteria of the nineteen] fifties. The Party, which had historically been rooted in a heavily immigrant workingclass culture characterized by economic insecurity and political alienation, was unable to adjust to these changes. We could not evaluate the significance of the changing composition of the work force and its new patterns of community life and consumption. In a sense the activities of the Left were undercutting the role of the [left-wing] fraternal groups in the ethnic community. Gains such as unemployment compensation and social security as well as the greatly enhanced sense of security brought by the c Io unions made the fraternal organization less necessary in meeting the needs of working people. At the same time, participation in the labor movement and especially the war effort ... eased the process of acceptance [into the 'mainstream' of us culture] of the foreign-born and their children.17 While Nelson's focus here centers on how the Communist Party was affected, this has obvious significance beyond that. 'Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life', Marx and Engels had argued. 18 The description above traces the erosion of the material basis of class consciousness for an important sector of the American working class. It is also described in this 1953 discussion by James P. Cannon of developments within the once left-wing United Auto Workers union, led by the ex-socialist Walter Reuther:

17 18

Nelson 1981, pp. 284-5. Marx and Engels, The Gennan Ideology, excerpted in Selsam and Martel 1963, p. 190.

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14

It is now sixteen years since the sit-down strikes made the new CIO unions secure by the seniority clause. These sixteen years of union security, and thirteen years of uninterrupted war and postwar prosperity, have wrought a great transformation in the unprivileged workers who made the CIO ... The pioneer militants of the CIO unions are sixteen years older than they were in1937. They are betteroff than the ragged and hungry sit-down strikers of 1937; and many of them are sixteen times softer and more conservative. This privileged section of the unions, formerly the backbone of the left wing, is today the main social base of the conservative Reuther bureaucracy. They are convinced far less by Reuther's clever demagogy than by the fact that he really articulates their own conservatized moods and patterns of thought ... Some of the best militants, the best stalwarts of the party in the old times, have been affected by their new environment. They see the old militants in the unions, who formerly cooperated with them, growing slower, more satisfied, more conservative. They still mix with these ex-militants socially, and are infected by them. They develop a pessimistic outlook from the reactions they get on every side from these old-timers, and unknown to themselves, acquire an element of that same conservatism. 19

'A new middle class arose which included a large number of young people of working-class background', wrote one radical sociologist, John C. Leggett, a few years later, noting that many prospering working people had moved out of traditional working-class communities to become homeowners in the suburbs. 'The class struggle abated with the end of the post-World War II strikes, although repeated flare-ups between management and workers occurred during and after the Korean War', he added in his description of the same auto workers discussed by Cannon. 'At the same time, another trend pointed up this harmony. Governmental boards and labor unions often helped minimize class conflict as unions grew more friendly toward companies which were willing to bargain with, and make major concessions to, labor organizations. Prosperity reached almost everyone. Even working-class minority groups [e.g. some African-Americans] improved their standard of living and sent sons and daughters into the middle class'. A Black auto worker named James Boggs, who had passed through the Trotskyist movement in earlier years, asserted in 1963: 'Today the working class is so dispersed and transformed by the very nature of the changes in production that it is almost impossible to select out any single

19

Cannon 1973, pp. 57, 58, 59.

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15

bloc of workers as working class in the old sense'. By this 'old sense' he meant class-conscious workers: 'The working class is growing, as Marx predicted, but it is not the old working class which the radicals persist in believing will create the revolution and establish control over production. That old working class is the vanishing herd'. 20 Similar developments were taking place in all of the 'capitalist democracies', of course. 'Fear of revolution and a desire for social appeasement stimulated the governments of Western Europe', explained one French scholar, Maurice Crouzet, in 1970, to 'set themselves the aim of creating prosperity and expanding a prosperity which would benefit all classes' in the post-World War I I period, through policies providing 'higher wages, shorter working hours, paid holidays, full employment and the virtual disappearance of unemployment, construction of wholesome and cheap housing, social security protection against sickness, loss of work, and old age'. The dramatic development of the welfare state after 1945 - in large measure won through the pressure of labor movements led by Social Democratic and Labor parties - did not fully live up to this idealized picture, let alone reform all capitalist oppression out of existence. The same writer offers some clues as to its limitations: 'Generally speaking, the standard ofliving has risen in all European countries. Working conditions have improved - first, through the growing importance of mechanization which requires, on the whole, less muscular effort (though it increases nervous tension); and then through the reduction of working hours and through paid vacations'. The mechanization of labor under capitalism, it should be stressed, involves the degradation of labor - introducing greater control by the employer over the labor process, not only increasing nervous tension among those keeping up with assembly lines, but also eroding their skills and power in their daily work. More than this, there are some sectors of the working class - especially foreigners and non-whites - for whom more traditional forms of working-class oppression were maintained: 'use [of) foreign labor ... has become so important that the expansion of certain industries is closely dependent on it. Immigrant workers provoke grave problems, even in Great Britain where a liberal attitude towards foreigners and the absence of racialism have been traditional ... These immigrants constitute a proletariat, often leading a wretched type of life'.21 In the United States, too, there developed an increasingly severe stratification within the workforce, with African-Americans, Hispanics, and many

20 21

Leggett 1968, pp. 52, 53; Boggs 1963, pp. 15, 16. Crouzet 1970, pp. 89. go, 93, 92.

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Asian-Americans being pushed into substandard living conditions, more strenuous and lower-paying occupations, higher rates of unemployment, etc., this institutionalized racism being reinforced by cultural and psychological biases on the most personal level. (This had obvious implications for the rise of civil rights and Black nationalist struggles but that brought to the fore a consciousness of race far more than of class ). 22 And for white workers as well as Black, technological developments imposed by the employers created increasing on-the-job alienation, undermining working-class power at the point of production. With little difficulty, astute social critics such as Harvey Swados (a former Shachtmanite) were able to puncture the 'myth of the happy worker' and the 'myth of the powerful worker'. The myth that the working class was simply evaporating altogether, being absorbed into a nebulous middle class, was also effectively refuted with ample facts and figures by more than one critical-minded writer. There was also abundant evidence that the American working class had a sense of being different from other classes - even though many working people referred to themselves as 'middle class' (certainly not 'Lawer class'!). Distinctive patterns of culture and consciousness continued to distinguish it in the larger society.23 On the other hand, there is something to the assertion of Stanley Aronowitz that there has been a tendency 'toward the replacement of all the traditional forms of proletarian culture and everyday life - which gave working-class communities their coherence and provided the underpinnings for the traditional forms of proletarian class consciousness - with a new, manipulated consumer culture which for convenience's sake we can call mass culture'. Regardless of precisely what one wants to make of this, the fact remains that there had been flattening and fragmentation of much that had sustained the old radical working-class consciousness. 24 This hardly meant that workers' minds simply turned to mush, or that they simply accepted whatever their bosses or televisions told them. The distinctive philosophy of many disaffected workers, one observer commented, was not any of the traditional left-wing ideologies but cynicism: 'Cynicism is a variant

22 23

24

On the African-American reality, see: Marable 2015; Jacobson 1968; Georgakas and Surkin 2012; Bracey and Sinha 2004. Harvey Swados's demolition of the myths of the happy and powerful worker was reprinted in Swados 1962, whose themes were also explored and developed in Sexton and Sexton 1971. The classic work on degradation oflabor through capitalist mechanization is Braverman 1974. Also see Le Blanc 2016. Aronowitz 1973, p. 95. The changes discussed here are beautifully conveyed in the novel by K.B. Gilden 1989.

INTRODUCTION: THE COMING AMERICAN REVOLUTION

17

of anarchism - anarchism without ideals or ultimate illusions, apathetic, easygoing instead of strenuous, non-sectarian, hence more broadly appealing and far more suitable to the conditions and mentality of contemporary workers than the older tradition of militant idealism and self-sacrifice'.25 The class-conscious layers of the American working class - the key to understanding the Socialist Party of Debs and the 1ww, the early Communist Party, and the pioneer Trotskyists - had, certainly by the end of the 1950s, ceased to exist as a distinctive social force. 'The surest way to lose one's fighting faith is to succumb to one's immediate environment; to see things only as they are and not as they are changing and must change; to see only what is before one's eyes and imagine that it is permanent'. 26 This had been Cannon's appeal to his comrades, and many were able to accept that - but this was only a tiny fragment of the us working class. The social basis for the kind of revolutionary party that the SWP had aspired to be, based on the model advanced by Lenin and his comrades in the early years of the Communist International, had ceased to exist. 27 All that remained for the stalwart veterans of the SWP in the 1950s was to maintain enough of an organization to keep alive the ideals and general perspectives of revolutionary Marxism, the understanding of history and the revolutionary tradition. If this could be accomplished, if the SWP could survive until the next radical upsurge that capitalism would inevitably generate, then American Trotskyism would have something to contribute to it.

Fragmentation and Insight

Especially from 1939-40 (the cut-off of our first volume), and extending down to the mid-196os (the cut-off of our third and final volume on us Trotskyism), we can see a proliferation of controversies and splits within the ranks of the us Trotskyists. While this three-volume compilation focuses on the 'mainstream' of American Trotskyism - the organizational succession of Communist League of America, Workers Party of the United States, the Appeal Caucus within the Socialist Party of America, and finally the Socialist Workers Party - the breakaways whose beginnings we note in these volumes deserve volumes and additional studies of their own: those who followed Max Shachtman, the JohnsonForest tendency of C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, the current associated 25 26 27

Hodges 1970, p. 446. Cannon 1973a, p. 61. For an elaboration, see Le Blanc 2014, pp. 142-6.

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18

with Albert Goldman and Felix Morrow, and those associated with the group around Bert Cochran, George Clarke, Harry Braverman, etc. Several facts stand out as we survey this scene with the critical distance that the passage of decades allows. Each of the dissident groups that evolved into breakaway currents - very sharply at variance with each other, on multiple points, as they certainly are - while hardly themselves constituting a coherent whole, represent a remarkable array of fertile insights into the realities of the society, politics and world around them, at the same time enriching Marxist theory. In the 2013 science-fiction film Cloud Atlas, a central character says: 'Truth is singular. Its "versions" are mis-truths'. This valid perception should not be allowed to block us from additional insights emphasized long ago by Henri Lefebvre: All reality is a totality, both one and many, scattered or coherent and open to its future, that is, to its end .... Each moment contains other moments, aspects or elements that have come from its past. Reality thus overflows the mind, obliging us to delve ever deeper into it - and especially to be ever revising our principles of identity, causality and finality and make them more thorough .... Every truth is relative to a certain stage of the analysis and of thought, to a certain social content. It preserves its truth only by being transcended .... In human terms, the energy of creation is extended and made manifest in and through the Praxis, that is the total activity of mankind, action and thought, physical labour and knowledge. The Praxis is doubly creative: in its contact with realities, hence in knowledge, and in invention or discovery.... Experience and reason, intelligence and intuition, knowing and creating, conflict with one another only if we take a one-sided view of them. 28 A shortcoming among those seeking to understand complex realities - in this case the history of us Trotskyism - is an inclination to identify with the perspectives of one or another of the contending tendencies or factions to such an extent that it is not possible to grasp and appreciate insights provided by opposing tendencies or factions. Instead, the opposing Other (whether it is one or another dissident grouping or the dominant majority) is flattened into a caricature from which little can be learned.

28

Lefebvre 1968, pp. 108-9, 110, 112.

INTRODUCTION: THE COMING AMERICAN REVOLUTION

19

If we apply this to the repeated critiques of the so-called 'orthodox' Trotskyists of the SWP mainstream, the supposed brain-dead dogmatism, the theoretical rigidity, the sterility and lack of creativity, etc. tum out to be optical illusions as those so characterized wrestle with realities in ways that yield valuable perceptions and conceptualizations which can shed considerable light on the complex and evolving realities of their time and ours. Naturally, this was not always the case. We can also find false starts and blind allies generated by an uncritical embrace of one or another 'established truth' or illusory hope something that crops up in all human groups, including among 'mainstream' Trotskyists and their dissident critics. There is another issue worth considering. The revolutionary Marxist perspective positing 'the coming American revolution' - which could be labeled The Trotskyist Paradigm - clearly underwent a crisis from 1939-40 down to the 1960s, and beyond. The word paradigm here refers to a theoretical framework, a specific set of thought patterns (concepts, theories, expectations and methodology) guiding the activities of these revolutionary activists. Far from imposing a rigid or mechanical approach, this could be utilized flexibly, creatively, and fruitfully. But the broader political, socio-economic, and cultural realities that we have surveyed in this introduction seemed to generate an accumulation of critical anomalies challenging the paradigm. Such a process, according to Thomas Kuhn in his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is characteristic of the evolution of thought and the expansion of knowledge within the natural sciences. As one summary notes, for Kuhn, 'When enough significant anomalies have accrued against a current paradigm, the scientific discipline is thrown into a state of crisis'. 'During this crisis, new ideas, perhaps ones previously discarded, are tried. Eventually a new paradigm is formed, which gains its own new followers, and an intellectual "battle" takes place between the followers of the new paradigm and the holdouts of the old paradigm'. 29 Something approximating this has characterized the history of us Trotskyism reflected in these three volumes. More than this, for the past half century there has been a parade of new paradigms, which have fairly quickly become passe within the dramatically rapid and recurring transformations characteristic of what Ernest Mandel once characterized as 'Late Capitalism' and what many now call the age of globalization (in which, with increasing velocity, 'all that is solid melts into air'). 30 There has yet to be the crystallization of anything 29 30

Kuhn 1962, and Wikipedia, 'Paradigm Shift', available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Paradigm_shift (accessed 11 May 2016). See Mandel 1999, Jameson 1991, Berman 2010, Lechner and Boli 2012.

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sufficiently durable to replace variants of the old perspectives that animated the people we can find in these pages. Such a superior paradigm, when it finally comes into being, may end up synthesizing new conceptualizations with those drawn from the richness of the Trotskyist tradition. The final volume of this documentary trilogy on us Trotskyism will reveal new stirrings and pathways of thought and activism that evolved and animated growing numbers of comrades within the swP mainstream, as the 1950s flowed into the 1960s. We should conclude this 'middle' volume with the acknowledgement that such developments were inherent, as well, in the lives, perceptions, and perspectives of members of the so-called 'orthodox' mainstream even of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The perceptive cultural historian of the Left, Alan Wald, has initiated an excavation of what he calls 'Cannonite bohemians' of this period. 31 There is evidence that this was more than simply a 'fringe' within the SWP. A clear example can be found in Detroit, as the SWP branch was rebuilt in the wake, and from the debris, of the damaging fight with the Cochran faction, with which this volume concludes, that tore apart the central core of the us Trotskyist mainstream. In the introduction to the next volume, some attention will be given to a 'case-study' of the Detroit experience. Despite repeated denigrations about presumably stale, dogmatic, dead thinking aimed at the SWP mainstream - coming from those associated with Shachtman, Goldman-Morrow,Johnson-Forest, and Cochran -we find a recurrent re-affirmation of the memorable phrase from the 1993 film Jurassic Park: 'life finds a way'. Persistent infusions of 'heterodoxy' into the reigning 'orthodoxy', which seems to have kept Marxism alive and vibrant down to our own time, remained evident among mainstream Trotskyists in the United States. Changing realities continually generated new insights that significantly - if sometimes covertly - enriched older perspectives, at the same time anticipating and helping to create possibilities for new breakthroughs. 31

See Wald 2012 and Wald 2015.

CHAPTER 2

Dawn of the American Century Paul Le Blanc

In February 1941, as the Second World War (1939-45) was unfolding but well before the United States had assumed a combatant role, the influential us magazine magnate Henry R. Luce wrote and published an essay entitled 'The American Century'. Luce had launched and for years closely oversaw three incredibly powerful magazines - Time was an informative newsweekly summarizing and interpreting the news for millions of readers, Life was a popular weekly picture magazine going into millions of homes to provide visual interpretations of society, culture and politics, and Fortune was a magazine for business executives and others seeking in-depth explorations of the economy. A well-connected ruling-class sophisticate, Luce emphasized - before the United States actually became involved militarily in the war - that in a sense it already was involved, and that actual military intervention was inevitable and desirable. More than this, he argued, the United States was an economic, political, and military powerhouse that would lead the Allies to victory and then go on to rebuild and shape the war-tom world, representing 'the triumphal purpose of freedom' and that 'it is in this spirit that all of us are called, each to his own measure of capacity, and each in the widest horizon of his vision, to create the first great American Century'.1 Four years earlier, in 1937, Trotsky had offered a number of insightful predictions about what he viewed as an inevitable Second World War. 'The next war will have a totalitarian character, not only in the sense that its operations will develop simultaneously on the earth, under the earth, on the water, under the water, in the air, including the stratosphere', he wrote, 'but also in the sense that it will draw into its vortex the whole population, all its material as well as spiritual riches'. Well before Luce, he predicted that given its 'geographical location, territorial dimensions, size of population, resources of war materials, reserves of gold and technology, ... domination over our planet will fall to the lot of the United States'.

1 Luce 1941, p. 65. See Brinkley 2010, pp. 265-73. To place this within the broader context of us foreign policy, see: Isaacson and Thomas 1986; Gardner 1970; Williams 2009; Lens 2003; and Hodgson 2005.

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Related to this, he forecast the postwar wave of anti-colonial liberation struggles, emphasizing that the British Empire and other colonial empires would not endure - the war would generate 'frictions, antagonisms, and centrifugal tendencies' which sooner or later would 'find their expression in insurrections and revolution'. His take on the future of the German and Italian war effort posited that 'if at the beginning of the war these states may and do score imposing military successes, then in the second stage they will become the arena of social convulsions earlier than their enemies'. He concluded: 'Not a single country will escape the consequences of the war. In pains and convulsions the whole world will change its face'. The only world power to compete with the United States would be the Soviet Union. 'The current contemptuous appraisal of the Red Army is just as one-sided as yesterday's belief in the indestructibility of Stalin's domination', he argued. Trotsky correctly predicted that Hitler's war machine on the Eastern front might be brought to 'complete collapse' at the hands of 'Russia's strong navy and air force' combined with '"the moral factor", that is, the living people: the Red soldier, worker, peasant'. 2 Of course, Trotsky was hopeful that this would be accompanied by a political revolution that would overthrow the Stalin dictatorship, with the inevitable anti-colonial revolutions likewise dovetailing with socialist insurgencies throughout Europe. Luce also perceived such possibilities, although he was not inclined to assume that Stalin would be overthrown - if anything, the Soviet dictator was seen as perhaps being at the center of a global challenge to post-war capitalism. 'It is for American and America alone to determine whether a system of free economic enterprise - an economic order comparable with freedom and progress - shall or shall not prevail in this century', he emphasized, hinting at a postwar confrontation between the United States and the threat of global Communism. 'We know perfectly well that there is not the slightest chance of anything fairly resembling a free economic system prevailing in this country if it prevails no where else'. 3 The capitalist perspectives dominating us foreign policy and the dominant contending powers during the Second World War was a factor of which the us Trotskyists were keenly aware, and they were not about to allow their opposition to Hitler and the murderous fascism of the Axis Powers to blind them to such underlying realities. As with the recently murdered Trotsky, so were they prepared to focus on the extreme and murderous destructiveness of this con-

2 Trotsky 1978, pp. 390, 391, 392, 393, 394, 396. 3 Luce 1941, p. 65.

DAWN OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY

23

flict, the imperialist motivations that were prevalent on both sides, and also as had been the case with the First World War - the revolutionary opportunities generated by the war's devastating impact. In his analysis The Meaning of the Second World War, Ernest Mandel (attempting to further develop Trotsky's approach) would later note that the destructiveness of the conflict was what Trotsky had predicted. 'The legacy of destruction left by World War II is staggering. Eighty million people were killed, if one includes those who died of starvation and illness as a result of the war - eight times as many as during World War 1', Mandel noted. 'Dozens of cities were virtually totally destroyed, especially in Japan and Germany. Material resources capable of feeding, clothing, housing, equipping all the poor of this world were wasted for purely destructive purposes. Forests were tom down and agricultural land converted into wasteland .. .'. According to Mandel, the Second World War 'must be grasped as five different conflicts'. There was, first of all, an inter-imperialist war fought for global hegemony - particularly for raw materials, markets, and investment opportunities. There was, secondly, a war of self-defense waged by the Soviet Union against a German imperialist attempt to colonize the country. Third, there was a war of the Chinese people against Japanese imperialist invasion, accompanied - at certain points - by a civil war between Chinese Nationalists and Chinese Communists. Fourth, there was a war of Asian colonial peoples for independence against various foreign oppressors and aggressors. Fifth was a war of national liberation fought by populations of the occupied countries of Europe. 4 This is basically the framework within which us Trotskyists approached the Second World War as it was unfolding. They produced work of greater value than is generally acknowledged. Joseph Hansen's detailed articles - highlighting the development of one of the keenest foreign policy analysts who had been mentored by Trotsky himself - were complemented by contributions of Time magazine's on-the-spot correspondent Sherry Mangan, who wrote for the Trotskyist press under the pseudonym of Terence Phelan, and by Jean van Heijenoort, writing under the pseudonym of Marc Loris. Van Heijenoort was a French militant who had, for some years and in more than one country, served as one of Trotsky's key aides before ending up, in 1939, in New York City; now functioning as international secretary for the Fourth International, he was in close touch with European comrades under 'the iron heel' of fascism. 5 Joseph

4 Mandel 1986, pp. 45, 169. Those seeking greater detail on all of this are well served by Calvocoressi, Wint and Pitchard 1999. 5 On Mangan's complex balancing act as Time correspondent and Trotskyist militant, see Wald,

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24

Vanzler, fluent in Russian and utilizing his widely recognized party name John G. Wright, produced an account of the Russian front that emphasized the need for a political revolution to overthrow Stalin. Art Preis and George Breitman provided scathing exposes of the crimes of the us bourgeoisie - in some cases having helped to finance pre-war Nazism, and now engaging in shameful wartime profiteering. Under his widely recognized party name of William F. Warde, George Novack drew attention to the tensions that would soon blossom into the Cold War confrontation between a us elite determined to establish the American Century and the Stalin regime determined to secure its own power on the world stage - each uneasily considering the destabilizing prospects of world revolution. The final two contributions in this section focus on the perceived beginnings of a post-war radicalization in the United States itself. A massive strike wave spread through the country in 1945-46 that suggested a profound workingclass radicalization in the making. The Militanfs seasoned labor reporter, Art Preis, would call this 'American Labor's Greatest Upsurge', pointing to the statistics: 'In 1937, the epic year of the era's rise, there were 4,740 strikes involving 1,861,000 strikers, for a total loss of 28,425,000 man-days of work. In 1945 the number of strikes was 4,750 with 3,470,000 on strike, almost double the 1937 figure, and a loss of 38,000,000 man-days. In 1946 the number of strikes reached 4,985 with 4,600,000 strikers and 116,000,000 man-days lost'. 6 Historian George Lipsitz has noted the causes and effects: By the winter of 1945-46, one quarter of all war workers had lost their jobs. Nearly 2 million found themselves unemployed by October 1, and real income for workers fell by an average of 15 percent in three months. Prospects for the future offered little hope for improvement as 10 million servicemen and women returned to civilian life to join the competition for jobs. Fears of another depression, accumulated resentments over wartime sacrifices, and anger over postwar reverses in wages and working conditions ignited strikes and demonstrations from coast to coast. 7 While business, government, and labor leaders sought to force the strikes and protests to confine themselves to concerns of narrow self-interest for the workers involved, Lipsitz reports that 'in city after city, workers and local unions

pp. 180-99. On Van Heijenoort, see Feferman 1993, and for his outstanding reminiscences of Trotsky, see van Heijenoort 1978. 6 Preis 1972, p. 283. 7 Lipsitz 1994, pp. 99-100.

DAWN OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY

25

appealed to public opinion and sought popular support on the grounds that their struggle promised gains for the many to the expense of the few. In many cases, the public responded enthusiastically'. Despite the sharpening conflict (or perhaps because of it), 'a Fortune magazine poll appearing in November 1946 revealed gradually increasing public support for labor' and an erosion of support for management. A common sentiment was captured in placards proclaiming: 'We Will Not Go Back to the Old Days'. Lipsitz shows that in a number of cities 'defensive strikes with modest demands triggered mass uprisings among the entire working populations of those cities; adding: 'By resorting to general strikes, workers expressed a collective understanding that their difficulties with management stemmed from public and political causes, that mass disruption could provide an effective tool for acquiring allies, and that their immediate needs as workers could and should be related to the needs of the community at large'. 8 Preis also notes a significant set of protests overseas that dovetailed with those at home: 'At the close of the war the American soldiers in Europe and Asia engaged in the most remarkable series of struggles for their rights that has ever been waged in a victorious imperialist army'. Delays in the demobilization of us forces were clearly linked to plans to block the successes of revolutionary forces in various countries, insurgencies that would - us policy-makers feared - undermine the status quo at the expense of making the postwar. 'Bring the us Home' demonstrations swept through the armed forces overseas led in the Philippines, for example, by socialist trade unionist Sergeant Emil Mazey from the United Auto Workers - coinciding with 'the peak of the strike wave at home', with methods that 'clearly reflected those employed in labor struggles'. These protests, and pressures from the homefront, compelled the policy-makers to accelerate demobilization plans. 'Less fearful of direct armed intervention by the United States, the peoples of India, Indonesia, In do-China, China and Burma pressed their struggles for national freedom and social emancipation', according to Preis. He adds: 'The struggles of the American soldiers and workers became interlinked and confronted the American capitalist ruling class with an invincible power'. 9 The militant spirit of such postwar developments is reflected in the reportage and analysis of SWP trade union coordinator Bert Cochran (utilizing his party name of E.R. Frank) presented here, and in what became a classic statement by James P. Cannon, 'The Coming American Revolution'. 8 Lipsitz, pp. us, n6, 120, 151-2. 9 Preis 1972, pp. 272, 275. See also Styron 1965, pp. 12-21; Garza 1998, pp. 105-6. An informative account focusing on Communist Party involvement is offered in Marquit 2002, pp. 5-39.

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History rarely moves in straight lines, and events would soon take a dramatic tum - for the worse, from the standpoint of revolutionary socialism. A business counter-attack to limit the power of organized labor was combined with a global Cold War confrontation with Communism, but also with a significant upturn in the us economy (in which some of the benefits were passed on to the workers). The consequent de-radicalization, and intensifying pressures from the resurgent forces of the status quo, soon made it apparent that revolution would not be coming to America anytime soon. New dissensions and divisions emerged in the Socialist Workers Party, and in the world Trotskyist movement. Within a few years Cannon and Cochran would be leading counterposed factions that would fracture the very core of the SWP.

DAWN OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY

1

27

March of Military Events (January 1941)

Joseph Hansen

The Battle ofBritain10

Britain, driven from the European continent, ravaged by continual waves of bombers, faced with defeat, now rests solely on the prop of aid from the United States. This aid, it is clear from a reading of America's military experts, is intended to be great enough to hamper and weaken the pretensions of German imperialism to world hegemony; but not great enough to prevent the downfall of the British Empire. But these same experts fear that, due to the lag in militarization of the United States, Roosevelt will not be able to furnish sufficient aid in time to prevent a German victory in the Battle of Britain. The present phase of the battle of Britain is struggle for mastery of the air. Germany holds the mastery with daily increasing superiority. The air bases of Germany form a semicircle about Britain from Norway to the coast of France, giving the German fliers much shorter distances to their objectives which in tum are concentrated in a relatively small area in comparison with the objectives of the British air fleet. A German bomber can carry three tons of bombs to the English bomber's one, the difference being made up in gasoline. The German bomber can remain for some time in the air over the objective, whereas the English bomber must dump his load as soon as possible in order not to run out of gasoline before returning to the home base. The German fleet is capable of proceeding in waves of approximately 500 planes to the British 150, which gives the German fleet a striking power of 1,500 tons of bombs to the British 150 per flight, with the German planes capable of making many times more flights for the same number of planes. This superiority of the German air fleet has resulted in terrific destruction in England - far more than the British censorship has permitted to leak out. At Coventry, center of automobile production where the Germans first began con-

10

Hansen 1941.

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centrating upon single industrial cities, more than 500 planes dropped 60,000 pounds of incendiary bombs and 1,000,000 pounds of high explosives for 10½ hours, that is about a bomb a minute. Such intensive bombing renders direct hits upon individual factories relatively unimportant, since electric power, gas, water, transport are so disrupted as to knock the factories completely out of service. The German attacks have so seriously interfered with production that even the conservative us News in its November 29 issue estimated that British armament production at that time had been slowed as much as 40 percent. Equally damaging to the British situation are the shipping losses she is now suffering. These are in excess of her losses at their peak during World War I. The Nazis have developed a new technique of sinking convoys against which the British have been unable to date to devise counter methods. The Nazis locate a convoy as it nears Ireland and then make a combined air, surface, and submarine attack. 'Whether or not the British can develop their counter-attack faster than the Nazis can develop the new technique in coordinated air-surface and sub-surface warfare at sea is the most vital problem confronting the Royal Navy', declares the December 7 issue of the Anny and Nmy Journal, a semiofficial organ. It is this new danger which accounts for the British anxiety to free the Mediterranean fleet and to obtain American battleships as convoy guardians. At what moment Hitler will choose to make an attempt to deliver the knockout blow to Britain through invasion cannot yet be determined. Most likely it will come after further destruction of British industry and the British airfleet, weakening of the British Empire through a drive on the Suez Canal and possibly Gibraltar. An attempt at invasion is considered inevitable by the military authorities of all the warring nations. If Hitler waits too long, Britain can become a great danger as Roosevelt's war machine gears into top speed and utilizes the British Isles as a military base for operations in Europe. As for the technical difficulties, American military authorities are convinced that the German generals have worked out a feasible plan, probably poison gas followed by wave upon wave of mosquito boats, troop planes, etc. 'It is this nightmare', according to the Anny and Navy journal of December 21, 'which is responsible for the greater activity the United States is planning to prevent its coming to pass'. The weakened situation of Great Britain is graphically disclosed in comparative figures of steel production in England and Germany, according to Barrons, Wall Street economic journal, in its December 23 issue: Steel production is an important index of a nation's Industrial power. Consequently the spread of German domination over the metal manu-

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facturing nations of Europe takes on a significance that can be measured in more or less concrete terms ... Germany's steel ingot output a few years ago was less than 20,000,000 tons annually. The 1939 output in territory now controlled by Germany was almost exactly twice that figure, and capacity probably is around 50,000,000 tons a year. In addition, Italy's output last year was more than 2,000,000 tons. "While most of this gain has been through conquest of neighbors to the east and west, the industry within Germany has been modernizing and expanding rapidly. Its capacity shortly may reach 30,000,000 tons a year. The total of 40,000,000 to 50,000,000 tons of steel capacity now at German command is three or more times Great Britain's 1939 output ... It compares with around 17,000,000 tons of ingot output in the entire British Empire last year. As the Anrry and Navy Journal of 21 December puts it: 'Britain is up against the

inescapable effect that modem warfare depends as much on relative industrial productive capacity of the combatants as upon the strength of their armed forces'.

America as Britain's Heir

The British ruling class has turned with increasing insistence to Roosevelt for aid in accordance with the secret promises made them. To the 'isolationist' group among the American capitalists, especially prior to the last presidential election, the British pointed to their holdings in the Western Hemisphere which they had managed to hold almost intact through World War 1: $350,000,000 in gold, $1,100,000,000 in American stocks and bonds, $1,160,000,000 in real estate, Canadian investments amounting to $2,750,000,000 and Latin American investments amounting to $5,000,000,000. The 'isolationists' hoped to take over all these investments through sale of armaments to England before taking over the colonies when Germany had finished with Great Britain. It is now clear that Hitler played on the cupidity of the British capitalists and attempted to negotiate a peace with them on terms that would be easier than the cost of American aid. 'Property groups in England', declared the us News in its December 27 issue, 'facing the alternative of peace or sacrifice of all investments to United States may press for peace. Sacrifice of all investments would leave the same question of ability to pay to be met in six months to one year'. The arrival of Lord Lothian, British Ambassador from England, who died shortly after reaching Washington, apparently increased the fears of Roosevelt

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that Britain might make such a peace, and pressure for aid to Britain, leaving out the question of British investments in the Western Hemisphere, was increased. Roosevelt, representing the interventionist group of American capitalists, apparently considers the defeat of Great Britain inevitable, her colonies in the Far East and Australasia, and her holdings certain to come under American control. So he is playing to utilize what fighting ability is left in Britain in order to weaken the menace rising German imperialism holds for the worldwide interests of American imperialism. The disintegration of the British Empire finds the British ruling class incapable not only of saving itself, but even of formulating its war aims. It is going into defeat with its eyes shut, responding only with automatic reflexes that take the form of repression of the working class at home and imprisonment of the leaders of the colonial peoples who take an antiwar attitude. In the 7 December issue of The Economist, well-known British economic journal, there is a curious editorial that attempts to answer the question which the workers of England are asking with increasing insistency: what are we fighting for? Too precise a formulation of war aims might well get in the way of the one indispensable condition for their realization - a British victory ... The British people do not need to be told what they are fighting for ... nevertheless ... We cannot afford, during the war, to be put on the spiritual defensive, to let the Nazis have a monopoly in New Orders or to let others be convinced that our only thought is to restore an unsatisfactory status quo. It is clear from this declaration that talk on the part of British government officials about 'granting' a 'socialist order' after the war is merely propaganda to counteract Hitler's propaganda and to lull the working class into fighting on blindly for their masters. The Economist continues with the declaration that no war aims whatsoever can be formulated until a definite attitude is taken toward the German people in the event of a British victory. Shall it be 'Repression' or 'Reconciliation'?, asks the editorial. The journal decides that 'Reconciliation' is impossible, that the German need for 'economic expansion' cannot be met, and that 'Repression' likewise is impossible since it cannot be carried to the extent of'sterilising the German population'. Nor is a combination of the two possible. 'But we shall have to choose one or the other'. 'So the question must be answered', concludes The Economist, 'and it cannot be answered without much deeper and more prayerful thought than has yet been given to it. Without an answer, any statement of war aims is likely to be mere beating of the air'.

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The utter bankruptcy of British 'democracy', the hopelessness of the future facing the capitalist class was underlined by Joseph Kennedy, American Ambassador to England, in an unofficial interview which cost him his job although he agrees with Roosevelt's policy of aid to Britain. The interview was printed in the Boston Globe in November: 'Democracy is finished in England', declared Kennedy. 'If we get into war, it will be in this country too ... Great Britain is not fighting for democracy. She is fighting for self-preservation,just as we will if it comes to us ... If we enter a war we will lose democracy ... Everything we hold dear would be gone'. In the coming period the workers in America will discover that the Ambassador did not lie when he said more 'off the record' than the trade of capitalist diplomat permits.

Counter-Attack in the Mediterranean

The British, strangling in the grip of German domination of Europe, cast about for an avenue of counter-attack. Italy was obviously the nearest weak link in the Axis war machine. Wracked by the internal contradictions of his own regime, Mussolini himself provided the opportunity. To understand what is involved in the Greek and Libyan set-backs to the Italians, it is necessary to understand the previous diplomatic moves made by Hitler - his conferences with Molotov, King Boris of Bulgaria and Foreign Minister Suner of Spain. The agreement reached at these conferences, which had the approval of Rome and Tokyo, are explained very well by the American military journals, which of course have special sources of information at their disposal. According to the American militarists, Hitler proposed to sever the lifeline of the British Empire at Gibraltar and Suez. In return for aid in attacking Gibraltar, Spain was to get part of French Morocco. In order to capture Suez, a German army was to have passage through Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania and Yugoslavia. In return for pressure on these nations to acquiesce, Stalin was to get the Dardanelles or an outlet to the Persian Gulf. Stalin in addition was to recognize Japanese conquests in China, thus freeing the Japanese army to move south to the Dutch East Indies and Singapore, with seizure of French Indo-China and a possible concession of part of this colony to Thailand for its aid. Stalin was likewise to advise Turkey to permit a German army to cross her territory. Bulgaria was to get a port on the Aegean Sea at the expense of Greece.

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The army of Metaxas, badly lacking in modem equipment, almost unequipped with aviation, was considered too weak to do anything but consent to the Axis plans. It even seems likely that Metaxas led Mussolini to believe that he would not resist invasion. However, as the Military Review, official organ of the Command and General Staff School of the American Army at Fort Leavenworth, reports approvingly, Metaxas received his military education in Germany and was even called by the former Kaiser a 'little Moltke'. He made a deal with the British and they prepared to occupy Crete and began landing troops in Greece. The Italian push in Egypt, aimed at the Alexandria naval base and Suez, had bogged down along the African coast since mid-September, inviting a British counter-attack. On October 28, with lack of preparation and under other conditions, such as bad generalship and bad weather, reminiscent of Stalin's first Finnish campaign, Mussolini launched his attack on Greece. The November 2 issue of the Amry and NavyJournal declared it 'very likely that Great Britain has ample force at hand to take care of the present situation', and in subsequent issues warned its readers of the American Army and Navy officers' staff not to be taken in by newspaper headlines playing up the 'Greek' victories. The British had large forces in Greece and were deliberately playing down their own role in order to strike at Italian morale and to increase the effect of a set-back at the hands of a woefully weak nation such as Greece. The Anny and Navy Journal of November 23 ascribed the Italian defeats in Libya and Greece to 'quality of Italian leadership both on the sea and in the air and the lack of fuel oil and aviation gasoline'. The setback of Italian forces was greater than expected. This was due in no small degree to the unwillingness of the Italian soldiers to fight; reports of their singing the revolutionary song 'Bandiera Rossa' give an indication of their mood. The British fleet likewise gained some successes against the under-plated Italian fleet whose principal value is not so much ability to carry on a sea battle as to keep the British fleet tied up in the Mediterranean, what the militarists term a 'nuisance value'. In drawing the lessons of the Italian defeat, the Military Review declares that the Italians will launch a better prepared campaign.' ... It is inconceivable that Greece can expect to continue to roll up her score of early successes', and compares the campaign with Stalin's campaign against Finland: The planning and the execution of the Italian campaign is highly reminiscent of the Russian campaign In Finland, and the results will undoubtedly be comparable to those of the Russo-Finnish war. Both Russia and Italy

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based their operations on what they considered the enemy's intentions rather than on the enemy's capabilities. Their agents in hostile territory appear to have overestimated the work done by their Fifth Columnists to create a state of unrest, coordinated opposition was not expected, and, as a result, security measures, particularly essential in mountain operations, were neglected. The consequences were disastrous, for entire divisions, both in Finland and in Greece, walked into traps from which they were unable to extricate themselves. The task of the weaker nation, in both cases, was further simplified by the failure of the invader to consider and prepare for unusual weather conditions. This cold-blooded comparison between the two campaigns does not mention a striking difference in the reaction of the world press to the two campaigns. As pointed out in the Socialist Appeal, the bourgeoisie defended Finland rabidly. The entire press went into mourning with the final victory of the Red Army. The Greek resistance however provokes not more than secondary interest. The difference involved has its property roots. Involved in Finland was the socialization of the means of production - in Greece a secondary bourgeois military campaign in one corner of a World War. The world bourgeoisie understand very well that Mussolini cannot expropriate the means of production, even if he should succeed in a second campaign. On the other hand his defeat in this theater of the war is not considered of first rate importance by the opposing imperialists. Barrons for December 23 puts it rather neatly: If present plans are carried out, the United States would be able to provide tremendous aid to Britain by 1942. In view of this possibility, will Hitler try to end the war in 1941 by waging another lightning-swift campaign? If he has such a plan in mind and is conserving all his aircraft for that purpose, the defeat of Italy's land forces might not be considered a matter of vital importance, so long as Italy remained in the war and kept its navy in operation. However ineffective the Italian Navy may be, it is still useful to Hitler because it requires the British to keep in the Mediterranean a substantial number of naval ships that otherwise would be available for the defense of the British Isles.

To the world working class what is of vital importance is the mood displayed by the Italian soldiers. For almost two decades they have borne on their backs the fascist regime of hunger, torture, assassination. Any beginnings of revolt among them can flash throughout the oppressed of the entire world as the signal for a renewal of the revolutionary wave which put an end to World War 1.

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Impending Clash in the Far East The third member of the Axis, Japan, has recently adopted a change in her diplomatic tone toward the United States; but on the economic and military front she has not changed her objectives one iota. Nor can she. Weakest link at present in the imperialist chain, she faces social revolution if she does not continue her imperialist expansion. It is true that continued expansion only heightens her inward contradictions and generates greater energy for the explosion that will eventually blow her up from within - but the ruling class of Japan, like its brothers in the other imperialist nations, closes its eyes to that prospect. Japan must dominate her oil supply which is located in the Dutch East Indies. She must dominate Inda-China with its valuable minerals. She must control China with its vast resources. She must control Singapore which carries with it control of the Far East. Consequently she has sent to Washington Admiral Nomura, a man considered friendly to the United States. This is diplomatic camouflage. At the same time she has signed a five-year agreement with Thailand, moved troops into French Inda-China, is negotiating with Moscow for a non-aggression treaty, is talking with the government of the Netherland Indies at Java over Japan's economic interests there. Roosevelt has answered by sending submarines, airplanes and destroyers to Singapore; by proclaiming such exports to Japan as iron ore, ferro alloys, airplanes and parts, aviation gasoline, scrap iron and steel under export license requirements, that is embargo. These moves by Roosevelt make it more imperative for Japan to move southward and thus bring the outbreak of military hostilities closer. The withdrawals of troops in China were probably intended to show Stalin that Japan will agree with arrangements made in Berlin concerning the boundary of Japanese expansion in China. At the same time it is preparation for the move southward, or a flanking move against Chiang Kai-shek if the United States persuades the Chinese Generalissimo that American dollars are of greater personal interest to him than a treaty with Japan. Prior to Japan's signing the Triple Alliance with Italy and Germany on September 27, the British had tried to buy her off at the expense of the Chinese people. British troops were ordered out of Peking for the first time since the Boxer Rebellion 40 years ago, and out of Shanghai and Tientsin. The British government turned over 100,000 pounds of Chinese silver in the British concession at Tientsin to Japan, and closed the Burma road over which military supplies were being sent to the Chinese soldiers. Japan responded by moving troops into French Inda-China, a move on the chess-board of the Far East toward the loot Roosevelt wants. The October num-

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her of The Pictorial Orient, overseas edition of Asahigraph, published in English, French and Spanish, describes Japan's interest southward with remarkable frankness, although the Japanese press is one of the most strictly controlled in the world: Assuming more importance with each new twist in the complicated world situation, the Netherlands Indies is being closely watched with interest by all major powers. The fabulous wealth of the islands is like a powerful magnet to the rest of the world, particularly in this day when wars are fought for rich economic stakes. And no nation is more vitally interested in the future of the rich colony than Japan, which by reasons of geographical and economic proximity is tied inextricably with it. To Japan, its tie-up with the Netherlands Indies is of tremendous importance, especially since the United States threatens to cut it off from America's vast markets and source of supplies. To offset this threat, Japan is forced to look elsewhere and the only satisfactory answer in sight is the Dutch islands in the south Pacific. Oil, tin, rubber, nickel, tungsten constitute part of the 'fabulous wealth' for which the United States will presently war with Japan. Already the Japanese government has instituted blackout drills for the major cities, apparently in preparation for a Yankee attack. On October 31, dance halls were banned, and a move instituted to popularize a national uniform to economize on material and labor in preparation for the pending war in the Far East. The isolation of Japan, the difficulty of the language, make it very difficult to get information concerning a possible revolutionary movement. Indirectly, however, it is possible to gain an inkling of how the monstrous war strain is affecting the population. The army in China more than once has given indication of rebellious tendencies, news of which seeped into the world press. But from Asahigraph we can get a glimpse of what is going on behind the insular isolation in Japan itself. The November issue reports: One conspicuous fact in connection with the new alliance is the absence of popular demonstration and the prevalence of sober, even chastened mood which the report of the new alliance has so far evoked. In the first place the time is inopportune for festive manifestation of any sort; even birth and marriage in private life are celebrated with nothing like jubilation.

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A danger sign to the Japanese ruling class of the utmost gravity! 'Country folk have been flocking to the urban industrial centers in great numbers since the outbreak of China hostilities'. Is this because of high wages in the industrial centers, or because the war strain is ruining the country districts? Asahigraph boasts of the efficiency of the census taken on October 1 at midnight when everyone was instructed to be at home, and prints a photograph with the descriptive caption: 'At the stroke of midnight census-taking squad raids a community of tramps and beggars in one of Tokyo's parks'. What poverty that produces communities of tramps and beggars in the parks! The Military Review for December 1940 reports the following concerning Japan: According to investigations conducted by Asahi, the cost of living index in Japan for July 1940, was 253.7 (July 1914 being taken as 100 ). Compared with pre-Chinese War times, the price index shows an average advance of 31.9 percent, the most conspicuous item being a rise of 64.6 percent in the price of clothing. Indices for the various items as compared withJuly, 1937, are given below:

Expense

July 1937 July 1940 Advance

Food and drink Housing Heating and lighting Clothing Culture Average

181 233 194 168 186

261 237 273 276 210

43.8% 1.5% 40.7°/o 64.6% 13.0%

192

254

31.9%

Small wonder that the Japanese people did not respond with 1ubilation' to the new Alliance. The revolution may well make its first explosion in the East before it extends to the West.

us Entry Draws Near Chiang Kai-shek asks for a 'loan' of $200,000,000 for continued opposition to Japanese imperialism. He receives $25,000,000 on the line with a prom-

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ise of more, pending guarantees of his proper behavior in the interests of Wall Street. Roosevelt stiffens the backbone of Petain by proposing Pershing, head of the last expeditionary army, as Ambassador to France with Admiral Leahy as actual substitute. Petain's backbone stiffens enough to dismiss Anglophobe Laval - us backing means a possible better deal with Hitler. Roosevelt holds up a proposal of the Red Cross to dispatch 10,000 tons of wheat to the starving people of Spain pending assurances from Franco that he will remain nonbelligerent for a while longer. 'If assured that the Madrid government would not participate in the war', says the Anny and Navy Journal for December 14, 'the wheat would leave at once for distribution among the Spanish people'. Finland, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Central Poland facing famine and pestilence with the prospective loss of millions of lives are denied relief although the necessary stock of food, according to the same issue of the Anny and Navy Journal, 'even if it were all seized, would be less than three days' food supply for Germany and this could have no importance in prolonging the war'. Vice-President Wallace was sent to Mexico on a 'good will' expedition with the hope that he will prove a greater success in popularizing Roosevelt's regime among the Latin-American people than he did among the Middle-West farmers; and the diplomatic conversations continue for air and naval bases in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Costa Rica, Mexico and the Dominican Republic to supplement the bases already obtained from Great Britain. At Valparaiso the Ministry of Defense has given final approval to plans of a privately owned ChileanUnited States company to build a$ 5,000,000 drydock capable of accommodating the new heavy battleships which are to be added to the United States fleet. When damaged in the South Pacific in the coming battles with Japan, these battleships can be repaired without returning all the way to the home base. Opposition to these moves of us imperialism on the part of the Latin-American people is being smoothed over with heavy loans to the South American dictators. In the Far East Roosevelt is bidding for bases in Australia and New Zealand as well as at Singapore and is making heavy efforts to concentrate maximum fleet strength in the path Japan must take when she starts moving southward. He is likewise buying up Australian wool and the rubber and tin of British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies far in excess of immediate needs. Convinced that Great Britain has been in effect defeated and can now be utilized as a base for operations against the German imperialism without fear of thereby bolstering the British Empire, Roosevelt is now sending 80 percent of us combat planes to Britain, has dropped all talk of payment for munitions, and is preparing to give convoy protection for armaments being sent across the

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Atlantic. The militarists are definitely in the saddle after years of planning precisely for the present war: 'Ever since the first World War', declares the Anny and Navy Journal of December 21, 'the high commands of the Army and the Navy and Marine Corps have been dinning into the ears of Presidents and Congresses the basic needs of their respective services ... Until the current European crisis began to unfold with all its horrors, they found their disclosures disregarded, their warnings unheeded, and their estimates cut. They were voices in the wilderness lost in the clamor of pacifists for disarmament. Facing the certainty that war would come, war which would roar upon American shores, they continued year after year to plan'. And these military realists who hailed Knudsen's Roosevelt-inspired disclosures concerning the 'lag' in armament production continue: Berlin and Rome have greeted ominously the President's arm loan program. It is in fact not new, it is merely an expansion of the policy of aid short of war to England, which the government has pursued since the outbreak of hostilities. We have turned over to the British, destroyers, planes, guns, rifles, etc. We have done this directly or through return of the material to manufacturers, who have sold it to England. Now the President has determined to do away with subterfuge, to implement openly and honestly his promises to England ... The axis powers now will realize that there will be no strings tied to our aid to England. Her military and naval needs are made paramount ... We will not be content to wait production to help her. We will even go so far, for example, as to purchase Danish and other merchant men tied up in American ports, and tum them over to her in order that she may not be starved into surrender. It is not too much to say, also, that if she needs additional money, that, too, will be supplied, perhaps through credits indirectly arranged by the Reconstruction Finance Corp. and the Export-Import Bank. Thus our aid to England has become direct and total, and commits us to her support until she shall achieve victory ... Throughout the United States the press considers that the definitive step, which Roosevelt will take to enter the war will be convoy protection, which most of the bourgeois editorial writers advocate as an immediate necessity. Here are some typical declarations:

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Without discussing the wisdom of a convoy system or deciding whether it is necessary or practical, it can be said that such a step would bring us immediately into the war. There can be no other result from that policy. Jackson, Michigan, Citizen Patriot

High administration officials are prepared to recommend that President Roosevelt ask Congress to repeal or modify the neutrality act so that American naval vessels may convoy American merchant ships to Great Britain ... a decision by the administration on the question of convoys for American shipping cannot be delayed long after the new Congress comes in next month. Philadelphia Inquirer

Entry of the United States into the war without reservation ... German Uboats and airplanes are attacking British convoys ... if the United States Navy undertook the burden of convoy duty, German U-boats and airplanes would necessarily continue the attack. Sooner or later American ships and American lives would be lost on one side, German submarines and German lives on the other. Both sides would then expand their activities to make them effective. Springfield, Mass. Republican

The time has come when the American Navy should be used to convoy merchant ships to Britain ... is the next logical step in our program to aid England by all means short of war, and it could be put into operation immediately ... The neutrality law also should be amended to permit American merchantships to carry goods to England. Why keep up a pretense of being neutral when we are not neutral? Cleveland Plain Dealer

Convoying British ships would not be neutral. Milwaukee journal

Americans who imagine that they can sit back and let the British win the war for them, while they do nothing about it except what is cheap, easy and convenient, are living in a fool's paradise. Keeping those sea lanes open is as vital an interest to the United States as it is to Great Britain, and if Americans expect it to be done they will have to put all their energy and boldness into the problem. New York Herald Tribune

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The Kiplinger Washington Letter, a high-priced inside information service 'circulated privately to business men' which 'prohibits' quotation makes some sensational revelations which have not appeared in the press designed for working class consumption precisely because they explain all the recent moves of Roosevelt and the bourgeois propagandists who aid him in his program of war:

There are times when unpleasant truths should be blurted out, and this is one of those times ... A war-time economy is about to be imposed upon the nation, even before or regardless of actual entrance into the war. Harder work and more sacrifice for all ... is to be the slogan. Here is the situation as it is viewed by our government: England is in a bad way ... Peace or truce is unlikely ... Our government course is fixed against anything resembling 'appeasement.' In January or February a push for peace or truce is expected. Technically and formally our government is supposed to be open minded, but essentially the official spirit or mood is strongly against it. Roughly, tentatively, three periods are in the official minds: First, from now to March, a speed-up in production, voluntary. There will be some compulsions, but main reliance will be on voluntary. Second, probably in March, a crack-down by the government in the form of a declaration of the legal state of 'imminence of war.' This would give the President practically dictatorship over everything, and would establish a war-time economy in advance of war itself ... Third, actual overt war against the Axis, perhaps by mid-1941. This is less definite than the other two steps, but it is 'contemplated' and a 'prospect' for which plans must be rushed in the next six months. Of course most officials do not positively wish for war, but many seem to be coming to the conclusion that it is inevitable, and that the nation must prepare as if the prospect of war were sure. The international perspective of American imperialism is a carefully planned entry into the World War to gain domination of the earth. At home, however, like the British and the Japanese, they do not see quite so clearly. The December 14 Letter says on this score: Outlook for years ahead is for deficits and mounting debt. No end is even faintly in sight. Even after the war (or the emergency), armament outpourings may be channeled into peace-time gov't projects to prevent a crash, to provide a bridge. And so ... continuing deficits. To avoid a fiscal crackup, there will be government regulation, controls of many sorts. They may

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work, but there's no way of telling. Thus the war into which we now seem to be heading will mean quite a different sort of financial and economic system after the war. No one is wise enough to know just what it will be. Dec. 14 Letter

But it is clear to Marxists exactly what it will be: either fascism with all its horrors, or a social revolution and the establishment of socialism which will forever end the regime of the bourgeoisie with its hunger, crises, wars.

The USSR and the War

Stalin, destroyer of the October revolution, has been reduced to one of the most miserable positions in the field of international politics. Where the leaders of the October revolution, Lenin and Trotsky, published all the secret treaties of the imperialist powers and conducted the negotiations forced upon them by these powers in the full light of world publicity so that the international working class could understand what was happening and exert their pressure in favor of the Soviet Union, Stalin has engaged in secret diplomacy like any bourgeois diplomat and made secret deals behind the backs of the workers and at their expense. Not a word came out of the Soviet Union as to the nature and purpose of Molotov's conversations with Hitler in Berlin. If Stalin acquiesced in the recognition of Japanese conquests, as American militarists believe,Japan took advantage of the secrecy and signed a treaty with its puppet Wang Ching-wei, the terms of which, according to the December 7 Army and Navy journal 'far exceeded those revealed in prospect to Foreign Commissar Molotov when he was in Berlin'. To show his displeasure, Stalin ordered the GPU agent who is acting as his Ambassador in Washington to call on the State department and offer them the 'reopening of an American consulate at Vladivostock'. It is to such utterly impotent gestures that Stalin has been reduced! If Stalin hopes to stave off war and even make new territorial gains through converting Turkey into a second Poland, those hopes at best can be of only temporary nature. More likely, with its increasing weight on the European continent, German imperialism will itself attempt to take the Dardanelles and let Stalin content himself with a challenge to Britain and hence the United States through his acceptance of a port on the Persian Gulf. Until Hitler finally achieves his future military catastrophe, Stalin will find himself in increasing dependence upon his master and thereby in increasing danger. Hitler has not for one moment taken his eyes from the Ukraine. He will tum attention upon

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the Soviet Union when he has finished with Britain. Stalin may well find himself the victim of an agreement between the German and the American imperialists before he has been given the opportunity to renounce his pact with Hitler and make a new one with Roosevelt. The danger to the Soviet Union grows with the progress of the imperialist war. Degenerated, distorted, suffering from the totalitarian grip of the monstrous Stalinist bureaucratic growth, the USSR nevertheless remains the only nation in the world where the bourgeoisie are expropriated, where the means of production have been taken out of the hands of a small exploiting minority and nationalized. As such it remains a conquest of the workers. When the flames of World Warr r have engulfed the entire planet, when the imperialists scourge the face of the earth with famine, pestilence, and death, the war weary workers will tum to the example set by the October revolution. They will rise with unconquerable strength and launch the new socialist society. Their revolution will at the same time end the Stalinist bureaucracy. A new era of peace and plenty will open. The first glimmerings are already perceptible among the oppressed who have been dragooned to fight by the capitalist class of Japan, Italy, Great Britain, France and - the United States.

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How Paris Fell (June 1941)

Terence Phelan (Sherry Mangan)

As bourgeois culture goes, it is indisputable that Paris was the heart of civilization.11 It was 'the city of light', the world's artistic Mecca. In the amenities of daily living, in poetry, painting and music, it was unsurpassed. Lenin, no sentimentalist, loved Paris and called it 'the capital of the world'. For a rare once, then, we can agree with the petty-bourgeois intellectuals the world over to whom the fall of Paris symbolized the end of an era of civilization. They mourn, they lament and they weep, but they refuse to face the question of greatest importance. Why was the foremost citadel of bourgeois culture abandoned to Nazi barbarism without a shot being fired in its defense? Let us try to answer it for them. This is how I saw Paris as it fell.

The Breakdown of the French Bourgeoisie

Paris as it fell was tragically beautiful. Late on the afternoon of Wednesday, the 12th of June, the petroleum and gasoline reserves in all the suburban refineries were set on fire by retreating French troops. Paris was ringed with monumental and sinister columns of jet, oily smoke. These, meeting at the zenith, far above the white cumulus clouds, slowly blotted out the sun, and spread a black pall over the doomed and deserted city. The blotting out of 'the city of light' by that cloud was a sort of grim apocalypse. Many bourgeois foreign correspondents have compared this to the black onrush of Nazis. It reminded me just as strongly of another obfuscatory cloud; that of the fleeing French censorship which, until the very last, characteristically refused to disclose the truth to its people. At the very moment that the surrender of Paris was being arranged at its own gate, the censor was still reporting that German troops were being held 40 kilometers away. Through that

11

Phelan 1941.

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black, foreboding sky, Parisians who sat by their radios (newspapers having ceased publication) first came in contact with German technique. The German advance had left the French government without enough broadcasting stations to broadcast news itself or to continue its war-long practice of ~amming' German broadcasts. Thus, for the first time, the French heard the cold, accurate account of the Germans' advance from the Germans themselves. It was a sobering shock. No less characteristic was the behavior of the upper classes. The Paris correspondent of a Chicago paper, with a taste for statistics, calculated that 71 % of the metropolitan Parisians and 68 % of the suburban Parisians who fled southward were bourgeois and petty-bourgeois. The wealthy quarters were entirely empty as their inhabitants piled into their expensive cars and deserted their capital in panic. This same correspondent aptly called this flight 'The Great Bugger-Out'. Most characteristic of all was the indecision about Paris on the part of the government. Contradictory orders were piled on top of one another. An order that all men above 17 were to leave the city at once for the south was followed by a countermanding order whereby they must, under penalty of being considered deserters, remain with the factories in which they had been requisitioned. In a burst of heroic bombast, the government announced that Paris would be defended 'street by street and house by house'. Three days later came the formal declaration that Paris was to be an open city.

The Nightmare of the Bourgeoisie

What lay behind such conflicting orders? Why was Paris not defended? No modem city which is seriously defended can be taken until it is either razed to the ground or starved and thirsted out. Madrid was defended for two years against overwhelming odds. Why, then, was Paris, not only the capital, but the economic nerve center of all France, abandoned at the last minute without a semblance of struggle? Was it because the French forces were, as they stated, so devoted to the artistic monument of Paris, so tender toward its populace? Nonsense! If that would have furthered its own ends, the French bourgeoisie of 1940 would have reduced Paris to rubble, as it came close to doing in 1871. Was it, as some AngloAmerican editors suggested, that France had 'degenerated', and French soldiers were cowards? The British Ministry of Information may spread such an explanation, but the French bourgeoisie knew better. It knew that the ordinary poilu was, and remains, as good a fighting man as there is in the world, provided he had something to fight for. In fact, the contrary was the truth. The French

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rulers were not so much afraid that the poilu Lacked courage; it was afraid that he would show it - in other ways than ordered. The French government and the French bourgeoisie was plagued by a nightmare, a nightmare so terrifying that it thought anything, even the yielding of its capital, preferable. That nightmare was a second Paris Commune. The heroic proletarian ghost of 1871 rose from the streets of its slaughter to make the French bosses jibber. A Commune! Anything, anything - rather than that! As a matter of fact, the possessing classes need not have worried so much. Stalinism and reformist socialism had done their dirty work only too well, during the Popular Front period. The workers of Paris were comparatively apathetic, virtually leaderless, wholly disorganized. There was no revolutionary party of mass strength to evoke and direct a proletarian defense. Under the prevailing circumstances, a Commune would have been an almost impossible improvisation. But even that extremely remote possibility was too much for the French bourgeoisie to bear; they were determined that no interlude should intervene long enough to permit the creation of any proletarian defense of their capital. To avoid that greater evil, they raced against time to deliver their city to the 'lesser evil' - the oncoming Nazis.

The Transfer of Power

No aspect of the collapse of France has been more obscured than this, in the official report. The reason is not hard to find. The cowardly betrayal strips from the French ruling class its masquerade costume of classless 'national patriotism', which helped it deceive the nation. Its voluntary gift of Paris to the Nazis reveals in all its foul class nakedness the bourgeoisie's preference for an enemy imperialism to defense by its own people. The delivery of the capital, the transfer of power, was accomplished with a smoothness beyond the French bosses' most optimistic expectations. They were really frightened of their own people. When the ministry fled southward, police began to disappear from the streets, and to be concentrated in barracks in genuine fear of their lives. For 20 years they had snarled at the Paris populace unchecked, ridden it down, arrested it and smashed it over the head. They had good reason to fear that, in any interregnum between the government's flight and the Germans' arrival, the long-abused masses might hunt them down like rats. It was both comical and dream-like to see how few 'flies' still showed their ugly mugs as they stood in timid pairs at a good distance from and in obvious terror of groups of discussing Parisians, especially workers massed around

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closed factory doors. Even those most vicious of professional strike-breakers, the black helmeted and black-hearted 'gardes mobiles' went into terrified hiding. I saw one of them, caught in the open, ostentatiously helping an old lady across a completely traffic-less street in a ridiculous attempt to make himself out as kind-hearted. Meanwhile, the French army emissaries were engaged in hasty parleys with a German Army commission in a villa outside Paris. Working against time, against the fear that the Parisians might take matters into their own hands, they were successful; the military arrangements were agreed to. At 6 p.m., the night before the occupation, the civil and police arrangements were likewise being completed at the eastern gates. When late-sleeping Parisians awoke on the morning of Paris' fall, the first thing they saw was the Paris police out in full force again, hauling down the tricolor and running up the swastika on public buildings and boulevard flag-posts. Within three days the comforting presence of their new masters restored the spirits of the police enough to bring forth their old bullying selves. They demanded 'papers' for the purpose of catching political refugees, turning over their archives to the Gestapo, and enforcing the new German regulations. The old blood-hounds who had hunted down revolutionaries and working class militants so long for the French bourgeoisie, went down on all fours before their new masters. The heart of the French police system is the Prefecture on the Isle de la Cite. Essentially unchanged since the days of the sinister Fouche, this great gray building, grim and grimy, has been the French symbol of secret police terror. There each week went thousands of refugees, driven from their own countries because they struggled against reaction, each with a pathetic ragged purple paper informing him that he must leave France within one week. They came to have this lease on life extended for one week more. This is how the emigre workers and democrats really lived in the greatest and most cultured of bourgeois democracies, renowned for 'political asylum'. By the Monday before occupation, the Prefecture was unrecognizable. Amid an atmosphere of burning documents and impending disaster, I saw running about the corridors those powerful functionaries from secret inner offices whose special delight it had been to remain invisible and unapproachable, to condemn a helpless petitioner without ever permitting him to plead his case face to face with them. These formerly omnipotent individuals were scurrying about in a panic that swung between a speechless impatience to get away, and a propitiatory politeness for self-protection. The notorious purple papers, still humbly presented for extension were waved aside with a hasty but significant statement - 'papers don't matter any more, we are beyond the stage of papers'.

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They spoke the simple truth. The Prefecture's 'paper' was worthless, like that of a bankrupt business or financial concern, because it had no material backing. The whole system of state repression had fallen to pieces, was powerless. Only a week before it had been sending men to death, to long imprisonment. It had the power of seizure, of holding incommunicado, of secret torture, of frameup. It had all the terrifying prestige of state power behind it. And now, here it was, dissolving like sugar in water.

The Hollow Shell

I had read about the breakdown of Czarism and the collapse of Kerensky's regime. But the dissolution of the French State was a sight - and a lesson never to be forgotten. Literary descriptions can give a theoretical understanding of the process and its significance, but it is quite a different thing to see the state structure crumble before your very eyes. The experience is overwhelming. We do not realize how much we are hypnotized by the apparent power and permanence of the boss state. I thought of the hundreds of good American union members I knew, who were ready to fight any private corporation to a standstill, but who thought that the State was something quite different, something too big and too enduring to struggle against and overthrow. I wish they had been standing beside me and could see with their own eyes what a hollow shell the whole monumental-looking system of boss state repression really is, once it has been shaken to its foundations by a real blow. It was tragic that in the case of France it had to be another imperialism a rival bourgeois repression machine - that the French Prefecture was giving way to. But that nowise affected the fundamental lesson of the collapsibility of the decadent bourgeois state. For the first time I then realized with my own eyes, ears and heart the profound meaning of the revolutionary cry: 'we are so many; they are so few!' I then understood that once the determining sector of the working class takes the revolutionary road and moves against the capitalist state, that state will crumple with an ease that will surprise the workers. Under sufficient pressure, the entire apparatus - its cops, its sheriffs and deputies, its army officers, its governors and judges and cabinet ministers and presidents - will run like so many scared rabbits. In an hour like this one really feels, in his own skin, the absolute tightness of the Marxist analysis of the state as the executive committee of the ruling class, of government as an instrument of armed repression. One sees how the ruling

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class maintains itself by bribing a thin segment of the workers to act as mercenary police against its own class struggle; and realizes how thin that segment is.

The Unknown Soldier

Returning home at midnight, between Thursday the 13th and Friday June 14th, through a black and empty Paris, I noticed that the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe, was deserted. The French government had fled, the plutocrats had fled, even the paid guards of the Tomb had fled. There, yesterday, the French rulers had skillfully and shamelessly exploited the genuine popular mourning for the unknown dead of the last war. On the morrow the army of German imperialism, using the same skillful means of propaganda, were going with their ostentatious orders, to pick up where the French imperialists had left off. But at the moment, between the regime of capitalist repression that had gone and the regime of imperialist oppression that was marching in on the morrow, the unknown soldier lay, as the perfect symbol of the completely forgotten man, the plain ordinary guy who gets killed so that one gang of exploiters rather than another can make his widow and children work for less pay and live in more misery. At that moment neither of the gangs had any real interest in him. For a brief hour, the unknown soldier was left alone, with only a stray foreign revolutionist standing by to honor him, with pity and vengeance in his heart.

The Entry of the German Troops A vague terror pervaded the city before the German troops arrived. The people left in Paris would not have been surprised to see columns of mechanized men marching into the city, after the swift speed of the Nazis' advance. Instead they saw battalion after battalion of robust farm boys on sleek, fat horses. The troops entered as though they expected to be received, not as conquerors but as deliverers. Every detail of the capture of Paris was executed with the calculated political aim of at least neutralizing the French, if not gaining them as allies. The Parisians had had reason to be frightened. The colonial troops, who fell back to the region around Paris, had looted and destroyed in a terrifying manner. These troops were sacrificed by their French commanders with a brutal

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carelessness beyond belief, and it can well be imagined with what rage and hatred toward the French, these colonials had retreated, through northeastern France. French propaganda led the people to expect the same treatment from the Germans. It can readily be imagined, then, what effect the agreeable occupation of the city by the Germans had upon the people. By passing their mechanized divisions around Paris to the south, the Nazis took over the city with the cheeriest, politest, most fraternizing of available troops. Contrasted with the looting of the French colonials, the behavior of the occupying Germans was almost comic in its correctness, so far did they lean over backward in observing legality. Reichswehr squads went about making inventories of damages, duly witnessed by French civil authorities. They, themselves, did no damage at all. Except for such big hotels and chateaux as were needed for officers' quarters, there were very few requisitions. Rare occasions of illegal requisitions or thefts by German soldiers were punished by immediate and ostentatious execution of the soldier involved in the presence of the aggrieved French civilian. An acquaintance of mine witnessed such an execution for the theft of six cakes and 100 francs' ($2.25 in American currency) worth from the woman proprietor of a bake-shop. During the first week of the occupation, about as many German soldiers were executed for such misdeeds as were French civilians for their resistance to German repression: about 10 Frenchmen were executed; two of them, to give the devil his due, were policemen. As soon as the parades needed for movie consumption at home in Germany were duly completed, the bulk of the occupying troops, given leave, started to visit artistic monuments and talk to the civilians. Most spoke French; all were polite. They were full of their own brand of anti-capitalism and they were perpetually apologizing to the French for being there at all. I overheard one soldier talk as follows: You Parisians are so polite; we have always heard you were. But we Germans know that you don't like to have us here. We are embarrassed too, you know. How can you be expected to like us, when we had to destroy large sections of your country to the north and east and when we have to take over your capital? We don't want to, but we have to, until we have beaten the capitalistic, imperialistic England, which starved and stifled Germany until National Socialism made us strong enough to fight back. But you French will administer Paris; we Germans will try to efface ourselves as much as possible. The Parisians had expected almost anything except this type of fraternization.

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While this source of well-rehearsed and, it is not at all unlikely, sincere declarations, were being made by the German soldiers to the people of Paris, the British Broadcasting Co. was accusing the French of cowardice and betrayal, just after the British had scampered out of the Dunkerque pocket, abandoning therein the 84,000 French poilus who had covered their retreat. It can be readily understood why the French people didn't become enthusiastically pro-British after the fall of Paris.

'Kill Them with Kindness'

On the road south of Paris, the humanitarianism of the German troops was as striking as their previous terrorism which had originally caused the chaos. The great columns of German trucks, rushing supplies to the fighting in the south became, as they sped northward again for further supplies, the surest transport for returning French refugees. Loaded with women and children, they could almost always spare a bit of food for the hungry or a liter of gasoline for a stalled car. They spread good-nature and puzzlement everywhere. Was this the Hun that the French radios and press had taught them to expect? the people asked. It was, but not at the moment. Mixing their methods, the clever Nazis outwitted the French by treating them in a totally different fashion than they had anticipated. By 'killing them with kindness', the Nazis succeeded in dumbfounding and immobilizing any potential resistance. The conduct of the Germans stood in particular contrast with the attitude of the British old-school-tie officers, who in the pre-Blitz days treated the French in the same lordly way as they were accustomed to treat Gold-Coast natives or Indians. The sole exception was the fascist Italian residents in Paris, who emerged from hiding after the Germans came, and strutted about like pouter-pigeons, arousing great popular resentment. Most skillful of all instruments were the news-broadcasting trucks which the Germans sent to every quarter of Paris. The Parisians had begun to discard as useless their home radios, from which they received either regular insults from the British or irregular lies from their own fleeing government. To their surprise and sorrow, they received from the German newscasting apparatus restrained and accurate information on the progress of the fighting and the French governmental crisis which ended in the Petain-Laval-Marquet coup d'etat. There is no weapon so strong as truth, even when it is pressed into the service of the worst reaction. Newspapers were encouraged to resume publication; censorship was, in actual fact, milder than under the French regime. Typical was a new daily

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called La France au Travail. Its slogan was 'national communism'. It was of course 200 per cent patriotic French. While 'admitting' that the Germans, having beaten the French in fair fight, had a right to occupy the strategic north until the campaign against England was completed, it 'pressed' for the retirement of the invader at 'the earliest possible moment'. With obvious access to police archives, it ran a devastatingly documented series of attacks on the late Reynaud government, proving to the hilt its suppression of civil liberties, its graft, frameups, anti-labor policy, etc. It attacked capitalism savagely, and called for a French renaissance under nationalist slogans. It even discreetly criticized Germany. (The only place the German cloven hoof showed through was in the paper's unremitting attacks against the Vichy government).

The Failures of Fascist Propaganda It is difficult to conceive a more accurately aimed, psychologically skillful kind of propaganda than La France au Travail. And how did the Paris workers react to this super-French press? To their eternal credit be it reported: they called it 'the German press' and used it to wrap potatoes in when they could find potatoes. One must report that the French working class has grown to some extent politically cynical; it has been sold but so many times by the socialists and Stalinists, that it tends to distrust all politics, including correct politics. But the vast political experience which the French working class has undergone has not been in vain as shown by its immediate hostility to such papers as La France au Travail. The very first weeks of German occupation showed, too, that a successful invasion by a fascist power brought no prestige to native fascism. On the contrary. The main fascist group, the Doriot followers, failed to gain any adherents. Under Marchale (Doriot himself being still in the unoccupied territory) the French fascists rushed into print with a new weekly, La Vie Nationale and, under German protection, began a drive for membership. But they were soon chased out of workers' districts and finally wandered miserably about in front of fashionable cafes, happy to sell a paper here and there. Anti-Semitism looked menacing for just a moment, after the occupation, when 'Aryans only' signs appeared on some cafes and restaurants and the kept press started a violent campaign of the most vulgar Jew-baiting. But AntiSemitism won no converts, did not spread, and was by most people treated as a joke. Students of fascist methods were expecting some frameup, like planting a Jewish grocery full of foodstuffs and then spreading word in the neighborhood that the Jew was hoarding. But the contempt with which the ordinary Parisian

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treated the anti-Semitic campaign apparently made the Nazis and their French friends decide it was useless to attempt such a tactic. As a matter of fact, the only propaganda campaign that had any success was that against the British. The ground it fell on was not barren. There was a widespread feeling among all classes that it was British imperialism which had dragged France into the war and that in military support the British had let them down badly. Still, it is to be doubted whether the anti-British campaign would have had the success it did have, had it not been for Churchill's order to attack the French fleet at Oran. The French were sick of the war, they felt they were out of the war; they believed that preparations had been made to sink the fleet rather than to tum it over to the Germans should the latter violate the armistice terms. It was simply too much then, they felt, when the British, alleging that Hitler was thinking of seizing the French fleet in violation of the armistice terms, tried to sink the semi-disarmed fleet, killing some 2,000 French sailors in the process. Fortunately for Churchill, not even the Oran murders could make the French proletariat agree to support the German war against England. The workers want no more of the bloody and meaningless imperialist war on either side.

Hitler's 'New Order' Blossoms

In the defeated nation, class distinctions remained sharper than ever. Till at least as late as October, anyone who had the price ofioo francs (h.25) per head, could stroll into, say, the Restaurant Chez Pierre and have himself a little snack consisting of caviar, Langouste, chauteaubriand marchand de vins with pommes sou.Jfies, salad, wild strawberries with thick creme d'Isigny, the whole washed down with Montrachet Goutte d' Or 1934 and Chambolles-Musigny Clos Comte de Vogue 1915, followed by plenteous coffee with accompanying Grand Marni er Cordon Rouge or a good 50-year-old fine-champagne. But in the workers' suburbs hundreds of women stood in hundreds of interminable lines waiting to buy a single cabbage, swapping tips on where to get a tiny piece oflaundry soap or trying to figure out how much truth there was in the rumor that such and such a market would sell one-half pound of potatoes per customer the following day. And those in these lines were the ones who still had some few pitiable savings; far more were standing in other long lines in front of soup-kitchens, waiting for their pint of weak and nearly meatless pot-au-feu. This was Hitler's New Order. Nearly two million unemployed haunted the closed factories of Paris. What work there was, was mostly at the Citroen plant - completely wiped out by

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astonishingly accurate German bombing during the one big air-raid on central Paris - helping in wrecking and salvaging operations, or loading immense quantities of heavy industrial machinery on flat-cars for Germany. Because, much more significant than the rather childish lies of British propaganda, it was not of food that Germany was stripping France, but of all machinery for heavy industry, in accordance with the long-range Nazi plan of reducing France to an agricultural and light-conversion-industry economy. The Nazis from the first showed little confidence of being able to secure enthusiastic acceptance from the Parisian masses for a perspective of a vassal agricultural state. Even in the first days when the German troops were fraternizing with the population, arrests began. They were carried out in the skillful nibbling tactics of the Gestapo. Very secretly, a few at a time, so as not to arouse the masses, the Gestapo began rounding up revolutionists, Stalinists, and militant trade unionists. No matter how many they may arrest, however, they cannot behead the growing movement against Hitler's 'New Order'. As the months have passed since the writer's departure, he has had indications that the situation has sharpened still further. Nor should one believe the fabrications about France in the American and British press: the resistance against the invader has nothing in common with the 'Free France' movement of the segment of French imperialists led by De Gaulle. There is as little hope for France under a restoration of the old national capitalism as there is under Hitler. If Hitler is obliged to reverse the historic process and de-industrialize France, the De Gaullists would do no better. Two wars, the first of which ruined even a victorious France, and the second of which finally destroyed her as an independent nation, have amply proved that the nationalistic anarchy of a divided Europe cannot solve anything, even if it could be restored. To avoid more such wars and to save and expand the productive forces that can only be done by the Socialist United States of Europe. That is the only conceivable perspective for the French people. And small but significant beginnings in France today show that history is inevitably moving that way: as a national liberation movement arises, in the form of thousands of little isolated underground committees, they tend to slip over from national movements into social movements, for the reason that there is obviously no longer any economic base in French national capitalism.

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3

Class Relations in the Soviet Union (July 1941)

john G. Wright Uoseph Vanzler)

Although the military operations at the front are of extreme importance, the fate of the Soviet Union will not be decided on a purely military plane but on the arena of the class struggle. 12 It cannot be repeated too often that the greatest breach in the defensive power of the USSR lies not so much in any salient which the Nazi armored divisions have driven through the Red Army's lines of defense as it does in the atomization, disorientation, demoralization and resulting passivity of the European labor movements. No matter how stubbornly and heroically the Red Army resists the Nazi onslaught, if the world working class remains prostrate the end result will be not only the downfall of Stalin's regime but also of the remaining conquests of the October revolution. As Lenin and Trotsky warned time and again, the fate of the Soviet Union will be decided on the international arena. The foreign policies of the Kremlin, carried out obediently and unquestioningly always and everywhere by the parties of the Third International, prepared the ground for Hitler's previous triumphs. Stalin's policy is once again clearing the way for Nazi successes. It is not accidental that from the Communist International there emanates today only the silence of the grave. Dimitrov, the 'helmsman of the Comintern' has not dared to this day to open his mouth. When and if he is permitted to do so it will not be to rally the world masses to the policy of defense through revolutionary war. The Kremlin is once again staking everything on another alliance with imperialists, this time the camp of Anglo-American 'democracies'. A victory of Churchill and Roosevelt opens up only the perspective of a new and much worse edition of the Versailles Treaty. What appeal can this possibly have for the German masses? It only drives them into Hitler's hands. The German workers will begin to move only if the way out through socialism - through the Socialist United States of Europe - is opened

12

Wright 1941.

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for them. But this is the road which the Kremlin seeks to block at all costs. Stalinism is again dealing the greatest blows to the defense of the Soviet Union.

Stalin Fears the October Tradition

After having boasted for so many years of having 'irrevocably' achieved the building of socialism in one country, after having announced that the very 'threshold of Communism' had already been reached, the Kremlin now prohibits even a whisper about it. All references to socialism are carefully deleted from Moscow's official statements, in particular, from all appeals to the German soldiers. The Manifesto of the Communist Party in this country follows suit (Daily Worker, June 30). This curries favor with London and Washington but will not spur German soldiers to fraternize with the Red Army fighters. There is also another reason for Stalinist reticence about socialism. The Kremlin's fear of the resurgence of the traditions, program and spirit of October surpasses its fear of the Nazi military might. This fear epitomizes the renegades from Bolshevism. This fear is expressed in everything the Kremlin says or does. It should be recalled that the Stalinists always have sworn that the great victories of the Civil War of 1918-1921 in which imperialist intervention was repelled on 22 fronts were primarily gained through the efforts of Stalin. But Molotov preferred to refer instead to the traditions of the Czarist triumph over Napoleon. He carefully evaded all references to those historical events with which Stalin is, according to the official myth, most closely associated. Was this perhaps done out of consideration for the modesty of the 'Great Father of the Peoples'? No, it was done because the bureaucracy must at all costs prevent the banner of October and of the Civil War - the banner of Lenin and Trotskyfrom being raised high again over the battlefields. But the final decision in this sphere, as in so many others, does not rest with the Kremlin. It rests with the greatest internal bulwark of defense, the Soviet working class. With the aid of the international vanguard the Soviet workers must and can summon the workers of the world to a revolutionary war.

The Soviet Proletariat

The Soviet working class today is ten to twelve times stronger numerically than were the workers in 1917 who led the Russian masses to the conquest of October and who defended them against the entire capitalist world in the greatest civil

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war in modern times. Thirty million soviet workers now operate the modem industrial apparatus and inhabit the cities of one-sixth of the world. In addition to quantitative differences there are profound qualitative differences between this numerically and productively more powerful working class and the workers under the Czar. The abolition of private property and of the proprietors is sharply expressed in the social composition of modem Soviet cities. The world has never seen such urban centers before. For the first time in history, events will occur under wartime conditions in cities where no bourgeoisie exists. Nor is there an urban petty bourgeoisie in the proper sense of the term. The proletariat constitutes the overwhelming majority of the urban population with a thin crust of the bureaucracy at the top, and a thinner stratum of the Stalinist underworld at the bottom. Even in Moscow, Leningrad and other capital cities of the Federated Republics and autonomous regions the same thing holds true. The bureaucracy in these capital cities constitutes but a minority. Only in the cities of the occupied areas (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia) are there still sizeable remnants of the old ruling classes and a middle class of any proportion. But the cities in Soviet Union proper have no middle class. All the petty bourgeois tendencies are concentrated within the ranks of the bureaucracy itself, and in the villages. This means that the counter-revolution faces an unprecedented task in the cities, i.e., the decisive centers, the counter-revolution lacks a genuine class base and will have either to improvise it or to import it. On the other hand, this provides the revolution with class resources never before at its disposal. Although the bulk of the workers stems from the land and was absorbed into industry during the first two Five Year Plans, the Soviet working class is far more homogeneous, despite its relative youth, than the Russian workers were in 1917, or the workers in any advanced capitalist countries are today. Trotsky estimated that at the outbreak of the February 1917 revolution, about 40 per cent of the Russian proletariat was of recent petty bourgeois origin, consisting predominantly of those who went into industry to avoid military service. Among the workers today not more than ten per cent are recent recruits from rural areas; moreover, they are extremely young and therefore tend to become proletarianized much more rapidly and readily than older peasants. The other workers who originally came from the villages have already behind them from five to ten years of proletarianization.

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Contrast between Bourgeoisie and Kremlin

The bourgeoisie possesses many means for intensifying differentiation within the ranks of workers. The bourgeoisie of any given nation can create a stable labor aristocracy; a social ladder, as it were, with gradations between the various skilled workers, and between the skilled and the unskilled. In addition, through the functioning of its educational, religious and state organs, the bourgeoisie is able to divide the workers along racial and religious lines. It is able to maintain its own political agencies within the working class from the outright bourgeois parties down to the various varieties of reformism. In contrast to this the Kremlin bureaucracy, which lacks a genuine class function, has not been able really to stratify the Soviet workers. Not that it hasn't sought to create a labor aristocracy and to create all possible divisions among the workers. But the Kremlin, while successful in creating an unbridgeable gulf between the privileged bureaucracy and the rest of the population has not been successful, despite all its efforts, in its attempts to foster any broad and stable labor aristocracy as a basis of support. What happened instead was this: the Stalinist aristocrats of labor - the Stakhanovists - became incorporated with the bureaucracy itself, replacing in many instances the older generations of revolutionists who became bureaucratized during and after the period of the NE P and who were by and large removed during the purges (1935-1938). Furthermore, the marked tendency in recent years has been to drive down the living standards of all workers, both skilled and unskilled. This has acted to fuse the various sections of the working class in a common hatred against the rapacious and oppressive bureaucracy. The living standards of all workers must now inevitably fall still lower. The working day, which was fixed at eight hours and a six-day week by the vicious decrees of June 21, 1940 has now been hiked to nine, ten and eleven hours a week. A dispatch from Moscow dated June 27, 1941, announces a decree which makes 'obligatory overtime work from one to three hours daily, both for all workers and office employees'. (Daily Worker,June 28). This means a legal working day of 11 hours and more.

New Conflicts between Workers and Bureaucrats

The vast majority of the Soviet workers will undoubtedly strain every ounce of energy to supply the fighters at the front. But their efforts come at all points into conflict with the irresponsible administration. The contradiction between

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the bureaucratic method of management and the demands of defense instead of weakening will intensify literally with every hour of war. For instance, the transportation facilities, already overstrained in peacetime, must now be used primarily to supply the front. How will the plants be supplied? The already monstrous physical strain upon the workers must presently reach the breaking point. The bureaucracy apparently realizes this, and has offered a special inducement in the form of an increase in pay for overtime. The decree specifies that 'remuneration for obligatory overtime (is) one and a half times the regular rates'. What will the workers be able to purchase with their increased wages in the face of scarcity and skyrocketing prices? Nevertheless, the 'raise' is highly symptomatic. It is the first time in years that the Kremlin has deemed it advisable to make any sort ofconcession to the workers. It is a tacit admission of the rising tide of opposition. To continue functioning, Soviet industry requires entirely different incentives and entirely different methods of management. Initiative on the part of the masses is now more indispensable than ever before. The struggle for rational working conditions and for the revival of workers' democracy coincides at all points with the life and death needs of Soviet enterprises and of the Red Army. The bureaucracy bars the way. The traditions of October and of the Civil War the program of Lenin and Trotsky- point the only way out. Will the Soviet workers take this road which is dictated by necessity? They have no other. To be sure, there exists as yet no organized and independent political force within the ranks of Soviet labor. But it ought not be forgotten that there still remain many millions in the land who participated directly or indirectly in the October revolution and who passed through the years of the Civil War. There are other thousands who have not forgotten the lessons of the struggle of the Left Opposition from 1923 to 1929, a struggle which reached the masses. In Stalin's jails and concentration camps now sit many who are capable of providing the necessary leadership and of working and fighting shoulder to shoulder with the masses, the Red Army ranks and with the new leaders now being tempered at the front, in the factories, the collective farms and among the youth. The traditions and methods of the great historical experiences of the Soviet masses will revive under the pressure of this gravest crisis. Once revived they will sweep the land with a speed and power beyond that of any Panzer divisions the imperialist world could muster. The very fact that Stalin chooses to keep so rigid a silence on the subject of October is in itself evidence that the bureaucracy already senses its approaching death.

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The Soviet Peasantry

What will the peasants do? They still constitute the great majority of the Soviet population. Has this social force, next in importance only to the proletariat, been irretrievably lost to the revolution because of the criminal policies of Stalinism? Or will they again as in 1917 and in the Civil War follow the lead of the revolutionary workers? The differentiation within the peasantry - its heterogeneity - contrary to Stalin's empty boasts of yesterday - does not fundamentally differ from that in capitalist countries. In general, the agricultural population is divided into the same main classes as exist in capitalist countries - the rural bourgeoisie (landlords, large scale farmers), the rural petty bourgeoisie (the well-to-do-farmers, the individual proprietors), and the rural proletariat (the agricultural laborers). Although the Czarist landlords have been abolished along with the old rural bourgeoisie, there nevertheless remains in Soviet agriculture a clearly delineated rural petty bourgeoisie in the shape of the kolkhoz (collective farm) aristocracy. Among the so-called 'millionaire kolkhozi' are even to be observed personages who strikingly resemble large scale farmers, i.e., rural bourgeois. In other words capitalist tendencies, far from having been abolished in agriculture, have merely been driven inside the collectives, and have luxuriated there. The capitalist tendencies in the collectives are further reinforced by some three million individual homesteads which have survived. In addition there are almost two million artisans most of whom are organized into cooperatives, with special privileges, tax exemptions, etc. granted them in January of this year. As the scarcity of foodstuffs and necessities becomes more and more acute, all the individualistic tendencies in agriculture will intensify. This is one of the main reservoirs of the counter-revolution. With the aid of Hitler or other imperialists, these elements might well be able to tum the hatred of all the peasants against Stalin into channels leading to capitalist restoration. The camp of the revolution, however, possesses this advantage: Hitler has really little to offer the peasants. The mask of 'liberator' sits poorly on a conqueror, all the more so an invader who comes to pillage after first sowing destruction and death. Phrases and promises, even threats and violence, will carry little weight with the great masses of the peasantry. They have had their fill of this diet from Stalin. The most backward and superstitious peasant is capable of reasoning. He is cognizant of the superiority of tractors and scientific large scale farming. Besides there has been an acute shortage of horses since the days of forced collectivization when all cattle were slaughtered. How will the crops be raised? Once the peasant is convinced that the fruits of his labor will not be de-

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voured by bureaucratic blood suckers or fascist despoilers - nothing will swerve him from his support of the resurgent revolution. Once the peasant is convinced that he is free to choose whether he wishes to cultivate his own land or to participate as a full-fledged and genuine shareholder in a collective farm, he will fight tooth and nail against the counter-revolution both from within and without. Once the peasant is convinced that the nationalized economy will be so planned as to take his vital needs into account he will readily lay down his life in defense of it. He will be further impelled to this choice by the fact that even his present scanty ration is directly threatened by the Nazis. All history teaches that the bitterest struggles are waged over the scantiest rations. Whatever territories Hitler may succeed in overrunning temporarily, he will have to hold with armies of occupation. It took more than 500,000 German soldiers to hold the Ukraine during the last war, when the Kaiser's Germany had the support of the old Ukrainian and Russian ruling classes. The results were very disappointing to the Kaiser. Hitler may well experience even a greater disappointment. Success for the counter-revolution can come only in the event that the proletariat fails to advance its own class program, and follows blindly Stalin's policy. The majority of the peasants who are members of the collectives or employees of Machine Tractor Stations, Sovkhozi (state farms), etc., are really agricultural laborers. Their interests coincide most closely with the interests of the urban workers. They will rally to the program of October; no other program can win them over, least of all the nationalist demagogy of the Kremlin.

The Soviet Youth

A crucial role in deciding the fate of the USSR is destined for its youth, the primary reservoir of the revolution. The giant Soviet proletariat is young not only in point of formation but also in actual age. A decisive section consists of young men and women under 27. Among the staunchest fighters in the Red Army are those young soldiers who received their training under the old command - the legendary heroes of the Civil War, the idols of the people, who modernized and mechanized the troops, developed the air force, introduced parachute troops and many other innovations, and whom Stalin murdered. The bureaucrats stand in greater fear of the youth than of any other single section of the population. The Komsomol (the Russian YCL) has been purged more frequently and savagely than any other branch of the apparatus. Five years ago, shortly before the staging of the first Moscow Frameup Trial in 1936, the Komsomol was dissolved as a political organization for fear lest it

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develop into an opposition political party. The ideas and program ofTrotskyism (Bolshevism) have from the outset met their maximum response and sympathy precisely among the Soviet youth. Even in its spontaneous forms the resistance of the youth to the regime was marked by its militant spirit. For example, the official press was compelled to admit that it was the young workers and members of the Komsomol who were in the forefront of resistance to the Ukases of June 26, 1940 which lengthened the working day to eight hours (and six days), and chained the workers to their jobs like medieval serfs. The most astonishing thing is that this militancy characterizes even striplings. When the decrees were adopted drafting children and youngsters from fourteen to seventeen into large scale industry, mines and railways, the bureaucracy insisted on paying them only one-third of the prevailing wages. But these bureaucrats reckoned without the children. They forced the Kremlin to change

its mind and to grant them very substantial increases. Article 19 of Order No. 1 issued by the Labor Reserves Administration in October, 1940 fixed the following wage scale: It is hereby established that one-third of the revenues accruing from the fulfillment of orders as well as work done ... during their period of training for industry is allotted to the state budget; one third is to remain at the disposal of the Director ... and one-third is to be given into the hands of thosefu!filling the work. (Our emphasis) Pravda, October 5, 1940

The children began work on December 1, 1940. Eight weeks later, their wages were increased to 80 per cent of the prevailing rates for those sixteen to seventeen and to 50 per cent for those fifteen and under (Pravda, February 5, 1941). Noteworthy, indeed, is the fact that the initiative compelling this 'concession' came from below, that is, from the most defenseless section of the working class, the child laborers. More than a million of these children are already in industry. Let us recall that the original party of Bolshevism under Czarist illegality was a party of very young workers.

The Stalinist Bureaucracy

The chief obstacle in the path of successful defense is the Stalinist bureaucracy. Although all data relating to this malignant and monstrous growth upon the organism of the first workers' state in history are a most closely guarded secret,

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it is nevertheless possible to estimate its numerical strength as somewhere in the neighborhood of ten per cent of the entire population, i.e., from 10 to 15 million, approximately twice the size of the former ruling classes and their retinue in Czarist Russia. In point of social origin and composition this bureaucracy is no monolith but a sort of crude patchwork. The oldest generation of those who either supported Stalin or capitulated to him after Lenin's death, has been annihilated physically. Hardly more than a few hundred survivors still remain, most of whom are in jail. The next generation, brought up and trained in the school of Stalinism and in utter ignorance of Bolshevism, its history, its traditions, its leaders, its methods, and its program, was likewise decimated during the purges before and after the signing of the Stalin-Hitler pact (1935-1938). The 'bloodless' purges of 1940 - after the Finnish invasion - completed the devastation of its ranks. The incumbent bureaucracy now largely consists of callow recruits. Among them are many sons and daughters of the former ruling classes, the progeny of former landlords, former capitalists, bourgeois intellectuals, Czarist generals, functionaries, etc. Another large tier is composed of Stakhanovists, most of whom are of very recent peasant origin and background. Fewest are those with proletarian background and origin. In the coming events, the bureaucracy will not be able to play an independent role. The final differentiation in its ranks will occur along class lines. There already exists an embryonic Fascist wing, typified by such individuals as Butenko, who, it will be recalled, deserted to Mussolini. Hitler no doubt hopes there are many more Butenkos who will desert to him. The days of this bureaucracy, as it is now constituted, are numbered. The war submits it to the final test. Stalin's regime now stands stripped of all its trappings and masks, naked before the world in its true despicable reactionary colors under conditions which make secrecy or camouflage no longer possible. 'There are no Municheers in the Soviet Union!' screams the Daily Worker in one more hysterical attempt to hide all the abominations and crimes of Stalinism. The Moscow Frameups, all the purges, the beheading of the Red Army, the destruction of the entire generation of Bolsheviks who made the October revolution and fought to victory in the Civil War, and, the crowning crime of all, the murder of Leon Trotsky- all this, these hirelings of the GPU are trying to palm off as measures indispensable for the defense of the Soviet Union. What these scoundrels are really saying is this: that it is impossible for Stalin any Longer to produce scapegoats for his own crimes. Yes, the Soviet masses and the whole world will now fix the responsibility for every breach in the lifelines of Soviet defense where it really belongs - upon the Judas-Cain in the Kremlin.

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Why Stalin Must Fall Stalin's regime - which has stifled all initiative, every living voice and every creative tendency in Soviet society - must crumble if only for the reason that initiative and creative ability are most indispensable precisely in war-time. Wherever this initiative arises it will come into mortal conflict with the bureaucracy. The initial impetus against the regime may come from the beheaded Red Army which is in direst and most immediate need to free itself from the dead hand of the totalitarian 'leadership'. The Kremlin has not the ability nor the policy for preserving the morale of the soldiers; it cannot keep the front properly supplied and equipped. The Kremlin and its flunkies put their own prestige and power above all other considerations. Moscow's official war communiques reveal the panic in the Kremlin which seeps through in its frantic attempts to paint up the officer-corps, to instill it with confidence, and, especially, bolster up its prestige. It is the lieutenants, majors, colonels, who are singled out for acclaim. If a rank-and-file Red soldier receives brief mention, it is only to mention his unquestionable readiness to shed his life-blood under any and all conditions. Yet it is precisely the initiative and the spirit of daring of the rank-and-file soldier and of the lowest command which will prove most decisive on the military arena. The Kremlin has done everything in its power to destroy this. Only a revolutionary war can release the vast creative forces latent in the masses at the front as well as behind the lines. We proceed from the knowledge that the strangled revolution still lives in the USSR. Every day of war will refresh the memories of those who fought in Trotsky's Red Army. Their sons and daughters, too, have not forgotten. But war speeds up in the extreme all processes, not only those of regeneration but also those of degeneration. It is a race for time between the still living forces of October and the march of the German imperialist war machine whose path is being cleared more by the corrupt and degenerate regime than by its own military might. Stalin is staking everything on the assistance of Churchill and Roosevelt. No force is too reactionary for Stalin if only he can temporarily summon it to his aid. His latest ally is the Russian Orthodox Church in the person of the Acting Patriarch Sergei, Primate of the All-Russian Orthodox Church and Metropolitan of Moscow. Pray on, gentlemen! We, however, stake everything on the real defense of the USSR- revolutionary war. We stake everything on the resurgence of the October spirit and the traditions of the Civil War. The strength of the resistance of the Soviet Union is not, as Hitler calculates, identical with the strength of resistance of Stalin's regime. The revolution once

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arisen will prove unconquerable. It will rise - as it has risen in the past - from the shambles of the most terrible defeats - and lift high once again the great and glorious banner of struggle and victory- the unconquerable banner of the October revolution and of the Civil War - the banner of Lenin and Trotsky.

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Europe Under the Iron Heel (February 1942) Marc Loris (Jean van Heijenoort)

This article proposes primarily to provide information for the non-European reader on the situation now existing in the continent which was for centuries the guide of mankind. 13 We reserve for another article an examination of our perspectives and of our political tasks. The information transmitted here is derived from bulletins and from special reviews, from conversations of the author with individuals arrived from Europe and finally from private communications received from Europe through underground channels. If one leaves aside for the moment the USSR, Europe has about 380 million inhabitants. Germany, with Austria, has 77 million. Her allies (Italy, Hungary, Finland. Bulgaria) have 60 million. The neutral countries (Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal) have 42 million. The British Isles - 51 million. Remaining are 150 million humans oppressed by Germany. Their countries are: Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece. The most important part of France is occupied and the rest directly controlled. As for Rumania, half conquered, half allied, it is in the position of an occupied country through its internal situation. During the first imperialist war of 1914-1918, Germany also occupied several territories in Europe (Belgium, Northern France, central European countries). The quantitative difference between the two wars is evident. But there is another distinction. In World War I the occupied territories were almost completely emptied of men of military age. Old men, women and children remained. Moreover, the fronts in western and central Europe were constantly moving. Industrial and agricultural production practically ceased. The present occupation is not only much more extensive, but also includes the mass of the population (except for prisoners of war in Germany) and there are no fronts in western and central Europe. But these advantages of the Nazis have also evoked resistance from the conquered population far beyond that of World Warr. 13

Loris 1942.

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All the forms of resistance which we are now witnessing existed in the previous war (in Belgium particularly), but they have now taken on enormously increased proportions. A Belgian newspaper published illegally in Brussels, La Libre Belgique, reported last August that more Belgians have been imprisoned in a year of occupation by the Germans than during the four years of 1914-1918.

Violence and Executions To give an idea of the situation in occupied France we reproduce from France Speaks some passages from a letter written in November 1941: The assassinations and sabotage now being committed in the occupied zone as well as the repressions that have followed, are creating a great stir in France, in all France. This wide official publicity is entirely new. The assassinations and the sabotage are an old story compared to it. Anyone who has lived in Paris and the occupied zone in 1940 and 1941 knows that if, in the capital, relations with the occupying force were peaceful, the same could not be said for the provinces. Beginning with the suburbs of Paris, there began to be signs of embittered relations. Many German soldiers were shoved into the canal near Saint-Denis. The farther away from Paris one went, the more those relations lacked that famous 'correctness' that was so emphasized in the official press. Dozens of large and small towns, villages and hamlets have seen on their walls the red posters announcing the executions of Frenchmen for 'assassinations' and 'assaults' perpetrated against the occupying force. Nearly all the towns of the occupied zone have had to pay fines as high as several million francs; have had to run the gamut of punishment, from earlier curfews to the closing of cafes, bans on going out on Sundays, etc. The acts for which they are punished range from individual assaults to destruction of telephone lines - a very frequent occurrence. The prison camps and jails are jammed. Those given light sentences of from two to three months have had to 'wait their tum.' They go to the camp or the jail upon being called there, when there is room for them. Once inside, they are in danger of incurring a 'supplementary sentence,' meted out under various pretexts. The most frequent is the perpetration of 'an insult to Hitler,' a crime of which the jailers alone are the judges. It is only since July and August 1941, a few weeks after the opening of Russo-German hostilities, and especially since the demonstration of Russian resistance, that the assaults and acts of sabotage have received wide

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publicity and the repressive measures have progressively increased, up to the climactic point of the Nantes and Bordeaux mass executions of October, widely publicized throughout the world. Why? Have the sabotage and the assaults been much more numerous and grave than they had been previously? They have been more spectacular, certainly- the victims having included two high German officers (one of them, Hotz of Nantes, a man particularly odious to the populace). Thus they have a wider political and public meaning. The acts of sabotage, too, have multiplied .... A number have been detailed by the press and the radio, but the majority and the most important of them have received no publicity. It appears that the violence of the repression has had as its primary aim the prevention of the generalization and aggravation of the hostile acts against the occupying force. Moreover, and perhaps above all, Paris and Vichy have been worried over the spread of that state of mind which has given rise to these troubles and has nurtured them. The first shot and the first train wreck brought into the public eye the hostility which previously had been hidden. Opinions began to be divided after the seizure of hostages and the first mass executions. But condemnation in principle of the saboteurs is seldom heard. Still less is credence given to the thesis that 'sabotage isn't French,' set forth in some communiques and some big bill posters which show, behind the gunman, the sinister shadow of Stalin the latest edition of the man with the knife between his teeth. Despite all the rewards held out to informers, none has yet come forth to inform on the various assaults. If those who shot a German officer in the Paris subway were able to 'vanish' in the crowd, it was because the crowd wanted it that way. What characterizes those assaults which are reported in the large newspapers is, above all, the extreme audacity with which they are executed, most often in broad daylight in the street. It should be noted also that they are very often crowned with success. Finally, their authors remain unpunished. For all the 'serious' assaults committed in France against high officers of the German army not one guilty person has yet been caught. Numerous hostages have been arrested and shot but the authorities have been unable to lay their hands on any presumed malefactor. Efforts in that direction, however, have not been lacking: Pucheu, Petain's Minister of the Interior, came to Paris personally to direct the investigations. So consistent a state of affairs can be explained only by the attitude of the population, the lukewarm enthusiasm of the ranks of the French police and the difficulties of the Gestapo in operating in a strange milieu.

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The assaults are in general the work not of an isolated individual but of a group. (An exception was the revolver attack upon Laval and Deat, the act of an isolated petty-bourgeois provincial). Who are these groups? At least in France we must list in the first place the Stalinists. In their press and leaflets they advocate terrorist acts. A supplementary proof of their organized participation is the murder of Marcel Gitton and the wounding of Henri Saupe, former Stalinist leaders who broke with the party at the time of the HitlerStalin pact, and who later became fascists. Besides the Stalinists there are in the European countries various secret patriotic groups, originating from the petty bourgeoisie, who systematically practice terrorism. As the letter quoted above reminds us, the assaults are by no means confined to the cases published in the press, which occur in the large cities. Immediately upon quitting the central sections of the big cities the Germans feel themselves less secure. Elementary hate spews forth upon the least occasion. In Northern France and Belgium rows often occur in saloons between German soldiers and the inhabitants (this region is predominantly working-class). If a German is killed, repression follows swiftly: usually ten young men, taken from the street where the incident occurred, pay with their lives. In the countries of western Europe, not to speak of countries like Poland or Yugoslavia, the victims of German firing squads are already counted in thousands. The various totals published in the press - the New York Times for instance spoke recently of two hundred in France - are the official figures, German in origin, and have absolutely no relation to the reality. Sabotage is one of the most widespread forms of resistance. It assumes the most diverse aspects and it is not always easy to say where it begins and where it ends. General statistics of production do not exist. From the few fragmentary figures made public it is difficult to measure the extent of sabotage, since one must make allowance for the lack of raw materials, for 'ersatz', and especially for the enfeeblement of the workers due to lack of nourishment. But the condemnations published in the German or the 'collaborationist' papers of each occupied country prove that acts of sabotage are discovered daily. The most violent forms of sabotage, such as the cutting of telephone lines or derailment of trains, have perhaps a tendency to diminish, or at least not to increase, because of the immediate retribution levied on the hostages. In Belgium, for example, the Nazis place in the train itself hostages responsible for the success of its trip. The Germans also draw upon the local population to mount guard around depots and railroads, naturally under pain of death in case of accident. Burnings of crops and stores of grain have been frequent at the end of summer and in attempts to stop this the Germans have often prohibited the peasants

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from leaving their quarters at night. In the last two or three months one notes rather numerous explosions in power stations and conflagrations in factories, especially in Belgium. The most active centers of sabotage are Northern France, Belgium, Norway, Czechoslovakia.

The Various Forms of Sabotage

In the factories, the least we can say is that no zeal at all is shown for working. As a primary form of resistance the workers 'play dumb'. Absolutely everything is utilized which can retard production without breaking the surface discipline. This state of mind has spread throughout all the occupied countries, independently of the propaganda of any party whatsoever. The Czech workers circulate this slogan: 'Our production should be the poorest in the world'. Their emblem they put it on walls, on their products, etc. is a tortoise with a P, first letter of the word 'Pomalu' (slowly). Who organizes the sabotage and under what forms? That is naturally rather difficult to determine exactly, especially from the outside. Leaving aside strictly individual acts, spontaneous outbursts of anger and hate, it is probable that a large part of the sabotage is executed by local or regional groups, in every case of rather small size. There do not seem to be any national bourgeois organizations actually organized to undertake and direct sabotage on a national scale in each country. The only organizations working on a large scale are the Stalinist parties, and even there local initiative must be extremely important. Who are the saboteurs? We can say that large strata of the population are represented among them. Here for example are the professions of 11 Norwegians recently shot for sabotage in the small city of Stavanger: a doctor, a bookkeeper, an office worker, a sign painter, a business man, a customs officer, a watchman, a warehouse employee, a salesman, a manager, a smith. Within the factories there are naturally the workers themselves. But these participate also in other acts of sabotage such as arson, derailments, etc., particularly in Belgium or in Northern France. In what measure do these workers act on their own initiative or under the influence of the Stalinist party? That is difficult to determine. But it is beyond doubt that a certain part of the acts of violent sabotage, outside of the factories, are organized by independent groups of workers, without the direct influence of any party. With the suppression of the most elementary democratic rights have appeared all the forms of underground expression. One repeats to another, mouth to ear, innumerable and virulent anecdotes against the Germans. Chain letters are also very widespread, but naturally it is the illegal press which has most

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importance. In each country of Europe there is now in circulation a quantity of small underground newspapers. Even in Hungary, allied to Germany, an illegal anti-Hitler paper now regularly appears. These newspapers are put together by every imaginable method, but with time their technique improves. At present a rather large number are printed and certain of them are even printed quite well. The countries where they are most numerous are France, Belgium, Norway and Poland.

The Illegal Newspapers

In France the Stalinist organ L'Humanite appears regularly each week in printed form and is reproduced locally by mimeograph when necessary. La Verite, published by the Trotskyists, appears in Paris, printed, every two weeks. These are the only two known working class papers; there is no socialist or syndicalist journal. All the other illegal papers have a national-bourgeois character. Here are some titles: La Voix de Paris (Voice of Paris), Le Feu (The Fire), Pantagruel, Liberte (Freedom), Le Peuple de France (The People of France), Les Petites Ailes (Little Wings), La France Continue (France Goes On), Valmy. This last seems to be edited by some right-wing trade unionists of the old c.G.T., but it declares itself purely national. It calls itself: 'organ of resistance to oppression' and declares 'Our motto: one single enemy - the invader'. The general attitude of the national-bourgeois journals is to declare themselves above the former political divisions and to unite all men of good will coming from all the former parties. They are extremely reticent on what will come after the 'liberation'. All publish abundant facts on German looting, violently attack Darlan and the Paris collaborationists. Concerning Petain, opinion is somewhat divided. The majority attack him, but some evidence reserve tinged with a certain sympathy. Some articles do not lack political perspicacity, as one can judge by this quotation from La France Continue (June 1941): 'Just as the regime of Blum sooner or later had to engender a dictatorship, so the regime of Vichy will inevitably engender the revolution'. And the journal opposes Petain precisely because his regime breeds revolution. Certain newspapers (Liberte, for example) pose as the organ of an organized group. They speak of their 'cells' and call upon their members to hold themselves in readiness for the day when their 'leaders' will give the signal for 'action'. During the first months of the invasion (that is, well before the attack on the ussR) the Stalinist organ L'Humanite preserved the most ambiguous attitude toward the Germans, declaring itself against Vichy and denouncing the democrats of yesterday (Daladier, Blum, etc.) as agents of English imperialism. Natur-

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ally all that is changed now. Recently L'Humanite announced that in occupied France an illegal conference had been held of 'Frenchmen and Frenchwomen of different points of view and beliefs, united by the will to struggle implacably and pitilessly for the liberation of France from the Hitlerian yoke'. This conference declared itself a constituent assembly of the 'National Front for the Independence of France' and addressed an appeal to all organizations to adhere to it. In the illegal national-bourgeois press a great polemic is being waged on collaboration with the Stalinists. In this connection we quote some lines from a national journal entitled Verites (Truths): Among us are no political sectarians, whether of the left or the right. When it came to defending our soil, Thorez deserted, and his propaganda was tied up with that of Goebbels in the attempt to demoralize France. That we don't forget. Today his effort consists of exploiting the purest patriotism for the greater good of the Soviets. Of course we admire the fierce resistance of the Russian soldier, but only to the extent that he is killing the Boche. He is defending his country against the foreigner. It is up to us to defend our country against the foreigner, be he German or Russian. Let anti-German Frenchmen watch out. They are in danger of being odiously deceived. Let them never join the 'national front for the independence of France.' Frenchmen we are. Frenchmen we shall remain. Other national groups declare themselves for collaboration with the Stalinists in order to use their wide experience in illegal work. One paper writes: 'The communist organization brings today the help of a unique experience of illegal action'. In Belgium we note more than forty illegal papers appearing regularly. The best known is La Libre Belgique (Free Belgium), which also appeared during World War 1. It has at present several local editions. There are also several socialist journals and not less than five regular Stalinist publications. In Norway these are the titles of some of the journals appearing regularly:

We Want Our Own Country, The Royal Courier, The Courier of v, The Sign of the Times. Appearing in mimeographed form, The Sign of the Times (Tidens Tegn) is the continuation of the oldest of the Oslo newspapers which, after having appeared for more than a year under German occupation, voluntarily ceased publication in 1941, since its editors were not willing to submit to the growing

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pressure of German censorship. Frequently these papers publish blacklists of individuals associating with Quisling's party. In Poland the illegal press flourishes abundantly. The struggle for the independence of Poland is mainly carried on by the workers' movement and numerous journals are published by groups of left socialists, the Jewish Bundists, etc., often anti-Stalinist. Pamphlets and manifestoes are also rather frequently published. Sympathy for England and for all things English is widespread and is the immediate reaction to the oppression. English aviators who are forced to abandon their planes by parachute are often concealed by the local population. Their military apparel and their parachutes are immediately burned and by slow stages they come to safety after long months. The death penalty is the rule for whoever is connected in any way with affairs of this kind, but the frequency of executions on these grounds shows that the risk is cheerfully accepted. The funerals of English aviators killed in action are often the occasion oflong processions and sometimes, as in Belgium, are transformed into anti-German demonstrations. The great number of convictions for espionage - most often followed by executions - show that espionage on behalf of England is widespread throughout the most diverse layers of the population. Naturally the Nazis justify many executions on the pretext of espionage, nevertheless it is clear that British agents get a great deal of help.

The Churches In Belgium and Holland the Catholic cardinals have refused collaboration and taken an attitude of opposition. In France the Catholic Church is somewhat divided. It seems that the opposition is sharpest where the Church has some base in the masses. That is the case in Belgium. That is also the case in Northern France and in Brittany and we see in these two regions instances of parish priests shot by the Germans. In Paris where the strata of population have long traditions of atheism, the church and especially its heads are 'collaborationist'. In Norway the great majority of the Protestant Church has gone into opposition. This opposition manifests itself in pastoral letters, sermons, refusal of the sacraments to local fascists and, in Belgium for example, by the singing of the national anthem and the display of the national flag inside the churches. The general character of the hate for the Germans is shown in the attitude of children: Throughout all Europe one observes demonstrations of children against the oppression: in Czechoslovakia, in Norway, in Holland, in Belgium, in

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Luxembourg. They beat up the sons of fascists, they mock the German officers in the street, they refuse to participate in the collecting of bones or old rags, etc.

Native Fascist Groups

In all the invaded countries Hitler found, when he arrived, fascist parties whose program was subordination to Germany. The history of these groups since then is altogether one of stagnation and disintegration. The population surrounds them with hatred and contempt, perhaps even greater than the feeling toward the Germans. In fact, the fascists are treated as lepers: the people avoid any contact with them, boycott their stores if they are in business, circulate blacklists of their names and relatives and friends break with them. The papers of these fascist groups complain in the most ridiculous and puerile way about these persecutions. Many demonstrations against them by the population are reported through underground channels. Leaving for the Russian front, a detachment of Belgian fascists paraded in Brussels a few weeks ago. They marched between two lines of German soldiers, behind whom the population booed and insulted the pale and silent fascists. In Belgium also a group of Flemish fascists was recently attacked in a workers' neighborhood; chairs, bottles, glassware were hurled at them and a good many of them had to be taken to the hospital. Such incidents are not infrequent not only in Belgium, but also in Holland and Norway. Generally speaking, the Nazis have little confidence in these groups, especially since they are frequently divided and have extremely violent internal fights. The Germans use them mainly for petty police tasks, for instance to stop cars on the main roads in search for smuggled foods. With the war against the USSR, the Nazis have made great efforts toward sending to the Russian front Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Belgian and French contingents recruited through the native fascists. The success has not been very great; a few thousand men altogether, in spite of extremely high pay. Once arrived on the Russian front, difficulties between them and the German staff flared up. Generally, for the administrative tasks, the Germans prefer to use old functionaries who agree to fulfill their 'technical' functions for the sake of preserving order. Thus they make use of secretaries of ministries, judges, policemen, mayors, etc., who formed a great part of the state apparatus of the 'democracies'. Without the collaboration of these individuals, the Germans would find themselves in tremendous difficulties in the occupied countries, and here they find their principal help, rather than among the fascist groups.

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The Occupying Troops

The main preoccupation of the German General Staff is to avoid too intimate contact between the German soldiers and the local populations. Naturally, officers are billeted in private houses. But simple soldiers live collectively in barracks, camps, etc. Persons who have been in contact with the German army report the lack of enthusiasm of the German soldiers, once the excitement over the victories of May-June 1940 had passed. Generally the soldiers manifest a great desire to return to civilian life, to see again their wives and their children. They show great fear of British bombings of their dear ones at home. Since the war in the USSR the occupying troops have greatly decreased in number and are completely changed in composition. The Germans now use older soldiers and even wounded ones. Acts of insubordination have been reported in the German army, but it is very difficult to verify the authenticity of such reports. The incidents are generally of the following type: a German soldier coming back from leave at home described to his comrades the conditions there. The officers proceeded to stop the discussion, the soldiers protested and expressed their weariness of the war. One or two were shot. Recently the news came, with a great deal of detail, of a rebellion in France where one hundred soldiers were shot, as well as four officers of the Paris garrison. But such reports must be taken very cautiously. Those in France or in Belgium who have seen German soldiers back from Russia report that they return completely terrorized by the savagery and bloodiness of the fight. They describe the front as hell.

The Economic Situation

We will indicate here only the most apparent aspects of the situation. The Germans are guided by one rule: to draw the utmost from the occupied countries in order to prosecute the war. This factor determines the economic activity of the invaded countries and gives to it an extremely uneven character. The industries which are able to provide for the needs of the German war machine are working overtime. Those intended to satisfy the needs of the local population are in complete decay. This division corresponds more or less to the one between heavy industry and industry devoted to consumer needs. This fact is especially apparent in France and Belgium where the leaders of heavy industry are for collaboration. In France at least two ministers of Petain are representatives of

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big business: Pucheu, former manager of the bigJapy metallurgical plants, and Lehideux, son-in-law of the big auto manufacturer, Renault. At the arrival of the Germans, the rate of exchange established between the mark and the various national currencies produced a kind of inflation: German soldiers felt rich with their marks and they bought everything they could send to Germany - stockings, perfumes, etc. For a few months a kind of prosperity rocked certain trades. But it ended soon. When their stocks were exhausted it was impossible to renew them, and the bonanza period ended. In spite of the general disorganization of the economy, unemployment, although existing, remains limited. The reasons are numerous. Germany still keeps many war prisoners, the strongest adults; there are still 1,400,000 French war prisoners in German camps. Numerous workers have gone to Germany to work: more than 2,000,000. Among them are 250,000 Belgian workers, or one-fifth of all the active workers of Belgium in ordinary times; 150,000 Dutch workers, etc. The recruiting of these workers takes every form, from mere violence to "free" contract. In Poland, the Germans resort to real man-hunts to get workers and send them to Germany, where they live in barracks. In western Europe the unemployed are threatened with the curtailment of their dole if they refuse to sign contracts for work in Germany. If the worker is really highly skilled he can get in Germany a standard of life almost equal to that of the German worker. But for the great mass, the standard is markedly lower and can go down to forced labor. One more reason for the apparently slight unemployment in the occupied countries is the fleeing of the workers to the countryside. An unemployed worker can simply not live in the city after a few months. He leaves then for a country village where he has some relatives or friends. Petain favors this decomposition of society and calls it a 'return to the soil'. In the primitive conditions of present Europe, life in the country is relatively easier than in the cities. The peasant family can always conceal some food from the administrative control. He can find wood when coal is lacking. He can always sell some of his products on the black market. Of course this situation has its negative side as well. With the money he gets he is unable to buy in the city such small things as nails or cord. Requisitions are not infrequent; the Germans come and take his horse or his steer and they give him in exchange a wad of newly printed marks which he keeps because he cannot buy anything with it. In some cases the peasants resist requisitions and shooting starts. Several cases have been recorded in Belgium and Holland. Finally, the profits from the black market go mainly to the big farmers who can deal directly with the profiteers. The small farmer does not get much of it. The black market reigns all over Europe and is now a recognized institution. The German authorities of course know all the details of its functioning but

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tolerate it and even make abundant use of it. In most countries the legal food rations are quite insufficient and for the mass of the population do not amount to more than one-fourth or one-third of the food they need. So everybody has to resort to the illegal, or black, market. This business is highly centralized in the hands of big profiteers. A whole new caste of nouveaux riches is rising. Smuggling of butter, bootlegging of edible oil, counterfeiting of food tickets bring big money. Here we quote a letter from Paris in July 1941: From the 'wholesaler' to the retail merchant, there is a wide range of clandestine vendors. Day after day the newspapers write about the fight against their activities against lawless skyrocketing of prices. But to no avail; collusion and favoritism go on. 'The reign of gold is over,' according to the Nazis. But money floats in wide streams. Some people are having plenty of good times. Never before were there in Paris so many night clubs, bars, speakeasies, taverns and other places where money can be spent for amusement. Many liquidated places are re-opening and are decorated more luxuriously than ever. And new ones are constantly springing up all over the city. In these places the 50 franc maximum menu is not obligatory; rationing cards are unknown. Bands, gypsy or Russian, international singers and performers contribute to the excitement of the atmosphere which does not remind the Frenchmen of their national mourning, or the Nazis of their Spartan spirit, so much exalted by Hitler. Well after midnight, when the rest of Paris is asleep, the new Paris, made up of Germans and those few Frenchmen of both sexes who get along well with the Germans, comes to life and has a 'good time.' Leaving the night clubs, the revelers see the first queues being formed outside the stores, where the sale of potatoes will begin several hours later. In most of the big cities such as Brussels, Antwerp and Oslo, the Germans have insisted upon the opening of new cabarets and night clubs. Everywhere prostitution has increased enormously. The small minority of the national population which has money enough can still find everywhere in Europe everything they want and have regal meals. But for the great mass of the population the situation is quite different. In France, which is not among the worst countries, one never ceases to be hungry. The queues for the rationed public start in the very early hours of the morning and last until eleven o'clock. Many women faint. Sometimes the stores close before the end because their stocks have been exhausted. The search for food is a constant strain, and takes a great part of everyone's time.

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The prices on the black market are on the average four, five or six times higher than for rationed products. In France a goose sells for 1,200 francs. The weekly pay ofa fairly well-paid worker is 300 francs, and the daily dole ofunemployed workers is 12 francs. That means that a worker would need an entire month's pay to buy a goose, and the unemployed worker would have to save his entire allotment for 100 days. Eggs are sold up to nine francs apiece. That means a worker could buy about five eggs with one day's pay. Sugar sells at 50 francs and butter at 120 francs per kilo (2.2 pounds). A packet of 20 cigarettes, of such a quality that an American would never smoke them, can be bought from street vendors for 125 francs. And, we must not forget, France is still the most privileged part of all the occupied territory. There have been many reports of food riots, generally initiated by women, especially in the big cities of Belgium, such as Antwerp and Liege. Everywhere tuberculosis is making tremendous progress. Recently some Swiss medical authorities had the opportunity of examining French war prisoners. They reported that one-fourth of these men, the strongest section of the population, were tubercular. In southern France, that is, in a relatively privileged part, the rate of child mortality compared with pre-war times has tripled. The number of premature births has doubled. More than half the mothers are unable to give natural milk to their babies. Forty per cent of the children are, on the average, unable to attend school because of illness, debility or want of clothes.

Recent Trends

Sufficient news to give a general idea always takes a certain time to arrive in New York. But all indications from Europe in recent weeks - that is, since about December 15th - show an aggravation of the situation. The reasons are clear; the continuation of the war, the Russian successes and also winter, always harder than the summer for the masses. The paper of the Norwegian fascists wrote in the middle of January that a genuine 'civil war' was reigning in Norway. Almost everywhere the executions for sabotage show a definite increase. During]anuary, food riots were reported in several big cities of France. According to rumors, the Germans are looking for new devices of administration in the occupied countries. We can be sure that the new will be no more successful than the old in creating the 'New Order'. 28January 1942

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On the War Fronts (May1942)

Joseph Hansen

In the first great stage of the Second World War, the German military machine uncoiled like a huge spring, crushing and driving out the armed forces of the 'democracies' from the satellite nations which constituted the Allied outposts on the European continent. 14 The spectacular speed with which this phase of the German drive for world power was accomplished resulted not only from the careful preparation of the German militarists, the superiority of their military machine and the advantage of operating from inside lines, but from the internal decay of the Allied powers. By June 1941 the only bastions remaining in the hands of the Allied camp were Great Britain-Iceland on one flank of Europe, North Africa-Middle East on the other. Conquering either of these outposts would have given Germany an immensely strengthened military position. However, separated by barriers of water from the continent, with Britain unprepared to launch an offensive, neither outpost constituted an immediate threat to entrenched Germany. German imperialism was faced, on the other hand, with the pressing necessity of securing a vast granary to feed subjected Europe and oil fields to supply its industrial and military machine. In the absence of sea power with which to break through the Allied blockade, the German armies were forced to tum eastward. In addition was the threat of socialist revolution - if suppressed temporarily inside Germany through the instrumentality of fascism, still present externally in the shape of the Soviet Union. If the Nazis succeeded in conquering this great fortress of the proletariat with its vast natural resources, they would thereby strike a terrible blow against the threat of socialist revolution, break the Allied blockade, succeed in joining forces with Japan and thus attain a pre-eminent world position. The military challenge of America through Great Britain and the Middle East area could be met from enormously strengthened vantage points. The second great stage of the conflict began with the German attack upon the Soviet Union. 14

Hansen 1942.

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In the third stage of the war, which brought in the United States and Japan as active military participants, the Japanese military machine in a series of operations paralleling those of Germany expanded with explosive speed. The same general factors which gave Germany military superiority in the west likewise gave Japan military superiority in the Orient, the previous German victories constituting an additional advantage. The 'democracies' were driven from their strongholds in the Far East. Only the outposts of Australia, New Zealand, and India remain to them on the periphery of the new Japanese empire. The much more threatening outpost of eastern Siberia is held by the Soviet Union. Throughout the war the 'democracies' have been forced to remain on the defensive in the military field. The Axis powers are on the offensive. They are still expanding upon advantageous internal lines of attack. If we grant an indefinitely prolonged world imperialist struggle uninterrupted by uprisings of the oppressed (a possibility that exists only in the abstract), and grant that in such a struggle the American colossus should secure the time to achieve ultimate superiority because of its great productive capacity, it is clear that on the military side such a victory could be attained only at the cost of unimaginable suffering and bloodshed. The Anglo-American powers must launch their offensive in both Europe and East Asia from difficult and costly outside lines in contradistinction to the inside lines from which the Axis powers operate. They must cross oceans to reach even the periphery of the Axis circles. They must land on distant coasts that will undoubtedly be desperately defended, recapture their lost outposts, and then step by step compress the expanded opposing military machines until they are driven back and finally shattered in the industrial centers from which they uncoiled. A clearer idea of exactly what such plans of the imperialist strategists will mean in misery and death to the workers can be obtained from a more detailed examination of the various war fronts.

In the Pacific

What will it take to conquer Japan? Economically Japan was, next to Italy, formerly the poorest great power. Yet this weak power crushed the remnants of the Dutch empire, smashed the British strongholds, defeated the American forces in the Philippines, and is now entrenching herself in one of the richest colonial areas of the world. She has knocked aside the Allied bayonets and placed her own bayonet at the throats of more than 137,000,000 people inhabiting approximately 1,385,000 square miles of territory. This does not take into

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account her seizures in the richest prize of all, China, which has yet to be conquered, although all the supply routes except the one through Mongolia are now in the hands of Japan. Tokyo has conquered virtual monopoly of the world's supply of rubber, tin, quinine, manila (used in the manufacture of rope). She has secured oil fields more than sufficient for her needs and along with it important ores such as bauxite from which aluminum is derived. The immediate booty which can be shipped to Japan includes rice, cattle, hides, tobacco, spices, etc. The March 7 issue of the Army and NavyJournal declared Japan now 'virtually self-sufficient in her war economy'. Writing in April Foreign Affairs, the military expert Hanson Baldwin says in an article 'America at War: Three Bad Months': The history of our first three months at war must be painted in somber colors. The United States Navy suffered the worst losses in its history ... As this was written the surging tide of conquest was imperiling India ... menacing Australia ... ship sinkings were increasing to totals which approximated those of the war's worst months and freight storage yards were clogged ... awaiting merchant shipping ... Thus in less than go days the strategic picture of the war had been considerably altered. The United Nations had suffered their worst defeats since the fall of France. As spring approached, the short-range prospects were grim ... Such enormous military forces will be required to dislodge Japan, such a titanic navy and air fleet, such colossal armies, such slaughter of troops, that American economy and the American people must be strained to the breaking point. The truth about the propaganda that Japan is 'weakening herself' was refuted by none other than Admiral Hart in the Hearst press of April 5. When asked the question, 'Aren't the Japs spreading themselves pretty thin, exposing their long lines of communication to attack?' the Admiral replied: 'Our position is essentially the same. We, too, have long lines of communication not only in the Pacific but in the Atlantic. We too are vulnerable'. Hanson Baldwin adds that America has 'convoy routes half as long as the circumference of the globe and three to twelve times as long as the Japanese communications'. For years American imperialists talked of the Achilles heel of]apan, her lack of oil, while they supplied her with oil until she had stored enough, according to some estimates, to last for two years of all-out war. In the battles it turned out that the Dutch fleet itself was caught short of oil, although it was guarding the oil fields of the East Indies.

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What is the truth about Japan's alleged 'weakness in oil'? Not only does she still have the greater part of her war reserves but, if we are to believe the February Fortune magazine, Dr. Fritz Fetzer, a high German naval official, after a trip to Tokyo reported to Berlin as long ago as 1935, 'that Japan ... depended on foreign crude oil reached only by sea, but conquerable; that therefore she was building not only extensive refineries but a large fleet of some of the fastest tankers in the world ... By 1941 Japan's plants could refine about three-fourths of all her oil requirements'. Apparently Hanson Baldwin would agree with this estimate, for in the January 19 New York Times he pointed out that on 'Tarakan, the oil-rich island off the northeastern coast of Borneo, the oil is so pure that it can be pumped directly into a ship's tanks without refining'. In his column of February 20 he declared that 'japan has now obtained access to great stocks of oil and raw materials in the Southwestern Pacific and is probably indefinitely blockade-proof'. In his article in Foreign Affairs he goes even further, pointing out that in the battle area it is the Japanese who are rich in oil, the Allies who are poor: 'Now that the Japanese are in possession of Malaya and the Indies, their need for oil and other materials is largely met, whereas we must transport most of our oil supplies to Australia'. Victories are likewise mapped in the bourgeois press, showing how it is possible to sweep across the Pacific from Hawaii and Alaska in a pincers movement for direct attack upon the Japanese islands. The slogan generally attached to these maps is 'Bomb Tokyo!' The truth is, such slogans only cover up preparations for the most terrible slaughter of Allied armed forces. We see very easily the difficulties Hitler faces in making a ground assault across 20 odd miles of English Channel. But the distance from Pearl Harbor to Yokohama is 3,394 miles; from Dutch Harbor, 2,928. The decisive factor, air power, is not even mentioned in these newspaper plans except possibly in connection with agitation to use Vladivostok as the base for bombing Tokyo. Yet it was air power which enabled the Japanese to drive the American fleet away from the Philippines, to wipe out the battleships Repulse and Prince of Wales which sealed the fate of Singapore, and finally, as the Amry and Navy journal of March 21 puts it, 'destroy' the United Nations' fleet at Java. The United States is manufacturing planes at many times the rate of Japan. However, it is not possible to manufacture in American plants bases for the use of these planes in the Far East. Where can these planes find a base well supplied with gasoline, armaments, food, replacements, etc.?The ports of China are held by Japan. The Burma road has been closed by Japan. All the islands down to Australia are held by Japan. Long range bombers can be knocked off with relative ease if they conduct sustained bombings, unless protected by fighter planes.

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Airplane carriers to transport such planes, and tankers to supply the accompanying vessels are among the most vulnerable of naval craft. Rather than easy victory, the March 7 London Economist sees the situation due to become worse, visualizing that Japan can advance still farther, raiding the coast of India as she did China and penetrating toward the interior; the review believes that Japanese control of the Indian Ocean looms. As for India resisting Japanese aggression, the Economist is not too confident: 'India is large enough to swallow the invader - particularly an invader thousands of miles from his main base. Another aspect, of course, is not so hopeful - the Indian people do not feel for the British raj what the Chinese feel for Free China'. Yet in the face of this grim reality the bourgeois press announces with appropriate fanfare that MacArthur is preparing to use Australia as the springboard for an offensive that will not stop until 'total victory' is gained over Japan. If we leave out the alternative of revolution and colonial uprisings - a specter which Wall Street fears above all else - this means taking and holding Java, Celebes, Sumatra, Borneo and the lesser neighboring islands, advancing into the blazing muzzles of the giant guns on Singapore (which is now being repaired and improved by the Japanese), advancing through the jungles of the Malay peninsula, taking Thailand, Burma, Inda-China, advancing along the coast of China, retaking Hong Kong, Canton, Shanghai, etc., recapturing the Philippines, and then landing on the Japanese islands themselves. If this project is ever carried out, the western waters of the Pacific will be dyed crimson with the blood of the opposing forces.

The Battle of the Atlantic

The defeat of the Allied fleet in the Pacific, which necessarily resulted in greater dispersion of the naval craft patrolling the rest of the sea lanes, has enabled the Axis to wage large-scale submarine warfare on the Atlantic coast. Apparently about two merchant vessels a day are being sunk; that is, twice as many as are being launched, according to official reports. The continued sinkings have seriously cut down on America's ability to send war supplies to the battle areas. Docks and warehouses are jammed with goods awaiting ships. The enormous war production of the factories pours to the coastlines and there piles up in huge reserves separated by wide oceans from the battlefields. Tanker sinkings, for instance, have resulted in a growing oil shortage on the eastern seaboard since 95 per cent of petroleum products required there are normally transported by tankers. In the Gulf area, storage tanks are filled to capacity and refineries have been compelled to curtail opera-

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tions by approximately 25 per cent because of the Shipping bottleneck. According to Arthur Krock in the New York Times of April 8, ... the truth is that the United States has well under 50 per cent of the bottoms required to carry out its full commitments and the needs of general war. The further truth is that shipping production figures do not yet justify the belief that construction will fill this gap and that caused by submarine sinkings, any time soon. The situation in the Atlantic was indicated when, from under the very noses of the British, the German war vessels trapped at Brest, the Scharnhorst, the Gneisenau, and Prinz Eugen, managed to make the perilous run through the English Channel and escape to Germany. Admiral Hart remarked dryly about this reverse: 'You noticed that the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst left Brest at the moment the Germans decided for their departure. And British air fields were only 130 miles away'. In his funeral oration over this defeat, Churchill expressed 'relief' that these vessels were no longer in a French port from which they could threaten Allied shipping. However, as the Army and NavyJournal of February 21 sarcastically points out: 'He failed to remind Parliament that when the vessels are repaired, they, in conjunction with the battleships Tirpitz, Suetzaw and Scheer will make a powerful fleet, which this summer can operate against the Russian naval forces in the Baltic Sea, and move to interrupt Lend-Lease material proceeding from the United States to Murmansk'. The German fleet may also attempt to effect a junction with the remnants of the French and Italian fleets in the Mediterranean. The European fleets of the Axis might also attempt to join the still largely intact Japanese fleet in the Indian Ocean, thus creating a formidable force that could be challenged only at the cost of untold slaughter. British occupation of Madagascar was to forestall a juncture of Germany andJapan at this strategic spot. The Amry and Navy Journal of March 7 pointed out: Hugh Dalton, president of the British Board of Trade, pointed out this week that the Tokyo government now has a great surplus of many vital war materials which Germany lacks, and there is a definite danger that those two allies will make every effort to join their trade routes. Herein lies the importance of Madagascar to the totalitarian governments, for, in their possession, that island would serve as a base for the transfer of goods, as well as for submarine operations against the ships of the United Nations carrying supplies to Libya, the Near East and India. At present the exchange of rubber, tin, etc., by the Japanese for German machine tools,

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instruments, etc., would be limited to blockade runners, but if a juncture should be effected by the Japanese Navy with the German battleships, and the French and Italian Fleets, the trickle that is likely would become a stream. The long tradition of American and British naval superiority still blinds people to the fact that the Axis is now close to turning the tables on the high seas. On April 17 Hanson Baldwin disclosed in his column: 'The tenuous naval superiority that the United Nations enjoyed last December has now been whittled down by losses and damages to a serious extent ... the margin of our present naval superiority is small .. .'. The loss of another naval battle could mean a shift in the balance of sea power in favor of the Axis. The conquest of Singapore has not only given Tokyo the possibility of offensive operations in the Indian Ocean but has greatly increased the danger to China. Besides the direct military threat there is the possibility that Chiang Kaishek will doublecross London and Washington. His price as ally of the United Nations has already gone up. Chiang Kai-shek, however, will not find it easy to shift into the camp of Japan, should he actually be considering such an alternative. The prestige of the Allied powers, dealt a terrible blow in the Far East debacle, has not thereby automatically been transferred to Japanese imperialism. Throughout the Orient the colonial movement has received a tremendous impetus. The Chinese people can see for themselves that the allies of Chiang Kai-shek were not so powerful as tradition and propaganda had made them out to be, and are speaking with a new note of self-confidence. The slogan 'arm the people' will gain in popularity throughout China as the realization sweeps the land that they must depend upon their own forces for victory. Chiang Kai-shek's bureaucratic conduct of the war has resulted in the slaughter of millions of people without dislodging the Japanese forces. An armed populace, inspired by an agrarian revolution in China, would consume the Japanese forces in short order and free China. Such an event could electrify the oppressed of the entire earth.

The Danger to the Soviet Union

The class-conscious workers are defending the Soviet Union as a mighty fortress of the proletariat. A Soviet victory over Hitler's armies would mean the opening of a new dynamic stage of the world socialist revolution. To the danger from the Nazis has now been added a new and imminent peril in Siberia.

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Strategicus, whose opinion seems to hold considerable weight with the American staff as well as the British, stated in the Amry and Navy Journal for January 3: The Soviet Army in Siberia has been greatly weakened in recent months by the transfer to Europe of most of its tank brigades, a number ofinfantry divisions, and a large part of its air-forces. Japan, therefore, possesses for the time being military superiority along the Manchurian-Siberian front ... it may be predicted that active hostilities between Japan and Russia will break out as soon as Spring weather permits large-scale military operations. Indeed ... unless the Malaysian offensive consumes too much of Japan's military strength, it will be Japan which will take the offensive and invade Siberia; and this offensive will be launched in conjunction with a German assault in European Russia. Washington speaks of an offensive against Japan. It is possible, as hinted in Chiang Kai-shek's paper, that the plans envisage the launching of this offensive not only from Australia but from Siberia. The winter campaign of the Red Army does not seem to have greatly impressed the strategists who control the armed forces of the Allies. The Amry and Navy Journal of January 10, for instance, expresses this attitude succinctly: What the Russian soldiers are doing in the defense of their homeland is the envy and pride of all fighting men ... There are still experts who fail to get enthusiastic over the Russian progress, who point out that the retreats of the Germans have been from their advance salients and have had the result, probably planned, they say, of straightening out the German line. There has been no break through, they point out, nor have any great bodies of German troops been cut off. Strategicus likewise declares: Despite recent successes in the Moscow and Rostov sectors, Russia will probably continue to be hard pressed by Germany. A revival of the Nazi offensive should occur in April or May, when winter has passed, and mechanized armies can operate once more. This offensive will almost certainly be just as violent and just as widespread as the attack of last June. Hanson Baldwin on March 16 declared that although the German losses had been heavy during the winter, they had given up only about one-fifth of the conquered territory. Moreover:

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The Germans have clung tenaciously- and on the whole, successfully- to key strong points which, because they control important communication networks in Western Russia, the Nazis hope to use as springboards for a summer offensive ... The Germans have waged during the winter a campaign of careful and calculated defense: They still have what is probably the world's strongest military machine. They will strike with relentless and increased power against a Russia that, like her enemy, has suffered from attrition. The offensive power of the Red Army lies primarily in revolutionary warfare, which Stalin has abjured, and not in restricting the struggle to the military arena. Has Stalin, in his desperation and his fear of conducting revolutionary warfare against German imperialism, vainly squandered on the winter snows of these vast and desolated plains the blood of hundreds of thousands of Soviet youth? Such conduct would be quite in accordance with the previous career of this betrayer of Bolshevism who has brought the Soviet Union to the very brink of the abyss. Japan is attempting to induce Stalin to make peace with Hitler, says the Anny and Na:vy Journal of April 11: Arriving simultaneously at Kuibyshev ... were Admiral Standley, American Ambassador, and Japanese special envoy Sato. They will be opponents in a diplomatic game of vital importance to the result of the war. The Admiral is charged with the duty of keeping Russia on the battle line ... Sato ... will re-enforce German efforts to induce Stalin to make peace with Hitler, and in the background of his representations will be the threat that his government will order its strengthened divisions to march from Manchukuo into Siberia ... Sato may tell the Soviet Government that if the United States and Great Britain attempt to establish a second front in France, Italy or Norway, Tokyo will be required to act against it. The reactionary politics of Stalin has brought the Soviet Union into a desperate situation. Stalin paved the way for Hitler's bayonet thrusts at the throat of the workers' state. Stalin has given Japan the opportunity to bring down her raised dagger in a stab in the back. With imperialist cannon bombarding the workers' state from all sides Stalinism is again demonstrating itself to be a terrible obstacle in the successful defense of the Soviet Union.

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A Planet Writhing in Agony

The bourgeoisie has no other perspective but intensification of the slaughter. Millions of men have already been slain in the uttermost comers of the earth. Tens of millions more are now being prepared to follow them in the coming installments of the Second World War. The bourgeoisie in the period of the death agony of capitalism is raising up all the forces of destruction. To maintain and extend their positions of privilege the capitalists are hurling all the acquisitions of mankind along with man himself into the inferno of war. The standard of living of the masses is being driven down to starvation levels in even the most productive nations. Mushrooming military dictatorships are tightening the straitjacket of internal passports, identification cards, regimentation of the entire population. Civil liberties are threatened with extinction. Labor organizations are faced with destruction and the loss of all the gains of centuries of struggle. If the bourgeoisie continues to have its way a new dark age will cover the face of the earth. With each day of the second imperialist world war it becomes increasingly clear that there is no way out except that of socialist revolution. If the hundreds of millions of oppressed in the colonial areas, China, India, Malaysia, Africa and elsewhere were to rise up they could end the slaughter overnight. Likewise a successful socialist revolution in any one of the highly developed imperialist nations - the United States, England, France, Germany, Italy or Japan - could so inspire the hundreds of millions of oppressed throughout the entire world as to usher in a socialist peace. The Second World War is but the continuation of the First World War. All the festering issues and irreconcilable contradictions of imperialism that brought about the First World War are again projected in military struggle but upon a far more violent and bloody plane. The same forces, however, that ended the First World War will likewise end the Second World War. The October revolution that flamed like a bright dawn over the battlefields of Europe in 1917, inspiring the oppressed of all nations with hope, will flame again, but far brighter and more brilliant than in its first flush. All the forces of destruction raised up by the bourgeoisie will end by turning upon the bourgeoisie itself as a class. The final act of destruction will be the removal of this last obstacle to the establishment of a world society based on the brotherhood of man. The very violence of the present conflict is a gauge of the depth and thoroughness with which the coming socialist revolution will perform its task. Already the old society is bursting at every seam - in India, Burma, the Middle East and Africa the masses are seething; in the old capitalist nations the people are filled with a deep uneasiness that can at any moment tum toward political channels. The

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day is fast approaching when imperialist war will be forever ended, and its horrible instruments of destruction, like the capitalist society which produced them, will find their place in the museums of the future as savage relics of the barbarous beginnings of civilizations.

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America's Sixty Families and the Nazis: The Role of the us-Nazi Cartel Agreements (June1942)

Art Preis

The Standard Oil officials 'hampered the development of synthetic rubber in the United States and ... engaged in activities helpful to the Axis nations' through their cartel agreement with the Nazi IG Farbenindustrie, but they are, nevertheless, 'personally patriotic men', declared the Truman Senate Investigating Committee May 26 report. 15 Similarly, Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold, condemning the Standard Oil-Nazi cartel, added that 'these arrangements were not entered into with any desire to aid or assist Germany'. Neither of these claims can be denied. The American monopolies are anxious, desperately so, to win the war. They are the real masters of this country; and they would never have entered this war had they not considered it essential to their interests. At the same time, however, the system of monopoly capitalism compels the monopolies individually to engage in activities that interfere with the war objectives of American capitalism as a whole. The consolidation of capital, which at an earlier stage of capitalism served to expand the means of production, now tends inexorably toward opposite ends. As a means of self-preservation, the monopolies must now drive in one general direction: Curtailment and limitation of production, in the international as well as domestic sphere. The safeguarding and increasing of profits is the sole objective of the monopolies, of course. Monopoly profit-making requires: arbitrary limits to production, restricting the output of goods which might glut the market, the elimination of competition. Capitalism, in its early progressive stage, created the modem national state within which the productive forces might develop unhampered by feudal

15

Preis 1942.

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restrictions. Today, however, national boundaries have become a noose strangling the productive forces. The capitalists are compelled to reach out beyond the national borders for new markets, sources of raw materials and cheap labor, and especially for new fields for the investment of their surplus capital. Hence the war. But the law of monopoly rules even on the international plane. The individual monopolies of every country, while instigating wars to win more of the world's markets and productive resources, at the same time seek to free themselves from competition and to restrict production through international cartel agreements with the foreign monopolies which their class as a whole aims to subdue by force of arms. There is not a single monopoly, in any capitalist country, which does not have international cartel agreements, and which is not attempting to continue these agreements despite the war. Thurman Arnold reported on June 3 that the Department of Justice had 'discovered last week' a list of 162 agreements between IG Farbenindustrie, the German chemical trust, and American corporations. In his March 26 report to the Truman Committee on the Standard Oil-Nazi patents-pool conspiracy, Arnold had to admit: 'There is no essential difference between what Standard Oil has done in this case and what other companies did in restricting the production of magnesium, aluminum, tungsten carbide, drugs, dyestuffs and a variety of other critical materials vital for the war'. The same is true of the British, German, Japanese and French monopolies. An outstanding example is the world aluminum cartel, an agreement by the American, British, German, French and Swiss interests to parcel among themselves the world markets. They pooled their resources, bought up all surpluses and withheld them from the world market, drastically limited world production and fixed the world prices. The chemical and dyestuffs cartel agreement between Du Pont and I G Farben also included the British Imperial Chemical Industries, the Etablissements Kuhlmann of France, and the Mitsui interests of Japan. Although Standard Oil and the other monopolies now claim that their agreements with the Nazis have been 'suspended' for the 'duration', the evidence indicates that the agreements are being maintained, so far as possible, during the war. The American monopolists are keeping a weather eye fixed on the post-war period. They expect and desire a postwar epoch retaining all the fundamental characteristics of the pre-war capitalist era. They have no perspective other than a return to 'normal' capitalist relations, to a post-war world in which German capitalism will continue to rule in Germany, and with which they will have

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to continue their monopoly agreements, though they hope it will be a defeated Germany - a weaker partner in the cartels. Moreover, the American capitalists are not too sure about the outcome of the war. They are keeping the way open, in the event of a protracted stalemate or a failure to score a decisive victory, for resuming relations as equals with their German cartel partners. As Thurman Arnold on June 3 was constrained to admit: There is another danger from the existence of these cartels which we have yet to face. It is a danger which will be felt in their influence over the peace that is to come. That danger arises from the fact that these cartels have not been terminated, they have only been suspended during the war. The small group of American business men who are parties to these International rings are not unpatriotic, but they still think of the war as a temporary recess from business-as-usual with a strong Germany. They expect to begin the game all over again after the war. So far as the monopoly rulers of America are concerned, even if Hitler must go, his masters, the German capitalists, must remain. This perspective of the monopolies is shown by provisions they placed in the cartel agreements as soon as the war broke out in 1939. The American trusts hastened to implement and extend their cartel agreements with the Axis corporations. The files of the Standard Oil Company have provided a typical example of such a 'full marriage', as Arnold called it, of the us-Nazi monopoly interests. On October 12, 1939, the Standard official in charge of the negotiations with I G Farben wrote a letter stating: 'They [ I G Farben] delivered to me assignments of some 2,000 foreign patents, and we did our best to work out complete plans for a modus vivendi arrangement for working together which would operate through the terms of the war, whether or not the us came in.' (Our emphasis). Another example is the cable which a Standard official sent on Sept. 11, 1939 from New York to the company's agent in Japan. This cable states: 'Also, as we fear United States Government in near future may have grounds for action, unfavorable to American-Japanese trade, we consider timely for us to organize with Japanese partners whose influence would be valuable later towards re-establishment after Interruption in our trade'. For Standard Oil, the war with the Axis is not an ideological battle to the death. It is merely an unfortunate but necessary 'interruption in our trade'. According to one confidential memorandum in its files, Standard had received an offer from I G Farben, after September 1939, to purchase Stand-

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ard's German subsidiary in order to 'safeguard Standard Oil of New Jersey's interest for the duration' - i.e., to prevent its seizure as enemy property. Very likely Standard accepted the offer, since it has attempted to do as much for IG's interests in American firms. Likewise the General Electric agreement with Krupp, the German steel and munitions trust, was extended after the start of the war. A special clause was inserted into the agreement fixing the formal date for its termination as 1950. That cartel agreements were to be operative, as far as possible, during the war itself, is proved by the royalty provisions under which American corporations agreed to put aside a share of the profits from American war production to be paid their German cartel partners afterward. An example of this practice was revealed at the Senate Patent Committee hearings. An official of Rohm and Haas, a du Pont subsidiary maintaining a monopoly on synthetic glass by cartel agreement with I G Farben, was forced to admit that his company had continued 'after Pearl Harbor' to set aside royalties on us military orders for post-war payment to the German interests. These, he belatedly assured the committee - after the facts were out! - are now being held 'with the hope and expectation that they will be seized by the Alien Property Custodian'.

How the Cartels Curtailed us Production

The American monopolies have used every conceivable device in carrying out their cartel agreements to restrict production. A. Restricting the Number ofProducers. The primary method is to exclude any independent companies from entering the field or to rigidly limit the number of producers and the quantities they may produce. This was the device used by the Aluminum Company of America to restrict American production of the vital war metal, magnesium, to one-twentieth of German production. ALCOA'S agreement with JG Farben provided that only one American company, Dow Chemical, could produce magnesium and that it could sell the metal only to companies designated by ALCOA. General Electric, which controlled the patents on tungsten carbide, the finest and cheapest metal alloy for the use of cutting tools, informed the German Krupp steel trust, at the time of the signing of its cartel agreement, that GE desired to limit American licensees 'to a small number, preferably not more than two'. It was actually limited to just one, GE's own subsidiary, Carboloy, Inc. GE's agreement even gives Krupp the right to determine what companies GE may license.

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Perhaps the most glaring example is tetracene, the best and most easily produced chemical agent for ammunition priming. The tetracene patents are jointly owned by Remington Arms, a du Pont subsidiary, and I G Farben. According to the agreement between the two, Remington could not license the United States and British governments to produce tetracene, nor could Remington or any of its private licensees produce tetracene to be used for war purposes by the American government or 'in ammunition sold to the British government'. B. Dismantling Plants. To curtail production American partners in the monopolies went to the extreme of dismantling costly plants. Standard's agreements with I G Farben covered acetylene and acetic acid, best and cheapest raw material base for rayons, plastics, paints, dyes and other important chemical products. Jasco, Inc., a holding company owned jointly by Standard and its Nazi cartel partner, had built an acetylene plant in Baton Rouge. At the behest of IG Farben, the plant had been closed down prior to the outbreak of war between Germany and Britain. Subsequently, Standard agreed to the complete demolition of the plant, through an agreement signed after the outbreak of war on Dec. 1, 1939. The Standard officials sought to cover up their tracks by pre-dating the agreement back to August 31, 1939, the day before war was declared. In another instance, work on Standard's government-financed Baton Rouge plant for the production of butadiene, basic element of synthetic butyl rubber, was impeded for several months. According to the testimony of W.S. Parish, president of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, 'in September 1941, the rubber corporation (division of the government Reconstruction Finance Corporation) instructed Standard to suspend all work on the government butadiene project for one year'. It was only after Pearl Harbor, Parish claims, that the government rescinded this order. c. Limiting Production Through Price-Fixing. When independent companies seek licenses to produce commodities protected by American-Nazi patent agreements, they can secure such licenses only by agreeing to sell their products at the high price established by the monopolies. Although it was manufacturing tungsten carbide at a cost of$ 6.50 a pound, General Electric, from 1928 until confronted with an anti-trust suit early this year, maintained a price as high at times as $ 453 a pound, and never lower than$ 200. According to the testimony before the Truman Committee of L. Gerald Firth, president of the Firth-Sterling Steel Company, a GE tungsten carbide licensee, 'a large number of firms never used it because of the price'. In accordance with its agreement with IG Farben, du Pont has fixed prices so high as to prevent any independent production of vital dyestuffs. Speaking of this conspiracy, Thurman Arnold stated that 'it not only resulted in high prices

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to the American consumer, but has also restricted the full development of the chemical industry which is essential to our war effort'. D. Prohibitive Royalties. Sometimes the monopoly simply refuses, on one pretext or another, to license any other manufacturer. More often, however, independent producers are discouraged by the exorbitant royalties demanded by the monopoly. When Goodrich Rubber Company sought the use of Standard's butyl rubber patents, Standard brushed the request off by demanding prohibitive royalties. A letter written on Jan. 10, 1940 to Goodrich by Frank Howard, vice president of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, states 'quite frankly, it was our intention that the license would not be a suitable one under which to operate if the licensee expected to go beyond producing a relatively high-cost specialty product'. E. Discouraging Plant Expansion. During the past two years of government war preparation the monopolies sought to avoid expansion of productive facilities and the erection of new plants. Only when the government agreed to pay for new plants did the corporations finally agree to expansion. A principal method for discouraging expansion has been the circulation of false reports that existing facilities and stock-piles of materials are large enough to meet any contemplated needs. The present acute shortage of aluminum resulted from the deliberate efforts of ALCOA. For two years prior to American entry into the war ALCOA repeatedly assured the government that no new plants were needed. The Office of Production Management accepted these assurances and passed them on to the public: For months the Defense Advisory Commission and the OPM had said that talk about a shortage in aluminum was misleading and that it was unpatriotic to talk about the possibility of such a shortage ... The o PM had apparently completely relied on ALCOA as a source of information as to the availability of aluminum and had discouraged anyone else from going into the business of producing aluminum.ALCOA had long followed a policy of maintaining high prices and building new capacity only when certain that it could sell at its fixed prices all that would be produced. Truman Committee Report, June 1941

When ALCOA did finally permit the erection of new plants - at government expense - it received the lion's share of the contracts. These new plants will not reach full production until 1943 or thereafter, and will still fail to produce sufficient aluminum for the country's civilian and military needs. This is a cal-

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culated scarcity, enabling ALCOA to maintain its monopoly prices and conform to its cartel obligations. The catastrophic rubber shortage is also due in great measure to discouragement of synthetic rubber plant expansion by the Rockefeller-Du Pont-Mellon interests controlling the synthetic rubber processes. A year and a half before Pearl Harbor,JesseJones, head of the RFC and the government's Defense Plants Corporation, was informed of an impending rubber shortage and was urged to facilitate expansion of synthetic rubber production. Acting undoubtedly at the instigation of Standard and the other monopolies, Jones took the position that sufficient crude rubber stocks were available, even if all imports were cut off, to meet the country's needs for more than a year of war. A year later, Jones finally agreed to start an 'experimental' program for producing 40,000 tons of synthetic rubber. When Singapore was about to fall, Jones informed the Truman Committee that he was making plans for the production of 400,000 tons of synthetic rubber - in 1944. He also told the Truman Committee that 'the president had concurred in this (previous) course'. Likewise to prevent expansion Standard Oil falsely denied that its butyl rubber process, which it had made available to IG Farben, was the best and cheapest synthetic rubber available. It turned aside government investigators with the excuse that butyl rubber was 'still in the experimental stage', and anyway was 'too costly'. Jesse Jones testified before the Truman Committee that 'Standard had not encouraged any of us in the belief that butyl rubber was a success'. In 1939, an official of the Navy's Bureau of Construction and Repair tried to get 'first hand information on the compounding' of butyl, but was prevented, a letter sent by a Standard employee to the corporation officials boasted: 'You will recall', says the letter in part, 'that I took up this question with you before his arrival As agreed upon I took Mr. Werkethin [the Navy official] over to see the K plant when it appeared that/ could not very well steer his interest awayfrom the process. However, I am quite certain that he left with no picture of the operation .. .' (our emphasis). Four months after Pearl Harbor, and after Standard had already agreed, because of a government suit, to release its butyl patents, Parish and Howard, heads of Standard Oil of New Jersey, still sought to mislead the government as to the true value of butyl rubber. They argued that it was still in the 'experimental' stage, even though the committee had before it Standard's own documentary evidence to show that butyl is superior in many respects to natural rubber. The Standard officials also claimed that butyl was 'too costly' to produce, although documents taken from Standard's files showed that it cost only 6.6 cents a pound as compared to the 21 cents a pound being charged by the British and Dutch interests for crude rubber.

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In addition to curtailing production, the German capitalists exacted other payments which their American partners were willing to meet. A. Giving the Nazis Industrial Processes. The first important price was granting the Nazi interests the patents on exclusive and invaluable industrial processes. To IG Farben, Standard Oil gave the secret of butyl rubber manufacture, its superior acetylene process and its method for producing high-octane aviation and synthetic gasoline. For the gasoline processes, the Nazis have special reason to be grateful. They have kept the Luftwaffe in the air for two and a half years and enabled Hitler to keep his gigantic motorized army in motion. The tungsten carbide formula perfected by General Electric has helped German industry to speed up certain tooling and metal cutting processes by as much as five hundred per cent. B. Direct Material Aid. The American monopolies supplied German industry with the necessary capital for expansion. American capital investment in Germany was $5,000,000,000 in 1933. By 1939, it had increased another $3,000,000,000.

Among the leading American corporations owning or holding large interests in German corporations are Standard Oil, General Motors, Ford Motor Co., Anaconda Copper, General Electric, International Telephone and Telegraph, us Rubber, International Business Machines, International Harvester, E.I. duPont de Nemours. Standard Oil designed and directly supervised the construction of Germany's synthetic gasoline and high-octane aviation gas plants. When Nazi and Italian fascist airlines, prior to American entry in the war, could not secure fuel in South America, Standard's Brazilian subsidiary supplied the necessary petrol, in defiance of objections from the American State Department. The Standard officials claimed they had contracts which, as a matter of 'business honor', they had to fulfill. A.A. Berle, Jr., Assistant Secretary of State testified on April 3 that: 'Their (Standard officials) position was they would keep the contract they had already made, irrespective of the interests of the United States'. On the same day, William La Varre, chief of the American republics office of the Department of Commerce, denied that any contracts existed, calling the claim a 'subterfuge'. c. Military Information. Information of military value relating American and British production was regularly provided to the Nazis. Through supplying Krupp with a complete list of the sources and amounts of royalties paid by its tungsten carbide licensees, General Electric's Carboloy Company kept the Nazis informed on the number and location of plants pro-

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ducing tungsten carbide and the exact quantities of this vital war metal being produced in this country. DuPont 'gave a German company access to military information through Remington Arms royalty payments (on all tetracene produced in America) to the German company'. (AP dispatch, April 17). Under the agreement between ALCOA and IG Farben, the Nazis were able to learn through royalty payments what companies in America were producing or using magnesium and how much. After the outbreak of war between Germany and Britain, Standard Oil made an agreement with the British oil interests, pooling patents for the important hydrogenation and polymerization processes in the production of synthetic gasoline. In order to get this agreement, Standard had executed a fake dissolution of its arrangement with IG Farben. But as late as March 18,1940, as documents from Standard's files revealed, Standard was secretly passing on to IG Farben all the confidential data and technical information it was securing from the British and other American oil firms in the Anglo-American pool. Most of the information about how American corporations gave military information to the Nazis is buried in the Department of Justice files. It is too explosive to make public. But here are two examples, which the New York newspaper PM unearthed: In one American company Arnold's investigators have found a patent license for making steam turbine engines, used by the Navy, with an agreement by the American company to furnish the German licensor with 'duplicates of all correspondence with the United States Navy as well as drawings worked out by the former.' In another case, the German trust was permitted to veto the appointment of the man in charge of military production for the American company. PM,April5

Withholding Military Infonnation from us. An important form of indirect aid has been given the Nazis by the refusal of American corporations to give information of military value to the American government. Not a single great American corporation has willingly released its patents for war production. Standard Oil and ALCOA, months after Pearl Harbor, forced the government to initiate anti-trust suits to secure release of the butyl rubber and magnesium patents. General Electric has been able to secure an indefinite postponement of a threatened government prosecution aimed at releasing its tungsten carbide patents.

D.

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Even where the patents have finally been released, as in the Standard and the companies have been able to retain the vital 'know-how', the developed industrial techniques. Without this 'know-how' which the companies have refused to release, the patents are of little value, since most of them are purposely incomplete and obscure. American companies 'failed' to give the government information about the patents they gave the German interests, or to keep the government informed of patents secured from Germany. The following letter, sent by Standard Oil's Howard to his superior Parish, demonstrates the reluctance of the monopolies to cooperate with the government when this is against their cartel interests. In part, the letter states:

ALCOA cases,

Any program by which the Army Air Corps can obtain their objective of a one or two year start over the rest of the world in this vital matter [high grade aviation gasoline] bristles with difficulties and sacrifi,ces from our standpoint ... To meet the very proper desires of the air corps as expressed to us, we shall have to violate our agreements and perhaps forfeit the confidence of our associates, both American andforeign ... (our emphasis). That letter was written in 1935. To date, Standard has not forfeited the confidence of its principal foreign associate - r G Farben.

The Impotence of the Government

The findings of the Department of Justice and of two Senate investigating committees have disclosed the above outlined consequences of the American-Nazi cartel agreements. Yet the government has proved impotent to cancel these agreements or force Standard Oil, ALCOA, Du Pont, General Electric and the other monopolies to discontinue honoring the terms of these agreements. For more than a year the facts about the American-Nazi patent-pools were in the files of the anti-trust division of the Department of Justice, but the government was reluctant to make them public through anti-trust prosecutions. Only after the fall of Singapore and the Dutch East Indies and three months after Pearl Harbor, did the Department ofJustice initiate suits against Standard Oil, ALCOA, General Electric, du Pont, and a few other monopolies to secure release of the American-Nazi patents.

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But these suits collapsed under the pressure of the corporations. Standard Oil threatened to stall the suit through years of lengthy litigation. To save face, the government was compelled to give Standard a so-called consent decree on Standard's own terms. Standard agreed not to contest the case and to pay total fines of $50,000, if the government agreed to drop all charges. Standard further agreed to formally release its butyl rubber patents, with the understanding that the government was to have no power of supervision over the company's future cartel agreements or its laboratories. The government in return obtained only the privilege of investing its funds in butyl rubber plants to be controlled by Standard. Other companies can use Standard's patents provided they agree to pay a 'reasonable royalty' on all production after the war. Standard is permitted, however, to charge its butyl rubber licensees royalties during the war for providing them with the 'know-how', the technical explanation which is needed to give the purposely obscure patents any value. The only other case which has thus far come to trial is that of ALCOA. This case also was settled by a consent decree, which Thurman Arnold admitted was 'even worse' than Standard's. Before the pending government suits against General Electric, du Pont and the other monopolies could come to trial, the Roosevelt administration took steps to halt further prosecutions 'for the duration'. On March 20, Attorney General Biddle, Secretary of War Stimson, Secretary of the Navy Knox and Assistant Attorney General Arnold sent a joint letter to Roosevelt, informing him that 'some of the pending court investigations, suits and prosecutions under the Anti-Trust statutes by the Department of Justice, if continued, will interfere with the production of war materials ... In those cases we believe that continuing such prosecutions will be contrary to the national interest and security'. Roosevelt pointedly made this letter and his reply public on March 28, the day after Arnold exposed the facts about the Standard-JG Farben conspiracy to the Truman Committee. Roosevelt's reply said, 'I approve the procedure outlined in your memorandum to me .. .'. The subsequent developments in the government's projected suit against General Electric's Carboloy, Inc., illustrate how this policy is now being carried out. This suit was originally scheduled to begin last October. It was postponed to February 1942, again postponed to March, then postponed again to April. In the third week of April, Federaljudge Philip Forman of Trenton, N.J., was about to open the trial, when he received a telegram from Undersecretary of War Patterson and Under-Secretary of the Navy Forrestal. The telegram asked Judge Forman to postpone the case once more, because 'we desire time to study the

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question of whether trial at this time of us vs. General Electric Co. and others would interfere with war production'. Judge Forman agreed, indefinitely postponing the case. Whether it will finally go to trial is up to the War and Navy Departments, which have an 'inter-departmental' agreement with the Attorney General permitting them to halt any antitrust prosecution which they deem an 'interference with war production', unless the President orders such prosecution on the direct appeal of the Attorney General. To cap this process, Attorney General Biddle on May 27 urged prompt passage of legislation exempting concerns from prosecution under the anti-trust laws when they are complying with specific requests from the War Production Board in furtherance of the war effort. 'Already', said the Associated Press, 'business men are receiving formal assurance that they will not be prosecuted for anti-trust violations directly ordered as part of the war drive. The Attorney General issues certificates under a plan worked out by President Roosevelt'. This is nothing less than unconditional surrender to the monopolies.

Why the Government Will Not Act To interfere in any effective fashion with the monopolies' cartel arrangements, with their control of patents and production, would mean to squeeze the very heart of monopoly capitalism. This government, whose sole function is to safeguard the interests of the capitalist class, cannot and will not take measures which would inevitably tend to undermine private property 'rights' in the means of production. In war-time particularly, the government is often constrained to establish certain rules and regulations which, if carried out, may step on the toes of this or that group of capitalists. This is done in the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. But, as the present situation reveals, this government will not curb the cartel system and its practices because this means to impose on the basic interests of all the monopolies. Since the cartel agreements, even those with the Nazi capitalists, are an inevitable and necessary part of the capitalist process in its present stage - monopoly- the government cannot and will not prevent them,just as it will not attack the monopoly system. The government dares not even seriously expose the cartel practices. For this might serve to discredit the capitalist ruling class in the eyes of the masses. The government seeks to preserve the prestige of the monopolists for that prestige

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is essential to their continued domination of the economic and political life of the nation. If the capitalist government cannot resolve this contradiction, still less can the assorted liberals, reformist labor leaders and the Stalinists, who are anxious above all else to maintain 'national unity' with the owning class. The liberal, trade union and Social-Democratic papers have been wailing woefully at the us-Nazi cartel conspiracies. The 'solutions' they offer are beneath contempt. A typical liberal newspaper, PM, which has published more on these conspiracies than any other daily, seriously called on the small stockholders of Standard Oil to take steps to oust the trust officials responsible for the agreements with IG Farben. The editors of PM must be aware of the absurdity of this proposal. The majority of small stockholders with a few shares of common stock, have no more say about the operations of a giant corporation than any ordinary depositor has in the operations of a bank. They cannot hope to carry through a long, costly legal fight against the tremendous wealth of the leading corporation share-holders. The trade union leaders and Social-Democrats would 'solve' the problem by appealing to the administration to give the labor leaders a few more government posts. Naturally, they do not question the 'right' of the private owners to control industry, nor do they dare to challenge the monopolies' domination of the government and its war production and procurement agencies. As for the Stalinist leaders, their press has systematically suppressed the facts about the us-Nazi cartel conspiracies. From March through May, during the height of the exposures, the Daily Worker and Sunday Worker carried exactly five tiny items, in obscure positions, on the conspiracies. This policy was 'explained' in an editorial in the Daily Worker, April 24, assuring its readers that the 'large American corporations and their leading personnel' are patriotic, and that they are 'part of the camp of national unity'. The same editorial attacks those publications which are exposing the monopolies as 'naive "trustbusters"' whose attitude 'can be dangerous' and who are imitating the 'demagogy of Hitler'. Neither the monopolies nor their cartel agreements can be eliminated within the framework of the capitalist system. They are bred by the system. They will disappear only with the end of that system. The first effective step to mobilize the workers for that purpose is the transitional slogan of the Socialist Workers Party: For the expropriation of the war industries and their operation under workers' control!

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7

Wartime Crimes of Big Business (December 1943)

George Breitman

Big Business spouts patriotic speeches about 'the boys in the foxholes' every time the workers ask for a wage increase to meet the rising cost of living. 16 But Big Business patriotism is only a hypocritical cloak for self-interest. Profits always come first with the capitalists - even during a war which they want to win. To get profits and more profits they do not even hesitate to endanger the lives of the men in the armed forces of this country and its allies. Here is the proof: On Jan. 17, 1943- more than a year after Pearl Harbor - the S.S. Schenectady snapped in half and sank off the West Coast, only a few hours after it had been delivered to the Maritime Commission. The American Bureau of Shipping reported the sinking was due to the steel plate on the ship which was 'brittle' and 'more like cast iron than steel'. The us Senate's Truman Investigating Committee took over the case and at a hearing before this body in Washington on March 23, 1943, the truth came out: The defective steel had been supplied by the Carnegie-Illinois Corporation, subsidiary of the giant United States Steel Corporation, whose officials had willfully and consciously delivered faulty material to the Navy, Maritime Commission and Lend-Lease administration and had falsified the steel test records to cover up their tracks. Testimony before the Truman Committee showed that the faking of tests had covered at least 28,000 tons of substandard plate; that minor officials and employees who had complained to their superiors about the faking of tests had had their 'ears pinned back'; that high corporation officials 'instead of cooperating (with the Truman Committee) ... attempted to delay and obstruct the investigation'. us Steel officials naturally 'deplored' the situation, describing it as 'so unnecessary', and tried to put the blame on 'a few individuals' with good intentions who had grown 'lax'. This alibi, however, was decisively rejected by a

16

Breitman 1943.

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federal grand jury in Pittsburgh in May, which refused to indict four individual employees offered as scapegoats and indicted the Carnegie-Illinois Corporation itself. Equally indifferent to the murderous effects of its frauds was the Anaconda Wire and Cable Company whose Marion, Ind., plant (financed by the government) was indicted on Dec. 21, 1942 for conspiring to sell the government defective communication and other combat wire, although its officials 'well knew at all times' that use of such wire would 'endanger the lives of men in the military service of the USA'. The Pawtucket, R. 1., plant of the company was indicted a month later on similar charges. The company was shown to have gone to great lengths to devise ingenious machinery for escaping government tests of its defective wire and thus getting the wire accepted for use by the armed forces of the United States, Soviet Union and Britain. Senator Kilgore has pointed out: The batteries on all our warships, including the anti-aircraft guns, are fired, controlled, aimed and ranges set, over this self-same cable, and if the cable is defective, the ship is helpless against aircraft attack. Also, the safety and success of the entire land combat forces are frequently dependent on messages sent overland by these self-same cables. The government charged that the conspiracy began about Nov.1, 1940 and continued up to Oct. 1, 1942. Commenting on this, Senator Bone said: The fact that we were suddenly plunged into a deadly war did not in any wise induce the defendants to change the criminal practices outlined in the complaint. After Pearl Harbor, and while the boys were dying on the battlefields. Anaconda and its officials continued their sordid work of defrauding the government by furnishing faulty cable. Bone also declared the cable was 'so defective that the persons deliberately creating the defects would be brought before a firing squad if they had done this in the war zones'. Attorney General Biddle called it 'one of the most reprehensible cases of defrauding the government and endangering the lives of American soldiers and sailors ever to come to the attention of the Department of Justice'. But it was no more reprehensible than the case of the Wright Aeronautical Corporation, subsidiary of the huge Curtiss-Wright Corporation, holder of the second largest war contracts in the country. Wright's Lockland, o., plant (financed by the government) was accused by the Truman Committee in July 1943 of falsifying tests on airplane engines, destroying records, forging inspection

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reports, changing tolerances allowed on parts, skipping inspection operations, etc. Inspectors who complained were intimidated or transferred. These activities were aided, abetted and covered up by Army inspectors and important Army officials influenced by the corporation. The result, according to the committee's report, was: Engines were built and sold to the government which were leaking gasoline ... Unsafe material has been discovered in completed engines ready for delivery. The company's own reports from its field representatives indicate that these parts had failed in a substantial number of cases. A substantial number of airplanes using this engine have had crashes in which engine failures were involved ... More than 25 % of the engines built at the plant have consistently failed in one or more major parts during a threehour test run. Spare parts were shipped without proper inspection ... Accused of exaggerating the gravity of conditions at the Lockland plant, Truman retorted: 'The facts are that they were turning out phony engines and I have no doubt a lot of kids in training planes have been killed as a result. The Committee was conservative in its report, in order to prevent too much alarm over the situation'. A number of other and smaller companies were accused of the same crime during 1943: the Bohn Aluminum and Brass Corporation of Detroit, charged with fraud for willfully violating specifications for engine castings used in Rolls Royce airplanes; the Sandusky Foundry and Machinery Company of Sandusky, o., whose officials pleaded guilty to faking tests on propeller sleeves used on Navy vessels; the National Bronze and Aluminum Company of Cleveland, convicted for selling the government defective sand and aluminum mold castings which are used in combat planes; the Antonelli Fireworks Company of Spencerport, N.Y., indicted for deliberately selling the Army faulty hand grenades and incendiary bombs; the Collyer Insulated Wire Company of Rhode Island, indicted for conspiring to avoid government inspection and deliver defective wire and cable.

Biddle's Admissions Nor does this exhaust the list. In a speech in Chicago on Aug. 23, 1943, Attorney General Biddle reported that Big Business frauds in this war are 'much bigger than they were in 1917 or 1918'; he declared that 123 federal indictments had already been filed, with 1,279 investigations pending. Biddle did not indicate

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how many of these indictments and investigations involve fraud endangering the lives of servicemen, but there can be no doubt that a substantial number do. In this same speech Biddle noted that so far 71 cases have been disposed of, with convictions or other penalties in about go% of the cases. But, he complained, in many cases the offenders had gotten off with extremely light penalties. If anything, that was an understatement. While a few of the smaller companies have not gotten off scot free and some of their officials have even been given prison sentences, the great majority of offenders - and particularly the powerful ones - have escaped thus far with at most a mere slap on the wrist. Typical was the trial in Fort Wayne, Ind., June, 1943, of the Anaconda Wire and Cable Marion plant: 'The most obnoxious fraud ever presented to a court of the United States!' That was how a prosecuting attorney described the Anaconda case. 'Revolting' was the comment by Federal Judge Thomas W. Slick, who presided at the trial. Nevertheless, not a single one of the indicted Anaconda officials spent an hour in jail for their crimes. Some were fined and given prison sentences, but the judge ordered the suspension of the prison sentences upon payment of ridiculously light fines. Anaconda attorneys at the trial volunteered the information that the company had made $46,000 from the frauds, but the total fines imposed by Judge Slick came to $31,000. Thus, even after paying these fines the company had a tidy margin of profit from its criminal activities! The company got away so easily by pleading nolo contendere, that is, not contesting the charges and throwing itself on the mercy of the court. Its lawyers admitted 'technical guilt' but not 'moral guilt'; they explained their reluctance to go before a trial jury on the ground that such a course 'would have impeded the war effort'. The court, as has been shown, was exceedingly merciful. The judge explained the suspension of prison terms by saying he felt the guilty officials 'could better serve the war effort by going back to work'; he did not say whether he meant the same kind of work for which they had been indicted. The judge also asserted that this disposition of the case would 'stop anything of a similar nature elsewhere' - a view shared by almost no one else. Thus, the first important trial for wartime fraud endangering the armed forces indicated that Big Business can get away with murder. 'But', some people say, 'these are the crimes of individual corporations, and Big Business as a whole should not be blamed for them'. This is the position taken among others by AFL president William Green and cw secretary James Carey. Contemptible as this argument is - especially from trade union leaders who are supposed to defend the interests of the workers against their Big Business enemies - it deserves an answer.

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First, it must be remembered that us Steel and Curtiss-Wright are not twobit businesses unrelated to the rest of industry. On the contrary, they are among the most powerful groups in American Big Business, being two of the 25 companies which hold 50 % of the war contracts, and they are controlled by the same financial interests that dominate the national economy. Check the names of their chief stockholders and boards of directors and you will find listed the same respected bankers and industrialists who top the list of America's Sixty Families. Second, let it be noted that the revelations of these wartime crimes have not evoked a single word of criticism or denunciation from a single important capitalist in this country. The employers' associations, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce - all have been as silent as the tomb, none has even implied that there is anything reprehensible in frauds that deliberately endanger servicemen's lives. This silence speaks volumes more than a million consciously deceptive statements by cowards like Green and Carey, for it indicates that the basic outlook of the corporations caught in the act is shared by Big Business as a whole.

Cynical Whitewash

Third, there is the behavior of the capitalist press, which reaps fortunes from the big patriotic advertisements inserted in their pages by the powerful corporations (and paid for out of the taxpayers' money). For every line they have devoted to incomplete and confusing accounts of the war frauds, they have printed ten lines whitewashing the corporations and trying to smear the Truman Committee. When used at all, the stories of the wartime frauds have been relegated for the most part to the inside pages where they will not attract the same attention as the huge headlines and editorials denouncing the miners and other workers forced to strike in order to secure a living wage. This is not because the capitalist press fails to recognize news when it sees it; rather it is because the press recognizes that these crimes are a damning indictment of all capitalists. Fourth, and most revealing, there is the following evidence about the steel and aircraft industries as a whole: A few days after the Truman Committee hearing on us Steel had been concluded, the steel barons began to talk about a threatening decline of 35 % in national steel production. 'Lower production prospects are due to the demoralizing fear the Senate inquiry has instilled into every steel plant', said the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, on Apr. 16, 1943. These reports - inspired by the steel corporations in an attempt to get the Truman

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Committee to lay off - showed that the entire steel industry feared such investigations. The only logical explanation for this fear is that other steel corporations besides us Steel are engaged in illegal production practices. Similarly, when the capitalist press was trying to blame the Truman Committee for an 85 % decline in shipment of finished airplane engines at Wright's Lockland plant in the period between April and August, 1943, it was shown that Curtiss-Wright was not the only company panic-stricken by the prospect of investigation: 'Leading industrialists and production experts the country over are carefully watching the case .. .', the New York Times reported on Sept. 2. 'The extent to which other companies and other plants of the Curtiss-Wright group have been affected by what happened at Lockland is difficult to estimate. Many other concerns are said to be worrying, however, lest they run into similar situations .. .'. But why should they be worrying if they are not guilty of the same crimes as Curtiss-Wright? Their apprehension is good reason for concluding that the Truman Committee investigations have scratched only the surface of Big Business crimes in this war and that further investigation would involve all the other big monopolies and corporations.

True to Form

The sale of defective war material has shocked some people more than the other wartime activities of the corporations because it is so openly cynical and in such flagrant contrast to the high-minded sentiments spread over the newspaper advertisements. As a result there is a tendency to look upon this practice as something exceptional and unrelated to the general policies of capitalism. But at bottom it is no different in kind from the other 'scandals' perpetrated by Big Business every day in the year. The explanation for the policies and activities of the monopolies and corporations is always to be found in the profit motive. No employer keeps his factory running unless there is profit to be made from it. This is as true in wartime as in peacetime, with only one difference: in wartime there is usually more profit to be made and the capitalists, maddened by greed, sweep aside all restraints and obstacles in the way of ever greater profits. Rare indeed is the case of an employer who has said: 'I have got enough'. The tendency of the ruling class is always to go after more and more. Billions are being made on war contracts, but even the most powerful corporations do not disdain to pick up a few millions extra by manufacturing substandard products and then palming off the defective material as the article for which they are being paid such generous prices.

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But in what sense does this differ from the normal practices of capitalism? In peacetime Big Business' concern for profits and profits alone often results in the shutting of the factories. The hardships this brings to the whole working class, the undernourishment it visits on millions of children, the diseases that follow in its wake, surely take as heavy a toll of human life and well-being as the war frauds. Who will say which is worse? Who will contend that the cause is different? What about war profiteering? The people were solemnly assured that there would be no war millionaires this time. Yet profits were bigger in 1942, after the payment of truces, than they were during the last war or in the boom year of 1929. And they were 14 % higher during the first six months of 1943 than during the same period in 1942, according to a report by the Department of Commerce. Which scandal is more detestable - the war frauds or the war profiteering which will place heavy burdens on all the masses and act as a drag on their living standards for years to come? And who will deny the connection between the two? No, the Big Business 'scandals' of this war do not begin and end with their cynical disregard for the safety of the servicemen. They began long ago, they touch on every aspect of the war program and they vitally affect the rights and conditions of every worker. Ask the sailors at Pearl Harbor and they will tell you what they think about the manufacturers who sold the Japanese warlords the scrap metal used to make the bombs that were dropped upon them. Ask the marines in the malaria-infested South Pacific jungles what they think about the capitalists who restricted the production of quinine and other drugs so that they could maintain high prices for these products. Ask the aviators and the merchant marine men, who survived the sinking of their ships what they think About rubber barons and oil magnates whose demand for monopoly control of rubber in the post-war period impeded the production of synthetic rubber necessary to build rafts and other life-saving equipment.

Critical Shortages

There are shortages of aluminum, binoculars, critical chemicals, magnesium, tetracene, dyestuffs, tungsten carbide, etc., all important materials in wartime. The reason? Because Standard Oil, du Pont, General Electric, ALCOA, General Motors and the other big corporations formed cartels with their fellow monopolists in Germany, Britain, France, Japan, etc., for the purpose of restricting

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production, maintaining monopoly and raising prices. More lives have been lost in this war because of these cartel deals than because of the sale of defective material. Other shortages affecting the war program can be traced directly to the fact that the big corporations have hogged the great majority of the government's war contracts. As Assistant Attorney General Tom C. Clark has reported: 'At the start of the war program in this country 175,000 companies provided 70% of the nation's manufacturing output, while today, two and a half years later, the ratio has been reversed to the point where 100 corporations hold 70 % of the war and essential civilian contracts. This group, he declared, has obtained the bulk of the fourteen billion dollars worth of new plants built at government expense' (New York Times, April 23, 1943). As a result many small plants have been driven to the wall; with them disappeared their productive capacity, while many of the new plants remain partly unused and unproductive. A typical example of how the monopolists impede production is the shipbuilding industry, where the revolutionary Higgins assembly-line production program was strangled because it was considered a competitive threat to the position of powerful companies like Bethlehem Steel. Other wartime blessings for which the workers can think Big Business are: the speedup, which resulted in 1942 in a greater number of casualties on the industrial front than on the military front; an artificially created manpower shortage - due to labor hoarding by the manufacturers and big agricultural interests, discrimination against Negro and women workers, managerial inefficiency - which is used to justify freezing the workers to low-paid jobs; an aggravation of the housing crisis in many war production centers, resulting in increased sickness, disease, child delinquency and disruption of family life; food shortages designed to force price rises. Big Business could not get away with all this if there were a government in Washington seriously interested in stopping it. But the government is itself the outstanding advocate of capitalism. The government is well aware of the attitude of Big Business, as was shown in Monograph No. 26, Economic Power and Political Pressure, issued by the government's Temporary National Economic Committee in November, 1940, and stating in part: Speaking bluntly, the government and the public are 'over a barrel' when it comes to dealing with business in time of war or other crisis. Business refuses to work, except on terms which it dictates. It controls the natural resources, the liquid assets, the strategic position in the country's economic structure, and its technical equipment and knowledge of pro-

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cesses. The experience of the World War, now apparently being repeated, indicates that business will use this control only if it is 'paid properly.' In effect, this is blackmail, not too fully disguised. Blackmail it may be, but the government has given in to it without complaint or rancor. It has given the employers the greatest profits in their history; and to pay for these profits, it has piled one scandalous tax bill after another on the masses, frozen wages and jobs, prohibited strikes, prevented effective price control, abolished all limits on big salaries. Big Business has no reason to complain that it is not being 'paid properly', according to its own lights. To make doubly sure that they don't muff any opportunities, the corporations have offered and the government has appointed a considerable number of dollar-a-year men to head the most important wartime agencies and posts. Even the New Deal Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes admitted on July 21, 1943, that 'it is the business men who are running the war'. And while running it, they see to it that the interests of the corporations are well protected.

Government Cooperation

Even after Pearl Harbor the government was still trying to get industry to discontinue illegal practices hampering war production. Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold complained in his report to Congress on Jan. 3, 1942, about: ' ... the attitude of powerful private groups dominating basic industries who have feared to expand their production because expansion would endanger their future control of industry ... There is not an organized basic industry in the United States which has not been restricting production by some device or other in order to avoid what they call the "ruinous overproduction after the war"'. The government pleaded with the corporations to cooperate, to discontinue their cartel deals and violations of the anti-trust laws, and to let other companies use their patents for war production; the corporations flatly refused. Early in 1942 the government - in order to prevent the complete breakdown of the war program, that is, in order to protect the interests of the capitalist class as a whole - was finally compelled to institute a series of suits against a number of monopolies, making public the damning facts about which the government had been aware for many years. The corporations had been caught red-handed. But the government, once having gotten their promise to permit the use of the patents during the war, dropped the charges and let these corporations escape virtually unpunished.

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Standard Oil, for example, whose restriction of synthetic rubber production had blocked the whole war production program, was permitted to plead nolo contendere and was given a $50,000 fine (which amounts to about the average profit this corporation makes every hour). The other corporations got away even more easily. To make the government's attitude unmistakably clear, Arnold, Biddle, Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of Navy Knox wrote Roosevelt on March 20, 1942, in the midst of the public revelations about the cartels, and said that' ... some of the pending court investigations, suits and prosecutions under the anti-trust statutes by the Department of Justice, if continued, will interfere with the production of war materials .... In those cases we believe that continuing such prosecutions at this time will be contrary to the national interest and security'. This was some more 'blackmail', a threat to hold up on production if the prosecutions were continued, with government officials covering up for the corporations. Roosevelt answered: 'I approve the procedure outlined in your memorandum to me .. .'. Thus, punishment of the corporations for violating the laws has been postponed to some remote future in the post-war period, if then. The same course has been followed in connection with the defective war material cases. Reluctantly the government has been compelled to prosecute in a few of the more flagrant cases, but each time high government representatives have stepped forward to make light of the corporation crimes. The War Production Board held a closed meeting on the us Steel case, but its only outcome was a statement by WPB chairman Donald Nelson deploring a 'more than usual' vigilance on the part of steel plant inspectors and a WPB telegram to several steel companies urging them not to lean over backwards while seeking 'unattainable perfection' in meeting production specifications. Other key government spokesmen issued statements implying that there was no need to worry about the practices of us Steel.

Labor Must Act

When a wave of protest arose after the Truman Investigation of Curtiss-Wright, Undersecretary of War Patterson, while not daring to deny the truth of Truman's charges, nevertheless issued a statement asserting that conditions at the Lockland plant were 'much less sensational than some of the inferences drawn in recently published statements'. An Army investigation board under Lt. General William S. Knudsen also had to admit the Truman Committee charges were accurate but sought to minimize their importance. Both these and other gov-

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ernment officials seemed more concerned in. quieting public indignation than in taking measures against the Curtiss-Wright criminals. And during the period between Anaconda Wire and Cable's indictment and trial, the Offices of the Inspector of Navy Material in New York and Cincinnati went out of their way to commend Anaconda for its 'good workmanship' and to announce that it was being considered for an 'E' award. During this same period Army and Navy procurement officials showed how little concerned they were about the corporation's malpractices by awarding Anaconda's Marion plant almost $4,000,000 in additional business. The trade union and liberal press have protested against most of the Big Business crimes and have often criticized government officials for their behavior. But they continue to regard each of the crimes and whitewash moves as a unique incident, isolated from all the others and caused by bungling or some other bad quality of individual capitalists and government officials. That is one reason why the union leaders and liberals are unable to work out a program to effectively combat such crimes. The workers who are seriously concerned about the present situation must take another approach. They must learn to look at all the crimes of capitalism together as a whole and to understand that each individual 'scandal' is part of and flows from the biggest scandal of all - Big Business domination not only of the war program but of the whole national economy. They must recognize that Big Business could not get away with its crimes were it not for the collusion or at best indifference of the government officials. Only on this basis can they determine on effective countermeasures. For Big Business will not voluntarily change its methods, and the administration and Congress will not and cannot make the punishment fit the crime. If anything is to be done, it will have to be done by the labor movement. Whatever else one may conclude from these government actions, it is safe to say that they do not have the effect of strongly discouraging war frauds. Some people have suggested the passage of legislation imposing the death penalty on manufacturers whose fraudulent practices endanger the lives of the men in the armed forces. A bill providing this penalty or a million dollar fine has even been introduced into Congress. It is hard to imagine the present Congress - which is the servant, body and soul, of the big corporations - ever adopting legislation to punish them. The members of the administration who have been rushing into print to defend the corporations accused of fraud likewise have no interest in seeing such a bill passed. Because its adoption would undoubtedly have the effect of discouraging many corporations from continuing their murderous frauds, a Socialist Workers Party member of Congress would vote for this bill. But as he did so, he would

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warn the workers that its passage alone could not put an end to the crimes of Big Business for it would not do away with the basic causes of such crimes: the profit motive and the corporations' domination over the means of production. To get to the root of the problem, the Socialist Workers Party advocates that the ownership and control of industry be taken out of the hands of the capitalists. This course of action will be regarded by Big Business as far more drastic than any bill providing the death penalty and it will be fought by them with every weapon they have, but it is the only practical answer to capitalist mismanagement of industry. At its June 1943 meeting in Toronto, the international executive board of the United Auto Workers, c 10, drew up a series of proposals designed to ensure full employment in the post-war period. One of these called for government ownership after the war of 'monopolistic industries and of industries strategically essential to the national safety'.

Why Postpone? This is a sound idea, and offers the key to the solution not only of unemployment, as nationalized production has shown in the Soviet Union, but also of the criminal practices of the capitalist class. Let industry be owned by the government and operated under the control of committees democratically elected by the workers. The profit motive would be removed, and with it would be removed the incentive to produce and sell dangerously defective products. The costs of production would be lowered and the workers' committees, having no interest in exacting profits from the blood of the soldiers, would guarantee production and honest testing in the interests of the masses of the people. The UAW executive board proposes post-war government ownership of industry. But why wait until the war is over? The contents of this pamphlet demonstrate that Big Business domination of industry menaces the welfare and safety of the masses in wartime as much as if not more than in peacetime. The war may last a long time, and so long as Big Business is in control, the number of victims of capitalist greed will continue to mount. Meanwhile the big corporations are using the war itself to smash thousands of smaller businesses and to tighten their own grip on industry. The longer the workers wait, the harder it may prove to expropriate the capitalists. The time to act is now. It will not be easy to put this program into effect. Union men and women who have had to strike for a wage increase of even five cents an hour know how vindictively the employers resist every challenge to their profits; capitalist ferocity will be multiplied a hundred times when the workers try to take

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the factories away from them. The daily press and radio commentators will become frenzied in their denunciations and incitations to violence against the workers; all the instruments of capitalist propaganda will be turned on full blast to bolster the myth that production cannot continue without the capitalist coupon-clippers, that society cannot function without parasitic exploiters. And, of course, the capitalists will be aided throughout in this campaign by their political parties and their agents in the government. The question of who is to own and operate industry is a political problem. To make the change that is necessary the workers will have to conduct a political struggle against Big Business. The employers already have their political organizations, the Republican and Democratic Parties, and to fight them successfully the workers will have to create a political organization of their own. The capitalist parties are last-ditch supporters of the system of private property and private profit which enables the employers to do what they wish with the means of production. The workers need a party which will be just as firmly devoted to the program of government ownership and workers' control of industry. That means an independent labor party, based on the trade unions and running its own labor candidates in elections. The present government has already shown where it stands on this question. The billions of dollars worth of factories, properties and equipment now owned by the government are going to be turned over at bargain prices after the war to the employers, who will use them to swell their profits and to further strengthen their monopoly control. That is why the workers and their party must fight for the creation of a new kind of government, one which will aid, not oppose the struggle for government ownership and workers' control, a Workers' and Farmers' Government. The wartime production crimes have tom away the mask from the rapaciously greedy countenance of Big Business. Now the working people must tear out of the capitalists' hands the power to continue their criminal activities. 1 October 1943

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s The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 1945)

James P. Cannon

[The original title of this talk was 'The Heritage of Leon Trotsky and the Tasks of His Disciples', presented to an August 22 memorial meeting in New York for Leon Trotsky - but Cannon used the occasion to express his outrage over atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki two weeks earlier (August 6 and g)].17 Five years ago today, when the world stood in the depths of the reaction engendered by the imperialist war, our great leader and teacher, Comrade Trotsky, perished at the hands of a Stalinist assassin. We memorialized him then as the great man of ideas, not yet acknowledged by the world, but a man whose ideas represented the future of mankind. Today, on the fifth anniversary of his tragic and most untimely death, as we stand at the beginning of the greatest revolutionary crisis in the history of the world, when thoughts and words must be transformed into deeds - today we pay our grateful tribute to Trotsky as the man of action. When we celebrated the 10th anniversary of our party in 1938, at a great jubilee meeting, Comrade Trotsky was one of the speakers. He couldn't come to New York, but he spoke to us on a phonograph record which he had made for the occasion - a greeting to our party on its tenth anniversary. Many of you no doubt have heard that speech. You will recall that he said we have the right to take time out to celebrate past achievements only as a preparation for the future. In the same sense we can say that if we take time tonight to memorialize our noble and illustrious dead, we do it primarily as a means of preparing and organizing the struggle of the living for the goal which he pointed out to us. The main ideas of Trotsky, the ideas for which he lived and died, are comparatively simple. He saw the great problem of society arising from the fact that modem industry, which is necessarily operated socially by great masses

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Cannon 1945.

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of people, is hampered and constricted by the anachronism of private ownership and its operation for private profit, rather than for the needs of the people. He saw that the modem productive forces have far, far outgrown the artificial barriers of the national states. These two great contradictions - the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for private profit, and the stifling ofindustrywithin the outlived framework of the national states - are the sources of the great ills of modem society - poverty, unemployment, fascism, and war. Trotsky saw the only way out for humanity in the revolutionary overthrow of outlived capitalism. Industry must be socialized and operated on the basis of a plan, for use and not for profit. The national antagonisms of the separate capitalist states have to give way to an international federation - the Socialist United States of the World. Socialized and planned economy can produce and provide an abundance for all the people - not only in one nation, but in all nations. The separate socialist nations, having no need or incentive to exploit others, having no conflicts over markets, spheres of influence, and fields of investment, no need of colonies to exploit and enslave - these separate socialist nations will necessarily unite in peace and cooperation based on a worldwide division of labor. The strength of one nation will become the strength of all, the scarcities of one will be made up by the plethora of others. Humanity will organize the cooperative exchange of all the conquests of art and science for the use of all peoples of all lands. Trotsky taught that only the workers can bring about this revolutionary transformation. Only the working class, the only really progressive and revolutionary class in modem society, standing at the head of all the oppressed and deprived and exploited and enslaved - only they can bring about this great revolutionary transformation and reorganization of society. The workers are the only progressive class, and they are the most powerful class by virtue of their numbers and their strategic position in society. All the workers need is to become conscious of their historic interests and of their power, and to organize to make it effective. Trotsky taught that this struggle for the revolutionary transformation of the world, which is on the historic agenda right now, requires the leadership of a party. But - Comrade Trotsky emphasized - not a party like other parties. That was his message to our 10th anniversary meeting: 'not a party like other parties', not a halfhearted, not a reformistic, not a talking and compromising party, but a thoroughgoing revolutionary party, a thinking and acting party. A party irreconcilably opposed to capitalism on every front and to capitalist war in particular. Such a party, he said, is required to lead this grand assault against an outlived social system.

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The workers of the world needed the ideas of Trotsky in 1940. All the material conditions for the transformation of society from capitalism to socialism had long since matured. What lagged behind was the consciousness and the understanding of the masses of the workers and their organizations. They had need of Trotsky's ideas when he spoke out- the one great voice in the worldagainst the slaughter of the second imperialist war. But they were not yet ready, they were not yet properly organized, to understand the ideas of Trotsky and to act on them. The great organizations of the workers, political and industrial, had fallen under the leadership of men who were, in effect, not representatives of the interests of the workers, but agents of the bourgeoisie within the labor movement. The social democratic parties; the communist parties of the Comintern, which had turned traitor to communism and to the proletariat; and the great trade unions - they all rejected the revolutionary program of Trotsky. They all supported the capitalist governments; and the governments plunged the people into the bloody shambles of the war. Trotsky died confident of the victory of the Fourth International, as he said in that last message which we carry above our platform tonight. He died confident of the victory, but without having the opportunity to live and participate in it. We have had six years of the war. The war that was supported by the labor leaders. The war that was defended by the professors and the intellectuals. The war that was blessed by the church. And now we can count up the results. What are the fruits of this war which, it was promised, was going to bring benefit to mankind? Look at Europe! Look at Asia! Or, closer home, look at the closing factories and the long lines before the unemployment offices, lines that will grow longer and hungrier, lines in which the returning soldiers will soon take their weary places - if they come back alive and able to walk from the battlefields. Under capitalism the factories ran full blast to produce the instruments of destruction, but they cannot keep open to produce for human needs in time of so-called peace. The whole of Europe, the whole of great cultured Europe, is a continent of hunger and despair and devastation and death. The victors at Potsdam announced to Europe the fruits of the victory and the liberation. They decreed the breakup of German industry, the most powerful and productive industry on the continent of Europe. They announced that the living standards of industrialized Germany, the workshop of Europe, can be no higher than those of the devastated backward agricultural states. Not to raise the lowest to the level of the highest, but to drag the highest and most developed and cultured countries down to the level of the lowest and least

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developed countries - that is the explicit program of the makers of the so-called peace. Such is the program for Europe. And what are the results in terms of human beings? I read a dispatch in the New York Times today from Frankfurt. It is a casual, matter-of-fact informational piece from which I quote a reference to an official report of the situation in that area. 'The figures', says the correspondent of the Times, 'show that the average consumer in this zone is living on 1100 to 1300 calories a day, in contrast to the army's ration of 3600'. Less than one-third of the food estimated by the army to be required to maintain the soldiers at a level of efficiency is allotted to the 'liberated' people of Germany in the American zone. Surely the European people will develop a great love and appreciation for the liberators. Surely the foundations are being laid for the peace of a thousand years. Capitalism in its death agony is dragging humanity down into the abyss. Capitalism is demonstrating itself every day more and more, in so-called peace as in war, as the enemy of the people. Bomb the people to death! Bum them to death with incendiary bombs! Break up their industries and starve them to death! And if that is not horrible enough, then blast them off the face of the Earth with atomic bombs! That is the program of liberating capitalism. What a commentary on the real nature of capitalism in its decadent phase is this, that the scientific conquest of the marvelous secret of atomic energy, which might rationally be used to lighten the burdens of all mankind, is employed first for the wholesale destruction of half a million people. Hiroshima, the first target, had a population of 340,000 people. Nagasaki, the second target, had a population of 253,000 people. A total in the two cities of approximately 600,000 people, in cities of flimsy construction where, as the reporters explained, the houses were built roof against roof. How many were killed? How many Japanese people were destroyed to celebrate the discovery of the secret of atomic energy? From all the indications, from all the reports we have received so far, they were nearly all killed or injured. Nearly all. In the Times today there is a report from the Tokyo radio about Nagasaki which states that 'the center of the once thriving city has been turned into a vast devastation, with nothing left except rubble as far as the eye could see'. Photographs showing the bomb damage appeared on the front page of the Japanese newspaper Mainichi. The report says: 'One of these pictures revealed a tragic scene 10 miles away from the center of the atomic air attack', where farm houses were either crushed down or the roofs tom asunder. The broadcast quoted a photographer of the Yamaha Photographic Institute, who had rushed to the city immediately after the bomb hit, as having said: 'Nagasaki is now a dead city, all the areas being literally razed to the ground. Only a few buildings are left, standing conspicuously from the ashes'. The photographer said that 'the

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toll of the population was great and even the few survivors have not escaped some kind of injury'. So far the Japanese press has quoted only one survivor of Hiroshima. In two calculated blows, with two atomic bombs, American imperialism killed or injured half a million human beings. The young and the old, the child in the cradle and the aged and infirm, the newly married, the well and the sick, men, women, and children - they all had to die in two blows because of a quarrel between the imperialists of Wall Street and a similar gang in Japan. This is how American imperialism is bringing civilization to the Orient. What an unspeakable atrocity! What a shame has come to America, the America that once placed in New York harbor a Statue of Liberty enlightening the world. Now the world recoils in horror from her name. Even some of the preachers who blessed the war have been moved to protest. One said in an interview in the press: 'America has lost her moral position'. Her moral position?Yes. She lost that all right. That is true. And the imperialist monsters who threw the bombs know it. But look what they gained. They gained control of the boundless riches of the Orient. They gained the power to exploit and enslave hundreds of millions of people in the Far East. And that is what they went to war for - not for moral position, but for profit. Another preacher quoted in the press, reminding himself of something he had once read in the Bible about the meek and gentle Jesus, said it would be useless to send missionaries to the Far East anymore. That raises a very interesting question which I am sure they will discuss among themselves. One can imagine an interesting discussion taking place in the inner circles of the House of Rockefeller and the House of Morgan, who are at one and the same time - quite by accident of course - pillars of finance and pillars of the church and supporters of missionary enterprises of various kinds. 'What shall we do with the heathens in the Orient? Shall we send missionaries to lead them to the Christian heaven or shall we send atomic bombs to blow them to hell?' There is a subject for debate, a debate on a macabre theme. But in any case, you can be sure that where American imperialism is involved, hell will get by far the greater number of the customers. American imperialism has brought upon itself the fear and hatred of the whole world. American imperialism is regarded throughout the world today as the enemy of mankind. The First World War cost 12 million dead. Twelve million. The Second World War, within a quarter of a century, has already cost not less than 30 million dead; and there are not less than 30 million more to be starved to death before the results of the war are totaled up. What a harvest of death capitalism has brought to the world! If the skulls of all of the victims could be brought together and piled into one pyramid, what

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a high mountain that would make. What a monument to the achievements of capitalism that would be, and how fitting a symbol of what capitalist imperialism really is. I believe it would lack only one thing to make it perfect. That would be a big electric sign on the pyramid of skulls, proclaiming the ironical promise of the Four Freedoms. The dead at least are free from want and free from fear. But the survivors live in hunger and terror of the future. Who won the war that cost over 30 million lives? Our cartoonist in the Militant, with great artistic merit and insight, explained it in a few strokes of the pen when she drew that picture of the capitalist with the moneybags in his hands, standing on top of the world with one foot on the graveyard and the other on destroyed cities, with the caption: 'The Only Victor'. The only winner is American imperialism and its satellites in other countries. What are the perspectives? How do our masters visualize the future after this great achievement of the six-year war? Before the Second World War, with all its horror and destruction of human life and human culture, is formally ended, they are already thinking and planning for the third. Don't we have to stop these madmen and take power out of their hands? Can we doubt that the peoples of all the world are thinking it cannot go much further, that there must be some way to change it? Long ago the revolutionary Marxists said that the alternative facing humanity was either socialism or a new barbarism, that capitalism threatens to go down in ruins and drag civilization with it. But in the light of what has been developed in this war and is projected for the future, I think we can say now that the alternative can be made even more precise: The alternative facing mankind is socialism or annihilation! It is a problem of whether capitalism is allowed to remain or whether the human race is to continue to survive on this planet. We believe that the people of the world will waken to this frightful alternative and act in time to save themselves. We believe that before American imperialism, the new master of the world, has time to consolidate its victories, it will be attacked from two sides and defeated. On the one side the peoples of the world, transformed into the colonial slaves of Wall Street, will rebel against the imperialist master, as the conquered provinces rose against imperial Rome. Simultaneously with that uprising, and coordinating our struggle with it, we, the Trotskyist party, will lead the workers and plebeians of America in a revolutionary attack against our main enemy and the main enemy of mankind, the imperialists of the United States. Five years ago today we first mourned and commemorated our great man of ideas, Comrade Trotsky. Today, as revolutionary action is becoming a life-anddeath necessity for hundreds of millions of people, as we prepare to go over

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from ideas to action - to action guided by ideas - we commemorate Trotsky as the great man of action, the organizer of workers, the leader of revolutions. That is the spirit in which we commemorate Comrade Trotsky tonight. He enjoined us above everything else to build a party. And again I repeat what he said: 'Not a party like other parties', but a party fit to lead a revolution, a party that does not dabble, does not go halfway, but carries the struggle through to the end. If you are serious; if you mean business, if you want to take part in the fight for a better life for yourself and for the salvation of mankind, we invite you to join us in this party and take part in this great struggle. There is no place for pessimists or fainthearted people in our party, no place for self-seekers, careerists, and bureaucrats. But the door is wide open to resolute workers who are determined to change the world and ready to stake their heads on the issue. Trotsky has bequeathed to us a great heritage. He gave to us a great system of ideas which constitute our program. And he set before us the example of a man who was a model revolutionist, who lived and died for the cause of humanity, and who, above all, showed how to apply theory in action in the greatest revolution in history. With this heritage we are armed and armored for struggle and for victory. All that we, the disciples of Trotsky, need for that victory is to understand those ideas clearly, to assimilate them into our flesh and blood, to be true to them, and, above all, to apply them in action. If we do that we can build a party that no power on Earth can break. We can build a party fit to lead the masses of America - to answer the imperialist program of war on the peoples of the world, with revolution at home and peace with the peoples of the world.

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9

The Big Five at London (November 1945)

William F. Warde (George Novack)

On October 2 the first peace conference of the Second World War broke up in utter collapse. 18 For twenty-two days the Foreign Ministers of the five greatest Allied Powers met in almost continuous session to grapple with the problems of making a peace. Their deliberations culminated in a hopeless deadlock. Weary, bitter, pessimistic, these representatives of the world rulers finally agreed to terminate their talks. This was the only thing they could agree upon. It was freely admitted that this first Council of Foreign Ministers had accomplished nothing, had even given a severe setback to enduring peace. C.L. Sulzberger who covered the conference for the New York Times called it 'an abysmal fiasco'. In Moscow Izvestia wrote on October 5: 'The first session of the Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs ended without result. No decision whatsoever was adopted. Not even a communique which could have explained why the Ministers' Council failed was issued'. The exalted participants could not even agree on the official minutes of the proceedings. Not a very auspicious beginning for the radiant new world that was supposed to issue from the war for democracy! The Big Three had set up the Council of Foreign Ministers at Potsdam in July to draft peace treaties with the defeated Axis nations and in general to work out detailed solutions of the political, territorial and strategic problems posed by the war. The London Conference was the first of a series of projected meetings expected to be drawn out for over two years. At London the Foreign Ministers of United States, Great Britain, the USSR, France and China undertook to devise peace settlements with Italy, Finland, Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria. The previous conferences of the Big Three held in wartime had been conducted in complete secrecy and their decisions withheld on the false pretext of military necessity. Since the Ministers' Council at London met during peacetime, this excuse was obviously invalid. Yet these meetings too, which were

18

Warde 1945.

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deciding the fate of millions, were conducted in as much secrecy as the Foreign Ministers could manage. In a moment of candor C.L. Sulzberger of the New York Times sub the mounting suspicion of the people regarding the real reasons for this secret diplomacy. 'The general public which fought and won this war', he wrote on September 30, 'has an uneasy feeling that the only excuse for this closed-door business, now that the war is over and secrecy is no excuse, is that there must be something smelly going on'. In fact, as reports of the haggling and bickering leaked out, the stench emanating from this cesspool of power politics became overpowering and impossible to suppress. At the moment, American imperialism sees no need for covering up the conflicts between the 'United Nations'. As a consequence, the capitalist press has become brazenly cynical in its comments. Here is a typical paragraph from the typewriter of William Philip Simms in the September 27 New York World-Telegram. 'There were power politics and bargaining behind closed doors. Nations without any interest in certain problems were invited in. Others, vitally concerned, were barred. For sordidness this first peace parley made the 1919 Paris peace conference look like a thing of sweetness and light'. All pretense of observing the declarations about self-determination of nations in the Atlantic and San Francisco Charters was thrown aside. Not one of the peoples whose lives and futures were at stake were even formally represented. Their wishes and welfare were neither consulted nor considered. Australia's Foreign Minister Evart acidly commented that 43 of the 48 lesser members of the United Nations who had come together in San Francisco last spring were shut out. Even the crowned puppets of Anglo-American imperialism, Kings George of Greece and Peter of Yugoslavia, complained because they were not permitted to intrude upon this exclusive gathering. Inside the conference room on most of the main issues the Council of Five was reduced to Three - and in essence this trio narrowed down to a contest of strength between the United States and the USSR. Almost every point on the agenda precipitated a conflict which served to expose the predatory aims of the participants and the utterly reactionary character and consequences of the war. Molotov demanded $600,000,000 in reparations from ruined Italy. The British also wanted heavy payments. Byrnes flatly refused to go along, not out of humanitarian motives, but because he said the United States would foot the bill for these indemnities in the long run. Further haggling and maneuvering ensued when Italy's colonial empire was placed on the auction block. Britain sought to safeguard her imperial lifelines in the Mediterranean from the threat of Kremlin encroachment by placing Italy's colonies under international trusteeships, which meant domination by the Anglo-American bloc. Russia thereupon put in a bid forTripolitania and for

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bases in Eritrea as well as the Dodecanese Islands claimed by Greece. Here too the dear 'Allies' found themselves deadlocked. Next came up the question of treaties with Rumania and Bulgaria. But the United States and Great Britain flatly refused to approve draft treaties with these two countries until their Kremlin-controlled regimes were 'democratized'. In retaliation Molotov caustically criticized the dictatorial regime propped up by Anglo-American bayonets in Greece. He did not refer to the actions of these 'defenders of democracy' who are engaged in suppressing the insurgent peoples fighting for national independence in Java, Burma, IndaChina and Malaya. But near the end of the conference Molotov was reported to have remarked to one English diplomat: 'Byrnes wants to push democracy in the Balkans to see how it works there before he tries it in South Carolina'. In their rush for spheres of influence, colonial outposts, military bases and lines of communication the five powers bared their fangs and snarled and snapped at each other like beasts of prey. They fought over whole countries and chunks of continents. The knives of the Big Three have already carved up the living body of Europe. But they find themselves unable to underwrite each other's plunder. These 'Allies' have no trust or confidence in each other. Neither the United States nor Great Britain hide its hostility toward the USSR. At one point of the conference Bevin accused Molotov of employing Hitlerian methods and retracted these words only when Molotov threatened to walk out of the parley. At another point Molotov's request that Russia have the right to share in the control of Japan provoked such a sharp rejoinder from Byrnes that it likewise threatened to break up the conference then and there. Molotov argued for revision of the treaty governing the Dardanelles, saying that Russia needed complete and free access to this strait which at present keeps the Russians locked up in the Black Sea. Byrnes and Bevin flatly opposed this in the guise of defenders of Turkey against the unreasonable coercion of the uss R. Thereupon, according to Drew Pearson, Molotov said to Bevin: 'How about discussing the Suez Canal and our relationship to it?' Bevin became furious at the suggestion. Then turning to Byrnes, Molotov said: 'Well, let's discuss the Panama Canal and its relationship to the United States'. This enraged Byrnes, who indicated to Molotov that the Panama Canal was none of Russia's damn business. To this Molotov replied that if the Suez and the Panama were none of Russia's business, the Dardanelles were none of the United States' and Great Britain's business! And in the hands of these brigands lies the fate of the peoples! These masters of world destiny could not even manage to get together on the future of the city of Trieste, which is a bone of contention between Yugoslavia

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and Italy. Molotov backed Yugoslavia's claim while Byrnes and Bevin insisted that Trieste remain in Italian hands. The question of Trieste has disturbed the peace of Europe for over thirty years. It has been a constant source of irritation between the nations, a breeding ground of war. Now after two world wars the victors are still incapable of cleaning up this plague spot. Trieste remains a hopeless tangle which continues to create fresh antagonisms. Thus even on the smallest questions the architects of peace could find no formula for settling their disputes, for maintaining peace amongst themselves. 'What had been foreseen as a meeting to draft treaties of peace for the defeated powers, starting with Italy, turned into a meeting overwhelmingly occupied by the attempt to establish a peace between the principal members of the United Nations', remarked Hugh R. Wilson, former us Ambassador to Germany. On the other side of the Atlantic the Daily Herald, organ of the British Labor Party, exclaimed: 'The world is heading with its eyes open for another war'.

Behind the Breakdown

Each side of course has tried to unload responsibility for the failure of the conference upon the other. Byrnes blamed its breakdown upon Russia's unreasonable demands. Molotov hastened to explain that the real reason for the London fiasco consisted in the divergent interpretations of the Berlin agreement signed by Truman, Stalin and Attlee. These diplomatic excuses touch only the surface of the situation. The fact is that the London conference served to lay bare the real relations among the Allied powers which military necessity had compelled them to camouflage during the war. The fundamental interests and aims of the Big Three do not coincide but conflict to an ever-increasing degree. Their divergent and antagonistic purposes engendered the disputes which deadlocked the conference. In his victory address on September 2 Stalin declared: 'Now we can say that conditions for the peace of the World have already been won'. This is as cynical a falsification as the similar 'peace' statements Stalin made after the signing of the Soviet-German pact in 1939. The present imperialist peace has not diminished, let alone eliminated, the sources of armed conflict in the world. It has instead immediately produced sharpened friction between the AngloAmerican bloc and the Soviet Union. The London meeting itself provided the best demonstration of this development. Its atmosphere was saturated with fear and suspicion. 'Russia began with her fear of isolation and her suspicions of Western democracies', noted the New York Times correspondent Herbert L. Matthews. 'Now these fears are stronger

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than at any time since before the war. The Western powers began with their fears of Russia and other profound objections to the Eastern bloc which Russia has created in her frantic search for security. Those fears are also stronger than ever'. The Anglo-American imperialists dread the extension of the Kremlin's power in Europe and Asia. Their diplomatic efforts are directed toward curbing and confining the spread of Soviet influence. The Anglo-American insistence upon intervention in Eastern European affairs is motivated by the desire to secure points of support for themselves in these countries, which Moscow has marked out for its own. The disputes over Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria do not revolve around the question of 'democracy', as the official propagandists present it, but around the struggle for power over these nations. At Yalta, Stalin and Churchill with Roosevelt's blessing concluded an agreement - one of many such secret deals - to divide Europe into two spheres of influence. Eastern Europe and Germany up to the Elbe was to go to the Kremlin while England was to be sovereign over the countries bordering the Mediterranean, Italy, Greece, etc. According to the rules of power politics, agreements of this kind are made to be bent, if not broken. Each side strives to outwit, to overreach, and outmaneuver the other. So it has been in this instance. Through their puppet monarchs and friendly political agents, by means of diplomatic pressure and manipulations behind the scenes the United States and Great Britain have been seeking to penetrate the Kremlin's allotted sphere of domination. In retaliation, through the EAM-ELAS in Greece, through the powerful Stalinist parties in Italy and France and through diplomatic counterpressure and intrigue the Soviet Union interferes with England's preserves. Underlying this struggle among the Big Three for spheres of influence and aggravating the conflicts between them is the social-economic antagonism between the capitalist world and the degenerated workers' state which still remains rooted in the nationalized property of the us s R. The Soviet occupation and domination of Eastern Europe disrupts and menaces capitalist property relations although the Kremlin has evidently thus far limited itself in the occupied countries to social reforms and has brutally suppressed the attempts of the masses to overthrow capitalism and place the workers in power.

The Russian Menace

Nevertheless this critical situation creates a permanent state of instability and unrest throughout Eastern Europe. Moreover, Stalin's Red Army marauders have not shown much regard for the properties owned by Western capital-

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ists in the Rumanian oil-fields, in Austria, Germany and elsewhere. Unrest in Eastern Europe, if it persists, will inevitably communicate itself into Western Europe. Present Stalin-controlled Eastern Europe represents therefore a social danger to capitalism and cannot be accepted by Anglo-American imperialism as a long-lasting solution. That is why the 'Russian menace' is again much discussed nowadays in the ruling circles of Washington and London. The social question still lies at the root of the growing political and territorial conflicts. The problems posed by the 'peace' are necessarily leading to a realignment of forces on a world scale. The United States and Great Britain are promulgating the idea of organizing a Western bloc designed to encircle the Kremlin's sphere of influence in Europe, to check its expansion, and, at a later stage, to push it back (in exchange for concessions from Washington and London). DeGaulle aspires to have France play the leading European role in the organization of such a projected anti-Soviet diplomatic combination. The world press is already openly discussing this unfolding cleavage between the powers. 'Everyone knows', cabled H.L. Matthews from London to the New York Times on September 24, 'that the continuation of present trends will inevitably bring about a division into an Eastern bloc dominated by Russia and a Western one dominated by the United States and Great Britain.... It is fully realized that problems of frontiers, colonies and the like are completely dwarfed by the one great problem of whether the East is going to line up against the West'. A parallel process, it can be observed, is taking place in Asia. There the United States and the USSR have both rushed forward to grab all they can in order to promote their strategic interests. In addition to the bases it has seized in the Pacific, United States forces have occupied Japan and Southern Korea. Washington plans to use the docile governments of China and Japan as agents in its encirclement of the Soviet Union and its further penetration into Asia. At the same time the Kremlin has taken over southern Sakhalin, northern Korea and the Kuriles. By treaty with Chungking the uss R has gained a foothold in Manchuria and obtained access to its chief ports, Port Arthur and Dairen, for naval purposes. These moves and counter-moves by the two leading world states are obviously directed against each other as insurance in case of eventual conflict. This was explicitly referred to during the discussions on Japan at the Big Three conference.

A Ring of Steel

Drew Pearson wrote that Byrnes explained at the conference that the United States had great need of a chain of Island bases in the Pacific as security against

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Japan. Molotov laughed at this feeble argument and hinted strongly that Russia felt the United States wanted the bases solely for use against the Soviet Union. 'oK', he is reported to have said, 'you've got your naval bases in the Pacific. Then we want Paramushiro. If you're going to have your ring of steel, we'll have ours'. Each of the great powers is busily engaged in forging the links in its own 'ring of steel'. Meanwhile the propaganda machines on both sides are trying to cover their real aims by accusing each other of aggression. In September, Pravda attacked the French Socialists for trying to recreate the old cordon sanitaire against the Soviet Union. The Anglo-American big business press along with its liberal and Social Democratic echoes keeps howling that the USSR acts like a 'totalitarian dictator' in Europe and Asia. In his speech broadcast after returning from London Secretary of State Byrnes charged that Moscow was trying to 'dictate terms of peace to its allies'. The Kremlin is unquestionably striving to get as much as it can and to stretch its influence as far as it will go. But the ambitions of the expansionists in Moscow are already beginning to sharply clash with the aims and interests of the Anglo-American imperialists throughout Europe and Asia. At London, the United, States and Great Britain served warning that they would not agree to converting Eastern Europe to a private preserve of the Kremlin. They went further and undertook a vigorous diplomatic counter-campaign to halt any further advances by the USSR and to girdle its domains. Stalin, as a matter of fact, would not at all be averse to dividing the world into mutually agreed-upon spheres of influence on a 'live-and-let-live' basis. The Kremlin's diplomacy is in fact shaped to arrive at an understanding with Washington along these lines.

Wall Street and Its World Plans

But the Wall Street agents in Washington have more ambitious plans. Nothing in history compares to the enormous explosive force of American imperialism which in the brief period of the past few years has penetrated into all comers of the world. America's monopolists cannot and will not tolerate, in the long run, a Soviet Union which dominates half of Europe and Asia. The present hue and cry against the expansionism of the USSR serves the purpose of distracting public attention from Wall Street's drive for world domination. This drive proceeds uninterruptedly under the most misleading disguises and hypocritical slogans: freedom of trade, freedom of the air, freedom of elections, etc. The foremost slavemaster decorates its predatory program with all the garlands of liberty. This accords with an established tradition of the American ruling classes. The Southern slaveholders likewise embellished

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their society with the trappings of democracy; bragged of their devotion to freedom; and finally launched a counter-revolutionary rebellion in the name of 'free trade, free men and a free South'. The truth is that the would-be peace-makers have little or no confidence in the prospect of a lasting peace. In their eyes the present period represents an armed interlude, a breathing spell for the war-wearied nations. Under the guise of a peace settlement the diplomats of the ruling powers are actually making preparations for the next war. In his recent Biennial Report, Chief of Staff George C. Marshall virtually admitted that America's militarists regard a new war as inevitable. They are preparing for a new war and yet they are deathly afraid of it. The fear of a third world war hung like a dark and foreboding cloud over the London conference. The Foreign Ministers were aware that their unresolved disputes contained the seeds of another bloodbath. This restrained them from precipitating any showdown. The Kremlin, especially, is mortally terrified of another war. Stalin knows how exhausted the USSR is, how mighty the us military machine is. The atomic bomb may not have been mentioned but this terrible engine of destruction monopolized at present by the United States was suspended over the heads around the conference table. Nor is Washington in a mood to wage war. The tide of events is now running in the opposite direction. Reckless militarists and impatient mouthpieces for imperialism are agitating for an attack upon Russia before it acquires the secrets of atomic bomb manufacture. But the people here and throughout the world are not only sick of war but shudder at the thought of unloosing a third world war which can demolish civilization and destroy humanity. This growing revulsion against war bridles the war-mongers. Moreover America's capitalist rulers have their own material reasons for wishing peace. The recently concluded war was a costly as well as risky enterprise for them. They have not even begun coping with its consequences. They look forward longingly to the Pax Americana in which they can rule and exploit the world to their pocketbook's pleasure. They want now to cash in on the imperialist peace. That is one set of reasons why, despite their differences, the representatives of the great powers limited themselves to a 'war of nerves' at the London conference. Having sparred a bit to feel each other out, the contenders have retired to their comers to consult with their managers on the tactics for the next round.

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The Fear of World Revolution

But there exists an even stronger brake upon the war-making propensities of the powers. That is their common fear of the world revolution. The colonial slaves in Asia and Africa are rising up as an aftermath of the war. The peoples in Europe are restless and poised for revolutionary resistance. This fear of the rising revolutionary temper of the masses unites the Big Three in an unholy counter-revolutionary alliance. It restrains their representatives from accentuating differences too deeply and pushing their conflicts toward the breaking point. Stalin remains a firm ally of the Anglo-American imperialists in stamping out the revolutionary movements of the masses. But the fierce struggle for hegemony between the powers is placing Europe on the rack and tearing it to pieces. The entire continent writhes in agony while the Big Three quarrel over the division of the spoils. The peoples of Europe who are the principal victims of Big Three power politics are groping for a way out of their terrible predicament. Some seek salvation through alliance with the Eastern bloc under the Kremlin; others through collaboration with a Western bloc managed by the Anglo-American imperialists. Experience has already proven that both of these courses will propel Europe deeper into the abyss. Either singly or in combination, the present conquerors cannot lead Europe out of its blind alley by reorganizing its economy and state relations. They come only to carve up, strangle, rob and further degrade the continent. They cannot even give tortured Europe bread, shelter, work or peace. At the beginning of the London conference, New York Times correspondent H.L. Matthews cabled: 'Already there is a striking parallel to Versailles in 1919. The grab for colonies is no different than it was in those days. One finds here now the same struggle for economic mastery in such questions as the Ruhr and the Rhineland, the clash of two great ideologies, the intense national rivalries, the secret treaties secretly arrived at, the spirit of revenge and domination'. After 33 sessions marked by incessant conflict the London conference arrived at a stalemate. Its collapse signifies how far the disintegration of the capitalist world and the demoralization and disorientation of its rulers has proceeded since Versailles. The peace settlement of the victors in the first imperialist slaughter brought humanity in the following years a world depression, fascism, and a Second World War. Now the victors of this war are at each other's throats before they can conclude the first treaties of peace. Can anyone capable of learning the lessons of events expect better results from the Big Five peacemakers of 1945 than from their Big Four predecessors at Versailles in 1919?

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The Great Strike Wave and Its Significance (May1946)

E.R. Frank (Bert Cochran)

The first cycle of the great strike wave of 1945-46 has come to a close. 19 The main bodies of the auto, steel, electrical, rubber, packinghouse, oil, telephone and numerous other unions have signed agreements with the corporations. It is now possible to assess this great class action as a whole, even though 75,000 workers are still forced to continue their strike against the Westinghouse corporation and the country's half million miners are again battling for improved conditions. The strike wave, which America has just experienced, will be recorded as an hi-storic labor upsurge. It can be compared properly only with those major climactic battles of the American working class which, for good or for evil, outlined for whole periods ahead the road oflabor's travels. This strike wave was an historic one, first, because it was fought on the most far-flung battle front, with the unions challenging the bulk of the major monopolists. Second, because it involved the first major test of strength between the new industrial union movement and the ruling capitalist oligarchy, since the mass production unions first established their right to existence ten years ago. And last because it brought into focus the social development and revealed the vast, latent power of American labor, power enough to beat back the offensive of the employers and to win significant concessions. We said in the February 1946 Fourth International: The abdication of the labor leaders during four years of war, and their underwriting of a program of enriching and strengthening the capitalist rulers guaranteed and made inevitable the present war of the banking and industrial oligarchy against labor. No sooner did Wall Street bring its imperialist rivals to their knees than it turned with redoubled fury upon the main enemy - the working class at home. Instead of the 'gratitude'

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Frank 1946a.

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which the labor leaders naively imagined they would receive in return for labor's 'sacrifices' in the war, they received a hail of wage cuts and antilabor bills. That is what started the fight. The battle between labor and capital began as an offensive of Big Business against the working class. Immediately on V-J Day, the industrialists let loose with a program of slashing wages, discharge of millions of workers, downgrading, etc. Philip Murray, CIO President, thus summarized the case: There have been four major, whopping big cuts in wages and salaries that, according to the United States Commerce Department, have taken $20,000,000,000 out of the national pay envelope. First: The cut in hours of work - generally from forty-eight to forty hours a week - with the elimination of overtime. The average manufacturing worker who earned $ 46.35 in June, is now making only $ 35.60 - a cut of $10.75 a week.... Second: Unemployment. One month afterv-J Day two million men and women were laid off entirely, and the number is mounting daily .... Third: Downgrading. The third big cut in the nation's pay envelope came when - as production was cut down - wage earners and salaried employees were downgraded from higher paying to lower paying jobs. Fourth: The last big cut in the nation's pay envelope is a hidden one. During the war, according to the War Production Board, labor's productivity rose about twenty-five percent over all. That is to say, what before the war took five men or women to make, now requires only four men or women. This means fewer people drawing wages or salaries. The industrialists were unquestionably getting set to return to the 'good old days', when there existed no restraints on their tyrannical rule, when they had to brook no interference and could crush by force and violence all attempts at revolt or reform. The industrialists had convinced themselves that they had rewon the 'moral leadership' which they had lost so ignominiously during the 1929-33 crisis and which they never succeeded in regaining in the first two terms of the 'Roosevelt era'. It is significant that a good number of the plutocracy's paid 'brains' had begun openly playing with fascist ideas and experiments. One of these, Virgil Jordan, had this to say in the Economic Record, published by the National Industrial Conference Board, the private mouthpiece of the big manufacturers:

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It does not matter to me what others may do or say ... but when some smooth-tongued wizard from Washington ... puts to me the typical twisted question with which the patriotism and pride of the American people has been slowly poisoned during the past decade, and asks whether I want to bring back the days of Harding and Coolidge and Hoover, of Teapot Dome and Ed Doheny and Albert Fall, and Insull or Musica or Whitney ... I shall look him straight in the eye without shame or fear and say: 'Yes'. After V-J Day, ensconced securely on the mountains of money bags, which had grown to fantastic size during the war, and shielded by the scandalous tax laws which permitted them to raid the public treasury again and again for their continued aggrandizement, the robber-barons of America decided this was the God-given opportunity to put the unions 'in their place'. What were their precise aims? At the very least, to deal the unions a jolting blow; to demoralize the union rank and file, to dampen its militancy; to isolate the unions and reduce labor's strength in the national scene; to drastically worsen the workers' standard of living. The monied autocracy launched its war upon labor at a time when the main advantages were with it; it had the advantages of initiative, superior preparation, superior ground and position and greater staying power. The class war of 1945-46 started out on the grounds and positions chosen by labor's enemies. The main lines of the union strategy, at this time, were virtually dictated by the circumstances of the situation. Here was organized labor confronted by American capitalism, whose leading circles were united as almost never before; determined to tame the unions and slash labor's standard of living. The capitalists moreover, were sitting pretty on their piles of gold, secure in their profits regardless, with a subservient Congress at their beck and call; all set to wait it out and starve out the unions. Obviously labor could not win its fight to maintain its living standards by thinking in terms of the ordinary, mine-run trade union strike, which is won by simply shutting down the individual plant or concern involved and then making sure that it stays shut down until the boss agrees to terms. It was clear from the start that any single union was doomed to defeat in its engagement with capital if the fight was converted into a simple waiting game. The capitalists were far better equipped for waiting and could starve out any union long before the union could starve out the corporation. Thus any real strategy of labor had to, perforce, be based on these fundamental propositions: 1. Labor was confronted with a fight that was national in scope against a more or less united and organized capitalist class.

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Labor could not emerge victorious by dragging out the fight. On the contrary, labor had to bring things rapidly to a head. In other words, its strategy had to be one of progressively bringing the economy to such a state of paralysis as to provoke a deep social crisis. The American plutocracy could not ignore a social crisis of magnitude. The Wall Street masters could not just sit on their gold and decide to wait out the hurricane. These bankers and industrialists are certainly a pig-headed lot. They certainly are gamblers of the craziest kind. They are unquestionably blinded by their class prejudices and savagery. But they are not completely insane. And that is why the government in Washington, the representative and spokesman of the capitalist rulers as a whole, would have been forced to step in and settle more or less rapidly such a strike crisis. Such a strike crisis can be settled either by the use of trickery, or by violence or by making concessions. The use of trickery, that is, cheating the workers out of any gains by the use of a lot of involved double talk and slippery formulas, is just not possible when dealing with superbly organized and experienced mass unions, headed by seasoned trade union leaders. It could not be employed as the major tactic in the present situation. As for violence, that is, large scale violence, sufficient to crumble the force of the present mass movement - its use was out of the question. The capitalists could not throw the armed forces of the state into headlong combat against the labor legions, without provoking conditions of a near civil war. That is why a strategy based on the propositions outlined above would have proven successful, would have forced great concessions from the industrialists. 2.

The CIO Strategy

How does this proposed strategy square or differ with the strategy actually employed by the CIO high command? The fact is there was no cw strategy. As a matter of fact, there did not even exist an understanding or knowledge of each other's plans among the leaders of the major CIO unions. During the General Motors strike there was a certain amount of talk, especially in the Stalinist publications, about a supposed CIO strategy. But this was invention. The CIO leaders simply blundered into the fight, one union at a time, and then improvised their battle tactics as they went along. The only union that can make out a claim for a plan of battle was the auto union in the case of the General Motors strike. And its plan was based on an absurd, utterly false one-at-a-time strategy of isolating the General Motors Corporation and winning the fight by bringing to bear the pressure of competition.

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v-J Day unloosed a wave of bewilderment and resentment among the American people. Fear of the future began gripping the working class. Now that the war was over, were they to return to the horrors of unemployment, insecurity, want? The leaders of labor, Philip Murray, William Green and the others had nothing to propose. They didn't even have the courage to declare that the nostrike pledge was revoked, or to withdraw from the hated War Labor Board. A rash of plant and departmental strikes swept through the steel and auto industries and the union leaders, out of sheer inertia, continued to stamp them out, as they had been doing throughout the war. In this charged atmosphere, on September 27, 1945, one month after V-J Day, the Oil Workers' Union called a national strike of its full membership against 16 major oil companies. The membership of this less powerful CI o union caught the spirit of the times and began to struggle for the demand which soon reverberated throughout the country: a 30 percent wage increase to retain the takehome pay - a 40-hour week with no reduction in pay. Paraphrasing a famous slogan of American history, the pickets carried signs which read: 52 for 40 or Fight! To the oil workers must go the credit for dramatizing all over the country the demand for a 30 percent wage increase. But the oil workers, left to their own resources, proved too weak to carry through this ambitious program. Truman soon moved in and broke the oil strike by means of a governmental 'seizure' of the oil properties under the provisions of the Smith-Connally Act. The oil workers' demands seemed destined to be buried for a long time under reams of governmental red-tape. On this atmosphere of confusion and bewilderment the major cw unions formulated their wage demands and began to inaugurate negotiations with the companies. The fight for the maintenance of take-home pay certainly began in an inauspicious manner. The 30 percent demand lost the character of a pious hope or a lost cause only when the great auto union took up the struggle in earnest and served notice that it expected the 40-hourweek with no reduction in pay. The auto union, the most volcanic and militant national union of the whole world, was experiencing a paroxysm of revolt at this time. Wildcat strikes were flaring throughout the industry. The Kelsey-Hayes strike, maintained for 6 weeks in defiance of the top officers, showed that the UAW membership was in a state of revolt against the leadership. It was in this heated situation that Walter Reuther, more perspicacious, farsighted and bold than his fellow bureaucrats, stepped into the breach. He took the program of the oil workers - a program advocated for months in the UAW by the more progressive locals - and began that remarkable series of negotiations with the General Motors Corporation that was finally climaxed by the strike of 225,000 GM workers.

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Walter Reuther's Leadership

Almost as soon as the GM negotiations got under way, it became clear that the leadership oflabor's fight for the maintenance of its standard ofliving had been taken over by the GM workers. And Walter Reuther, Vice-President in charge of the GM Department, who directly led this extraordinary fight, found himself again catapulted into the national limelight, this time as the leader of labor's momentous wage struggle. It is not difficult to understand why the workers all over the country eagerly accepted and looked to the leadership of the auto union. The GM union committee, headed by Walter Reuther, from the first, conducted its negotiations with the corporation in a fighting manner indicating that it was serious, that it meant business, that it was not simply going through a lot of motions for the record. Next, the working people all over the country knew that the auto union, and especially its GM section, was best suited to lead off this fight, because the auto union is strongest and has the greatest experience in warfare. Furthermore, Walter Reuther raised in the course of the negotiations several farreaching demands which have already served to advance the American labor movement and have already left an indelible imprint on the minds of the American workers. His propaganda around the slogans of 'Opening the books' of the Corporations and 'Wage Increases without any Price Increases' served to dramatize to millions the unconscionable profits that have been amassed by the major corporations and dealt powerful blows against the insidious teachings of the corporations that wage increases are responsible for inflation. The labor movement has gained measurably, especially with the middle classes and the more backward workers, by exposing this fake economics a la Wall Street. And lastly, Walter Reuther conducted himself as a leader in the course of the GM negotiations. He showed he had the ability to stand up against the hired 'brains' of the plutocrats, answer argument for argument and give blow for blow. As we had occasion to remark of John L. Lewis in the 1943 coal negotiations, the American workers admire leadership. They want leaders who can show up the Big Business representatives and who can voice in clear, forceful fashion the aspirations, the sufferings and the needs of the masses of people. For all these reasons the union conduct of the GM negotiations inspired American labor and when the General Motors workers hit the bricks they had already won the sympathy and support of the great mass of the American people. But though the ranks of the GM strikers were determined, tenacious and strong, they could not win the battle alone. For they were facing not only the two-billion dollar corporation for which they worked, but the united ranks of America's leading billionaires. And here the lack of a national strategy on

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the part of the cw became painfully apparent. The leaders of the steel and electrical unions, the two other major unions of the CID, proceeded with their own negotiations at a leisurely pace, as if these had no bearing on the GM strike. The other CID unions in packinghouse, rubber, maritime, etc., conducted themselves in similar fashion. The Stalinist leadership of the electrical union even went so far as to refuse to call out on strike 30,000 odd GM workers under its jurisdiction. And the GM strikers were themselves prisoners of the 'scissorbill' one-at-a-time strategy authored by Reuther, which instead of isolating the corporations, threatened to isolate the GM workers. Instead of demanding the shutdown of Chrysler and Ford and thus preventing competition inside the union and the undercutting of each other's conditions, Reuther insisted that Chrysler and Ford be kept working. Instead of howling for a steel strike to bring the strike crisis to a head, Reuther resented the steel strike, as interfering with his one-at-a-time strategy. Thus while the momentous battle between labor and capital was joined on November 21, only one division of labor's army actually took the field. It was almost two months before the much needed reinforcements arrived on the field of battle and brought matters to a head. In the course of these two months, as week wore on after week and no settlement seemed in sight, a lot of defeatist talk began going the rounds, some of it emanating right out of Philip Murray's office and some spread by the Stalinists, that the General Motors strike should never have been called when it was, that it was badly timed. Why badly timed? Because the 1946 tax laws reduced the excess profits tax by so much that none of the corporations were interested in going into production in 1945. That was true. But then the 1946 or even 1947 tax laws guarantee the corporations huge profits even if they don't produce at all. That would seem to indicate that no strikes ought to be called before January 1, 1948! All that the tax law argument proved was that the top trade union bureaucracy had permitted the capitalists to shamelessly raid the public treasury and to entrench itself into a superb position for warring on labor. And that only by a united, unified and powerful labor assault, which brought on a deep social crisis, could labor Overcome capital's financial advantage. The tax law argument was nothing but an attempt at a fancy alibi to excuse the criminal inaction on the part of the other major c ro leaders.

The Strike Climax

The GM strike held out, virtually alone, for two months. Finally the much needed reinforcements began to arrive. On January 15, 1946, 200,000 members of the electrical union struck, closing down GE, Westinghouse, RCA and

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the GM electrical plants. The packinghouse workers both CIO and AFL struck the next day on January 16 and finally on January 21, three-quarter of a million steel workers walked out and brought the strike movement to its thunderous climax. Almost 2 million workers were on strike at the height of the strike wave. It was this display of big power that finally broke the log-jam and forced through the wage settlements, first in steel and then in the other major industries. But by the time the strike movement was brought to a climax, the top CIO leaders had already given away a considerable part of their original demands. They had, in practice, already appreciably lowered the stake for which the strikers were battling. They did this when they completely reversed their previous stand against Truman's Fact-Finding Boards scheme and agreed to cooperate with these so-called Fact-Finding Boards. By this one move, the CI o leaders actually scaled down their wage demands by almost 40 percent. Because once the authority of these boards was accepted, the unions were in effect bound by the board's decisions. It was furthermore clear that these boards, given the existing relationship of forces, would split the difference between the workers and the employers and award the unions slightly better than half of their wage demands. The c Io leaders not only scaled down their wage demands by some 40 percent but saddled the labor movement with a new semi-compulsory arbitration governmental strait jacket. The first Fact-Finding Board appointed by President Truman in the GM strike recommended onJanuary10 an increase ofi9½ cents per hour to the GM workers or about 17½ percent increase as contrasted to the union's demand for 30 percent. The union promptly accepted the board's recommendation. On this 19½ cent front, then, one might imagine, the union forces would reform and rally to hold the line. But the leaders of the major unions showed as little unity in negotiating their strike settlements as they had previously displayed in the calling of their strikes. One week after a governmental body had awarded the GM workers a 19½ cents increase, Philip Murray agreed to accept a penny less 18½ cents - for the steel workers. The Stalinists, not to be outdone, signed a contract with the General Motors Corporation for an 18½ cents increase in the plants organized by the UE while the UAW was still holding out for 19½ cents. The packinghouse workers, following the general pattern of everyone for himself and devil take the hindmost, agreed to scale down their demand to 17½ cents increase and finally settled for 16 cents. And the other leaders of the auto union itself signed contracts with Chrysler and Ford for wage increases of 18½ cents and 18 cents, respectively, while the GM workers were still holding out for the 19½ cents that a governmental body said they ought to get!

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The c Io high command presented the spectacle of an army, where each divisional commander throws or fails to throw his troops into the battle, without any regard for the decisions or needs of the other commanders and without any concern as to the over-all disposition of the forces and the general line-up of the battle. Where, furthermore, every divisional commander negotiates his own peace terms with the enemy anytime he sees fit without any regard for the peace terms being negotiated by others and without any concern for the effect that the withdrawal of his forces will have upon his allies. One can sum up and say that by their timidity, their lack of sufficient solidarity and a unified strategy, the c Io leaders unnecessarily dragged out the fight to its detriment, and gave up a somewhat bigger share of the wage stake than was warranted, than was absolutely necessary on the basis of the relationship of forces that obtained. Any analysis of the strike wave would be completely one-sided and inadequate, however, if it confined itself to merely criticizing the shortcomings of the national era leaders, their strike program and strategy. The significant weaknesses and defects of the strike leadership are part of the picture. But they are by no means the whole picture.

Labor's High Point The big fact that stands out in the present strike struggle is that never before in its entire history has the American working class fought such a big battle on such a tremendous battle-front. Never before has the trade union movement shown itself capable of dealing such powerful blows, one after the other, on such a national scale. Never before have the trade unions displayed such perfected organization, such tenacity, such staying power and self-confidence. And despite the cross currents, the personal jealousies amongst the leaders, the factional bickering and the lack of a unified plan, the fact remains that never before has the labor movement displayed the unity and solidarity that was achieved in the present struggle. The recent strikes were better organized, the blows against the enemy were dealt more vigorously and decisively and the strike movement - which was brought to a smashing climax within two months and began to ebb a month after that - embraced a larger section of the American working class than ever before in American history. The very length of some of the strikes is unprecedented. The General Motors strike lasted 113 days, and a considerable number of the GM locals struck several weeks beyond that. Despite this long, drawn-out character of the fight, the union ranks never faltered; morale remained high throughout. Truly an unprecedented achieve-

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ment! (While on the record many strikes of the past probably are recorded as longer-lasting, in actuality in all these past strikes, the majority of workers returned to work after the first period and only a small minority of the most determined and militant held out.) This series of strikes, it must be remembered, involved the first major test of strength between the industrialists and the unions since the sit-down strikes of ten years ago. Coming immediately at the conclusion of the war, after 4 years of the no-strike pledge, the wage and job freeze, and the rule of the War Labor Board, the union movement unleashed a power that amazed everyone - its enemies as well as its friends. This power was so persuasive and palpable that it swept into its wake even the white collar slaves, as witness the strike of the independent telephone union, the bulk of whose membership is in the white collar field. It won the warm sympathy of the middle classes and the veterans. It smashed, by its sheer social weight and strength, the 4-year old campaign of the Big Brass and their Big Business associates to organize the veterans into anti-labor vigilante gangs. The labor movement has won the ardent sympathy of the veterans and its strike struggle directly inspired the great soldier protest that was heard round the world. The working class was able to answer the attempts at violence by general strike action, in such out-of-the-way places, to boot, as Stamford, Conn, and Lancaster, Pa. This explains, incidentally, the more or less peaceful character of the great fight. The two sides were very evenly matched; the labor movement was too strong to tolerate large scale violence and strikebreaking on the part of the regular government police and state troops; the plutocracy possessed no private fascist armies of its own; the struggle was not yet of a decisive social character. Both sides were testing each other's strength. There is no question that the labor movement emerged out of the fight stronger than it was when it went into the fight. The battle originated as an offensive on the part of capital and labor was fighting defensively to maintain its standard of living. But the battle soon took on the character of a counteroffensive on the part of labor. Despite the indecision of the top union officers, the working class by the sheer strength of its organization, by its discipline, self-confidence and will to fight brought things to a head within two months after the GM strike first began. They were thus able to frustrate the design of the industrialists to wear out the unions and were able to smash through to a victory - a victory, because they hurled back the anti-labor offensive of the employers, because they came out of the fight with a strengthened position on the national scene and because they won significant concessions. This estimate of the results of the strike movement is the accepted one, in a general way, on the part of all the leading militants in the leading cw uni-

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ons. But the pseudo-Marxists of Shachtman's New International, we note, have come forward recently to challenge this estimate. Their writings show that they are obviously badly disappointed and even annoyed with the American workers. Rather than a victory, the Shachtman magazine believes the working class suffered a straight-out defeat. 'The first great post-war trial of strength', we read in the March 1946 New International, 'between American labor and capital is drawing to an end. The over-all result is a defeat for labor'. Why a defeat? Because the unions demanded a 30 percent wage increase which they proved they were entitled to, but only got a little better than half. That's why it was an 'over-all defeat!' We are not making this up out of our heads. This wisdom is to be found in the New International. 'Labor did not get its war-time "take-home" pay demand. It did not get what its spokesmen had proved was necessary to again bring wages up to a pre-war parity with the cost of living. If an army that takes the offensive and fails to dislodge the enemy from its positions has suffered a defeat, then labor suffered a defeat in the present strike struggles.'

A Marxist Analysis

One might first point out that it is very improper for people who call themselves Marxists to ignore all other factors in such a titanic class struggle as the recent strike wave and center their analysis exclusively on the money factor, like a bunch of 'scissor-bills'. Even if the recent series of strikes succeeded only in repulsing the industrialists' offensive and preserving the union organizations and the morale of their membership, even in that case these strikes could not by any manner of means be called defeated. Even in that case they would have to be described as having achieved some partial successes. A veteran militant trade unionist understands this. Is it too much to expect that people who call themselves Marxists should show a similar breadth of view? Furthermore in what strike manual or work of Marxism is it written that a strike is to be considered defeated if it does not achieve its full declared objectives? Under that rule there have been very few strikes that have ever been won. The Shachtmanite writer repeats over and over again the thought that the workers needed the 30 percent wage increase to maintain their living standards. Sure. They needed it. Their cause was just. We stand with Ben Hanford who said that justice is always on the side of the working class. But that does not mean that when labor wins only half-a-loaf it has been defeated. No. It has won a partial victory.

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A real strike analyst in casting a balance of a strike will ask himself these questions: Is our union stronger or weaker as a result of the strike? Is the morale of the membership up or down? Have we made gains in wages and working conditions? Or, if there are no gains, have we at least minimized the losses that we would have otherwise suffered? A balance based on a rounded and thoughtful analysis will show gains on all counts in the recent strikes: The unions are stronger, morale is heightened, outright gains in wages; as well as the other key factor that we discussed before. Some pseudo-leftist wiseacres have adumbrated a somewhat more pretentious idea. Their argument runs like this: 'True the workers won about 18 cents an hour wage increase. But prices are being boosted all along the line. Thus the wage increase is wiped out and in practice the workers haven't won anything at all'. Underneath its aura of profundity, this argument betrays a wretched misconception of economic laws under capitalism and an ignorance of the relationship between wages and prices, explained by Marx fully 80 years ago in his debate with Weston. We can only touch, at this time, on a few high points of the inflationary process that is now going on in the United States and the reasons for it. American capitalism is in the monopoly stage. The economy is owned and controlled by a few billionaire cliques. Due to the specific conditions of the market, both domestic and foreign, which we have previously discussed in the magazine, the capitalists are in a position to boost prices to fantastic heights. (We, of course, struggle for price control by consumers' and workers' committees in the same spirit as we struggle for our other transition demands.) With the end of the Second World War the dominant capitalist community was determined to sweep away most of the governmental price controls. And they have the power to do so. They simply refused to produce after the war except under their own terms, just as they refused to go into war production five years ago until Roosevelt told them to write their own ticket. Now this capitalist control of economy cannot be fundamentally eliminated until capitalism is destroyed. The inflationary process in the us had been predicted before the recent strike wave got under way and would have taken place if the strikes had never occurred. The capitalists simply seized on the wage increases as a convenient excuse to attempt to place the onus for inflation upon the labor movement. Reuther attempted, not without success, to expose this fraud and to place the onus where it belongs, on the profit-greedy capitalists. The falsity of the argument of the pseudo-leftists is thus clearly seen. It incorrectly implies that the present price increases are due to the wage increases. What is correct to say is that the gains won by the workers will soon be dissipated because of the violent inflationary rise. Therefore the trade unions must

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gird their loins for continued struggle for wage increases, must begin the propaganda for a sliding scale of wages to meet the increases in the cost of living. The heightened morale of the whole labor movement is again being displayed. We see it in what is an almost infallible sign: The drive to organize new millions of unorganized workers. The CIO is going into the South. It is launching another million-dollar campaign. The older CIO unions are likewise undertaking their own organization campaigns. The UAW has already pledged to organize the tens of thousands of white collar workers of the automobile industry. This organizing campaign spells new big struggles. This added to the fact that all labor will be goaded into fighting in order to keep up with rising prices means that the coming period will, indeed, be a turbulent one. The unions revealed superb power in the strike wave. Such power that the capitalist masters saw in them a dangerous threat to their very existence. The capitalists will now prepare more thoroughly for the next engagement. That is why in the major industries, guerrilla warfare is a thing of the past. The trade union struggle is passing over into a social struggle. That is what the present strikes proved. In this sense, American trade unionism is at the crossroads. The objective conditions demand that the trade unions now discard the old, outworn hit-and-run tactics and narrow trade union aims which were of value when the unions were weak and their objectives small and now adopt a broad social program and strategy that the times demand. That is what the American working class is instinctively reaching out for, as the victory of Reuther in the UAW indicates. Great social ideas were raised in the course of the strike struggle, such as the demands voiced by Reuther and Murray's radio speech in which he broke with Truman. But these were left dangling in mid-air. Reuther did not propose any political action to implement his social demands. Murray refused to work for a labor party after his break with Truman. The social aims remain to be realized. The growing numbers of left-wingers in the key mass production unions have the task of convincing the broad ranks that the labor movement must now become a social movement if it is to survive and prosper.

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11

The Coming American Revolution (November 1946)

James P. Cannon

We have undertaken as our central task at this 12th Convention of the Socialist Workers Party to analyze the present stage in the development of United States imperialism as it emerged from the Second World War - and its further perspectives - and to draw the necessary conclusions from this analysis. 20 In our main thesis we deal exclusively with the perspectives of the American Revolution. Secondary questions of tactics, and even of strategy, are left for consideration under another point on the agenda after we have discussed and decided the main question of perspective.

Why Are the Theses on Perspectives Needed Now? The question might be asked: Why are the theses on perspectives needed now? In order for the party to see clearly on the road ahead it is necessary to have a main orientation and a long-range view of future developments. The theses we have presented are needed at the present moment for a number of reasons. First, the whole Trotskyist concept of our epoch as the epoch of revolutions, has been challenged by a new school of revisionists of Marxism. What answer do we give to this challenge, with specific reference to the United States of America? What conclusions do we draw from the war and its consequences; from the new power of American imperialism; from the postwar prosperity; and from the retardation of the European revolution? What conclusions do we draw from these great events for the conduct of our own work and for our own future outlook in the United States? Secondly, what shall we say to our co-thinkers in other lands about revolutionary prospects in the United States? They are surely waiting to hear from our

20

Cannon 1947a.

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convention on this question, for it is of the most vital and decisive importance for them. This applies to the workers of Europe, but not only to them. It applies to the workers of Russia, of South and Central America, of China, Japan, Asia as a whole, India - in fact, to the workers of the whole world which lies today under the shadow of American imperialism. And finally, what shall the party teach the new members who today are streaming into our ranks by hundreds and who will come to us tomorrow in thousands? What shall we tell them concretely about the prospects of the revolution in the United States? That is what they want to know above everything else. Our document undertakes to give straight answers to all these questions. Another question may well be asked: What is new in the Theses on the American Revolution presented by the National Committee? In one sense it can be said that nothing is new; for all our work has been inspired by, and all our struggles with opportunist tendencies have been derived from, a firm confidence on our part in the coming victory of the American workers. In another sense it can be said that everything is new; for in the theses of the National Committee on the American Revolution we are now stating, explicitly and concretely, what has always been implied in our fights with opportunist organizations, groups and tendencies over questions which were derivative from this main outlook of ours. That has been the underlying significance of our long struggle to build a homogeneous combat party. That has been the meaning of our stubborn and irreconcilable fight for a single program uniting the party as a whole; for a democratic and centralized and disciplined party with a professional leadership; for principled politics; for the proletarianization of the party composition; for the concentration of the party on trade union work ('trade-unionization of the party'); and, if I may say so without being misunderstood, for its 'Americanization'. All of this derived from our concept of the realism of revolutionary prospects in America, and of the necessity to create a party with that perspective in mind. In short, we have worked and struggled to build a party fit to lead a revolution in the United States. At the bottom of all our conceptions was the basic conception that the proletarian revolution is a realistic proposition in this country, and not merely a far-off 'ultimate goal', to be referred to on ceremonial occasions. I say that is not new. In fact, it has often been expressed by many ofus, including Trotsky, in personal articles and speeches. But only now, for the first time, has it been incorporated in a programmatic document of the party. That's what

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is new in our Theses on the American Revolution. We are now stating explicitly what before was implied. For the first time, the party as a party is posing concretely the fundamental question of the perspectives of the American Revolution. You will note in your reading of the theses that secondary questions of tactics and even of strategy, with all their importance, are left out. And this is not by accident or negligence, but by design. The theses deal only with analysis and perspectives- and these only in the broadest sense - because that is the.fundamental basis from which we proceed. Tactical questions and even questions of great strategical importance - such as the alliance of the labor movement and the Negro people, the role of the returned war veterans, the relations between the workers and the poor farmers and the urban petty-bourgeoisie, the questions of fascism and of the labor party- these questions with all their great subordinate importance are left out of the main theses for separate consideration in other documents. They will be considered at another time in the convention, because the correct answer to all of them depends in reality on a correct answer to the main question of general perspective posed in the theses of the National Committee. Of course, a general line, a general perspective, does not guarantee that one will always find the right answer to derivative questions, the secondary issues. But without such a general orientation, without this broad overall ruling conception, it is quite hopeless to expect to find one's way in tactical and strategical questions. The theses have been criticized already by people who deal exclusively in 'the small coin of concrete events'. We have been criticized because we 'do not mention concrete tasks' and 'pose no concrete problems'. That is true. But what is wrong with that procedure? We are Marxists; and therefore we do not begin with the small questions, with the tactics, or even with the strategy. We first lay down the governing line from which the answers to the secondary questions derive. Those who preoccupy themselves primarily with tactics reproach us for our procedure, and allege that it reveals the difference between their political method and ours. That is quite correct. We proceed from the fundamental to the secondary; they proceed by nibbling at the secondary questions in order to undermine the fundamental concepts. There is indeed a difference in method. Our theses specifically outline the revolutionary perspectives in America and require the party to conduct and regulate all its daily activity in the light of these perspectives.

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Internationalism

Our preoccupation at this convention with American affairs and American perspectives does not signify a departure on our part from the time-honored internationalism which has always distinguished our tendency. Rather, we are taking a step forward in the application of our internationalist concepts to American affairs. That means to bring them down from the realm of abstraction and give them flesh and blood. We began in 1928 with a struggle for internationalism against the dogma of 'socialism in one country' which had been imposed upon the Comintern and all its sections by the Stalinist revisionists. That was the most fundamental of all the principled questions which have shaped and guided the development of our movement in America for the past 18 years. We said then, and we still believe, that the modem world is an economic unit; and that not a single important social problem - and certainly not the most important problem, the socialist reorganization of society- can be defmitively solved on national grounds. With the presentation of the theses of the National Committee on the perspectives of the American Revolution, we are adding a correlative idea to the following effect: It is no longer possible to speak seriously about the world socialist revolution without specifically including America in the program. Today that would be almost as utopian as was the theory of 'socialism in one country' when it was first promulgated by Stalin for Russia in 1924.

This was always true, but it is truer now than ever in the light of the Second World War and its outcome. The United States has emerged from the war as the strongest power in the world, both economically and militarily. Our theses assert that the role of the United States in further world developments will be decisive in all respects. If the workers in another country, or even in a series of other countries, take power before the revolutionary victory in the United States, they will have to defend themselves against the American colossus, armed to the teeth and counter-revolutionary to the core. On the other hand, a revolutionary victory in the United States, signalizing the downfall of the strongest bastion of capitalism, would seal its doom on an international scale. Or, in a third variant, if the socialist revolution should be defeated in other countries or even on other continents, and pushed back and retarded, we can still fight and win in the United States. And that would again revive the revolution everywhere else in the world.

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The world situation makes it quite clear that platonic internationalism is decidedly out of date in this country. Internationalism, as the Trotskyists have conceived it, means first of all, international collaboration. But in our view this international collaboration must signify not only the discussion of the problems and tasks of co-thinkers in other countries - this is where platonic internationalism begins and ends - but also the solution of these problems, above all our own specific problems, in action. That is our conception of internationalism as we mean to apply it and as we have expressed it in the theses. One-sided internationalism - preoccupation with far-off questions to the exclusion and neglect of the burning problems on one's own doorstep - is a form of escapism from the realities at home, a caricature of internationalism. This simple truth has not always been understood, and there are some people who do not understand it yet. But our party can justify its existence only if, beginning with an international program, it succeeds in applying this program to the conditions of American life and confirming it in action. This presupposes first of all an attentive study of America and a firm confidence in its revolutionary perspectives. Those who are content with the role of commentators on foreign affairs - and it is surprising how many there are or that of a Red Cross society to aid other revolutions in other countries, will never lead a revolution in their own country; and in the long run they will not be of much help to other countries either. What the other countries need from us, above everything else, is one small but good revolution in the United States. Trotskyism - which is only another name for Bolshevism - is a world doctrine and concerns itself with all questions of world import. But let us not forget - or rather, let some of us begin to recognize for the first time - that America, the United States, is part of the world; in fact, its strongest and most decisive part, whose further development will be most fateful for the whole. It is from this point of view that we deem it necessary now to outline more concretely and more precisely than before our estimation of American perspectives, and to concentrate on the preparation for them. When we speak of the 'Americanization' of the party in this sense we are not speaking as vulgar nationalists - far from it - but as genuine internationalists of the deed as well as of the word.

The Objective Factors for the American Revolution

Our theses on the perspectives of the American Revolution proceed in accord with the Marxist method and the Marxist tradition by analyzing and emphasizing first of all the objective factors that are making for the revolution. These are

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primary. These are fundamental. Any other approach than that which begins with the objective factors is unrealistic, mere wish-thinking utopianism, no matter how revolutionary-minded its proponents may be. This characterization of unrealism applies also to the new revelation of those who have exalted the subjective factor - meaning thereby the party and its strength or weakness at the given moment - to first place. It would be incorrect, however, to add the supplementary qualification that these latter-day experts of the subjective factor, these latter-day revisionists, are 'revolutionary-minded'. They are unrealistic, but not revolutionary-minded, for they employ their new 'theory' exclusively for the explanation of past defeats and anticipation and prediction of new ones. I don't see anything revolutionary about that. Our theses pay due acknowledgement to the great strength of United States imperialism. Let no one accuse us of failing to give the American imperialist power its due. We paid due acknowledgement to it. This is correct and proper in a document which aims at scientific objectivity; for the might and resources of the Yankee colossus are so imposing in relation to all other countries, and in relation to anything that has ever been seen in the world before in the realm of material power - and have been so well advertised in the bargain - that no one could possibly overlook them. But our theses - and here we demarcate ourselves from all those who are hypnotized by the superficial appearance of things - point out not only the strength of American imperialism but also its inherent weaknesses; the contradictions from which it cannot escape; and the new, even greater, power which it has created and which is destined to be its grave-digger - the American working class. That is also part of the American picture which has to be observed and noted if one wants to have a completely true and objectively formulated document. A one-sided view of the American capitalist system - over-estimation of its power and awe-stricken prostration before it - is the source of many illusions. And these illusions, in tum, are the chief source of American labor opportunism in general; of the capitulation and treachery of the radical intellectuals en masse; of Stalinism; and of all varieties of reformism and Menshevism. In considering the perspectives of the American capitalist system in general and of the present postwar prosperity in particular, we observe a peculiar and rather interesting anomaly. The capitalist masters of society, and their ideologues and economic experts, enter the new period with doubts and fears which they do not conceal; while the greatest confidence in the long life and good health of the present order of society in America is either openly

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expressed or tacitly implied by those who set themselves up as representatives of the workers - namely, the official leadership of the labor movements and the Mensheviks of all grades. The American bourgeoisie entered the great boom of the Twenties with the exuberant confidence and enthusiasm of alchemists who had finally discovered the philosopher's stone which turns everything into gold. In that golden age of American capitalism a new school of bourgeois economists came from the colleges to proclaim the glad tidings that Marx had been refuted by Henry Ford; that American business genius had discovered the secret of full employment and permanent prosperity without interfering with the private ownership of the means of production, but on the contrary, strengthening it and aiding its concentration. They continued to beat the drums on this theme up to the year, the month and even to the day when the stupendous myth of the Twenties was exploded in the stock-market crash of 1929. The very week in which the whole structure came tumbling down, the most learned articles were published in the name of the most eminent college professors explaining that this prosperity was going to go higher and would continue endlessly. It is true that the labor leaders and the Social Democrats in this country and throughout the world were captivated by the myth of permanent prosperity in the Twenties and were enlisted in the great parade. But they only followed; they did not lead. The capitalists were in the lead, full of confidence and optimism in those days. The capitalists and their economists were fortified in their faith by their ignorance, and that is a wonderful fortification for some kinds of faith. They simply observed that profits rolled in and productivity increased at a rate and on a scale never known before, and that this continued year after year. Hypnotized by the marvelous empirical phenomenon, they mistook a passing phase for a permanent condition. This misunderstanding was widely shared. The myth of the Twenties penetrated deeply into all social strata in the United States and imbued even the great mass of the workers with future hopes of prosperity and security under capitalism. Those were the conditions under which the pioneer communists had to lay the foundation for a party aiming at the revolution. The confidence and illusion in the permanence of the prosperity of capitalism penetrated down into the depths of the working class itself. The great boom of the Twenties developed under the most favorable conditions. The American sector of capitalist economy was still in its healthy prime, relying on a vast internal market of its own which extended from coast to coast and from Canada to the Gulf, and on an expanding foreign trade. All other conditions were most favorable then.

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But in spite of that, it is now a matter of historical record that this great boom ended with the stock-market crash of 1929. lt is a matter of record that the crisis lasted, with some fluctuations, for ten years. The salient facts and figures about the crisis of the Thirties are recited in our theses. They show the depth and intensity of the crisis, its horrible effects in terms of human misery, and the irreparable blows it dealt to the American capitalist system. National income was cut in half, and with it the living standards of the workers were cut in half. Unemployment reached the figure of 20 million out of a working-class population of no more than 40 million at the time. The partial recovery, brought about in large measure by huge government expenditures, only led to a second sharp drop in 1937, a crisis within the crisis. The crisis as a whole lasted for ten solid years. And even then, a way out to the revival and increase of production and the absorption of the unemployed, was found only in the war and the colossal expenditures connected with it. And this artificially induced recovery, which greatly expanded the productive plant of the country and the numerical force of the working class, has only deepened the contradictions and has prepared all the conditions for the explosion of another crisis, far worse than the Thirties and fraught with far more serious social implications. So, in surveying the future prospects of American capitalism, we simply heed the counsel of realism by putting the question: if American capitalism was shaken to its foundations by the crisis of the Thirties, at a time when the world system of capitalism - and America along with it, and America especially- was younger, richer and healthier than it is now; if this crisis lasted for ten years, and even then could not be overcome by the normal operation of economic laws; if all the basic causes and contradictions which brought about the crisis of the Thirties have been carried over and lodged in the new artificial war and postwar prosperity, with new ones added and old ones multiplied many times; if all this is true - and nobody but a fool can deny it, for the facts are clearly to be seen - then what chance has the capitalist boom of the Forties, that we are living under now, to have a different ending than the boom of the Twenties? Marxist realism tells us that it can be different only insofar as the crisis must go far deeper, must be far more devastating in its consequences, and must come sooner than it came in the boom of the Twenties. The specious theory expounded by the foolishly optimistic bourgeois economists in the heyday of the capitalist boom of the Twenties, to the effect that Marx had been outwitted by American business genius, was refuted by the tenyear crisis of the Thirties - and that crushing refutation remains in the memory of all.

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How inexcusable, then, how absurd, how downright reactionary is the cultivation of this myth under the new conditions today! In justice to the bourgeoisie and their ideologists it must be admitted that they, instructed by the experiences of the past, now take a far more sober and cautious position in their prognostications of the future. The burnt child fears the fire - that is, if he is a bourgeois economist, a businessman, and not a theoretical trifler. The bourgeois economists and businessmen talk today far more of "boom and bust" than of boom without end. Any businessmen's economic review you may pick up at random expresses dark forebodings for the economic future. They speak quite casually - as though it is a matter of course, to be taken for granted - of an impending 'shake-out' which will slow down the wheels of production and bankrupt the smaller firms which have flourished on the fringes of the boom. At first, they referred to this process as a 'shakedown', but that expressed their thoughts too truthfully. And since bourgeois economists cannot live without lying and dissimulating, they stopped talking about the 'shakedown' and finally hit on the euphemistic substitute of a 'shake-out'. That sounds better but it will not be one cent cheaper. The sole chorus of optimism, where the economic prospects of American capitalism are concerned, is that raised by the American variety of Mensheviks. And that is a thin, piping chorus of trebles and tremolos, without a bass voice in it, or a baritone, or even a first-class tenor. It is a eunuch's chorus. Our fundamental theses on the American Revolution do not tie themselves to the economic prospects of the next month or the next year. They deal exclusively with the long-range inevitable outcome of the present artificial prosperity. From the point of view of our theses it makes no difference whether the deepgoing crisis begins in the early spring of 1947, as many bourgeois economists are predicting; or six months later, as many others think; or even a year or two later, as is quite possible in my opinion. Our theses do not consider immediate timeschedules, but the general perspective. That is what we have to get in mind first. We take the position that the crisis is inherent in the situation; that it may not be escaped or avoided; and that this crisis, when it strikes in full force, will be far deeper and far more devastating than was the crisis of the Thirties. As a consequence it will open up the most grandiose revolutionary possibilities in the United States. That conception must be at the base of the policy and perspectives of our party from now on. I proceed from the discussion of the objective factors in the broadest sense, as our theses do, to go over to another of the most fundamental factors making for the coming American Revolution and its victory.

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The American working class which confronts the next crisis will not be the disorganized and helpless mass which met the crisis of the Thirties in bewilderment and fear, and even with an element of despair. Great changes have taken place in the meantime, and all these changes redound to the advantage of the revolution.

The Transformation of the American Working Class

The proletariat greatly increased in numbers with the expansion of industry during the war. Millions of Negroes, of women, and of the new generation of youth have been snatched up out of their former existence and assimilated into the processes of modem industry. Thereby, they have been transformed from a multitude of dispersed individuals into a coherent body imbued with a new sense of usefulness and power. Most remarkable of all, the most pregnant with consequences for the future, is the truly gigantic leap which the American workers made from disorganized individual helplessness to militant trade union consciousness and organization in one brief decade. The trade union movement in the early Thirties embraced barely more than three million members. Today the figure stands at 15 million

members of organized labor in the United States. One can point to this fact and say that this represents a remarkable growth. But these bare figures, eloquent as they are, do not in themselves tell the whole story, the true story. For of the three million-odd members of the trade unions in the early Thirties, the great majority were composed of the thin stratum of the most skilled and privileged workers who are the most conservative in their social thinking. The great bulk of workers in the mass production industries the most decisive section of the proletariat - were entirely without benefit of organization and had never even known the experience of it. In spite of that - or more correctly, because of that - when these mass production workers took the road of trade union organization, with the partial revival of industry in the middle Thirties, they were not impeded by the old baggage and deadening routine of the conservative craft unions. They started from scratch with the modem form of organization - the industrial union form - and with the most militant methods of mass struggle, which reached their apex in the great wave of sit-down strikes in 1937. The benefits these mass production workers derived from trade unionism were wrested from the employers in open struggle, and therefore were all the more firmly secured. The stability and cohesiveness of the trade union organizations created in these struggles were put to the test in the strike wave of the

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past year. Here we saw a clear demonstration of the great difference in the relationship of forces between the workers and the capitalists at the end of World War 11 from that which prevailed at the end of the First World War, a difference entirely in favor of the workers. After the successful termination of the First World War 'to make the world safe for democracy', the ruling class of America embarked on a furious reactionary campaign to break the unions, to establish the open shop and to suppress all forms of labor radicalism. In the "Palmer Red Raids" of 1919 hundreds of political meetings were broken up and thousands of radical workers were arrested, hundreds were sent to prison, whole shiploads of foreignborn workers were deported. The newly-founded Communist Party was savagely persecuted, its leaders arrested and indicted and the party driven underground. Simultaneously, the steel strike was broken, in part by ruthless violence and in part by the wholesale importation of strikebreakers; unions newly-formed during the war were broken up and scattered right and left; the railway shopmen's strike was defeated in 1922. American capitalism, smashing all opposition before it, marched confidently into the strikeless, open-shop paradise of the great boom of the Twenties. The same thing was attempted, or at least contemplated, for the period immediately following World War I 1, but the result was a miserable fiasco. This time it was the organized workers who were victorious on every front. The great industrial unions of the steel, auto, oil, packinghouse, electrical and maritime workers demonstrated their capacity to bring production to a complete stop until the employers came to terms. So great was the new-found solidarity and militancy of the workers that neither violence nor the importation of strike-breakers - the decisive factors in the defeat of the strikes following World War I - could even be attempted by the bosses. Millions and tens of millions of workers in other industries, profiting by the example of the auto, steel, packinghouse, electrical and other strikes, and riding on the wave created by them, gained wage increases by 'collective bargaining', while keeping their unions intact and even strengthening them. Where did this marvelous labor movement come from?Who created it? Here we must pay due acknowledgement to American capitalism. By the blind operation of its internal laws and method of operation, it has created the greatest power in the world - the American working class. Here is where Marx takes revenge on Henry Ford. Capitalism produces many things at a rapid rate and in great quantities. But its richest contribution to the further and higher development of human civilization is the production of its own gravedigger the organized working class.

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American capitalism, as we know, could not work the miracle of boomwithout-crisis. But in the period of the Twenties and Thirties, working blindly and unbeknownst to itself, it wrought some other wonders which border on the miraculous. American capitalism took millions of barefooted country boys from the bankrupted farms of the country; put shoes on them and marched them into the regimented ranks of socially-operated modem industry; wet them in the rain of the man-killing speed-up exploitation of the Twenties; dried them in the sun of the frightful crisis of the Thirties; overworked them on the assembly line, starved them on the breadline, mistreated and abused them; and finally succeeded in pounding them into a coherent body which emerged as a section of the most powerful and militant trade union movement the world has ever known. American capitalism took hundreds of thousands of Negroes from the South, and exploiting their ignorance, and their poverty, and their fears, and their individual helplessness, herded them into the steel mills as strikebreakers in the steel strike of 1919. And in the brief space of one generation, by its mistreatment, abuse and exploitation of these innocent and ignorant Negro strikebreakers, this same capitalism succeeded in transforming them and their sons into one of the most militant and reliable detachments of the great victorious steel strike of 1946. This same capitalism took tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of prejudiced hillbillies from the South, many of them members and sympathizers of the Ku Klux Klan; and thinking to use them, with their ignorance and their prejudices, as a barrier against unionism, sucked them into the auto and rubber factories of Detroit, Akron and other industrial centers. There it sweated them, humiliated them and drove and exploited them until it finally changed them and made new men out of them. In that harsh school the imported southerners learned to exchange the insignia of the KKK for the union button of the c Io, and to tum the Klansman's fiery cross into a bonfire to warm pickets at the factory gate. You won't find Ku Kluxers or Black Legionnaires in the auto and rubber factories today - or at any rate, not many of them. But there is a mighty sight of first-class shop stewards and picket captains who originally came down out of the hills and up from the bayous of the backward South at the summons of American capitalism. The American working class covered the great distance from atomization, from non-existence as an organized force, to trade union consciousness and organization, in one gigantic leap, in one brief decade. What grandiose perspectives this achievement opens up for the future!What

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are the limits to the future possibilities and powers of this remarkable class? There are no limits. All things are possible; and all things that are necessary will be achieved. If someone had predicted in 1932, at the depths of the crisis, that in ten years' time 10 million new workers who had never known unionism would organize themselves into industrial unions of the most modem type and demonstrate their ability to force the absentee owners of the steel and auto and rubber and other mass production industries to come to terms and not even to dare to attempt to break the strikes - the skeptics would have said: 'This is fantasy. This is ultra-left radicalism'. But it happened just the same. The American workers do not always move when impatient revolutionists call them, as many of us have learned to our sorrow. But they do move when they are ready, and then they move massively. Industrial unionism is not a new idea. It was projected long before it found its realization on a mass scale in America, and the pioneers of industrial unionism in America suffered many disappointments. In 1930 the IWW dolefully observed its 25th Anniversary. At the end of a quarter of a century, the organization which had proclaimed the program of industrial unionism 25 years earlier was completely defeated, a hollow shell comprising far less members than it had started with in the bright year of promise, 1905, under a great galaxy of leaders. Industrial unionism seemed to be a defeated program in 1930. But only ten years later the majority of the most important basic industries were completely organized in industrial unions under a new name. The workers did not move when the IWW called them in 1905. They didn't move when many of us called them later than that. But they moved when they were ready and when conditions were mature for it, and then they moved on a scale and at a speed scarcely dreamed of by the pioneers of industrial unionism. The scale of the difference is remarkable. Bill Haywood, the great captain of the IWW - I love to mention his name - used to dream and speak in his intimate circle of the goal of a 'million members' in the 1ww. As a matter of fact, the organization never had more than 100,000 at any one time in all its history, and most of the time only a fraction of that number. The great strikes of the IWW which took place in its heyday, those great pioneer battles which heralded and blazed the way for the CIO - Lawrence, Akron, Paterson, McKees Rocks, the lumber strikes in the Northwest - they never involved more than 10 to 20 thousand workers at any one time. But in 1946 nearly two million workers of the cw, with only a few years of trade union experience behind them, were on strike at one time!

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These comparative figures show not growth, not simply progress, but a veritable transformation of the class. And what has been seen up to now are only the preliminary movements, the promise and the assurance of far greater movements to come. Next in order - and not far away- comes the political awakening of the American workers. That will be at the same pace and on the same scale, if not greater. The American workers will learn politics as they learned trade unionism - 'from an abridged dictionary'. They will take the road of independent political action with hurricane speed and power. That will be a great day for the future of humanity, for the American workers will not stop half way. The American workers will not stop at reformism, except perhaps to tip their hats to it. Once fairly started, they will go the whole way. He who doubts the socialist revolution in America does not believe in the survival of human civilization, for there is no other way to save it. And there is no other power that can save it but this all-mighty working class of the United States. The young generation entering the revolutionary movement today, with the goal of socialism shining bright in their far-reaching vision, come at a good time. A lot of pioneer work has been done. Many obstacles have been cleared out of the road. Many conditions for success have matured. The young generation coming to us today comes to a party that foresees the future and prepares for it. They come to a great party with a glorious record and a stainless banner, a party that has already been prepared for them and awaits their enlistment. They come to a strong party, firmly built on the granite rock of Marxism. This party will serve them well, and is worthy of their undivided allegiance. This 12th Convention coincides with the 18th Anniversary of the party. The experience and tradition of the party are the capital of the new generation. The work of many people for two decades has not been done in vain. And, besides that, the new recruits can find in a realistic examination of the objective facts many assurances that the course of development is working mightily in favor of the realization of their ideal. Our economic analysis has shown that the present boom of American capitalism is heading directly at a rapid pace toward a crisis; and this will be a profound social crisis which can lead, in its further development, to an objectively revolutionary situation. Our analysis of the labor movement has shown that the workers have already demonstrated the capacity to move massively and rapidly forward in the field of trade unionism; and we have every right to confidence that they will move even more massively and with even greater speed on the political field in the days to come.

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The objective prerequisites for the social revolution in America will not be lacking. Capitalism itself will provide them. The manpower of the revolution will not be lacking either. The many-millioned masses of the organized workers of America will provide this manpower. It is already partly assembled and partly ready. The rest is our part. Our part is to build up this party which believes in the unlimited power and resources of the American workers; and believes no less in its own capacity to organize and lead them to storm and victory.

CHAPTER 3

Challenging Racism Paul Le Blanc and Tom Bias

The items gathered in this chapter highlight the fact that, by the time of the Second World War, the us Trotskyist movement had largely moved beyond the racial myopia afflicting it in much of the previous decade. As one white activist recalled of her time in the SWP in the late 1930s, while the organization formally had impeccably anti-racist positions, she had 'been dismayed by some of the ignorance and subliminal racism among my comrades' - and strong residues of this, sadly but not surprisingly, persisted in later years. The fact remains that the SWP had traveled a significant distance - in respect of racial awareness and anti-racism - by the time of the Second World War.1 Related to this development within the SWP is the fact that there was a growing ferment within African American communities throughout the country stirred by the ongoing effects of the Great Migration (the massive flow of blacks from the rural South to the urban, industrial North), and the radicalization and labor insurgencies of the 1930s - that generated transformations in culture and consciousness throughout society.2 As we have noted, the breakthrough regarding 'the Negro Question' among us Trotskyists was largely due to the joint contributions of Trotsky and C.L.R. James (whose party name wasJ.R.Johnson) through their intensive 1939 discussions - reflected in the first volume of this documentary trilogy. James's powerful impact was interrupted when he and others of the Johnson-Forest tendency joined with Max Shachtman in the 1940 split from the Socialist Workers Party in order to form the Workers Party. In 1947, the Johnson-Forest tendency rejoined the SWP, and their influence can be seen in this chapter not only with the

1 Webb 2003, pp. 200-1. Strong residues are reflected in the angry memoir of a black author worker who was in the SWP for several years in the 1940s, Si Owens (who also wrote under the name of Matthew Ward and Charles Denby); see Denby 1989, pp. 166-79. The wife of C.L.R. James who assisted in the composition of the Ward/Denby memoir, Constance Webb, conveys other dimensions of the complex reality in her own recollections (in Webb 2003, pp. 183-6, 191-2, 226,231, 341, 243-8). On the SWP's strongly anti-racist orientation at the time of the Second World War, see Stanton 1980. 2 See Ottley 1943, Aptheker 1974, and Lynn 1979, pp. 73-114.

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substantial contribution by James (using the name]. Meyer), but also by an outstanding article on black workers by his co-thinker Raya Dunayevskaya, under the name Freddie Forest. Injames's absence, however, there were others who followed the theoreticalpolitical pathway he had helped to blaze. One of the most important of these was George Breitman (often making use of the nom de plume Albert Parker) whose incisive article on A. Philip Randolph's March on Washington Movement3 can be found in this chapter, along with a pioneering SWP pamphlet co-authored with Arthur Burch, the Detroit SWP organizer who utilized the pen-name John Sanders. Also of great importance were the contributions of Carl Jackson, whose actual name was Edgar Keemer (1913-80), a black physician persecuted by the government for his open opposition to racism in the us Navy during the war. He was a member of the SWP from 1943 to 1947, and a regular columnist for the Militant. 4 Reflected in this chapter is the fact that the SWP took up a number of antiracist defense cases during the 1940s - the most dramatic and successful being that of James Hickman, on trial for retaliating against 'death by fire' of a number of family members due to a slumlord's callous negligence, described here and recounted in detail in Joe Allen's recent book People Wasn't Made to Bum. 5 The version presented here of C.L.R. James's remarkable 1948 contribution, 'The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States', provides a far richer and more detailed report than is available in the truncated version commonly circulated under the same title. A black worker who was a member of the SWP at that time describes his reaction upon hearingjames's convention speech: 'I felt I was floating ... The Negro struggle would help bring the workers forward. That was complete for me'. 6 Even before the Johnson-Forest tendency left the SWP for a second and final time, however, it was by no means an automatic or simple matter for the SWP as a whole to translate the insights adopted at the 1948 convention into practical policy, as this black worker soon discovered to his great frustration (and as James himself predicted in his report). As we will see in the final volume of this documentary trilogy, this was a matter whose complexities us Trotskyists - black and white - continued to wrestle

3 More on this movement can be found in Anderson 1982, pp. 241-61. 4 In later years, as 'a pro-life abortionist', Keemer offered illegal services to women in need and consequently served 14 months in prison in 1959-60. See the rare but significant memoir, Keemer 1980. s Allen 2011. 6 Denby 1989, p. 173.

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with through the 1950s and into the 1960s. One of the most persistent stalwarts in this effort to 'get it right' was George Breitman, whose seminal essay 'When Anti-Negro Prejudice Began' concludes this chapter.

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1

The Negro March on Washington (1941)

Albert Parker (George Breitman)

A committee of prominent Negroes, headed by A. Philip Randolph, President of the Brotherhood of Pullman Porters, is now engaged in furthering a march on Washington, which is scheduled to take place onjuly1.7 Randolph has correctly described the national industrial and military situation: The whole National Defense Set-up reeks and stinks with race prejudice, hatred and discrimination ... Responsible committees of Negroes who seek to intercede in behalf of the Negro being accorded the simple right to work in industries and on jobs serving National Defense and to serve in the Army, Navy and Air Corps, are given polite assurance that Negroes will he given a fair deal. But it all ends there. Nothing is actually done to stop discrimination. It seems to be apparent that even when well-meaning, responsible, top government officials agree upon a fair and favorable policy, there are loopholes, and subordinate officers in the Army, Navy and Air Corps, full of race hatred, who seek its contravention, nullification and evasion. Randolph has had to recognize the impotence and weaknesses of the current Negro leadership and their methods, even though he has many words of praise for them: 'Evidently, the regular, normal and respectable method of conferences and petitions, while proper and ought to be continued as conditions warrant, certainly don't work. They don't do the job'. And, on the same theme, in another article: 'Negroes cannot stop discrimination in National Defense with conferences of leaders and the intelligentsia alone. While conferences have merit, they won't get desired results by themselves'.

7 Parker 1941.

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Randolph states the need for organization and action by the Negro masses: 'Power and pressure do not reside in the few, the intelligentsia, they lie in and flow from the masses. Power does not even rest with the masses as such. Power is the active principle of only the organized masses, the masses united for a definite purpose'. And then he calls for action in the form of a march of 10,000 Negroes to Washington: On to Washington, ten thousand black Americans! Let them swarm from every hamlet, village and town; from the highways and byways, out of the churches, lodges, homes, schools, mills, mines, factories and fields. Let them come in automobiles, buses, trains, trucks and on foot. Let them come though the winds blow and the rains beat against them, when the date is set. We shall not call upon our white friends to march with us. There are some things Negroes must do alone. This is our fight and we must see it through. If it costs money to finance a march on Washington, let Negroes pay for it. If any sacrifices are to be made for Negro rights in national defense, let Negroes make them. If Negroes fail this chance for work, for freedom and training, it may never come again. Let the Negro masses speak!

Why We Support the March The Socialist Workers Party, the Trotskyist movement in this country, was among the first to hail the progressive character of the proposal to march on Washington. It should be obvious, however, that our support of a march on Washington does not depend on any of Randolph's ideas at all. We support a militant action, not Randolph's reasons for it. We do this in the same way that we would support a strike of the union of which Randolph is president, in spite of our sharp differences with Randolph on many basic questions. That is to say, our support of the march, while full and wholehearted, is not uncritical. We feel it our duty, as part of our fight for full social, economic and political equality for the Negroes, to indicate mistakes and shortcomings where we see them, and to urge Negro militants to correct them. Randolph says again and again in his articles: 'Let the masses speak'. But the masses had nothing to say about the composition of the Committee or its functions. This Committee has taken on itself the sole right of determining the slogans to be used and the work to be done in Washington.

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A representative conference should have been called together before the final plans were adopted. At such a conference, representatives of different organizations that want to participate in the march could have worked out policy and strategy and elected a leading committee. This would have enabled participating organizations to help work out the policy, instead of putting them in a position, as Randolph has done, where they have only the choice of carrying out the Randolph Committee's decisions or just not participating. Such a conference would have increased not only the publicity for the march, but it would also have improved the morale of those participating. The Negro workers would then really have felt that this was their march; something that is not truly accomplished by the mere device of excluding white workers. Nor can Randolph object that 'there wasn't time for that; we'd have wasted valuable time'. This is not true. There was plenty of time for it between the time Randolph first presented the proposal in January and the time the hand-picked Committee issued the call in May. Furthermore, at the time this is written, during the first week in June, less than a month before the march is to take place, there is no evidence that the masses, even on the eastern seaboard, have yet been reached and aroused by the organizers of the march. Most workers haven't even heard about it. It is to be hoped that, in spite of the slow beginning, the masses and especially the workers in the trade unions, will be mobilized to support the march during the weeks that still remain. The Socialist Workers Party is doing what it can to influence advanced workers to participate in this action. But if the march fails because of lack of support from the workers, it will be directly attributable to the bureaucratic organization of the whole affair. In spite of many militant words, the Committee's Call to Negro America suffers from the same half-heartedness that has characterized the other attempts by 'respectable' Negro leaders to win concessions. Certainly one of the key questions to be faced by any movement is the question of the war and the capitalist demand for 'National Unity'. The exploiters mean that the workers should stop asking for higher wages and better conditions until the war is over. For the Negroes 'National Unity' means suspension of the fight for equal rights until after the war is over. The Randolph Committee has no forthright answer to this question. Instead, it says: But what of national unity? We believe in national unity which recognizes equal opportunity of black and white citizens to jobs in national defense and the armed forces, arid in all other institutions and endeavors in America. We condemn all dictatorships, Fascist, Nazi and Communist. We are loyal, patriotic Americans, all.

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But, if American democracy will not defend its defenders; if American democracy will not protect its protectors; if American democracy will not give jobs to its toilers because of race or color; if American democracy will not insure equality of opportunity, freedom and justice to its citizens, black and white, it is a hollow mockery and belies the principles for which it is supposed to stand. Why all those ifs? Don't the Committee's members know very well what is going on? Is there any real doubt in their minds as to exactly what is happening to the Negro? Hidden behind the ifs is a potential surrender of the fight for the rights of the Negro people. The bosses will think: 'Never fear; this is only another bunch of people who are urging us to be good, but who are pledging their loyalty in advance'. Because the Committee is afraid to take an out-and-out position on this question, it weakens the effectiveness of the march. There can be only one correct answer to 'National Unity': unity of the Negroes with the white worker against their common enemy and exploiter. This is not the only instance of the Call for the march making concessions to the ideas looked on with favor by the ruling class. In another place it says: However we sternly counsel against violence and ill-considered and intemperate action and the abuse of power. Mass power, like physical, when misdirected, is more harmful than helpful. We summon you to mass action that is orderly and lawful, but aggressive and militant, for justice, equality and freedom. Crispus Attucks marched and died as a martyr for American independence. Nat Turner, Demark Vesy, Gabriel, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass fought, bled and died for the emancipation of Negro slaves and the preservation of American democracy. Our criticism of this section of the Call should not be mistaken to mean that the Socialist Workers Party is in favor of 'ill-considered and intemperate action' or anything of the kind. Not at all. But who is served by this reassurance that everything is going to be nice and respectable and within the 'lawful' bounds established by the ruling class and its anti-labor,Jim Crow legislatures and courts? If we are going to talk about history, let us talk about it correctly. Did King George the Third think that Crispus Attucks' action was 'lawful'? Did the slaveholders of Virginia think that Nat Turner was 'orderly'?

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The trouble is that the Randolph Committee members are too much concerned about what the powers that be may think about them. And as long as that is true, they lead a halfhearted fight, in spite of all their talk about aggressiveness and militancy.

What Shall the Marchers Demand?

The central demand of the Committee is that Roosevelt issue an executive order abolishing discrimination in all government departments, the armed forces and on all jobs holding government contracts. This Roosevelt will be asked to do when he is asked to address the marchers. The local demonstrations are supposed to ask their city councils to memorialize the president to issue such an order. To fully understand this proposal, one should read the article written by Randolph himself, explaining the theory behind this demand. Printed in the April 12th Afro-American, it began this way: 'President Roosevelt can issue an executive order tomorrow to abolish discrimination in the Army, Navy, Air Corps, Marine, and on all defense contracts awarded by the Federal Government, on account of race or color, and discriminations against colored people would promptly end'. (Our emphasis). If Randolph's statement means anything at all, it means that discrimination and segregation continue to exist in the government, the armed forces and in industry, only because the President hasn't issued an order abolishing discrimination and segregation. Can Randolph really believe that? He must know that Jim Crowism does not depend for its existence on the lack of executive orders abolishing it.Jim Crowism exists because it serves the interests of the capitalist ruling class to keep the working class divided and split along racial lines. We are ready to support the Randolph Committee's demand for President Roosevelt to issue an executive order abolishing discrimination. To force him to issue such an order would be a step forward in the struggle for abolition of racial discrimination. But only a step. Roosevelt's executive order would not be so very much more weighty than the laws and rulings and orders already on the books prohibiting discrimination. In spite of them, Jim Crow rides high. Randolph should recall one of the statements he made when he first called for the march: ' ... even when ... top government officials agree upon a fair and favorable policy, there are loopholes, and subordinate officers in the Army, Navy, and Air Corps, full of race hatred, who seek its contravention, nullification, and evasion'.

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How can Randolph square his January statement with his statement in April that a presidential decree would 'promptly' end discrimination? An executive order abolishing discrimination would remain largely on paper, as long as control of industry, military training and the government remain in the hands of the enemies of the Negroes. A movement that denies these facts or tries to ignore them cannot successfully lead the struggle for full equality. A movement that shuts its eyes or refuses to open them is good only for sleeping.

The Workers, Black and White, Must Control

Negroes must fight for more than a presidential executive order. They must fight for a program that will take control out of the hands of the enemies of the Negro people. Employers controlling the war industries won't hire Negroes? Then have the government take those industries over, and let them be managed and operated without discrimination by committees elected by the workers! Negroes need military training in this epoch when all major questions are decided arms in hand. But the army bureaucrats are bitterly anti-Negro and determined to 'keep them in their place'. Therefore, Negroes must join the fight for military training, financed by the government but under control of the trade unions, based on full equality for the Negroes! The government and the capitalist parties aid the bosses in segregating and discriminating against the Negro people, refusing to pass such elementary legislation as punishing lynching and granting the Negroes in the South the right to vote. Therefore aid in the formation of an independent labor party pledged to carry on the Negroes' struggles. An independent labor party pledged to establish a Workers' and Farmers' Government that would create a new society that would forever abolish poverty, war and racial discrimination! Such a program, aimed at putting control of their destiny into the hands of the workers themselves, black and white - in military training, in industry, in politics - this must become the program of the militant Negro workers. This is the road to jobs and equality. The Negro misleaders will say that this program is impractical and Utopian. That is what Uncle Tom said about freedom for the slaves. But the fighting program we propose is infinitely more realistic than expecting Roosevelt - the partner of the Southern Democrats, ally of the British Empire which oppresses Negroes on every continent - to abolish discrimination.

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The Socialist Workers Party supports the march on Washington. We call on the Negro workers to bring forward in the march a really militant program. If this is done, the march on Washington, whatever its immediate results, would serve to be an important stage in the fight to change the world.

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The Struggle for Negro Equality (1943; 1945)

Albert Parker and john Sanders (George Breitman and Arthur Burch)

Introduction 8

Reading this pamphlet lifted a blinding fog of bewilderment and discouragement through which I, because I am a Negro, had been forced to searchingly feel my way as long as I can remember. When I learned of the program set forth in here, then, for the first time, was the real basic cause of this repulsive racial prejudice made clear to me - this prejudice which, solely because of the color of my skin, had loomed up around me on a hundred sides and in a hundred forms and thus constantly interfered with my doing the things I wanted to do and going the places I wanted to go. The rock-bottom explanation, however, set forth in this booklet, struck me as being so clearly the downright truth that the solution to the whole color question seemed plain as day even before I had come to that part where it was to be discussed. And speaking of solutions, the authors not only point out the real job that has to be done but they give a concise layout of how it can be done. Another useful section contains analyses of other programs which many Negroes still follow and the reasons why these programs, alone, cannot bring the complete equality which we deserve and which we mean to have. I am firmly convinced that when a substantial number of Negro workers read this pamphlet, or, when a substantial number of Negro workers become acquainted with and subscribe to the program it presents, there will be definite shortening of the time during which we have to further endure that degrading status of second-class citizenship forced upon us in this capitalist 'democracy', the America of today. - Charles Jackson [Edgar Keemer] February 8, 1945 8 Parker and Sanders 1945. This pamphlet, originally published in 1943, was published in an

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The Struggle for Negro Equality

The Negro under Capitalism The Source of Prejudice Scientific research proves that race prejudice is not hereditary. No one is born with it, not even the worst cracker in the South. It is generally non-existent among children before they enter the primary schools. It arises and flourishes as the result of miseducation of the child by the school system, the press, the radio, the motion pictures - in short, by the entire propaganda, educational and informational machinery of present-day society. This is a fact of vital significance. For since it is possible to implant a child with race prejudices, it is equally possible to train him from the very beginning to believe in and practice race equality. It can likely be shown that people with the same background and training, of the same color and nationality, may develop entirely different attitudes on this question. For example, two white brothers go to the same school and grow up in the same environment; one is unable to escape the influence of his miseducation and consequently regards Negroes as inferior, refusing to associate with them as equals, while the other is able by experience and observation to overcome the effects of his training and is completely free of prejudice toward Negroes. In other words, even people who have been trained wrong can escape the effects of such training or can be re-educated properly. The best example of this in recent years is the inspiring way in which white workers from the South united with Negro workers on the picket lines in Detroit and Flint and together established the great United Auto Workers Union. The same thing is generally true of the development of the c Io as a whole. While these facts indicate that prejudice against the Negro in this country can be eliminated, they do not explain how it arose or why it is deliberately maintained. To find the answer to these questions, it is necessary to look back and examine the conditions under which the Negro was brought to this country - the system of chattel slavery which existed from the beginning of American colonization until almost 80 years ago. The system of slavery was introduced in all parts of the country. But it made little headway in the North as compared to the South, and after the nation won

expanded edition that year, and in a third edition in 1945, which provides the material repro• duced here.

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its independence from Britain, the Northem states began gradually to abolish it and to emancipate the slaves. The Southern states, however, insisted on writing into the Constitution guarantees for the slave system and even for the importation of more slaves. Slavery and the Inferiority Myth The reason for this was not that the Northern rulers and political spokesmen were more humane than their Southern brothers. It was simply that there were different kinds of economy in the two sections of the country. In the North the ruling class was engaged in trading and manufacturing; it based itself on the system of wage labor, and had little use for slave labor, which was too unskilled for its purposes and required too great an outlay of the capital it wished to use for investing in factories, machinery, etc. The Southern economy, on the other hand, was agricultural, based on the rice, sugar, tobacco, and later, cotton plantations, which required at that time, when the means of cultivating the soil were still comparatively crude, a large and regular supply of unskilled labor that by enslavement could be prevented from departing to other regions of the country to strike out on their own. Economic interest - the greater profits to be made from the cultivation of the plantations by slave labor than by wage labor - was, therefore, responsible for the establishment and the expansion of the slave system in the South. But the fact that an oppressive society benefits a small minority of rulers is not sufficient to guarantee its maintenance. Also required are force - and 'moral' justification. The slave traders and the Southern planters who were their chief customers seized the Negro slaves and held them by force. They justified their practices by teaching that it was 'the word of God' for them to rescue the poor benighted heathen from savagery and bring them the benefits of civilization. It was in the slaves' own interests to be transplanted to a Christian country, they said - and if the slaves did not realize the truth of this, it was cited as only another sign of their ignorance and backwardness. It was the self-asserted God-given duty of the Southern planters to care for the slaves as wards and incidentally to put them to work at productive labor. Thus arose the great lie of Negro inferiority. It flew in the face of all the facts, distorted the history, and ignored the culture and contributions of the African peoples. But it was proclaimed by the ruling class, codified in law, sanctified by the church, taught in the schools. And it was nourished by the treatment of the Negro slave - he was denied an education, denied the opportunity to express or develop his talents, denied everything but the obligation to work for his master in the fields and propagate new generations of slaves.

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The Civil War was the climax of a long struggle to decide whether the nation's domestic and foreign policies were to be dominated by the manufacturers of the North or the plantation owners of the South; to decide which productive system, wage labor or slave labor, was to be dominant as the country expanded westward. In the course of winning the war, the Northern manufacturers found they had to abolish the system of chattel slavery. The slaves were freed and for a few years after the Civil War, during the period of Reconstruction (1865-76), while the capitalist conquerors were still at odds with the Southern planters, the Negroes were afforded opportunities to compete on equal terms with the whites. Despite the handicaps of their training under slavery, the Negroes demonstrated by what they accomplished in these years that they were the equals of the whites in every sphere of human activity. New Use for the Old Myth But racial prejudice against the Negro did not disappear with the abolition of slavery. Previously the function of the 'Negro inferiority' myth had been to justify and bolster the slave system; now it was retained for use by the class which had become the most powerful group in the nation, the industrial capitalist class, forerunner of the modem monopoly capitalists. Capitalism is a system under which the employers, owning the means of production, pay wages to workers to produce commodities to be sold at a profit. Today this system brings only misery to most of mankind, but in its early stages it played a progressive role: expanding production, developing labor-saving devices, increasing the productivity of labor, building new industries and railroads to make possible a more intensive exploitation of the nation's natural resources and raw materials. Capitalism cannot exist without a large labor force to work at the machines and tum the wheels of industry. The development of capitalism therefore brings with it the growth of a new class, the workers. Although the working class was numerically far greater and potentially far stronger than the capitalists, it lacked - and to a certain extent, still lacks - a sufficient understanding of its historical task, the abolition of the capitalist system and the establishment of a new society which will end the exploitation of man by man. The capitalists, on the other hand, were and are fully conscious of their class interests. They may compete among themselves for business and profits, very viciously on occasions, but they are always ready to join together against the working class and to use every possible agency for protecting their rule and their profits. While not yet as class-conscious as their exploiters, the workers were from the very beginning driven, by the terrible working and living conditions to

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which they were subjected, to try to improve their working and living conditions, to get higher pay, a shorter work-week, etc. This inevitably brought the workers into conflict with the capitalists who, always trying to increase profits, always trying to lower wages, raise the number of working hours, and generally speed up the workers. A Weapon of the Employers This struggle between the two chief classes over the division of the national income - which will continue as long as capitalism exists - assumes different forms in different periods, depending on the strength and class-consciousness of the contending camps. Sometimes, within a given plant or industry, it is a strike by the workers or a lockout by the employers; sometimes, on a nationwide scale, it is a revolutionary struggle for socialism by the workers or a counterrevolutionary attempt by the employers to establish a fascist dictatorship; sometimes, on the world arena, it is the war between a workers' state and a capitalist state. Different weapons are used by the opposing classes at different stages in this struggle. But at all times, at all stages, whether locally or nationally or internationally, a basic requirement for the victory of the working class is the unity and solidarity of its forces. Similarly, the numerically weaker capitalists always try to weaken the workers' forces by dividing them. 'Divide and rule' is not a new device for oppressors, but under the capitalists its use has been magnified more and extended further than ever before in history. Divide the masses, set them quarreling and fighting among themselves, teach them to hate and suspect and envy each other so that they will be blinded to the need for uniting in defense of their common interests - this is the policy of the ruling classes everywhere in the world today. It is applied not only within nations but between nations as in the present war where the masses of the different countries are urged to hate and distrust each other. Following this policy, the rulers and their agents deliberately seek to create, sharpen, and extend antagonisms that will divide the working people by age, young against old; by sex, male against female; by religion, Christian against Jew, Protestant against Catholic; by craft, skilled worker against unskilled worker, professional worker against laborer; by nationality, native against foreign-born; and, of course, by color, white against black or brown or yellow. Why Negroes Are Hardest Hit But why is it, many people will ask, that the Negro is especially singled out for discrimination? First of all, we must understand that Negroes are not the only

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victims of prejudice. In countries where there are virtually no Negroes, as in Germany, Big Business has found other scapegoats, the Jews. In some countries, where most of the population is colored, as in South America, there is little or no discrimination because of color. When this country was expanding westward and capitalism was beginning to create great industries, there was often acute shortage of labor and the employers used to send scouts to Europe to find cheap labor for their factories. When the Irish workers first came here and accepted lower wages than the native Americans were receiving, they were for some time the object of much prejudice. Bad feeling was created in the same way later between the Irish and the newly arrived Italians; between both of them and the newly arrived Poles, and so on. The employers took advantage of these antagonisms and benefitted financially from them. But since the sales were freed, the employers have concentrated their attention on discrimination because of color, for that is the easiest kind to foster. A person's national background is difficult to determine among second-generation Americans, and it is hard to judge one's religion at a glance. In Germany the Nazis had to make the Jews wear a yellow star on their clothing. But it is quite easy in most cases to recognize a person's color. That is why in certain parts of the world discrimination against the Negro is used more than other forms of prejudice. Color discrimination strikes not only at the Negroes but also at the Mexicans, Chinese, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Japanese, Indians, West Indians, and other minorities in this country who can generally be singled out by the color of their skin. For the same reason and in much the same way it is practiced in other parts of the world - by the British imperialists against the masses of India, by the Japanese imperialists against the Koreans, by the Dutch imperialists against the East Indians, by the French imperialists against the Arabs. The Negro's struggle in the United States is not an isolated fight, but part of the international struggle for equality by all the oppressed and exploited colored peoples who constitute the great majority of humanity. Other Evils of Capitalism

If racial discrimination were the only evil of capitalism, it might indeed be difficult to destroy it. But, as we have indicated, Negroes are not the only victims of this system. The white workers are also exploited by the ruling class. Furthermore, capitalism in its present stage has become the breeder of other evils imperialism, chronic unemployment, war, fascism. This unfortunately means tremendous suffering for all the masses, the undermining of whatever security and liberties they have won. But it also means, since all the toiling people are

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vitally affected by these byproducts of capitalism, that the Negroes are provided with allies in the struggle against their oppressors. In its early period capitalism played a progressive role. Despite occasional breakdowns, the system built up the nation's economy. Each depression was followed by a new and greater upswing in the production of the necessities of life. But now, in the period of the decline of capitalism on a world scale, each depression is worse than the previous one, longer and more devastating, and the periods of 'prosperity' are shorter. Indeed it now appears that capitalism can guarantee capacity or near-capacity production only in time of war or preparation for war. Under the capitalist system the workers make commodities, such as food, shoes, clothing. They get back only part of what they produce, in the form of wages; the employers get the rest, the profit. With their wages the workers are unable to buy back all that has been produced, and 'extra' goods begin to pile up in the employers' warehouses. The employers cannot sell this surplus to the workers, and they cannot use it all themselves; their only interest is profits, and when they don't get profits, they see no use in continuing to keep the factories open, so they shut them down. His is how the profit system creates depressions and breadlines. Unable to sell the surplus at home, the employers try to sell it abroad. Since the other industrially advanced countries have the same problem, the employers tum to the predominantly agricultural countries, the colonies, seeking to find there new markets for the commodities they cannot sell at home, as well as sources of cheap raw materials and fields for investment of the surplus capital which they accumulated from the exploitation of the workers at home. To make sure that there will be no interference from other countries with their super-exploitation of the colonies, the employers either seize them and set up political control, as Britain did in India, or they use their economic power to dominate the colonies, as the United States employers do in many Latin American countries. This oppression of the colonial peoples and this exploitation of their resources are known as imperialism. But since all the great capitalist nations are desirous of finding such profitable markets abroad, there is a constant economic and political struggle among them over which shall extract the colonial super-profits. And since the world is already divided up among the great nations, who are ready to fight to keep their spoils, this rivalry results in wars for the redivision of the world such as we are now witnessing for the second time in twenty-five years. At the same time the employers, competing with each other in the world market and trying to maintain or increase their profits at home, try to lower the production costs of their commodities by cutting wages and lengthening

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the work week. They can accomplish this only by stifling all opposition to wage cuts, only by destroying all the workers' organizations that resist this process in other words, only by entering on the road to fascism. The Negro in the Post-war World The United States is the richest, most powerful capitalist country in the world. But no more than the others has it been able to escape the processes of decay which are inherent in capitalism and are developing ever more rapidly in this period. As in the other capitalist nations, here, too, greater and greater power and wealth are accumulated in the hands of the monopoly corporations and heavier restrictions are set on the rights of the masses. In its youth capitalism was able to grant concessions: democratic liberties to certain sections of the masses, and slightly higher wages to the more skilled layers of the working class. Today, capitalism is in its death agony. To exist it must snatch back the few concessions it was able to give in the past; it must depress the living standards of all the workers; it must destroy the democratic rights of all the masses. No capitalist nation in the epoch of imperialism is immune from this process which is speeded up in wartime but was in operation before the war and will not be eliminated after the war if the capitalists remain in power. The United States capitalists follow in the footsteps of their German brothers, although at a different tempo. Keeping in mind this background, Negroes will be best able to appreciate what capitalism in this country has to offer them. When the trend is toward the destruction of all democratic rights, when more regimentation is in store for the masses as a whole, Negroes have little to hope for from the capitalist system. When the employers are trying to take away the few democratic rights of the white workers, there is little chance that they will willingly extend new rights to the Negroes. The events of the last decade clearly indicate that under capitalism the prospect is not for Negroes to be raised to the status of the white workers but rather for the white workers to be driven down to the status of the Negroes. And if fascist reaction triumphs, the Negro's status will become even more intolerable than it is today. Negroes can learn from the fate of the Jews in Europe, who made some gains during the period of capitalism's rise only to be forcibly deprived of them when capitalism assumed the political form of fascism. Like the Jewish scapegoat in Germany, the Negro may face loss of whatever citizenship rights he now possesses, deportation, mass slaughter, and extermination. Even assuming that the termination of the war is not followed by the victory of fascism at home, it will surely be followed sooner or later by the most catastrophic depression the world has ever seen. Today Negro unemployment

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has reached a new low point, although it is still greater than that of any other able-bodied group in the country. Most Negroes have the jobs formerly held by white workers who went into the armed forces or war production plants; and those Negroes who work in war plants are generally confined to the worst and lowest-paying jobs. In short, Negroes do not have job equality today; most of their present jobs were secured as the result of manpower shortages and shifts. This is bad enough today, in a period of frozen wages, heavy taxes and rising living costs. But it will become much worse in the postwar period. Most war production will be discontinued; many workers will be shifted back to peacetime production; millions of soldiers will come home and try to regain the jobs they left. Being the last hired, the Negroes will be the first fired, the first squeezed out of jobs, the first turned out on the streets. Role of the Government A study of the nature of modem capitalism teaches the Negro that he is the victim of capitalism in more than one, sense, and that he has allies - in the white worker, in the colonial toiler - whose interests drive them also to a struggle against capitalism. But such a study would be incomplete if it did not also teach him to understand the role of the government in capitalist society. The schools teach and the press asserts that the government is an instrument representing the interest of all the people, of all the classes. But this 'government impartiality' is only a myth, like the myth of 'racial superiority'. The truth is that the government is the instrument, the agent, the executive committee of the ruling class. It may not always estimate the situation correctly, but it always tries to act in the benefit of the ruling class. When it goes to war, when it 'appeases' a foreign rival; when it passes a law, when it decides not to pass a law; when it makes a concession to the masses, when it bitterly attacks the organizations and living standards of the masses - always, and under all conditions, it tries to protect the interests of the ruling class and to maintain the capitalist system. This is demonstrated also by the government's attitude toward the Negro. When the slaveholders were the ruling class, the government upheld the institution of slavery and furthered the domestic and foreign policy of the slaveholders. When the industrial capitalists took over the government, it limited the power of the slaveholders and finally abolished slavery. For a few years after the Civil War, while it suited the interest of the capitalist class, the government even protected the rights of the Negroes in the South and sharply curtailed the 'white supremacy' activities of the former slaveholders. When the capitalists came to an agreement with the planters at the end of the Reconstruction period, the government turned its eyes the other way and let the Ku Klux Klan

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and other terroristic groups smash the democratic rights of the Negroes and reduce them to the status of second-class citizens. Today the government continues the same policy. In violation of its own laws and constitution it refuses to grant the justified demands of the Negro people. Despite the needs of the war machine and war propaganda, it fears to alter the pattern of Jim Crowism which so well serves the needs of the ruling class. By its subservience to this pattern the government itself even becomes the transmitter of racial prejudice - as in the case of the armed forces, where it segregates Negro from white and in many cases instills the ideas of racial superiority for the first time in the minds of white youth who were brought up and went to school alongside of Negroes in non-Southern communities. The policies and practices of the government vitally concern all the workers, but they have an extra significance for the Negro militants. For the struggle to achieve equality is a struggle not only against the capitalists and their propaganda but also to replace the capitalist government with a new kind of government which will represent the interests of the working people, white and Negro. Emancipation through Socialism A Workers' and Farmers' Government The Socialist Workers Party proposes to lead the working people of this country in the struggle to replace the present capitalist system with a new socialist society. Only socialism will guarantee an end to racial prejudice and discrimination as well as to imperialist war, unemployment, fascist reaction, and colonial oppression. What we propose can be stated quite briefly. A Workers' and Farmers' Government will be established, replacing the present capitalist government. The factories, mines, railroads and other means of production will be taken away from the handful of employers and will thereafter belong to all the people. The industries will be managed and operated by committees democratically elected by the masses. They will operate under a system of planned production for the purpose of producing the things the people need, not for the purpose of producing profits. Production, once the strangling band of the employers is removed, will reach new heights. The increased output of nationalized industry and the introduction of new and improved machinery and inventions will enable the people to have more and more of the things they need, and will make possible a gradual reduction in the work-week. Each person will be called on to contribute a fair amount of labor in return for which he will be entitled to his share of the things needed. The needs of those too old or too young to work will be provided for by the government.

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The power of the capitalists will become a thing of the past - like other people they will have to do an honest day's work. And with their power will go the crazy anarchy and planlessness of economic life, including unemployment. There will be no shutting down of factories merely because a handful of exploiters is not making enough profits to satisfy them. The more production, the higher the standard of living of all the people. There is a whole new world to build - decent housing, more roads, more washing machines. And when these are built, the people will work less hours and have more time for cultural and intellectual and scientific pursuits. The power to increase production will then be not a curse, but a boon to mankind. An End to Capitalist Evils Imperialist war and rivalry will be eliminated for all time. Socialist nations will have no interest in fighting each other, but only in cooperation, in the exchange of goods and raw materials. The industrially advanced nations will have no interest in oppressing and exploiting the colonies, but will do everything in their power to build up and industrialize these nations, something which the imperialists never did or tried to do. The industrialization of the so-called backward nations will raise the living standards of the masses of the whole world. The great waste of lives and armaments which have characterized the twentieth century will be looked back on the same way that we today look back on barbarism or the superstitions of the Middle Ages. There will be no imperialist wars because there will be no imperialist nations and because there will be no class to benefit from such wars. Similarly the threat of fascism will be erased. Fascism, being only another form of capitalist rule, possible only while the employers have economic and political power, will be swept away with all the other poisons and rubbish of the profit system. Democracy, true democracy, the rule of the great majority through the Workers' and Farmers' Government, will give way to a classless society governed by and for all the people. And most important, for the purposes of the present discussion, a Workers' and Farmers' Government will guarantee full social, economic, and political equality to the Negro people and all other minorities, and will lead to the complete abolition of racial prejudice. It will truly inaugurate, in this sphere as in all others, the brotherhood of man, the equality of all peoples. Race Relations in a Workers' State A Workers' and Farmers' Government will be able to come to power, in the first place, only with the united support of a substantial majority of the people. This will necessarily include the great majority of the Negro and other oppressed

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toilers. This unity, in aim and action, of the masses will be the greatest asset of the new government, and on coming to power the government will act quickly to maintain and strengthen it. Among the very first moves of the workers' state, therefore, will be the abolition of all kinds of inequalities which could divide the masses, weaken the popular basis of the new government and deflect it from the road to socialism. To carry out its aims and in self-defense, as it were, the Workers' and Fanners' Government will immediately enact a law prohibiting all types of discrimination. And the new government will enforce such laws. It could never build toward socialism if it failed to do so; it could never gain the support of the oppressed people of other countries if it failed to do so; its personnel would be recalled in short order if it failed to do so. It must be firmly borne in mind that a Workers' and Farmers' Government would have no interest in not carrying out its promises regarding racial equality. No one in the government or in the new ruling class would have anything to gain - and all would stand to lose much - if racial discrimination continued. Today the government tolerates and even encourages Jim Crowism because it furthers the economic and political interests of the capitalists to keep the masses divided. But that situation could not obtain in a workers' state which would necessarily have to arouse the enthusiasm and initiative of the broadest sections of the masses for the socialist tasks ahead. What we have been trying to show here, for the benefit of the most skeptical people, is that the logic of the situation as well as self-interest will compel the new government to adopt and enforce these laws. Actually the new government will not have to be prodded to take these steps; on the contrary, it will willingly and eagerly do all this, for it will be a government representing and reflecting the interests and aspirations of the revolutionary masses, just as the present government represents and reflects the interests of the capitalists. What a Workers' State Will Do Most clearly will this be demonstrated by the other actions the government will take, for it will by no means confine its efforts in this field to the adoption and enforcement of a law prohibiting racial discrimination. For the first time in this country's history Negroes will assume their rightful place in the government, on state and local governing bodies, on the basis of full equality, holding posts solely on the basis of their ability. The day of 'Negro advisers' to government officials will be done. Segregation in the armed forces will end immediately; Jim Crow schools and housing projects and restrictive marriage laws will be abolished simultaneously. By these and other measures the government will show in practice and by example that no discrimination or segregation will be tolerated in the new society.

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But the best guarantee for the future will be the measures taken by the government in the field of education, the importance of which was stressed at the very beginning of this pamphlet. For the first time the major instruments of education, information and propaganda will be controlled by representatives of the working class, and they will be used to the hilt in educating the population to the meaning, source and adverse effects of racial prejudice, to the need for equality, to the achievements and contributions of the minority groups from the beginning of American history and especially in the making of the socialist revolution which would have been impossible without their active support and collaboration. Just as the radio, the press, the movies and literature in modem society pound away at the masses, crudely or subtly filling them with false ideas and prejudices, so will the Workers' and Farmers' Government utilize these instruments to tell the masses the truth, to wipe out prejudices, to forge the bonds of interracial solidarity. And in the schools the youth, not yet prejudiced, will receive an education in this field entirely different from that given children under capitalism. From the very beginning of their consciousness they will be brought up to believe in the equality of man. As the result of such education of both the youth and the adults, it will be hard, a generation after the revolution, for many people to understand how racial prejudice had held sway for so many years in American life. If remembered at all 50 years after the establishment of the Workers' and Farmers' Government, it will be primarily in the books of the scientists and scholars who will study it as a mysterious weapon of the former ruling class in the dim, dead past. The Russian Revolution The principles of scientific socialism were first worked out by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels almost 100 years ago. From their studies of capitalism, then still in its early stages, they were able to perceive the forces within capitalism which would inevitably lead to its degeneration and decay. Their studies also showed them that the development of the productive forces by capitalism would lay the material foundations for a new socialist society and would create a new powerful class, the working class, which alone could lead in building that new society. Marx and Engels did not stop there. They also worked out practical methods by which the socialist revolution could be achieved, and they stressed the need for joint struggle by all the masses of all races and nations. Marx was the author of the famous lines: 'Labor with a white skin cannot emancipate itself where labor with a black skin is branded'. The principles of Marxism, developed and amplified in the light of modem

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conditions, were first put into effect by the Russian Bolsheviks, led by Lenin and Trotsky, and supported by the great mass of the Russian workers and working farmers, who overthrew Czarism and capitalism and established a workers' state. The history of the Soviet Union in the last quarter century has shown for all time that the world can get along without the capitalists - as a matter of fact, that it can get along much better without them. Starting with a backward and broken down economy and a largely illiterate population, surrounded by hostile capitalist countries, weakened by the Stalinist bureaucracy which later seized control of the government, the workers' state was nevertheless able to make economic progress that amazed the world and to make advances in the field of racial and nationality relations which have never yet been equaled anywhere. What the Bolsheviks Did An examination of Soviet history, of its great liberating policies under Lenin and Trotsky, and of all the crimes and betrayals of the Stalinists, cannot be undertaken in this pamphlet, although they are subjects of vital significance to all fighters for a new world. What we do wish briefly to discuss here, however, is the workers' state's treatment of race and nationality problems. Czarist Russia was a prison-house of nations. Within its borders were 165 different races and nationalities, speaking 150 different languages and dialects and believing in many different religions. The various minority groups, comprising 57 of the population, were oppressed by the Great Russian 'master' race. Superstition and ignorance flourished everywhere; minority groups were forced to adopt the alien language and customs imposed on them by the Czar. The Russian rulers had unlimited opportunities to set off one race against another. Pogroms and attacks against Jews, Armenians and other racial minorities were a common occurrence. Only present-day India with the religious and racial prejudices stirred up by the British imperialists can be compared to Czarist Russia. The Bolsheviks had little difficulty in carrying out their promise to eliminate race prejudices. In its own ranks the party had been preaching racial equality from the first days of its existence. The common struggle for socialism cemented the bond among the millions of Russian toilers of all nationalities and races. When the power of the capitalists was finally removed, it was a relatively simple task to end racial discrimination. The socialist principle of absolute equality of peoples and races was everywhere applied. Full equality and autonomy up to the point of separation were granted to the many nationalities. The workers' state voluntarily gave up Russian imperialist holdings and privileges. It recognized no superiority of one race over another; it recognized no second-class citizenship with regard to race; it

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destroyed forever the myth of racial inferiority; it gave the lie once and for all to those who maintained that people of different language, religion, culture and race could not live side by side in amity. Today nothing amazes the Soviet visitor to this country so much as the barbaric institution of Jim Crow. So natural has it become for the various peoples in the Soviet Union to respect one another, their traditions and cultures, that not even Stalin's counterrevolutionary policies have been able to destroy many of the gains made by the minorities. This conquest of the revolution accounts in great part for the unity of the Soviet masses in their resistance to the Nazi invader-in sharp contrast to the attitude of the colonial masses in the Far East, who refused to support their British and Dutch oppressors against the Japanese imperialists. The Problem of the South What a workers' state could do in the former empire of the Czars, the more enlightened and more culturally advanced American workers will certainly be able to achieve in this country. It is not our intention to minimize the problems that will face us, especially in the South, where racial equality must be guaranteed before it can be permanently secured anywhere else in the country. But we have good reason for believing that even the problem of the South will be solved by a Workers' and Farmers' Government. In the first place, the revolution will not have to contend with what is still known as 'the solid South'. Even today, conditions, traditions and ideas are undergoing important changes in this area. The South is still largely conservative, looking back to the past rather than ahead to the future. But like the rest of the country it is reacting as it necessarily must to the contradictions and evils of capitalist society. The agricultural South is becoming industrialized; it still lags behind the rest of the country, but it now has important industries and a growing industrial working class; the pauperization of the toiling farmers and sharecroppers creates new areas of discontent with things as they are. There is still much to be done, but the workers of the South are beginning to be organized into unions, many of them in the industrial unions of the c r o. These workers are beginning to learn in action that theirreal enemy is the capitalist class; as time goes on they will realize increasingly that their own standards can never be substantially raised as long as the Negro workers are unorganized and that unless they change their own attitudes the Negroes can be used by the capitalists to lower the standards of the white workers. Lifelong prejudices and misconceptions come into conflict with the basic economic needs of the labor movement, and in the end the prejudices will be discarded because they hamper the daily struggles for a better life. Already where Negroes have been

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admitted into the unions, white workers who were brought up in the atmosphere of bigotry have learned in practice that the Negroes are the best fighters for the union and they have begun to alter their ideas. In some parts of the South this process of slow change is more evident than ill others, but everywhere it is at work. The South is not solid; it is composed of exploiters and exploited and the class struggle breaks through, and everywhere white workers are beginning to reconsider and change their ideas. When the socialist revolution comes, millions of white Southern workers and sharecroppers will take their stand with the workers elsewhere, and they will learn in the process of the struggle for a Workers' and Farmers' Government that their own interests coincide with those of the Negro people. But it would be foolish to assert that prejudices will disappear overnight in the South. While millions will abandon their old bias, a good number of people will be unable to do so immediately. In that case the Workers' and Farmers' Government, determined to safeguard the rights of all minorities, will not hesitate to take measures in the South at least as vigorous as those undertaken by the Republican administration immediately after the conclusion of the Civil War. It was in those years, the Reconstruction period, 1865-76, that the Negroes attained the greatest share of democratic rights they have ever had in the South. To keep the former slaveholders in subjection, the federal government, pushed forward by the Radical Republicans, set up a military dictatorship in the South. But the Northern capitalists had no intention of going all the way, as they showed by their refusal to divide up the land among the Negroes and poor whites. On the contrary, they intended to share in the exploitation of the South, and once they had come to an agreement with the planters, whereby the planters recognized the dominance of the capitalist power, they withdrew their troops and the Southern ruling class by violence and legislation took away the Negroes' rights. Since then the Northern employers and bankers have invested a considerable amount of capital in the South and they oppose any fundamental changes in the Jim Crow pattern for such changes would menace their profits and investments as much as they would those of the Southern rulers. For the same reasons the federal government which once took half-hearted measures to protect the Negroes' rights can no longer be expected to do anything but maintain things as they are. -And How We'll Solve It What the federal government of the 1860s began and then abandoned, the Workers' and Farmers' Government will carry through to completion. It will enjoy great prestige among the Southern masses for it will give the land to the landless, it will place industry in the hands of the workers, it will develop

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and expand production, it will bring security to the toilers for the first time. To such a government the Southern masses will listen with respect and confidence. Furthermore, the educational program which the Workers' and Farmers' Government will undertake everywhere will have special effect in the South to whom the revolution will immediately bring so many blessings and advances. The government will have millions of supporters among the white workers, as a result of the experiences of the pre-revolutionary period, and these supporters will teach the others by example and propaganda that equality for minorities must be respected and upheld; consequently, the efforts of the government to abolish Jim Crow will not appear the work of a foreign and hostile body, as the federal government 75 years ago appeared to be, and will receive a far more favorable response. As for those who refuse to listen to the Workers' and Farmers' Government and its Southern supporters, they will be dealt with firmly. The government will distinguish between those agents of the former ruling class who will undoubtedly try to use the race issue to rally support for the overthrow of the Workers' and Farmers' Government and those who are misguided and confused by such propaganda and lingering prejudices. But it will deal firmly with all of them. This mixture of socialist construction, patient education and firmness against prejudice will solve the problems of the South. Other Parties and Programs The Capitalist Parties Most Negro militants, including those who do not yet agree with us that socialism alone can end racial discrimination, have already learned through their own experience that they can get no aid at all from the two capitalist parties either in the daily struggle to improve the Negroes' conditions or in the major struggle to end Jim Crowism for good. For many years after the Civil War the great majority of the Negro voters supported the Republican Party because they associated it with the fight to abolish slavery. Even after the Republicans restored control of the South to the plantation owners; even after the Republican Party became the party of monopoly capitalism out to exploit and oppress the workers of the whole world; even though the Republican politicians offered the Negroes nothing but some stale promises and speeches about Lincoln and the emancipation of the slaves on election day; even though the Republicans for a long time controlled both houses of Congress and the White House and failed to pass any legislation on behalf of the Negroes - even then the Negroes continued to support the Republicans because they saw no alternative but the Democratic Party, instrument of the 'white supremacy' South.

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But the great depression beginning in 1929 upset this pattern as it did so many other things. Always at the bottom of the economic ladder, the Negroes were driven still lower and when the Northern Democrat, Roosevelt, promised to remember the forgotten man with a new deal, a majority of the Negroes disregarded the speeches about Lincoln and voted for the first time for the Democrats. But the New Deal was unable to solve any of the basic economic problems and although Negro unemployment has diminished, that is the result of the war and not of any change in the Negro's status. Roosevelt has sponsored only one measure specifically affecting the Negro in more than ten years in office - Executive order No. 8802, establishing the Fair Employment Practice Committee - and then only in an effort to head off a proposed Negro march on Washington in the middle of 1941. Even this measure was inadequate and largely ineffective. Roosevelt's administration today depends more on the Southern reactionary wing of the Democratic Party than it did at the beginning of the New Deal - and consequently he makes more concessions to it than ever before. Similarly the Republicans, looking for allies in the South, tum not to the white and Negro masses but to the powerful poll taxers and advocates of keeping the Negro 'in his place'. Almost everyone knows of the examples of the anti-lynch and antipoll tax bills, but it is worthwhile to mention them again, for they well illustrate the attitude of the capitalist parties toward the Negro. In the 1920s when the Republicans ran Washington, and in the 1930-4os when the Democrats were in full control of the government, bills were introduced to make lynching a federal crime and to abolish the payment of poll taxes in federal elections. On every occasion these bills were buried in committee and when forced out of committee by mass pressure were filibustered to death. Never once did the Republican presidents lift a finger to get these bills passed. And Roosevelt, who is notorious as a speechmaker about the blessings of democracy, who knows how to seek public support when he wants something passed, has been as mum on these questions as the sphinx. The fact is plain for all to see: parties which today speak for the capitalists in this country can only be the enemies of social, economic, and political progress. Parties which refuse to grant concessions on lynching and disenfranchisement will inevitably oppose all other measures in the interests of the masses, Negro and white. Parties which refuse to grant such concessions will fight to the death against efforts to end Jim Crowism altogether. Such parties must be fought, not supported.

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The Middle-Class Negroes The fundamental struggle is between the outright capitalist parties on the one side and the party representing the socialist revolution on the other. But in between stand many other parties and groups offering different programs, all of which must be analyzed and understood if the fight against Jim Crow is to be successful. For this fight requires not only militancy and aggressiveness, but also and above all a correct program. Between the capitalist and working classes stands another important group in modem society which we can refer to here as the middle class. Large in numbers, but lacking the economic power of the capitalists and the cohesiveness of the workers whose very work brings them together and teaches them how to cooperate, the middle class is a vacillating force, reacting to the pressure of the capitalists on the one side, to the pressure of the workers on the other. Generally speaking, however, and except when the workers take positive revolutionary measures, the middle class swings along behind the employers, who control the nation's economic might and instruments of propaganda. Because it is being wiped out gradually by the monopolists, the middle class wants reforms and gradual changes even while it supports the continued existence of the profit system. All Negroes are discriminated against in this country, but some of them they used to be called 'the talented tenth' - have been able to lift themselves up to the status of the middle class: white collar and professional workers, lawyers, preachers, doctors, etc. They want certain changes in society and they push themselves forward as the leaders of movements and the authors of programs designed to bring about reforms under capitalism. Because they are generally the best educated and the most articulate Negroes, they assume an importance out of proportion to their actual numbers and often present an obstacle to the organization of the Negro masses for militant action. In their ranks will be found all kinds of people and programs - ranging from servile Uncle Toms, treacherous demagogues and opportunists, all the way over to elements sincerely wanting to solve the most pressing problems of the Negro people. Among them you will find the 'segregationists', who admit that segregation is not nice but who argue that it should be accepted on the ground that a Jim Crow school is better than no school at all. The effect of their propaganda is to blunt the militancy and aggressiveness of the masses, thus guaranteeing that there will be no unsegregated schools and incidentally guaranteeing the jobs of these treacherous rascals. Fortunately the following of such people among the Negroes is growing ever smaller. Then there are those -call them either reformists or liberals -who warn that Rome was not built in a day and that haste should be made slowly, that you've

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got to learn to crawl before you can walk. These experts at crawling declare that the Negroes must not antagonize the powers that be, that they must appeal to the reason of the ruling class. If Negroes 'fly off the handle', they warn, they get nowhere; while if they maintain their Christian patience, things get better and better gradually. They are fond of telling about how much progress has been made since the 1860s and will quote you long lists about the number of schools then as compared with now. The effect of their talk is to lull and intimidate the Negro masses, discouraging them from taking the road of militant struggle which alone can bring real progress. The 'Negro Nationalists' Not to be overlooked, despite their currently diminishing prestige, are the selfstyled 'Negro nationalists'. These gentlemen know how to talk militantly; particularly do they know how to exploit the Negro's natural distrust of 'white people' - natural because they have been betrayed so often by the white rulers, politicians, and their agents. Beware of the white men, they shout, they are all the same, they all want to oppress you, they are none of them to be trusted, white worker or white boss. They try to make the Negroes forget that they comprise but one-tenth of the population, that without allies, and powerful allies at that, they will never be able to break the chains of Jim Crow. These people stand as an obstacle to an alliance of the white workers with the Negroes, to the organization of the Negroes into the trade unions, to a fighting solidarity against the common enemy. Their counsel leads to a blind alley, to the isolation of the Negroes from their natural allies, to objectively aiding the capitalists in keeping the workers divided. Equally dangerous are the scoundrels who warn 'but you've got to wait until after the war' - and most of the types described above fall into this category. When the masses hear the government talking about 'a war for democracy' and see society in a crisis, and when they want to take advantage of favorable conditions to make some gains in their own status, the leaders who support the war echo the false after-the-war promises of their masters and seek to prevent independent mass action at a time when it can be most effective. In words some of these people may concede the need for militant struggle, but they do so only to place themselves in positions of leadership where in action they can prevent militancy. They know that it will be harder to make gains after the war; if they are afraid to fight now, they will be afraid to fight later; they cannot be trusted either now or later. Of course there will also be found among middle-class Negroes a considerable number who are actually ready to put up a fight, honest elements who are looking for a way out. These people should be welcomed into the common

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struggle, but because of their background and connections the Negro masses should watch them closely, making sure that they accept a program of militancy and that they abide by the responsibilities of such acceptance. The Stalinists Many advanced Negroes who had become thoroughly fed up with the capitalist parties turned with hope and expectation to the Communist Party, believing that this was the party of the Russian Revolution, which had abolished the profit system and struck such a crushing blow to race discrimination in Russia, and believing that this party was seeking to do the same in this country. True enough, it once was that kind of party, but that was many years ago when the Communist International was led by Lenin and Trotsky. Since the rise of Stalinism, however, the Communist Party has been revolutionary in name and by claim only. International socialism was no longer the goal of the bureaucrats who entrenched themselves in the Soviet Union after the death of Lenin almost twenty years ago. For a while they continued to make revolutionary speeches, but they had lost confidence in the masses of the world, and they began to rely for the continued existence of the Soviet Union on alliances with the imperialist governments. The Communist Parties of the world were transformed under Stalin's domination from free and democratic instruments of the revolution into slavish tools of the false and reactionary foreign policy of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Those who objected to Stalin's ruinous policies were expelled and later imprisoned and murdered. Thus, when Stalin was trying to effect an alliance with the Roosevelt administration during 1935-39, the Stalinists soft-pedaled and held back the militant struggle of the workers against their employers, of the unemployed against the government, of the Negro masses against their oppressors. For to do otherwise, they reasoned, would be to antagonize the employers and the administration and thus possibly interfere with the signing of a Stalin-Roosevelt pact, which the Stalinists placed before all other considerations. When the Stalin-Hitler pact was signed in 1939 and the Second World War was begun, the Stalinists in Germany were told to discontinue their struggle against Hitler. Because they feared that the United States government would declare war against the Soviet Union, they changed their line and, adopting a pseudo-antiwar policy, began to denounce the Roosevelt administration as imperialist warmongers; they suddenly remembered again that the workers were being exploited and the Negroes Jim-Crowed. This went on until the middle of 1941, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and Stalin was again an ally of Roosevelt. The Stalinists sharply reversed their line once more; Roosevelt was again hailed as a great progressive and humanitarian; they told the work-

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ers to speed up production and make sacrifices for the war, which they now described as a people's war; they told the Negroes that 'Hitler is the main enemy', and the 'foes of Negro rights in this country should be considered as secondary'. Their treacherous policies during this period can be illustrated by their attitude toward the Negro March-on-Washington Movement which was preparing for a demonstration in the capital on July 1, 1941. Before June 22, the date of Hitler's attack, they denounced the movement and its leader, A. Philip Randolph, for being pro-war and conservative. After June 22, they remained silent when Randolph called off the march and then they began to attack him as an antiwar enemy of national unity because be continued to talk about the need for militant Negro action. A correct characterization of their present policies was made recently by one who is not a revolutionist but a respected union official and Negro leader, Willard. S. Townsend, international president of the United Transport Service Employees Union, crn, who wrote in the March 1943 issue of the Red Caps union newspaper: We have no quarrel with those honest intellectuals, progressives and radicals whose sincerity of opinion and sacrifices have created many of the bright spots in the history of our movement. We do, however, emphatically question the unwholesome role being played by a completely dishonest clique of union power-politicians, the 'Communists' ... To us, the present 'party line' of the [Stalinist] carpet-baggers on the Negro question in America is indistinguishable from that of many of our Southern poll-taxers or Uncle Toms. They wrap their reactionary positions in a red flag and yell 'unity'. In the open they spout fireeating but harmless phrases about 'freedom and equality of opportunity' for Negroes, but behind closed doors they are sabotaging every decent effort and impulse on the part of independent liberals and trade unionists to push for an immediate and adequate solution of these problems. The Stalinists are dangerous because they pretend to continue the tradition of Marx and Lenin, because they know how to make pseudo-revolutionary speeches for the purpose of covering reactionary policies. Their treachery has disillusioned thousands of militant Negroes with Marxism and has lost them for the socialist struggle. They must be fought relentlessly for their policies are based not on the interests of the American working class - or of the workers anywhere else for that matter, including those of the Soviet Union - but on

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the interests of the reactionary Stalinist bureaucracy which has weakened the Soviet Union and is concerned only with safeguarding its own privileges and power. It cannot be repeated too often that Stalinism and the struggle for international socialism have nothing in common. Marxism is dead in the Communist Party, but it still lives in this country. It has been kept alive by the followers of Lenin and Trotsky who were expelled from the Communist Party for adhering to Marxist principles and who are now gathered together on a world scale in the Fourth International and on a national scale in the Trotskyist organization in the United States, the Socialist Workers Party, which follows in the footsteps of the Bolshevik party. The Socialist Workers Party opposes the capitalist parties, the middle-class misleaders and the Stalinist traitors. It teaches that class division and exploitation foster and perpetuate all kinds of class and race prejudices and that the way to eradicate these prejudices is by destroying the economic basis of class division. It declares that the time to fight is now and always; that the way to fight is militantly, with every weapon and by every means that will raise the class-consciousness, self-confidence and solidarity of the masses; that the goal to fight for is a Workers' and Farmers' Government and socialism. Activities of the Socialist Workers Party Daily Work in the Unions Socialism alone can solve the basic problems of the Negro and white workers. But this does not mean that they can sit back, ignoring their daily problems and intolerable conditions, and wait for the sun of socialism to shine. If they were to do this, present conditions would become worse and we would never get socialism. Socialism does not fall from the sky like manna; it is obtained only as the result of struggle. In the course of their fight against Jim Crow and capitalist attacks on union rights and conditions, the Negro people and their white allies learn to recognize their real enemy and to understand the need for a complete change of society. For this reason and because it wants to safeguard the rights and conditions of the masses, without which further progress is difficult, the Socialist Workers Party advocates and participates in the daily militant struggles of the masses on all fronts, including the Jim Crow front. Generally speaking, the most important arena for the daily struggles and the education of the masses is the trade union movement, for there we find the decisive sections of the working class and the greatest opportunities for educating them. The trade unions are not perfect organizations; under capitalism they reflect to one degree or another the backwardness and confusion and misunderstandings which capitalist society introduces among the masses. But they

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are the workers' own organizations, built with much sacrifice and suffering, and reflect the workers' aspirations for a better life; they are the organizations where the most militant workers are to be found working together to solve their problems. For these reasons we work within them, helping to build them, to protect them against the class enemy, to raise the level of understanding of their members, and to recruit the most advanced and responsible members into our party. Even when the unions adopt a wrong position on certain questions, we do not tum our backs on them but remain there patiently working to improve things and bearing in mind that their errors are the result of capitalist pressure and miseducation. We regard the unions as our organizations, as the organizations of our class, and when things go wrong within them, we strive to reform them and to restore them to the proper path. This is true even in connection with unions which for one reason or another refuse to accept Negroes as members or as members with equal rights. Some people might think that the advanced and class-conscious white workers should withdraw from such organizations; but if they were to do that then they would be conceding and thus assuring the victory of capitalist pressure and ideas within them - and that our party refuses to do anywhere and anytime. Even in these organizations our members continue to work, adjusting our tactics according to the situation, and trying to show the workers the right path. How We Fightjim Crow We cannot pretend that it is always very easy for our members, cooperating with other workers in the plants who agree with us on this question, to change the opinions and attitudes of white workers subjected to anti-Negro propaganda all their lives. But we know from our experience in this work that it is not too difficult to be accomplished. For we know what the problem really is, and we enter into this work with some very clear ideas and arguments on our side. We know, for example, that the only reason capitalist propaganda is able to make headway among the white workers is that it appeals to their self-interest, that it turns the white workers against Negro equality by teaching that it would threaten their jobs, etc. Our task therefore is to answer the capitalist propaganda by showing that discrimination against Negroes hurts the interests of the white workers. We show them how such discrimination divides and weakens the union movement. We remind them how discrimination in the past turned the Negro people against the unions and enabled the bosses to use the Negroes as scabs against the workers when they sought to get higher pay for themselves. In other words, we show them concretely that it is in their own interest, as individuals and as

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unionists, to take the Negroes into the unions and to enable them to work in the plants on the basis of equality. This is a powerful argument and our experiences have shown that it is an effective one. While breaking down the barriers in this way can usually be best done by our white members, an equally important kind of work is carried on by our Negro comrades: while the advanced white workers educate their less enlightened white fellow-workers to the need for combating Jim Crow, the advanced Negroes educate the other Negro workers to the need for joining the common anticapitalist struggle for economic gains. Our Negro comrades persuade their fellow-workers to join the unions and to play an active and leading part there. Most white workers know very little about Negroes; our job is to show them that the Negroes are dependable union members and worthwhile allies against the employers; more than anything else this helps to eradicate feelings of suspicion on the part of union men formerly prejudiced against Negroes. And by making good unionists of the Negro workers we make it possible to build the progressive forces of the unions and to elect the kind of union leaders who will be responsive to the wishes of the members. In addition our comrades, both white and Negro, prove in action that they can be depended on to shoulder their part of the burden in the everyday struggle against Jim Crow; they fight against all forms of discrimination in the plant; they demand that Negroes be hired, that they be given skilled jobs on the basis of seniority; they get the unions to pass resolutions against Negro discrimination and they help wherever possible to set up committees in the plants to implement these resolutions, etc. The work is sometimes very difficult, but our comrades never shirk it. They welcome it because they realize it is a necessary part of the struggle to build the workers' economic organizations and the revolutionary party. Our experiences have shown us that a few people with a correct program and tactics can do a lot in this field. As our party grows, as the class-consciousness of the workers develops, we will be able to do much more. Meanwhile, every success won in the plants and the unions makes it easier to advance elsewhere in society. This was demonstrated in Detroit in 1942 when the CIO played an important part in the fight to save the Sojourner Truth housing project for the Negro people. Work in Negro Organizations Needless to say, our anti-Jim Crow activity is not confined to the unions but is carried on in all possible fields to the extent that our forces permit, and particularly within the national and local Negro organizations, both in 'mixed' organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and in all-Negro organizations such as the March-on-Washington Movement.

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Our activities in such organizations are somewhat like those within the unions, with the exception of course that we don't have to convince the members of the need for fighting Jim Crow. We seek loyally to build the organizations, to further their progressive aims, to extend their struggles, to educate their members and where possible to recruit them to the Socialist Workers Party. We advocate militant mass action and the need for close cooperation and links with the labor movement. At the same time we try to get the unions to support the struggles of these Negro organizations. Our support of these organizations in no way includes agreement with the false ideas or the essentially conservative methods of most of their leaders. Where necessary, we do not hesitate, in a constructive manner, of course, to criticize their mistakes and to urge on the members the need for adopting a fully-rounded militant program and electing leaders to carry out that program. We oppose all bureaucratic tendencies within the ranks of the leadership and advocate full democracy in deciding the policies of the organization. We do all this not in the interest of factional opposition, but for the purpose of strengthening these organizations and making them more effective instruments of the struggle against discrimination and segregation. Build an Independent Labor Party We Trotskyists also stress the need for political action against the forces that foster Jim Crow. Equality can never be achieved until Big Business is defeated on the political front. In addition to organizing and uniting the Negro and white masses on the economic field, we seek to break them away from the domination of the capitalist parties and to lead them onto the road of independent political action. Without militant politics, the Negro masses must fight with one hand tied behind them. Leaders who oppose independent political action by the Negro and white masses are helping to ensure the political domination of the capitalists which in turn ensures the continuance of Jim Crow. For these reasons we advocate the formation of an independent labor party, based on the trade unions and embracing the militant Negro organizations. Such a party, controlled by the workers and running workers for political office, could do much to advance the daily struggles of the workers, including the struggle against Jim Crow. Such a party would unquestionably fight the Democrats and Republicans in Congress for the enactment of anti-lynching and anti-poll tax legislation, and would have a real interest in putting teeth into measures to halt discrimination in employment.

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Our Inner Party Relations This pamphlet would be wholly incomplete without a warning as to its inadequacies and without some comment on the inner party life and relations of the Socialist Workers Party. Lack of space makes it impossible for us to enter into a discussion of all the ideas of our party. In this pamphlet we have given only the sketchiest kind of outline of what we believe and what we stand for, and have necessarily dealt chiefly with the questions relating to the Negro struggle for equality. Our aim is not to make bookworms or full-time scholars of our members and sympathizers, but knowledge is strength and we seek to strengthen and educate the workers within and without our party for the great tasks ahead. The serious Negro militant who wants to emancipate his class and his race will find this pamphlet only an introduction to the great school of Marxism. He will want to read much more, to learn more about the workings of capitalist society and the class struggle, to become better acquainted with the principles, strategy and tactics of the revolutionary party. He will find these in the great works of our teachers, in the press and pamphlets of our party, by holding discussions with our members and by attending the lectures and classes arranged for workers who want to learn so that they can become better fighters. And he will find these above all within the ranks of the party, by participation as a member in its activities. Our party, in the forefront of the struggle against Jim Crow in society, naturally is a bitter enemy of all prejudice within its own ranks. We tolerate no expressions of racial superiority or practices of bias by any of our members. We vigilantly educate all our new members as to the meaning of prejudice and seek to eradicate all white chauvinistic ideas which they may bring with them when they join our organization. The race relations within our party are the forerunner of race relations in the future society. In its ranks the class-conscious Negro feels perfectly at home. As the influence of our party spreads, the principles of race equality which it preaches and practices at all times will spread along with it. Wider and wider circles will embrace these ideas until with the victory of socialism all race prejudice will be ended. This is not a dream or illusion. It is the achievable goal of a party that is completely realistic in its approach. Its teachers, Marx and Engels, pointed the way. Their disciples, Lenin and Trotsky, put this program into effect. Our task is much simpler. We need only to adhere to their program and adjust our tactics to present day conditions in this country. There is no other road for the Negro militant except as a fighter in the ranks of the Socialist Workers Party.

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The Anti-Negro Terror in Detroit

(Statement by the National Committee, Socialist Workers Party, printed in The Militant,]uly 3, 1943) A series of assaults upon the Negro people throughout the country has reached a bloody climax in Detroit. This latest ferocious lynch attack murdered 24 Negroes, beat and injured hundreds, struck terror into the hearts of Detroit's community of almost 200,000 Negroes. This was not a 'race riot' but an unprovoked attack by 'white supremacy' mobs. The hoodlums who constituted the lynch mobs in Detroit operated with comparative immunity. That is proven, not only by the many eye-witness accounts testifying that the police either tolerated or directly aided the mobsters, but also by the official figures showing that 85 of those arrested were Negroes. Emboldened by their success, the hoodlums are undoubtedly ready for further lynch attacks against the Negro people. It is unfortunately all too plain that the anti-Negro elements have made advances in their aim of keeping the Negro 'in his place' and halting his struggle for equality and emancipation. Large numbers of Negroes have been terrorized and intimidated. Many others are becoming attracted toward 'Negro nationalist' sentiments and feel hostility towards white people as a whole. There is great danger that these Negro workers will tum away in distrust and despair from the trade union movement. The attacks on the Negroes threaten the unity of the working class. And this threat to labor unity comes at the very moment when the labor movement must mobilize its full fighting strength to beat back the union-busting offensive of Big Business and Washington. Why has this epidemic of the lynch spirit broken out like a plague all over the nation? The capitalist, liberal and Stalinist press claim that Axis agents and Japanese 'fifth columnists' provoked these outbursts. Although the Axis powers unquestionably exploit these acts of violence for their own reactionary ends, any informed person knows that such an explanation is absolutely worthless and nothing more than a fake alibi to cover up the real conditions and forces responsible for the crimes. The real causes and culprits are here at home. Lynch assaults upon Negroes took place decades before the fascists came to power or the United States went to war with the Axis. These attacks are an inevitable outgrowth of the Jim Crow system fostered by reactionary capitalist interests, protected by the Democratic and Republican Parties, and buttressed by the government's policies of discrimination against

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Negroes in war industry and segregation in the armed forces. This vicious system breeds race hatred, officially sanctions and deliberately sharpens antagonisms between white and colored. The Jim Crow system provides the social basis for the poisonous propaganda and activities of the Ku-Kluxers, Black Legions, Christian-Americans and other native fascist cliques. The adherents, beneficiaries and dupes of the Jim Crow system take advantage of every source of friction between white and Negro to stimulate ill-feelings between them, inflame their prejudices, incite and hurl them against each other. This carefully cultivated hostility has been aggravated by the consequences of the war. Bad housing, poor transportation, dislocation of family life, juvenile delinquency, scarcity of food, frozen wages, and burdensome taxes in the face of soaring prices, afflict all sections of the working masses and create enormous discontent and rebelliousness. Because of their no-strike pledge and slavish subservience to Roosevelt's labor policies, the CIO-AFL leadership has completely failed to provide the workers with any program of resistance to the encroachments of the capitalists, to stop profiteering and the mounting cost of living. That is the reason why fascist demagogues and preachers of race hate and violence are able to receive a hearing from some workers. For their own ends the ultra-reactionary forces are trying to divert the justifiable indignation of the workers away from the real causes and authors of their misery. The actual instigators of these attacks come from the capitalist class and their conscious or unconscious tools. It has already been disclosed that agents of the employers planned and provoked the anti-Negro demonstrations in Mobile and elsewhere. Every worker is aware that the capitalist interests are conducting today a furious campaign against the labor movement. The blows against the coal miners, the anti-labor decisions of the War Labor Board, the passing of the SmithConnally slave-labor act, Roosevelt's demand for the drafting of all strikers, have been high points in this offensive. All workers must realize that the concerted attacks upon the colored people are an essential and integral part of this national union-busting drive. The employing class hopes by these murderous means to split the workers along race and color lines, to throw white workers against black, to undermine and demoralize the unions; and thus to tum the attention of the workers away from their real enemies. Divide and rule: This policy, everywhere pursued by the possessing classes and their agents, has alone enabled them to hold down the exploited masses. Britain incites Moslems against Hindus. Hitler uses the Jews for scapegoats. All of them hurl the workers of one country against another in periodical world wars.

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For generations here in the United States employers have grown fat and powerful by playing native workers against foreign-born: white against black, craft against craft. The American workers were able to build their powerful union movement in the last decade by sweeping aside, overcoming and fighting against all these artificially fomented divisions. The Negro workers played a heroic role in the building of the industrial union movement. They fought side by side with their white brothers against the bosses. Race prejudice and discrimination cannot be permitted to penetrate again and regain a foothold within the trade unions. The capitalist government bears a large share of responsibility for these attacks. The administration's recent decision for segregation of colored workers in the Mobile shipyards and the policy of segregation practiced in the armed forces provide official example and encouragement to the Jim Crow elements. The government fails to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment or the federal statutes against discrimination, and even violates the provisions of the Selective Service Act against discrimination. This authorized lawlessness has encouraged similar lawlessness amongst the advocates of 'white supremacy'. The failure of Roosevelt's administration to press for the passage of anti-lynching and anti-poll tax legislation has given aid and comfort to all enemies of the Negro people. Roosevelt has brought neither freedom from want nor freedom from fear to the Negro people. On the contrary they are today more terrorized and troubled than ever before. What must be done to stop this lynch violence? Certainly no trust or reliance can be placed in the federal authorities, the army, state or municipal police, the good will of the capitalist rulers, the action of Congress or the President. They have shown that they will not take the steps needed to protect Negro lives and rights. The Negro people have both the right and the duty to protect themselves against lawless attacks of the lynch mobs. They have the right to demand that, in event of any future attacks, Negro troops alone be used and Negroes be deputized to defend them. But the Negroes constitute only a small minority of the population. For their protection they require strong and reliable allies. These allies will come above all from organized labor of which the colored workers form a significant section. The prejudices exhibited by some workers should not blind the Negroes to the necessity of uniting with the labor movement. Prejudices implanted in the minds of white workers by their enemies have been and can be overcome through action and education in joint struggle of black and white workers against their enemies and exploiters. The fundamental interests and aims of the white and colored workers in their fight for equality and emancipation are the same.

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The chief responsibility for defending the Negro people rests today upon the trade unions. The CIO, most powerful organization of the working people in Michigan, was established and grew strong because of its policy of nondiscrimination against any worker, regardless of color, race, religion or political affiliation. The labor leaders must do more than deplore these attacks upon the Negro people. They must do more than order their members to stay off the streets and appeal for grand jury investigations. They must summon their membership to take determined and organized action against the instigator's and organizers of these lynch mobs. The unions of Detroit could have repulsed this threat to their very existence as they repulsed General Motors in 1937 and Ford in 1941. Detroit would be far different today and the native fascists would be cowering in their holes, demoralized instead of triumphant, had the union leaders called out the veteran flying squadrons to defend the Negro people. These attacks are an alarm signal. They involve issues no less important to the unions than the fight waged against the auto barons in 1937. The hoodlums and hooligans who are today assailing the Negroes are training themselves for other acts of violence. Tomorrow or the day after they can be unleashed by the Fords, Wilsons, and Chryslers as storm troops and strikebreakers against the unions themselves. Workers, take warning! This is how fascist gangs were formed and fascism arose in Europe and crushed the labor movement. Do not permit them to take root here. For their own self-protection the unions must use the same methods of struggle, the same fighting program that proved so effective against Harry Bennett's mobsters. Let the union officials call a great meeting of all the shop stewards in the Detroit area, acquaint them with the seriousness of the situation and inform them of the union's plan of campaign. The members of each local should be mobilized for action. Flying squadrons of union militants should stand ready to protect the rights of their Negro fellow-workers menaced by the mobs. The various local unions should maintain order and clear their respective territories of anti-Negro, anti-labor gangs. Every local union should set up a vigorous anti-discrimination committee to combat employer-instituted discrimination in the shops and to ferret out the conscious Ku-Klux agents and provocateurs who try to stir up dissension between white and colored workers. The unions must carry on educational activities to explain to the backward workers the reactionary meaning of race prejudice and its menace to their own interests and organizations. The prejudices inculcated by capitalist institutions can and must be eradicated by union education. In addition, the Detroit labor movement should set up its own investigating committee and conduct its own public hearing, where the truth

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can be told about the causes, instigators and beneficiaries of the anti-Negro terror, and where plans to prevent new attacks can be mapped out. Such immediate steps in Detroit must be extended on a national scale. The unions can be content with nothing less than the leadership of the struggle to abolish Jim Crowism and to secure full economic, political and social equality for the Negro people. Such a program of action would help restore the shaken faith of the Negroes in the entire labor movement. It would create unbreakable bonds of unity between white and colored workers. By establishing the solidarity of the working class as a whole, it would clear the way to smash the capitalist anti-labor offensive all along the line. Black and white, unite and fight your common enemies! The Harlem Outbreak- a Protest againstJim Crow (From The Militant, Aug. 7, Aug. 14, Sept. 4, 1943)

Five killed, more than 500 injured, more than 500 arrested, property damages exceeding $5,000,000 - these were the immediate results of the outburst in Harlem last Sunday and Monday. (Another of the injured died later.) It began Sunday night when a white policeman shot and wounded a young Negro soldier who had objected to his maltreatment of a Negro woman he was arresting. The rumor spread that the soldier had been killed, and resentment rose high. Groups began roaming the streets, fighting with police, breaking store windows, carrying off merchandise. With the exception of 40 police injured, all of the casualties were Negroes. What set these thousands of people into motion in this way? The shooting of the soldier was only a chance incident; it could have been precipitated by some other accidental event. The real cause must be sought in the social, economic and political conditions of the Negro people. On several occasions in the past year Negro leaders have been compelled to complain publicly about the brutality of the New York police toward Negro citizens. More than one outbreak provoked by police brutality has been narrowly averted in Harlem in recent months. The Negro people are sick and tired of being beaten, maimed and thrown into jail on the slightest pretext. They are revolting against victimization by the police who have been taught by the press that all Negroes are 'muggers' and must be dealt with viciously. Another and equally important factor in the Harlem conflict was the fact that a Negro soldier was involved in the initial incident. Nothing rankles in the Negro people so much as the true stories they bear and read about the treatment of the Negro soldiers, especially in Southern camps. Many Harlemites

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have sons and brothers in Camp Stewart, Ga., and other 'hell-holes', as the soldiers describe them, and they know that their relatives, being trained to fight in a 'war for democracy', are themselves Jim Crowed and insulted in a manner to make Hitler green with envy. Every Negro leader in Harlem recognizes this to be one of the basic causes of last Sunday's outbreak. On top of these are the economic conditions in Harlem, aggravated in the extreme by the war. Rents are uncontrolled. Prices are higher, the quality of food is generally lower, and food is scarcer than in other parts of the city. Negroes have the worst-payingjobs, despite the manpower shortage. The Negro people suffered from the lowest standard of living in the city before the war; today they are even worse off. On Sunday and Monday the Negro people carried on a spontaneous protest. Their protest took on a distorted, elemental and chaotic form, as protests usually do in the absence of a clear program and a trained leadership; under these conditions the protest could not possibly win what the demonstrators wanted. But it is perfectly clear that they were trying to show in some way that they were fed up with present conditions and ready to fight against them. The Communist Party, which has considerable influence in Harlem, was among the first to denounce the protesting Negroes. Acting in the interests of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, these Stalinist finks have betrayed the Negro struggle as well as the labor movement at home. For La Guardia -who knew long ago what was coming and failed to do a thing about it but make speeches on the need for keeping calm in times like these the Stalinists have nothing but praise. For the Negro masses they reserve their vilest slanders and attacks. In the same language the capitalist press uses in denouncing 'hoodlums and vandals', and with the same spirit of hatred and contempt, a front page editorial in the August 3 Daily Worker says: ... groups of irresponsible elements began a wholesale looting of stores owned by white storekeepers. This looting of stores was a shameful act at this moment in our nation's history ... Like the capitalist press the Stalinists neglect to mention the fact that people are hungry in Harlem. Yes, mothers accompanied by six-year-old children took food from the window-broken grocery shops. The Stalinists attack them as 'irresponsible'. That is the voice of well-fed bureaucrats, not of a party genuinely concerned with the suffering of the masses. 'A shameful act', they say. But not half so shameful as the cynicism, baseness

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and treachery of the Communist Party, and not a hundredth as shameful as the Jim Crow system that produces such acts - a system which the Daily Worker editorial does not mention, let alone blame .

•• • 'This is not another Detroit! This is not a "race riot"'. Thus Mayor LaGuardia, the liberals, Stalinists and 'respectable' Negro leaders hastened to assure the world that the August 1-2 outbreak in Harlem, deplorable as it was, could have been much worse. It is true that there were marked differences between the events in Harlem this week and the tragedy in Detroit last June. In Detroit organized bands of hoodlums and advocates of 'white supremacy' intervened in a minor clash to aggravate the situation and terrorize the whole Negro population; such bands were absent from the Harlem outbreak. In Harlem a large section of the Negro people gave a demonstration of their dissatisfaction with the conditions under which they live; the only whites to molest the Negroes were the police, with the result that whites were able to walk freely through the streets at the height of the demonstration, and the affair never took on a Negro-versus-white complexion. Nevertheless, the underlying cause of the Harlem events was the same as the underlying cause of the Detroit events - the maintenance of the Jim Crow system, which assumes the most oppressive form in times of social crisis such as we are now passing through. The capitalist, Stalinist and liberal press congratulate LaGuardia on restoring 'order' and on handling the situation so that greater harm did not result. But what now? Does anyone seriously believe that this has solved the situation? The underlying causes of the outbreak remain; the authorities have not proposed and will not propose any measures to eliminate these causes. This week Jim Crowism took five lives and inflicted injuries on hundreds. What is to prevent it from taking a toll ten times greater next week? What is to prevent it from developing into the form and on the scope of the Detroit anti-Negro terror? The Militant does not denounce the masses of Harlem who felt constrained in their desperation to demonstrate against Jim Crow in the manner which they did. We recognize it to be an expression of their discontent, of their desire to conduct a militant struggle against their Jim Crow conditions. We understand that it happened the way it did because they are lacking the program and leadership able to direct their struggle into fruitful channels and against the real enemy- the capitalist system which promotes and upholds Jim Crow.

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Until the Negro people forge a fighting program and leadership -which they will find only through an alliance with the militant labor movement- there will always remain the social conditions breeding Harlems and Detroits.

••

•

There was remarkable unanimity of opinion among the well-known Negro leaders and in the Negro press during and after the August 1-2 outbreak in Harlem. Practically every one of them - whether conservative, liberal, Stalinist or 'radical' - joined in calling for the restoration of 'law and order' as the most important need of the Negro masses and in denouncing thousands of Harlemites as hoodlums, vandals, irresponsible elements, etc. The Pittsbur9h Courier headlines screamed: 'Disgraceful Scenes Enacted As Hoodlum Elements Loot Stores'. The Chica90 Defender expressed its disapproval by refusing to print a single picture relating to the affair. The Daily Worker echoed the capitalist press by calling it a 'shameful act'. A. Philip Randolph, who delights in referring to himself as a militant and dynamic leader, voiced 'great sorrow and distress' and delivered a short lecture to the masses on the need for observing the law. Virtually all the Negro papers hailed the behavior of the New York police the same police whose brutality to Negroes was one of the chief causes of the outbreak. They seem highly elated and relieved that 'only' six died, most of them at the hands of the police. These Negro leaders and editorial writers knew, as most of them have since half-admitted, that the Harlem outbreak was fundamentally a protest and demonstration against the oppressive Jim Crow conditions to which the Negro people are subjected in even the 'most liberal city in the country'. It was not a planned and organized protest; its participants did not understand the program for abolishingJim Crow; under such conditions the demonstrators could not do more than show their deep dissatisfaction and their strong impulse to resist the Jim Crow attacks on their rights and conditions. These Negro leaders and writers know as well as The Militant does that the responsibility for what happened in Harlem lies not on the Negro masses, but on the capitalist system which breeds discrimination and segregation, on the White House and Congress and the bureaucracy of the armed forces which inspire and set a reactionary example for the most backward elements of the white population, and on the propaganda and educational machinery of the nation which upholds and spreads the ideas of 'white supremacy'. But none of these leaders used the same vituperative language against the real culprits that they used against the desperate and harried victims of the Jim Crow system.

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Fundamentally, we repeat, it was a demonstration against Jim Crowism. But it was more than that. It was also a demonstration against the official Negro leaders. It was also a protest against the program of these leaders, a vote of noconfidence in their policies and methods. How have these leaders reacted to the present crisis in the struggle for equality? At best, they offer a program for fighting defensive, rear-guard actions. At worst, they counsel patience, 'tolerance', the subordination of the Negro people's interests to the needs of 'national unity', and the postponement of the anti-Jim Crow fight to some future date after the end of the war. In no case do these leaders present a bold, realizable program; all they can inspire is defeatism and despair. As a result the masses do not have a program. They see no way out of the crisis. Their conditions, the increase of reaction, the growing gap between the democratic slogans of the war and freezing of the second-class citizenship status of the Negro - all these convince the Negro masses that now is the time for struggle. They see the need to fight, they want to fight - but they don't see how. What can result from such a situation but blind, chaotic, bitter, misdirected, and hopelessly futile outbursts of the kind witnessed in Harlem? Only the most naive optimist will believe that the same thing won't happen again, on an even greater scale, in Harlem and elsewhere. And the blame for it rests in part on those people who present themselves as the leaders of the Negro masses but who have led them only into a blind alley. No wonder that these people, recognizing their own responsibility, were so violent and unrestrained in their denunciations of the masses. As for us, who recognize the real causes of the Harlem outbreak and the real forces to be censured for it, we see in these developments the need to intensify our efforts to win the Negro people over to the program of revolutionary socialism.

•• • This whole discussion reminds us of many of the slave rebellions that took place a century or so ago. We all know how cruelly the slaves were oppressed and exploited - and that the arguments raised on behalf of the maintenance of slavery sound monotonously like the arguments raised on behalf of the maintenance ofJim Crow today. Many of the slaves were ignorant and superstitious, they had no understanding of the forces at work in society, they rarely had leaders who knew how to give them the proper guidance. But when they saw no other way out, when their patience came to an end

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and their resentment reached a boiling pitch, they revolted - in most cases blindly, often realizing that they had little chance of success. In many instances they resorted to arson and robbery, often innocent bystanders (like the small storekeepers in Harlem) were killed and beaten. Now the question arises: who and what were to blame for the 'excesses' committed during these revolts? If you leave aside the sociological, economic and political explanations then you could come to the conclusion, as some wellmeaning abolitionists did in that period, that the slaves were to blame. But the verdict of history is that the slave system and the slaveholders were responsible. And today the Negro people and the labor militants pay honor and tribute to the memories of those brave, unlettered slaves who didn't have a full and correct program but who had the courage to fight against oppression in the best way they could see. We don't pretend that the Harlem outbreak was completely identical with the slave revolts, but we do maintain that the same spirit was evidenced. Those who look only at, the effects and shut their eyes to the causes will learn nothing from the Harlem events. Those who see the indissoluble connection between the two will be able to learn at least one thing useful for the struggle against Jim Crow- namely, that the masses today are ready to fight and are desperately seeking the correct program. Trotsky and the American Negro Struggle (From The Militant, Aug. 15, 1942)

It is not our purpose on this occasion, the second anniversary of the death of Leon Trotsky, to discuss all of what that great Marxist had to say about the Negro struggle in the United States. Nor is it our intention here to exaggerate the extent of his contributions toward the solution of the immediate, practical problems of uniting the American Negro and white masses against their common enemy. Trotsky did not have the opportunity to study the problems of the American Negro at close hand; for one thing, the 'democratic' government of this country- which welcomes Queen Wilhelmina and other oppressors of millions of colored people - would not let him live here and refused to permit even his dead body to cross the border. Trotsky's great contributions were in the field of clarifying the tasks and tactics of the world working class and thus bringing together the forces of the world revolutionary party which alone will lead the masses of all races to the solution of their problems. It will be for this above all that the American Negro people will remember and honor Trotsky in the future. In addition, many of his writings dealt with the problems of the colonial people and their struggle for independence from imperialism.

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But this does not mean that Trotsky was unaware of or underestimated the significance of the concrete problems relating to the American Negro people. On the contrary, at every possible chance, he kept emphasizing these things: 1. The necessity for winning the Negro people to support of the revolutionary party. 2. The necessity for combating all traces of racial prejudice among the white militants and workers. Long before the Trotskyist movement was formed as an opponent of Stalinist treachery, Trotsky wrote a letter in reply to some questions put to him by Claude McKay, then a communist. Printed in the March 13, 1923 International Press Correspondence, part of the letter said: In North America the matter is further complicated by the abominable obtuseness and caste presumption of the privileged upper strata of the working class itself, who refuse to recognize fellow-workers and fighting comrades in the Negroes. (AFL President) Gompers' policy is founded on the exploitation of such despicable prejudices, and is at the present time the most effective guarantee for the successful subjugation of white and colored workers alike. The fight against this policy must be taken up from various sides, and on various lines. One of the most important branches of this conflict consists in enlightening the proletarian consciousness by awakening the feeling of human dignity, and of revolutionary protest, amongst the black slaves of American capital. As stated above, this work can be carried out only by self-sacrificing and politically educated revolutionary Negroes. More than six years later, when the Trotskyists had been expelled from the Communist International for their defense of Marxist principles, and when the Trotskyists were holding their first organization conference in this country as the American Left Opposition, forerunner of the present Socialist Workers Party, Trotsky, already in exile, wrote a letter to The Militant on 'Tasks of the American Opposition'. In this, the first letter which he was able to write to his American collaborators, Trotsky emphasized the importance of the Negro problem in relation to the revolutionary movement: The trade union bureaucrats, like the bureaucrats of false Communism, live in the atmosphere of aristocratic prejudices of the upper strata of the workers. It will be a tragedy if the Oppositionists are infected even in the slightest degree with these qualities. We must not only reject and condemn these prejudices; we must bum them out of our consciousness to

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the last trace. We must find the road to the most deprived, to the darkest strata of the proletariat, beginning with the Negro, whom capitalist society has converted into a Pariah, and who must learn to see in us his revolutionary brothers. And this depends wholly upon our energy and devotion to the work. The Militant, May 1, 1929

Trotsky's attitude toward the Negro masses contained not a trace of that condescension and sentimentalist superciliousness which characterized the Stalinists and social-democrats of ten years ago. He was far more interested in recruiting a Negro worker than a white intellectual. And for very good, very material reasons. To illustrate: In 1932 an application for membership in the Trotskyist movement was received in this country from 24 Negroes inJ ohannesburg, South Africa. As soon as Trotsky had seen their letter, he wrote an article for The Militant (July 2, 1932) in which he said:

If the Johannesburg comrades did not as yet have the possibility to acquaint themselves closer with the views of the Left Opposition on all the most important questions, it cannot be an obstacle in getting together with them as closely as possible even today and to help them fraternally to come into the orbit of our program and our tactics. When ten intellectuals of Paris, Berlin or New York, who have been in various organizations, address themselves to us with a request to be taken into our midst I would give the following advice: Put them through a number of tests on all the questions of program; wet them under the rain, dry them in the sun, and then after a new careful examination, accept one or two. The matter changes basically when ten workers connected with the masses come to us. The difference in our relation to the petty bourgeois and to the proletarian groups does not require any explanation. But if the proletarian group works in a district where there are workers of various races, and in spite of this, it consists only of workers of a privileged nationality, I am inclined to regard them with suspicion: are we not dealing with the workers' aristocracy? Isn't the group poisoned by slaveholding prejudices active or passive? It is quite a different matter when we are approached by a group of Negro workers. Here I am ready to consider beforehand that we are achieving agreement with them, even though this is not yet obvious; because of their whole position they do not strive and cannot strive to

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degrade anybody, oppress anybody or deprive anybody of his rights. They do not seek privileges and cannot rise to the top except on the road of the international revolution. We can and we should find a way to the consciousness of the Negro workers, of the Chinese workers, of the Hindu workers, all these oppressed colored races of the human ocean to whom belongs the decisive word in the development of humanity. In a discussion on 'self-determination' held with one of the American Trotskyist leaders on Feb. 28, 1933, Trotsky returned once again to the need for fighting racial prejudice among the white workers: The Negro can be developed to a class standpoint only when the white worker is educated ... I am absolutely sure that they (the Negro masses) will in any case fight better than the white workers. That, however, can happen only provided the communist party carries on an uncompromising merciless struggle ... against the colossal prejudices of the white workers and gives it no concessions whatever. Considerations of space prevent us from quoting further, but we think we have made the point. Trotsky guided us to a correct working-class perspective in this respect as in all others. We Trotskyists do not claim to have a lot of influence among the Negro masses today. The job of gathering together a group of courageous, self-sacrificing Negro revolutionists in a period of reaction has not been an easy one - no easier than that of building the revolutionary party. But we have reason to be encouraged by the progress of the last few years, especially since the war began. We now number in our ranks a comparatively small but important number of Negro workers, most of them active trade unionists with experience among the masses. The difficulties ahead are considerable, but we are confident that our comrades, both Negro and white, will play a decisive role in the Negro struggles coming. Success in those struggles will be the only kind of monument that Trotsky would have wanted.

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The Case of Milton Henry (1944)

Carl]ackson (Edgar Keemer)

For some time now, the Army has been making a practice of expelling those men who object to the system of maintaining separate Jim Crow units for Negro soldiers. 9 It is obvious the brass hats do not intend to stand for any criticism of their discrimination policies. These expulsions have taken different forms. The men may be judged physically unfit, mentally deficient, or morally lacking in the qualifications for making a 'good' soldier. In known cases in the army as well as the 'wAcs', Negroes who refused to abide by the Jim Crow regulations were judged by the army psychiatrist as - plain crazy. Although news of these cases is usually carefully censored, the military does not hesitate to blast forth publicly whenever they think they can angle the case to infer that the rebellious Negro is a 'menace to the American people'. Take the case of Milton R. Henry, who was dismissed April 25 after a court martial at Selfridge Field, Michigan. He had enlisted as a private in April 1941 and worked up to Second Lieutenant in the 553rd Air Corps Squadron. The charges filed and 'proved' were 'AWOL nine times and disrespect to two superior officers'.

Medical Testimony

It developed that Lt. Henry had been ill for some time with a chest disease which, according to medical testimony, may cause great fatigue. Twice he had been examined and x-rayed by a medical board, and a transfer to limited service had been advised. This advice was ignored. The basis for the Awo 1 charges was Henry's inability to awaken in time to report for duty.

9 Jackson 194411.

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As reported in the capitalist press, Lt. Col. A.R. De Bolt and Lt. Col. Charles A. Gayle charged the defendant with being disrespectful. These members of the reactionary officers' caste quoted Henry as saying: 'I got my promotion by initiative and integrity;you officers can't say that. All revolutions have been initiated by minorities. Remember the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. In each case it was a minority who ruled, and some day I, too, will be in a position to dictate'. What the officers had said to Henry before this and whether he affirmed the statement, denied it, or claimed to have been misquoted was not recorded in the press reports. What puzzles us is the lightness of the sentence after such a defiant statement. No dishonorable discharge, no fine, no time in the jug;just dismissal from the service. Remember that in an army orientation handbook, the new soldier is pointedly told that in case of a 'revolutionary' uprising even in his home town he must remain loyal to the army. Violations are punishable up to death.

'Postwar' Unemployment

If, in the inevitable 'postwar' unemployment, a group of workers becomes resentful enough of the war, profits made by some big business baron, it may be termed a 'revolutionary' uprising and the soldier will be expected to carry out a command from his superior officer to machine-gun his fellow men and thus protect the profit-hog even though his own brother or father should happen to be in the aroused group of workers. Thus, if we are to believe the accusations of the superior officers, we cannot understand the honorable discharge. As to the soldier's actual statements or beliefs about revolution, we do not know. We do know, however, that a successful working-class revolution that will put us on the road to socialism will only occur when a majority, not a minority, of the people are convinced that such a change would be of benefit to society.

Selfridge Field

All indications point to the fact that Milton Henry had been an efficient, conscientious young man with the courage of his convictions. He had enlisted in the army under the common false impression that by fighting for 'democracy' over there - he would receive his rightful portion of it over here. Obviously disillusioned after three years ofJim Crow treatment, he got to the point where he could keep quiet no longer.

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As an example of what he had to put up with, look at Selfridge Field - the beautiful base for the advanced training of American fighter pilots ... pardon me, my error. I meant Negro fighter pilots. Anyway, at Selfridge Field Negro lieutenants are barred from entering the regular officers' club. Barred in spite of the fact that the majority of the men there are Negroes; barred in spite of the fact that such a policy openly violates the State of Michigan's Civil Rights law. Furthermore, under the familiar army caste system, Lt. Henry was prohibited from fraternizing with non-commissioned men. Consequently, he had to travel 28 miles to Detroit at his own expense for any type of recreation. This is just one of the many inconveniences confronting a soldier at this base if he happens to be a Negro. A Negro soldier was recently shot there by the drunken commanding officer. Several recent exposes have shown Selfridge Field to be rotten with Jim Crow discrimination. These militant elements which the army is finding necessary to purge serve to reflect the seething, simmering, potentially explosive feeling that is present in the masses of Negro soldiers. The segregated, second-class Jim Crow army'for Negroes' is a dead giveaway to the hypocritical character of the high-sounding phrases such as 'liberation of oppressed people', 'four freedoms', etc., which are being applied to this worldwide slaughter. The Henry case merely represents another ugly bump on the army's angelic face. It is an external symptom of the inner, rotten poison of Jim Crowism. Dr. Brass Hat prefers to cut off the pimple instead of cleaning out the patient with the castor oil of democracy.

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4

Government Policy on Race Equality (1944) Carljackson (Edgar Keemer)

The House Military Affairs subcommittee, headed by Rep. Carl T. Durtree, North Carolina Democrat, makes the accusation that the pamphlet Races of Mankind is spreading 'communist propaganda'. 10 The committee bases its charge on the fact that the pamphlet explodes the myth that one group of people is automatically superior in ability over another group simply because of skin color or other racial characteristics. The pamphlet proves that the opportunities for development of the mind, the condition of health and home surroundings, etc. are, in reality, the important factors that mold a 'superior' person. These factors, of course, are all manifestations of the person's economic status. For example, the pamphlet shows that a poor Southern rural white may prove 'inferior' in intelligence tests to a Northern Negro raised in a large city under better economic conditions. 55,000 copies of this pamphlet were purchased for an army orientation course. The distribution of the pamphlet, however, was abruptly stopped by the reactionary officers' caste on the ground that the pamphlet was 'too controversial'. The House Military Affairs subcommittee objects to this scientific book being read by soldiers. They brand it as 'communistic'. In this instance, the destiny of capitalism and racial hatreds are exposed to be solidly bound to each other. First, it is interesting to observe that this pamphlet, written by scientists, after demonstrating the foolishness of the 'white supremacy' fable, comes to the conclusion that the way to defeat the forces that foster such a policy is to tone down any active fight on American capitalism (with its policy of segregation in the Army, Navy, and the industries) and to unite with the same capitalists to beat the advocate of 'Aryan' superiority. If the authors of this pamphlet knew as much about social forces as they do

10

Jackson 1944b. The suppressed pamphlet discussed here was a popular work written by anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Gene [Regina] Weltfish, Races ofMankind (1943), published by the Public Affairs Committee in New York and widely distributed.

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about anthropology, they would realize that when the German workers overthrow Hitler they will also throw out the window his 'master race' ideology, which represents in their minds an integral part of the rotten fascist regime, which has brought them nothing but slavery, suffering, and death. The significant point, however, is this: the Military Affairs subcommittee, representing American capitalism (which is surely interested in winning this war in order to exploit a larger slice of the world's resources and labor) lashes out with familiar red-baiting tactics at a pamphlet that teaches racial equality despite the fact that this pamphlet urges support of the war. This can mean only one thing - that American capitalism is making known to all liberals, pussy-footers, and other people of 'good will' the fact that it does not want the myth of white supremacy exploded by scientific truths. The red-baiting tactics of the committee plainly imply that all who preach racial equality are automatically 'communists' in the sense that they are opposed to 'our form of government'. In effect, the Congressional lackeys of Big Business declare that they do not intend to tolerate any dulling of the edge of the vicious weapon of race prejudice even though American capitalism is engaged at the present time in a life-and-death struggle with another imperialistic power. This case is but one example of a well-defined policy of the us government in regard to treatment of the Negro people. They do not intend to give us our equality, because they want to keep the workers divided. No one freely gives up a method that has repeatedly proved profitable to him. It all boils down to this: if you are for capitalism you are supporting a system that breeds racial bigotry and oppression; if you are for racial equality you can realize your aim only by allying yourself with capitalism's only genuine enemy, revolutionary socialism. Which side are you on and what are you doing about it?

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s How to Win the Struggle for Negro Equality (1944) Carl]ackson (Edgar Keemer)

In order to carry on an effective struggle for Negro equality we must first trace back the stream of inequality until we have found and marked the source from whence it flows. 11 Just what comprises Negro inequality? If not the whites, certainly every Negro here knows the answer to that one. In the South the Negro knows what it is to be denied, either through legal maneuvers or intimidation, the right to vote. He knows what it is to be contemptuously referred to as boy, George, Uncle, or just plain 'nigger'. He knows what it is to enter a street car and meet the signs: 'This end of car for white people; this end of car for the colored race'. He may know what it is to see an innocent man beaten, dismembered, hanged, shot, and burned to a crisp on some trivial accusation and without a trial. In this nation's capital, a woman recently reported that she was raped by a Negro. Police rounded up eleven Negroes in 24 hours. The woman then admitted that she had fabricated the story. In the deep South usually the first Negro would have been lynched, without a wait of 24 hours. Even in some Northern states the Negro knows what it is to be turned down at a theater box office or else directed around the alley to the balcony entrance. He may know what it is to insist that a waiter serve him a drink in states where there is a civil rights law and then have the waiter break the glass in his face. Negro women in Indiana who were delegates to a convention of the Mothers of World War II were recently refused rooms in an Elkhart hotel. They had to return home. In Washington, o.c., in the Church of the Immaculate Conception, a Negro woman was asked to get off her knees and go behind the ropes to the Negro section to pray. Even in death the Negro cannot rest. In a Catholic cemetery in Chicago, plans were recently made to dig up the grave of a colored woman buried accidentally among the whites.

11

Jackson 1944c.

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In the South or the North, the Negro knows what it means to be segregated into a ghetto of shacks near the railroad tracks. He knows what it means to be discriminated against in industry: to get the dirtiest jobs at the lowest pay, to be the last hired and the first fired. The unkindest cut of all, however, has come since this 'land of the free' has been engaged in the present colossal slaughter which, they would have us believe, is being waged for the most lofty and humanitarian ideals. In a war for 'democracy' the Negro has been officially labeled a second-class citizen by his own government. In the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps, Negroes are set aside in separate regiments, quarantined from English-Americans, ItalianAmericans, German-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and Jewish-Americans. Any soldier with a 'drop of Negro blood' in his veins must, on orders of President Roosevelt and his War Department, and in violation of the Selective Service Act, train and fight not in the regular army, but in the Jim Crow army. There he is sure to get the dirtiest and most hazardous work and the added scorn and persecution of white civilians and soldiers alike.

Persecuting Negro Soldiers

The anticipated results of this policy are occurring every day. In Petersburg, Virginia, last week, a local policeman arrested a Negro soldier for some undetermined reason and took him to the fire house. Another soldier asked the policeman what the trouble was, and he was also arrested. Sergeant Abraham Jackson made similar inquiries and was ignored. Thereupon he started for the fire house to rescue his men. He was promptly shot down by the local police. At last reports he was not expected to recover. But let us not be too hard on the police system of the capitalist government. In Miami, Florida, five Negro policemen were hired - but with a reservation: they cannot arrest any white person, no matter what crime he may be in the act of committing. Reported by the New York Times and the Pittsburgh Courier of November n, and incidentally by The Militant some three weeks earlier, was the reactionary policy established in regard to the all-Negro 92nd Division, now in combat on the Italian front. The policy is this: as Negro officers are killed, they are replaced by whites, instead of the customary replacement by advancing lower officers. Also there must not be under any circumstances a Negro officer who is superior in rank to a white officer in that sector. We understand what Negro inequality is. Now just what is the Negroes' conception of equality? What does the Negro want? The Negro wants what everyone else wants - no more, no less. He wants a dependable annual wage

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capable of bringing him all the necessities of a healthy, happy life. In short, economic security. He wants political freedom, a voice in the way things are done, a vote, and a representative who understands his problems. In addition to this he wants complete social equality. Let us get this straight - the mind, body, and emotions of the Negro are inherently the same as those of any other race. Therefore, just as the white man would resent the stigma of social inferiority, so does the Negro resent it. To stamp an entire group of individuals as inferior simply because they have more melanin or less carotene in their skins - absolutely inert pigments - to do so is contrary to scientific truth. Now what is the direct instrument of repression that condemns the Negro to second-class citizenship? It is the State, that is, all the various agencies of government from top to bottom. Through their actions and their failures to act, they condone, teach, foster, and enforce the oppression of the Negro people. Who protected Noble Ryder, the recently freed murderer who lynched an aged Negro preacher in Liberty, Mississippi? The sheriff. Who upholds white supremacy in the South? The courts. Who holds Negroes in Georgia in the chain-gangs for stealing a loaf of bread?The State. Who leads this pack in race-baiting?Your government officials such as Chauncy Sparks and the poll-tax senators. Who tenaciously insists upon a Jim Crow army? Roosevelt and his War Department. Who carries out this policy? The brass hats in the Army and Navy. The Federal Housing Authority recommends discrimination in its official manual. The Office of War Information has a standing order that a messenger shall watch the news ticker and bring all copy on race or color to the 'Negro Censoring Division'. At the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas, the Army set up a rehabilitation center for soldiers and their wives. The management of this hotel happens to house, without discrimination, Indians and all other races and nationalities. A Negro lieutenant and his wife registered at the hotel and were given rooms. But as soon as this was discovered by a white army captain, he ordered their removal. They were removed. But how about individual prejudices? Remember, these are not inherited; they are acquired. H. Scudder Mekeel, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, told the National Committee for Mental Hygiene last week: 'With Brazil and Russia as examples, we can say that racial prejudice is not inherent in the human animal ... What we need to do is to deflect, modify, or transform the processes at work in our society so that children will no longer learn prejudice and discrimination ... The cradle is the best place to start'.

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Jim Crow Propaganda Well, that's not news to the American educators. Not for nothing are the 'nigger' dolls used in the nurseries and the tale of 'Little Black Sambo' taught in the kindergartens. The history books, the comic strips, the radio, and the cinema all contribute to the formation of the Negro stereotype - a petty thief, a clown, an ignoramus. Whoever attempts to teach equality is usually stymied. Last month, the subway lines right here in New York barred a poster showing babies of all races side by side. You remember the revealing pamphlet 'Races of Mankind' which torpedoed the myth of racial inferiority, giving statistical proof from the records of drafted soldiers? That was too much truth for the Army brass hats, and they recalled 50,000 copies that had been distributed for soldiers' libraries. Directly or indirectly the agencies of government are responsible for individual prejudices. Why would the government officials want to foster such a policy? President Roosevelt is well known as a humanitarian. Mrs. Roosevelt has even been photographed with Mrs. Bethune, Negro soldiers, and Negro children. Many government officials welcome Negro leaders to their offices to confer with them on race problems. Some of the most reactionary Southern governors have sponsored drives to obtain funds for Negro colleges. Now, I don't think we are fooled by these patronizing gestures. It is plain that the State in America is invariably anti-Negro. But back to the question. Where there is an effect there must be a cause. Maybe with the following facts we can better follow the trail. In 1848 Karl Marx, after making a scientific analysis of the history of society, arrived at the conclusion that the State was supported and kept in power by and for the ruling class in society. Whoever owns the means of production makes up the ruling class. The State serves to protect the interests of the exploiting minority over the exploited majority. In slavery days the judges, law officers, and governors, that is, the state apparatus, unfailingly upheld the interests of the slaveholder over the slave. In feudal days the State was always on the side of the noble and against the serf.

'Divide and Rule' We have reached the point in America today where it is the monopoly capitalists who own and control the means of production. The industrial workers, on the other hand, comprise the exploited majority. True to the Marxist analysis, every agent of the State from top to bottom must do the bidding of the monied

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interests. If he defies the capitalists he is soon kicked out in one way or another. Now what has that got to do with the Negro? Marx said that no ruling class has been able to long exploit the vast majority unless that majority was split within itself. The capitalists know this, and they make the most of it. Whether based on race, religion, nationality, language, or custom, the axiom 'Divide and Rule' is never forgotten and never neglected by those who are in power. They take the most convenient minority within the group of exploited people and set them up as a scapegoat. The other oppressed people are permitted - even trained - to kick around this minority at their leisure, thus unconsciously venting the perfectly natural resentment which arises from their economic insecurity. The ruling class, through control of the educational system and the State apparatus, deliberately fosters prejudice among the masses against the designated minority. They inoculate this venom in such large doses that it is practically impossible for even the most mentally alert individual to escape from its degrading effects. In America, of course, the Negro is a 'natural' for the capitalists. His dark color makes him easy to recognize. His background of slavery is also played up to give impression that he is inferior and as docile as a dumb animal. The history books put out by the capitalists, by a crime of omission, imply the lie that the darker races have never been 'civilized'. They tell us of the pyramids and other wonders of the world, butthey fail to say thattheywere built by black Egyptians centuries ago. The features of the Sphinx betray their Negroid characteristics, the existence in the valley of the Nile of a highly civilized Negroid race. The books of the capitalist class don't tell us that, and no white scientist has been able to even explain how those engineers accomplished these feats. Their propaganda depicts the black man in the very worst light simply because he is a useful minority to tum to their ends. As a result of the tremendous pressure of their gigantic propaganda machine, millions of Americans are color-conscious. 'What's white is right: what's black, stay back'.

Well-Paying Crimes Although in the Dick Tracy comic series 'crime never pays', we find the opposite is true in real life in America. The crime of Jim Crowism, the crime of indoctrinating prejudice into the workers, and the crime of denying the Negro people equality, are very well-paying crimes for the American capitalist. For it is largely as a result of racial divergence in the working class that the capitalist is able to remain in power. He knows full well the day of working-class solidarity will be his day of reckoning.

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Now, let's look down the trail. Negroes are denied equality either through official government action or official government lack of action. The government is under control of the ruling class. That class is the capitalist class, which comprises only a small minority of the population. These capitalists, through their control of the means of information, indoctrinate the people with the lie that a man is inferior if the color of his skin is dark. They do this so that they can keep their economic slaves, the workers, white and black, split and fighting among themselves. Thereby they are able to spend their winters in Florida clipping stock coupons while the workers toil in the shops for a mere existence. These leeches suck the life blood of the American working class by setting up the Negro as a straw man and then shouting: 'Don't give a Black a break: give the Black the boot'. By this system of capitalism, race prejudice is made profitable. Therefore we say that this system - capitalism - is the basic and fundamental enemy of the Negro people. Here is the spring from which flows the vile potion that cascades down to form the final stream of Negro inequality. We have found the source - let us mark it well. This is the reason why the fight against Jim Crow without a fight against capitalism, well intentioned though it may be, is an endless and fruitless fight. To establish Negro equality, we must abolish capitalism.

Capitalism Bars Progress Furthermore, the capitalist methods of exchange are outmoded. The assembly lines and mass production, along with thousands of chemical and engineering discoveries, have so improved the means of production that the potential turnout is gigantic. But the policy of exchange for profit is holding back the productive forces. When the masses cannot pay enough for the capitalists to make a substantial profit, the capitalists simply close down the factories and let the workers shift as best they can, even though the people may be in need. It is only when they are warring with a rival imperialist power for foreign markets, that the factories run full blast, and then the workers and their sons are sent to die on bloody battlefields. History is bearing out Marx's prediction that increasingly savage wars and depressions are inevitable under the decaying capitalist economic anarchy. Again, how does this affect the Negro?Well, we all know that the Negro is the last to go on a job when things are getting better and the first to be pulled off when things are getting worse. That is why - and remember this! - you only have Negro employment when you have full employment. Therefore, under

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capitalist production, the average Negro can only look forward to a good-paying job during war, whereas during the long years of depression he has to depend either on the breadline or the relief roll. Now what would bring the Negro full equality? What would bring him full employment? We say not capitalism, but Socialism. Socialism with its nationalized property and its planned economy. Now factories hum only with the production of instruments of death and destruction, manufactured solely for the profit of the few. Under Socialism factories would hum with the production of instruments of life and construction, manufactured to supply the needs of the many. World Socialism, without a doubt, would bring with its classless society full equality, full employment,job security, peace and plenty to not only the Negro people but to all mankind. Will we get Socialism by talking about it, hoping for it, or praying for it? Hardly. We've got to fight for it in organized fashion. Like every ruling class in the past, the capitalists will not relinquish their stranglehold on the workers of their own free will. The industrial workers, for the very good reason that they are the most oppressed and at the same time the most highly organized group, will lead the Socialist revolution. They will take over the means of production and thereby lead the way for the liberation of the farmers and the white collar workers. The capitalists during this period will try desperately to retain or regain their exploitive power on a world scale. They will try, in vain, to hold back the wheel of human progress. Their main weapon in America will be to set the white against the black and to bring on a racial war within the working class. The capitalists will be willing to exterminate the Negro minority if their preservation makes it necessary. The new Workers' and Farmers' Government, on the other hand, for the very basic reason of self-preservation, will have immediately to grant and enforce full equality for the Negro people. It will have to do this to counteract the capitalists and to demonstrate that its program is reliable. When such a government gets control of the means of communication, it will have to embark immediately upon an educational program to enlighten backward white workers and thereby destroy the false ideas of white supremacy which have been indoctrinated in their minds by bourgeois society. Thus the very step in the direction of Socialism will also give birth to Negro equality.

The Negro and Socialism

This is no pipe dream. The Socialist Revolution was scientifically outlined a century ago and has been demonstrated in real life in that greatest of all spec-

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tacles in human history, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. This fact is obvious: nothing short of a proletarian revolution will bring the Negro full equality in America. The Negro struggle, therefore, is inseparably intertwined with the struggle of the world working class. Our fight is not hopeless if we realize its breadth. We Negroes are outnumbered 10 to 1 from a racist point of view. That is true. But as workers we are part of the vast majority. The white worker of this country is our ally, not our enemy. His prejudices have been artificially learned and may be just as easily unlearned when he sees the necessity of working-class solidarity. He needs us, and we need him. Necessity will force us to get together. Our allies also include all the workers and peasants of imprisoned Europe who are now pitted against each other by the German and Anglo-American imperialists, but who tomorrow will rise and take their destiny into their own hands. The toiling masses of India, China, and Africa are also on our side. When they are free, we will be free. A word of warning about our false friends: a false friend is one who aids us in the struggle but at the same time leads us to believe that we can win full equality within the confines of the present capitalist system. What shall we do about these false friends? If such a friend still clings to the old order because he knows nothing of the dynamics of the world class struggle, we must educate him by patient explanation. Into this category fall some of our preachers, our 'race leaders', and some opportunistic labor leaders. In this bed also rest our militant anti-white racists, as well as the weak-kneed pacifists, who think that the problem will be solved by people of good will getting together on a basis of brotherly love. It should be obvious that it is too late in history to go back and call the roll and count in the Negro as a paid-up brother in good standing. Look how the Negro has fared during the war.Judge Hastie, reporting for the NAACP this past June, said that all forms of Negro brutalizing increased in 1943. If they stopped to draw blood from us even while engaged in an outside brawl with German imperialism, then what can we expect when Germany is defeated and they are free to tum their entire strength against the Negro and the American labor movement? We should try to awaken these reformist leaders, and if they don't see the light we should fight relentlessly against them. If we find, however, a false friend who supports capitalism even after he has become familiar with and participated in the class struggle - beware of him, for he is a hired quisling for the ruling class. Into this category fall, primarily, the Stalinists who, because they parade under the banner of Communism, are still quite a factor in the Negro struggle and in the labor movement. They live primarily on the world prestige of the Russian Revolution. Since the degeneration of the Soviet State, however, and the rise of the counterrevolution-

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ary Stalinist bureaucracy, the Communist parties throughout the world only remain as agencies of the reactionary clique in the Kremlin. These servile lackeys, for example, are now crawling on their bellies before President Roosevelt and American capitalism. Now many workers contend that Roosevelt was the lesser of the two evils in the past election. We won't go into that now, since it was covered in The Militant, but I want to tell the Negroes again that the idea that Roosevelt, the 'leftist' henchman of Big Business, intends to give or would be permitted to give the Negro the equality he demands, is a brazen lie. The only substantial advancement of the Negro's cause in the political arena will come with an independent labor party.

More Oppression Planned

Now what does American capitalism plan in the period ahead? It plans further oppression of the Negroes in the form of extended restrictions, Negrobaiting by government spokesmen, company-inspired anti-Negroism in the labor movement such as we saw in Philadelphia this summer, and again in Detroit last week. After the defeat of Germany there will be further brutalizings, lynchings, and mass pogroms. All this will be deliberately instigated to further divide and crush the labor movement. Iflabor does not put up a strong fight to protect the Negro, and if it fails to rescue society by setting up a Workers' and Farmers' Government, then we are sure to see fascism or some similarly barbaric political monster stalking the United States. Even now the capitalists are priming Gerald L.K. Smith, the Jew-baiting and Negro-baiting rabble-rouser for this very job. Harry Bennett, vice president of the Ford Motor Company, admitted in October before a House Committee that he gave Smith $2,000 to fight the unions. Government records show that New York and Detroit industrialists have contributed much larger amounts to Smith's campaign as the presidential candidate of the America First Party. Under fascism, the Negro people would be even worse off than the Jews in Nazi Germany: they would be tracked down, deported, or exterminated. This would apply to rich and poor Negroes alike. What can be done at present to further the Negro struggle for equality? The Negro organizations should adopt the strategy of militant mass action in their demand for democratic rights. This should be done with the support of the progressive labor unions such as the CIO. Realizing that to be anti-Negro is in essence to be anti-working class, politically advanced white workers should carry on now a relentless fight against all forms of industrial discrimination and segregation. When a crisis comes they should call for Workers' Defense Guards

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to protect the Negro workers from fascist attacks. Finally, the keeping alive of the class struggle in the shops is all-important to the Negro, because more interracial education can be obtained on a picket line during a strike where white and black workers are in common struggle for basic needs, than can be gleaned in a dozen pink tea liberalist discussion groups.

For Working-Class Unity

The fighters for Socialism today are found in the Socialist Workers Party and among the Trotskyist builders of the Fourth International. Our Marxist analysis brings us to the conclusion that the Negro struggle in the coming period will be largely a defensive one. It will mount in intensity with rising world class struggle and will only be resolved when the workers come to power. That is why we say: The only way to win full Negro equality is through a simultaneous struggle for the liberation of all the toiling human brothers - be they black, brown, yellow, or white. Negro workers, to avert a losing race war, prepare now for a victorious class war!

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6

The Case of James Hickman (1947)

Robert Birchman

Social Symbols12

Every so often a previously unknown individual suddenly attracts wide attention. There is usually a social reason for this. The story connected with the particular case epitomizes the plight of voiceless millions, focusing attention on the needs of one group and the crimes of another, bringing into the light of day the festering rottenness of class society. In the years immediately preceding the American Civil War, for example, the case of Dred Scott, a Missouri chattel slave, who had fled to the North and courageously challenged the right of his master to return him to servitude in the South, dramatically exposed the danger to the nation's freedom emanating from the slaveholding autocracy. Then came John Brown, the warrior for freedom and justice, whose heroism aroused the souls of men, stirring them into action against the slaveholders who kept all the Dred Scotts in inhuman degradation. In our own time the frame-up and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti threw into the limelight, for the whole world to see, the vengefulness of the modem American slave-masters, baring their class justice in its hideous cruelty. A no less dramatic instance today is the case of James Willis Hickman whom the State of Illinois now seeks to convict and execute on the charge of murdering his landlord. Hickman's story is the story ofJim Crow as it is practiced north of the MasonDixon line. Lynchings and Ku-Klux terrorism in the South are the most sensational manifestations of this system, and they receive the most publicity and attention. But there is much more to it. There are other, more 'routine', day-byday, 'less violent' by-products of this system which are no less destructive, no less barbaric in their effects on the victims. For proof - there is Hickman.

12

Bircham 1947. A valuable book has been written on this case - see Allen 20n.

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Restrictive Covenants

This Negro steel worker brought his family from Mississippi to Chicago, a city where hundreds of thousands of other Southern Negroes have sought a haven but, like Hickman, found instead another man-made hell. Unlike the hell described by the Italian poet, Dante, Chicago's 'Black Belt' and other slums where Negroes may dwell bear no tell-tale inscriptions over their portals. The promoters of modem American infernos prefer to keep their restrictive covenants less public. But their message is the same as the one Dante wrote: 'All Hope Abandon, Ye Who Enter Here!' Doomed to house himself and his family in a dilapidated, disease-ridden ghetto, Hickman found his plight doubly aggravated by the housing shortage which, on top of restrictive covenants, made him, like millions of other people, easy prey to unscrupulous landlords. He and his family had to live, to put it in Hickman's own words, 'like rats in a hole'. Hickman's hole happened to be in a fire-trap. His landlord, wanting to reconvert the building's apartments so he could get still higher rents, threatened to bum Hickman out after he refused to move. When a fire did indeed start soon after, four of Hickman's children were burned to death; another was critically injured; his wife still suffers from leg injuries resulting from her leap from the blazing third floor. It was only one of many similar calamities that every day befall the Negroes and the poor generally. The others generally pass unnoticed - the casualties, you see, are not high enough to merit briefest mention in the daily press. Add this toll of 'accidents' to the even greater toll that the day-to-day routine of the Jim Crow system takes in crippled bodies, mangled limbs, shattered minds and broken lives. Hickman did add all this up, not in his mind's eye, not as an observer, but as a direct victim of it all. His soul had been seared by flames as scorching as those which had consumed the lives of his dear ones. Add all this up, too, and you will grasp a measure of the desperation that drove Hickman to his deed.

Who the Real Criminals Are

On October 27 the State of Illinois will place James Willis Hickman on trial. But the real criminals, who took the lives of Hickman's children and who drove him in the end to kill the landlord - these criminals will continue to walk at large, respected members of the business community, free to continue their crimes. The identity of these criminals is not unknown to the people of the State of Illinois.

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They are the real estate sharks who are the chief promoters of restrictive covenants. They are the housing profiteers who fatten on the housing shortage and who strive might and main to perpetuate it. They are the ruthless and unscrupulous landlords who profit from inhuman housing conditions, as Hickman's landlord did. They are the corrupt local authorities with their callous disregard, over a period of years, for the enforcement of the pitifully inadequate regulations of the building code, health and fire ordinances. Finally, they are the local, state and federal authorities who tolerate and in fact condone and encourage both the Jim Crow practices of restrictive covenants and the housing shortage. The collective name for the list of these real criminals is the capitalist system, the fountainhead of all of men's inhumanities toward fellow men. Its upholders are the criminals who should be in the defendant's dock. This is the system that should be indicted, tried, punished and prevented from continuing to tum workers' blood and sweat and tears into dollars. Not to come to the defense of Hickman is to be on the side of the Jim Crow system, whose victim he is. The millionaire publisher of the Chicago Sun, Marshall Field, who boasts of his liberalism and friendship for labor and oppressed minorities, has again shown his true colors by refusing to publish even as a paid advertisement a stirring appeal in defense of Hickman by the brilliant young novelist Willard Motley. But a different response has come from the labor, Negro and community organizations in Chicago - the CIO and AFL unions, the NAACP, tenants unions, veterans, religious groups - who have formed the Hickman Defense Committee and through it are mobilizing mass sentiment to win freedom for Hickman. 'This defense movement to save Hickman's life and liberty merits support everywhere that workers are crowded together and restrictive covenants are enforced', says the Hickman Defense Committee. We agree wholeheartedly. They need support; they need financial aid. All labor, Negro and progressive organizations should take a stand at once on this case and its vital issues. Resolutions and donations should be sent to the Hickman Defense Committee, 4619 South Parkway, Chicago 15, Illinois.

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Industrialization of the Negro (1948)

Freddie Forest (Raya Dunayevskaya)

The entry of Negro workers into war production industries produced an industrial and social change of first magnitude, the scope of which has not yet been fully grasped. 13 It is true that four out of five Negro workers still remain in the unskilled category, but now they are not on the fringes of industry, but in the midst of the production process. An outstanding authority estimates that there has been more occupational diversification of Negro labor in the four years, 1940 to 1944, than in the preceding seventy-five years. (Robert C. Weaver, Negro Labor, p. 78.) In viewing this development created by World War I I, we must bear in mind the dialectical interrelationship between the development of industry initiated by the war boom, and the heightening of the Negro mass struggle which forced the introduction of Negroes into war industries, from which they had practically been excluded until mid-1942. It was the threat contained in the organization of the March-On-Washington movement in January 1941 which first brought the active pressure of the Negro masses to bear upon the Government and forced the incorporation of Negro labor into mass production industries. Another feature of great importance is that the new migration of the Negro during the Second World War encompasses the whole of the United States, including the Pacific North-west. World War II completed the process begun in World War I of transforming the Negro question from a 'Southern' to an allAmerican problem. The repercussions of this are so explosive that in the wake of the race conflicts during 1943, Attorney General Biddle, in his now infamous secret memorandum to President Roosevelt, had the effrontery to pose the question of containing the Negro migration. An analysis of the latest data on this question is of utmost importance to Marxists who recognize in the Negro a most potent force in the making of the third American revolution.

13

Forest 1948.

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The War-time Migration14

To the millions of unemployed at the outbreak of World War 11, the establishment of mass production centers around war industries held a greater lure than did the Western lands for the old pioneer. Between 1940 to 1944 four million workers - who, with their families, totaled no less than nine million people moved out of 30 states and into 18 other states and the District of Columbia. A million of these were Negroes. Contrast this with the fact that until mid-1942 Negro migration contributed no more than 5 per cent of total migration. The greatest movement was to the Pacific Northwest. The United States Census Bureau, in conducting a survey in 1944 of the ten most congested production centers, found that, whereas the total population increased by 1,840,000 (19 per cent), in these centers the Negro population increased by 49 per cent. It is true that the overwhelming majority of Negroes still live in the South - nine million out of thirteen million. But whereas only 5 per cent of Negroes lived in the North in 1910, by 1930 that percentage had grown to 13. What is more remarkable is that even during the depression, when there were no job opportunities in the North, the Negroes kept leaving the South. By 1940, the nearly 13 million Negroes in the United States were thus distributed: 9,904,619, or 77 per cent, lived in the South; 2,790,193, or 21.7 per cent lived in the North, and 170,706, or 1.3 per cent, lived in the West. By 1945 fully 25 per cent lived North and Northwest. More than go per cent of these are urbanized! During the previous great migration North - there were two waves, 1916-1919 and 1921-1924 - one and one-half million Negroes left the South. The Negro populations in Northern cities seemed to spring up overnight. Between 1910 and 1930 the Negroes in New York grew from 91,709 to 152,647, an increase of 66.3 per cent. In Chicago the Negro experienced a 148.2 per cent increase. Detroit's growth was the most phenomenal, from a mere 5,741 in 1910 to 40,838 in 1920 - an increase of 611.3 per cent. These cities never ceased to grow, and this new migration in 1942-1945 has increased the Negro population of Chicago from 270,000 to 350,000, and that of Detroit from 150,000 to 230,000. 14

Footnote by Forest: The reader is referred to the following material: (a) The us Census

Bureau reports on the ten congested areas: Charleston, sc, Detroit-Willow Run, Hampton Road area, Los Angeles, Mobile, Alabama, Muskegon area, San Francisco-Bay area, Portland-Vancouver area, Puget Sound and San Diego; (b) the Urban League Report to the President: 'Racial Aspects of Reconversion, 1940-44'; and (c) the special issues of The journal of Educational Sociology edited by L.D. Reddick, the January 1944 issue on 'The Negro in the North during Wartime', and the November 1945 issue on 'Race Relations on the Pacific Coast'.

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Recent Negro Migration The present Negro migration had two outstanding new features: (1) the movement to the Pacific Northwest, hardly touched previously, and (2) the migration within the South, from rural to urban areas. In the Portland-Vancouver area the Negro population has increased no less than 437.5 per cent. There were, for instance, only 2,566 Negroes in the whole state of Oregon in 1940, 1,931 of whom lived in Portland. The Kaiser industries moved in, and by 1945 the Negro population leaped from less than 2,000 to 22,000. In Seattle the Negro population was 3,789, and that of near-by Bremerton had only 77. The Bremerton Navy Yard opened its doors to Negro labor, and five years later the Negro population of Bremerton leaped from a mere 77 to 4,617. Next to this 'major area of tension on the West Coast', the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) lists the San Francisco-Bay area. In San Francisco itself there were only 4,846 Negroes in 1940. By 1945 the Negro population increased to 25,000. Of equal importance with this movement to the Pacific Northwest has been the urbanization of the Negro within the South itself. Between 1942 to 1945, 250,000 Negroes shifted from rural to urban areas within the South, Mobile, Alabama, increased its Negro population by 106 per cent, from 30,554 to 60,000. Of the total population of Charleston, s.c., 70 per cent came from elsewhere in the South. The Negro population in the South is now approximately 50 per cent urbanized. To get the epochal significance of this, we must take a brief view of the South.

11

The South

In the period 1940-44 non-farm employment in the 13 Southern states had increased by one-third. It was not, however, the mechanization of agriculture which freed the agricultural population for manufacturing employment. There had been a backlog of 2 million unemployed in the South at the outbreak of the war, and it is these who poured into the war industries, which were established in the South alongside the cotton culture. This is the key to the whole industrialization of the South which, ever since the end of the Civil War, has been built not directly upon the ruins of slavery, but alongside its economic remains.

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'The Boss and Black' Relationship15 Industrialization in the South, instead of disintegrating the peasantry, i.e., transforming the overwhelming majority into proletarians, and thus creating the traditional home market for bourgeois production, had developed so haltingly that the black peasant, or sharecropper, remained largely untouched. The bourgeoisie was compelled to sacrifice this section of the home market for the sake of maintaining the archaic social structure there. Continuation of the crop lien system, instituted at the end of the Civil War, forced Northern capital to follow what is euphemistically called the Southern 'color pattern'. The basis for it is the 'boss and'black relationship' inherent in cotton culture. The labor supply of the plantations was left intact in order not to intrude upon these semi-feudal agrarian relations upon which cotton production is based. These remain 'less changed than the soil itself on which this cotton is grown'. (The Deep South, p. 266.) The gory reign of 'white supremacy' is rooted in cotton culture. The 'gentlemen's agreement' between the bourbon South and the Wall Street North which owns it, was that Southern industry develop under the conditions that it leave untouched the black labor supply of the plantation, holds to this day. 16 One of the main reasons why the Negro was slow to benefit from the industry boom produced by World War II is that the Southern oligarchy insisted that black labor be left 'free' for cotton picking. And they were able to have this extraordinary power, although war-time industry in the South was government-financed to the extent of 81 per cent, as against 65 per cent for the rest of the nation! Industriali.zation 17 Just as cotton labor was at first exclusively a Negro occupation, so textile labor has been exclusively a poor white occupation. As late as 1937 only 20,000 of the 350,000 workers in the textile industry were Negroes. With World War 11

15

16

17

Footnote by Forest: Cf. Johnson, Embree and Alexander: The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy; also Report on Economic Conditions of the South, prepared for the President, by the National Emergency Council, 1935. For later data, Chapters 11 and 12 of An American Dilemma by Gunnar Myrdal, as well as the special Business Week Reports to Executives on

'Better Farming, Better Markets'. Footnote by Forest: The Morgans, Mellons, Fords and Rockefeller control the South. The Tennessee Coal, Iron & Rrd. Co., for example, is a subsidiary of u.s. Steel; the International Harvester Co. has acquired many thousands of acres of land. To see the extent to which finance capital of the North owns semi-feudal South, cf. The South in Progress by Katherine Lumpkin. Footnote by Forest: For the industrialization and trade unionization of the Negro both North and South, see, for the period to 1930: Black Worker by Spero and Harris; for the

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production of textiles increased tremendously, while the labor force practically doubled, now comprising 650,000 workers. But only 26,000 of these are Negroes and almost all of them are employed not in the direct process of production but around the mill. The Negro, being at the very bottom of the social structure is pushed by capitalism into the worst said industries. But as capitalist economy develops, these low-paid industries become ever more important. Thus heavy industry did not, like textiles, by-pass the Negro. From the very place he occupies in capitalist society, the Negro necessarily becomes one of the principal forces for its overthrow. The Negro proletariat has been very strategically placed in industry. By 1907 39.1 per cent of Southern steel workers were Negroes. In 1930, out of a total of 19,392 employed in the iron and steel industry, 13,331, or 68.74 per cent were Negroes. The latest movement into Southern urban areas shows how important is the place they occupy even in single enterprises. For example, out of the 25,000 workers of the Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Co., in Mobile, 20 per cent are Negroes. Between textiles which employ no Negroes in the direct process of production; and mines and steel mills, in which Negroes are more or less equal in number to whites, there are the so-called 'strictly Negro jobs' in the South saw mills, fertilizer plants, etc. These remain unorganized. They are located rurally so that the Negro worker is isolated. But, on the whole, the Negro has been an integral part of the labor force in heavy industry since the earliest days of Southern industrialization, and he has, moreover, been a militant member of whatever unions were implanted there, and opened their doors to him. At the height of its power, the IWW claimed one million members, of whom 100,000 were Negroes. The most important of the IWW unions among Negroes were precisely in the prejudice-ridden South, in the lumber industries of Louisiana and Texas, and among the longshoremen and dockworkers in Baltimore, Norfolk and Philadelphia. The Brotherhood of Timber Workers in the lumber camps of Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas had 35,000 members in 1910, of whom 50 per cent were Negroes. The Negro proletarian has from the first been an active militant of the United Mine Workers. It was the UMW militants who were

cw: Black Workers and the Nf!W Unions by Cayton and Mitchell; up to 1942: Chapters 13, 18 and 19 and Appendix 6 in An American Dilemma by Gunnar Myrdal; and for the war

period and reconversion: Organized Labor and the Negro by Northrup, and Negro Labor, A National Problem by Weaver.

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used by the cw organization drives to organize steel. Whereas the Negro was used in 1919 to break the steel strike, in 1937 the Negro steel worker broke Big Steel's lordly refusal to negotiate with the union. The Negro proletarian is not the cowed plantation hand. He is literate and has been disciplined by the factory. He knows the might of a cohesive group, organized by the very process of production. He is, and feels himself, a powerful force. No less than two million are now members of the c IO, AFL and independent unions. Yet four out of five Negroes remain in an unskilled category. And when union meetings are over, the white and Negro workers, in the main, go their separate ways. It is clear that the recent proletarianization and urbanization has far from 'solved' the Negro problem. The 'boss and black' relationship still pursues him, in the city as well as in the country, North, as we shall see, as well as South. Wage differentials exist in the factory as in the field. Jim Crowism persists. The contradiction between the potency in the process of production and his seeming impotence outside cannot but find a manner of expression. The explosive power lodged in the struggle of the Negro proletarian in the Southern cities will have significance in repercussions for the contiguous rural Black Belt. It will strike at the heart of the Southern economy and Southern politics and upset as well Northern capitalistic interests which have so readily accepted the South's segregation pattern in order to coin profit from it. But among the millions suffering on the plantations and among the thousands who have won themselves a place in industry, the most insistent problem is and must continue to be for some time the emancipation from the national oppression they feel at every tum.

III

The North

The basic movement of capital in 1917-1919 and the movement of the industrial reserve army oflabor brought the Negroes to the North and sent them into mass industries. With World War I the Negro became an established part of the American labor force. In 1930 they constituted 22. 7 per cent of labor in building trades, 16.2 per cent of the unskilled in steel, 25 per cent of the unskilled in meat packing, 31.7 per cent oflongshoremen and 89.5 per cent in saw mills. However, so long as the basic industries remained unorganized - and they could not but remain unorganized until the unions let down the color bars along with the craft lines - the Negro could not became an integral part of the trade union movement. That is why the coming of the c Io also witnessed the unionization of the Negro on an unprecedented scale.

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Nevertheless, in the North, too, the proletarianization and trade unionization of the Negro did not raise him to the status of the white proletarian and did not dissolve his struggle for elementary democratic rights into the general class struggle of organized labor against the capitalist regime. First, in the trade unions he must fight as a Negro for his place as a worker. Wage differentials, discrimination in seniority, upgrading have by no means been abolished. Then, outside the trade union, he is ghettoized. The creation of comparatively free proletarian and semi-proletarian masses in the large urban centers of the North during World War I first made possible the development of a powerful Negro press. In this respect, Gunnar Myrdal has correctly pointed out: 'The foreign language press is doomed to disappear as immigrants become fully assimilated and are not replenished by new immigration. The Negro press, on the contrary, is bound to become ever stronger as the Negroes are increasingly educated and culturally assimilated, but not given entrance to the white world'. (An American Dilemma, Vol. II, p. 912.) But, although the national oppression produced the Negro press, and his ghettoization the Negro community, that very community has special characteristics precisely because the Negro is so overwhelmingly proletarian. A beautiful example of this dual movement and its economic base was given by the Pittsburgh Courier in 1937. This bourgeois newspaper, most intensely race conscious, nevertheless led the swing of the more progressive Negroes in the community towards entry into and acceptance of the c Io. On the other hand, the more integrated the Negro is in the trade union, the more he resents his ghettoization outside. At the very time that he has joined the trade union, he has also joined in large numbers an independent mass Negro organization which fights for his democratic rights. The new migration gave new life to the NAACP, which had been declining because of its donothingness. During World War II the NAACP experienced so great an influx of membership that it now has nearly one million members. Its greatest increase was precisely in such centers as Detroit, where the militant UAW has made the Negroes' trade union integration easier than elsewhere. An over-all picture, North and South, at the outbreak of the recent war showed that unemployment had been as high as 17 per cent of the total Negro labor force. The number of Negroes in manufacturing, which had risen from 6.2 per cent in 1910 to 7.3 per cent in 1930 had sunk to a new low of 5.1 per cent by 1940. The movement back into industry did not gain a real foothold till mid-1942. The war period, 1940-1945 took a million into the armed forces. Another million swelled the civilian labor force, raising the total Negro employment, from 4.4 million to 5.3 million. The employment of women, which had increased from 1.5 million to 2.1 million has an especial importance because it

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meant not merely an increase in employment, but so great a movement from domestic service to basic industry as to be comparable in importance to the movement from farm to non-farm employment. This movement into basic industry also, of course, characterized the Negro male labor force. Negro employment in heavy industry tripled. A break-down of percentage increases in various heavy industries will show how strategically he was placed. Per cent of non-white workers employed in selected war industries, 1942-1945

Agricultural machinery & tractors Aircraft Aluminum and magnesium products Blast furnaces, steel works & rolling mills Communication equipment & related products Explosives Iron and steel foundry products Shipbuilding Tanks

July 1942

January 1945

1.9 2.9 7.1 9.8 0.7 3.3 18.6 5.7 22

6.o 5.8 13.5 11.8 4.9 7.1 25.4 11.7 13.0

A majority of the one and one-half million Negroes in war industries were concentrated in the ten most congested war industrial areas, listed in the section on migration. Another 9 per cent were concentrated in four cities - Pittsburgh, Birmingham, New York and St. Louis. Two characteristic examples of the horrible housing situation which this produced will illuminate the Negro's feeling of confinement. In Baltimore, where the Negro constitutes 20 per cent of the population, he is segregated in 2 per cent of the residential area. In Chicago 250,000 live in units built for 150,000. In wards 2 and 3 of that city, the density of population is 95,000 per square mile, which is comparable to Calcutta, India! This congestion has served to sharpen the Negro's frustration, which W.E.B. Du Bois so graphically described in 1935: 'It is doubtful', he wrote then 'if there is another group of 12 million people in the midst of a modem cultured land who are so widely inhibited and mentally confined as the American Negro'. (Black Reconstruction, p. 703.)

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It is precisely in the Northern urban centers18 that the political results inherent in the situation in the South receive their sharpest political expression. Capitalism, in dragging the Negroes to the North, cannot prevent the explosion of revolt against the national oppression which are kept beneath the surface in the South. The ghetto-like existence, the social humiliation not only spring historically from the cotton plantation. The cotton plantation system also exports to the North its workers, imbued with the ideology of the South, to stimulate, encourage and organize the anti-Negro prejudices of the people of the North which are fortified among the working class by competition in industry. The double oppression which the bourgeoisie has placed upon the Negro, as a worker and as a nationally oppressed minority, has not only resulted in placing him in strategic industries, but will give his developing class consciousness a hostility to the existing society and a keener determination to destroy it. The proletarian vanguard must respond by recognizing not only the validity but the inevitability of Negro mass movements against this double oppression and strive to lead this movement and harness its revolutionary potentialities for the struggle against capitalist society. But only that revolutionary party can do this which understands the objectively revolutionary role that these independent mass movements can play in the reconstruction of society on communist beginnings. Trotsky saw this most profoundly and hence spoke with confidence:

We must say to the conscious elements of the Negroes that they are convoked by the historic development to become a vanguard of the working class. What serves as the brake on the higher strata? It is the privileges and comforts that hinder them from becoming revolutionists. It does not exist for the Negroes. What can transform a certain stratum and make it more capable of courage and sacrifice? It is concentrated in the Negroes. If it happens that we are not able to find the road to this stratum, then we are not worthy at all. The permanent revolution and all the rest would be only a lie.

18

In his 'Growing Up in the Black Belt', Charles S. Johnson points out that the urban Southern Negro is more race conscious than the rural Southern Negro, and that the Negro in the North is more race conscious than the Negro in the South. Only he who understands the dual development of the Negro from a Marxist point of view can grasp the full significance of this fact; the 'talented tenth', unfortunately, does not

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s Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States (1948)

]. Meyer (C.L.R.James)

Comrades, our party, with this Resolution, is preparing to make a powerful entry into a section of the class struggle that is now raging in the United States.19 The decay of capitalism on a world scale, the rise of the c Io in the United States, and the struggle of the Negro people, have precipitated a tremendous battle for the minds of the Negro people and for the minds of the population in the us as a whole over the Negro question. During the last few years certain sections of the bourgeoisie, recognizing the importance of this question, have made a powerful theoretical demonstration of their position, which has appeared in The American Dilemma by Gunnar Myrdal, a publication that took a quarter of a million dollars to produce. Certain sections of the sentimental petty bourgeoisie have produced their spokesmen, one of whom is Lillian Smith. That has produced some very strange fruit, which however has resulted in a book which has sold some half a million copies over the last year or two. The Negro petty bourgeoisie, radical and concerned with communism, has also made its bid in the person of Richard Wright, whose books have sold over a million copies. When books on such a controversial question as the Negro question reach the stage of selling half a million copies it means that they have left the sphere of literature and have now reached the sphere of politics. President Truman has made his literary and theoretical declaration in the report of the Civil Rights Committee, and he has also made his political declaration in his recommendations to Congress to accept the proposals of that committee. The Communist Party is doing its hardest in the same field and has declared at one of its recent plenums that the test and touchstone of the work of the party, of its maturity in the United States, is the work it has done and does on the Negro question. 19

Meyer 1948. The report by C.L.R. James presented here in its entirety is more than twice as long, and in the opinion of the editors far richer, than the highly abridged version commonly circulated under the same titled.

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It is into this battle that we now propose to enter, in a more rounded, more consistent, and more militant form than we have entered in the past. That is the first significance of this Resolution. It is not only a guide to the actions of the party; its mere presentation to the public will mean that the policies of genuine Bolshevism are now ready to compete fully armed in the tremendous battle that is raging over the Negro question in the United States. Now what is it that we have to say that is new? In one sense - and I quote 'nothing is new'. What we say in this Resolution has been 'implicit', it has been an 'underlying conception' of our activity in the past. It has appeared in many discussions by Trotsky and in various articles and speeches. But nevertheless it has not appeared in such consistent and rounded and finished form as we propose to do in this Resolution. We can compare what we have to say that is new by comparing it to previous positions on the Negro question in the socialist movement. The proletariat, as we know, must lead the struggles of all the oppressed and all those who are persecuted by capitalism. But this has been interpreted in the past - and by some very good socialists too - in the following sense: the independent struggles of the Negro people have not got much more than an episodic value and as a matter of fact, can constitute a great danger not only to the Negroes themselves, but to the organized labor movement. The real leadership of the Negro struggle must rest in the hands of organized labor and of the Marxist party. Without that the Negro struggle is not only weak, but is likely to cause difficulties for the Negroes and dangers to organized labor. This, as I say, is the position held by many socialists in the past. Some great socialists in the United States have been associated with this attitude.

Our Standpoint

We, on the other hand, say something entirely different. We say, number one, that the Negro struggle, the independent Negro struggle, has a vitality and a validity of its own; that it has deep historic roots in the past of America and in present struggles; it has an organic political perspective, along which it is travelling, to one degree or another, and everything shows that at the present time it is travelling with great speed and vigor. We say, number two, that this independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights, and is not led necessarily either by the organized labor movement or the Marxist party.

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We say, number three, and this is the most important, that it is able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in the United States, and that it is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism. In this way we challenge directly any attempt to subordinate or to push to the rear the social and political significance of the independent Negro struggle for democratic rights. That is our position. It was the position of Lenin thirty years ago. It was the position of Trotsky which he fought for during many years. It has been concretized by the general class struggle in the United States, and the tremendous struggles of the Negro people. It has been sharpened and refined by political controversy in our movement, and best of all it has had the benefit of three or four years of practical application in the Negro struggle and in the class struggle by the Socialist Workers' Party during the past few years. Now if this position has reached the stage where we can put it forward in the shape that we propose, that means that to understand it should be by now simpler than before; and by merely observing the Negro question, the Negro people, rather, the struggles they have carried on, their ideas, we are able to see the roots of this position in a way that was difficult to see ten or even fifteen years ago. The Negro people, we say, on the basis of their own experiences, approach the conclusions of Marxism. And I will have briefly to illustrate this as has been shown in the Resolution. First of all, on the question of imperialist war. The Negro people do not believe that the last two wars and the one that may overtake us, are a result of the need to struggle for democracy, for freedom of the persecuted peoples by the American bourgeoisie. They cannot believe that. On the question of the state, what Negro, particularly below the MasonDixon Line, believes that the bourgeois state is a state above all classes, serving the needs of all the people? They may not formulate their belief in Marxist terms, but their experience drives them to reject this shibboleth of bourgeois democracy. On the question of what is called the democratic process, the Negroes do not believe that grievances, difficulties of sections of the population, are solved by discussions, by voting, by telegrams to Congress, by what is known as the 'American way'. Finally, on the question of political action, the American bourgeoisie preaches that Providence in its divine wisdom has decreed that there should be two political parties in the United States, not one, not three, not four,just two: and also in its kindness, Providence has shown that these two parties should be one, the Democratic Party and the other, the Republican, to last from now until the end of time.

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That is being challenged by increasing numbers of people in the United States. But the Negroes more than ever have shown - and any knowledge of their press and their activities tells us that they are willing to make the break completely with that conception.

Recent Negro Struggles

Such are the ideas that are moving among the Negro people. And it is not only a question of approaching the conclusions of Marxism, in their own instinctive way, under the banner of democratic rights. We have seen during the last ten or fifteen years that the Negro people have carried on tremendous struggles, significant in themselves but still more significant as a portent of the possibilities of things to come. We saw them riot and break out in Harlem in 1935. We saw it again in 1940 when the 'March On Washington' exploded and shook the American bourgeoisie, particularly the Roosevelt administration. We saw it again in Detroit and in various other towns in 1943 and later. We have seen it explode recently in the tremendous challenge and defiance of the RandolphReynolds movement. 20 And, finally and most important, at the time when the American bourgeoisie presented its most powerful organization and clamped its strength upon the American people during the war by means of the American bourgeois military machine, we saw individual Negroes, groups of Negroes, masses of Negroes, hurl themselves at that machine with a reckless disregard for their personal safety and their personal situation that shows the tremendous revolutionary potentialities that are simmering among the Negro people. So that our theoretical position, our analysis of the situation among the Negro people - what they are thinking - has got evidence in what the Negro people have been doing. Now we can draw from this one of the first of the important conclusions. The Randolph-Reynolds movement, the mere declaration by Reynolds and Randolph, caused a tremendous confusion in the ranks of the bourgeoisie. It disrupted the propaganda for mobilizing the nation to go into the war. You have 20

The 'Randolph-Reynolds movement' refers to a protest movement in 1947-48, headed by two African Americans - socialist trade unionist A. Philip Randolph and prominent civic leader Grant Reynolds (a liberal Republican) - which challenged a government initiative to institute a so-called 'peacetime draft' as the Cold War, calling instead for blacks not to serve in the us military because it was racially segregated. Bayard Rustin and William T. Worthy were central organizers for the effort, which garnered significant publicity and support. The campaign would soon force the end of racial segregation in the us armed forces. See Anderson 1986, pp. 274-82, and D'Emilio 2003, pp. 156-60.

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seen also that it has seriously disrupted the passage of the important draft bill in Congress. And if not what Randolph says and what Randolph proposes but if what Randolph expresses can find the organizational expression which we hope it will find, then it is certain that under the banner of Negro democratic rights, asking only for an army that will not practice segregation, the Negro people will have a terrific impact, national and international, upon the preparations of the American bourgeoisie for the war. It is impossible to deny this. Secondly. If we look at what took place after the 'March on Washington' and if we look again at what took place in Harlem after the 1943 outbreak, we shall see the Negro people, by their independent mass activity and by their determination to gain their rights, have been striking terrific blows at one particular point in the Democratic Party, the link between the organized labor movement and the Southern reactionaries. When the history of the Democratic Party comes to be written, and particularly the history of the break-up of the Democratic Party, it will be seen that the independent Negro struggle, the vigor with which the Negroes are protesting, their determination to gain their rights under American bourgeois democracy, has been one of the most powerful means of breaking that unnatural alliance between the most advanced section of the population - the organized labor movement - and the Southern reactionaries.

Already a Powerful Factor Under the banner of Negro democratic rights, struggling purely for what seem to be limited objectives, the independent Negro movement is contributing to the release of the proletariat from the stranglehold of the Democratic Party and giving it an opportunity and a possibility to emerge as an independent political force. This is our basic position. It can be concretized and will have to be developed. But it is clear that we cannot look upon the independent Negro movement as episodic or of little importance. It is a part of the political life of the country and, more important, of fundamental importance for the political development of the proletariat. But when that is said - we have little doubt that it will be accepted - there arises for us a very important problem. As Bolsheviks we are jealous, not only theoretically but practically, of the primary role of the organized labor movement in all fundamental struggles against capitalism. That is why for many years in the past this position on the Negro question has had some difficulty in finding itself thoroughly accepted,

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particularly in the revolutionary movement, because there is this difficulty what is the relation between this movement and the primary role of the proletariat - particularly because so many Negroes, and most disciplined, hardened, trained, highly developed sections of the Negroes, are today in the organized labor movement.

Fundamental Propositions

Now let us note first that the resolution does not falter in one single degree on fundamental propositions. It states, for instance, that the Negro struggles in the South are not merely a question of struggles of Negroes, important as those are. It is a question of the reorganization of the whole agricultural system in the United States, and therefore a matter for the proletarian revolution and the reorganization of society on socialist foundations. Secondly, we say in the South that although the embryonic unity of whites and Negroes in the labor movement may seem small and there are difficulties in the unions, yet such is the decay of Southern society and such the fundamental significance of the proletariat, particularly when organized in labor unions, that this small movement is bound to play the decisive part in the revolutionary struggles that are inevitable. Thirdly, the Resolution pays great care and attention to the fact that there are one and a quarter million Negroes, at least, in the organized labor movement. On these fundamental positions we do not move one inch. Not only do we not move, we strengthen them. But there still remains in question: what is the relationship of the independent Negro mass movement to the organized labor movement? And here we come immediately to what has been and will be a very puzzling feature unless we have our basic position clear. Those who believed that the Negro question is in reality, purely and simply, or to a decisive extent, merely a class question, pointed with glee to the tremendous growth of the Negro personnel in the organized labor movement. It grew in a few years from three hundred thousand to one million; it is now one and a half million. But to their surprise, instead of this lessening and weakening the struggle of the independent Negro movement, the more the Negroes went

into the Labor movement, the more capitalism incorporated them into industry, the more they were accepted in the union movement. It is during that period, since 1940, that the independent mass movement has broken out with a force greater than it has ever shown before. That is the problem that we have to face, that we have to grasp. We cannot move forward and we cannot explain ourselves unless we have it clearly. And

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I know there is difficulty with it. I intend to spend some time on it, because if that is settled, all is settled. The other difficulties are incidental. If, however, this one is not clear, then we shall continually be facing difficulties which we shall doubtless solve in time, but which must be the function of this Convention to try to get rid of at once. Now Lenin has handled this problem and in the Resolution we have quoted him. He says that the dialectic of history is such that small independent nations, small nationalities, which are powerless - get the word, please - powerless, in the struggle against imperialism nevertheless can act as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, which can bring on to the scene the real power against imperialism - the socialist proletariat. Let me repeat it please. Small groups, nations, nationalities, themselves powerless against imperialism, nevertheless can act as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli which will bring on to the scene the real fundamental force against capitalism - the socialist proletariat. In other words, as so often happens from the Marxist point of view from the point of view of the dialectic, this question of the leadership is very complicated. What Lenin is saying is that although the fundamental force is the proletariat, although these groups are powerless, although the proletariat has got to lead them, it does not by any means follow that they cannot do anything until the proletariat actually comes forward to lead them. He says exactly the opposite i.s the case. They, by their agitation, resistance and the political developments that they can initiate, can be the means whereby the proletariat is brought on to the scene. Not always, and every time, not the sole means, but one of the means. That is what we have to get clear.

OurTask Now it is very well to see it from the point of view of Marxism which developed these ideas upon the basis of European and Oriental experiences. Lenin and Trotsky applied this principle to the Negro question in the United States. What we have to do is to make it concrete, and one of the best means of doing so is to dig into the history of the Negro people in the United States, and to see the relationship that has developed between them and revolutionary elements in past revolutionary struggles. For us the center must be the Civil War in the United States and I intend

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briefly now to make some sharp conclusions and see if they can help us arrive at a clearer perspective. Not for historical knowledge, but to watch the movement as it develops before us, helping us to arrive at a clearer perspective as to this difficult relationship between the independent Negro movement and the revolutionary proletariat. The Civil War was a conflict between the revolutionary bourgeoisie and the Southern plantocracy. That we know. That conflict was inevitable. But for twenty to twenty-five years before the Civil War actually broke out, the masses of the Negroes in the South, through the underground railroad, through revolts, as Aptheker has told us, and by the tremendous support and impetus that they gave to the revolutionary elements among the Abolitionists, absolutely prevented the reactionary bourgeoisie - (revolutionary later) absolutely prevented the bourgeoisie and the plantocracy from coming to terms as they wanted to do. In 1850 these two made a great attempt at a compromise. What broke that compromise? It was the Fugitive Slave Act. They could prevent everything else for the time being, but they could not prevent the slaves from coming, and the revolutionaries in the North from assisting them. So that we find that here in the history of the United States such is the situation of the masses of the Negro people and their readiness to revolt at the slightest opportunity, that as far back as the Civil War, in relation to the American bourgeoisie, they formed a force which initiated and stimulated and acted as afennent. That is point number one. Point number two. The Civil War takes its course as it is bound to do. Many Negroes and their leaders make an attempt to get incorporated into the Republican Party and to get their cause embraced by the bourgeoisie. And what happens? The bourgeoisie refuses. It doesn't want to have Negroes emancipated. Point number three. As the struggle develops, such is the situation of the Negroes in the United States, that the emancipation of the slaves becomes an absolute necessity, politically, organizationally and from a military point of view. The Negroes are incorporated into the battle against the South. Not only are they incorporated here, but later they are incorporated also into the military government which smashes down the remnants of resistance in the Southern states. But, when this is done, the Negroes are deserted by the bourgeoisie, and there falls upon them a very terrible repression. That is the course of development in the central episode of American history.

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Historical Anticipations

Now if it is so in the Civil War, we have the right to look to see what happened in the War of Independence. It is likely- it is not always certain - but it is Likely that we shall see there some anticipations of the logical development which appeared in the Civil War. They are there. The Negroes begin by demanding their rights. They say if you are asking that the British free you, then we should have our rights, and furthermore, slavery should be abolished. The American bourgeoisie didn't react very well to that. The Negroes insisted - those Negroes who were in the North - insisted that they should be allowed to join the Army of Independence. They were refused. But later Washington found that it was imperative to have them, and four thousand of them fought among the thirty thousand soldiers of Washington. They gained certain rights after independence was achieved. Then sections of the bourgeoisie who were with them deserted them. And the Negro movement collapsed. We see exactly the same thing but more intensified in the Populist movement. There was a powerful movement of one and one quarter of a million Negroes in the South (the Southern Tenant Farmers' Association). They joined the Populist movement and were in the extreme left wing of this movement, when Populism was discussing whether it should go on with the Democratic Party or make the campaign as a third party. The Negroes voted for the third party and for all the most radical planks in the platform. They fought with the Populist movement. But when Populism was defeated, there fell upon the Negroes between 1896 and about 1910 the desperate, legalized repression and persecution of the Southern states. Some of us think it is fairly clear that the Garvey movement came and looked to Africa because there was no proletarian movement in the United States to give it a lead, to do for this great eruption of the Negroes what the Civil War and the Populist movement had done for the insurgent Negroes of those days. And now what can we see today? Today the Negroes in the United States are organized as never before. There are more than half a million in the NAACP, and in addition to that, there are all sorts of Negro groups and organizations - the churches in particular - every single one ofwhich is dominated by the idea that each organization must in some manner or another contribute to the emancipation of the Negroes from capitalist humiliation and from capitalist oppression. So that the independent Negro movement that we see today and which we see growing before our eyes is nothing strange. It is nothing new. It is something that has always appeared in the American movement at the first sign of social crisis.

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A Sign of the Times It represents a climax to the Negro movements that we have seen in the past. From what we have seen in the past, we would expect it to have its head turned towards the labor movement. And not only from a historical point of view but today concrete experience tells us that the masses of the Negro people today look upon the CIO with a respect and consideration that they give to no other social or political force in the country. To anyone who knows the Negro people, who reads their press - and I am not speaking here specially of the Negro workers - if you watch the Negro petty bourgeoisie-reactionary, reformist types as some of them are in all their propaganda, in all their agitation - whenever they are in any difficulties, you can see them leaning toward the labor movement. As for the masses of Negroes, they are increasingly pro-labor every day. So that it is not only Marxist ideas; it is not only a question of Bolshevik-Marxist analysis. It is not only a question of the history of Negroes in the us. The actual concrete facts before us show us, and anyone who wants to see, this important conclusion, that the Negro movement logically and historically and concretely is headed for the proletariat. That is the road it has always taken in the past, the road to the revolutionary forces. Today the proletariat is that force. And if these ideas that we have traced in American revolutionary crises have shown some power in the past, such is the state of the class struggle today, such the antagonisms between bourgeoisie and proletariat, such, too, the impetus of the Negro movement toward the revolutionaryforces, which we have traced in the past, is stronger today than ever before. So that we can look upon this Negro movement not only for what it has been and what it has been able to do - we are able to know as Marxists by our own theory and our examination of American history that it is headed for the proletarian movement, that it must go there. There is nowhere else for it to go. And further we can see that if it doesn't go there, the difficulties that the Negroes have suffered in the past when they were deserted by the revolutionary forces, those will be ten, one hundred, ten thousand times as great as in the past. The independent Negro movement, which is boiling and moving, must find its way to the proletariat. If the proletariat is not able to support it, the repression of past times when the revolutionary forces failed the Negroes will be infinitely, I repeat, infinitely, more terrible today. Therefore our consideration of the independent Negro movement does not lessen the significance of the proletarian - the essentially proletarian-leadership. Not at all. It includes it. We are able to see that the mere existence of the CIO, its mere existence, despite the fakery of the labor leadership on the Negro question, as on all other questions, is a protection and a stimulus to the Negroes.

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Penalty of Defeat We are able to see and I will show in a minute that the Negroes are able by their activity to draw the revolutionary elements and more powerful elements in the proletariat to their side. We are coming to that. But we have to draw and emphasize again and again this important conclusion. If - and we have to take these theoretical questions into consideration - if the proletariat is defeated, if the CIO is destroyed, then there will fall upon the Negro people in the us such a repression, such persecution, comparable to nothing that they have seen in the past. We have seen in Germany and elsewhere the barbarism that capitalism is capable of in its death agony. The Negro people in the us offer a similar opportunity to the American bourgeoisie. The American bourgeoisie have shown their understanding of the opportunity the Negro question gives them to disrupt and to attempt to corrupt and destroy the labor movement. But the development of capitalism itself has not only given the independent Negro movement this fundamental and sharp relation with the proletariat. It has created Negro proletarians and placed them as proletarians in what were once the most oppressed and exploited masses. But in auto, steel, and coal, for example, these proletarians have now become the vanguard of the workers' struggle and have brought a substantial number of Negroes to a position of primacy in the struggle against capitalism. The backwardness and humiliation of the Negroes that shoved them into these industries is the very thing which today is bringing them forward, and they are in the very vanguard of the proletarian movement from the very nature of the proletarian struggle itself. Now, how does this complicated interrelationship, the Leninist interrelationship express itself? Henry Ford could write a very good thesis on that ifhe were so inclined.

The Ford Experience The Negroes in the Ford plant were incorporated by Ford: first of all he wanted them for the hard, rough work. I am also informed by the comrades from Detroit he was very anxious to play a paternalistic role with the Negro petty bourgeoisie. He wanted to show them that he was not the person that these people said he was - look! he was giving Negroes opportunities in his plant. Number 3, he was able thus to create divisions between whites and Negroes that allowed him to pursue his anti-union, reactionary way. What has happened within the last few years that is changed? The mass of the Negroes in the River Rouge plant, I am told, are one of the most powerful

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sections of the Detroit proletariat. They are leaders in the proletarian struggle, not the stooges Ford intended them to be. Not only that, they act as leaders not only in the labor movement as a whole but in the Negro community. It is what they say that is decisive there. Which is very sad for Henry. And the Negro petty bourgeois have followed the proletariat. They are now going along with the labor movement: they have left Ford too. It is said that he has recognized it at last and that he is not going to employ any more Negroes. He thinks he will do better with women. But they will disappoint him too.

The Case of Negro Women

Now there we have a movement, essentially proletarian, proletarianized Negroes, Negroes who are part of the organized labor movement and who dominate the Negro community. Here it would seem is a place where the independent Negro movement should play a strictly subordinate role. But history takes its own course. Let us look at what happened in Detroit in 1943. The struggle began over the Sojourner Truth housing developmentfor Negroes. Isn't that so? It continued by the activity and hostility of the Negro people to being pushed around, and finally the general dissatisfaction burst out in the rioting. At this stage the organized labor movement had to intervene; absolutely had to intervene. In other words, owing to the activity and conflict of the Negro people, the proletariat begins to get some education in its responsibilities not only for the demands and needs of labor, but for other sections of the population. But it didn't stay there, it didn't stay there. When the municipal election came up, the Negroes wanted to run a candidate. They put up a Negro clergyman (one of those petty bourgeois whom Ford thought he had won over). Now the revolution sometimes needs the whip of the counterrevolution. Frankensteen, then a CIO leader, was running for Mayor. Mayor Jeffries and the rest thought they saw an opportunity to discredit Frankensteen's campaign by calling him a Negro lover and flooding Detroit with information that the victory of Frankensteen would mean that whites and Negroes would have to live in the same houses, and so on. Naturally Frankensteen, (in great difficulty, and sweating no doubt), had to play a peculiar course. He had to remember that the Negroes played a certain role in the labor movement, that he couldn't afford to antagonize them, that on

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the whole he had to be careful not to antagonize Negroes in general, and had to preserve the honor of the labor movement; and yet he did not want to give the impression that he was a Negro lover. It was difficult but that is his difficulty; not ours. What we have to look at is what happened. In spite of themselves the Negro masses found themselves pushed up against the organized labor movement, and though with a lot of confusion, the organized labor movement found itself compelled to take over, so to speak, the Leadership ofthe Negro community. It was very confused and hesitant; but the general line was clear. Most remarkable of all, this Negro clergyman in the Negro community ran on the cIO ticket. This made Jeffries say that the Negroes and the labor unions were planning to run Detroit. He was a little bit premature but nevertheless it showed that he could recognize these possibilities.

Beginnings of a Great Alliance The movement has fallen off since, but we have seen enough to know this: That the struggle which began by Negro militants in the Negro community fighting purely for Negro rights - a simple matter of housing, and resisting people who pushed them around, resulted ultimately- let us put it mildly- the beginnings ofan alliance, a political alliance between the Negro community and the organized labor movement in Detroit. I give you this as an example of how complicated the relationships can be between the Negro community and the organized labor movement even in a city where the Negro community is dominated by proletarians of a very high quality who have their first allegiance to the organized labor movement. If we can reflect on that, if we can constantly be on the alert to see these possibilities, the leadership, the fundamental leadership that organized labor can give to the Negro movement, the basic dependence of the Negro movement upon organized labor; but we can at the same time see the kind of leadership, the kind of stimulus, the kind of impetus, the kind of anticipation that the Negro movement can give to organized labor, then we shall be able to deal with all problems, not only the general problems outside, but the specific problems that the party will have to face. Now if all this is true from a theoretical point of view, and if it is true also from a historical point of view, and if we are able to see the signs of it - not too clearly but nevertheless sufficiently for us to draw some tentative conclusions in Detroit- then we, as a party, having participated in Negro work, having

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taken part in it for the last three or four years, should be able to see this general movement reflected in party life and in the activity of the party. We have been able to see it. What fundamentally has been the history of the party as I have seen it, as it has been explained, as we have heard it in discussion? The party in 1946 embarked on the task, consciously and deliberately to transform itself from a propaganda group (that is to say, a group that more or less puts over the whole program) into a mass party, in other words, a party which would draw workers not on the basis of general socialist conceptions, but on the basis of concrete activity and readiness to help them on basic problems that were immediately troubling them and which, as far as they could see, required, if not an immediate solution, at least immediate activity. It was the Negroes in the crisis of '43, '44, and 45, who came first to the party and offered the partyfor the first time the opportunity to draw masses on the basis of agitation and with the perspective of concrete activity. Our general analysis shows that this experience of the party was no accident. It took place this way because of this peculiar relationship of the Negro mass movement to the general struggle. Our first opportunity, our first experience, really to become a mass party was given to us by the Negroes.

Recent Party Experiences

Now the fact remains that a great number of Negroes who came into the party left. First of all, the most fundamental reason which has been given to me and which I see no reason to disagree with, is that the party was not quite ready to handle these tremendous problems. It could handle a specific case like the Fontana case. It could handle a case like the Hickman case and carry it through to a brilliant conclusion. But the actual day-to-day struggles against the bourgeoisie, and the Negro organizations, and the inertia of the labor movement, we simply were not powerful enough to handle. And we come to another very important conclusion here for our practical activity. If the vitality of the independent Negro movement depends in the last analysis upon the power and response of the proletariat, then life and activity, the strength of the party's Negro work must depend also - American society being what it is - upon the strength the party has in the organized labor movement and as a Marxist organization. You see the pattern continues. It is impossible to be able to do Negro work in the sense that the party at this stage wants to do it, in mass activity, meeting the demands of the Negroes, transformation from a propaganda organization to a mass party, without great strength and power in the organized labor move-

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ment. That the convention has dealt with. It is to be remembered that this is a report on the Negro Resolution, but we must never lose sight of that; that was our experience. And in fact, I have been told that the best work has been done and the best Negro cadres have remained where our party was strongest in the Labor movement. That must guide us in the coming period. In addition to these there were certain subordinate reasons for our difficulties. The Negro militants who came to us came in revolt from the NAACP and these other organizations which were, as usual, like the labor bureaucracy, talking but doing little or nothing. When they came to us, we were not able, under our own banner, as I have said, to carry on a sustained mass activity on these questions. The correct road for these Negro militants was back into the Negro mass organizations and there to do solid, patient fraction work as we do in the union movement. But they had just come from there. It was very difficult, it was very difficult for them to understand that they had come from there to us only to learn that they had to go back there again. And, not at all to be forgotten, I am informed that the party didn't have trained, experienced personnel to be able to lead this work in the way that it should be done. So that we have been more successful with the Negro comrades in the unions, who could work in one of our fractions in the labor movement. That is good, but it is not sufficient. Now, we hope, upon the basis of the experience that we have had, upon the fact that certain solid Negro cadres remain, upon the basis of the work that we intend to do with this Resolution, upon the basis of the impetus to thinking, study, penetration in the Negro movement, and observation of the Negroes in the trade union movement, which we hope will come from this Convention and the six months' discussion, we hope that those opportunities which were presented to us, from which we have gained some capital, we hope that we can begin again, we hope that when opportunities will be presented - we are absolutely sure they will be - then the party will be able to undertake that task and lay a solid foundation in its Negro work.

A Permanent Feature of Activity

And therefore our policy is that a clear consideration of all theoretical issues involved in what is a very difficult, very complicated and at times can be, a very exasperating question, our party proposes to you that we make a permanent, fundamental feature of our work, the work in the Negro organizations. (Applause)

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We say that whatever these Negro organizations are today, they represent the channel whereby the Negro people today or tomorrow will express themselves in the way we have outlined. We make our main orientation the NAACP. That is the most powerful Negro organization. Today it may look to be petty bourgeois, reformist or whatever you think; that is not the issue. Behind this organization, or liable to flow into it, or to create an organization which can destroy it at a future date, is the tremendous revolutionary potentiality of the Negro people that we have outlined. We have to be there, we have to devote ourselves to this work and in much the same way that for us the trade union is the basic place where we can work, whatever may be the position of the labor bureaucracy. We concentrate on the Negro organizations and for the time being as a general rule, the NAACP is the place where we are going to work, because we are confident that the Negro movement has these great potentialities both for itself and in regard to revolutionary developments. But as the Resolution states clearly, we go into those movements, into that movement, as we go into all others, as revolutionists. I have been talking to one or two Negro comrades, not as many as possible but I have been talking to some, and one of them says that he gets an impression that this insistence upon the significance of the Negro struggle for democratic rights gives him the feeling that when we go into the Negro movement, we may go there concerned only with a democratic program, when in reality, he says, there are many Negro militants who want Marxism. We can assure you that in saying many Negro militants want Marxism, he is absolutely correct. We go there as revolutionists seeking to make those organizations into class organizations, seeking to inculcate proletarian methods of struggle, seeking to clear out the petty-bourgeois reformist leadership and substitute the leadership of organized labor or of revolutionary militants. But we do more than that. If our analysis of the Negro people is correct, if what they think about fundamental questions approaches empirically the conclusions of Marxism, if we believe that the Negro movement is heading toward the proletarian revolution led by the proletariat, then it is absolutely imperative that we carry into those Negro organizations the fundamental doctrines of Marxism not only on the Negro question but on all the political questions of the day. We are not going into those movements to limit ourselves to the Negro struggle for democratic rights and the particular methods which may appear to be used by the majority of the Negroes in those organizations at that time. Not at all. If our analysis is sound and if we grasp its significance, we gain two things. We gain, one, the conviction to be able to stay in these movements and to work patiently under the most difficult conditions. But we gain something else. We gain a conviction

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of the necessity that our Marxist ideas, Marxist propaganda, our struggle for the labor party and our struggle for the proletarian revolution must meet some important response from the Negro militants in those organizations, and with the necessary discretion we have a fruitful field for party recruitment and the development of the general Marxist movement.

Racial Prejudices

Now there are only one or two things more that I would like to say. There is the question - and I hope you will allow me a minute or two extra - there is the question of racial prejudice. I am not talking here about going out to dinner with Negroes or having Negroes at your house or any of those things. When the party gets larger and rank-and-file Negro and white workers and others come into it, rank-and-file white workers will bring their prejudices. Negroes will bring their suspicions, and in my opinion, absolutely justified suspicions, and there will be difficulties created of a certain kind. But the party is a Bolshevik organization and on the basis of a fundamental political line and its general socialist aspirations, will be able to settle the crudest forms of those to the extent that they appear. The cadre by and large today is sound on these matters. But bourgeois race prejudice against the Negroes in the United States is something extraordinarily powerful and of a range and subtlety that it takes years to understand and only the proletarian revolution and the breakup of the bourgeoisie will make the proletariat fully understand. Such is the tremendous power which racial prejudice exercises in the United States, at every stage, wherever the races meet. In the Resolution we select one series of examples. Undoubtedly this Resolution is breaking a new stage in the organized form in which we are bringing forward Negro work and our conception of the Negro contribution, bringing it forward before the country and before the organized labor movement. We can accept it. We can feel that we shall do everything we can to carry it through. But bourgeois race prejudice isn't going to let it pass so easily. No. We have pointed out (and this has been the experience of many and particularly in the old Communist Party), that you will find many high-class unionists who accept a sound policy on the Negro question, genuinely mean to carry it out. Then they find themselves in a certain situation in the union, maybe a union of predominantly white workers, and the constant hammering home by the party of the importance of the Negro question and the significance of the Negro question in the party press and in the party propaganda and agitation begins to affect the work. There are problems created.

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A problem arises and these unionists ask, couldn't we in this particular situation, not on the whole but in this crisis, couldn't we play down the Negro angle a bit. Sometimes, in fact, we have to. But you can find, and it is possible that as we expand you will find this tendency to push the Negro question back a bit. Not for any reactionary reasons but with the genuine intention to advance what looms as more important, the role of the party in the organized labor movement at large. If we have time, maybe tonight, I will tell you many instances that have been given to me. This is not an individual aberration, it is not a personal weakness of a comrade. If it were, it wouldn't find a place in the Resolution. It is the pressure of bourgeois race prejudice that will penetrate into the party and impede the development of Negro work to the stage that we want to place it.

Problems Facing Negro Militants

There are other examples. You find a Negro unionist who for thirty years of his life has been bothered with chauvinism and the problem of where the Negro people are going to find some salvation. And at last he gets into the union movement, a progressive union. He meets other unionists, he sees what the union signifies, he grasps the question of the class struggle. Good. Now he has a perspective. He comes to the revolutionary party, and there he sees in embryo, despite certain difficulties, he catches a glimpse of the perspectives of a new society, and he is reinforced in his fundamental conceptions. When we now begin, when the party now begins to insist upon the significance and vitality of the independent Negro movement, this is a shock to him. He doesn't understand it too well. He thinks that we may be taking a step back. He doesn't quite see it. And you will find that he may align himself with those (I have seen this) who are finding some sort of objection to the projection forward of the Negro work. That is only another aspect of bourgeois race prejudice. It isn't that the Negro unionist is prejudiced. Don't misunderstand it. It is the impact of prejudice, that affects us at every tum. There are others, there are plenty of others besides those that are mentioned here. There are petty-bourgeois Negroes who more than most Negro groups suffer terribly in a personal way from the persecutions and humiliations of bourgeois society. When they come in to a fairly large party, there they are able to work genuinely for the revolution and at the same time find a social milieu in which they can be comfortable and are saved from the merciless repression and savage attacks that bourgeois society subjects them to. I have seen, I have been told, and we shall undoubtedly see, you will find, if not today, tomorrow,

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some of these who, also using as argument the basis of 'the class struggle', tend to push the Negro question back, so to speak, into a sort of obscurity. It seems to be forcing forward what they have gotten away from. This again, is the influence of the prejudice of bourgeois society. Thus, inside the party, you get certain tendencies which are likely to stand in the way of our work. Nothing can check this but a clear fundamental theoretical line and the education of the party not abstractly, not 'black and white unite and fight' (that is a very crude example) and not 'the Negroes must follow the whites and the proletariat must lead them' - not at all. No. We need a careful systematic building up of historical, economic, political, literary ideas, knowledge and information, on the Negro question inside the party. Because it is only where you have Bolshevik ideas, Marxist ideas, Marxist knowledge, Marxist history, Marxist perspectives, that you are certain to drive out bourgeois ideas, bourgeois history, bourgeois perspectives which are so powerful on the question of the races in the United States. That is what we must do. (Applause)

Inescapable Difficulties

We will have, we have had difficulties in the party. We cannot escape them. I have been hearing of some. I hope the Negro comrades in the party will express themselves freely and fully. But all these difficulties assume importance and in the last analysis can be traced directly to, both on the part (and I am speaking now of the party), both on the part of the white comrades and on the part of the Negro comrades, can be traced to the fact that we have not thoroughly grasped to the fullest extent the difficulties that the party faced when it was placed before masses of Negroes coming into the party and having to deal with them as a mass party when it was still a propaganda group. It is the settled opinion of the most experienced comrades and certainly it is mine - I have a wide experience on the Negro question - that a basic fundamental understanding, a clear understanding (within the limitations of the party and the objective situation), a clear historical and theoretical grasp of perspectives is the only cure for those difficulties that are bound to arise, and if they don't tum up today, they are bound to tum up tomorrow. Because we are not creating them. It is the tremendous power of bourgeois society which tries to stop and tries to prevent a complete coordination and pushes itself into the party at all times. That is what is taking place. It is an aspect of the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletarian movement. And we have to learn to meet it in a proletarian way.

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Comrades, in bringing forward this Resolution, the Political Committee is telling the party now, in a manner more serious, more concentrated, more organized than ever before, not to consider ourselves merely as the champions of Negro rights, but to make it our special business to advocate to the Negroes, to the organized labor movement and to the country at large the role which these persecuted, humiliated, despised people are going to play in the destruction of bourgeois society. The moment you say that in this American bourgeois structure, ridden with race prejudice, hatred and contempt of the Negroes, the moment we push forward what the Negroes can and will do, we shall find ourselves represented not merely as the champions of Negro rights, but as mortal enemies of the whole bourgeois structure.

The Revolutionary Potential

Let us not forget that in the Negro people, there sleep and are now awakening passions of a violence exceeding, perhaps, as far as these things can be compared, anything among the tremendous forces that capitalism has created. Anyone who knows them, who knows their history, is able to talk to them intimately, watches them at their own theatres, watches them at their dances, watches them in their churches, reads their press with a discerning eye, must recognize that although their social force may not be able to compare with the social force of a corresponding number of organized workers, the hatred of bourgeois society and the readiness to destroy it when the opportunity should present itself, rests among them to a degree greater than in any other section of the population in the United States.

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The Bomb Murder of Harry T. Moore (1952)

George Breitman

Two days before Christmas, Parade, the Sunday picture magazine, devoted an entire page to a report from Key West, Fla., where President Truman had just completed another of his many vacations. 21 It was the story of a 12-year old boy named Johnny Lawler, who had been encouraged by his parents to hang around for a chance to see Truman, and who finally succeeded and even shook Truman's hand and then was so thrilled that he did not wash his own hand for several days. Johnny was quoted as asking his father, 'Say, how did Mr. Truman get to be President?' By working hard, his father replied, and then Johnny said, 'I'll do the same because some day I want to be President'. There is something horrible in the thought that people are actually educating their children to emulate a man like Truman, the biggest strikebreaker in us history, the one who ruthlessly gave the order to murder hundreds of thousands of helpless civilians with the atom bomb; the hypocrite who advocated civil rights laws to get elected and then dropped them like a hot potato; the initiator of a witch hunt that is destroying our civil liberties. Truman worked hard, all right - he worked hard obeying the orders of a crooked machine politician named Pendergast, and he has been working hard since then obeying the orders of the capitalist class, up to and including the order to intervene in a so-called police action that has already cost the us over 100,000 admitted casualties in Korea. Johnny Lawler would be far better off if he hitched his wagon to another star. And what a star there was in his own state - a Negro, unknown to almost everyone until his death, a man who never committed any crimes but who also became great by working hard. That was HarryT. Moore, a hard worker, but one who worked on the side of the people and not against them.

21

Breitman 1952.

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Harry Moore: a Truly Noble Man It seems a shame that we never heard of Harry T. Moore until after Christmas night, when his life and his wife's life were ended by a bomb that blew up their home in Mims, Florida. Because he was a truly great and noble human being, the kind of man we should look up to for guidance in how to live our lives, a man whose memory we should keep forever fresh and green. He was a school principal, and better off than most Negroes in the South. But he was not content to think only of himself. He joined the fight to win equal salaries for Negro teachers, and for doing that was fired from his job. That would have silenced some people, as it has intimidated many teachers of liberal or radical views and others menaced or victimized by the witch hunt. But it did not frighten Harry T. Moore. On the contrary, it increased his determination to fight for justice. He became more active than ever in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and in struggles to win and protect the right to vote for Negroes in his state. And when he was confronted with the Groveland 'rape' frameup, he became a thorn in the flesh of the white supremacists and Ku Kluxers and their protectors in high office. He went around organizing and speaking at scores of meetings, fearlessly defending the Groveland victims and boldly demanding that McCall, the lyncher with a sheriff's badge, should be tried for the murder of Samuel Shepherd.

Knew What He Faced We know now that he was taking his life into his hands when he did these things. He must have known it too. But it did not stop him. His mother says that when she cautioned him to be more careful not long ago, he replied, 'Every advancement comes by way of sacrifice, and if I sacrifice my life or my health I still think it is my duty for my race'. That is why it is correct to call Harry T. Moore a martyr of the Negro struggle and of the general struggle of the working people for a better world, he saw his duty and he did it, despite the costs it entailed. He wanted to live too and to be happy, but he could not be happy unless he offered his resistance to the misery and injustice around him. In other words, he was a really moral man, setting an example that should shine brightly for all time for the youth of all races. He was a true son of great predecessors - of people like Nat Turner and Harriet Tubman and John Brown and others who were ready to risk their lives in the fight against oppression. We would be ingrates, unworthy of the sacri-

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fice he made, if we were content to merely mourn his passing and then forget about him instead of devoting ourselves to avenge his death and to complete the struggle he led so well.

Misleading Figures on Lynching

The Nation (Jan. 5) was absolutely correct when it insisted that such crimes as the murder of Harry T. Moore 'cannot be understood as senseless acts of depraved or prejudiced individuals. On the contrary, they were essentially political crimes, crimes deliberately committed for a purpose'. And the purpose cannot be completely understood without examination of a new trend that has appeared in the last few years. At the end of 1951 the Tuskegee Institute, a Negro institution which issues annual lynching figures, announced that the total of lynchings last year was one. This report was widely publicized here and abroad by the propagandists of capitalism; for them this constituted proof that lynchings are diminishing year by year, that America is more and more becoming the land of freedom and equality for the Negro people, and that one of these days we will wake up and find that they are treated just like other people. They would be very happy if they could get the 15 million American Negroes and the colored people who form a majority of the earth's population to believe in this picture of progress that goes ever onward and upward until the arrival of the millennium. Because if what they said was true, it might not be necessary to fight to end the Jim Crow system-maybe people could just afford to sit back and wait for it to die a natural death. But it is a lie. The reason the capitalists and their political errand boys in Washington go to the trouble of peddling this lie is that they have set themselves the objective of dominating the whole world. Part of their program for achieving this depends on force - economic force through the dollars they are pumping into the dying capitalist system all over the world, military force through armament that they are trying to impose on unwilling countries in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. But part also depends on propaganda - the propaganda that the us is the champion and paragon of democracy. The colored people abroad find that hard to swallow. 'If you are such lovers of democracy', they ask, 'then how is it that you have become the partner of so many lifelong bitter enemies of democracy like Chiang Kai-shek, Syngman Rhee, Franco, the Nazi and Japanese generals and most of the other dictators who are not behind the iron curtain?'

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Along with that question goes another: 'If you love democracy so much, why do you treat Negroes as second-class citizens, deny most of them the right to vote, discriminate against them at the hiring gate or bar them from the better jobs when you do hire them, subject them to humility and brutality, segregate them in the armed forces and in so many parts of your educational system, deny them the protection of anti-lynching and anti-poll tax laws - why, if you love democracy so much and talk to us about it so much, don't you practice what you preach?' This makes the us ruling class, its politicians, diplomats and Voice of America squirm like fish on a hook. And needless to say, the representatives of the bureaucrats in the Kremlin never miss a chance, inside the United Nations and outside, to make them squirm some more. Many people, including some 'radicals' who expect capitalism to end Jim Crow, wonder why the us government does not rid itself of this embarrassment, disarm foreign suspicions and deprive the Kremlin of one of its most effective propaganda themes. All they would have to do is quit discriminating against Negroes and begin treating them the same way as other citizens. But they don't do it, for reasons to be discussed later. Instead, they seek to get around their embarrassment by juggling figures to show that lynching is diminishing and conditions are improving, etc. When we say this is a lie, we do not mean to challenge the official lynching figures compiled every year. It is true that they have declined temporarily. What we mean is that lynching has assumed new forms. Everyone knows that lynchings are violence resulting in death committed by a mob, by more than a few people - if only one person does the killing, it is listed by the Tuskegee Institute as a murder and not a lynching. (Harry T. Moore was not officially listed as a lynch victim, presumably because it has not been proved that more than one person killed him.) But there is another and more crucial aspect to lynching its purpose. The purpose is not so much to take a life- that can just as easily be done by so-called legal procedure, in a Jim Crow court, that is, by 'legal lynching'. The purpose of a lynching is not so much to take a life as it is to frighten, terrorize, silence, demoralize other people who are permitted to go on living, but who are expected to cringe as long as they live and not dare to organize or vote or go to court - just to live and work like a mule for the benefit of others. That is the real aim of a lynching, and if it does not have that effect it is not considered a success.

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New Trend in Anti-Negro Terror

The point can be illustrated by the Groveland case. In Groveland, Lake County, Fla., a large number of Negroes were working and living under conditions of virtual peonage, a system about half-way between slave labor and wage labor. After the war the Negro workers began to complain about their conditions and talk about doing something to improve them. When their employers heard about this, they decided to do something drastic to throw the fear of god into their employees. That was the background of the Groveland case in 1949, and when a white woman yelled rape the employers had just what they wanted. They unloosed a reign of terror that lasted over a week; Negro homes were burned, Negroes were shot at if they ventured out of doors, and finally 400 Negro families had to flee out of the county. One Negro was shot dead by a posse, three others were almost lynched and later were convicted; one was given life imprisonment, two were sentenced to death; when the Supreme Court ordered a new trial for the latter, a sheriff shot them in cold blood, murdering one and leaving the other for dead. But it was not these victims the ruling class was most concerned about - they wanted blood and some bodies burning in the electric chair so that they could point to them and remind the remaining, living Negroes of what they could expect if they tried to alter the wonderful American way of life as it is practiced in the South.

Real Aim: to Frighten the Living

To frighten the living- that is the real aim oflynching. When that is understood, we can see that there may be less of the old-style type of lynchings, where mobs are used, but that lynchings have continued as much as before, only in new forms. Today, when they want to achieve the purpose of lynchings, they send out only two or three men to shoot down a Negro who will serve as an example to others, or they may even send out only one man, armed with a bomb, which he can throw under a house where people are sleeping at night. And in some cases they use the police instead. Because these people who are so brave about murdering sleeping men and women don't like to take any risks, and even small vigilante committees face a risk that their victim may resist. But with the police taking over the function of the lynch mob there is practically no risk. The police have always been noted for their brutality toward Negroes. Now, in addition, in ever-increasing numbers, they are killing Negroes too, in the North and the South.

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It is estimated that in the city of Birmingham alone almost 100 Negroes have been shot or beaten to death on the streets or in the police stations during the last 2½ years alone. Nobody knows what the national total is, but it surely equals any annual total of 'official' lynchings recorded in the us since the early days of the Ku Klux Klan. It is not a matter of punishing individual Negroes or of letting the police work off their sadistic frustrations - the main aim is to paralyze the members of the Negro community with fright, to make them shudder every time they see a cop, to keep the memory of broken and bloody bodies on their minds so that they will be afraid to talk back or stand up for their rights. In other words, the same aim as the old-style lynchings, only now committed under guise oflaw, now protected by the police badge and uniform, now masked as 'resisting an officer' or 'trying to escape'. That is one of the new trends in the struggle for Negro equality. The Negro people have been pressing forward - it is estimated that two million of them will go to the polls in the South this year as compared with about one million in 1948. Unable to sweet-talk them into accepting second-class citizenship, the ruling class and its political agents have decided to beat them into submission. It is impossible to exaggerate the dangers presented by the new forms of lynching. If they are not stopped where they are already being committed, then they will spread into every state and city where the ruling class wants to keep the Negro people down - that is, every state and city where Negroes live.

Danger Evident Not Only to Radicals Revolutionary socialists are not the only ones who understand what is happening. The Psychology Department of the City College of New York, 20 educators, sent a wire to Truman last November after the sheriff of Lake County took the two handcuffed Groveland defendants for a ride and shot them. They noted that the pattern for denying Negroes their constitutional rights has shifted from mob violence 'to the more subtle forms of quasi-legal executions or violence at the hands of "law enforcement" officers'. The new pattern, they said, would give 'the aura of official sanction to racial murders' and would expose all the people to 'the dangers of a capricious,jungle-like state'. (This is an acute observation, because once the cops get such powers of life and death in their hands they will not confine their use to Negroes but will employ them against whites as well.) And they warned that 'only the most immediate and strongest action of the federal government can prevent the legal murder of a great many more Negroes in the near future'. Events have already begun to confirm this warning.

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Another conservative source, Walter White, in his annual report for the declared:

NAACP,

At times during the year justice and human rights in America seemed to be standing still or even moving backward ... we saw in our country a resurgence of violence - rioting, home burning, bombings, police brutality and mockery of the revered American concept of 'equal justice under law.' Cicero, Martinsville, Groveland, Birmingham, Miami and Mims, the horror names of 1951, drove home more strongly than ever the continuing and increasing need for the NAACP.

Why No Action from Washington? The International Executive Board of the cw Auto Workers - not one radical among them - protested the Groveland killing, the murder of an NAACP member who had filed suit for the right to vote in Louisiana and was shot down by a deputy sheriff, and the murder of a Negro steward at sea by a white captain. These crimes were designated as signs of 'an intensification of terroristic aggression against Negroes by officers charged with upholding and enforcement of the law'. Urging Attorney General McGrath to arrest, indict and try the killers for murder, the UAW Board wrote: 'Failure to take such action subverts all of our lofty professions of democratic principles. The hour is late. Action now is imperative'. The hour certainly is late, but no action has been forthcoming, despite thousands of appeals to Truman for the government to step into the picture and do something to stop the terrorism. Not one legal or semi-legal lyncher has been punished. Not one cop has been fired. Not one bomb-thrower has been apprehended. The strongest government in the world seems to be helpless, or else tries to give that impression. The mighty FBI has found nothing. The Department of Justice can't seem to get the wheels of justice moving. Are they really so inefficient? The answer is that it all depends on whom they are hunting. When they want to catch a radical, nothing seems to stop them. The whole machinery of the government is thrown into high gear, thousands of cops and FBI agents labor ceaselessly; no financial expense is too high; they lap wires and open mail; they set up a stoolpigeon system extending across the whole country. And they get results - when they really want them. So when they don't get results we have good reason to believe they don't want them. They arrest radicals and prosecute them and send them to jail, not for

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employing force and violence - there has not been a single case of this kind but for allegedly conspiring to advocate force and violence, a frameup assault on the Bill of Rights. But when it comes to those who do not advocate but clearly commit force and violence, the government seems paralyzed, bumbling, impotent. They are great at hounding people whose only crime is that they express their opinions but a complete dud when it comes to catching and punishing fascistic elements who commit crimes in violation of all the federal, state and local laws. Liberals think this is accidental, but it is not. The truth is that the government is not really disturbed by fascist elements while it is afraid of ideas and free speech and free press. This gives a better and sharper insight into the true character of the government and the capitalist ruling class than can be gotten in almost any other way.

Our Warnings Confirmed

What is the government doing about the murder of Mr. and Mrs. Harry T. Moore? Look first of all at Truman, the so-called great civil libertarian and humanitarian. Not one word. He can't be bothered by such trifles. When us airmen fly over Hungarian territory in violation of international law - you can imagine what would happen if a Soviet or Hungarian plane flew over us territory without permission - and then are arrested and fined, there is a great hubbub, Truman demands restitution and firm action, and even after they are released he vindictively demands that the case be taken before the UN. But when people are murdered in his own country, in the state where he takes his vacations, Truman is silent (and no newspaper reporter questions him about it at his press conferences). Not that it would mean anything if he did say something about the Moore case because he has proved that his promises cannot be trusted anyhow. Action speaks louder than words. And the inaction of the Truman administration also speaks louder than words. Attorney General McGrath promises 'the full facilities of the F B1'. Eventually he sends down two (2) FBI agents, who, when added to those already stationed in Florida, make a grand total of nine (g ). Which is less than one-tenth as many as he set into action like bloodhounds when four Stalinists convicted under the Smith Act jumped bail last summer. Evidently expressing opinions that Truman and McGrath do not like is a more heinous crime than murder. The FBI agents in Florida have achieved exactly nothing. The whole thing is a farce. Because even if they should arrest someone for 'violating the federal civil rights' of Mr. and Mrs. Moore, the penalty - the maximum penalty - would be one year in prison and a few thousand dollars in fine! (Provided a Southern jury could be

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found to convict the defendant.) That is the way the government acts, that is the way it intends to keep acting- unless and until it is compelled to do otherwise by the mass pressure of the American people. When Harry T. Moore was murdered, the Socialist Workers Party immediately sounded the alarm. It warned that if his killers were not punished, they would feel free to spread their violence to maintain white supremacy and to extend their attacks to white workers and the labor movement. This warning was confirmed almost as soon as it was uttered. Recent issues of The Militant, by printing a number of small news items that are lost in the back pages of most papers, have shown that the bomb is joining TV and comic books as symbols of American capitalist culture (which is ironical when we recall that the favorite cartoon stereotype of a revolutionist used to be a man with a bomb in his hand). A white evangelist in Florida is warned that he will get the 'Mims treatment' if he does not stop preaching against sin so vigorously (Moore's home was in Mims). A crusader against vice in Alabama comes home to find his house in smoke and his son blown 30 feet through the air by a bomb, and he decides to move his family out of the state (why he sent them to Florida for protection from bombs is a mystery). The white sheriff of a North Carolina county complains that his deputies cannot do their job at night in the rural areas because the Klan has been flogging so many people that the residents have become jittery and start firing their shotguns as soon as they hear a noise outside; the sheriff says if this kind of thing goes on, why, it will not be possible for his deputies to preserve law and order much longer. The United Press reports a dynamite explosion near a Negro night club in Dallas, Tex., and calls it the third such 'apparently pointless' bombing in less than a month. And now the scene shifts North, to Chicago, where a black-powder bomb is exploded outside the new headquarters of the AFL Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen's Union, shattering 40 windows and rocking the whole area; the police began an investigation, of course - not of the labor haters, not of the anti-union racists or the White Circle League, but of the c Io United Packinghouse Workers Union!

What Is Being Done?

What is being done by the groups that are directly affected by this new wave of terrorism? The NAACP, which is most vitally involved, denounced the outrage, offered a reward for the killers of Mr. and Mrs. Moore, held memorial meetings for them, and urged McGrath to appoint a special prosecutor and

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grand jury (which he refused to do). And then, two weeks after the bombing, it voted to consult the labor leaders for a nationwide work stoppage, something it had never done before and something which it did almost on the spur of the moment under the pressure of the mass indignation over the Moore case. All these measures were justified and progressive - but inadequate. The leaders of the labor movement too know they are involved, and knew it before the bombing of the Chicago AFL union. They know that union organizers and members will be next on the death list, that the forces behind lynch terror are the same ones that seek to smash unions. But beyond sending a few telegrams of protest, they do nothing. An editorial in the Jan. g AFL NewsReporter concludes by 'wondering' if maybe 'reactionaries everywhere won't stop to think whether stirring up race hatred in order to win an election is worth the damage it helps to cause'. This is not a summons for the people to fight the reactionaries but an appeal to the reactionaries to think over what they are doing and decide if the terrorism really benefits them - as if the reactionaries do not know what they are doing. The Socialist Workers Party takes an altogether different approach. Farrell Dobbs, National Chairman and presidential candidate of the SWP, wrote a letter to the NAACP, AFL and CIO and 22 other powerful national organizations scheduled to meet in Washington on Feb. 17-18 to lobby for a change in Senate rules that make it possible to filibuster all civil rights legislation to death. Speaking on behalf of the SWP, Dobbs urged them to revise the plans for their conference - to tum it into a broader affair, to summon a mass march on Washington by tens of thousands instead of staging a lobby with a few hundred polite representatives; to call mass meetings and demonstrations in cities all over the country at the same time; to endorse the proposal for a nationwide work stoppage; and to support the idea of forming defense guards to protect lives and homes and liberties which the authorities have failed to protect.

The Need for Defense Guards

The proposal for defense guards originated in Florida, and not with the swP. For several months in Miami bombs have been thrown or planted in Negro housing projects, Jewish synagogues, and a Catholic church. When the police failed to stop this, here is what happened, according to the Jan. 2 New York Times: 'Members of the Jewish War Veterans recently suggested that 325 of their members be deputized to guard synagogues, but this was turned down after several rabbis had issued a statement declaring that to resort to "vigilante action at this time is to succumb to hysteria and panic."'

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The subsequent killing of Mr. and Mrs. Moore, undoubtedly encouraged when the racists saw they could act with impunity in Miami, proves how blind those rabbis were to put their confidence in the police. In the first place, defense guards need not be deputized; when needed, they can and should be, formed without getting the recognition or approval of the police, who usually act in connivance with the lynchers anyhow. In the second place, formation of defense guards is not 'vigilante action' but its very opposite - protection against vigilante action. And in the third place it is not panic or hysteria to protect your life when the police fail to do so - but good sense. The bombers respect only those who can oppose them effectively; they will think twice about going out to take another life when they see Negroes and Jews and workers banding together and promising to resist. Even the police will think it over before clubbing a helpless victim if they know he has friends who will come to his aid. Without ever having heard of the Socialist Workers Party, the Jewish veterans in Miami sensed this; so did 18 whites who stood armed guard around the church of the preacher threatened with the Mims treatment in Jacksonville; and so did the Negroes who formed a guard around the home of a Negro farmer in North Carolina after a bomb had been exploded there.

What Impedes the Leaders?

Farrell Dobbs' proposals were not answered by the labor, Negro, liberal and civic organizations. But they made it clear that they rejected them by changing the name of their lobbying conference in February to the 'Leadership Conference on Civil Rights' - an obvious refusal to call for mass action. But what about the proposal for a nationwide work stoppage, which was made first by the NAACP itself? The NAACP authorized the setting up of a committee to consult the labor leaders. What happened? Was it set up, and if it was set up, why isn't it functioning? If it is functioning, why is the NAACP so silent about the whole thing, which was their idea and not ours? If the labor leaders refuse to go along with the proposal, why doesn't the NAACP announce this so that the people can do something about it? Why, if they say this is a situation of crisis, don't they act accordingly? What are they waiting for? The answer can be found by examining the new form of propaganda that both Negro and labor leaders have become very fond of in recent years. This has already been done in The Militant, but it bears repetition and amplification. Today this propaganda is being applied to just about every public issue that can be thought of. When Truman asks for another five billions in new taxes, he seeks to justify this unpopular demand by its necessity for the struggle against com-

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munism. But his Republican opponents say new taxes are out of the question for the same reason - they would hurt the economy and weaken the struggle against communism. When Philip Murray asks for a steel wage increase, he explains it is needed so the steel workers can contribute their maximum effort to the fight against Stalin. Fairless of us Steel retorts that a wage increase would undermine the steel industry, which would please no one so much as Stalin. Of course the class struggle continues just the same. The steel workers are not impressed with Fairless' arguments, nor he with theirs. This shows that propaganda has certain limits, and while it can mix things up it cannot change the realities of social life and struggle.

False Propaganda Paralyzes Action

But it can mix things up, which is why it must be paid some attention when it is applied to the Negro question, where the argument runs like this:Jim Crow, discrimination, segregation, bombings are all crimes because they help Stalin, and should be ended so that Negroes will be able and willing to go all-out in the crusade against communism. This was the theme sounded over and over by Philip Murray and Walter Reuther at the last cw convention, and given a timely application by Walter White, secretary of the NAACP, when he said the murder of HarryT. Moore was 'one of the greatest services that could have been performed for Joe Stalin'. The duty of leaders, labor or Negro, is to educate the people, teach them to know causes and effects - otherwise, no lasting progress is possible. Specifically, it is their job to teach the masses what causes Jim Crow oppression, who benefits from it, how all workers are harmed by it, why they should fight it, and how to fight it effectively. The basic cause is the profit system, and the beneficiaries are the capitalists who do everything they can to keep the workers divided along any lines possible - racial, geographic, religious, sexual, etc. Because the more the workers are divided, the easier it is for the employers to exploit them and squeeze the maximum profit out of their labor. The workers have to be shown that Jim Crow benefits the ruling class, and that anything that perpetuates Jim Crow is harmful to their own interests. It must be made plain that Jim Crow is not the product of Stalin. This is not said in defense of Stalin, but of a historically incontrovertible fact.Jim Crow is the product of capitalism, American capitalism; its seat is in Washington, not Moscow. Any propaganda that obscures this fact is harmful and not helpful to the Negroes and their white allies.

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The Roots of Jim Crow The workers must be encouraged and taught to figure out their problems from the standpoint of how their problems affect the class and individual conditions and liberties of the masses themselves. When the question of a strike comes up, workers should be conditioned to ask: 'Will this strike help me and the other workers, or will it help the capitalists, who benefit from our losses and lose from our gains?' They should not be bamboozled into introducing extraneous questions, like: 'Will this strike help Stalin, or hurt him?' Trying to figure out what is going on in Stalin's mind (something the masterminds in Washington have not done with perceptible success) can result only in confusion, lack of determination, demoralization and inactivity- which are of benefit only to the capitalists and the white supremacists. The argument is not altogether new; only the form is. In World War II it had a slightly different wording, namely, will this or that action help Hitler? For some groups this became the sole and supreme criterion for everything. The Communist Party was most guilty of this. If workers wanted to resist speedup, or if Negroes wanted to march on Washington to protest Jim Crow, the Stalinists opposed and fought them on the grounds that such action was disruptive of 'national unity' and therefore helpful to Hitler. The Stalinists became the most vicious and virulent opponents of labor and Negro struggles because their policy of considering everything from the viewpoint of how it allegedly affected Hitler led them to shut their eyes to how these things affected the workers and Negroes, and to subordinate and oppose every progressive struggle under the guise of fighting Hitler. Those who use this method in its new form will do the same and will play into the hands of the reactionary ruling class, which is already stressing the idea that there must be no more conflicts in this country because Stalin wants us to be fighting one another instead of him.

Who Really Benefits from Terrorism? But even if it is conceded for the sake of argument that the murder of Mr. and Mrs. Moore is a service for Stalin (in the sense that he makes use of it, not that he committed it) - so what? Is that all it is? On the contrary, it is also a service for the American ruling class - in fact, a much bigger service for them than for him. The purpose of Jim Crow terrorism, as we noted earlier, is to keep the Negro 'in his place'. That is where American capitalism has tried to keep him since 1876 when they made a deal with the Southern landlords, businessmen and Ku Kluxers at the expense of the Bill of Rights and the Negro people, and

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that is where they are trying to keep him today. Stalin may reap certain indirect propaganda benefits from Jim Crow terrorism, but American capitalism benefits from it directly, politically and economically, and in a big way. That is why they do nothing to stop it. The Moore murders embarrass them in the United Nations. But not enough so that they want to end Jim Crow at home. For them it is cheaper to pay the price of being embarrassed than of having anything done to overthrow the Jim Crow system. So Walter White is telling only half the truth. The murder of Harry T. Moore is a service for Truman as well as for Stalin. White, Murray and Reuther make a great deal of noise about how embarrassingJim Crow is to American capitalism. The Truman administration, which would not be in power without the support of the South, knows all about this embarrassment, even better than its labor and Negro supporters. But that does not stop them from maintaining the Jim Crow system. Why this is so, why the ruling class retains the 'embarrassment' of Jim Crow and desperately resists all efforts to end it - that is the question which White, Murray and Reuther never even think of asking. But it is the decisive question and must be answered.

Why Washington Prefers 'Embarrassment' AbolishingJim Crow is no easy thing. Even if they decided in Washington to do it, it would still not be easy. Because the ruling class in the South would not like the idea. That is putting it very mildly. They know that Truman's only interest is in getting Negro votes and not in threatening the South's sacred way of life, but they go wild with rage every time he utters a few innocuous words about poll taxes or FEPC. And if the government actually tried to end Jim Crow in the South, we would be confronted with the threat of another civil war. In other words, the only way to abolish Jim Crow in this country is by making a revolution in the South, which is the powerhouse and breeding ground of the Jim Crow system. The present Southern ruling class would have to be thrown out of power, and that would be a revolution, a political revolution. But no matter how started, such a political revolution would inevitably tend to develop into a social and economic overturn, which in tum would upset the whole national structure. And that is why the capitalists who are running things will never consent to the abolition of the Jim Crow system. And nothing will shake them in this. They would much rather risk alienating the whole world than risk a revolution threatening their own profits and privileges at home. The final note in the White-Murray propaganda is a plea to the ruling class to end their great 'inconsistency'.

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How, they ask, can you get ready to fight a war for democracy in Europe and Asia and continue to treat the Negro at home in the most undemocratic fashion? Can't you see that to be consistent you must give the Negro democracy in America too? But since the capitalists know that they are not preparing for a war for democracy in any respect, this alleged inconsistency does not bother them at all. Their foreign policy and their domestic policy, despite what the labor and Negro leaders say, are cut from the same cloth. They are not getting ready to bring the blessings of democracy to the people of Asia or Europe any more than they are getting ready to extend them to American Negroes. On the contrary, they intend to enslave the people both at home and abroad, and are proceeding to destroy civil liberties at home precisely so that nobody here will be able to interfere with their reactionary program abroad.

Where There ls a Contradiction

Walter White and Philip Murray regard the war in Korea as a crusade for democracy, but millions of American Negroes, when they heard Truman give the order for us intervention, which he called a 'police action', must have thought to themselves: 'I sure feel sorry for the Koreans if they get the same kind of "police action" we've been getting'. And they do - the police action against colonial masses in Korea is qualitatively the same thing as police action against minorities here at home, although on a bigger scale and with bigger weapons. So there is a great contradiction, but it is with the labor and liberal leaders who act as apologists for the imperialists. They have got to make a choice themselves. If they keep on supporting capitalism and its foreign policy and its wars then they will have to subordinate labor and Negro struggles, shove them into the background the way the Stalinists did in World War 11 ( and as the liberals are already half-doing by their timorous policy on the Moore case). Or else they will have to increase their opposition to Jim Crow, the wage freeze, high prices, big profits and the witch hunt, and break with the imperialist foreign policy that conflicts with every progressive movement and struggle in the world today. That is their problem, and they will have to meet it. Revolutionary socialists have made their choice, and nothing will swerve them from it. They are and will remain implacable opponents of capitalism and its Jim Crow, and nothing will persuade them to moderate or abandon that struggle for a single day, rain or shine, war or peace, Murray or White, Truman, Taft or Eisenhower. Because they understand that if the struggle is stopped, if the fight is weakened, then things will become even worse than they are now.

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An Instructive Lesson fromJewish History

Nothing could be more deadly for the Negro people than a fatalistic belief in progress - automatic, self-moving progress, the chief staple of liberalism and reformism. This is borne out by what happened to the Jews. Before the First World War, when he was still a Marxist, Karl Kautsky wrote a book which was revised after the war and translated into English under the title, Are the fews A Race? This book is still worth reading as an example of the conceptions of the socialist movement about the Jewish question at that time. It contains some historical and anthropological material, an analysis of economic causes of antisemitism, etc. But its most interesting chapter is the one on the assimilation of the Jews, containing a number of tables of statistics showing that gradually the Jews were intermingling more and more with Christians and intermarrying with them at a really remarkable rate - in some European countries during the early part of the century, one out of every three or four Jews was marrying non-Jews and great numbers of them were being converted to Christianity. All in all, there seemed good ground to accept the prevailing belief, shared even by the socialists, that the Jewish question was solving itself through the assimilation of the Jews. An appealing notion - but how appallingly false! It proves that history, and especially the history of oppressed groups, does not move forward in a straight line but that it zigs and zags, that conditions can arise which will wipe out in a single decade all the gains that have been painfully accumulated in a century of strenuous effort. How empty and remote the statistics in Kautsky's book appear alongside of the single, lone statistic we became acquainted with after World War 11 - six million Jews exterminated under Hitler in a few brief years. And so the Negro people must be warned: Remember what happened to the Jews. They too were told in assuring tones about how things were getting better day by day and all they had to do was wait and be patient with the 'gradual' method and then the happy day of equality would dawn by itself. Remember what happened to the Jews in Europe and do not let anybody lull you with consoling statistics! The day may come in this country too when the ruling class, determined to conquer the whole world, will try to drown the Negro people in blood as an example and scapegoat for the other victims of capitalism.

A Century of Experience in Negro Struggle The idea that the Negro question would solve itself, so to speak, seemed to have validity once upon a time. This capitalist system we live under was progress-

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ive in its youth. Less than a hundred years ago the capitalists united, although reluctantly at first, with Negroes and workers and farmers to wage a bloody civil war that ended in the smashing of the chattel slave system. There was reason then to think that under capitalism Negroes could eventually prosper or at least breathe the free air of equality. Then, after the Civil War, came the period of Reconstruction, whose first stages were the brightest chapter in the book of American history, when the capitalist government did not hesitate to suppress the former slaveholders and to keep them suppressed and to use federal troops and guns in support of the Negroes' struggle for freedom. But that was when capitalism was young and thriving and moving ahead. Today this profit system is old and decrepit, attacked by incurable diseases, demented by illusions of grandeur and vain hopes that it can succeed in the program of world conquest that Hitler failed to achieve. It's a different animal now. Since the betrayal of Reconstruction, which gave the reins of power in the South back to the former slaveowners, there has been no reason whatever to expect anything progressive from the capitalists. Besides, why should the Negro people expect that their capitalist oppressors are going to grant them more rights at a time when the capitalists are busily engaged in withdrawing rights from the white workers, staging a witch hunt to destroy freedom of speech and press and association for the white workers? Preparations for an imperialist world war do not portend the flowering of democracy for the Negro people they signify an attempt ... to wipe out the democratic rights of all the masses. Even without the evidence of new and spreading forms of lynching and terrorism, it does not take much vision to see that the prospects for things getting better by themselves are very slim, and are going to get slimmer unless they are resisted vigorously, militantly, in the spirit of Harry T. Moore.

Moore Pointed to the Road The solution is not easy, and anyone who thinks it is, is fooling himself. These are not easy times in which to make progress. Many people who know that the answer lies in struggle have been frightened by the witch hunt and have retired to the sidelines. But struggle is still the only answer, and no slick or cheap substitutes will do. Sending petitions to Truman will not bear any better results now than in the past. Proposals for a boycott of Florida citrus fruits and vacation centers are not harmful as such - unless the idea is created that they are the answer. By themselves they do no harm, but they cannot do much good either. Struggle, backed up by the readiness to sacrifice that Harry T. Moore exhibited, remains the only answer.

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The nature of the struggle is primarily political. If the government wants to, it can put an end to terrorism in the South, which is itself a political thing. Because the government does not really want to, the government must be changed. Not changed by shifting from control by one capitalist party to control by another capitalist party, but changed from a government representing the interests of the capitalist class to one representing the interests of the workers, Negroes, working farmers, housewives and youth - representing them, controlled by them, responsible to them and replaceable by them. If the government wants to, it can end discrimination in industry. Because it does not want to, it must be changed. And so it goes with all the other problems facing the labor and Negro movements - they are political problems, which can be solved only through political action and struggle. We revolutionary socialists are not able by ourselves alone to set into motion our program for combatting terrorism. That is because we are still a small minority. But even a small minority, armed with a correct program, can exert a tremendous influence. The Abolitionists also started out small, a persecuted minority whose leaders were tarred and feathered and jailed and lynched, but within a few decades they ended up by seeing two-thirds of the nation take up arms to defend the anti-slavery principles they had stuck to so persistently during dark and troubled times.

Future Belongs to Revolutionary Socialism

And revolutionary socialism will not remain a minority; because our ideas conform to reality and are right, they will attract the majority of the people, and they will triumph. Some have been scared off by the witch hunt, and others have been corrupted into compliance and apathy by 'prosperity' - but the ruling class cannot stop ideas or their spread because it cannot do away with the reactionary conditions of life that produce those ideas and it cannot prevent the rise of new generations on whom the future rests and who will not want the future to be like the past. Our confidence in the future is not the result of wishful thinking or of an ability to hop ourselves up, but the product of scientific study and understanding of society and history and the class struggle. Some people think that it is visionary, hopelessly impractical and idealistic to continue a struggle to end capitalism against, such seemingly great odds. The same view was held by most people 100 years ago when a minority suggested that it was advisable, necessary and possible to end the system of slavery. 'The slave system is here to stay', they were told, 'and only crazy fanatics will refuse to try to live with it, and maybe fix it up, patch it or reform it here or there'. But

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from their own experience with the slave system, the majority of the American people were forced to the conclusion that slavery had to go, and they had to accept the program of the revolutionists whom they had derided as crackpots. Experience with capitalism, especially with capitalism in its death agony, is going to have the same consequences in our own time. It is going to teach the people that if they want to live, capitalism must die, and that if they want peace and dignity they will first have to employ militancy in taking power away from the capitalists. It is not the revolutionary socialists, primarily, who will teach these things, but capitalism itself. The Harlem paper, the New York Age, says: 'The blast (that blew up Harry T. Moore's home) exploded all hopes that the fight for equality in politics, education, the courts and other spheres of life in the South could be won with little or no bloodshed'. We have said that, too, but events say it better. We're educating all whom we can reach to the best of our ability- but capitalism is educating them, too, and in a way that will have deeper, more lasting, profound and revolutionary effects than any words we can speak or write. The enemies of Jim Crow, war and thought control are still on the defensive. But that is no reason for despair. The Nation is correct when it observes that the Moore bombing 'is likely to bring about an imponderable change in the political thinking of American Negroes' and when it notes that pressure for militant action is coming from 'rank-and-file Negroes whose patience is utterly exhausted not only with Dixiecrat provocation but with the relaxed middleclass attitude of some of their leaders, who have been quite willing to issue further political bills of credit to Mr. Truman on the basis of his stale civil rights speeches of 1948 and the lesser evil premise'. A similar process is certain to develop among the white workers. Whether it likes it or not, capitalism is forced to continue to produce all kinds of opportunities for awakening the masses and driving them into struggle against conditions as they are. If the politically advanced workers know how to stick to their guns and grab hold of all the opportunities offered them, then they will win to their side all the other workers whose needs are satisfied by the program of revolutionary socialism, and then it will be goodbye forever to capitalism, and all of its products like Jim Crow terrorism.

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When Anti-Negro Prejudice Began (1954)

George Breitman

It is now common knowledge even among conservative circles in the labor movement that race prejudice benefits the interests of the capitalist class and injures the interests of the working class. 22 What is not well known - it still comes as a surprise to many Marxists - and should be made better known is the fact that race prejudice is a uniquely capitalist phenomenon, which either did not exist or had no perceptible influence in pre-capitalist society (that is, before the sixteenth century). Hundreds of modem scholars have traced anti-Negro prejudice (to take the most important and prevalent type of race prejudice in the United States) back to the African slave trade and the slave system that was introduced into the Americas. Those who profited from the enslavement of the Negroes - the slave traders and merchant capitalists first of Europe and then of America, and the slaveholders-required a rationalization and a moral justification for an archaic social institution that obviously flouted the relatively enlightened principles proclaimed by capitalist society in its struggle against feudalism. Rationalizations always become available when powerful economic interests need them (that is how most politicians and preachers, editors and teachers earn their living) and in this case the theory that Negroes are 'inferior' followed close on the discovery that Negro slavery was exceptionally profitable. This theory was embraced, fitted out with pseudo-scientific trappings and Biblical quotations, and trumpeted forth as a truth so self-evident that only madmen or subversives could doubt or deny it. Its influence on the minds of men was great at all levels of society, and undoubtedly aided the slaveholders in retarding the abolition of slavery. But with the growth of the productive forces, economic interests hostile to the slaveholders brought forth new theories and ideas, and challenged the supremacy of the slaveholders on all fronts, including

22

Breitman 1954.

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ideology. The ensuing class struggles - between the capitalists, slaves, workers and farmers on one side and the slaveholders on the other - resulted in the destruction of the slave system. But if anti-Negro prejudices and ideas arose out of the need to justify and maintain slavery, why didn't they wither away after slavery was abolished? In the first place, ideas, although they must reflect broad material interests before they can achieve wide circulation, can live lives of their own once they are set into motion, and can survive for a time after the disappearance of the conditions that produced them. (It is instructive to note, for example, that Lincoln did not free himself wholly of race prejudice and continued to believe in the 'inferiority' of the Negro even while he was engaged in prosecuting the civil war that abolished the slave system - a striking illustration both of the tendency of ideas to lag behind events and of the primacy of material interest over ideology.) This is a generalization, however, and does not provide the main explanation for the survival of anti-Negro prejudice after the Civil War. For the striking thing about the Reconstruction period which followed the abolition of slavery was the speed with which old ideas and customs began to change and break up. In the course of a few short years millions of whites began to recover from the racist poisons to which they had been subjected from their birth, to regard Negroes as equals and to work together with them amicably, under the protection of the federal government, in the solution of joint problems. The obliteration of anti-Negro prejudice was started in the social revolution that we know by the name of Reconstruction, and it would have been completed if Reconstruction had been permitted to develop further. But Reconstruction was halted and then strangled - by the capitalists, acting now in alliance with the former slaveholders. No exploiting class lightly discards weapons that can help maintain its rule, and anti-Negro prejudice had already demonstrated its potency as a force to divide, disrupt and disorient oppressed classes in an exploitative society. After some vacillation and internal struggle that lasted through most of Reconstruction, the capitalist class decided it could make use of anti-Negro prejudice for its own purposes. The capitalists adopted it, nursed it, fed it, gave it new clothing, and infused it with a vigor and an influence it had never commanded before. Anti-Negro prejudice today operates in a different social setting and therefore in a somewhat different form than a century ago, but it was retained after slavery for essentially the same reason that it was introduced under the slave system that developed from the sixteenth century on - for its convenience as an instrument of exploitation; and for that same reason it will not be abandoned by the ruling class of any exploitative society in this country.

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But why do we speak of the introduction of anti-Negro prejudice in the slave system, whose spread coincided with the birth of capitalism? Wasn't there slavery long centuries before capitalism? Didn't race prejudice exist in the earlier slave societies? Why designate race prejudice as a uniquely capitalist phenomenon? A brief look at slavery of both the capitalist and pre-capitalist periods can lead us to the answers. Capitalism, the social system that followed and replaced feudalism, owed its rise to world dominance in part to its revival or expansion of forms of exploitation originally developed in the pre-feudal slave societies, and to its adaptation and integration of those forms into the framework of capitalist productive relations. As 'the chief momenta of primitive accumulation' through which the early capitalists gathered together the capital necessary to establish and spread the new system, Marx listed 'the discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins'. The African slave trade and slavery produced fortunes that laid the foundations for the most important of the early industries of capitalism, which in tum served to revolutionize the economy of the whole world. Thus we see, side by side, in clear operation of the laws of uneven and combined development, archaic pre-feudal forms and the most advanced social relations then possible in the post-feudal world. The former were of course in the service of the latter, at least during the first stages of their coexistence. This was not a mere repetition of the slavery of ancient times: one basic economic difference was that the slave system of the Americas produced commodities for the world capitalist market, and was therefore subordinate to and dependent on that market. There were other differences, but here we confine ourselves to the one most relevant to the subject of this article - race relations in the early slave societies. For the information that follows we are indebted to the writings of an anthropologist and of a sociologist: Ina Corinne Brown, Socio-Economic Approach to Educational Problems, 1942, chapter 2 (this government publication, the first volume in the National Survey of the Higher Education of Negroes sponsored, by the us Office of Education, is now out of print, but the same material is covered in her book Race Relations in a Democracy, 1949, chapter 4 ); and Oliver C. Cox, Caste, Class, and Race, 1948, chapter 16.23 Dr. Cox's treatment is fuller; he also has been more influenced by Marx. 23

Footnote by Breitman: Neither of these would claim they were the first to discover this historical information, and it may well be that other scholars unknown to us preceded

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This is what they write about the ancient Egyptians: So many persons assume that racial antipathy is a natural or instinctive reaction that it is important to emphasize the fact that race prejudice such as we know did not exist before the modem age. To be sure there was group antipathy which those who read history backwards take to be race prejudice, but actually this antipathy had little or nothing to do with color or the other physical differences by which races are distinguished. For example, the ancient Egyptians looked down upon the Negroes to the south of them. They enslaved these Negroes and spoke scornfully of them. Many writers, reading later racial attitudes into the situation, have seen in this scorn a color prejudice. But the Egyptians were just as scornful of the Asiatic sand dwellers, or Troglodytes as Herodotus called them, and of their other neighbors who were as light or lighter than the Egyptians. The Egyptian artists caricature the wretched captives taken in the frequent wars, but they emphasize the hooked noses of the Hittites, the woolen garments of the Hebrews, and the peculiar dress of the Libyans quite as much as the color or the thick lips of the Negroes. That the Egyptians mixed freely with their southern neighbors, either in slavery or out of it, is evidenced by the fact that some of the Pharaohs were obviously Negroid and eventually Egypt was ruled by an Ethiopian dynasty. BROWN, 1942

There seems to be no basis for imputing racial antagonism to the Egyptians, Babylonians, or Persians. cox

On the Greeks: One frequently finds mention of the scornful way in which Negro slaves were referred to in Greece and Rome, but the fact is that equally scornful remarks were made of the white slaves from the North and the East. There seems to be no evidence that color antipathy was involved, and of the total slave population the Negroes constituted only a minor element. BROWN, 1942

them in writing about this field in recent years; all we know is that it first came to our attention through their books. Historical material often lies neglected for long periods until current social and political needs reawaken interest in it. These writers were undoubtedly stimulated Into a new and more purposeful interest in the subject by the growth of American Negro militancy and colonial independence struggles during the last 15-20 years.

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The slave population was enormous, but the slave and the master in Greece were commonly of the same race and there was no occasion to associate any given physical type with the slave status. An opponent of Athenian democracy complained that it was impossible in Athens to distinguish slaves and aliens from citizens because all classes dressed alike and lived in the same way. BROWN, 1949

... we do not find race prejudice even in the great Hellenistic empire which extended deeper into the territories of colored people than any other European empire up to the end of the fifteenth century. The Hellenic Greeks had a cultural, not a racial, standard of belonging, so that their basic division of the peoples of the world were Greeks and barbarians - the barbarians having been all those persons who did not possess the Greek culture, especially its language ... the people of the Greek city-states, who founded colonies among the barbarians on the shores of the Black Sea and of the Mediterranean, welcomed those barbarians to the extent that they were able to participate in Greek culture, and intermarried freely with them. The Greeks knew that they had a superior culture to those of the barbarians, but they included Europeans, Africans, and Asiatics in the concept Hellas as these peoples acquired a working knowledge of the Greek culture. The experience of the later Hellenistic empire of Alexander tended to be the direct contrary of modem racial antagonism. The narrow patriotism of the city-states was given up for a new cosmopolitanism. Every effort was made to assimilate the barbarians to Greek culture, and in the process a new Greco-Oriental culture with a Greco-Oriental ruling class came into being. Alexander himself took a Persian princess for his wife and encouraged his men to intermarry with the native population. In this empire there was an estate, not a racial, distinction between the rulers and the un-Hellenized natives. cox On the Romans: In Rome, as in Greece, the slaves did not differ in outward appearance from free men. R.H. Barrow in his study of the Roman slave says that 'neither color nor clothing revealed his condition'. Slaves of different nationalities intermarried. There was no color barrier. A woman might be despised as a wife because she came from a despised group or because she

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practiced barbaric rites but not because her skin was darker. Furthermore, as W.W. Buckland points out, 'any citizen might conceivably become a slave; almost any slave might become a citizen'. BROWN,1949

In this civilization also we do not find racial antagonism, for the norm of superiority in the Roman system remained a cultural-class attribute. The basic distinction was Roman citizenship, and gradually this was extended to all free-born persons in the municipalities of the empire. Slaves came from every province, and there was no racial distinction among them. cox There is really no need to go on quoting. The same general picture is true of all the societies, slave and non-slave, from the Roman empire down to the discovery of America - in the barbarian invasions into Europe, which led to enslavement of whites, in the reign of the Moslems, in the era of political domination by the Catholic Church. There were divisions, discriminations and antagonisms of class, cultural, political and religious character, but none along race or color lines, at least none that have left any serious trace in the historical materials now available. As late as the middle of the fifteenth century, when the West African slave trade to Portugal first began, the rationalization for the enslavement of Negroes was not that they were Negro but that they were not Christian. Those who became Christians were freed, intermarried with the Portuguese and were accepted as equals in Portugal. Afterward, of course, when the slave trade became a big business, the readiness of a slave to convert to Christianity no longer sufficed to gain his emancipation. Why did race prejudice develop in the capitalist era when it did not under the earlier slave systems? Without thinking we have in any way exhausted the subject, we make the following suggestion: In previous times the slaves were usually of the same color as their masters; both whites and Negroes were masters and slaves; in the European countries the Negroes formed a minority of the slave population. The invidious connotations of slavery were attached to all slaves, white and Negro. If under these conditions the notion of Negro 'inferiority' occurred to anyone, it would have seemed ridiculous on the face of it; at any rate, it could never have received any social acceptance. But slavery in the Americas became confined exclusively to Negroes. 24 The Negro was distinguished by his color, and the invidious connotations of slavery 24

Footnote by Breitman: Slavery was not confined to Negroes at the beginning. Before the Negro slave on the plantations, there was the Indian slave and the white indentured ser-

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could easily be transferred to that; it was inevitable that the theory of Negro 'inferiority' and that anti-Negro prejudice should be created, that they should be extended to other non-white people who offered the possibility of exploitation, and that they should be spread around the globe. Thus anti-Negro prejudice was not born until after capitalism had come into the world. There are differences of opinion as to the approximate birthdate. M.F. Ashley Montagu, discussing the 'modern conception of "race,"' says: 'Neither in the ancient world nor in the world up to the latter part of the eighteenth century did there exist any notion corresponding to it ... A study of the cultures and literatures of mankind, both ancient and recent, shows us that the conception of natural or biological races of mankind differing from one another mentally as well as physically, is an idea which was not born until the latter part of the eighteenth century', or around the French Revolution. (Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race). Cox says that ifhe had to put his finger on the year which marked the beginning of race relations, he would select 1493-94 - when the Pope granted to Catholic Spain and Portugal jurisdictional control over, and the right to exploit, all of the (predominantly non-white) heathen people of the world and their resources. He sees 'nascent race prejudice' with the beginning of the slave trade: 'Although this peculiar kind of exploitation was then in its incipiency, it had already achieved its significant characteristics'. However, he finds that 'racial antagonism attained full maturity' only in the second half of the nineteenth century. Whichever century one chooses, the point is this: Anti-Negro prejudice was originated to justify and preserve a slave-labor system that operated in the interests of capitalism in its pre-industrialist stages, and it was retained in slightly modified form by industrial capitalism after slavery became an obstacle

vant. But Negro slave labor proved cheaper and was more plentiful than either of these, and eventually they were abandoned. The most satisfactory study of this question is in the excellent book by Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 1944 Williams writes: 'Here, then, is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had to do not with the color of the laborer, but the cheapness of the labor. As compared with Indian and white labor, Negro slavery was eminently superior ... The features of the man, his hair, color and dentifrice, his "sub-human" characteristics so widely pleaded, were only the later rationalizations to justify a simple economic fact: that the colonies needed labor and resorted to Negro labor because it was cheapest and best. This was not a theory, it was a practical conclusion deduced from the personal experience of the planter. He would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labor. Africa was nearer than the moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India and China. But their turn was to come'.

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to the further development of capitalism and had to be abolished. Few things in the world are more distinctly stamped with the mark of capitalism. The implications of this fact are so plain that it is no wonder it has received so little attention in the schools and press of a country dominated by capitalists and their apologists. Anti-Negro prejudice arose out of the needs of capitalism, it is a product of capitalism, it belongs to capitalism, and it will die when capitalism dies. We who are going to participate in the replacement of capitalism by socialism, and who have good reason to be curious about the first stages of socialism, because we will be living in them, need have no fear about the possibility of any extended lag with respect to race prejudice. Unlike the capitalist system that dominated this country after the Civil War, the socialist society will be free of all exploitative features; it will have no conceivable use for race prejudice, and it will consciously seek to eradicate it along with all the other props of the old system. That is why race prejudice will wither away when capitalism dies just as surely as the leaf withers when the tree dies, and not much later.

CHAPTER 4

Dissensions Paul Le Blanc

We have noted that Leon Trotsky's 1937 analysis of the approaching Second World War was remarkably prescient on a number of points - but in regard to the wartime and postwar prospects of the Fourth International there was an optimism that some have referred to as revolutionary fatalism. The founding document of the Fourth International composed by Trotsky in 1938 proclaimed: 'Workers - men and women - of all countries, place yourselves under the banner of the Fourth International. It is the banner of your approaching victory!' 1 The 1940 resolution 'Imperialist War and the Proletarian Revolution', written for an emergency conference of the Fourth International, projected revolutionary opportunities in the USSR and in Western Europe. In the former, the resolution asserted that 'the epoch of great convulsions upon which man kind has entered will strike the Kremlin oligarchy with blow after blow, will break up its totalitarian apparatus, will raise the self confidence of the working masses and thereby facilitate the formation of the Soviet section of the Fourth International'. In reference to Western Europe, it emphasized: 'War ... speeds up enormously the political development. Those great tasks which only yesterday seemed long years, if not decades away, can loom up directly before us in the next two or three years, and even sooner.... The Fourth lnternational's program of transitional demands, which seemed so "unreal" to nearsighted politicians, will reveal its full significance in the process of the mobilization of the masses for the conquest of state power'. 2 The SWP, in its great majority, continued to adhere to this perspective from 1941 through 1946. We have seen that the Cannon leadership was even inclined to envision for the postwar period 'the coming American revolution'. While this revolutionary optimism coincided with a significant uptick in recruitment among workers (including significant numbers of black workers), amid a postwar strike wave characterized by remarkable militancy and considerable success, other trends, going in a very different direction, were perceived by a pessimistic minority led by Albert Goldman and Felix Morrow. Others drawn to this

1 2

Trotsky 1974a, p. 112. Trotsky 1973b, pp. 201-2, 220.

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current were the business manager of the Militant and of the party's theoretical magazine, Lydia Beidel; Trotsky's former secretary Jean Van Heijenoort (living in New York since 1939 ); and the well-known novelist James T. Farrell who, while not a member, had been publicly aligned with the SWP from its beginning, and with Trotsky before that. 3 While this minority strongly favored a reunification of us Trotskyists arguing that this was justified by the anti-war position taken by both the SWP and Max Shachtman's Workers Party- it was also increasing inclined to see the SWP as somewhat less democratic, more dogmatic, and less realistic politically than Shachtman's group. Ironically, there was a small but vibrant current in the Workers Party, the 'Johnson-Forest tendency' headed by C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, which was drawing the opposite conclusion - attracted especially to the revolutionary optimism articulated in Cannon's 'The Coming American Revolution'. The analyses of the wartime and postwar realities advanced by Morrow, supplemented by Van Heijenoort, turned out to be more accurate than that of the majority. As Peter Jenkins has put it, Morrow sought to 'replace the revolutionary fatalism' of his factional opponents 'with a political practice adequate to the problems posed by the survival, and stren9thenin9, of reformism following the war', perceiving the revival of Stalinist and social-democratic parties in wartime Europe which 'made the expected revolutionary outcome of the war unlikely'. 4 The realism of this analysis, however, was not the only factor in the dissension of the Goldman-Morrow group. The question of reunifying Trotskyist forces was certainly an issue - but while Goldman and a few others quite simply walked out of the SWP to join the Workers Party, Morrow disagreed with this act and remained until he was expelled for indiscipline in 1946. But there was another factor stressed in a discussion of Lydia Beidel by a young comrade who had known her in the Chicago branch of the swP: 'in general she was a fine woman, she left with the group around Goldman - she was obviously an old-timer ... and she was just tired. When people are tired they often develop all sorts of ... reasons other than the fact that they're tired .... [S]he had been

3 Farrell's involvement in this, and his subsequent de-radicalization, Is laid out in Wald 1978, pp. 125-31, as is his fictional put-down of an alcoholic Cannon: 'the Lenin of America if he hadn't drunk whiskey' (Wald 1978, p. 140 ). 4 Jenkins 1977. In addition to material presented here, see the extensive collection of documents 'The Fourth International During World War II (and immediately afterwards)', in the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL), available at: https://www.marxists.org/history/ etol/document/fi/1938-1949/ww /index.htm (accessed 6 June 2016).

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through all of the wars [on the Left]. They were terribly demoralized- a couple of them participated in the Shachtman group ... but most of them just dropped out of politics ... they were just tired'. 5 Although starting off with the claim that they were defending and utilizing the Trotskyist, Leninist, and Marxist method, principles and traditions from the vulgarization and rigidities presumably represented by the Cannon leadership, the central figures of the Goldman-Morrow group quickly abandoned all of this. In a talk he gave (soon becoming an article published under a pseudonym in Partisan Review), Van Heijenoort repudiated the ideas that had linked him to Trotsky, explaining that the central premise of the Communist Manifesto had proved false: The proletariat is no longer what it was in 1848: a new star just emerging into sight over the horizon. For a hundred years now, its course has shown what it is capable of, but also, unfortunately, what it has been unable to accomplish .... A century now lies behind us, and experience has turned in its verdict. The political capacity of the working classes has revealed itself as a never-ending capacity for being 'betrayed'.... Stalinism is after all only the most monstrous link in a chain of bankruptcies .... The end of the Second World War, out of which no movement emerged to indicate that the proletariat was yet fit for power, has, I believe, conclusively invalidated the fundamental hypothesis of Marx ... 6 After a year and a half, Goldman and Farrell would break from Shachtman's Workers Party in order to support the us government's Cold War anti-Communist policies. As Farrell put it in a letter to Goldman: The simple and blunt fact of the matter is that nothing stands in the way of the Stalinization of Europe but American power. The motives of the American capitalists in opposing Stalinism are not your motives and they

In addition to the article by Goldman presented here, see Goldman 1947. On Beidel, see YouTube inteiview with Frank Fried. A more detailed and political critique of the GoldmanMorrow group (consistent, however, with Fried's characterization) can be traced in the collection of writings and speeches in Cannon 1977 and 1975. 6 Vannier 1948, pp. 289, 291, 292, 293. An account by left-wing art critic Meyer Schapiro of the meeting at which Van Heijenoort gave his talk is summarized in Wald 1987, p. 285: 'Van Heijenoort had not carefully examined the subject presented in the paper but had coldly and haughtily claimed to have been let down by the working class'. While like-minded friends vociferously applauded, some like Schapiro were stunned. 'Shachtman was in attendance but was too astounded to speak'. 5

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are not my motives. But for you and I, for thousands and millions of others, the question concerning Stalinism is a matter of actual survival. For the American capitalists, in effect, it's the same issue. It is for different reasons, but it is a question of survival.7 Such was the reasoning of a large number of anti-Stalinist intellectuals and one-time revolutionary Marxist activists who from the late 1940s through the 1950s abandoned the struggle for socialism and 'chose the West' in the Cold War confrontation that dominated the American Century. While Farrell became a leading figure in the Congress of Cultural Freedom (established with covert assistance from the Central Intelligence Agency), Morrow and Goldman simply dropped out of public political activity, while quietly assisting the c IA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the anti-Communist crusade. As Goldman commented in 1952, in a security hearing that cleared him of his 1941 Smith Act conviction (and which made it possible for him to practice law once again): 'If I were younger ... I would gladly offer my services in Korea or especially in Europe where I could do some good fighting the Communists'. 8 While also responding to disappointed hopes amid the intensifying pressures of the Cold War, the Johnson-Forest tendency introduced dissensions in the SWP that represented a qualitatively different perspective. Far from being demoralized, their disappointment came from the failure of the SWP to live up to the optimistic commitments represented in Cannon's 'The Coming American Revolution' and with the growing demoralization within the SWP after 1947, as well as the very low level of Marxist understanding which they perceived as dominant within the party. All of this flowed from what the]ohnsonForest group saw as a theoretical dead-end represented by Trotsky's own theoretical perspective, which they had transcended through an immersive study of Hegel and through the development of the theory that what existed in the USSR was merely a variant of capitalism - what they termed 'state capitalism'. Seeing the Cold War as a competition between various forms of capitalism, they viewed both the Social-Democratic and Stalinist wings of the labor movement as not representing the genuine interests of the workers but instead the interests of one or another of the competing capitalist elites. Yet intensifying exploitation and alienation of the working class - which continued to be an incredibly diverse, dynamic and creative force - continued to be fed by crisis-

7 Wald 1987, pp. 256-7. 8 Wald 1987, pp. 287-8. For a classic elaboration of this position from anther ex-Trotskyist, see Macdonald 1970, pp. 197-200.

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ridden capitalism in all its forms, and this had explosively revolutionary implications globally, with which the Johnson-Forest group was eager to connect.9 The abrupt 1951 exit of the Johnson-Forest group startled the SWP majority and was attributed to the belief that the tendency was essentially a cult organized around the brilliant and charismatic C.L.R.James, whose party name was J.R.Johnson. As Cannon later recounted: The cult followed Johnson, not simply for his theory of the Soviet Union other people have that theory; a lot of people in the world have that theory about 'state capitalism'. The Johnsonites were personal cultist followers of Johnson as a Messiah; and when he finally gave the signal for them to jump out of this party for reasons known only to himself, but allegedly because of some personal grievance he imagined, of which they had no knowledge and which they had just heard about, they all left the party at the same hour, Eastern Standard Time. 10 While there is certainly evidence to suggest that this was an aspect of the reality, there is also ample material presented in the documents here to indicate that serious theoretical-political differences were involved in the walk-out. As it turned out, the realities proved more complex and problematical than the Johnson-Forest tendency had anticipated - leading to a split, two years later, which resulted in the Marxist-Humanist group led by Raya Dunayevskaya (Forest) and the Facing Reality group led by James (which subsequently split again and finally dissolved). In contrast to much of the Goldman-Morrow group, however, the ideas and many of the individuals associated with the Johnson-Forest tendency continued to be a force on the Left for many years to come. 11

9

10 11

For a more general survey and analysis, see Le Blanc 2017.James is well served by a number of biographical studies, including Buhle 1988, Worcester 1996, and Rosengarten 2008. Cannon 1973, p. 185. Worcester 1996, pp. 83-144; Rosengarten 2008, pp. 62-84; Boggs, Boggs, Paine, Paine 1978, pp. 281-7; Webb 2003, pp. 237-49, 267,269, 281-4, 287-9; Gogol 2004.

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CHAPTER 4

The Political Position of the Minority in the SWP (May1945) Felix Morrow

[Editors' Note, Fourth International, May 1945:12 The following article by Comrade Morrow deals with the controversial issues which arose during the preconvention discussion and which then came before the Eleventh Convention of the Socialist Workers Party. In this article, which is published for the information of our readers, Comrade Morrow presents his own views and position. For the position of the SWP majority we refer our readers to the December 1944 issue of Fourth International which carried the European resolution adopted by the Convention and the editorial article The Eleventh Convention of the American Trotskyist Movement; and also to E.R. Frank's The Imperialist War and Revolutionary Perspectives, which appeared in the February 1945 issue of our magazine.] In the December Fourth International there appeared an article by the editors, The Eleventh Convention of the American Trotskyist Movement. One of its sections was entitled Convention Minority. It proceeds from the correct statement that the minority had its origin at the party plenum of October 1943 where a dispute arose over the plenum resolution. But what actually were the issues in dispute at the plenum; what happened to those issues in the course of the dispute; to what extent the majority and minority had arrived at a common position by the time of the November 1944 convention - on these, the really important questions, the editors of Fourth International have not a word to say. Nor do they help the reader by their choice of documents which they publish in the same issue. The reader is told that the minority 'took issue with the resolution' on The European Revolution and the Tasks ofthe Revolutionary Party. In actual fact, however, this resolution in its final form was voted for by the minority. Instead, the reader is left with the impression that the final convention resolution of November 1944 represents only the position of the majority,

12

Morrow 1945.

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while side by side with it is published, as representing the position of the minority, my December 1943 criticism of the October 1943 plenum resolution. True, my article of December 1943 is relevant to a complete understanding of the dispute. But my article is relevant when one reads it in conjunction with the October 1943 plenum resolution which it criticized; it belongs to that stage of the dispute. Without a word of explanation, however, the December 1944 issue of Fourth International counterposes my 1943 article to the final convention resolution of November 1944! The reader is not told that this resolution of a year later does not repeat the errors which I objected to in the 1943 plenum resolution. Thus the puzzled reader finds me complaining about things which he does not find in the final convention resolution. What is going on here? the reader must wonder. He is provided with an answer by the article of the editors and by the speech in the same issue of Comrade Frank, reporter for the National Committee. These two items tell the reader that behind the minority's ostensible position lie far more deep-going differences: the minority has 'an exaggerated appraisal of the role of bourgeois democracy and its potentialities', a false economic theory on which it bases this appraisal, it thinks us imperialism has 'inexhaustible powers', it has been fooled by the democratic veneer of the imperialists, etc. etc.

What the Real Disputes Were

The three principal issues in dispute at the October 1943 plenum, and their final fate, should have been outlined in the article of the editors which purported to describe the dispute. It is now necessary to do this. 1. The theory of 'Franco-type gavemments' as the sole method to be employed by us imperialism and the European bourgeoisie in ruling Europe. On this the

minority stated: 'That the draft plenum resolution erred in excluding the possibility of the use of bourgeois-democratic methods by the European bourgeoisie and its American imperialist masters; they would in all probability attempt to stem the European revolution not only by the use of military and fascist dictatorships but also where necessary by the use of bourgeois democracy'. A few sentences from the minority amendments along this line were included in the final text of the plenum resolution, but side by side with them remained the contrary view of the majority's main formulations. In September 1944 the Political Committee issued its draft resolution on the same subject for the coming Eleventh Convention: this again enunciated the theory of 'naked military dictatorship' as the Allies' sole 'pattern' for ruling Europe. The minority offered amendments to delete this theory. Until the very eve of the conven-

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tion the Political Committee stood its ground. But then it presented a series of 'clarifying and literary amendments' which deleted the formulations on this question which the minority had proposed to delete. Thus came substantial agreement between majority and minority on this question. 2. The failure of the Political Committee to say one word, in its draft plenum resolution, about the method of democratic and transitional demands, le., the method ofwinning the majority of the workers and peasants to the revolutionary party. Amendments to rectify this omission were introduced by the minority. Instead of accepting them, the Political Committee introduced into the final plenum resolution the statement that the 1938 Program of the Fourth International 'makes clear the value and necessity, as well as the limitations and subordinate character, of democratic slogans as a means of mobilizing the masses for revolutionary action'. This formulation was confusing because (1) it did not affirm the method of democratic and transitional slogans - the method includes both and does not counterpose one to the other - as the method of winning a majority of the masses and (2) it appeared to minimize the role of democratic demands in the coming period in Europe. Hence the dispute on this question continued after the plenum. The Political Committee a year later corrected its position substantially, when its draft convention resolution dropped the plenum resolution's characterization of 'the limitations and subordinate character' of democratic demands and instead spoke of a 'bold program of transitional and democratic demands' as the method 'to rally the masses for the revolutionary struggle'. The one concrete democratic slogan proposed by the minority- for Italy: immediate proclamation of the democratic republic -was rejected by the majority; but the resolution took no position on the question. All that is in the final resolution is the formally correct generalization on the role of democratic and transitional demands. So far as the resolution is concerned, therefore, nothing remained in it of the original dispute on this question. 3. The third important dispute which originated at the October 1943 plenum was formulated as follows by the minority: 'That the draft resolution erred in minimizing the Stalinist danger; we must recognize that the victories of the Red Army have temporarily strengthened the prestige of Stalinism; and we must, therefore, include in the resolution a warning of the very real danger of Stalinism to the European revolution'. Rejecting this view, the majority persisted in repeating in the final plenum resolution its original formulations: a whole section on 'The Significance of the Soviet Victories' which saw in them only progressive consequences; and a condemnation of 'defeatists' who 'foresee only a repetition of the Spanish events in Stalin's political maneuvers in Europe' whereas the majority proclaimed 'the vast differences in conditions between

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the Spanish revolution and the coming European revolution'. But a year later the Political Committee had to retreat; its September 1944 draft convention resolution abandoned the formulations of the plenum and - as the minority had originally proposed - warns of the 'unmistakable danger signals that Stalin is prepared to repeat his hangman's work in Spain on a continental scale'. Thus this dispute, too, was resolved.

The Alleged Disputes Are the Imperialisms 'Equally Predatory'? Not a word about all this appears in the December article of the editors of Fourth International. Instead it lists 'three main flaws' in my 1943 article and thereby conveys the impression that these 'flaws' were the issues in the dispute. Actually these 'flaws' were secondary details. But since the editors make so much of them, it is necessary to examine them. 1) The contention that American imperialism is less predatory in character than German imperialism; that 'this difference between the two great imperialisms aspiring to subjugate Europe is based on the difference in the economic resources of the two'; and that therefore 'it is quite false' to refer to them as 'equally predatory'. The editors thus quote my phrase that the two imperialisms are not 'equally predatory', but take good care not to try to refute me on the real question I had posed: is it not a fact that us imperialism is employing very different methods than Nazi imperialism in Europe? I had written:

1

Hence it is quite false when the plenum resolution, without distinguishing between the long-term and short-term perspectives, says: 'Europe, today enslaved by the Nazis, will tomorrow be overrun by equally predatory Anglo-American imperialism.' Equally imperialist, yes, but not 'equally predatory.' One could permit oneself such language loosely in an agitational speech; but it has no place in a plenum resolution, which should provide a coldly precise estimate of the different methods which are being employed by different imperialisms. Instead of politically grappling with the different methods of the two imperialisms, the editors of Fourth International pick out the one phrase about not 'equally predatory'. Very well, let us examine it. The robbery and looting practiced by Nazi imperialism we all know about: outright confiscation of Jewish property; dismantling and shipping factories

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and machinery to Germany; looting of gold stores and art treasures, etc. Nazi oppression, too, we know about the cremation plants, the mass executions of hostages, totalitarian rule, mass deportations and forced labor, etc. Are the Allies doing the same in Italy and France? Obviously not. Call the Allies' rule, if you will, predatory, robbing and looting. But you cannot call it 'equally predatory' as that of the Nazis. If you call it that, as the majority has insisted on doing, it makes us look ridiculous to the world which knows better.

2a

2)

Why Bourgeois Democracy?

From this appreciation of the 'less predatory' character of American imperialism, Morrow proceeds to construct his theory that the European masses will in the period ahead fall prey to illusions centering around the character and role of us imperialism. He contends that these illusions will persist because: Unlike Nazi occupation, American occupation will be followed by improvement in food supplies and in the economic situation generally. Where the Nazis removed factory machinery and transportation equipment, the Americans will bring them in. These economic contrasts ... cannot fail for a time to have political consequences. On this double foundation of a 'short-time' improvement in European living standards and the consequent reinforcement of bourgeois democratic illusions, Morrow greatly exaggerates the role of bourgeois democracy in Europe. This description of my position makes it seem that I stated that bourgeois democracy would have a role in Europe solely as the result of 'illusions centering around the character and role of us imperialism'. One has only to tum to the minority's plenum and convention amendments to see that this is not so. The majority originally based its denial of the possibility of bourgeois democracy primarily on the subjective aims (methods) of the Allies: 'The Allies will not sanction the slightest democracy', etc. Thus the majority failed to understand that the subjective aims (methods) of the ruling classes change under the impact of the class struggle. The minority, on the other hand, followed a different method. It saw an evolution toward bourgeois democracy in Europe as the objective resultant of the class struggle and of the struggle between the contending capitalist classes. The Allies may not desire this objective resultant, the working class may and in fact strives for something more, nevertheless this is the objective resultant of the conflict among the various forces at this stage.

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Factor No. 1 for us was the struggle of the European proletariat and its objective effect on the state power. That was the factor we began with, and not the aims of us imperialism. With the collapse of fascism and the rise of the masses again to their feet, the question of what is to come can only be answered in terms of the situation of the revolutionary Marxist parties in the various European countries. Trotsky said more than once that the collapse of fascism could be followed by the socialist revolution only under the condition that great mass revolutionary parties had managed to form themselves under the extraordinarily difficult conditions of fascism; otherwise one would first have a period of bourgeois democracy. No such mass revolutionary parties exist yet. The struggle of the masses is limited by the fact that it still accepts the leadership of the reformist parties. The objective resultant is bourgeois democracy. Another factor making for bourgeois democracy is the resistance of a section of the French capitalist class, led by de Gaulle, to us domination. There was much indignation at the plenum, notably from Comrade Cannon, when I defined the Gaullists as a bourgeois-democratic tendency. The majority could not understand this quite simple phenomenon, that a section of the French capitalist class, first to resist German imperialism and then to resist us domination, was for a period basing itself on the masses through the mediation of the reformist parties. Even as late as the December Fourth International we have the speech of Comrade Frank which defines the present French government as a military dictatorship; fortunately, the final convention resolution has nothing in it about de Gaulle at all, so that Frank's statement cannot claim convention ratification. In sum, the minority saw an evolution toward bourgeois democracy as the objective resultant of 1. the rising struggle of the proletariat; 2. the limitations of that struggle due to the present hegemony of the Stalinists and Social Democrats and the smallness of the Fourth International parties; 3. the resistance of French imperialism, supporting itself on the masses, to us domination; 4. the ability of us imperialism to shift from methods of military dictatorship to bourgeois democratic methods under the given conditions; 5. the pressure of the us and British masses in opposition to imposition of dictatorships. These were the factors we saw making for bourgeois democracy and not 'illusions centering around the character and role of us imperialism'. Nevertheless such illusions do exist among the European masses, due precisely to the methods employed by us imperialism different from those of Nazi imperialism.

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2b Why the us WilLAidEurope I am told that the majority leaders made speeches in the branches against Morrow's outrageous theory that us imperialism was going to feed and reconstruct Europe. That, of course, was not my thesis; I said that us imperialism would bring goods and machinery whereas the Nazis took these things away. Can this seriously be denied? On the question of American food to Europe, the minority introduced the following amendment:

The Allies have not stopped talking about the sending of food to Italy. They try by that to save the remnants of hope in their benevolence. No doubt, when the Italian masses return to their offensive, this talk may materialize in a precipitated sending of food. Food will become, as it has often been in the past, a counter-revolutionary weapon, a means of blackmail against revolution and a tool to revive confidence in the bourgeois system. Isn't this ABC Marxism? Then why was the amendment rejected? Can the majority comrades seriously deny that the concentration of shipping for military purposes has been a cause of small food shipments and that when this eases much more food will be sent? Even leaving aside the fact that us imperialism will be forced to send food and machinery to Europe in order to back the European bourgeoisie against the danger of proletarian revolution, is there any reason why us imperialism would not make large loans for food and machinery (not to mention selling the goods and being paid in gold, art treasures, materials, etc.)? Comrade E.R. Frank thinks there is such a reason: 'Wall Street wants not the rebuilding of European economy, but to render impossible its revival as a competitor'. False in this is the inference, from Wall Street's hostility to competitors, that it will not help them rebuild. Since when has any capitalist nation refused to sell and lend to another because that would eventually result in the latter becoming a competitor? That is simply one of the contradictions of capitalism. Trotsky never said that America would not sell or lend heavy machinery to the European countries. It was not in this way that he thought of America as ruining Europe. He knew very well that it was with the aid of America's 1924-1928 loans that German industry was reconstructed and that this could happen again after the next war, if not in Germany itself, then certainly in other countries of Europe. Simultaneously, however, with its loa1_1s to Germany, us imperialism was spreading everywhere so that when German industry was reconstructed it found its possible markets preempted by American and other

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imperialisms. America was aiming to put Europe 'on rations', said Trotsky, in the sphere ofworld markets.

One must understand the elementary distinction between America lending Europe money and materials to help rebuild its industrial plant and then America barring the reconstructed industries from returning to a large part of their former markets. Comrade E.R. Frank thinks it can't happen again. He says:

If it was possible for American imperialism to stabilize European capitalism after the last war by loans on the basis of a bourgeois-democratic regime in Germany, then today American imperialism sees as its only program the dismemberment and destruction of Germany as an economic power and the preservation of capitalism with its own bayonets propping up dictatorial regimes. Why is it no longer possible for us imperialism to make big loans, if not to Germany, then to the other European countries? Comrade Frank says it isn't possible, but gives no reasons. He finds it well-nigh incredible that I should write: 'The short-term perspective is that American imperialism will provide food and economic aid to Europe and will thus for a time appear before the European masses in a very different guise than German imperialism'. What is wrong with my statement? He says: 'Morrow apparently took for good coin some of the stories floating around about building TVA's on the Danube'. This joke shows that Comrade Frank fails completely to understand the distinction between helping Europe rebuild and barring it from markets. Both to save Europe from revolution and to keep American factories going, us imperialism will help Europe rebuild its industrial plant. But it will keep Europe 'on rations' so far as permitting Europe to retrieve its former markets. And without these markets, Europe is condemned to ruin under capitalism. Had the editors thought of these elementary considerations, they could never have objected to my statement that 'Where the Nazis removed factory machinery and transportation equipment, the Americans will bring them in'.

3

The Question of Ultra-leftism

Finally, we come to the third 'major flaw' in my article: 3) The contention that 'the main danger within the Fourth International lies in the direction of ultra-leftism'.

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How did the question of ultra-leftism arise in the first place? I tell this in my article of December 1943: In the plenum discussion, a number of supporters of the draft resolution justified its passing over the problem of democratic demands, and its preoccupation with reiterating programmatic fundamentals, by referring to the danger within the Fourth International of opportunism and revisionism. In answer, I stated in part: The young parties of the Comintem suffered primarily not from opportunism but from ultra-leftism. It was against this tendency that Lenin in 1920 wrote 'Left-Wing' Communism - an Infantile Disorder. If, despite the tremendous prestige of the victorious Bolsheviks, the Comintem was so pervaded by ultra-leftist deviations, the same phenomenon is far more likely to confront the Fourth International at the end of the war. I confess that it would never have occurred to me that anyone in our movement would take issue with this statement. Our parties in Europe are young parties. Even where, as in France, there is some continuity with the past, the leading cadres are decimated and new and inexperienced elements must provide leadership. All I was saying, then, is that ultra-leftism is an infantile disorder. The only practical conclusion I drew is that we must warn our European comrades of the necessity of a program of democratic and transitional demands. This practical conclusion is at last accepted by the majoritywhich then proceeds to attack me for the entirely incidental references to the danger of ultra-leftism! The majority arguments on this score are truly astonishing. 'It is far more correct', Comrade Frank lectures me, 'to say that in the period of revolutionary rise the main danger comes from the opportunist direction. Consider Lenin's own party. In 1917 .. .' etc. But I was talking about young, infant parties just beginning to make their way; and Comrade Frank refutes me by telling us about the opportunism of Zinoviev and Kamenev on the eve of the Bolshevik seizure of power! He then proceeds to enumerate some examples of opportunism in the Comintern parties in 1919 and 1920. True. But the same period was also full of ultra-leftist errors: the one kind does not exclude the other, except in the head of Comrade Frank. Finally, this crushing argument from Comrade Frank: 'It was only at the Third Congress of the Comintern, after the first wave of the revolutionary tide had already passed, that the struggle was first launched against the ultra-leftist danger'. The Third Congress took place June 22-July 12, 1921. But Lenin's 'Left Wing' Communism - an Infantile Disorder is dated April 27, 1920 and was expli-

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citly issued to prepare the discussion at the Second Congress which took place July-August 1920, i.e., in the period of revolutionary rise. Arguing for democratic demands, I referred to the danger of ultra-leftism. There should not have been a moment's disagreement with my truism. But this discussion ends, according to the editors of Fourth International, with nothing less than a convention rejection of my 'theory' of ultra-leftism! The same is true of the other two 'main flaws' found in my article by the editors: they are not rejected by the convention resolution for the good and sufficient reason that they were not the real issues in dispute. And the real issues in dispute were no longer in dispute by the time of the final resolution, because the majority had abandoned its original positions. That is why the minority could vote for the resolution. Such are the indisputable facts which the editors failed to report in what purported to be a summary of the nature and results of the dispute.

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2

Minority Statement on Joining the Workers Party (1946)

Albert Goldman

Dear Comrades: Our leaving one Trotskyist group, the Socialist Workers Party, and joining another Trotskyist group, the Workers Party, requires an explanation for the advanced workers of this country and all other countries.13 Ours is a group composed largely of comrades with ten to fifteen years of service in the Trotskyist movement. We left the Socialist Workers Party because it rejected our proposal for unity of the two Trotskyist groups. We joined the Workers Party because it accepted our proposal for unity. We left the SWP because in rejecting unity, and in using, the most dishonest methods to do so, the leaders of that party clearly indicated that what they want to build is not a revolutionary Marxist party, a Bolshevik party, but a monolithic party. We joined the Workers Party because the leaders and members of that party want to build the kind of a party we are interested in building - a living, thinking revolutionary socialist party. The Minority (in the swP) had a sharp political difference with the Majority at the party convention of 1944. The Majority, basing itself on the proposition that we are living in an epoch of imperialist wars and proletarian revolutions, denied the importance of democratic demands for the European countries. The Minority, accepting the same basic premise, insisted on the great importance of democratic demands as a means of mobilizing the European masses against the capitalists, Stalinists and Social-Democrats. But it never entered the mind of any comrade in the Minority to leave the party because of that difference.

13

Goldman1946.

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We had sharp differences with the Majority on minor organizational questions. They were important only because the position of the Majority on those minor organizational questions indicated the existence of a Stalinist trend on the part of the Majority with reference to the nature of the party. An article which was clearly a build-up of Cannon was permitted in the Fourth International; a letter by comrade Goldman mildly criticizing the tendency to leaderworship evidenced in that article, and insisting that leader-worship is hostile to the tradition of Bolshevism, was refused publication. A letter written by James T. Farrell criticizing articles that appeared in the Fourth International was refused publication. The Minority protested vigorously. Four comrades were censured by the Majority for organizing a discussion with members of the Workers Party on the Russian question. The Minority objected, declaring that to prevent members from discussing with opponents was a characteristic of Stalinism, and was completely alien Trotskyism. It was the dishonest attitude of the Majority on the unity question, an attitude that clearly revealed the Majority's monolithic conception of the party, that is the fundamental cause of our decision to leave the party. A subsidiary cause was the refusal of the Majority to permit the Minority to politically fraternize with thewP [Workers Party].

The Minority's Argument for Unity ofwp and SWP

The Minority raised the question of unity after the SWP recognized that the defense of the Soviet Union was no longer an important question, and that the defense of the European Revolution against Stalin was far more important. True, we always accepted the position that differences on the nature of the Soviet Union or the defense of the Soviet Union do not justify a split. But it was only natural that the end of the war, which brought the necessity of defending the European Revolution against the Stalinist army, should have turned our attention to the question of unity. On the question of the defense of the European Revolution against Stalin the two parties had an identical position. The position of the Minority on the question of unity was simple indeed. The two parties had the same fundamental program for the overthrow of capitalism; they carried on approximately the same agitation on the important immediate questions. Why not unite? Why continue a split that weakens the Trotskyist movement? Why have two parties with two weekly agitational organs, with two monthly theoretical magazines, with enormous duplication of effort and with resulting confusion created in the ranks of the advanced workers?

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There are of course differences, but a Bolshevik party without differences is inconceivable. The Minority had no hesitation in saying that the differences were compatible with membership in one party. The Minority did not propose immediate unity. It proposed that the two parties go on record in favor of unity and proceed to joint work in the trade unions, to joint election campaigns, to joint anti-fascist campaigns - all for the purpose of preparing the parties for unity. It was necessary to eliminate the personal animosities resulting from the sharp factional struggle of 1940. Common work in the interest of the working class would show whether unity was possible without the danger of a factional struggle immediately following the unification. Without the slightest hesitation the leaders of the majority rejected the proposal for unity. Cannon, when confronted with the resolution, stuck to his line previously enunciated: 'We must deepen the split'. He had encouraged the SWP members to consider the WP members as 'renegades', and unity with 'renegades' was out of the question. His first and honest reaction to the proposal of unity was a definite 'no'.

WP

Declares Itself Clearly for Unity

The WP, on the other hand, accepted the proposal of unity. The leader of the Majority claimed that the acceptance was only a maneuver, that in reality the WP wanted to enter to prepare another split. On the face of it the claim is absurd. The WP comrades were willing to give up their organization and their public press; they were willing to submit to the discipline of the Majority. To do that in order to unite with a small party in the hope of making a bigger split would not enter the minds of the most inexperienced people. And the WP is led by experienced revolutionists. The Minority was absolutely convinced of the sincerity of the WP comrades in accepting the proposal for unity for there is only one test: readiness to accept unity. And the WP so committed itself. Because the WP accepted the proposal, Cannon could not continue with an open opposition to unity. He shifted his ground from open and honest opposition to a shifty, dishonest one. Whereas at first he took the position that there was nothing to discuss, that the press of the WP gave us all the information we needed, he began a farce of insisting on a 'thorough discussion and probing of the differences'. As a decisive objection to unity, the Majority leaders cited the fact that the WP insisted on publishing its own internal party bulletin after unity, something that every group has a right to do in a Bolshevik party. To remove that pretext

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the Minority requested the WP to promise not to publish its own organ provided the Majority recognized the right of a minority to publish an internal bulletin if it so desires. The WP consented, but the Majority in no way changed its mind. The Minority became convinced that the real motive of the Cannon clique in opposing unity was the fear of having in the ranks of a united party a large number of revolutionists who would not blindly follow the leader, that Cannon and his clique want to build a monolithic party. It was this conviction that led the Minority to state: either unity or we belong with the WP. It was this conviction that led the Minority to launch upon a course of political fraternization with the WP in disregard of the policy of the Majority which considered the WP comrades to be 'renegades'.

Minority Rejects SWP Ban on Fraternization

To the charge that we were violating the principle of democratic centralism we answered: that principle is a means to build a revolutionary party; when it is used to prevent unity of revolutionists it is used in a criminal manner. Under the circumstances, the Minority refused to abide by the policy of the Majority against political fraternization with the WP. The Minority was confronted with the question whether to leave the party immediately or remain in the party and continue fraternizing with the WP. For a time we followed the latter course since that enabled us to exhaust all possibilities for achieving unity and it was unity that we wanted above everything else. We chose a most difficult course, and followed it until it became absolutely certain that we could not have unity. The fakery of a discussion with the WP was continued when the Political Committee of the SWP issued a list of questions for 'discussion'. The list included all the possible differences - major and minor, past and present - for the obvious purpose of confronting an inexperienced membership with the statement that there are too many differences for unity to be practicable. The fact that the fundamental anti-capitalist program of the two parties is the same; the fact that in day to day agitation of the parties there is a great similarity if not identity; the fact that the WP expressed its willingness to abide by the decision of the Majority on those questions where there were differencesall that was completely ignored. After the death of Trotsky, Cannon is bold enough to introduce completely dishonest methods as a substitute for political arguments!

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Responsibility for Split Rests on Cannon Clique

When, at the last meeting of the National Committee, a warning was given ·the Minority to give up its course of political fraternization with the WP with the threat of expulsion if the Minority refused, it became evident that it was useless to remain in the party. Characteristically enough, Cannon accused the Minority of 'disloyalty'. What was essentially a political question he, in the manner of a policeman, transformed into a question of disloyalty. There can be no criticism of a majority expelling a minority that refuses to abide by the decision of the majority; but honest and understanding Trotskyists do not pursue the method of Stalinism and then raise accusations of disloyalty. Upon the shoulders of the Cannon clique rests the responsibility of the continuation of a tragic division of forces in the American Trotskyist movement. It is responsible for perpetuating the split in the American Trotskyist movement. The comrades of the SWP Minority, in joining the WP, do not give up the platform of unity. Together with the other comrades of the WP they are ready to unite the Trotskyist forces. It is entirely up to the Cannonite clique. To the question as to why we chose to leave the SWP instead of continuing the struggle we answer: Since there is another Trotskyist party in existence led by comrades who have our point of view on the nature of a revolutionary party, it is far more fruitful for us to join that party and help build it than to waste our efforts in constant factional struggle with opponents who are not interested in honest discussion but in mere distortion and name-calling. Until unity is achieved we shall be in the WP helping to build a revolutionary party without a trace of Stalinism. In the WP we shall work to effect [unity of] the two Trotskyist organizations. And we call upon our comrades who have remained in the SWP to continue their fight for unity. We appeal to all unaffiliated revolutionists to join the party of unity, the Workers Party. Join the Workers Party with us! Join us in building the kind of party that led the Russian masses to victory in 1917. ALBERT GOLDMAN,

for the SWP Minority.

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3

303

State-Capitalism and the World Revolution (Excerpts, September 1950)

Johnson-Forest (C.L.R.James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Grace Lee)

Introduction14

In 1940 the theory ofTrotskyism seemed founded on a rock. Today, August 4th, 1950, this is the situation in the world Trotskyist movement. 1. The 'irresponsible' RC P [Revolutionary Communist Party] of Great Britain and a powerful and very responsible minority ofus Trotskyists claim that the states in Eastern Europe are workers' states. Pablo's latest position is indistinguishable from theirs. 2. A great majority now accept Yugoslavia, hitherto denounced as a capitalist, totalitarian police-state, as a workers' state. 3. The cornerstone of Trotskyist policy for nearly twenty years, that the nationalization of industry alone gave Russia the claim to be a workers' state, is now vigorously denied; though what then makes it a workers' state is impossible to see because the Transitional Program says that politically the Stalinist state does not differ from the Fascist state 'save in its more unbridled savagery'. 4. Those who are opposed to the states in Eastern Europe being considered workers' states denounce the theory as based upon exceptional circumstances and say, rightly, that conclusions would have to be drawn for the whole world. When asked to explain how nationalization took place without the proletarian revolution, these bitter opponents of any theory of exceptional circumstances do not hesitate to reply that the nationalizations were due to exceptional circumstances. But one of their number, Germain, generalizes the theory of exceptional circumstances, and declares that the property relations can be overturned without permitting us to conclude that what we have is a workers' state.

14

Johnson-Forest 1950.

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Pablo declares: (a) Stalinist parties can under exceptional circumstances lead a proletarian revolution. This destroys the historical necessity of the Fourth International. (b) We must be prepared to have degenerated workers' states for centuries. This means either that some capitalism (actually American capitalism) will last for that time; or that all proletarian revolutions will be betrayed. To this pro-Stalinist, liquidationist tendency, now months old, there is no resistance. Under the impact of the events of 1940-50 the theory of the Fourth International is in chaos. Concretely the Majority and the Minority are now engaged in an unrestrained attempt to establish the closest possible alliance with the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (cPY). To this 'Johnson-Forest' are opposed and attribute the action to the prevalence in the International, implicit and explicit, of the ideas expressed by Pablo.

5.

The Johnson-Forest' Tendency All tendencies inside world Trotskyism, sharp as the differences may be, have been united in adherence to the fundamental theory of the permanent revolution; in maintaining the traditions of Bolshevism; in irreconcilable opposition to all other tendencies in the labor movement. The ideas put forward by 'Johnson-Forest' originate in that common heritage and have no other purpose than to bind us together in the achievement of our aims. 'Johnson-Forest' have abstained almost totally from the Yugoslav discussion and now enter it only to the degree that it is a part of the preparation for definitive decisions. We ask that our views, however far-reaching, be considered on their merits. We believe that we have earned the right to such a hearing, and more so because in the death-agony of capitalism, the chief spokesman of the Fourth International has called into question the validity of Marxism for our epoch. We have to mention this because all positions, even Pablo's, claim, and no doubt sincerely, to be interpreting and bringing up to date the basic ideas of Trotsky. We are not doing that. Our position is that the chaos in the International is due to the fact that Trotsky's method of analysis and system of ideas are wrong, and that the chaos in the International will continue to grow until a new system is substituted for the present one. We are very conscious of the fact that for this system of ideas which we claim must be discarded, thousands have died, and that by it many now living have shaped their lives. But the class position of the proletariat is involved the moment you reach the question of defensism or defeatism.

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As long as this was confined to Russia, there was no urgent necessity to draw what was implicit to its conclusions. But today the question involves half of Europe and half of Asia, that is to say, the whole world.

What Is Stalinism?

Trotsky's Analysis The first, the basic, the indispensable task of a revolutionary international is to define correctly the working class organization it proposes to overthrow. In this task the failure of orthodox Trotskyism is complete. The Transitional Program asserts: 'The definite passing over of the Comintern to the side of the bourgeois order .. .'. Later the same document says: 'The Third International has taken to the road of reformism .... The Comintern's policy ... demonstrates that the Comintern is likewise incapable of learning anything further or of changing'. In the December, 1938, issue of the New International we read why: 'Ten years ago it was predicted that the theory of socialism in one country must inevitably lead to the growth of nationalist tendencies in the sections of the Comintern. This prediction has become an obvious fact .... Today we can predict with assurance the inception of a new stage. The growth of imperialist antagonisms, the obvious proximity of the war danger and the equally obvious isolation of the USSR must unavoidably strengthen the centrifugal nationalist tendencies within the Comintern. Each one of its sections will begin to evolve a patriotic policy on its own account. Stalin has reconciled the communist parties of imperialist democracies with their national bourgeoisies .. .' (Emphasis in original.) In the last pages of The Draft Program of the Comintern can be seen the prediction that Stalin's theory of socialism in one country would lead the Comintern to disintegration into national sections, like the Social-Democracy on August 4th, 1914. This is the theory from 1929 to 1938, absolutely clear and absolutely wrong. It is precisely this question, this and no other which, since the end of World War 11, has crippled the French party. To this day the International does not know whether the Chinese Stalinists are enemies of the Chinese bourgeoisie or collaborators with it. At the World Congress in 1948 those in Europe who held our views moved that the quoted sections be deleted from the Transitional Program. The motion was voted down. Trotsky, basing himself on the experience of 1914-1918, believed that there were two fundamental political currents in the world working class movement. One was reformism, the Second International, based upon private property, the defense of the national state, enemy of the proletarian

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revolution. The other was revolutionary, based upon or fighting for stateproperty, repudiating the national state, advocate and defender of the proletarian revolution. Between them were various brands of centrism. Upon these premises he saw the bureaucracy in Russia as centrist, and inevitably headed, as all bureaucracies, for the restoration of private property. That is why the Transitional Program says: The fascist, counter-revolutionary elements, growing uninterruptedly express with ever greater consistency, the interests of world imperialism. These candidates for the role ofcompradors consider, not without reason, that the new ruling layer can insure their positions of privilege only through rejection of nationalization, collectivization and monopoly of foreign trade in the name of the assimilation of 'Western civilization,' i.e . ... capitalism. Between these two poles, there are intermediate, diffused Menshevik-sR-liberal tendencies which gravitate toward bourgeois democracy. (Emphasis added.) p.48

And a little later: 'From them, i.e., from the right, we can expect ever more determined attempts in the next period to revise the socialist character of the USSR and bring it closer in pattern to "Western civilization" in its fascist form'. (pp. 49-50.) Again at the World Congress it was moved to delete this from the Program. This was voted down. Two years after the World Congress Pablo has come to a decision. When he says that we have to make up our minds to deal with degenerated workers' states for centuries, he is saying that the bureaucracies in Eastern Europe are organically attached to the state-property forms, that they perform a function in production, and this is a form of economy superior to capitalism. The same applies to the Russian bureaucracy, parent and sponsor of the satellite bureaucracies. This, we have to admit, is Trotskyism, logical and complete. Pablo leaves out only the one thing that Trotsky did not leave out, namely, that if this were so, then Marxism is Utopia.

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The Analysi.s of Johnson-Forest' 'Johnson-Forest' repudiate all this, theory, practice and methodology. We base our analysis on the theory of state-capitalism. It is commonly believed that this has mainly to do with defeatism or defensism of Russia. That is the least of our concerns. This is the position of Johnson-Forest': (a) As the Social-Democrats were the labor bureaucracy of monopoly capitalism, the Stalinists are the labor bureaucracy of the period of 'vast statecapitalist trusts and syndicates'. (b) The Stalinists are not class-collaborationists, fools, cowards, idiots, men with 'supple spines', but conscious clear-sighted aspirants for worldpower. They are deadly enemies of private property capitalism. They aim to seize the power and take the place of the bourgeoisie. When they support a war or do not support, support the bourgeoisie or do not support, they know exactly what they are doing. The bourgeoisie also knows. In fact everybody, including most workers, knows this, except orthodox Trotskyism. (c) But the Stalinists are not proletarian revolutionists. They aim to get power by help, direct or indirect, of the Red Army and the protection of Russia and the Russian state. That is the reason why they follow the foreign policy of the Kremlin - it is sheer naked self-interest. (d) Theirs is a last desperate attempt under the guise of 'socialism' and 'planned economy' to reorganize the means of production without releasing the proletariat from wage-slavery. Historical viability they have none; for state-ownership multiplies every contradiction of capitalism. Antagonisms of an intensity and scope so far unknown already have Stalinism in their grip. Power merely brings these into the open. (e) The dilemma of the Fourth International is that it has to recognize that there now exists a labor bureaucracy which is the enemy of private property and national defense and yet is counter-revolutionary. The Fourth International cannot escape this decision: if the destruction of private property and the repudiation of national defense are revolutionary, then Stalinism is revolutionary and there is no historical need for a Fourth International. (f) These are the questions with which the theory of state-capitalism deals. The theory is not primarily concerned with defensism or defeatism in Russia, about which we can do little. We are primarily concerned here with what the refusal to accept this theory does to the party, its solidarity, its capacity to fight its enemies, its capacity to preserve itself and to grow, in brief, to prepare the liquidation of Stalinism....

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The Class Struggle

The Stalinist theory is, despite zigzags, logical, and consistent, like every theory of all exploiters it is the theory of the rulers, the result of their struggle with the direct producers whom they exploit, and of competition with other rulers. The theory justifies Stalinist exploitation of the Russian workers. It can be used as a weapon against the traditional bourgeoisie in the struggle for the domination of the world working class movement without impairing the position of the rulers inside Russia. It fortifies this position in the minds of the public which is interested in these questions and the members and fellow-travellers of the Stalinist parties. The theory itself is an adaptation of the pre-Marxian petty-bourgeois ideology from Kant to Sismondi and Proudhon to the specific conditions of statecapitalism. That we shall go into later. But then as now its purpose can be summed up in a phrase the radical reorganization of society with the proletariat as object and not as subject, i.e., with no essential change in the mode of labor. The crisis of world capitalism, a hundred years of Marxism, thirty years of Leninism, impose upon this theory, as a primary task, the need to destroy and to obscure the theory of class struggle in the process of production itself, the very basis of Marxism and of the proletarian revolution. The Stalinists did not arbitrarily 'choose' this theory. Politics on the basis of the analysis of property is of necessity the struggle over correct policy and the correction of 'evil'. Social division, if not rooted in classes, automatically becomes a selection of personnel. The criterion not being a criterion of class becomes automatically a criterion according to competence, ability, loyalty, devotion, etc. This personnel, comprising many millions, the Stalinists have enshrined in the 1936 constitution under the name of 'our socialist intelligentsia'. The most competent, the most able, most loyal, most devoted, the elite become the party. The instrument of the party is the state. The corollary to disguising the rulers of production as 'our socialist intelligentsia' is the Stalinist denunciation of bureaucracy as inefficiency, red tape, rudeness to workers, laziness, etc. - purely subjective characterizations. The Bureaucracy in Industry

The first task of the revolutionary International is clarification of this term, bureaucracy. The Stalinists take advantage of the fact that Marx often used the term, bureaucracy, in relation to the mass of state functionaries. But with the analysis of state-capitalism by Engels, the word bureaucracy began to take on a wider connotation. Where Engels says 'Taking over of the great institutions

DISSENSIONS

309

for production and communication, first by joint-stock companies, later on by trusts, then by the State', he adds: 'The bourgeoisie demonstrated to be a superfluous class. All its social functions are now performed by salaried employees'. (Socialism, Utopian and Scientifi,c, p. 138.) These are bureaucrats. The moment Lenin saw the Soviet, the new form of social organization created by the masses, he began to extend the concept, bureaucracy, to include not only officials of government but the officials of industry, all who were opposed to the proletariat as masters. This appears all through State and Revolution and, in its most finished form, in the following: We cannot do without officials under capitalism, under the rule of the bourgeoisie. The proletariat is oppressed, the masses of the toilers are enslaved by capitalism. Under capitalism democracy is restricted, cramped, curtailed, mutilated by all the conditions of wage-slavery, the poverty and misery of the masses. This is why and the only reason why the officials of our political and industrial organizations are corrupted - or more precisely, tend to be corrupted by the conditions of capitalism, why they betray a tendency to become transformed into bureaucrats, i.e., into privileged persons divorced from the masses and superior to the masses. This is the essence of bureaucracy, and until the capitalists have been expropriated and the bourgeoisie overthrown, even proletarian officials will inevitably be 'bureaucratized' to some extent. Lenin's whole strategic program between July and October is based upon the substitution of the power of the armed masses for the power of the bureaucrat, the master, the official in industry and in politics. Hence his reiterated statement that if you nationalize and even confiscate, it means nothing without workers' power. Just as he had extended the analysis of capitalism, to statecapitalism and plan, Lenin was developing the theory of class struggle in relation to the development of capitalism itself. This strengthened the basic concepts of Marxism. Marx says: The authority assumed by the capitalist by his personification of capital in the direct process of production, the social function performed by him in his capacity as a manager and ruler of production, is essentially different from the authority exercised upon the basis of production by means of slaves, serfs, etc. Upon the basis of capitalist production, the social character of their production impresses itself upon the mass of direct producers as a strictly

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regulating authority and as a social mechanism of the labor process graduated into a complete hierarchy. This authority is vested in its bearers only as a personification of the requirements of labor standing above the laborer. Capital, Vol. III, p. 1027

This is capitalist production, this hierarchy. The special functions are performed 'within the conditions of production themselves by special agents in opposition to the direct producers'. (p.1025). These functionaries, acting against the proletariat in production, are the enemy. If this is not understood, workers' control of production is an empty phrase. With the development of capitalism into state-capitalism, as far back as 1917, Lenin, in strict theory, denounced mere confiscation in order to concentrate his whole fire upon the hierarchy in the process of production itself, and to counterpose to this, workers' power. It thus becomes ever more clear why the Stalinists in their theory will have nothing whatever to do with state-capitalism and rebuke and stamp out any suggestions of it so sharply. The distinction that Lenin always kept clear has now developed with the development of capitalism over the last 30 years. It has now grown until it becomes the dividing line between the workers and the whole bureaucratic organization of accumulated labor, science and knowledge, acting against the working class in the immediate process of production and everywhere else. This is the sense in which the term bureaucracy must be used in Russia. A Higher Social Organization ofLabor It is upon this Leninist analysis that the theory of state-capitalism rests, and inseparable from this theory, the concept of the transition from social labor as compulsion, as barracks' discipline of capital, to social labor as the voluntary association, the voluntary labor discipline of the laborers themselves. Lenin in 'The Great Beginning' theoretically and practically wrote an analysis of labor in Russia which the development of society on a world scale during the last 30 years, now raises to the highest position among all his work on Russia. This must be the foundation of a Marxist approach to the problems of economics and politics under socialism. In that article Lenin did two things: (a) Established with all the emphasis at his command that the essential character of the dictatorship of the proletariat was 'not violence and not mainly violence against the exploiters'. It was the unity and discipline of the proletariat trained by capitalism, its ability to produce 'a higher social organization of labor'.

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311

(b) Analyzed the Communist days of labor given to the Soviet state and sought to distinguish the specific social and psychological characteristics of a new form of labor, and the relation of that to the productivity of labor. With all its mighty creations of a Soviet state and Red Army, and the revolution in the superstructure, it is here that the Russian socialist revolution could not be completed. The 'historical creative initiative' in production, the 'subtle and intricate' relations of a new labor process these never developed for historical reasons. But there has been a vast development of capitalism and of the understanding of capitalism all over the world since the early days of the Russian Revolution. The British Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Stalinist bureaucracy, the whole capitalist class in the us (and in the us more than anywhere else) all declare that the problem of production today is the productivity of labor and the need to harness the human interest, i.e., the energy and ability of the worker. Many of them are aware that it is the labor process itself which is in question. What they see partially, contemporary Marxism must see fully and thereby restore the very foundations of Marxism as a social science. It is in the concrete analysis of labor inside Russia and outside Russia that the Fourth International can find the basis of the profoundest difference between the Third International and the Fourth International. The whole tendency of the Stalinist theory is to build up theoretical barriers between the Russian economy and the economy of the rest of the world. The task of the revolutionary movement, beginning in theory and as we shall see, reaching to all aspects of political strategy, is to break down this separation. The development of Russia is to be explained by the development of world capitalism and specifically, capitalist production in its most advanced stage, in the United States. Necessary for the strategic task of clarifying its own theory and for building an irreconcilable opposition to Stalinism, it is not accidental that this method also is the open road for the revolutionary party to the socialism inherent in the minds and hearts, not only of the politically advanced but the most backward industrial workers in the United States. It is for this reason that the analysis of the labor process in the United States must concern us first and only afterwards the labor process in Stalinist Russia.

The Mode ofLabor in the United States Roughly, we may attribute the decisive change in the American economy to the last part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century, taking 1914 as a convenient dividing line. After World War I the Taylor system, experimental before the war, becomes a social system, the factory laid out for

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continuous flow of production, and advanced planning for production, operating and control. At the same time there is the organization of professional societies, management courses in college curricula and responsible management consultants. Between 1924 and 1928 there is rationalization of production and retooling (Ford). 15 Along with it are the tendencies to the scientific organization of production, to closer coordination between employers, fusion with each other against the working class, the intervention of the state as mediator and then as arbiter. For the proletariat there is the constantly growing subdivision of labor, decrease in the need of skills, and determination of the sequence of operations and speed by the machine. The crisis of 1929 accelerated all these processes. The characteristic, most advanced form of American production becomes Ford. Here production consists of a mass of hounded, sweated labor (in which, in Marx's phrase, the very life of society was threatened); and opposed to it as a class, a management staff which can carry out this production only by means of a hired army (Bennett) of gangsters, thugs, supervisors who run production by terror, in the plant, in the lives of the workers outside production, and in the political control of Detroit. Ford's regime before unionization is the prototype of production relations in fascist Germany and Stalinist Russia. But - and without this, all Marxism is lost - inextricably intertwined with the totalitarian tendency is the response of the working class. A whole new layer of workers, the result of the economic development, burst into revolt in the cw. The CIO in its inception aimed at a revolution in production. The workers would examine what they were told to do and then decide whether it was satisfactory to them or not. This rejection of the basis of capitalist economy is the preliminary basis of a socialist economy. The next positive step is the total management of industry by the proletariat. Where the Transitional Program says that the 'cw is the most indisputable expression of the instinctive striving of the American workers to raise themselves to the level of the tasks imposed upon them by history;' it is absolutely correct. The task imposed upon them by history is socialism and the outburst, in aim and method, was the first instinctive preparation of the social revolution. Because it was not and could not be carried through to a conclusion, the inevitable counterpart was the creation of a labor bureaucracy. The history of production since is the corruption of the bureaucracy and its transformation

15

Footnote by Johnson-Forest Tendency: A similar process in Germany led straight to

Hitler.

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313

into an instrument of capitalist production, the restoration to the bourgeoisie of what it had lost in 1936, the right to control production standards. Without this mediating role of the bureaucracy, production in the United States would be violently and continuously disrupted until one class was undisputed master. The whole system is in mortal crisis from the reaction of the workers. Ford, whose father fought the union so uncompromisingly as late as 1941, now openly recognizes that as far as capitalism is concerned, improvements in technology, i.e., the further mechanization of labor, offers no road out for the increase of productivity which rests entirely with the working class. At the same time, the workers in relation to capitalism resist any increase in productivity. The resistance to speed up does not necessarily mean as most think that workers are required to work beyond normal physical capacity. It is resistance by the workers to any increased productivity, i.e., any increase of productivity by capitalist methods. Thus, both sides, capital and labor, are animated by the fact that for each, in its own way, the system has reached its limit. The real aim of the great strikes in 1946 and since is the attempt to begin on a higher stage what was initiated in 1936. But the attempt is crippled and deflected by the bureaucracy, with the result that rationalization of production, speed up, intensification of exploitation are the order of the day in industry. The bureaucracy inevitably must substitute the struggle over consumption, higher wages, pensions, education, etc., for a struggle in production. This is the basis of the welfare state, the attempt to appease the workers with the fruits of labor when they seek satisfaction in the work itself. The bureaucracy must raise a new social program in the realm of consumption because it cannot attack capitalism at the point of production without destroying capitalism itself. The series of pension plans which have now culminated in the five-year contract with General Motors is a very sharp climax of the whole struggle. This particular type of increase in consumption subordinates the workers to production in a special manner after they have reached a certain age. It confines them to being an industrial reserve army, not merely at the disposal of capital in general but within the confining limits of the specific capitalist factory which employs them. The effect, therefore, is to reinforce control both of employers and bureaucracy over production. But along with this intensification of capitalist production and this binding of the worker for five years must go inevitably the increase of revolt, wildcat strikes, a desperate attempt of the working class to gain for itself conditions of labor that are denied to it both by the employers and the labor bureaucracy. While the bureaucracy provides the leadership for struggles over consumption, it is from the workers on the line that emerges the initiative for struggles over speed up. That is precisely why the bureaucracy, after vainly trying to stop wild-

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cat strikes by prohibiting them in the contract, has now taken upon itself the task of repressing by force this interruption of production. It expels from the unions workers who indulge in these illegal stoppages, i.e., who protest against the present stage of capitalist production itself. The flying squads, originated by the union for struggle against the bourgeoisie, are now converted by the bureaucracy into a weapon of struggle against the proletariat, and all this in the name of a higher standard of living, greater consumption by the workers, but in reality to ensure capitalist production. The increase of coercion and terror by the bureaucracy increases the tendency of the workers to violent explosion. This tendency, taken to its logical conclusion, as the workers will have to take it, means the reorganization of the whole system of production itself - socialism. Either this or the complete destruction of the union movement as the instrument of proletarian emancipation and its complete transformation into the only possible instrument of capital against the proletariat at this stage of production. This is the fundamental function of the bureaucracy in Russia. Already the tentative philosophy of the bureaucracy in the United States, its political economy of regulation of wages and prices, nationalization and even planning, its ruthless political methods, show the organic similarity of the American labor bureaucracy and the Stalinists. The struggle in the United States reveals concretely what is involved in the Stalinist falsification of the Marxist theory of accumulation, etc., and the totalitarian violence against the proletariat which this falsification protects. In the recent coal strikes, despite the wage and welfare gains of the miners, the heads of the operators declared that control of production had been restored to them by the two-year contract. C.E. Wilson, president of General Motors, hailed the five-year settlement as allowing the company 'to run our own plants', and as 'the union's complete acceptance of technological progress'. Reuther hailed the G.M. settlement as a 'tremendous step forward' in 'stabilizing labor relations at G.M.'. An editor of Fortune magazine hailed the contract as the harbinger of 'new and more meaningful associative principles' with the corporation as 'the center of a new kind of community'. The Stalinist bureaucracy is the American bureaucracy carried to its ultimate and logical conclusion, both of them products of capitalist production in the epoch of state-capitalism. To reply to this that the bureaucracy can never arrive at maturity without a proletarian revolution is the complete degradation of Marxist theory. Not a single Marxist of all the great Marxists who analyzed state-capitalism, not one ever believed capitalism would reach the specific stage of complete centralization. It was because of the necessity to examine all its tendencies in order to

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be able to mobilize theoretical and practical opposition in the proletariat that they followed the dialectical method and took these tendencies to their conclusions as an indispensable theoretical step. In the present stage of our theory it is the scrupulous analysis of production in the United States as the most advanced stage of world capitalism that forms the indispensable prelude to the analysis of the labor process of Russia.

The Mode ofLabor in Russia The Russian Revolution of October 1917, abolished feudalism with a thoroughness never before achieved. The stage was therefore set for a tremendous economic expansion. Lenin sought to mobilize the proletariat to protect itself from being overwhelmed by this economic expansion. The isolated proletariat of backward Russia was unable to do this. The subsequent history of the labor process of Russia is the telescopic re-enactment of the stages of the process of production of the United States; and, added to this, the special degradation imposed upon it by the totalitarian control of the bureaucracy and the plan. The Russian Revolution in 1917 substituted for the authority of the capitalist in the factory the workers' control of production. Immediately there appeared both the concrete development of self-initiative in the factory and the simplification of the state apparatus outside. There was workers' control, with some capitalists as owners, but mere owners. Production conferences, not of bureaucrats but of workers, decided what and how to produce. What capitalists there remained seemed to vanish into thin air once their economic power was broken, and workers' control was supplemented the following year by nationalization of the means of production. The red thread that runs through these first years of workers' rule, workers' control, seems to suffer a setback under war communism in general and with order 104216 in particular. It takes less than a year for the workers to force a

16

Footnote by Johnson-Forest Tendency: This was the order issued in the attempt to get the completely disorganized railroad system to function. The railroads were placed under almost military rule, subordinating the ordinary trade union democracy to 'Chief Political Departments' which were established in the railway and water transport workers' unions. As soon as the critical situation had been solved, the transport workers demanded the abolition of the 'Chief Political Departments' and the immediate restoration of full trade union democracy.

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change, and the all-important trade union debate of 1920 follows. Lenin fights successfully both Trotsky, the administrator, and Shlyapnikov, the syndicoanarchist, and strives to steer a course in consonance with the Declaration of the Rights of the Toilers, that only the masses 'from below' can manage the economy, and that the trade unions are the transmission belts to the state wherein 'every cook can be an administrator'. Stalinism in the Russian Factory In the transition period between 1924 and 1928 when the First Five-Year Plan is initiated, the production conferences undergo a bureaucratization, and with it the form of labor. There begins the alienation of mass activity to conform to specified quantities of abstract labor demanded by the plan 'to catch up with capitalism'. The results are: (a) In 1929 ('The year of decision and transformation') there crystallizes in direct opposition to management by the masses 'from below' the conference of the planners, the engineers, economists, administrators; in a word, the specialists. (b) Stalin's famous talk of 1931 'put an end to depersonalization'. His 'six conditions' of labor contrasted the masses to the 'personalized' individual who would outdo the norms of the average. Competition is not on the basis of creativity and Subbotniks,17 but on the basis of outstanding individual (read: bureaucrat) who will devise norms and have others surpass them. (c) 1935 sees Stakhanovism and the definitive formation of an aristocracy of labor. Stakhanovism is the pure model of the manner in which foremen, overseers and leadermen are chosen in the factories the world over. These individuals, exceptional to their class, voluntarily devote an intensity of their labor to capital for a brief period, thus setting the norm, which they personify, to dominate the labor of the mass for an indefinite period. With the Stakhanovites, the bureaucratic administrators acquire a social base, and alongside, there grows the instability and crisis in the economy. It is the counter-revolution of state-capital. (d) Beginning with 1939 the mode of labor changes again. In his report on the Third Five-Year Plan, Molotov stressed the fact that it was insufficient to be concerned merely with the mass of goods produced. The crucial point for 'outstripping capitalism' was not the mass but the rate at which

17

Footnote by Johnson-Forest Tendency: Subbotniks were the workers who on their own initiative volunteered to work five hours' overtime on Saturdays without pay in order to help the economy of the workers' state. From the word Subbota, meaning Saturday.

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317

that mass was produced. It was necessary that per capita production be increased, that is to say, that each worker's productivity be so increased that fewer workers would be needed to obtain an ever greater mass of goods. Intensity of labor becomes the norm. During the war that norm turned out to be the most vicious of all forms of exploitation. The Stalinists sanctified it by the name of 'socialist emulation'. 'Socialist emulation' meant, firstly, that the pay incentive that was the due of a Stakhanovite was no longer the reward of the workers as individuals, once they as a mass produced according to the new raised norm. In other words, the takehome pay was the same despite the speed up on a plant-wide basis. Secondly, and above all, competition was no longer limited to individual workers competing on a piecework basis, nor even to groups of workers on a plant-wide basis, but was extended to cover factory against factory. Labor Reserves are established to assure the perpetuation of skills and a sufficient labor supply. Youth are trained from the start to labor as ordered. The climax comes in 1943 with the 'discovery' of the conveyor belt system. This is the year also of the Stalinist admission that the law of value functions in Russia. We thus have: The Declaration of the Rights of Toilers - every cook an administrator. Abstract mass labor - 'lots' of it 'to catch up with capitalism'. Differentiation within labor - 'personalized' individual; the pieceworker the hero. Stakhanovism, individual competition to surpass the norm. Stalinist Constitution: Stakhanovites and the intelligentsia singled out as those 'whom we respect'. Systematization of piecework; factory competing against factory. 'The year of the conversion to the conveyor belt system'. Whereas in 1936 we had the singling out of a ruling class, a 'simple' division between mental and physical work, we now have the stratification of mental and physical labor. Leontiev's Political Economy in the Soviet Union lays stress not merely on the intelligentsia against the mass, but on specific skills and differentials, lower, higher, middle, in-between and highest. If we take production since the Plan, not in the detail we have just given, but only the major changes, we can say that 1937 closes one period. It is the period of 'catching up with and outdistancing capitalism' which means mass production and relatively simple planning. But competition on a world scale and the

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approaching Second World War is the severest type of capitalist competition for world mastery. This opens up the new period of per capita production as against mere 'catching up'. Planning must now include productivity of labor. Such planning knows and can know only machines and intensity of exploitation. Furthermore, it includes what the Russians call rentabl'nost, that is to say profitability. The era of the state helping the factory whose production is especially needed is over. The factory itself must prove its worthiness by showing a profit and a profit big enough to pay for 'ever-expanded' production. And that can be done only by ever-expanded production of abstract labor in mass and in rate. Nowhere in the world is labor so degraded as in Russia today. We are here many stages beyond the degradation which Marx described in the General Law of Accumulation. For not merely is the Russian laborer reduced to an appendage to a machine and a mere cog in the accumulation of capital. Marx said that the reserve army kept the working laborer riveted to his martyrdom. In Russia, because of the power to plan, the industrial reserve army is planned. Some 15 million laborers are planned in direct forced labor camps. They are organized by the MVD (GPU) for production. The disciplinary laws which began with reduction in wages for coming 15 minutes late have as their final stage, for lack of discipline, 'corrective labor', i.e., the concentration camp. What the American workers are revolting against since 1936 and holding at bay, this, and nothing else but this, has overwhelmed the Russian proletariat. The rulers of Russia perform the same functions as are performed by Ford, General Motors, the coal operators and their huge bureaucratic staffs. Capital is not Henry Ford; he can die and leave his whole empire to an institution; the plant, the scientific apparatus, the method, the personnel of organization and supervision, the social system which sets these up in opposition to the direct producer will remain. Not inefficiency of bureaucrats, not 'prestige, powers and revenue of the bureaucracy', not consumption but capital accumulation in its specifically capitalist manner, this is the analysis of the Russian economy. To think that the struggle in Russia is over consumption not only strikes at the whole theory of the relationship of the superstructure to the productive mechanism. In practice, today, the crisis in Russia is manifestly the crisis in production. Whoever is convinced that this whole problem is a problem of consumption is driven away from Marxism, not toward it.

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319

The Crisis of State-Capitalism It was Marx's contention that the existence of a laboring force compelled to sell its labor-power in order to live meant automatically the system of capitalist accumulation. The capitalist was merely the agent of capital. The bureaucrats are the same. Neither can use nor knows any other mode of production. A new mode of production requires primarily that they be totally removed or totally subordinated. At this point it is convenient to summarize briefly the abstract economic analysis of state-capitalism. We have never said that the economy of the United States is the same as the economy of Russia. What we have said is that, however great the differences, the fundamental laws of capitalism operate. It is just this that Marx indicated with his addition to Capital dealing with complete centralization of capital 'in a given country'. 'A given country' meant one specific country, i.e., the laws of the worldmarket still exist. If the whole world became centralized, then there would be a new society (for those who want it) since the world-market would have been destroyed. Although completely centralized capital 'in a given country' can plan, it cannot plan away the contradictions of capitalist production. If the organic composition of capital on a world scale is 5 to 1, moving to 6 to 1, to 7 to 1, etc., centralized capital in a given country has to keep pace with that. The only way to escape it would be by a productivity of labor so great that it could keep ahead of the rest and still organize its production for use. Such a productivity of labor is impossible in capitalism which knows only the law of value and its consequence, accumulated labor and sweating proletarians. That is precisely why Engels wrote that though formally, i.e., abstractly, complete state-property could overcome the contradictions, actually it could not, the 'workers remain proletarians'. The whole long dispute between underconsumption and rate of profit theorists has now been definitively settled precisely by the experience of Russia. Lenin in 1917 repeated that state-capitalism without the Soviets meant 'military penal labor' for the workers. The Soviet power was the road to socialism. The struggle in Russia and outside is the struggle against 'military penal labor' and for the Soviet power. The revolt which gave birth to the c Io prevented American capital from transforming the whole of American production and society into the system which Ford and Bennett had established. This monstrous burden would have driven capital still further along the road of accumulation of capital, domination over the direct producer or accumulation of misery, lowered productivity, barbarism, paralysis and gangrene in all aspects of society. That was Germany. That would be the plan, the plan of capital, and with state-property it is more free than before to plan its own ruin.

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The totalitarian state in Russia prevents the workers from making their social and political experiences in open class struggle. But by so doing, it ensures the unchecked reign of capital, the ruin of production and society, and the inevitability of total revolution. The decisive question is not whether centralization is complete or partial, heading toward completeness. The vital necessity of our time is to lay bare the violent antagonism of labor and capital at this definitive stage of centralization of capital. Whether democratic or totalitarian, both types of society are in permanent decline and insoluble crisis. Both are at a stage when only a total reorganization of social relations can lift society a stage higher. It is noteworthy that in the United States the capitalist class is aware of this, and the most significant work that is being done in political economy is the desperate attempt to find some way of reconciling the working class to the agonies of mechanized production and transferring its implacable resistance into creative co-operation. That is of educational value and many of its findings will be used by the socialist proletariat. In Russia this resistance is labeled 'remnants of capitalist ideology' and the whole power of the totalitarian state is organized to crush it in theory as well as in fact. We shall see that upon this theoretical analysis the whole strategy of revolutionary politics is qualitatively differentiated from Stalinism, inside and outside Russia. The Stalinists seek to establish themselves in the place of the rival bureaucracy. The rival bureaucracy seeks to substitute itself in the place of Stalinism. The Fourth International must not seek to substitute itself for either of these, not after, not during nor before the conquest of power. Theory and practice are governed by the recognition of the necessity that the bureaucracy as such must be overthrown. The Bureaucratic Administrative Plan We can now come to a theoretical conclusion about the question of plan and with it, nationalization. For the capitalist mode of labor in its advanced stages, the bureaucratic administrative plan can become the greatest instrument of torture for the proletariat that capitalism has yet produced. State-property and total planning are nothing else but the complete subordination of the proletariat to capital. That is why in The Invading Socialist Society we summed up our total theory in two points, the first of which is: I. IT IS THE TASK OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL TO DRIVE AS CLEAR A LINE BETWEEN BOURGEOIS NATIONALIZATION AND PRO-

DISSENSIONS

321

LETARIAN NATIONALIZATION AS THE REVOLUTIONARY THIRD INTERNATIONAL DROVE BETWEEN BOURGEOIS DEMOCRACY AND PROLETARIAN DEMOCRACY,

All theory for our epoch must begin here. But aren't state-property and the plan progressive? State-property as such and plan as such are metaphysical abstractions. They have a class content. Aren't trusts progressive, Lenin was asked in 1916. He replied: It is the work of the bourgeoisie to develop trusts, to drive children and women into factories, to torture them there, corrupt them and condemn them to the utmost misery. We do not 'demand' such a development; we do not 'support' it; we struggle against it. But how do we struggle? We know that trusts and factory work of women are progressive. We do not wish to go backwards to crafts, to pre-monopolist capitalism, to domestic work of women. Forward through the trusts, etc., and beyond them toward socialism! The Bolsheviks and the World War, p. 495

We reply similarly. This is Marxism - the antagonism of classes. Under capitalism, private or state, all science, knowledge, organization, are developed only at the expense and degradation of the proletariat. But at the same time capitalism organizes the proletariat for struggle. We do not 'demand' or 'support' plan. We propose to substitute proletarian power and subordinate plan to the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Where does orthodox Trotskyism stand on this? Every member knows the answer. Nowhere. Its conception of plan is summarized in the slogan in the Transitional Program: 'The plan must be revised from top to bottom in the interests of the producers and consumers'. The capitalist plan cannot be revised except in the interests of capital. It is not the plan that is to be revised. It is the whole mode of production which is to be overthrown. The whole analysis is in terms of (to use the underlined phrases of the Transitional Program) 'social inequality' and 'political inequality'. In The Revolution Betrayed the chapter entitled 'The Struggle for Productivity of Labor' deals with money and plan, inflation, rehabilitation of the ruble. It says that analysis of Stakhanovism proves that it is a vicious form of piecework. But it soon returns to the question of the ruble. And it finally ends on the note that the Soviet administrative personnel is 'far less adequate to the pro-

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ductive tasks than the workers'. Therefore, what is needed is more competence, more efficiency, less red tape, less laziness, etc. If the Russian bureaucracy were more efficient, more scientific, etc., the results for the Russian proletariat would be worse. The chapter 'Social Relations in the Soviet Union' in The Revolution Betrayed deals with the privileges, wages, etc. of the bureaucracy in relation to the workers. Neither in the Transitional Program nor The Revolution Betrayed does analysis of the worker in the production process find any place, except where in the Program the slogan is raised, 'Factory committees should be returned the right to control production'. In the analyses of orthodox Trotskyism there are a few references here and there to creative initiative being needed at this stage. That is all. All the slogans in the Transitional Program do nothing more than demand the restoration of democracy to where it was in 1917, thereby showing that the whole great experience of thirty years has passed orthodox Trotskyism by. World capitalism has moved to the crisis and counter-revolution in production. The program for the reintroduction of political democracy does no more than reintroduce the arena for the reintroduction of a new bureaucracy when the old one is driven out. But, after all, production relations must include somewhere workers, labor, the labor process - the place where the population is differentiated by function. The World Congress Resolution (Fourth Intemational,]une, 1948) quotes from The Revolution Betrayed an elaborate summary by Trotsky of his own position in 1936. The worker in the labor process is not mentioned. The resolution asks: What alterations have to be made in the analysis following the development of the past eleven years? It begins: ' ... the social differentiation is the result of bourgeois norms of distribution; it has not yet entered the domain of ownership of the means of production'. The struggle out of which the c IO was born, the domination of the machine, the drive for greater productivity, what about that? The Orthodox Trotskyist in 1950 would have to reply: the question is not a question of production. It is a question of collective ownership; it is a question of the thieving bureaucracy taking for itself consumption goods which belong to the workers; it is a question of whether the bureaucracy passes laws of inheritance; it is a question in 1950 as it was in 1934 of whether the tendency to primitive accumulation will restore private property, etc., etc. Is this an injustice to Orthodox Trotskyism? If it is, then what would it reply, and where is any other reply to be found?

DISSENSIONS

VI

323

The Theory of the Party

(a) The Stalinist theory and practice of the party is the direct result of the Stalinist conception of Plan. The party consists of the elite, the most efficient, the most loyal, the most devoted, etc. The party mobilizes the proletariat, politically, economically and morally, to carry out the Plan. There is here no parallel with the political parties and politics of capitalist competition and bourgeois democracy. In state-capitalism the state becomes capitalistic in the sense of administration, supervision, control against the proletariat. The party forms the state in its own image, which is the reflection of the productive process of state-capitalism. That was the party of Hitler (despite historical differences), that is the party of Stalin. The Stalinist parties outside Russia function on the same model. Their attitude to the membership and the proletariat is that of an elite leading backward workers. All initiative, policy, direction comes from the Stalinist leaders. Society will be saved if it follows them, defends them, puts its trust in them. Historical circumstances may alter their practice, but in their fundamental conceptions there is no difference whatever between the CP in Russia and the CP in the United States. (b) Upon the basis of its analysis of state-capitalism and Plan, the Leninist party must form its own revolutionary theory of the party. The party is, in Lenin's words, based upon the factory but upon the progressive co-operation aspect of the factory: unity, discipline and organization of the working class, in unalterable opposition to the theory and practice of the elite. Every age has its own specific development of production and its specific social relations. Each separate International has its own separate (and antagonistic) conception of the party which is rooted in its own social base and its conception of its political tasks in relation to that base. Marx's conception of the party in 1848, the way he organized the First International, carefully explained by him; the organization of the Second International which Lenin accepted as sound up to 1914; the organization of the Third International, all were different and show a dialectical progression. Lenin never conceived of a mass party of two and a half million people before the struggle for power. The whole of the Stalinist theory and practice of the organization of the party is based upon the administrative bureaucratic Plan. Conversely, the revolutionary party expands and develops its own theory on the basis of the vast revolutionary upheavals which are stimulated in the proletariat by the structure of state-capitalism. The European proletariat in Italy,

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in France, in Spain, and the American proletariat, have already shown us that from the beginning of the social revolution, the proletariat as a whole will be organized to become the state and to manage production. Here concretely is the embodiment of Lenin's reiterated phrase 'to a man' which was impossible ofrealization in backward Russia in 1917. Not only does the revolutionary proletariat of our age make its tremendous mass mobilizations. The petty-bourgeoisie does the same as in the Nazi party and the almost overnight creation of the French Rally of millions by de Gaulle. The Stalinist leaders aim to control the mass proletarian mobilizations in exactly the same manner as de Gaulle aims to control those of the pettybourgeoisie. The Leninist party in 1950, in practice where it can, but in theory always, must be the expression of the mass proletarian mobilization aimed against the bureaucracy as such. This bureaucracy in Russia, in France and Italy (even where it is in opposition) and in the United States is the embodiment of the Plan of state-capitalism. No question is more important theoretically, not only internally but externally, than this of the relation between party, the state and the Plan. For theoreticians and millions of workers everywhere it is the central question. No substantial section of any society today will die in defense of private property. That today is dead. The question is: can the nationalized property be planned without having as the inevitable consequence the domination of a single party? The popular formulation, one-party state, is absolutely and exactly right. 'Johnson-Forest' have given here the essentials of the answer. (c) What does the Fourth International have to say on this question? It can be summed up in the following: The Stalinists are criminals, opposed to democracy in the party; the Trotskyists are believers in democracy as practiced by Lenin. The history of Trotskyist theory of the party, however, reinforces Stalinism in spite of all its criticism. In 1931 Trotsky believed that 'with the weakening of the party or with its degeneration even an unavoidable crisis in economy can become the cause for the fall of the dictatorship'. What actually took place was the reverse. When the bureaucratic administrative Plan of the ruling class was finally substituted for the planning of the revolutionary proletariat, it was the Bolshevik party that was liquidated. State-property remained. (d) Fifteen years later with the Bolshevik party destroyed, the Fourth International improves upon the original thesis. The World Congress thesis says: 'The political dictatorship today as twenty years ago is decisive in preventing the complete collapse of planning, the breakthrough of the petty-capitalist market, and the penetration of foreign capital into Russia'.

DISSENSIONS

325

'The political dictatorship' is an abstraction. Concretely it is the party of Stalin, the murderers of the Bolshevik Party, the antithesis in every respect of the Bolshevik Party. The theory is false whether it is standing on its head or its feet, and in either form it is useless as a theoretical weapon against Stalinism. (e) Unfortunately, this conception is not confined to Russia. The first sentence of the Transitional Program states that the crisis of the revolution is the crisis of revolutionary leadership. This is the reiterated theme. Exactly the opposite is the case. It is the crisis of the self-mobilization of the proletariat. As we shall show, and it is perfectly obvious logically, this theme of orthodox Trotskyism implies that there is a competition for leadership, and that whereas the other Internationals have betrayed, the Fourth International will be honest. Exactly the contrary must be the analysis. The concept that the whole problem is a problem of revolutionary leadership does not, cannot, upon its political premises, pose on the one hand the Stalinist leadership as clear-sighted, determined leaders with their own theory, program, policy for the enslavement of the proletariat; and opposed to them, ourselves as leaders, not simply 'honest' but with a totally different conception of the role, movement and function of the proletariat. Honesty and dishonesty, sincerity and betrayal imply that we shall do what they, because of 'supple spines', have failed to do. We do not propose to do what they have failed to do. We are different from them in morals because we are different from them in everything, origin, aims, purposes, strategy, tactics and ends. This fundamental antagonism 'Johnson-Forest' derive from the theory of state-capitalism. From the Stalinists' observation of state-capitalism, their conception of the party becomes the essence of bureaucracy, bureaucratic administration, bureaucratic organization, the bureaucratic party. For the Fourth International, on the other hand, it is a matter of life and death, in the analysis of modern economy, to counterpose what has been created by the modern economy, the mass mobilization of the proletariat and sections of the petty-bourgeoisie, as an opposition in form and content to Stalinism and the Social Democracy, and our role as a party in relation to this. To say that all the proletariat needs is revolutionary leadership drowns all differences between us and strengthens their conception of the party. Trotsky at any rate was practiced in the leadership of revolution. The Transitional Program and particularly the conversations preceding it are sufficient indication of his profound comprehension of the mass movement. But as this whole document has shown, he gave it no theoretical basis. He did not relate it to the new stage of world economy. The result is the increased revolutionism of the masses becomes nothing else in the minds of his followers but an increased reaction to the crimes of capitalism, a mass base for leadership.

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The theory as stated has had funereal consequences in our movement. Germain, for example, writes in an exhaustive analysis of the Stalinist parties: 'But despite all that has been revealed about the crimes of the GPU, the large mass of Stalinist workers will continue to follow their Stalinist leaders or will fall back into complete passivity - until the day when the Trotskyist parties can prove to them in practice the superiority of their policy over the policy of Stalinism'. (Fourth International, May, 1947.) In the resolution presented to the World Congress in 1948 by our European co-thinkers, there was pointed out in detail the practical consequences for politics of this conception of the party which constantly appears in the strategy and tactics of the Fourth International, particularly in France. It is the placing of this impossible, this fantastic, responsibility upon the Trotskyist organizations as they are that in the end produces Pablo.

DISSENSIONS

4

327

The Balance Sheet Completed: Ten Years of American Trotskyism (Excerpts, August 1951)

[C.L.R.James]

1

From Revolutionary Marxism to Political Gangrene 18

Johnson Forest' has now made its final and complete break with what the Fourth International of today stands for. We are leaving behind forever the ideas of those who today represent Trotskyism, their unsocialist, anti-proletarian practice and organizational life. For years we loyally stood all of this, bearing in mind constantly the interests of the movement as a whole. But by now things have reached a stage where we have to fly not only from their dehumanized politics but from their social immorality and the personal degeneration and ruin to which this movement is now rapidly reducing members of the organization, from the most highly-placed and long-experienced leaders and functionaries to rank and filers, old and new.... We have formally participated in the discussion that took place during the last period. Our political discussion with the Fourth International has now been completed. What we have to do now is to describe how the 'dehumanized brutes' who could see in the barbarism of Stalinism the road to socialism have pursued the same degenerate politics in the life of the party and in their own political personalities. We call this document The Balance Sheet Completed. In 1947 when we left the WP [Workers Party]. We published a Balance Sheet, dealing ostensibly with the WP but in reality analysing the ideas and practices of all who represented Trotskyism, at home and abroad, organizationally and ideologically. Now after nearly four years in the SWP, we can complete the Balance Sheet. What we have to say is this: there is nothing to choose between these two parties. One is headed towards Menshevism, the other towards Stalinism. But the basic causes of their degeneration, the processes by which it has developed,

18

James 1951, pp.1, 4-6, 11-14, 16-17, 18, 20-4, 32-3, 34-5.

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and the concrete phenomena by which this is expressed are absolutely the same in both parties.... The SWP is the WP over Again We wrote in the Balance Sheet:

The WP has no policy, neither on the character of the epoch nor on the nature of the Stalinist parties nor on American perspectives nor on the Negro question. There is complete 'democracy' - a perfect example of a democratic jungle. But in politics at a given moment it is necessary to say something decisive. The party learns then from Shachtman what the line is and in its uncertainty and confusion must follow. Behind all the anarchistic freedom of speech the one solid political reality is Shachtman's political response at a given moment to political and organizational pressure by which he decides the political line for today. The result is the leader principle and clique politics carried to an extreme degree. p. 18

The SWP has now arrived at the same situation. Their attachment to the organization in and for itself irrespective of politics or principled conduct is all that matters. What is Stalinism, what is Titoism, what is a centrist party, nobody knows. At a given moment the leader decides and the rest follow. We said of the WP in the Balance Sheet: As the petty-bourgeois democrats of all stripes seek to protect the democracy of elections and votes in a world going to pieces, so the pettybourgeois revolutionaries seek frantically to preserve democratically their views and their 'ideological life.' This for them is the party. The swp has now reached the same stage. The same cliquism, the same endless discussion of ideological differences, the same willingness to agree to disagree all these climaxed the retrogressionist politics of the WP. These are now present in full force in the SWP. And, as always, this is called democracy. The objective roots of the degeneration are the same. Basically the world situation today is that there are two great masses of capital competing for world mastery, the USA and the USSR. Each of these has its own labor bureaucracy: the one, the Social-Democracy, the other, Stalinism. Revolutionary politics must oppose both from the basis of the revolutionary proletariat or be continually drawn in one direction or another.

DISSENSIONS

329

We shall show that neither the swP nor the WP sees the proletarian revolution in the us as a realistic possibility. Hence each capitulates to the labor bureaucracy, the one in the form of Reutherism and the other in the form of Stalinism. The WP tries to build the politically organized labor movement around Reuther as an arena in which it can work and grow. As long as it is given the chance to make loud declarations of principle, it will work for Reuther or join any opposition strong enough. The SWP in its own sphere does exactly the same. It seeks in the growing power of Stalinism 'elbow room' in which to find a place for itself. It will join with Titoism which seems able to offer some base. The political tendencies we have long ago defined. The concrete symptoms are new and in their way conclusive. In the Balance Sheet we insisted on page after page that the degeneration of the WP was due to its incapacity to pose to itself the revolution in the United States. But we insisted from the first page to the last that this was an experience of international significance .... We repeated over and over again the phrase: 'De Te Fabula Narratur', i.e. this story being told in reality is about you. We meant to say: we are talking about the WP, but you are going the same way. In our resolution of 1948 we wrote: The World Congress [of the Fourth International] will fail to achieve its elementary tasks if it does not recognize that two dangerous tendencies have penetrated deep into the International. One tendency represented by the I.K.D. [a grouping among the German Trotskyists] and the Shachmanites wavers continuously between the proletarian revolution and an implicit Menshevism. The other, represented by the present French Minority (Geoffroy Tendency) wavers continuously between the proletarian revolution and Stalinism.... The one tendency reflects the power of American imperialism, the other the power of Stalinist Russia. The one tendency is refracted directly into the labor movement through SocialDemocracy, the other through the Stalinist parties. But in the revolutionary movement, both these forces are united in a common fundamental premise - their skepticism and pessimism of the capacity of the proletariat to achieve the international socialist order, sole solution to the universal crisis and the most immediate needs of the masses. It is the struggle against these tendencies around which the World Congress must revolve. We accepted the guidance of the Movement with our eyes open. We tried not to be offensive in tone but we were absolutely clear.

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From this inevitable degeneration we excluded the SWP We praised Cannon's The Coming American Revolution. We quoted from it. We wrote: 'This is the key to the past, the present and the future of the American movement'. (p.23) But that turned out to be a flash in the pan. The degeneration is now complete, the WP to Menshevism and the SWP to Stalinism. The concrete phenomena of degeneration are the same in both parties. This we shall trace to the end. Just as the WP plays with the Social-Democracy, while denouncing American imperialism and the labor bureaucracy, the SWP plays with the Stalinist parties, while denouncing the Russian bureaucracy and the Communist parties. But as we look closely at both these unprincipled maneuverers, it becomes clear that the SWP is infinitely worse. Their so-called defense of Russia is the most shameful and unmitigated dishonesty we have ever seen or heard of in the revolutionary movement. Defense of a workers' state or a colonial country carries with it certain clear-cut and very serious obligations. These hypocritical scoundrels have led a whole movement to disaster, ruined themselves and thousands of revolutionaries, besmirched the principles for which Trotsky fought all his life, all in the name of the defense of Russia and now that the chips are down, they squirm out of the concrete steps in which they ought to educate the party to carry out its tasks. In the WP at any rate there are some who come boldly out for their counter-revolutionary pro-imperialist position. But in the SWP and the whole Fourth International, despite discreet but repeated proddings on our part, there is a common understanding to ignore and repudiate and forget about the practical consequences of their Russian position ...

2

The Trotskyists and the American Question

Let us briefly review our analysis of the WP which we made in 1947. It was an analysis of the WP; but the SWP leaders did not know (so insensitive are they) that in section after section it was intended as a warning not only to the International, but to them. They thought they were being friendly and considerate to us. In reality they were on trial. We had made the experience in the WP and we understood from early that the WP was a section ofTrotskyism in the United States. This is the course of development of the WP: 1. The WP left the SWP in 1940. Its main purpose was to build a mass party in the United States. 2. It attempted to do this by typical Menshevik methods, denunciation of capitalist profits and crimes, immediate demands, and Plenty for All [the

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name of a WP pamphlet describing its vision of socialism] in the future, all based upon the conception of the American proletariat as essentially backward and not ready for the revolution. 3. Its main expectation of revolution was from the European masses. 4. By 1944 it faced, according to its lights, total failure. It recognized that its mass distribution of the paper [the weekly Labor Action] had led nowhere, and that its attempts to build trade union caucuses had backfired. The European revolution did not come. The WP therefore turned to: a) inter-party polemics with the SWP b) on the question of world revolution it turned to the theory of retrogression. By this theory it could look for salvation to the Social-Democracy. c) a sustained attempt to hound 'Johnson-Forest' out of the party. The unity negotiations [with the Socialist Workers Party] were only an interlude. Since then it has continued unchecked its course toward Menshevism. All this we documented fully and completely, and shall refer to only as necessary. In 1946, in detailing the union policies of the WP we gave a specific warning to the SWP: The SWP and the 'small mass party': The 'small mass party' conception is no personal aberration of Comrade Erber [a figure in the Shachtman leadership]. The party must recognize it in essence the result of the political inexperience of the American proletariat and long years of struggle against the usurpation of 'revolutionary' leadership by Stalinism. The party must especially recognize that in rejecting Erber's ideas and particularly their manifestations in the building of the party, it will be doing far more than putting itself on the right road toward building the Bolshevik Party. It will also help to correct the false course of the SWP, and lay the basis for an effective unified organization. The SWP practices the 'small mass party' conception in a form concealed (and to some extent corrected) by its strenuous attempts to adhere to the strategic conceptions of Trotsky. Parallel to its genuine revolutionary temper in propaganda in concrete trade union activity it builds illusions among its membership about its influence in the unions and leading the workers in mass struggles. Only a powerful mass party can attempt to exercise the organizational function of leading workers in dayto-day struggles without (i) succumbing to opportunism, and (ii) having the work of its members swept away by obvious inability to withstand the pressure of the trade union bureaucracy whenever these wish to destroy the influence of the propaganda group.

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The past history of the party (Los Angeles and Philadelphia) show, and the inevitable puncturing of the illusions of the SWP will show, that only a correct conception of its function can save the Fourth International from diverting its precious energies into fruitless and demoralizing channels. Building the Bolshevik Party, pp. 18-19

That was clear enough. We knew then what these wise men were only just beginning to glimpse: 1. The whole attempt to build caucuses and manipulate in the unions would confuse and disorient the membership, sow distrust in those workers looking on, and eventually have to be abandoned. 2. Nothing would save the American party unless it based itself on the proletarian revolution in the United States as a concrete universal, viewed all daily politics as a manifestation of this, and educated itself from top to bottom on this 3. Politically, in the United States, revolutionary politics in our epoch must be based upon the conflict between the masses and the bureaucracy.

The Promise of the American Revolution Cannon's Coming American Revolution was the high point of the SWP. It came after the tremendous strikes of 1945-46. We hailed it, but whoever reads the Balance Sheet can see that we had reservations. We distrusted the theoretical premise of the document. In fact it had none. We saw the American proletariat as part of this specific stage of the development of capitalism. We saw that the line of class demarcation was between the American proletariat and the labor bureaucracy, the bodyguards of capital. For us the bureaucracy did not in any sense represent the proletariat. The proletariat was not backward, but revolutionary. The whole aim and purpose of the bureaucracy was to demoralize the revolutionary character of the proletariat. We are Marxists and therefore sober. We promised the revolution to no one at any time. For us the American Revolution was a strategic perspective, to be constantly deepened theoretically as the proletariat itself developed. We said over and over again and in every conceivable way in the Balance Sheet: 'A revolutionary party in any country lacks sound formulations unless the perspectives of the revolution in that country are the granite foundation of the program and explicit in every branch and shade of its activity'. We called for the Americanization of Bolshevism. We reminded the International of Trotsky's insistence that the American movement particularly must deepen its understanding of and apply the dialectic in the United States. This

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was not theory for the sake of theory, or culture for the sake of broadening the mind, but concrete education for the class struggle. In the United States, above all, to build the party it is necessary for the vanguard to be armed with the theory of sudden violent eruption of creative mass activity. In the Balance Sheet we quoted extensively from our 1944 document Education, Propaganda and Agitation. We mapped out the tasks with regard to Americanization and Internationalization, Americanization and Problems of Modem Culture, Americanization and Historical Materialism, Americanization and Labor, Americanization and Marxian Economics, Americanization and Dialectical Materialism. We knew that either the SWP would see this clearly, do this work and take these steps, or it would be totally lost. It is now lost. If it had this in the us, it would never run after Tito. The party would have risen up against any Titoization of American Bolshevism. But at that time, though our ideas were clear enough, they were abstract. We came in determined to make the experience thoroughly and completely. All this was and is Greek to the SWP. We soon found out that The Coming American Revolution had been taken by the membership and some leaders literally as a promise and as a reward for the 'sacrifices' of which they are so painfully conscious. For them the revolution was on the order of the day. And when it did not come, disillusionment set in. By the fall of 1947 a long mournful wail of a speech by the leader showed clearly in what a superficial sphere of ideas the party, from top to bottom, moved. They had the mental attitude of children who had been promised candy and had been disappointed. They were told to be patient and be good children and the candy would come some day. This was the situation in the SWP when the beacons of hope flared from the colors of Tito's break with Stalin. To us the SWP leadership seemed to go stark raving mad. The public statement that Tito and his Leninism were the greatest things that had ever happened to Trotskyism, the public statement that the dark night of Trotskyism was over and the dawn - Tito - had now appeared, there revealed the morass of helplessness and despair that permeated the cadres of the majority. Here maybe was a way out and with a growing momentum they clutched at it. ... This further paved the way for the leap towards Stalinism. Faced with a similar crisis and not seeing the revolution anywhere, the WP fastened on to retrogressionism and sought a place for itself in the international Social-Democracy. The SWP grabbed on to Stalinism instead. Different as they may appear to be, the root in each case is hopelessness about the proletarian revolution in Europe .... The constant pleading for 'new, young blood' is the best confirmation that such reinforcements are not arriving. The particular tiredness which domin-

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ates the SWP cadres is not from experiencing a revolution which failed. It arises from the total isolation of the SWP from any vital current in the revolutionary class and the absence of its corresponding counterpart inside the party. The Attitude ofJohnson Forest' Through all this our tendency maintained an iron discipline and reserve. We used infinite patience, forbearance and finesse to make relations easy. We watched our behavior and our language, were prolific in smiles and sparing in frowns. We did our best to help them. On the Negro question, for example, to have expected the SWP to adopt a complete revolutionary position was impossible. A fully Marxist position on the Negro question presupposes a fully Marxist position on the American proletariat. But from the start we accepted our limitations cheerfully. At an immense expenditure oflabor, tact and diplomacy, and using Trotsky as a smoke-screen, we maneuvered them as far as we dared along the Marxist road. We tried to help them without offending them, looking always for ways to add a Workers and Farmers Government here, or a revolutionary position there, to push the party along. But these simpletons, like their fellows in the WP, could not understand us .... We submitted State Capitalism and World Revolution, but having said our piece we showed that we did not want to talk too much. The switch from anti-Stalinism to pro-Stalinism was a shock. Still, we kept our tempers and our heads. We merely said at the Convention: Get a position and then we shall discuss with you. The result was a new insight into the process of degeneration. The party turned on us with bared fangs. 'Irreconcilable tendencies' was hurled at us from all sides. In Detroit, in Philadelphia particularly, and in New York and Los Angeles, the provocations were unbridled. The tendency met this assault in exemplary fashion. We could not but note that the hysteria, the red eyes and the shaking fists were on their side while it was we who remained calm, conciliatory but politically firm and unyielding. We satisfied ourselves that the central leadership was not at the back of this. We let the matter slide. But the political flip-flop and the organizational hooliganism deeply affected the tendency.... The whole episode marked, it seemed to us, a turning point in our relations with the SWP ...

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335

The Life of the Party

The Shachtmanites lived entirely in the spheres of the Russian question, party democracy, collective leadership and such like. The SWP claimed a correct position on the Russian question, that the party did practice party democracy, and collective leadership and so on and so forth. They were merely different sides of the same coin.... The SWP cadre was able to establish itself as a propaganda group on the basis of the general ideas of Trotsky and the solid, in fact, genuinely Bolshevik character of the cadres it took over from the split, particularly those from Minneapolis. But once this was established, the organization came to a halt. The leading cadre sees itself very literally as leaders. The revolution will put the cadre, vastly extended, of course, but still the cadre, into power. The masses will make the revolution under their guidance. Then they will plan and organize, above all they will plan. They are honest, devoted, sincere; and the proof is their readiness to sacrifice. Their tasks, therefore, are two: 1) to maintain principled politics, i.e., politics which do not capitulate to the bourgeoisie; 2) to prepare themselves and the party to get hold of unions and other organizations in preparation for the revolution. The whole conception is not merely bureaucratic in a theoretical sense. It is a profoundly bourgeois conception. They propose to substitute their honest (and sacrificing) selves for the corrupt bourgeoisie, they propose to substitute plan for the anarchy of bourgeois production. This conception governs every aspect of party life, strategy, education, propaganda, agitation, and social life. It spears most sharply and clearly in the attitude to organized labor and the very definition of what is a revolutionary worker. For this leadership, this cadre and this party, an advanced, a revolutionary worker is one who is prepared to devote himself completely to assisting the party leadership to gain control of a union. This is the road to the revolution. Any labor bureaucrat who appears to be sympathetic to these aims is the greatest of all prizes, and infinite, devious, and (as in Detroit recently) very illuminating are the means employed to incorporate him. Ten years of this policy has now proved its complete practical bankruptcy. The party has not only gained nothing by it. The result is that the party seems to be justified in its conception of the backwardness of the proletariat and preaches a recession of the working class struggle ...

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Johnson-Forest' and the Rank and File Worker The rank and file worker comes to the party to find out about himself and the potentialities of his class. He finds nothing. And limited, handicapped, circumscribed as we have been, we have been able to demonstrate that new inexperienced comrades and friends without long experience of Marxism, trained and educated by us, have been able to participate in various spheres of the class struggle as effectively as any others in the party- in similar circumstances.... The SWP leaders preach the backwardness of the workers, the corrupting wealth of American imperialism, the sacrifices which only they are prepared to make, a whole series of falsehoods, follies and slanders of the working class as the reasons why the average worker does not join, or when he joins, leaves. The workers leave because the revolution is not concretized for them, and it is not concretized because the SWP does not concretely practice revolutionary politics. All these proletarians ever got was that the American imperialists were plotting war and made high profits, which they knew before they entered. In return they were to make sacrifices, ring door-bells, and sell the Militant which in any case few party members read except by an effort.... In the SWP and the WP rank and file proletarians have always known that 'Johnson-Forest' had what they were seeking. That is why our very presence in the branch, as workers in the plant, and as members of 'Johnson-Forest' was the cause of such a bitterness on the part of the leadership in Detroit ... Constantly in the party the 'Johnson-Forest' comrades in some of the simplest day-to-day conversations have had to walk on eggs in order to avoid this question of the backwardness of the American proletariat. It becomes an issue simmering under the surface of all relations in the party....

4

Bolshevism and Personality

... A political line ultimately expresses itself in the very personalities of those who are shaped by it or adhere to it. This was so in the WP. The 'Johnson-Forest' comrades had a long experience of soul-sickness among the members of the WP. There Freud, or rather his popularizers (for these people study nothing seriously) took first place before Marx. When we came into the SWP we noted with satisfaction that there was none of this in our new party. But as The Coming American Revolution receded and as we got to know the party better, slowly certain characteristic traits began to emerge. The first theme was 'sacrifice'. From top to bottom there can never have been a set of people as conscious of the sacrifices they are making. The 'Johnson-Forest'

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comrades could not understand this. We in 1951 are not conscious of making any sacrifices. When we see radical types, especially the petty-bourgeois intellectuals outside the movement and the lives they lead, we thank our stars that we have found some way oflife by which we can develop our capacities in every direction. Even on ceremonial occasions this intangible but very real dash would be obvious to the discerning. Along with the recital of the great efforts and suffering and heroic deeds of the past, there was often a peculiar maudlin humanitarian note of sacrifice, and of going to bed at night conscious that one had worked not for self but for humanity. This came straight from the nineteenth century. Among the 'Johnson-Forest' comrades, one went to bed at night personally conscious, if of nothing else, that one was doing what one had to do, not for anyone else, but for one's own self. In line with this we noticed also the readiness with which the women cadres, and particularly the wives of the leaders, burst into tears at any moment. From the top to bottom of the party they swam in maudlin self-pity. In a political party every recurrent phenomenon is a political symptom. As we grew to know these better, the genuine political significance of this became dear. Both the WP and the SWP have been educated on a theory of the party. They themselves, their party, would somehow, by some means, grow and reach the head of the masses, and seize the power, and thus give them the chance to plan. Both have now awakened to the fact that this dream which sustained them for years is nothing but a dream. As usual their reactions were parallel. The WP, seeing that there was no party, called off the revolution and sought to attach itself to the Social-Democracy. The SWP, seeing that there was no revolutionary party, decided that the Stalinists would somehow become one. Each in its own way abdicated. But the abdication expresses itself in the bitterness against 'renegades', the constant reminders of the great sacrifices which the 'renegades' could not and cannot endure, and the ready tears.... Normally this would be of only psychological interest. But we lived and worked with them. They too found us strange. The 'Johnson-Forest' comrades, vigorous, confident, without a trace of skepticism about the proletariat, found it difficult to establish other than formal relations with many of these people .... But oflate the whole question has assumed an aspect which has forced itself on our notice and compelled recognition. Openly-discussed crises of personality in the highest leadership of the party have come to our attention.... The more sensitive of the leadership knew that the party was attracting elements who could not possibly be called revolutionary. This was particularly so in New York where a certain type of petty-bourgeois was coming into the party, people who knew nothing and cared less about Marxism and the revolu-

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tionary proletariat, but were bringing into the party their preoccupation with their own personality in an absolutely individualistic sense. The old cadre still had enough revolutionary tradition and temper to recognize these elements for what they were and to be hostile to them. They showed this hostility on various occasions. One of the most striking of these types, distinguished by great energy in the ersatz political activity of the party, was at the same time distinguished by a vulgarity and corruption of character which repelled even those who depended on her and those like her for the success of party activities. The 'Johnson-Forest' comrades felt not only disgusted but bewildered by the appearance of these political types, the substantial role they were playing in the party, the distaste of the leadership for them, and yet the incapacity of the leadership to handle the situation .... The 'Johnson-Forest' leadership talked to some of the comrades [in the tendency]. When they were questioned and invited to say what they knew and thought, they poured out such a torrent of horrible experiences, grievances, provocations, day to day struggle against demoralization and such a devastating analysis of the life and politics of the SWP as overwhelmed us. With splendid loyalty and discipline our younger comrades in particular had endured in silence and said little to us because they felt that to do so would be an indirect questioning of our line of complete integration into the SWP .•• How we struggled to remain in this party. Every SWPer knows that. But now our comrades were able to establish concretely what the leadership [of the tendency] now knew, that integration into this party meant self-destruction. As we understood ourselves and where we were, the cry became unanimous: Let us get out of here at once. It is a political gas-chamber. We do not trust this leadership even to carry out its own political line. None of our comrades who is in any difficulty can trust himself to them. Even those who are not degenerate are ready to support those who are when their crimes are discovered. We do not want to discuss with them. Such a discussion can only besmirch us. Let us get out of here as quickly as we can ... We come out infinitely stronger, more disciplined, more mature, more confident than when we entered. The SWP has totally demoralized some of our weaker comrades but surprisingly few. The SWP knows that against all elements of degeneration in our own ranks we have always been and are quite merciless politically, though tolerant organizationally, as Bolsheviks have always been. All our principled politics have meant nothing to them. They cannot learn. We have not lost by it. But we want not a single second more of it....

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In conclusion we must make clear that not all the leaders and all the members of the SWP are degenerate. It would be ridiculous to say that. There are in the leadership and far more, in the party, good comrades with whom we have worked satisfactorily and who we would be sorry to leave behind. But they must understand that they belong to an organization, and that they are responsible for the dominant political and organizational practices by which that organization lives. That responsibility they cannot escape ....

CHAPTER 5

Coping with the Cold War, Global and Domestic Paul Le Blanc

At the close of the twentieth century, the Cold War was described as a 'confrontation - military, economic, ideological - between two great superpower blocs, the United States and the Soviet Union', that constituted 'the central story of our times'. For us Trotskyists, this posed particular challenges, both in regard to Marxist theory and practical politics, matters already discussed in the introductory chapter of this volume as well as in Chapters 3 and 5. As this chapter's first two essays by James P. Cannon indicate, the political and intellectual pressures bearing down on the revolutionary left were intense, and the same was true within the labor movement and beyond. One critical-minded historian of the us left has suggested that the Socialist Workers Party- despite serious mistakes and limitations - 'managed to chart an honourable course through the difficult World War I I and Cold War years avoiding the Scylla of Stalinism and the Charybdis of imperialism better than any other American radical group of its time'.1 The creation of the 'two great superpower blocs' in a contest for global 'defense' and dominance involved an effort to secure 'the American Century' that us publishing mogul Henry Luce had advocated, which from a Marxist standpoint could naturally be theorized with reference to an imperialism flowing naturally and necessarily from the capitalist needs for secure global markets, expanding investment opportunities, and ready supplies of raw materials, but what was the meaning of the ussR's expansion into Eastern Europe (where Communist Party dictatorships - loyal to the USSR-were established)?2

1 Isaacs and Downing 1998, p. ix - a volume providing a useful overview, particularly in combination with LaFeber 2006, Heller 2006, and Williams 2009; impacts on intellectual life are traced in Lasch 1969, pp. 63-114 and Saunders 1998; impacts on the labor movement in Cochran 1977, and Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin 2003; impacts in both realms, and in other realms, are documented in Caute 1978; evaluation of SWP performance in all of this can be found in Wald 1987, p. 309. ('Scylla and Charybdis' is a reference from Greek mythology, which

involves making one's way between two evils - similar to saying that one is between a rock and a hard place, or the devil and the deep blue sea). 2 On imperialism in the Cold War era, see Magdoff 1978 and Heller 2006. On the development of the ussR's 'satellite states', see: Claudin 1975, pp. 307-548; Eley 2002, pp. 278-328; Priestland 2009, pp. 204-33, 273-314; Fejtti 1974, pp. 7-63; Harman 1988.

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A majority within the Fourth International (among whom was the brilliant young theoretician Ernest Mandel, referred to as 'Germain' in discussions and debates) asserted that the USSR remained a degenerated workers' state, as Trotsky had argued, but that since Stalinism is incapable of being a revolutionary force, the new 'satellite' states in the ussR's power bloc remained some variant of capitalism. This was initially the perspective of a majority in the Socialist Workers Party as well - but the position was sharply and effectively challenged by Joseph Hansen and (under the party name E.R. Frank) Bert Cochran. The nuanced and informative positions they advanced soon changed minds among majorities of us and world Trotskyists (including Mandel). 3 As we have already noted, there were also strong counter-arguments among Trotskyists - denying that the USSR could be considered any kind of workers' state, degenerated or otherwise. In the previous volume we noted the theory of 'bureaucratic collectivism' pungently articulated by Max Shachtman and his co-thinkers. In Chapter 5 we saw the conception of 'state capitalism' advanced by the Johnson-Forest tendency, whose partisans ended up agreeing that such comrades as Hansen and Cochran had demonstrated the consistency of their analyses with Trotskyist fundamentals - and therefore ended by rejecting Trotskyism in all its forms. A different variant of 'state capitalist' theorization, remaining within a basic Trotskyist framework, was developed in Britain by Tony Cliff.4 There were other analytical approaches as well, and in his massive exploration of Marxist theorizations, Marcel van der Linden has suggested that 'numerous attempts were made to understand Soviet society, some with solid empirical foundations, but most lacking them; some consistent and carefully thought-out, others illogical and superficial'. Van der Linden notes that for Trotsky 'planned economy and bureaucratic dictatorship were fundamentally incompatible'. He envisioned either the working class once again taking control of its own workers' state, clearing away the bureaucratic deformations and (within the context of working-class revolutions spreading to other lands) moving forward to socialism, or instead a continued bureaucratic decay ultimately resulting in a collapse that would pave the way for capitalist restoration - which is, of course, what took place 50 years after his death. The weak point in Trotsky's conceptualization was pinpointed by his one-time follower in Britain, Tony Cliff (and articulated by others as well): 'If the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class, then you cannot have a workers' state

3 Frank 1979, pp. 67-84; Alexander 1991, pp. 304-16. 4 See: Shachtman 1962;Jacobson 1972; Dunayevskaya 1992; Cliff 1974.

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without the workers having power to dictate what happens in society'. Van der Linden himself suggests that useful insights can be drawn from each of the divergent currents flowing from the Trotskyist tradition. 5 The momentous popular revolution which swept through China in the late 1940s, and which continued to transform it through the 1950s, not only had a powerful impact among revolutionary-minded people throughout the world, but also posed important political and theoretical challenges for us Trotskyists. The article by Liu Fu-jen (one of several party names used by South Africanborn Frank Glass, who had spent many years in China) provides a clear and very positive survey of China's history and of the 1949 revolutionary triumph. How best to understand the nature of the Chinese Communist Party and the perspectives of its presumably 'Stalinist' leaders (particularly Mao Zedong, in this period commonly spelled Mao Tse-tung) would be matters to which Glass and his comrades would return more than once. As we will see in the final volume of this documentary trilogy on us Trotskyism, this resulted in fierce debates within the swP. 6 A serious examination of the global confrontation between Stalinism and imperialism highlights, on both sides, the increasing dominance of bureaucratic structures - including within the labor movements that happen to be associated with and central to both sides.7 That is an important dimension in the readings offered in this chapter, with the selections by Kerry and Cannon giving special attention to issues of bureaucracy and democracy in the workers' movement and struggle for socialism.

5 Van der Linden 2009, pp. 67, n9, 305, 318. 6 Additional discussion and sources on China, its revolution, and Trotskyist debates on this can be found in the final volume of this documentary trilogy - but an informative and influential eyewitness account can be found in Belden 1970. Useful information can also be found in Priestland 2009, pp. 234-72, and a synoptic oveiview is provided by Mitter 2008. For a biography of Frank Glass, see Hirson 2003. 7 On the development of revolutionary Marxist perspectives on bureaucracy, see Le Blanc 2016a, pp. 65-9, 108-15, 121-2, and Mandel 1992. An outstanding study of bureaucratic power structures in the United States is Mills 1956. A key work on Marxist theorizations of bureaucracy, with special reference to Trotsky's analysis of the USSR, is Twiss 2015. Focus on problems of leadership, bureaucracy, and democracy in trade unions and workers' struggles can be found in: Van Tine 1973; Dubofsky and Van Tine 1987; Mills 2001; Hall 1972; Moody 1988.

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343

American Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism (1947)

James P. Cannon

1

Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism in Europe8

Recent events afford us an occasion to present our point of view once again on the complicated and many-sided problem of Stalinism in the labor movement of the United States. The red-baiting drive on the one side, and the growth of anti-Stalinist sentiments in the ranks of the militant workers on the other, seem to require a reexamination of the question, and a more precise definition of the real nature of Stalinism. The blind fight against the Communist Party is unavailing. The workers must give thought to the why and how, in order to fight Stalinism in a manner that will serve their own interests. Otherwise they run the risk of falling into the trap of their worst enemies, who are currently raising a hue and cry against the Communist Party with other objectives in mind. The Stalinist pestilence, like many other things good and bad, was imported from Europe; the American aspect of the question can be seen more clearly in its true light against a background review of the situation in the countries of Western Europe where Stalinism is now a burning and decisive question and is the subject of much discussion. For our part, we believe that a frank discussion among those anti-Stalinists who strive for the socialist goal should serve to clarify the issue and thus aid our cause. It is known that we are and have been for a long time opposed to Stalinism, or to any conciliation with it whatever. We started on this theme more than eighteen years ago and have been hammering away at it ever since. We welcome cooperation with other opponents of Stalinism, but we believe that such cooperation can be fruitful only if there is some basic agreement as to the nature of Stalinism, and agreement also that the fight against Stalinism is part of the general anti-capitalist struggle, not separate from it nor in contradiction to it.

8 Cannon 1947c.

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So that there may be no misunderstanding, let us make our position clear at the outset. We believe that the greatest and most menacing enemy of the human race is the bipartisan imperialist cabal at Washington. We consider the fight against war and reaction in the United States to be the first and main duty of American revolutionists. This is the necessary premise for cooperation in the fight against Stalinism. Those who disagree with us on this point do not understand the reality of the present day, and do not talk our language. An understanding of the perfidious character of Stalinism is the beginning of wisdom for every serious, class-conscious worker; and all anti-Stalinists who are also anti-capitalist should try to work together. But anti-Stalinism, by itself, is no program for common struggle. It is too broad a term, and it means different things to different people. There are more anti-Stalinists now than there were when we started our struggle eighteen years ago, especially in this country where Stalinism is weak and Trumanism is strong, and they are especially numerous in New York and not all of them are phonies. But very few of the current crop of vociferous anti-Stalinists have anything to do with us, or we with them. That is not because of exclusiveness or quarrelsomeness, either on their part or ours, but because we start out from different premises, conduct the struggle by different methods, and aim at different goals. Many anti-Stalinists devote their arguments exclusively to the terrorist activities and totalitarian methods of the Stalinists. This is a. rather common approach to Stalinism nowadays, but in our opinion it is an incorrect one. We believe it puts the question in too narrow a frame and provides neither an explanation of the monstrous phenomenon of Stalinism nor an adequate program by means of which the revolutionary workers can rid the labor movement of this plague. Stalinism manifests itself in a totalitarian police state in the Soviet Union and a terrorist apparatus in the labor movement of the capitalist countries. But it is not only that. Stalinism has its social base in the nationalized property of the Soviet Union - the product of the great revolution. It is not the continuator and legitimate heir of Bolshevism, but its antithesis. The Stalinists, a privileged bureaucracy which fastened itself on the Soviet state in a period of its degeneration and decline, had to liquidate in blood virtually the whole generation of the original Bolsheviks, before they could consolidate their power. But despite all the crimes and betrayals of the Stalinists, great masses of radical workers in Western Europe still identify them with the Soviet Union and, in turn, identify the latter with the revolution which gains attractiveness in their

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eyes the more that capitalism reveals its irremediable bankruptcy. Herein is the main secret of the malevolent influence of Stalinism in the European labor movement. By far the greatest power of Stalinism derives from the illusion in the minds of the European workers that Stalinism means communism as represented by the great Russian revolution. They want the same kind of revolution, and they will not be freed from Stalinism until they are freed from the illusion that Stalinism can help them to get it. Most anti-Stalinists, especially the professionals, identify Stalinism with communism. This only serves to embellish Stalinism in the eyes of the radical workers, to reinforce their illusions, and to strengthen the position of Stalinism in their midst. For there is one thing that the workers of Europe have very few illusions about, and that is capitalism. In this fundamental disillusionment lies the great hope for the future. Two world wars within one generation, with their sum total of forty million dead and uncounted wounded; the wholesale destruction of material culture in Europe; the crises, the unemployment, and insecurity between the wars; and the universal hunger, poverty, and misery at the end all this has served to convince the masses of European workers in their bones that they have no further need of the social system which engendered these horrors and promises nothing better for the future. The workers of Western Europe can see a way out only along the lines of socialism. They demonstrate their will to socialism at every opportunity, as in the revolutionary upsurge following the conclusion of hostilities, in the subsequent elections, etc. And when they think of socialism, they look to the East, not to the West. They have had victorious 'democracy' brought to them twice already in the shape of guns and bombs from America and they don't want a third visitation of that blessing. How to explain the well-established fact that the workers follow the Stalinists in increasing numbers, while the Social Democratic parties are more and more pushed out of the labor movement and obliged to base themselves on a predominantly petty-bourgeois composition? It is absurd to imagine that this result is simply brought about by the terrorist activities of an army of GPU agents. No, the sweeping movement of the masses is to be explained by the fact that they think the Stalinists represent socialism more truly and more militantly than do the Social Democrats. Those who do not take due note of this phenomenon and make it the starting point of their tactical struggle may rail all they please against the Stalinists, but they will not defeat them in the European labor movement. The illusions of the masses as to the real nature of Stalinism are continually nourished and kept alive by the Stalinist propaganda machines with their per-

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fected technique of demagogy and mass deception. Stalinism is, first of all, a political influence in the labor movement in the capitalist countries. And it exerts this influence, primarily, not as a police force or a terrorist gang, but as a political party. The fight against Stalinism is first of all, and above all, a political fight. This political fight will never make any serious headway with the radicalized workers - and they are the ones who are decisive - unless it is clearly and unambiguously anti-capitalist from beginning to end. No propaganda that bears, or even appears to bear, the slightest taint of Trumanism will get a hearing from the anti-capitalist workers of Europe. That kind of 'antiStalinism' which is currently popular in the United States is absolutely no good for export. We have no reason to minimize the terrorist apparatus ofStalinism, unexampled in its magnitude and monstrousness in all history. It is a bloody and fearsome thing; we have paid enough in blood to know it. This terrorism must be exposed and fought. We must keep the pitiless light of publicity shining on it. But the exposure of the terrorist activities of the GPU is only one part, important to be sure, but not the most important part of the struggle against Stalinism. Leaving out of consideration altogether the capitalist demagogues who exploit the fraudulent slogan 'democracy versus totalitarianism' for their own imperialistic purposes, there are a great number of people who sincerely hate Stalinism for its violence and terror, its bloody and awful tyranny, its utter disregard for human life and human dignity. But in their revulsion against this horror - which does them credit, no doubt - they fall into the same basic error as that of the Stalinists themselves. They overestimate the power of naked force. The Stalinists think that violence can accomplish anything, and this fallacy will eventually facilitate their downfall. Many of their opponents likewise imagine that violence and terror are omnipotent, able to repeal the historical laws explained by Marx. It is wrong to make a fetish of violence and terror, to see only the GPU and not the tens of millions of Communist and Socialist workers in Europe. It is fatally wrong to lose faith in the ability of these workers to overcome their illusions and take their destiny into their own hands. And it is criminal to proceed from these errors - as so many anti-Stalinists are doing in this country - to the dreadful and monstrous conclusion: The destruction of hateful Stalinism must be entrusted to Truman and his atomic bombs. If Stalinism were merely a totalitarian police state in the USSR and a terrorist apparatus in the labor movement of the capitalist countries, then the struggle against the terrorists by publicity, exposure, and any other means at our disposal would be the main, if not the only, task. But the problem doesn't end there; it only begins. The real fight against Stalinism, the main fight, takes

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place on the political field. That is the way Trotsky explained the question and conducted his struggle. And that is why the Stalinists have always regarded Trotskyism as their most serious and consistent enemy. Trotsky's method must be the model for the revolutionary workers of the present day. The influence of Stalinism today is stronger in France and Italy than in the countries of Eastern Europe which have experienced Russian occupation, and stronger by far than in the Soviet Union itself. To those who are prostrated before the fetish of police and gangster violence, who see the Stalinist police machine ruling supreme everywhere, over a vast domain in the East, this may appear as an astonishing, even as an absurd statement. But it is true and can be demonstrated. Stalinism has a million members in the party in France, and controls the trade union federation with its six million members. In Italy the number of party members is even greater. In these two countries it appears from all the evidence that Stalinism virtually dominates the proletarian sector of the population, along with a substantial section of the peasantry. From all reports, the Socialist parties in Western Europe - in France and Italy especially - steadily lose their working class support to the more radical-appearing rival. This tremendous mass influence of the Stalinists is not the result of police measures. In the main it is the product of the illusions of the masses, nourished and reinforced by the demagogy and deception of the Stalinist propaganda machine. On the other hand, reports from Eastern Europe, where the first approaches of the victorious Red Army were greeted by revolutionary uprisings and mass acclaim, indicate that the workers have already been sadly disillusioned and the moral position of Stalinism has apparently been hopelessly shattered. The conditions are maturing there for the construction of genuine Socialist (or Communist) parties - anti-Stalinist as well as anti-capitalist. What, then, can be the real situation within the Soviet Union itself, after all the bitter, bloody years? Can the masses still believe in Stalinism? Are there any illusions left? The known reaction of the masses in the occupied territories should give us the answer. The very fact that the terror, instead of mitigating, grows worse from year to year, with the police apparatus swelling to ever more monstrous proportions - all this testifies not to the strength of the Stalinist regime within the country, but to its weakness, to its isolation and lack of mass support. The Stalinist regime in the USSR, isolated from the masses and ruling by terror alone, is weakest at the moment when it appears to be most secure. The strongest assaults of the Nazi military machine proved unable to bring about the downfall of the regime in the USSR from within. And that is convincing evidence we think that the Russian masses don't want liberation from a cursed and hated Stalinism in the shape of capitalist restoration and the colonial dismember-

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ment of the country. But one strong revolutionary demonstration from the outside can bring the whole regime, with all its apparatus of repression and terror, crashing down in ruins. The salvation of the Soviet Union, or rather what is left of it, from the curse of Stalinism, depends in the first place on a strong revolutionary impulse from Europe or America, or some other part of the world. This impulse will come, we firmly believe, and this will change everything. This task of liberation belongs to the workers. It cannot be farmed out to their class enemies, the AngloAmerican imperialist gang, in the hope that somehow something good will come from the greatest evil. To assign the task of liberating the Soviet Union and the labor movement of the West from Stalinism to Truman and his atomic bombs is to renounce faith in the future of humanity, to pass a premature death sentence on civilization. We must go back to Marx, and reassert and be guided by his affirmation that 'the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself'. Only on that basis can we make an effective common front against Stalinism and free the labor movement from its malign power and influence. Only on that basis can we see the future clearly and prepare for it. In a personal letter a prominent European anti-Stalinist wrote: 'I sincerely do hope that all anti-Stalinist elements of the socialist camp will be able to form a united front in the difficult days ahead'. We share this hope and heartily support it as a program, with only one explicit proviso: those whom we count in our socialist camp must be real socialists and not bourgeois agents masquerading as such, not ignoble stooges of Yankee imperialism, not 'Truman socialists'. The revolutionary socialist movement in Germany during and following the First World War had to reconstitute itself in mortal struggle against those traitor socialists who had led the German workers into the imperialist slaughter - the 'Kaiser socialists', as they were derisively called. The best hope today for the German workers - and not only for the German workers but for all the workers everywhere, all over the world - is that they will succeed by their own efforts and with their own strength in cleansing the labor movement of the influence of both the Stalin 'communists' and the Truman 'socialists'. That is the way to victory and socialism. There is no other way.

2

The Communist Party and the Red-Baiters

The Communist Party, which served American capitalism well during the war, and in return basked in its favor, is getting into trouble again. The American Stalinists' support of the Kremlin in the current diplomatic conflicts, is provoking

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retaliatory measures from the owners of America and their servitors. American Stalinism is under heavy attack along a wide front in the United States these days, and this time it is a real attack which takes on more and more the color of persecution. Red-baiting is the order of the day. The powerhouse behind the assault on the Communist Party and its trade union positions and peripheral organizations is the National Association of Manufacturers. On the political field it is led, of course, by the RepublicanDemocratic coalition in Washington, as part of the propagandistic buildup to put the home front in shape for a war against the Soviet Union, which is being deliberately planned and prepared. Under this formidable leadership a broad supporting movement has been mobilized in the population generally, as well as in the labor movement. The capitalist press, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, and the American Legion - the three most reactionary influences in American life - speak with one voice in support of the new holy crusade for 'democracy against totalitarianism'. Almost the whole of the non-Stalinist trade union bureaucracy has taken its place in the campaign. The Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, a sinister, priest-ridden outfit which menaces the unions with a split along religious lines, is very active and aggressive in the pogrom against the 'Commies'. Drawing encouragement from the governmental campaign and the general reactionary trend in the country, the ACTU grows ever bolder and more brazen in its attempts to switch the allegiav.ce of the progressive trade unions from Moscow to Rome. The rear of the anti-Stalinist united front is brought up by a vociferous assortment of New York Social Democrats and ex-radical intellectuals who do their best to supply the 'ideology' for the frenzied campaign. The current drive against the Stalinists is labeled 'anticommunist' and every attempt is made to identify the two terms - Stalinism and communism - in the popular mind. This is the result of ignorance on the part of some and of deliberate deception on the part of others who know better, but in any case it is completely false. And that is the reason why the whole campaign, while it is undoubtedly weakening some of the organizational positions of the Stalinists and dislodging them from some strategic posts in the trade union movement, and furnishing not a few Stalinist careerists an excuse to run for cover, is actually strengthening the moral position of the Communist Party. The ranks of the sympathetic radical workers and party members are being solidified by the crude reactionary ballyhoo, and the support of new groups of workers is being drawn to the party which is made to appear as the persecuted revolutionary opponent of the big money sharks and their antilabor plus atomic war program. For example, the c P, according to the Daily Worker, raised a 'defense fund' of$ 250,000 in less than twenty days. This important sum could

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properly be posted in the financial report of the party treasurer as a free donation from the associated red-baiters. We Trotskyists, as everybody knows, are also against Stalinism and have fought it unceasingly and consistently for a very long time. But we have no place in the present 'all-inclusive' united front against American Stalinism. The reason for this is that we are anticapitalist. Consequently, we can find no point of agreement with the campaign conducted by the political representatives of American capitalism in Washington, with the support of its agents in the labor movement and its lackeys in the literary and academic world. We fight Stalinism from a different standpoint. We fight Stalinism not because it is another name for communism, but precisely because of its betrayal of communism and of the interests of the workers in the class struggle. Our exposition of the question is made from a communist point of view, and our appeal is directed not to the exploiters of labor and their various reactionary agencies of oppression and deception, but to the workers, who have a vital interest in the struggle against the capitalist exploiters as well as against perfidious Stalinism. The problem of advanced and progressive workers is to learn how to fight Stalinism without inadvertently falling into the camp of capitalist reaction and thus hurting only themselves. For this it is necessary, first of all, for them to understand the question and to get a clear picture of the Communist Party, of what it used to be and how it came to be the hideous thing it is today. The Communist Party of the United States originated as an honest revolutionary organization designed to serve the interests of the working class. By degrees, over a period of years, and from causes which are known and can be explained, this same party was transformed into an agency of imperialism in the labor movement - from communist to anticommunist. That is the truth of the matter, and that is what is really wrong with the Communist Party, as we shall undertake to demonstrate. In doing so we hope to convince the militant workers that they must think and discriminate in taking their position on Stalinism and anti-Stalinism. It is a fatal error to think that rapacious American capitalism can be effectively fought under the banner of Stalinism. It is a no less fatal error for them to allow their hatred of the disruptive and treacherous methods of the Stalinists to push them into the camp of capitalist reaction. The Communist Party of the United States is not a newcomer on the labor scene; it is already twenty-eight years old, and in that time has gone through a curious evolution. It was originally constituted by the revolutionary left-wing section of the Socialist Party. The struggle of this left wing for a revolutionary program, which they had carried on as a faction of the SP for a number of years, finally culminated in a split at the September convention in 1919. The

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new party quickly enlisted many of the most militant representatives of the rww and other radical formations of the earlier day, and was in fact the legitimate successor and continua tor of prewar revolutionary radicalism in the United States. The party unfurled the banner of the Russian revolution, which was the veritable banner of authentic communism; affiliated itself to the newly created Communist International founded by Lenin and Trotsky; and declared war on American capitalism. The party from its very beginning encountered the fiercest persecution on the part of the 'democratic' government at Washington. Those were the days of the notorious 'Palmer raids'. The members suffered wholesale arrests and imprisonments even before the new party had had an opportunity to properly constitute itself. In the fierce persecution of that period the party was driven underground and was compelled to conduct its activities illegally for several years. Under the fierce onslaught of reaction and persecution many fell by the wayside, but the main cadres of the new party stood firm, held fiercely to their revolutionary convictions, and gradually fought their way back into the open as a legal party. Due to the inexperience of the leadership, numerous mistakes were made; but the early CP was an honest working class party, carrying on an uncompromising struggle against capitalism and defending the interests of the workers as best it could. In the early and middle twenties the party attracted to itself the best, most idealistic, and self-sacrificing of the advanced workers and soon became the recognized organizing center of American labor radicalism; while the Socialist Party fell into innocuous, senile decay and the trade union bureaucracy became more and more subservient to the capitalist exploiters and their governmental agencies. But toward the end of the twenties, while the 'prosperity' boom was still riding high, the picture began to change. This party, which began with such bright promise, whose founding members had been inspired by such honesty, courage, and idealism, eventually fell victim to the innumerable pressures of its hostile environment, as had happened with other workers' parties many times in the history of the international labor movement. Degeneration set in, and the party began to lose its revolutionary character. From an irreconcilable enemy of capitalism, the party was changed, by degrees and over a long period of time, into a treacherous and servile tool of capitalism. This was shown most glaringly during the recent war, when the Stalinists became the worst jingoes and strikebreakers in the labor movement, and when Browder, then the official chief of the party by grace of Stalin, even went so far as to offer to shake hands with J.P. Morgan. The Communist Party became anticommunist, the most perfidious enemy of authentic communism.

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That is what really happened. But the course of degeneration did not go unchallenged. The genuine communists, the Trotskyists, revolted against the degeneration and the betrayal as soon as it was first discerned; organized a determined fight against it; were expelled from the party in 1928 and organized a new movement on the old program, which is today known as the Socialist Workers Party. Thus the banner of communism, which the official Communist Party renounced, was not lost or surrendered to the class enemy. It was taken up and carried forward by the Trotskyist minority who believed then, as they believe now, that it is not the program of communism which has been discredited and refuted but only those who have deserted and betrayed it.

3

Why and How the Communist Party Degenerated

The degeneration of the Communist Party derives from the same source as the degeneration of their professional opponents, the labor fakers of the old school who are flanked by the New York ex-radical intellectuals and 'Socialist' or exSocialist labor skates. This source is the pressure of the capitalist-imperialist environment, which they lacked the historical foresight and the moral strength to resist. The Stalinists and the anti-Stalinists equally share an awe-stricken prostration before the seeming invincibility of American capitalism and a corresponding lack of faith in the proletarian revolution, in the power of the workers to save the world by reorganizing it on a socialist basis. This delusion - and it is the most tragic of all delusions - is the main psychological source of all varieties of opportunism in the labor movement. It transformed onetime opponents of capitalism into its agents and servants. The opponents of Stalinism, with the exception of those who fight it from a revolutionary point of view, suffered essentially the same degeneration as did the Stalinists, from the same basic cause, and the degeneration is complete in each case, as we hope to demonstrate. This degeneration consisted in shifting their basic allegiance from one class to another. The converted Stalinists campaign in every election, and all the year around, on their basic slogan: 'Socialism is not the issue!' And if they have their way it will never be the 'issue'. The Social Democrats and the repentant ex-Communist and ex-Socialist intellectuals coyly refer to themselves nowadays as 'liberals', although in truth they are not even very liberal. If they mention socialism at all it is only by way of satiric jest at those who still believe in it and still fight for it, and in sentimental recollections of the 'follies' of their younger days. As for the old-line labor fakers, if they didn't 'degenerate' it is only because they have always been 'labor lieutenants of the capitalist class', as De Leon

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called them, and didn't have to change much. But even many of them, if not the majority, began better than they ended. Not a few of them started out as trade union militants and picket captains who showed energy and courage in defending the immediate interests of the workers in struggles against individual employers. Lacking socialist consciousness and any broad and comprehensive view of the class struggle as a whole, they succumbed to the pressure of the class enemy even more easily than did the ex-Communists and ex-Socialists, but the end result is essentially the same: the transformation of working class militants into conservative bureaucrats who view the conflict of labor and capital as a struggle without a goal. It may be maintained that we overstate the case or oversimplify it by thus seeming to identify two currents in the labor movement - the Stalinists and the anti-Stalinists - who appear to be always at each others' throats in the fiercest antagonism. But this contention can be granted only conditionally, and within very narrow limits which do not encroach upon the essence of the question. It is not even correct to say without qualification that the two quarreling factions of traitors to the working class serve different masters. True, the immediate allegiance of the anti-Stalinists is to America's imperialist government of the Sixty Families, while the Stalinists are indubitably the direct agents of the Stalin regime in the USSR. But the Kremlin gang is itself an agency, and the most important agency, of imperialism in the world labor movement. That is its most essential role. The Stalinists hate and fear the proletarian revolution more than anything else, and their unbridled demagogy, their lies, their organized terror, their assassinations, and their organized mass murders have been employed to prop up decaying capitalism, not to overthrow it. The Stalinists and the anti-Stalinists serve the same master - world imperialism - in different ways. Every labor bureaucracy has a contradictory nature. The Stalinist bureaucracy has its own special interests and seeks to serve them first of all, and this frequently come into conflict with the capitalist class which they serve fundamentally. The opposition of the entire American labor bureaucracy to the pending anti union legislation in Congress is a case in point. But in the essence of the matter, in the great fundamental and irreconcilable conflict of historical interests between the workers and the imperialists, both the Stalinist bureaucracy and the other bureaucracy fight on the side of the capitalists and against the workers. The fierce struggle between them is a clique struggle, and not a principled struggle. The anti-capitalist 'ideology' of the radical intellectuals and the 'Socialist' labor leaders and functionaries was scarcely more than skin-deep to start with. Their transformation from fellow travelers of the proletariat into fellow travelers of the bourgeoisie was accomplished so quickly and easily and smoothly,

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under the first squeeze of real pressure with the approach of World War II, that it was hardly noticed by anybody. They hardly noticed it themselves. The degeneration of the Communist Party along the same lines, however, was a far more serious matter. Here it was a question of changing the fundamental nature of a party that was genuinely revolutionary into its counterrevolutionary opposite. This took a much longer time and was unavoidably accompanied by the most violent and bloody convulsions. Stalinism originated in the Soviet Union after the death of Lenin, when the retardation of the expected European revolution on the one hand, and the subsequent temporary stabilization of capitalism on the other, raised doubts of the revolutionary perspective. These doubts soon crystallized into a complete disbelief in the capacity of the workers in Europe and the rest of the world to overthrow capitalism. The privileged bureaucracy in the Soviet Union made this disbelief the basis of their policy. These Soviet bureaucrats felt impelled at all costs to secure their own privileges, enjoyed at the expense of the Russian masses, and decided to call that 'socialism in one country'. Like every other crystallized labor bureaucracy, they wanted above all to be let alone in peace and comfort regardless of what happened to the masses of the people in one country or another, or in all countries put together. A conservative program of narrow-minded nationalism, and of collaboration with the world of capitalist imperialism, was evolved by the privileged bureaucrats to express their moods and serve their special interests. The same doubts and sentiments infected a section of the leading staffs of the Communist parties in the capitalist countries at the same time and from the same cause. The stagnation of the movement and the apparent - though only apparent - recovery and resurgence of the capitalist system from its wartime and postwar shocks and dislocations, seemed to empirical leaders to postpone the realization of the socialist program to the distant future. They mistook a temporary situation for a historical epoch. This created the conditions for the dry rot of bureaucratism to set in, even among the leading staffs and the paid party functionaries and trade union officials of the most revolutionary parties history had ever known. They began to visualize careers for themselves as functionaries of a party machine which existed for itself, that is, for them, and not for the purpose of organizing and leading a proletarian revolution. But the transformation of the Communist parties in the capitalist countries, as well as in the Soviet Union, could not be easily or smoothly accomplished. A section of the leading staffs everywhere, supported by the most militant proletarian elements in the parties, retained the long view; they remained faithful to the revolutionary program and tradition and resolutely fought the course of degeneration. They were the first to stigmatize Stalinism, to analyze and expose

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its real tendency, and to declare irreconcilable war against it in the name of communism. And they have been its most consistent, most uncompromising opponents ever since. This struggle, organized and led by Trotsky and supported by other authentic communists in every country in the world, against the degeneration of the Communist parties was a stubborn struggle, long drawn-out and irreconcilable, conducted with unexampled energy and courage. How could it have been otherwise? The fate of a revolution was at stake, and the leader of the fight was the greatest man, and the best man, of our troubled and stormy time. Before they could succeed in substituting an essentially reformist program for the original program of proletarian revolution, and transforming the nature of the Communist parties accordingly, the Stalinist bureaucrats who had seized the apparatus of the Russian state and of the Communist parties had to resort to every kind of method alien to socialism and alien to the means required to serve the socialist end. They misrepresented everything, turned every question upside down, pictured the Left Opposition of Trotsky as counterrevolutionary and themselves as defenders of the Leninist doctrine. They slandered the Oppositionists in the press, which they had monopolized, and deprived them of the opportunity to answer. They abused the principle of party discipline, designed by Lenin to insure united action against the class enemy, and turned it into a trap for the Communist workers, a device to suppress critical opinion and free discussion within the party. They corrupted the parties by advancing subservient careerists and removing the independent-minded revolutionists from party posts. They abused the good faith of the Communist workers everywhere by confronting them with accomplished facts, and then compelling them to ratify the actions under penalty of expulsion as counterrevolutionaries and enemies of the Soviet Union. All this did not suffice. The Opposition could not be terrorized and could not be silenced. One step followed another on the reactionary course with a fatal logic. Next came the wholesale expulsions of the leaders of the Opposition in Russia and in all the parties of the Comintem. After the struggle had raged for five years, the great majority of the original leaders of the Communist parties in almost every country, those who had founded the parties and carried them on their shoulders through their most difficult years, had been expelled. In place of the independent-minded revolutionary fighters who had created the movement in struggle, a new type of leader was installed, the type of functionary who looks to some power for instructions and does what he is told. All this was not enough to complete the degeneration and transformation of the Communist parties. The revolutionary tradition was so strong, the Marxist logic of the Opposition so powerful, that opposition groupings kept rising anew.

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The parties had to be purged again and again. But the struggle did not end. The Stalinists then turned the fatal comer on the road of counterrevolutionary infamy from which there could be no turning back: the physical annihilation of the Communist Left Opposition. The Oppositionists in the Soviet Union, with Trotsky at their head, were arrested and imprisoned by the tens of thousands. When that failed to quell the Oppositionist movement, Trotsky was deported from the country in which he, side by side with Lenin, had led the greatest revolution in all history. But the ideas of the Trotskyists were correct, and therefore could not be destroyed. The imprisonment of tens of thousands of the best Bolshevik fighters in the Soviet Union, the deportation of Trotsky from the country, and the expulsion and isolation of the incorruptible communists from the Communist parties in the capitalist countries, did not end the struggle of the Left Opposition (the Trotskyists) to correct the policy of the Comintem and tum it back on the Marxist road. They continued to fight as an expelled faction; and some of the richest Marxist literature in the entire history of the world labor movement was produced by the Opposition in that period, primarily by Trotsky himself. In 1933, after ten years of unceasing struggle, came the great and final test, and the turning point in the tactics of the Trotskyists. The Stalinists surrendered the German working class to the Nazis without a fight - the greatest and most criminal betrayal in all history. Then it became finally clear beyond dispute that the Stalinist Comintem was corrupted to the core, and that its reformation was impossible. The Stalinists had gone over into the imperialist camp, as had the bureaucracy of the Social Democracy in 1914, only even more shamefully, more brazenly, and more criminally. The Left Opposition thereupon raised the banner of the Fourth International. The mortal struggle still goes on, no longer as faction against faction but as party against party. Since 1933 the Trotskyists have conducted their struggle on a worldwide scale as a completely independent movement, irreconcilably hostile to Stalinism as well as to capitalism. This is the most important struggle in the world, for its goal is nothing less than the socialist reorganization of the world.

4

The Crimes and Betrayals of American Stalinism

The Stalinist bureaucracy proceeded from its abandonment of revolutionary internationalism, and thereby of the most basic principle of Marxist politics, while still basing itself on an economic system created by a proletarian revolution. Beset by contradictions at every step, it gradually began to take shape as the greatest monstrosity the world has ever known.

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The Stalinists raised the technique of falsifying, lying, and slandering to a degree unknown or unimagined by any precedent or contemporary political grouping based on privileges, none of whom have been strangers to these techniques. Obsessed by the mad delusion that ideas count for nothing and that physical force decides everything, they embarked on a campaign of bloody violence, mass murder, and assassination that has already taken its toll not in thousands or in tens of thousands, but in millions of human lives. The whole generation of the original Bolsheviks were murdered in cold blood under cover of the Moscow frame-up trials. The whole of Russia was converted into a prison and a torture chamber where terror rules supreme. Many of the best leaders of the Fourth International outside Russia were assassinated by the agents of Stalin, including the leader and founder of the movement, the companion of Lenin, L.D. Trotsky. Stalinism, through its reactionary policy executed by a murder machine, was mainly responsible for the defeat of the Spanish revolution. And this same Stalinism has acted as the gendarmerie of capitalism in suppressing by bloody violence every attempt at revolutionary uprising in those territories where its army penetrated in Europe, and by deception and demagogy in the other countries behind the Anglo-American lines. The American Stalinists have not gone so far in violence only because they have lacked the power. But they have endorsed and defended all the crimes and betrayals of Russian and international Stalinism, and therefore fully share the guilt for them. The apologist and defender of assassins is himself an assassin. But aside from mass violence and murder, from which the American Stalinists have been restrained only by their weakness and incapacity, they have committed enough crimes and betrayals in the United States on their own account to damn them forever in the eyes of the advanced workers. And these crimes, like the crimes of Stalinism everywhere, have not been directed against the capitalist exploiters, as many erroneously believe, but against the workers and the masses of the people. Their conspiracies have not been dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism, as stupid reactionaries allege against them, but to propping it up and striking against the genuine revolutionary movements aiming at the socialist goal. Roosevelt understood this much better than those color-blind aborigines, such as Bilbo and Rankin, and others of similar mentality in the labor movement, who see 'red' whenever Stalinists are mentioned. Roosevelt knew what he was doing when he made the war alliance with Stalin, and made no mistake in relying on him not to promote the proletarian revolution in Europe but to crush it in blood or balk it with demagogy. The suppression of Trotsky's book on Stalin during the war, by the pressure of the State Department on the publishers, was a tacit recognition of the counterre-

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volutionary services of Stalin. So, likewise, was the production, under quasigovernmental auspices, of the monstrous movie Mission to Moscow, a vulgar glorification of the Moscow frame-up trials and a defamation of their victims. The betrayals of the American Stalinists began, as betrayals of the workers always begin, with the revision, perversion, and eventual renunciation of the theory of Marxism, the only revolutionary, the only truly proletarian theory there is. Trotsky warned that the theory of 'socialism in one country', first enunciated by Stalin in 1924 to justify the policy of national reformism, could only lead to social-patriotism in the capitalist countries. His warning seemed to many to be farfetched at the time, but it had a tragic verification in the United States, as everywhere else. The new revisionist theories espoused by the American Stalinists, following the Moscow lead, ran so counter to the tradition and the socialist consciousness of the party membership that they could not be imposed on the party under conditions of free and democratic discussion, which had characterized the party in its early years. Party democracy had to be suppressed, and the Marxist dissidents who could not be silenced had to be expelled. Following the expulsion of the Left Opposition, the Trotskyists, in 1928, the right wing, led by Lovestone, who criticized the policy from another point of view, was expelled six months later. Thus the party was disrupted and converted into a bureaucratic caricature of the democratic revolutionary organization it once had been. From the disruption of the party, the Stalinist bureaucracy, as one who says 'A' must say 'B', was obliged to carry disruption into the mass organizations and trade unions where dissidents and critics, including those who had been expelled from the party, also appeared. The Stalinists sought not to serve the mass organizations but to establish an iron-bound control over them, by any and every dishonorable means, in order to manipulate them at will. The Communist Party came to appear in the mass movement as an organization with special interests of its own to serve, and which served them ruthlessly and brutally against the interests of the mass movement. The Marxist axiom which says that 'The Communist Party has no interests separate and apart from the interests of the working class as a whole', was turned upside down and made to read: 'The working class has no interests separate and apart from the interests of the Communist Party'. The destructive weapon of expulsions and splits was carried over from the party into the mass organizations and the trade union movement. The Stalinists became hated and feared as disrupters who would stop at nothing to serve party aims dictated by the momentary interests, or supposed interests, of the Kremlin bureaucracy, which regulated the day-to-day policy of the American

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Communist Party as imperiously and automatically as a business firm directs the activities and policies of a branch office. Apart from everything else - and there is much else - the American Stalinists wrought untold damage in the trade unions and mass organizations of the American workers by their policy of ruthless disruption and suppression of workers' democracy. The ultra-radical policy of the American Communist Party, carried out from 1928 to 1933 by Moscow command, prompted the Stalinists to lead the advanced workers under their influence out of the established conservative trade unions to form separate, isolated 'red' unions of their own. This insane policy, which had been so tragically refuted in life so many times in the past history of the American labor movement, was a crime against the working class, and especially against its progressive vanguard. Following that, when Stalin began to seek a bloc with the bourgeois-democratic imperialists after Hitler came to power in Germany, the American Communist Party immediately followed suit with its infamous policy of the 'People's Front'. The slogan 'class against class', which is the basic slogan of the workers' emancipation struggle, was discarded in favor of the treacherous formula of class-collaboration between the workers and their exploiters. The good and correct slogan of the united front of the workers was replaced by the slogan of an all-class political combination. The movement for an independent labor party, which had gained such a wide response in the progressive labor movement, was sabotaged and strangled. The Rooseveltian Democratic Party, the other half of the bipartisan political mechanism of American capitalism, was recommended to the workers as their means of salvation in the struggle against this same capitalism. The c P bureaucrats did everything to dragoon the workers into supporting the capitalist Democratic Party, by hypocritical indirection in 1936, openly and directly in 1944. The earlier crimes of the Communist Party became swollen into betrayals, and the betrayals increased in magnitude and cynicism. After some obscene gestures at ultra-radicalism, in accord with the Kremlin policy during the Soviet-Nazi pact, the American Stalinists promptly jumped onto the democratic imperialist bandwagon with the start of the Soviet-Nazi war. And after the entry of American imperialism, they became the most blatant jingoes in the American war camp. In return for Roosevelt's lend-lease to the Kremlin, the American Stalinists sold out the American workers in the most shameless and cynical fashion. They were the loudest shouters for the no-strike pledge which shackled the workers and kept their wages frozen while prices rose during the war. In the strategic situation created by the labor shortage during the war, they viciously fought every attempt of the rank and file of the workers to use their organ-

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ized strength to improve their conditions. They became militant advocates of 'incentive pay' plans by which the workers could be speeded up more efficiently, while their solidarity in the shops was undermined. They became the most unabashed finks and strikebreakers in every labor dispute that flared up during the war; and they put the stool pigeon's finger on every revolutionist and every militant, howling for their arrest and prosecution. The record of American Stalinism is indeed a record of crimes and betrayals. But here is the important point for militants to get clear in their heads: These crimes and betrayals have been directed against the interests of the American workers. It is on this ground and no other that the militant workers who are conscious of their own class interests must expose and fight them.

5

Stalinist Bureaucrats and the Other Bureaucrats

Some people, who carry their understandable and quite justified hatred of the Stalinists to the point of phobia, seem to overlook the fact that there are other evils in this world, and in the labor movement. They tend to limit their political program to the single simple formula: United front of everybody against the Stalinists. This does not state the problem correctly. And, moreover, it doesn't hurt the Stalinists. They can live and thrive on the indiscriminate campaign of 'red-baiting' directed against them, and even gain a certain credit in the eyes of radical workers which they by no means deserve. We define the Stalinists as a bureaucracy in the labor movement, with special interests of its own to serve. This bureaucracy seeks to gain, and does gain, special privileges at the expense of the masses of the workers, tenaciously holds on to these privileges and fiercely defends them, and is ready at any moment to sell out the workers to maintain them. But the Stalinists are not the only bureaucrats in the labor movement. There are others, and in America the others are more numerous, and stronger. By the same token they constitute a far more useful instrument of the capitalists in preventing, restraining, and sabotaging the emancipation struggle of the workers. We refer, of course, to the old-line, conservative, trade union bureaucracy and its 'progressive' and 'Socialist', or ex-Socialist, appendages. This bureaucracy is also based on special privileges which differ from those of the American Stalinists mainly in the circumstance that their privileges are more extensive, more firmly established over a longer period of time, and more secure. A vast horde of these privileged bureaucrats, ranging from the overfed business agents of a good many of the local unions to the high-salaried International officers, have raised themselves up on the backs of the workers. They

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enjoy standards of living which the workers cannot even dream of, and think and act more like businessmen than like workers. Most of them feel more at home in a conference with bosses and capitalist party politicians than in a meeting of rank-and-file workers. The pickings of the conservative American labor bureaucracy are the richest in the world, and their consciousness is determined accordingly. When they fight it is always mainly for the defense of these privileges. Whether it is a fight to smash a rank-and-file revolt one day, by any and every dirty means of demagogy, expulsion, and brutal violence; or another day against antiunion legislation which threatens the existence of the unions and therefore their own basis of existence; or a third day against another union in a jurisdictional quarrel - their primary motivation is always the same: the defense of their pickings. The good-standing members of this corrupt and reactionary gang are fierce Russophobes and red-baiters; and superficially they appear to be diametrical opposites of the Stalinists, whom they are attacking with exceptional energy at the present time in response to the Washington tuning fork. In reality, however, they are essentially the same type as the Stalinists. They are motivated by the same kind of privileged special interests and defend them with very much the same mentality. There are differences, of course, between them and the Stalinist bureaucrats, but the points of difference are superficial and secondary. The points of similarity are fundamental. That is why they attack the Stalinists not for their crimes and betrayals of the workers but rather for their virtues; more correctly, what would be their virtues if the accusations were true. Leaving aside the stupid allegation that the American Stalinists are promoting and planning to organize a workers' revolution to overthrow capitalism - a 'crime' which they are not in the least guilty of there is not much substance to the furious bluster of the reactionary red-baiters in the labor movement against the 'Commies'. These anti-Stalinists are guilty of the very same crimes as the Stalinists, and in every crucial test they find themselves allied with the Stalinists in the commission of these crimes against the workers. Strange as it may seem, that is what the record says, and the record does not lie. We have already recounted the most important crimes and betrayals of which we accuse the Stalinists in the American labor movement. We cited their disruption, class collaboration, and support of capitalist political parties, leading up to the crowning infamy: support of the imperialist war. On top of that, strikebreaking activity to keep the workers in shackles during the war, and stool-pigeon collaboration with the capitalist government for the prosecution of militant and revolutionary workers. That is a 'criminal record' if there ever was one. And where were the noble red-baiters while all this was going on? The

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anti-Stalinist labor bureaucrats were committing the very same crimes, point for point; many times in intimate collaboration with these same Stalinists with whom unbalanced Stalin op ho bes imagine them to be in irreconcilable conflict. The old-line trade union bureaucracy has always sought to restrict the trade union movement to the more or less skilled trades that constitute the aristocracy of American labor. They did more to hinder than to help the organization of the great mass of the unskilled. Prior to the thirties, whenever they entered the unskilled and mass-production field, it was hardly ever to organize the unorganized, but nearly always to disrupt the organizing campaigns of rival organizations, such as the IWW and the independent unions. In this field, where the most exploited workers stood most in need of the benefits of organization, the old-line labor skates have always done ten times more union busting than union building. The movement of the mass-production workers for unionization surged forward mightily in the thirties, and its driving impulse came from below, not from the top. The shameless and cynical fakers feared the entrance of these great masses into the organized labor movement as a possible threat to their bureaucratic stranglehold, and consequently to their privileges. The heroic rankand-file efforts to attain effective unionization were disrupted again and again by the AFL bureaucracy. The auto workers and the rubber workers, especially, can tell a tale about that; to say nothing of the electrical workers who, in order to create their own union, had to break out of their 'Class B' prison in the AFL union, where they had the right to pay dues but not to breathe or to vote. It required a split with the AFL bureaucracy before the mass-production workers could finally break through and secure for themselves the protection of organization under the banner of the c Io. Rank-and-file militants in many a local union know from experience that every attempt to take advantage of a favorable opportunity to improve their conditions by strike action must take into account not only the bosses and the cops, but also the top officers of their own organization. There is always the danger of their interference, which does not stop at gangsterism and strikebreaking. These bureaucrats would rather bust up a local union any time than allow it to come under an honest militant leadership that might endanger their control in the International organization and the emoluments and perquisites appertaining thereto and accruing therefrom. Approximately 40 percent of the local unions of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, for example, at the present time are under 'receivership', i.e., deprived of all their constitutional rights to elect officers, etc., for precisely these reasons. It was the attempt, by the way, to impose such a 'receivership' on Minneapolis Local 544, in order to get rid of its militant leadership and line

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the union up for the war program, that led to the big fight and the subsequent arrest and imprisonment of eighteen of the union and SWP leaders - all Trotskyists. Tobin, the president of the Teamsters International, appealed directly to Roosevelt and directly instigated the prosecution. And he worked hand-inglove with the Stalinists, first to put us in prison and then to prevent any union under their control from aiding our defense committee. These cynical labor skates couldn't learn anything about disruption, union busting, stool pigeoning, or violations of trade union democracy, from the Stalinists; they are past masters at all these dark and evil arts. When it comes to class collaboration on the political field - another crime we charge against the Stalinists - it cannot be said that the Stalinists taught this scheme of class betrayal to the conservative labor bureaucrats. On the contrary, they learned it from them. The labor leaders of the old school operate in every election as procurers for the capitalist parties, urging the trade unionists to 'reward their friends', who almost invariably tum out in every real showdown to be their enemies. Witness the present Congress, a large percentage of which, if not a majority, sailed into office with the 'endorsement' of the labor leaders; not to mention the strikebreaking president who was recommended as labor's 'special friend'. We have cited the especially abominable record of the Stalinists during the war - their support of the war, their support of the no-strike pledge, and their collaboration with the employers and governmental agencies to frame up and break up every attempt of the hard-pressed rank and file to get through it or around it. We denounced the Stalinists during the war for these real and heinous crimes against the interests of the working class. But the red-baiting anti-Stalinist labor bureaucrats, who are making so much noise today in synchronism with the governmental drive against the Stalinists, had absolutely nothing to say against these crimes committed by the Stalinists during the war. And for good reason. They were engaged in the same dirty business. They were, in fact, united with the Stalinists in the conspiracy against truth which was required to dragoon the workers into the war. They jointly put over the 'nostrike pledge', and jointly fought the militant rank and file whenever they tried to assert their right to strike during the war. And this applies to the so-called 'progressive' labor leaders of the c10 as well as to their more stolid brethren of the AFL. Visualize once again the unforgettable picture, drawn by Art Preis in The Militant, of the convention of the United Automobile Workers in 1944. Thomas and Reuther and Addes and Leonard, the whole administration in all of its factions, were lined up solidly on the platform in fraternal unity with the Stalinists to beat down the rank-and-file revolt against the no-strike pledge.

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The transitory leaders thrown to the top of the first great wave of the new unionism represented by the CIO are showing a marked inclination to imitate the AFL fakers and a tendency, like them, to grow fat, especially around the ears. They strive constantly to consolidate their positions in official machines, permanent and secure, and independent from all control, on the pattern of the AFL - and to constrict the membership in a bureaucratic straitjacket. If they have not succeeded - as they have not and will not - it is by no means owing to the lack of ambitions in this respect, but primarily to the power of resistance that resides in the rank and file of the new unions of the mass-production workers; to the alertness of these workers, and their mighty striving for democracy and for an aggressive, militant policy. The closer you look at the dubious program of united front with the conservative and 'progressive' labor bureaucrats against the Stalinist bureaucrats, the clearer it becomes that in practice, wherever the vital interests of the masses of the workers are concerned, the 'united front' usually takes a different shape, with or without a formal agreement. When it comes to the fundamental conflict of interests between the classes, the burning reality which serious workers must take as their starting point, the Stalinist bureaucrats and the anti-Stalinist bureaucrats find themselves lined up on the same side, and it is not the side of the workers. 'But', say the AFL fakers, and the CIO 'progressive' red-baiters, and the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, and the ex-radical Stalinophobes - 'but', they all say in chorus, 'there is one crime of the Stalinists you have not mentioned, and it is the greatest crime of all which should unite all men of goodwill in opposition to them: They are the servants of a foreign power'. That is true. The official leaders of the Communist Party of the United States are indubitably the hired agents of the Stalin regime in Russia; and they servilely carry out its instructions and serve its interests with every twist and tum of Kremlin policy, no matter how such conduct may contradict and injure the interests of the American working class. For that we condemn them and denounce them, and wage war against them. But not under your leadership, Messrs. Labor Fakers and Russophobes! You are just as much the agents and servants of the capitalist government at Washington as the Stalinists are the agents and servants of the Stalin regime. What kind of a government is that, if you please? Didn't it drag the people of America into two wars of imperialist conquest under the fake slogan of 'democracy', and isn't it now plotting and planning a third? Didn't it preside over the tenyear depression of the thirties with its terrible toll of broken lives and broken homes, and isn't it heading the country straight into another depression, and a still worse one? Isn't it the cynical instrument of the monopolists and profit

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hogs, serving their interests against the interests of the American people? Isn't it an antilabor, strikebreaking government, owned lock, stock, and barrel by the Sixty Families of monopoly capitalism? The main enemy of the American workers is in their own country; and as far as their most basic interests are concerned, this government at Washington is also a foreign power. It is a far mightier, and a far more immediate threat and danger to the American working class than the government of Stalin, as the experience of the past year has amply demonstrated once again. It is not the Stalin government that is breaking strikes and threatening the rights of unions in the United States at the present time. It is the bipartisan capitalist government at Washington. That is a foreign power, workers of America, and those who serve this foreign power cannot be your allies in the struggle against Stalinism. The united front the workers of America really need is the united front of the rank and file, who have no privileges, who serve no foreign powers, who have nothing to lose but their poverty and insecurity, and have a world to win. This united front must be directed at the capitalist system, and thereby against both of its servile agencies - the Stalinist bureaucrats and the other bureaucrats.

6

Is the Communist Party a Working Class Organization?

Stalinism, like every other force obstructing the emancipation struggle of the workers, thrives on confusion and assiduously disseminates it in the labor movement. The Stalinists also profit not a little by the confusion in the heads of some of their bitterest and most conscientious opponents. The misunderstanding of the question by these opponents arises in part from an emotional approach to the question. Hatred is permitted to obscure reason, and no good ever came from that. Nothing is better calculated to lead the opponents ofStalinism in the United States astray than the simple description of this monstrosity as the agency of a foreign power, and in tum, the designation of this foreign power as an exploiting class, imperialistic to boot, which dominates more than one-sixth of the earth and is reaching out for the rest of it. This conception, which would put the Communist Party in the same category as the unlamented German-American Bund, clashes with reality at every step and leads to tactics in the struggle against Stalinism which are futile and self-defeating every time. It bars a tactical approach to the masses of workers under the control and influence of the Communist Party, and thus inadvert-

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ently aids the Stalinist bureaucrats in consolidating and retaining this control and influence. Such a theory would be absolutely fatal in Western Europe where the Stalinists dominate virtually the whole working class movement. And it certainly is of no help even in the United States. Stalinism is relatively weak here, and for numerous and weighty reasons can scarcely be expected ever to play the dominating role it plays in Europe. Nevertheless, it is a serious obstacle to the development of a genuinely revolutionary movement, and consequently to the mobilization of the masses for resolute action in the class struggle which would lead objectively to the socialist goal. For that reason we should fight it. But in order to achieve success we must fight Stalinism with a correct understanding of its nature and role. If the Communist Party were merely a 'fifth column' and terrorist gang operating in America as the agency of a foreign 'imperialist' government, then the problem would be considerably simpler and easier for the working class movement. And it would be no problem at all to the government at Washington, which is indeed imperialist and has the means to cope with foreign agents and spies. This was shown in the case of the German-American Bund. Fritz Kuhn's sorry 'Bund' - equipped with 'storm troopers' and all - was easily isolated and could gain no serious influence in the American trade unions. The FBI and other governmental agencies had no difficulty in liquidating this fantastic Hitlerite agency when they got ready to do so. And it never once occurred to any working class tendency, faction, or party to come to the defense of the 'Bund'. The same prescription does not work, however, and will not work in the case of American Stalinism. Fascism and Stalinism, although much similar in their methods and practices, have entirely different social foundations on their home grounds where they wield state power, and this applies to their foreign extensions too. The rather widespread conception that the Communist Party is a formation similar to Hitler's 'fifth column', and can be treated accordingly, is profoundly false. The Stalinists make the labor movement the main base of their operations, and it is there that they must be fought, and fought, moreover, with working class means. The analogy which can best aid our thinking on this question is provided by the experiences of the Russian Bolsheviks and the early Comintern in the struggle against the Social Democrats. The German Social Democracy betrayed the proletariat in the First World War; and following that, after they came into control of the government, they employed the police and the army to slaughter tens of thousands of workers in suppressing the proletarian revolution. Besides that, the noble Social Democrats were accountable for a substantial number of

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'unofficial' murders of revolutionary leaders, such as the murders of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Despite these crimes, the Social Democrats retained a strong organization and influence in the labor movement, as do the present-day Stalinists - despite their crimes. A strong tendency arose among the revolutionary workers to regard the Social Democratic Party as no longer a workers' organization, and to reject any kind of tactical approach to its members. This characterization proved to be one-sided, too simple, and therefore false and harmful to the further development of the workers' revolutionary movement. This attitude had to be radically changed before the young Communist Party of Germany could make any real headway in the struggle against the Social Democratic traitors. By their program and their policies the Social Democratic parties then, as now, were petty-bourgeois and not proletarian parties. But by their tradition and composition, by the fact that they made their main base of operation the working class movement, and by the fact that the workers considered them to be workers' organizations - they had to be designated as such. More precisely, as an organized tendency within the labor movement which the revolutionary party had to combat by tactical means as well as by frontal principled struggle. The Leninist policy of the united front followed inexorably from this basic analysis. This opened the path of the revolutionary party to the Social Democratic workers. There are many differences between Social Democracy and Stalinism, especially in the domain of methods, but in our view they are differences of degree and not of principle. The Social Democrats substituted the program of class collaboration and reform for the program of class struggle and the proletarian revolution. The Stalinists do the same thing, on a far greater scale. The Social Democrats lied and slandered, murdered and betrayed. The Stalinists do the same thing, also on a far greater scale. Both confuse, disorient, and demoralize the advanced workers and disrupt their struggle against capitalism. And they are able to do so precisely because they work inside the labor movement and demoralize it from within. Traditional Social Democracy doesn't amount to much in the United States. Its place and its essential function is taken over by the official trade union bureaucracy. This bureaucracy also represents a tendency, although an alien tendency, within the labor movement, which also serves a foreign power - the government of the capitalists - and it is more firmly rooted, more influential, more powerful, and therefore a more formidable enemy, at the present time at least, than the Stalinists. Our method of fighting this formidable bureaucracy in the American labor movement is and must be the method worked out by the Russian Bolsheviks

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to combat the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, and later taught by them to the young Communist parties of the early Comintern. We oppose the reactionary bureaucrats in principle, and the main burden of our irreconcilable struggle against them must be devoted to denunciation and exposure of their perfidious role. Subordinate to that, but inseparably connected, goes the tactical approach to the vast masses of workers under their influence and domination. This is the Leninist tactic of the united front. We demand of the bureaucrats that they break their alliance with the capitalist political parties and follow an independent class policy on the political field. We give critical support to the bureaucrats in all cases where they find themselves obliged to lead the struggles of the workers for the improvement of their conditions or the defense of their rights. We defend the unions and the individual labor leaders against any attack or infringement from the side of the government. The workers learn more from experience than from propaganda. It is only by participating in the struggles of the workers along these lines that we will win them over to an aggressive classstruggle policy and eventually to a socialist consciousness. On the ground that the Communist Party is not a working class organization and not a tendency in the labor movement, a contention is advanced that we can have a different attitude toward the Communist Party, or to those trade unions or other workers' organizations under its control, when they find themselves in clashes with the capitalist class or its governmental agencies. To think so requires an absurd, subjectively motivated denial of reality. Such a mistake can only lead its proponents, if they follow out the logic of their analysis, into the bourgeois camp. Unfortunately, that is precisely what has happened to the great majority of American anti-Stalinists. Stalinism is a new phenomenon of the last quarter of a century, and is unique in many ways. But this does not change the essential fact that it is a tendency in the labor movement. It is rooted in the trade unions and wields influence over a section of the progressive workers. That is precisely the reason that it is such a great problem and such a great obstacle to the emancipation struggle of the workers. In our opinion, it is impossible to wage an effective struggle against Stalinism without proceeding from this premise. Stalinism is an internal problem of the labor movement which, like every other internal problem, only the workers can solve. The gist of the matter, let us repeat, consists in the fact that the misnamed Communist Party makes its main field of activity the trade union movement; wields a certain influence there; and by a combination of demagogy, machination, bureaucratic repression, and gangster violence - aided no little by the stupidities of its opponents - has gained the controlling position in numerous

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unions and represents an influential force in others. And these unions,just like the unions under the control of the anti-Stalinist conservatives, by the logic of the class struggle frequently come into conflict with the employers and even with the government and find themselves involved in strikes. Shall these strikes be supported on the general principle of class solidarity, or should support be withheld because of the circumstance that the official leaders are Stalinists? And should these leaders, in case they are arrested in the course of strike activities, be defended - also on the general principle of class solidarity against the class enemy? And should the legal rights of the Communist Party be defended against the red-baiters? Those who say no, end the debate so far as we are concerned. By that fact they take their place in the camp of the class enemy. Those who say yes, thereby recognize implicitly the falsity of the contention that Stalinism is not a tendency in the labor movement, to be contended with as such. There is no getting around this question. It must be squarely faced and answered. This question arose very acutely in last year's strikes of the Stalinized UE [United Electrical Workers] against Westinghouse and General Electric. And again in the long drawn-out strike of the auto workers at Allis Chalmers, which was indubitably dominated by a Stalinist leadership. And again in the recent strike of the National Maritime Union, which had been completely under Stalinist domination for years, and was still partly so. And it is sharply posed right now by the movement to pass legislation outlawing the Communist Party. A clear understanding and recognition of the class nature of the Communist Party as a workers' organization - as a tendency in the labor movement determines the tactical approach of the revolutionary workers to the problem. Stalinism cannot be disposed of by reliance on police measures of the bourgeois state - the very idea is ludicrous - nor by anathema and excommunication from the labor movement, when the power to enforce it is lacking. Nothing will do but an uncompromising principled fight, combined with a tactical approach which will enable the revolutionary party to win the workers away from its perfidious influence. From the revolutionary point of view, that is the heart of the problem of fighting Stalinism in a way that will lead to its elimination from the working class movement, not in fancy but in fact.

7

The Working Class Fight against Stalinism

The preamble of the old IWW, on which a whole generation of worker-militants was raised and taught the class struggle, began with the declaration: 'The work-

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ing class and the employing class have nothing in common'. This is certainly true as far as social interests are concerned. The struggle between the classes never ceases and cannot cease until the workers are completely victorious. The social evils which plague the world today, and even threaten the continued existence and future development of civilization, are due fundamentally to the fact that the international proletarian revolution, the necessary precursor of world socialism, has been unduly retarded and delayed. Outlived and decadent capitalism is stretching out the period of its decline - or rather, its death agony - for too long a time. Capitalism is the root of the evil. The overthrow of capitalism is the historic mission of the working class, and all of its daily struggles are instinctively directed to this end. When this struggle becomes conscious and properly organized and led, the downfall of capitalism and the beginning of socialism will be equally assured. Power is on the side of the workers, thanks to their numbers and their strategic social position. They cannot fail to be victorious once they get a clear view and understanding of the central requirement: that their policy be anti-capitalist, and that their organizations and their activities be independent, free from capitalist influences and agencies. This is the core of what Marxism teaches us about the politics of the working class. The foregoing considerations fully apply to the problem of Stalinism, which is one of the agencies of capitalism in the labor movement, and the fight against it. The advanced workers above all must give thought to this problem and work out their policy from an independent class standpoint. Stalinism helps the capitalists by introducing disruption, confusion, and demoralization into the labor movement, and sells its services to the capitalists in this destructive capacity. To be sure, Stalinism tries to drive a hard bargain with the imperialists. The bargaining over the terms of betrayal sets up conflicts and irritations, as at the present time in the United States, which give the false appearance of a revolutionary struggle. This, however, does not change the basic fact that Stalinism is essentially an agency of world imperialism in the labor movement of the advanced countries, as well as in the colonial world. But for Stalinism, all of continental Europe would long since have been united in a Federation of Socialist Republics. Even today, after all that has happened, after all the harm that has been done and all the destruction that has been wrought, not a single capitalist regime would stand up for a month in continental Europe unless it was propped up and supported by Stalinism, the 'loyal opposition'. It is from this point of view that the fight against Stalinism must be conducted - as an integral part of the general fight against capitalism. It should be clear

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that the advanced workers need a class policy for this fight as for all others, and one that is completely independent. For this fight the workers need and can expect no help from the capitalists; it is stupidly incongruous to speculate on it for a moment. The workers need rather to get rid of the agents of capitalism and that means all of them. 'Class against class' must be the guiding line for the fight against Stalinism, as for all other fights of the workers. The current red-baiting campaign is inspired and directed by the exploiters of labor. They are more class-conscious than the workers and always try to keep their class interests in mind in elaborating any policy. Ostensibly directed against the Stalinists alone - or the 'Communists' as they falsely label them, partly through ignorance and partly through the design to confuse - the witchhunt is in reality directed against labor and the rights of labor in general. Notice how intimately it is tied up with the program of war preparation and anti union legislation now being railroaded through Congress. That is no accident. In part the red-baiting campaign is designed also as a diversion to distract attention from the ripening disturbances of the American social system and the mounting inequalities, injustices, and deprivations inflicted upon the mass of the people. 'Don't look at the harsh realities of American life. Don't think of your real troubles. Look at Russia and the "reds."' To fall for this transparent fake requires a rather high degree of gullibility. For the American militants and trade unionists to join in a 'united front' with the American exploiters for the prosecution of the red-baiting campaign would simply be to adopt a severely efficient method of cutting their own throats. Some labor leaders who understand or partly understand the truth of the matter are taking part in the red-baiting campaign stemming out of Washington, in the hope of buying immunity for themselves. Besides being unprincipled, that tactic is sheer folly. The campaign is aimed at all the organizations of the workers and will strike them all with increasing violence as it gathers momentum. The appetite of the red-baiting reactionaries grows by what it feeds on. They become more aggressive with every attempt at unprincipled appeasement offered to them by one section of the labor leaders or another. Evidence is accumulating that the rank-and-file workers in the more progressive and democratic unions are getting the pitch. They are taking a somewhat reserved, and in some places, even a hostile attitude toward the anti-red campaign, to the consternation of some short-sighted 'progressive' labor fakers who thought they could easily dispose of their rivals and get themselves elected simply by raising the red scare. In the recent election in Ford Local 600 of the UAW, the largest local union in the world, the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, the Roman pope's foreign legion in the American labor movement, led a well-organized, boastful,

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and confident 'anti-Moscow' campaign. They suffered a completely unexpected disaster. The Thomas-Addes slate backed by the Stalinists swept the elections by a majority of three to one. In the last convention of the era Electrical Workers, likewise, the red-baiting office-hunters got a brutal and well-deserved beating. The workers in the plants apparently took a more serious view of their problem as a whole than the red-baiters counted on. They apparently linked the anti-red drive with the drive against labor in general, and decided by their votes to give a rebuke to the opportunist labor politicians and reactionaries who tried to fish in the troubled waters without bothering to present a serious program on union issues. Unfortunately, the Stalinists profited by the confusion in these cases. That is not to be desired, for they are a real menace to the trade union movement and must be fought tooth and nail. They try to stigmatize every criticism of their wrecking activities as 'red-baiting', but this dodge is playing out. There is no reason why we should take their definition and refrain from the struggle against them just because some stupid reactionaries are also fighting them, from another point of view. The thing is to put the fight on the proper basis and conduct it from the standpoint of the interests of the working class. That means to fight the redbaiters without covering up or shielding the criminal record of the Stalinists. It means, no less, to fight the Stalinists without falling into the booby trap set by the reactionary red-baiters. This discrimination is not so difficult as it may appear. It has been done. From all indications it is being done right now with very good results in the National Maritime Union. The Stalinist machine has controlled the NM u since it was first organized ten years ago. They have run things there, as they do in every union that falls under their control, with brutal disregard for the wishes and interests of the workers. The union was converted into a political instrument of the Communist Party, and made to serve every zigzag of policy in conformity with the interests and demands of the Kremlin. At the same time, the union apparatus was converted into a happy hunting-ground for careerists and bureaucrats. The chief qualification required to secure their places on the swollen payroll was that they be always ready to carry out any and every policy dictated by the Stalinist machine, regardless of how it might affect the interests of the workers who paid the dues. The treacherous policies and bureaucratic brutality of the Stalinist machine in the NMU provoked more than one revolt in the ranks in the past, as has been the case in all other Stalinist-dominated unions and will always be the case in the future. But these previous revolts, inspired in the main by the justified resentment of honest workers, fell under the leadership of ignorant, reaction-

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ary, red-baiting place-hunters. They simply made good punching bags for the Stalinist demagogues in the 'ideological' struggle, and couldn't even hold their own in the physical struggle which they, like so many of their breed, imagined could accomplish everything. They found out that muscle-stuff is a game that more than one side can play at, just as the Stalinists, who are addicted to the same theory, are finding out now and will find out increasingly, as the tide of revolt rises against them. The Stalinists, following their regular procedure, manipulated the expulsion of their leading opponents. All opposition was driven underground. For a long time the CP stranglehold on the union seemed to be absolutely unshakable. But the logic of the class struggle proved to be stronger than the bureaucratic machine of Stalinism. The anti-worker policy followed by the leadership of the NMU during the war went to such monstrous lengths of cynicism and betrayal that it stored up a tremendous reserve of resentment in the ranks. Finally, this brought about a split even in the Communist Party fraction which dominated the union. With that, came a split in the union apparatus and the creation of conditions for the real sentiment of the rank and file to assert itself. The new opposition attacked the Stalinist machine not for its radicalism but for its conservatism, for its betrayal of the interests of the workers in the trade union fight against the shipowners. President Curran, who had long been a fellow traveler of the Stalinists, took the leadership of the fight; and to his credit it must be said that on the whole he has led it wisely and effectively, abstaining from stupid and reactionary red baiting, and fighting on issues of vital concern to the seamen in their daily struggle. The rank and file of the union were only waiting for the signal, and have rallied around the anti-Stalinist leadership in what appears to be a very substantial majority. If the fight is continued along these lines, there is every reason to be confident that victory will be assured and that an important union with a great future will be cleansed of the Stalinist pestilence. Two important lessons can be drawn from the experience of the NMU: (1) The masses are stronger than any bureaucratic apparatus, whether it is a trade union apparatus or any other kind, and demonstrate it every time they find an opening to break through and have proper leadership. (2) The workers who mistakenly follow the Stalinists are also their victims, and by the logic of the class struggle must come into conflict with the bureaucratic betrayers. Many of them can be counted upon as reserves for the future in the victorious struggle against perfidious Stalinism - provided they are approached with a worker policy, not a pro-capitalist one. Stalinism can and will be defeated and cast out of the labor movement. But the workers themselves must do it.

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The Prospects of American Stalinism

The most reactionary power and the most formidable enemy of the workers in their struggle for a better life is American imperialism. This holds true on a world scale; and it is a hundred times true as far as the direct struggle of the American workers is concerned. It is unpardonable to overlook this simple truism, and to see the main enemy in the person of the discredited, hounded and harried, and numerically weak Communist Party of the United States. The strength and influence of the Communist Party here is in no way comparable to that of European Stalinism. There the Stalinist parties command the support of millions and are the chief prop of the decadent capitalist system, which could not maintain itself anywhere on the continent without their support. Here the role played by the CP is a minor one, and most probably will remain so. Historical reasons in the main account for this disparity. The socialist consciousness and tradition of the European proletariat attracted them very strongly to the Russian revolution from the first. Since then, as the Soviet Union demonstrated its strength and viability, they transferred their sympathies to the Stalin regime, seeing behind its shoulders the image of the Soviet Union, and not noticing or not taking full account of the frightful degeneration wrought by this usurping bureaucracy. Moreover, the European workers, who in their vast majority are anticapitalist, recognize American imperialism as an irreconcilable enemy of their socialist aspirations, and feel the need of alliance with a power to counterbalance it. They tum more and more to the Soviet Union since the latter demonstrated its power on the field of battle against the Nazi war machine. In America the situation is quite different. Due to a number of historical conditions peculiar to the country, the great masses of the American workers never attained a socialist consciousness, not even to the extent of independent political action on a reformist basis, such as even conservative Britain has experienced now already for several decades. In addition to that, the American workers have shared the isolationist provincialism which dominated almost the whole population up until the most recent years. Except for a very thin stratum represented by the class-conscious vanguard, they saw Russia as a faraway country in which they had little interest; and such interest as they manifested was more hostile than friendly. Besides all that, beneath all their apparent conservatism the American workers have a not inconsiderable feeling of independence and of confidence in their own power. They see no need of the help of any 'foreign power'.

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All these circumstances have operated up till now to restrict and limit the growth and influence of the Communist Party, which appeared in the popular mind as the most radical party. On the other side, Stalinism has perhaps been more thoroughly exposed, and subjected to more effective criticism from the revolutionary point of view in America than in any other capitalist country. The forces of genuine communism, as counterposed to Stalinism, have made more headway with the development of their independent organization and the extension of their independent influence here than elsewhere. Thus for reasons which may appear to be somewhat contradictory, Stalinism in the United States has been stunted in its growth. And, if we continue to follow a correct policy, there is good ground to believe that American Stalinism cannot hope to attain the present powerful position, and thereby the capacity for evil and betrayal, of its European counterparts. The main strength and danger of American Stalinism lies not in its numbers and its popular influence, nor in its apparatus, its money, and its terrorist agents - although it disposes of considerable forces in all these fields and departments - but rather in its demagogical capacity to deceive, demoralize, and disorient the more radical elements who have attained a conscious anticapitalist attitude, or are awakening to it. These forces of the class-conscious vanguard are as yet not very numerous in comparison to the size of the American working class as a whole. But they are the most decisive for the future, for it is their destiny to lead the others. Once the class struggle in America is posed in its sharpest and most irreconcilable form, they alone can lead; and they will then represent the greatest power in the world. It is primarily on this ground, in the fight for the minds and souls of the awakening militant workers of the class-conscious vanguard, that the real fight against Stalinism must take place. Here we can already record considerable success; and we confidently count on more because we are gaining right along, steadily if slowly, thanks to our correct approach to the question. Stalinism was a much more formidable danger when we first opened up the irreconcilable fight against it in 1928, and in the ensuing decade or so, than it is today, even though its numerical forces and its apparatus were smaller then than now. At that time the Communist Party dominated virtually the whole radical labor movement in this country. In the first years of the depression the party drew into its train a supplementary army of radical intellectuals, disillusioned in capitalism by the crisis, who rendered them great service in propagandizing and popularizing the lie that Stalinism was true communism. In those days also the economic progress recorded by the Soviet Union under the Five Year Plan, while capitalist world economy, including its American sec-

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tor, was plunged into the greatest difficulties, gave a new attractive power to Stalinism and its myth of 'socialism in one country'. The critics from the Left Opposition, the Trotskyists, appeared to be refuted by events and were pushed into isolation on the sidelines. Thanks to this, the American Stalinists were able to vastly expand their propaganda mediums; to dominate the movement of the unemployed in the first years of the crisis; and then later to play a big role in the organizing of the unorganized, and to entrench themselves in various unions of the newly created c 10. But since the late thirties, both the organizational position and the influence of American Stalinism have declined rather than advanced. The Moscow trials, which were so thoroughly exposed in the United States, dealt powerful blows to the moral position of American Stalinism and alienated a large section of its intellectualistic periphery. The great majority of the latter, now disillusioned in Stalinism, acquired a new faith in capitalism coincident with the temporary improvement of the economic conjuncture, and have since become professional red-baiters who damn and expose Stalinism on every occasion as assiduously as they once praised it and glossed over its crimes. A smaller section of the former intellectual fellow travelers of Stalinism carried their criticism through to its logical conclusion and joined the Trotskyist movement, and have contributed fruitfully to its ideological work. So also, numerous communist workers, who had mistakenly believed that Stalinism was communism, drew the necessary conclusions from the new events and revelations and transferred their allegiance to the genuinely revolutionary and communist party, the Socialist Workers Party. Each turn and twist of American Stalinist policy, in consonance with the zigzags of the Kremlin on the world diplomatic field, produced new defections, desertions, and splits. The signing of the Soviet-Nazi pact brought with it the desertion of a small horde of careerists and muddleheads who had mistaken Stalinism for the champion of bourgeois democracy, pure and undefiled. At the next tum the Stalinist support of the war, and their antiworker jingo policy in support of American imperialism, steadily alienated increasing numbers of honest workers who had mistaken Stalinism for communism. The betrayals, bureaucratic abuses, gangster methods, and false policies inflicted by the Stalinists upon the unions which had fallen into their control are now beginning to bear fruit in widespread and violent revolts against the Stalinists. Increasingly numerous and militant oppositions are rising up against them from two sides: on the one side, from reactionary red-baiters who want to displace the Stalinist bureaucrats in order to take their places and appropriate their plums; on the other side, from militant workers, some of them former Stalinists, who want to throw out the Stalinist bureaucrats in order to provide the unions with a militant policy and an honest leadership.

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The Communist Party has to face these increasing troubles with a leadership of very low caliber. The sterile bureaucratic regime of the Stalinized party prohibited any normal renewal of the leadership. The seed of talent could not sprout and grow. Independent-minded revolutionists could not breathe in that poisoned atmosphere. The party has to rely for leadership mostly on old hacks who know nothing but to do what they are told and lie to order, and characterless careerists who frequently desert them for greener fields. Budenz is only the latest of this unsavory crew, but by no means the last. The present prospects of American Stalinism are not very bright, all things considered. Only one thing could rescue them from their difficulties and give them a new lease on life. A great wave of labor radicalism is in the making in the us. If the Stalinists are allowed to appear as the persecuted champions of the workers, instead of the cynical betrayers they are, there is danger of the radicalization being diverted to Stalinism. Therein is the tragic error of redbaiting, especially if the progressive workers go in for it. That error must be avoided. The American workers will tum toward communism, and they will move swiftly and massively once they start; of that there can be no doubt. Will Stalinism be able to seize upon this great movement, pervert it and demoralize it, and tum it aside from its goal? That depends on us. If we explain things correctly and work with the necessary energy, the American workers will embrace communism in its genuine form and reject the Stalinist counterfeit. In the struggle for the American working class, Stalinism will be defeated by its revolutionary nemesis - Trotskyism.

9

Workers' Revolution and Bureaucratic Degeneration

Will the American workers lose the revolution after they have won it? Will they overthrow capitalism with all its power only to fall victim to a new bureaucracy and be subjected to a new form of slavery? The people who ask these questions - and there are many of them - have in mind the post-Lenin developments in Russia. Rashly concluding that the revolution has already been completely destroyed there - which is far from the truth - and taking the Russian experience as a universal pattern - another serious mistake - they fear that Stalinism or something like it, with its totalitarian police state, forced labor camps, and terroristic suppression of all democracy, will be the eventual outcome of the workers' victory in any case. This line of thought and speculation has led not a few people to conclude that the revolu-

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tionary cure for capitalism will tum out in the end to be worse than the disease. It is the perfect formula for passivity leading up to capitulation and renegacy. Those who take this gloomy view of the ultimate outcome of a victorious proletarian revolution sound something like the worker who refuses to join a union and prepare a strike for higher wages because of previous bad experiences with bureaucratic sellouts and betrayals. 'How do I know the leaders won't sell us out as the others did? If the strike is lost we will be worse off than we are now. How do I know the union will not fall into the hands of racketeers and be more a detriment than benefit to us?' Those who demand guarantees as to the eventual outcome of a strike - or a revolution - ask more than we can give. Defeats and setbacks are always possible in every struggle. Naturally, as revolutionists we should look ahead and take into account the possible difficulties and dangers of the future and consider how to deal with them. But we must do this without exaggerating them and without permitting ourselves to be diverted from the task of the day. That task is the struggle against capitalism, and with that, the struggle against the reactionary labor bureaucracy. This bureaucracy is a powerful obstructive force. It is this bureaucracy, as it exists today, which must first be dealt with and overthrown. Only then will we confront the possible danger of a new bureaucracy of the future, which no longer has any privileged section of the working class to lean on and no capitalist government to support it. In our view this problem will be much simpler and easier to cope with in the United States. The real danger of bureaucratism with which we must concern ourselves first of all is not one that will arise on the morrow of the workers' victory. Rather, it is the burning reality of the present day, and of the whole period between now and the American workers' revolution. The breakup of the bureaucracy in the labor movement and the freeing of the working masses from its strangulating grip is the indispensable condition for the overthrow of American capitalism. Can this be done? Those who doubt it, or those who skip over the problem in favor of gloomy speculations about the dangers of bureaucratism after the revolution, are no good for the struggle. In the early years of the Co min tern some extremely interesting and instructive discussions took place on the trade union question between the Bolshevik leaders and some 'left' Communists. The specific point at issue was posed as follows: Should Communists accept the reactionary trade unions controlled by the reformist bureaucracy as they were and work within them to overthrow the bureaucrats, as the Bolsheviks said; or should they abandon these unions to the bureaucracy, withdraw from them, and build new unions of their own,

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free from the presence of the bureaucrats, as the 'lefts' maintained? This was also the position of the American IWW, and was one of the reasons for its failure. The 'lefts' of that time were unquestionably serious and sincere revolutionists - that is why Lenin took the trouble to debate with them at great length and with the utmost patience. They were confident that the workers could overthrow the capitalist regime and reorganize society on a socialist basis. But they seemed to be equally convinced that it was impossible to 'reform' the reactionary trade unions - that is, to win over the majority, throw out the bureaucrats, and transform the unions into militant organs of the class struggle. Lenin pointed out that the 'lefts' lacked the sense of proportion. Look, he said, you are confident of being able to defeat and overthrow the power of the bourgeoisie concentrated in its state apparatus, its army, its police force, etc.; but you consider it impossible to overthrow the reactionary trade union bureaucracy, which is only one of the agencies of this bourgeois power which you expect to defeat in its entirety. This, said Lenin, shows a glaring inconsistency on your part; an overestimation of the power of the bureaucratic rabble which has seized control of the trade unions and an underestimation of the power of the masses of workers who make up the union membership. The same inconsistency, on a thousandfold greater scale, is today manifested by not a few people who have been demoralized by Stalinism and horrified by its crimes. The same doubts and fears formerly advanced in support of the discredited theory of the 'left' Communists with respect to the trade union bureaucracy under capitalism - based on the foolish belief in its invincibility- are here expressed again in connection with the broadest problems of socialism, with far more dangerous implications than when they were first revealed in the limited field of trade union tactics. These people underestimate the mass power of the workers - the motive force of every revolution - and surrender the field to a possible future bureaucracy before it has even made its appearance. Genuine revolutionists who have confidence in the ability of the American working class to overthrow capitalism do not and cannot have the slightest doubt of the ability of the workers to dispose of the conservative bureaucracy, which serves as an agency of capitalism in the labor movement. The struggle of the rank-and-file workers against this bureaucracy is one of the surest expressions of their instinctive striving to settle accounts with capitalism and solve the problems of poverty and insecurity which haunt their lives. As far back as 1931 Trotsky directly linked the coming radicalization of the American workers with a determined and irreconcilable fight against the trade union bureaucrats. He wrote: 'With the first signs of economic recovery, the trade union movement will acutely feel the need to tear itself from the clutches

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of the despicable AFL bureaucracy'. This was written when the bureaucracy seemed to have an unshakable grip on the existing unions, which then had less than three million members, and an unlimited power to prevent the organization of the unorganized outside of their control. There were many croakers who scoffed at Trotsky's 'optimism'. But within the brief space of less than a decade, the movement of the masses proved itself to be strong enough to break this bureaucratic grip and achieve the organization of the unorganized in the mass-production industries under the independent auspices of the cw. The 'new unionism' took shape in struggle against 'the despicable AFL bureaucracy'. This example shows how ridiculous it is to make a fetish of the power of the labor bureaucracy - or any other bureaucracy. The bureaucracy can dominate the masses only when they are passive. But the masses in motion can smash any bureaucracy. This is the law demonstrated in every great revolution. It will be demonstrated once again, and finally, we think, in the greatest revolution of all - the coming American revolution. This magnificent movement of the CI o, which has wrought such a profound change in the whole labor movement and in the position and outlook of the American working class, is only the beginning. So far we have seen only the first tentative steps of the American workers on the road of radicalism and class militancy. Considering this, it does not require much imagination to foresee what a genuine, deepgoing revolutionary movement of the working masses will do to the bureaucratic barricades still standing in their path. The American workers can and will make their revolution; and, as is quite obvious, they will smash the present trade union bureaucracy in the process. 'But', say the defeatists, 'what then? After the victory, after the expropriation of the capitalists and the consolidation of a workers' government and the organization of socialist production - will not then a new bureaucracy arise? What guarantee do we have that power will not be usurped by a new bureaucracy, as happened in Russia, which will oppress and enslave the workers and rule by totalitarian terror?' Such a thought indeed opens up 'a perspective of profoundest pessimism', as Trotsky once remarked, and is all the more to be condemned because it has no real justification. It can only debilitate the movement of the revolutionary workers by robbing them of their will to struggle, which must presuppose the prospect of victory and the emancipation of the workers. An aversion to the Stalinist regime in the USSR is quite justified, for it is indeed a horrible monstrosity, but the fear of its duplication here, after a victorious revolution, has no basis in reality. There are profound differences between America and Russia, and these differences create different problems both before the revolutionary victory of the

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workers and afterward, when the problem of consolidating the victory comes to the fore. Russia was the most backward of the big capitalist countries. The proletariat, although highly concentrated, was numerically weak in relation to the population as a whole. Its industrial development and technique lagged far behind. On top of all that, the victorious workers' revolution inherited from tsarism and the destruction of war and civil war a devastated, ruined, poverty-stricken country and a frightful scarcity of the most elementary necessities. The disrupted productive apparatus taken over by the revolution was incapable of turning out a volume of goods sufficient to overcome the scarcity in a short period of time. The Russian revolution was not an end of itself and could not build 'socialism' by itself, in one backward country. It was only a beginning, which required the supplementary support of a revolution in more advanced Europe and a union of the European productive apparatus and technology with the vast natural resources of Russia. The delay of the European revolution isolated the Soviet Union, and on the basis of the universal scarcity a privileged bureaucracy arose which eventually usurped power in the state and destroyed the workers' organizations - Soviets, trade unions, and even the revolutionary party which had organized and led the revolution. A horrible degeneration has taken place, but for all that, the great revolution has not yet been destroyed, and its ultimate fate has not yet been decided. Socialism can be constructed only on the basis of a highly productive economy capable of producing abundantly. Where there is scarcity, with the consequent scramble for the meagerest necessities, the fight for privileges takes place; the material basis for a privileged bureaucracy appears, as was the case in Russia. We cannot see any prospect of such a situation in richly productive America once the power of the capitalist class is broken and production is organized, under a workers' government, for use and not for profit. America is a much more advanced country than was the Russia of the tsars, and consequently the American bourgeoisie is much stronger than was its Russian counterpart. Because of that, the overthrow of the capitalist regime in the United States will be much more difficult. But for the same reason the consolidation of the workers' victory, once it has been attained, will be all the easier. Thanks to the extraordinary development of American industrial technique, its vast resources and skilled working class, the organization of production on such a scale as to ensure plenty and thereby economic equality for all, can be assured almost immediately after the consolidation of the victory. This is the main point to keep in mind; it is the greatest assurance that neither capitalist counterrevolution nor bureaucratic degeneration can find a firm material base here. Once the American workers have made their revolution, the decisive

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factors of American resources and technology will provide the material basis for the broadest workers' democracy, leading to the fulfillment of the revolution in the classless socialist society. The thing is to make the revolution.

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The Treason of the Intellectuals (1947)

James P. Cannon

Whatever became of the revolutionary intellectuals - and why? What happened to the numerically formidable aggregation of cogitators and problemsolvers who challenged capitalism to a showdown fight in the unforgotten 'gos and appeared to be all set to mount the barricades with fountain pens unsheathed? 9 Time was when it seemed that a section of the American intelligentsia, quartered in New York, was at long last preparing to emulate that renowned band of educated people in Western Europe and old Russia who so bravely revolted against the spiritual stagnation and decay of bourgeois society, abandoned their own class in disgust and contempt, formulated and popularized the socialist doctrines of the proletariat, and placed themselves at the head of its emancipation. Alas, the hopes aroused by the vociferously uttered challenges of the American intellectuals proved to be immeasurably greater than their capacity to fulfill them. The contrast between their showing and that of the revolutionary intellectuals of Europe and tsarist Russia is appalling to contemplate. The latter went ahead of the workers' movement, organized it, supplied it with ideological weapons and inspired it to strive for great goals. But here in America the radical intellectuals - with only a very few exceptions - abandoned the mission they had undertaken just at the time when the workers, rising out of nothingness, moved under their own power to create gigantic organizations which boldly engaged in head-on struggle against the most powerful monopolists. Great class battles have taken place, and more momentous ones are in preparation. The workers are on the march. But all is quiet on the intellectual front. The imperialists 'pacified' that sector without a fight.

g Cannon 1947b.

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The American intellectuals didn't simply step out for a rest, like tired warriors nursing their wounds after a hard campaign. They quit before the fight got really started. They took it on the lam. They deserted and betrayed. Their welladvertised revolt against capitalism ended 'not with a bang but a whimper'. The learned professors such as Hook and Burnham, the writers such as Eastman and Corey, and the journalists whose names are too numerous to mention, did not fall back to an independent middle position after they had deserted the workers whom they had promised to lead and the youth whom they had promised truly to instruct. They went over to the enemy, unconditionally and all the way, with all their bags and such baggage as they had, and helped to lie the youth into the war. And they lost no time about it. With the most unseemly haste, without a decent interval for meditation, they began forthwith to ideologize in behalf of American monopoly capitalism as calmly and easily as one changes his shirt. If you draw a line somewhere to the left of the Hearst press and to the right of the New York Times, you will identify the present political position of our absconding highbrows. Even Henry Wallace, with his populist-pacifist blather about the 'common man' and 'peace by understanding', is much too radical, too far to the left, for them. These newly converted servitors of capitalism outshout all others in their zeal, as the man who came to Christ late in life prayed more fervently than the Christians of longer standing and surer conviction. Professor Sidney Hook, who once expounded the class struggle, declaimed against imperialist war and explained that workers' internationalism alone can lead to peace and socialism, now reveals in the New York Times Magazine that the basic conflict of our age is that between 'democracy' and 'totalitarianism'. Professor James Burnham once informed us, with straight-faced solemnity, that for him 'socialism is a moral ideal'. Today, with the force-worshipping mentality of a fascist and the irresponsibility of an idiot shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre, he incites the power-drunk American imperialists to convince the world of their benevolence by hurling atomic bombs. Authors like Lewis Corey, who once wrote Marxist books against capitalism in favor of socialism, now writes other books in a directly opposite sense to justify and glorify capitalism. Max Eastman, the original champion ofTrotsky and his revolutionary cause, now writes like Herbert Hoover, with the difference only that the style is better. A fair-sized mob ofjournalists, who for a while served or aspired to serve the labor movement and the cause of internationalism, have comfortably settled back into editorial spots on the most conservative and reactionary newspapers and magazines and labor there to 'slant' the news and poison the wells of public information. A considerable number of the more educated or more sophistic-

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ated radicals, ex-Trotskyists or almost-Trotskyists, who fancied themselves to be racehorses, so to speak - and of purest breed at that - now work as harnessbroken dray horses hauling loads for Henry Luce, the 'American century' man, and contentedly munch their oats in the editorial stables of Time-Life-Fortune. One and all, these fugitives from the revolution think the late Thomas Wolfe was off base when he said, 'You can't go home again', and refute him with pragmatic proof: 'We can and we did'. To anyone who values and respects human dignity they present a most unattractive spectacle. Their performance borders on obscenity when they take time out from ballyhooing the 'Truman Doctrine' to deliver little homilies about 'independence' and to expatiate, like any hypocritical crook, mammon-serving sky pilot or confidence man, on the wellknown virtues of 'morality'. They are just about as independent- and just about as moral - as advertising copywriters or the authors of radio commercials, including the singing variety. The dominating fact of present-day society is the struggle between the two great classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the outcome of which will decide the fate of humanity. No individual and no other class can be 'independent' or neutral in this struggle. All must take sides and serve or follow one of the great classes or the other. The powerless, in-between, petty-bourgeois class, which is incapable of maintaining an independent policy, swings from one side to the other, always attracted to the side which displays the greatest power at the moment. The New York intellectuals, unknown to themselves, are simply verifying this Marxist political law by swinging over to the dominant power of the present day, along with the rest of the petty-bourgeois class to which they belong. At the present time American monopoly capitalism gives the appearance of invincible power. That is what determines the current predilection of the pettybourgeois class to side with the monopolists against the workers. To be sure, the present picture of social relations is somewhat deceptive. The 'invincibility' of American imperialism is only the temporary and superficial appearance of things and is certain to be exploded in the course of further developments. But the petty-bourgeois intellectuals would not know about that, for they are not much given to analysis, deep thinking and foresight. No one can be 'independent' in the struggle between the great classes. But even in the more limited sense of the term, the independence of character which enables and even requires one to make a free choice of ideas regardless of external circumstances and pressures, and to hold firmly to those which he considers to be right, to see a light and follow it regardless - the quality which most precisely distinguishes the revolutionist from the functionary and the flunkey - even this kind of independence is alien to the palpitating New

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York intelligentsia who change their ideas according to changes of the weather and the atmospheric pressures of the day. In the early '30s, when American capitalism was writhing in the depths of the crisis, while the Soviet Union under Stalin seemed to be going forward from one success to another - and physically annihilating the Trotskyist opposition in the process - the present day professional anti-Stalinists were nearly all fellow-travellers of Stalinism, sponsors of the Stalinist 'League Against War and Fascism' and organizers of the 'Artists and Writers Committee for Foster and Ford' in 1932. Later on, when the economic conjuncture in capitalist America began to improve, at the same time that some spots began to show up in the Soviet sun, our doughty fellow-travellers began to travel in another direction, from Stalin and Browder to Roosevelt and Truman, some of them detouring and tipping their hats to Trotsky on the way. These 'independent thinkers' haven't the least idea what it means and what it takes to fight for an idea independently, against any odds whatever. They only know how to serve a power, not to create one of their own. And these professional 'moralists' don't bother much about honesty and scrupulousness in practice. In their apologist propaganda for American 'democracy' they systematically throw the Stalinists and the Trotskyists together into one sack which they label alternatively 'communist' and 'totalitarian' - although they are well aware of the fundamental differences between these mortally antagonistic tendencies. Their venomous hatred of the Trotskyists has the same profound psychological basis as that of the Stalinists. They hate us for the same reason that the Stalinists hate us - because we are witnesses to their treachery. Our existence and our struggle are evidence against them, and a reproach to them. Their desertion, of course, is not evidence of the elimination of the class struggle, which most of them discovered late and soon forgot. It is a sign, rather, of its sharpening and intensification - a process which exerts its pressure everywhere and squeezes people into their proper places. The working class of America is taking these defections in stride, building up great organizations, tempering them in struggle and looking ever more confidently to a better future. That is the greatest assurance that the present state of affairs, which is not good for the great majority of people, can and will be changed for the better, for the workers have the power to change what needs to be changed and to do what needs to be done. The terrified rout of the New York professors, writers, journalists and serious thinkers, who didn't stop to think, would be comical - were it not for the sadly disappointed and betrayed hopes of the new generation of students who

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have been led into a blind alley of pessimism and resignation by these educated Judas goats. It is really too bad that the young generation in the universities, including the veterans who have returned to their studies bitter and disillusioned, have been temporarily disoriented by the circumstance that those ideologists, whom they had a right to look to for enlightenment and guidance, turned rotten before they became ripe, like apples blighted by an untimely frost. The workers, too, need the forces of enlightenment and progress which a section of the educated classes, as individuals, can supply and did supply so notably in Europe and old Russia. It will happen here, too. There can be no doubt that the further disintegration of capitalist society in the United States will impel a section of the intelligentsia to revolt. This revolt will acquire great significance when it leads them, as it must, to join forces with the labor movement in the revolutionary struggle for the socialist transformation of society, which alone can save humanity from the abyss. This union of revolutionary intellectuals with the best representatives of militant labor will open up a perspective of great promise for the leadership of the coming American revolution. But this promise, from the side of the intellectuals, depends entirely and exclusively on the new generation now approaching maturity. The workers will make the emancipating revolution in any case, but the task will be easier if the young intellectuals contribute reinforcements to the leadership in time. For that the workers must look forward, not backward. The shameless traitors of the old generation are spiritually dead, and there is no such thing as resurrection. Cross them off. Look to the living and let the dead bury the dead.

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3

The Kremlin's Satellite States in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, Marxist Theory, and Our Perspectives (1950)

E.R Frank (Bert Cochran)

We are all acquainted with Trotsky's book Revolution Betrayed, where he discussed the perspectives for Stalinism as he saw them prior to the outbreak of the war. 10 Trotsky envisaged one way or another the destruction of Stalinism in the course of the war. In the event of victorious socialist revolution, the forces would be set in motion for the undoing of Stalinism in a progressive manner. If the other variant occurred, and capitalism was victorious, the Soviet Union would be defeated, capitalist counter-revolution would triumph in the USSR, and Stalinism would disappear as a world force having lost its state base in the USSR.

We know that due to a peculiar tum of developments, the Kremlin was able to effect an alliance with one group of imperialists against another, and instead of being eliminated from the scene, has succeeded in coming out of the war as the second world power. While its victory over Nazism inspired the working masses the world over and gave profound impulses to revolutionary actions and uprisings, the victory likewise strengthened world Stalinism and the Kremlin power for the time being, enabled it to stamp out; revolutionary manifestations in different parts of the globe and suppress the initiative and straitjacket the independent movements of the proletariat. Furthermore, having emerged as the second world power concomitant with the pulverization of a number of once-powerful imperialist states and the enfeeblement of the bourgeoisie in great sections of the globe, the Kremlin was able to step into these 'vacuums', and fasten its sovereignty on great stretches of country, to an extent that none of us had envisaged before the war. These are big new facts of the world situation. Properly analyzed and understood they point to an extreme weakening of the world imperialist structure, to the beginning of the centrifugal dissolution of Stalin-

10

Frank 1950.

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ism; they constitute new sources of optimism and open-up new perspectives for the world revolution and for our movement. But they must be properly analyzed and understood, else they can lead simply to an angry rejection of important new developments because these do not yet conform to our programmatic demands; the end result of which can be a turning of one's back on the historic process itself. The discussion of the class nature of the Satellite East European states and ofYugoslavia has importance from two points of view. First, the preservation of the internal logic and thought-out character of our theory. We cannot permit our world program to become a 'thing ofrags - and patches', with one set of criteria for the USSR, another set for Eastern Europe, and a third and entirely different set of arguments developed - judging by the ingenuity displayed by some comrades in the present discussion - for the Far East or elsewhere. Second, we must be able to view and analyze great revolutionary mass movements, or even, as in the case of the Satellite states in Eastern Europe, important social happenings, without prejudice, even though they are not yet occurring under the leadership of either our program or our movement, and find in them sources of optimism for our future and inspiration for our ranks, rather than embarrassment or discouragement.

•• • The 1949 me resolution, while commendable in its summary description of the evolution of the buffer countries, erred in artificially attempting to squeeze them into the Procrustean mold of capitalism, to accomplish which two false positions were introduced. On the economic plane, a new criterion of 'real planning' was presented to demonstrate the sociological dissimilarity of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary as well as Yugoslavia from the USSR. Unfortunately, for this criterion, it not only, regardless of facts, forces the five Satellite countries into the capitalist mold, but also Yugoslavia, and even calls into question our class definition of the USSR itself. On the social plane, the resolution arbitrarily deduced from the fact that because the present states came into being as a result not of victorious proletarian revolutions but of military-bureaucratic actions, ipso facto they cannot be sociologically similar to the USSR except if the Kremlin annexes them into the USSR and integrates them into its own economy. This criterion is likewise false and dangerous because it forces its proponents to deny the reality of the overturn of property relations in the five Satellite countries and draw hair-splitting distinctions between these and the property relations of the USSR; and in an attempt to maintain consistency with our program, forces them likewise into a whole

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series of theoretical innovations and contradictory formulations which necessarily reduce our Russian position to one of indescribable confusion and patchwork. Let us examine these two main arguments of the me resolution in chronological order. The resolution acknowledges that 'the nationalization of industry, of the banking system, of communications and transport have been practically completed in Bulgaria, in Yugoslavia, and in Czechoslovakia; it is on the road to completion in Poland and in Hungary, and it has had a big start in Rumania. Wholesale trade is equally on the road to statification in most of these countries. Only retail trade and agriculture remain as yet largely in the hands of private proprietors'. The further broad nationalization decrees promulgated in 1949 have swept into the statized sector practically all of banking, industry and transport in Poland, Hungary and Rumania as well, have made giant inroads into wholesale trade and have even bitten into retail trade. As a not untypical example, Rakosi announced in Parliament in August 1949 that 94 percent of wholesale trade and 25 percent of retail trade in Hungary was now transacted by the state. But the resolution informs us that all these facts notwithstanding, 'real planning' is impossible in these countries. Why? Because of the capitalist character of agriculture, and especially, as we have been lectured in our own discussion, the absence of nationalization of land; because of the narrow national frameworks, their lack of material resources and their dependence on the world market; and because of the mortgage the Kremlin has imposed on the economy of all these countries. The resolution authors are starting the argumentation off on the wrong foot. They are guilty of confusing two different concepts - planning and socialist production. Planning can be effected when a state possesses the commanding heights of an economy and can determine, within the limits of its material possibilities where to invest capital, on what lines to develop the economy, can eliminate to some degree the anarchy of the capitalist market and capitalist cyclical crises. Socialist production is another matter. For that you need a sufficiently high level of material resources, you have to be freed to a large degree from the pressure of the world market, you have to abolish the contradiction between agriculture and industry. That is why the arguments of the resolution, or any single one of them, are effective refutations of the possibility of organizing socialist production in one country, much less in such a small, poor country as Yugoslavia or the impoverished and plundered East European Satellite states. But they are not good arguments against the possibility of these countries, once their states have seized the commanding heights of the economy, of operating the economy in accordance with a plan, and to that extent,

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however inadequate it may be, eliminating the anarchy of capitalist production. Comrade Germain is guilty of muddling up these two different concepts when he writes: 'It does not at all follow that any national framework whatever lends itself to planning on the mere condition that the proletariat had conquered power ... To make a start in the building of socialism in Rumania, in Luxemburg, or in Paraguay is an even more patent absurdity than to pretend that this construction is being completed in the USSR' (Fourth International, September 1949 ). Not at all correct. One can argue about Luxembourg or Monte Carlo. But while the working class cannot build socialism in one country much less in small, undeveloped countries, precisely what it can do is to make a start, be it in Rumania or Paraguay, even though its efforts may not be as impressive as was the case in the USSR. This line of argumentation is wrong in theory and flies in the face of the reality of what is happening in Yugoslavia and the five Satellite states. If socialist production is our criterion, we would have to apply it to the USSR as well, where socialist production also remains the music of the future. How seriously do the factors listed in the resolution affect nonetheless the ability of these countries to organize the economies in accordance with a plan? The capitalist character of agricultural production in all these countries undoubtedly constitutes a most serious obstacle to planning. Not primarily because of the absence of nationalization of the land. Such a measure would not of itself alter the mode of agricultural production and was never listed as a task for the transitional period in the old socialist program. Engels, in his article The Peasant Problem in France and Germany, wrote what has been considered the classic position of Marxism on this question. He says, 'When we are in possession of the powers of the state, we shall not even dream of forcibly expropriating the poorer peasants, the small holders (with or without compensation), as we shall have to do in relation to the large landowners. Our task as regards the small holders will first of all consist in transforming their individual production and individual ownership into cooperative production and cooperative ownership, not forcibly, but by way of example, and by offering social aid for this purpose'. The reasons for such a policy are obvious. Capitalism develops industry far more rapidly and thoroughly than it does agriculture. While industry is brought to the point of social production under capitalist private ownership, agricultural production is carried on to a large extent on small individual family farms. The workers state, therefore, in a position to expropriate industry and the banks at once and operate them as state enterprises, can only develop agriculture to large-scale mechanized production, operating on big state farms, only gradu-

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ally and by convincing the bourgeois-minded farmers that the change is beneficial and in their interests. It is true that one of the first decrees adopted by the young Soviet Republic nationalized the land. But desirable and important as such a step is, as it lays the legal groundwork for further moves to limit and curb capitalist tendencies and accumulations on the countryside, it does not at all follow that workers' states everywhere, and at all times, will necessarily adopt such a measure in the first stages of the transition period. In old Russia, the peasantry itself demanded land nationalization because of the predominantly feudal character of land ownership. As early as 1905, the All-Russian Peasant Union called for the abolition of private property in land. In other cases, however, in the face of the hostility of the peasantry, especially in view of their fears of confiscation after the experience of Stalinist forced collectivizations, a young workers' state may forego for a period such a move and concentrate on a number of supplementary measures to curb accumulations in land and the growth of big capitalists on the countryside while using its state power to encourage collectivization as a step toward eventual socialist production in agriculture. All the same, once the big landowners and big farmers are crushed as a class, once the big estates and farms are expropriated (with or without land nationalization), the petty-bourgeoisie of the countryside, while it remains a petty bourgeoisie, is incapable of playing an independent role, either politically or economically. They may place innumerable obstacles in the way of planned economy and create enormous difficulties, but they do not have the ability to overturn the essential policy of the workers' state and to pull the economy in a capitalist direction. Statized industry and banking replaces the old capitalist millionaire cliques as the hub around which the agricultural spokes revolve. We are handed Lenin's well-known statement: 'Small individual exploitation generates capitalism and the bourgeoisie in a permanent way, every day, every minute, with an elemental force and on a mass scale', and we are informed that is exactly what is happening in all these countries. Let us examine the whole reality, not just a part of it. First on the USSR. Agricultural production in the USSR remains, to this day, petty-bourgeois as the collectives are not statized but petty-bourgeois enterprises, which after meeting taxes and other State obligations, sell their produce on the market. The Kremlin has been forced to make further concessions to the peasantry by legally granting collective farms use of the land in perpetuity, and the individual collective farm families use of private plots ofland on which they are permitted to keep livestock, and the produce of which they can dispose of in any way they see fit. Two decades of experience have demonstrated that while this petty-bourgeois mode of production undoubtedly continues to constitute

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a big disorganizing factor in the Soviet economy and remains an easy starting point for new capitalist growth and developments, nevertheless, the workers' state power has the ability to control, regulate and dominate the course of agricultural production, prevent the emergence of a new strong capitalist class and the sabotaging of its economic plans. The five Kremlin Dependencies as well as Yugoslavia are attempting, in one form or another, to emulate and carry through a similar policy of collectivization of agriculture, of curbing capitalist accumulation on the countryside, and of controlling and regulating, as far as they can agricultural production. In all these countries, the large and what would be considered in this country medium-sized estates and farms have been confiscated and the broken-up parcels distributed to the landless peasantry or converted into model state farms. The old landowning and rich farming interests have been ruined and crushed. In all these countries the maximum size of farms is limited by law, 75 acres in Yugoslavia, 123 in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, 142 in Hungary, etc. In all these countries land cannot be bought or sold without permission from the state authorities, and no resale whatsoever of the land is permitted that was received from the state when the large estates were confiscated and broken up. Moreover, all six states are embarked on special campaigns to induce the peasantry to organize into large-scale cooperative farms. They are trying to set up a network of state-owned tractor and machine stations to service the farm cooperatives, in order to control agricultural production as well as to raise its levels, and to be in a position to integrate it as much as possible into their overall planning. To this end, extraordinary concessions are being made to the cooperatives in the way of lower taxes, smaller grain deliveries, and the granting of cheap credits and technical assistance, while progressively heavier taxes and deliveries to the state are demanded from the richer individual farm holders. Even outside the cooperatives, which are told what and how much to produce the state regulates all agricultural production to an extent, by means of the trading cooperatives which act as middlemen between the farmer and the government. Of course, the reality is far less radiant than the resolutions and the paper plans indicate. The peasants are entering the cooperatives very slowly and with great reluctance. In Yugoslavia, where the regime apparently practices a softer policy toward the peasant and permits the well-to-do to enter the farm cooperatives, it was announced that at the end of 1949 approximately 14 percent of the arable land was in the cooperative sector and another 6 percent worked by state farms. In Bulgaria in July 1949, 12 percent of the arable land was tilled by cooperatives, although its Five-Year Plan calls for 60 percent of agricultural output being produced by cooperatives at the end of the plan in 1953. Hungary

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in May 1949 had a membership in the cooperatives of 60,000 who accounted for only a little over 1 percent of the country's arable land, although the Minister of Agriculture, I. Czala, stated that now that the enemies of the people had been kicked out of the cooperative movement the task was to increase the membership to 1,200,000 by the end of the year! In Poland, the cooperative movement has made scarcely any headway at all in the face of the panic and opposition of the peasantry, but 10 percent of the land is worked by the State farms. Czechoslovakia has been experiencing similar difficulties as Poland. Moreover, the farm cooperatives in Eastern Europe are somewhat more capitalistic in their organization than the collectives in the Soviet Union, the main differences being that in the cooperatives, the working members, in addition to payment in kind for the amount and type of work performed, receive rent for their land in proportion to the amount contributed to the cooperative. Beginning with 1948, especially after the cold war got going in earnest with the start of the Marshall Plan, and especially Tito's break with the Kremlin, the quisling regimes embarked on an energetic policy of bringing the 'class war' into the villages, curbing the capitalist elements and aligning agriculture with their general state plans. The Tito regime, after the Cominform denunciation of its pro-kulak policy, also apparently executed a determined left tum in its agricultural policy. Immediately, all the acute ailments besetting the regime in the USSR in the twenties, which Trotsky made so familiar to us in the earlier days of our movement, struck all these countries with ten-fold force. Attempting to fight their way out of their economic cul-de-sacs by 'building socialism in one country', they embarked on vastly ambitious plans of industrialization. Since they lacked the machinery, resources, productive capacities or trained personnel, they began taking it out of the hides of the workers. Piece work and speed-up were introduced in the plants, hours of work lengthened, the authority of management made absolute. The desperate nature of the difficulties was highlighted recently when in Yugoslavia, where there exists, in contradistinction to the Satellite states, some enthusiasm for the plan, the regime was forced to give up the 'voluntary labor brigade' system and institute a new system of contract labor which freezes the worker to his job. At the same time, the lack of consumer products and the high prices of those manufactured deprived the farmers of incentive to produce, led to speculation and black marketeering. The regimes thereupon decided to solve the crisis with the Stalinist mailed fist, by bringing the 'class struggle' into the countryside, carrying through forced seizures, executing sales to the state for prices little better than confiscatory, arresting and imprisoning farmers who resisted or disobeyed, and forced entrance into cooperatives. This struggle against the peasantry was prosecuted in all the Satellite countries and assumed a trulyfero-

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cious character during 1948-49 in Bulgaria, Hungary and Rumania. In Bulgaria in 1948 quota deliveries totaled approximately n billion levas, while free market purchases stood at 715 million levas. Stalinist adventurism produced such panic in the peasantry and led to so much sabotage and individual resistance that the regimes felt compelled to back down here and there. The resolution passed by the plenum of the Communist Party of Bulgaria in June 1949 indicates pretty clearly the state of affairs. A few excerpts are worth quoting: Our party has admitted serious weaknesses and mistakes in its policy toward the peasant farmers ... Under the system of quota purchases, in many cases the total produce of farmers has been taken away at controlled prices ... the peasants have accordingly lost interest in increasing production and improving quality ... By setting up labor cooperative farms in almost the whole of the country, the best fields around the villages have been illegally confiscated and given to these labor cooperative farms, while farmers who are not members, have been given in exchange poor land in remote parts ... The peasants are either infuriated or fall under the influence of reaction ... Some peasants have been compelled to join labor cooperative farms, thus violating the principle of voluntary membership. The plenum adopted a number of concessions to the peasantry, declared that it 'wholeheartedly condemns these abuses and obliges all party organizations to launch a merciless struggle ... for the immediate removal of all irregularities' etc., etc. This bureaucratic maneuvering and adventurism of the Stalinist quisling regimes brings out fully the monstrosity of the East European economies and the patent absurdity of any talk of building socialism in one country, and in such bled, ruined and backward little countries, at that. They point up the grisly character of Stalinist planning. But what stands out with equal force is that the regimes, in emulating Stalinist policy in the USSR from 1929, are curbing big capitalist accumulations in agriculture, are preventing the uncontrolled playing out of the natural economic laws and the emergence of a powerful kulak class, are forcing the peasantry to go along with their economic designs, even though all this is accomplished, as it was in the USSR under Stalin, at the cost of tremendous disorganization and waste, and at the cost of provoking the burning hatred of the peasantry. The disorganized and scattered peasantry can balk, sabotage, force some concessions from the regimes. Petty-bourgeois agricultural production is undoubtedly a prime factor in sharply limiting any economic plan; but in the absence of strong leadership and support from the cities,

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the peasantry is helpless to reverse the present trend toward collectivization, or overturn the general trend toward state-planned-and-operated economy. Thus, it is entirely correct to point to petty-bourgeois production in agriculture as an important obstacle limiting planning and a possible starting pointfor capitalist restoration. It is entirely wrong, however, to point to it as preventing planning and demonstrating the capitalist character of the countries involved.

This lengthy excursion into agriculture was necessary because this point constitutes, in our opinion, the most serious argument, on the economic side, of the supporters of the me resolution. It will be possible to deal with the other factors under the economic heading in a more cursory manner, as they all follow essentially the same scheme of argumentation. It is called to our attention that these states are dependent on the capitalist world market to a far greater degree than was or is the USSR, that they are thus subject to its oscillations and to capitalist exploitation by the operation of the law of the equalization of the average rate of profit. All true. As a matter of fact, one could add that even when they trade with the USSR, this law remains operative, as the transactions are based on world prices, at least for the Kremlin's products in the exchange. All these arguments were used with devastating logic years ago by Trotsky against Stalin to demonstrate the impossibility of building socialism in one country. But no one up to now has thought that they were arguments against the possibility of organizing an economy in a given anti-capitalist country in accordance with a plan. Comrade Germain, in an article in the September 1949 Fourth International makes much of the fact that Czechoslovakia may have to curtail its production plans if it does not regain some lost markets, how production in Poland would be seriously affected if the world price of coal fell. We can recall how seriously the first Five-Year Plan in the USSR was affected when the world price of wheat cracked in the thirties. We see today how the plan in Yugoslavia is being hurt by the Kremlin's embargo and Tito's inability to sell enough to the capitalist world. These factors demonstrate very clearly that planned economy in one country, especially a small poor country encircled by capitalism, is bound to be deformed, distorted, pitiable; but they do not prove that planning cannot be initiated and practiced. It is possible that capitalism, through its control of the world market, may choke a country like Yugoslavia, or by one means or another overturn the present government, but then we will be confronted with a new Yugoslavia, and not the present one. The same applies to the discussion of the narrow national frameworks and inadequate resources of all these states, and their consequent inability to organize and plan their economies on any broad division of labor and develop the productive forces to any satisfactory extent. Again the analysis is absolutely

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correct provided it is not employed to prove the wrong thing. The Kremlin's decision to prevent the formation of a Balkan-Danubian Federation is one of its historic crimes against the peoples of these countries and demonstrates by itself - that the Kremlin has no progressive mission, that it can only exercise control by brute force, and that its very expansion carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. But this does not prove that planning, however inadequate it may be, is impossible in Czechoslovakia or Poland any more than it is in Yugoslavia. The question of Kremlin pillage, dismantling of plants, reparations and the joint-stock corporations fall in reality into the same category as the previous propositions and cannot be said to render impossible the organization of planning. The brunt of Kremlin pillage and reparations demands fell on the so-called 'ex-enemy' countries, Rumania, Hungary and Bulgaria, and not on Czechoslovakia, Poland or Yugoslavia. Moreover, the policy of unrestrained robbery without thought of consequences or of future relations was likewise abandoned after 1947, when the Kremlin broke the remaining power of the bourgeoisie and perfected its own quisling regimes. (Yugoslavia, as everyone acknowledges, is in a special category and must be discussed separately.) The Kremlin, at first, apparently had no clear idea of just what its relations would be with these states. Only after the 'cold war' with the West became an established fact, and after a series of fumbles and empirical experimentations, did it resolve on converting these countries into its own dependencies, with a relationship symmetrical, not identical, to that of a colony and an imperialist state. In the recent period - especially after the Tito break - it has made an attempt to permit these countries to build up their economies. The reparations in Hungary and Rumania have been scaled down. Loans have been extended in a number of cases. So-called Germany property seized as booty has been returned to Bulgaria. Of course, the robbery of these dependent states continues by overcharging them for their imports from the USSR and underpaying them for their exports to the USSR, by occupation charges, by preventing them from fusing their economies, and by deforming their production to suit the needs and demands of the Kremlin masters. The joint-stock corporations, which represent in reality a legal form for collecting unlimited reparations, still operate in two of the six countries, Rumania and Hungary. But even, here proportions have to be guarded. In Hungary for which figures are available less than four percent of all industry is involved in the joint-stock corporations. This brigandage of the Kremlin oligarchy, taken in its entirety, certainly condemns these countries, to poverty and continued economic backwardness and dislocation. But it cannot - leaving aside the arguments on the social plane which we will discuss

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presently- negate the anti-capitalist, and by that reason, workers character of these economies, any more than imperialist exploitation of a colony necessarily negates the capitalist character of such a country's economy. One adroit polemicist has suggested that our whole argumentation on the economic side is wide of the mark because the IEC resolution simply points out the various factors that are obstacles to the structural assimilation of these countries into the USSR and that must be overcome if assimilation is to take place. The proponent of this argument forgets that a premise must be proven as well as asserted. The me resolution authors start from the arbitrary premise that in the absence of socialist revolutions, these Satellite countries can become workers states only by being absorbed into the structure and economy of the USSR. This flies in the face of what has taken place in the six countries under discussion of Eastern Europe. We maintain that if the state structures and the economies, of these countries are similar to that of the USSR, then they are of the same class type. Any other conclusion calls into question, among other things, our characterization of the USSR.

•• • After belaboring us for weeks with 'real planning', the capitalist character of Eastern Europe's agriculture, the dependence of these countries on world trade, their narrow national frameworks and so on, this line of argumentation was suddenly dropped like a hot potato. The reason being that in the interim, a number of supporters of the IEC resolution had concluded that Yugoslavia was a workers state, and obviously these economic criteria - if correct - were as valid for Yugoslavia as for Poland or Czechoslovakia. Since that time the discussion has shifted in the main to the arguments on the social plane, the questions of the state structure of these countries, the implications of the positions with regard to Marxist theory and the nature of Stalinism; and that is the main burden of Comrade Germain's most recent discussion article on the question as well. Let us begin our consideration of this aspect of the question by reviewing briefly the 1944-45 events. The Red Army's entrance into Eastern Europe everywhere gave an impulse to the socialist revolution. There was a big uprising in Prague in May 1945. Czechoslovakia was soon dotted by a network of Committees, which were organs of power, even though of a bowdlerized variety. (Unlike soviets, their members were selected from all the National Front parties, including the bourgeois parties. They were, however, dominated by the representatives of the working class parties, the Stalinists and Social Democrats.) Workers' Councils

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sprang up in the plants and in the first period exercised control over production. The London Economist correspondent reported: 'When the country was liberated, the councils and committees were really more powerful than the central government, which had no armed forces at its disposals and which came in from abroad at the heels of the victorious Russians'. It must be recalled that the Partisan movement attained great proportions in Czechoslovakia, being second only to Yugoslavia and Greece. The movement was strong enough that a Slovak National Council could be set up by 1943 which led an uprising in Slovakia in August 1944 and proclaimed on September 1 of that year its assumption of power and the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic (which the Nazis shortly defeated). A big uprising likewise took place in September 1944 in Sofia which swept the existing government out of power. So-called Fatherland Front Committees, similar to the committees in Czechoslovakia, sprang up throughout Bulgaria, wielded power on a local scale, and in many cases attempted a revolutionary settlement with the native fascist tyrants. The correspondents reported that in the capital red flags were flying over the government buildings as over thousands of homes, of the arrest of great numbers of fascists by the armed masses, of huge demonstrations, of a railway strike that paralyzed all activity. Ferenc Nagy, former Premier of Hungary, describes the situation in that country during this period in his book, The Struggle Behind the Iron Curtain: The disintegration of the government of the country opened the way for Communist penetration. None of the old town councils or municipal assemblies remained; the new political order substituted for them transitory administrative bodies called 'national committees,' with unlimited power. Assuming control of the municipalities, townships, and even cities, they appointed their own men as elders, councilors, and committeemen to pass judgment upon the political past and present of each citizen. The national committees managed the scant food supply; few aspects of daily life escaped their control. This situation was not peculiar to Hungary. Exactly right. It was duplicated in Rumania on almost identical lines, and even in Poland, where the masses were very suspicious of and largely hostile to the new regime and the Red Army because of Stalin's betrayal of the 1944 Warsaw uprising and his terror against left-wing elements in Eastern Poland. As for Yugoslavia, we are all acquainted that a civil war raged from 1941 on, that Committees were set up as new organs of power in the territories taken by

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the Partisans, and the similar Committees were appointed and began functioning in the major centers after Tito's forces marched in with the Red Army into Belgrade. In all these countries the pre-war regimes and pre-war state structures had collapsed and had been replaced with new ones. Comrade Germain in his recent article admits that the old state apparatus was smashed in the war in at least Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia. To these three countries we will add at least two more, Hungary and Bulgaria. In Hungary, the native fascists had been infiltrating the state apparatus throughout the war period until they won complete control in the Szalasi coup d'etat in 1944. With the retreat of the Nazi forces at the end of that year, the Szalasi government, including every official of any consequence, likewise moved westward, and for a brief time it even persisted as a government-inexile. Whatever officials of the old regime remained behind were not ruling anything or anybody, but skulking in the cellars. Ferenc Nagy, in the book previously referred to, states: 'Local administration had fallen into chaos. Most officials had fled to the west, particularly if they had dealt with the Nazis. A large proportion of the reliable civil employees had been transferred forcibly to Germany ... The old police, branded as the tool of the former reactionary government, was disbanded, and a new force hurriedly organized'. The Stalinists have the same estimation. Zoltan Deak, editor of Magyar Jove, describes in Hungary's Fight for Democracy the period at the end of 1944: 'There was no administrative force left in the country, almost all of them had fled with the Nazis'. The picture was no different in Bulgaria. Again both the Stalinists and the capitalist reactionaries agree on the facts. Ilya Ehrenburg, in his work European Crossroad, declares: 'What happened in September 9, 1944 was not a mere change of ministries, but a change of government. The whole governmental apparatus of the fascists was destroyed ... In Bulgaria 11,000 fascists, including diplomats, courtiers, glamor girls, and profiteers, were handed over to the tribunals as war criminals'. R.H. Markham, the reactionary correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor, writes in his book on Tito that as the Red Army advanced into Bulgaria, 'all authority broke down and every Bulgarian became his own master. At that moment a group of conspirators, organized in the Fatherland Front and led by Communists, reached out their hands and took the reins of power, which they still hold ... The courts were set up by selfappointed Fatherland Front Committees. They did not emanate from nor were they controlled by the Ministry of Justice, the Cabinet, or the Supreme Court'. Dragoicheva, in an official report, describes the activities of the Fatherland Front during the first six months of its existence. It formed 7,292 committees

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throughout the country, which 'controlled' the government, and in many cases 'functioned as the government'. About 59 percent of the members of the Committees were 'Communists', 36 percent Agrarians, 3 percent Social Democrats, 2 percent Zvenoists. The one country in which the old state structure was able to partially maintain itself, for a while, anyhow, was Rumania, because of the fast footwork of the old ruling classes and. the treachery of the Kremlin agents. And even here, as the facts show, it was of brief duration. Comrade Germain insists, however, that even in Czechoslovakia and Poland, where the old structures were wiped out, new bourgeois states under Stalinist domination were set up, using whatever old bricks were still lying around for the reconstruction job. We thus arrive at the triumphant 'Marxist' conclusion that 'bourgeois states' have been engaged for four years in expropriating the landed estates, large farms and distributing them to the landless peasantry, in destroying the old landlord and agricultural bourgeois classes, in curbing in the most violent and brutal fashion capitalist developments in the countryside and pushing a collectivization policy designed to control and harness agricultural production; for four years, supposedly 'bourgeois states' have been expropriating, in the main, the urban capitalists and statizing all the essential parts of the economy, banking, industry, transport, wholesale trade and even some retail trade, and organizing the economy in accordance with a plan; and finally, these same 'bourgeois states' have been systematically and violently purging and wiping out the remains of the political power of the bourgeoisie, destroying its points of support in the state apparatus and replacing it with an administrative apparatus which in all essentials resembles the one in the USSR. Some bourgeois states! And this phantasmagoria is handed us - with solemn mien in the name of theoretical orthodoxy and Marxist methodology. We now have to add to our previous categories a new one of bourgeois states of such unique variety that rather than being the guardians of bourgeois property relations, are its executioners. The comrades apparently have an uneasy feeling that everything is not in order here, so they try to divert our attention with irrelevancies. We are informed that there remain a lot of ex-fascists, capitalists and former functionaries in the present state apparatus. We can be sure there are. But that has no decisive significance. The important question is: Who determines policy? Who runs who? Are the bourgeois opportunists serving under the orders and policy of the Stalinists, or are the Stalinists serving under the orders and policy of the bourgeois elements? Everyone knows the answer. Let us recall in this connection that Trotsky wrote in 1936 - fourteen years ago - that a bourgeois counterrevolution in the USSR would have to clean out far fewer of the person-

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nel in the state apparatus than a proletarian political revolution. No one in our ranks has heretofore deduced from this that the state in the USSR was bourgeois in character. Germain, in another attempt to extricate himself out of this difficulty, informs us of the existence in history of Bonapartist regimes that are in conflict with their economies. Yes, Trotsky taught us this long ago. But such a conflict signifies a condition of civil war, which will be brought to a conclusion either by the state reconstructing the economy in its own class image, or the class forces of the economy overthrowing the state and setting up a new one in harmony with their economy. How is this an explanation for the analysis in Eastern Europe where for four years supposedly 'bourgeois states' have not been bringing the economy into harmony with their own class nature but constantly widening the contradiction between the two? Some Bonapartist regimes may lift themselves above the classes and represent the interests of the dominant class only in the last analysis. That does not permit us to stretch the formula another notch and suggest that they need not represent these class interests at all. That would be a denial of the class theory of the state. A study of the actual happenings in these countries provides the key for an exit out of this theoretical blind alley. The states set up in all these countries in 1945 - including Yugoslavia - were not simply bourgeois but regimes of dual power. The power of the working class was soon overwhelmed as an independent force by the Stalinist bureaucracy which harnessed it in its own interests, resided in the local and district committees, the workers militias, the newly created Stalinist-controlled police force and judiciary, buttressed, of course, by the all-powerful Red Army occupation forces. The bourgeoisie still retained a measure of power through its ownership of great sectors of the economy, its political organizations, press, and elements of governmental power. This dual power assumed the unique form of central coalition governments which formally were pledged not to alter the pre-war social character of these countries. Because the Stalinists, under the Kremlin dictate, wanted the alliance with the bourgeoisie to help fasten their bureaucratic grip on the working masses, and because they still had no clear perspectives of their future course. And on the other side, the debilitated bourgeoisie grasped at these alliances as the only means by which they could even hope to reconstitute their rule.

Only in this sense, only within the strict limitations of the dual power character of these regimes, was it permissible to still call these new states capitalist in the 1945 period. The relationship of strength in the dual power varied from country to country, from Czechoslovakia, as the extreme on one end, to Yugoslavia on the other. In the former, the bourgeoisie retained a lot of class strength and was a real factor in the coalition. In Yugoslavia its power had been decisively

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broken during the protracted civil war, and it was little more than a captive in the coalition. But in every case the Stalinists were the dominant force. This was demonstrated conclusively later on by the ease with which they broke the back of the bourgeoisie politically and economically, and finally eliminated the dual power in favor of their exclusive power. All of us are aware that the Kremlin did not give free rein to the workers to carry their revolutions through to the end, but on the contrary, suppressed the independent actions of the masses, put its heavy hand on their organizations, and sidetracked the movement into the channels of the coalition governments. Their role was politically counterrevolutionary. But the Kremlin did not wipe out these new organs of power as would a bourgeois counterrevolution. They bureaucratized them. They took over control and reshaped them as instruments of their own purposes, and finally as the new administrative structure of their sovereignty. The swift strangulation of the workers' independent movement and the victory of the bureaucracy was due, as in 1939, to the workers' isolation from the international labor movement and their insufficient organization in the face of the Kremlin's overpowering strength. The facts are plain that in every case confiscation of the estates and the distribution of the land was carried through by a great network of local committees, which then remained as administrative organs for the Stalinist regimes on the countryside. The Workers Councils in Czechoslovakia, to take another example, were not abolished, but transformed into part of the 'new aristocracy' by electing their representatives from single lists, providing that these representatives no longer be required to do manual work, and to be paid for all extra time spent on special duties. The committees, which took over the functions of the former municipal bodies, were incorporated into the state apparatus by special decrees. Even the 'action committees' organized by the Stalinists in 1948 to bring the capitalists to heel, have not been disbanded but, we read, 'are to become permanent institutions to safeguard the victory won during the crisis'. The police, the army, the judiciary have been thoroughly overhauled, reorganized and placed under new leadership. The next stage came after the sharpening of the cold war and the Kremlin's determination to consolidate its hold on these dependencies. The Stalinist bureaucratic cliques, using their crushing superiority, and resting on the new administrative organs under their command, proceeded, step by step, to exterminate the bourgeois parties and drive their representatives out of the governments and committees, with the most prominent sent to the gallows, or prisons, or forced into exile. They then forced through the purge of the Social Democratic parties and their prison unification with the Stalinists. In the sane period, new decrees were promulgated which, in effect, expropriated

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the remaining sections of the bourgeoisie, and placed all the levers of economic power in the hands of the now totalitarianized regimes. With the elimination of the remains ofbourgeois power, the new police governments issued new constitutions during 1948-49, all modeled on the 1936 Stalinist constitution and based on the new administrative organs of the state. These constitutions were thejuridical expression ofthefact that the dual power regimes had come to an end, that the de facto civil war had been resolved inJavor ofthe Stalinist power, and that the new states could therefore no Longer be regarded as capitalist even in the limited form that we have previously employed it, but were now guardians of the new property relations based on expropriated and nationalized property, and hence of the same class character as the USSR. This whole development revealed again, as it did in 1939 in Eastern Poland, the dual role of the Kremlin oligarchy. On the one hand, it cannot tolerate a free working class movement and must suppress it to preserve itself. In ordinary circumstances, this need to exercise dictatorial control over the labor movement and its policy of maneuvering between the proletariat and bourgeoisie, inevitably disarms the workers' movement and reinforces the capitalist power, as it did in France and Italy in this same period. On the other hand, this caste cannot share power with the capitalists because it rests on the sociological remains of the Russian Revolution. Hence, in the special circumstances prevailing in these adjoining countries in the years after the war, where the Kremlin's might was so overwhelming it could impose its own will on the proletariat with the aid of the bourgeoisie and then in tum, resting on its new bureaucratized apparatus, crush this enfeebled bourgeoisie. This is what occurred in Eastern Europe. To deny it is to deny reality.

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What is the answer of the comrades on the other side to these facts? They have shifted the discussion to the doctrinal plane. Let us see how matters stand here. We are accused of economism because it is claimed we have created a simple equation that nationalized economy equals a workers' state. But have we not witnessed extensive nationalizations in England, France, Norway, and Comrade Germain, in his researches, has even dug up a paper decree for nationalization issued by Mussolini in Northern Italy, and tossed it into the discussion for whatever it is worth. These analogies are all arbitrary and false. We certainly ought to be able to distinguish between capitalist and anti-capitalist nationalizations. The nationalizations in Western Europe were all carried through with the approval, or at least the acquiescence, of the capitalist class. The capitalists, after the nationalizations, became state rentiers, and often remained the

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managers of the concerns involved. And all this was done under the aegis of a capitalist state maintained intact, capitalist property relations maintained intact, and a capitalist class whose dominant position continued undisturbed. There could be reasonable question in 1945 as to the precise character of the first nationalizations in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia, as they were executed under ambiguous formulas, and the class character of the states involved was still not settled. There can be no doubt concerning their class character today. Beneath all the deceptive and sly Stalinist legal formulas governing the nationalizations stands out the dominant fact that, in the main, the properties of the native capitalist classes have been expropriated, and that these classes have been politically crushed. Numbers of individual capitalists have undoubtedly been able to save themselves by going to work for the new rulers, by stealing, by black marketeering and bribe taking. But the class has been expropriated and ruined. The press of these countries bristles with news accounts which testify to the accuracy of this evaluation. The first series of nationalizations which expropriated 'German', 'enemy', and 'collaborationist' properties broke the back of the weak bourgeoisies and placed the lion's portion of urban economy in the state sector, 82 percent of industry in Yugoslavia, almost 2/3 in Czechoslovakia, 40 percent in Poland; as well as most banking operations. In the later nationalization decrees, which took over the properties of the native capitalists, state nationalization funds were set up in a number of countries to ostensibly compensate the former owners. Even where payments were actually made, the transactions were little short of confiscatory, while on the whole, compensation was honored more in the breach than the observance. The sweeping and anti-capitalist character of the 1945-46 nationalizations in Yugoslavia is too well known to require elaboration. But, even in the case of the Tito government, which emerged, unlike any of the others, out of the civil war, these were carried through by means of deceptive slogans and ambiguous methods. Kidric, in his economic report to the Fifth Congress of the Yugoslav Communist Party, explains: 'The principal form of this offensive (against the capitalist positions in the economy) were the court procedures against traitorous reactionaries which regularly ended, aside from other things, with the confiscation of their properties'. In addition, monetary manipulation, two-price systems, state control over raw materials, and progressive taxation were deliberately employed in every case to ruin the bourgeoisie, and as instruments of expropriation. Thus, while the 1947 nationalization decree in Bulgaria officially indemnified former proprietors with interest-bearing bonds redeemable in 20 years; the 1948 nationalization law in Rumania provided for compensation by

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state bonds redeemable against profits realized in the former owner's plants; and, the 1948 nationalization decrees in Yugoslavia and the 1949 decrees in Hungary called for compensation of former owners with state bonds, the chief interest of all these decrees and laws is for a study of Stalinist methods rather than in any importance they possessed in maintaining the native capitalist classes. Here are a few samples of how they operated in practice: Immediately after the publication of the Rumanian nationalization law, it was announced that no compensation would be paid to persons who enriched themselves illegally, or who left Rumania illegally, or who would not agree to return; while the press was filled with reports of arrests of former owners for economic sabotage. On October 5, 1948, the Presidium of the Grand National Assembly deprived a number of persons of their citizenship, including N. and C. Malaxa and Max Ausnit, Rumania's biggest industrialists, with all their property confiscated by the state. The London Economist explained in detail that the pretense of compensation in the Bulgarian nationalization laws was fraudulent: 'In reality this nationalization was the naked confiscation of all property and spelt the liquidation of the middle classes'. The same de facto confiscation occurred in Czechoslovakia, where in July 1949 a bill was passed giving the Minister of the Interior the right to deprive all those of citizenship who lived abroad, or engaged in activities hostile to the state, or who had gone abroad illegally, or failed to return within 30 to go days if summoned by the Minister of the Interior. It is true that in a number of cases foreign Allied capitalists received compensation for their properties, this being the price that the East-European countries had to pay for loans or trade credits from the West, or to get back their gold supplies from England or the United States. But this cannot be given any decisive weight in Yugoslavia any more than in Poland or Hungary. To say, therefore, as Comrade Germain does (Fourth International, May 1949) that in none of the countries has the bourgeoisie been reduced 'to a point comparable in Russia during the period of the NEP' is to contradict the facts. So much for the anti-capitalist character of these nationalizations. There is another important aspect to this question. It is putting the thing on its head to claim that we say nationalizations equal a workers state. The correct way to put the matter is that only an anti-capitalist, therefore a workers, state can nationalize the whole economy and operate it in accordance with a plan. We have heretofore denied the capacity of capitalism to do it. Trotsky, writing 58 years after Engels' Anti-Diihring, and basing himself on the greater experiences of the development of capitalism, wrote: 'Under an integral "State Capitalism," this law of the equal rate of profit would be realized, not by devious routes - that is, competition among different capitals - but immediately and

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directly through state bookkeeping. Such a regime never existed, however, and, because of profound contradictions among the proprietors themselves, never will exist - the more so since, in its quality of universal repository of capitalist property, the state would be too tempting an object for social revolution'. (Revolution Betrayed). The British labor government has gone further in nationalizing sectors of the economy than probably any of us envisaged in the past. Can we therefore conclude that this process can go on indefinitely until all commanding heights of the economy are in the hands of the state? Not according to our theory. As a matter of fact, the capitalist opposition to the steel nationalization gave forewarning that at a certain point the bourgeoisie would resist with every weapon at its command. And if, under the impulsion of pressure from the masses, the Labor Party would nevertheless - in the teeth of capitalist hostility - proceed with its nationalization program, that would lead to a decisive clash and the beginning of civil war in the British Isles. And for precisely the reason given by Trotsky: 'In its quality of universal repository of capitalist property, the state would be too tempting an object for social revolution'. In their anxiety to find formal analogies to refute our position, the comrades are opening the door wide to Comrade Johnson's theories of state capitalism, and endowing capitalism with the possibility of entering a new higher stage, under which the economy would be statized and operated in a planned manner. The suggestion that a capitalist state can nationalize 'the greatest part of the means of production and exchange' is an innovation in our ideology. We are not unjustified in demanding that this be proven, and its consequences for our program explained to us, and not just tossed out in the course of the discussion - in passing. We are informed that Marxism-Leninism holds that the transition from a capitalist to a workers state can only be effected by 'the violent destruction of the bourgeois state apparatus and the establishment of a new type of state apparatus' and that therefore we are compelled, on the basis of our analysis, to revise the Marxist-Leninist theory of the state. Before we have any glib talk of revising Marxism, let us check back on what the classics have to say on this score. Marx's discussion of this question is contained in his well-known April 12, 1871 letter to Kugelmann, where he states: 'If you look at the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire, you will see that I declare the next attempt of the French Revolution to be: not merely to hand over, from one set of hands to another, the bureaucratic and military machine - as has occurred hitherto but to shatter it; and it is this that is the preliminary condition of any real people's revolution on the Continent'. Lenin in State and Revolution explains

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that Marx confined his conclusions to the Continent because he 'excluded England, where a revolution, even a people's revolution, could be imagined, and was then possible without the preliminary condition of the destruction "of the available machinery of the state"'. In his address in 1872 to the Hague Convention of the International, Marx further stated: The worker must one day capture political power in order to found the new organization of labor. He must reverse the old policy, which the old institutions maintain, if he will not, like the Christians of old who despised and neglected such things, renounce the things of this world. But we do not assert that the way to reach this goal is the same everywhere. We know that the institutions, the manners, and the customs of the various countries must be considered, and we do not deny that there are countries like England and America, and if I understood your arrangements better, I might even add Holland, where the worker may attain his object by peaceful means. But not in all countries is this the case. To complete the quotations, it is necessary to add that Lenin in his State and Revolution concluded that, 'Today in 1917, in the epoch of the first great imperialist war, this distinction of Marx's becomes unreal'. These quotations from the classics are not being adduced to suggest at this late date the possibility of a peaceful transition today in England, America, or Eastern Europe. They are introduced to show the development of Marxist thought on this question based on living experiences. Naturally, Marx, and Lenin in 1917, knew nothing of Stalinist degeneration, and concluded that the working class could get itself into a position where it could shatter the old state machinery only by winning political power by means of a mass uprising. But in the meantime a new phenomenon has come into the picture: A workers state which is today ruled by a reactionary oligarchy, and which was able to enter Eastern Europe at the end of the war, and under the special circumstances and in the specific territories, control the working class movement, and utilize this control to shatter the old bourgeois states and erect new ones in their place. Wherein is there any revision of Marxism here any more than in Trotsky's explanation of the change-over in Eastern Poland in 1939?

The remaining arguments on the doctrinal front reduce themselves to the flat assertion that the capitalist state can be shattered and a new state created only by means of a classic socialist revolution, or the absorption of territories into the USSR; and since neither one nor the other has taken place in Eastern

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Europe, they cannot be workers states, regardless of the facts. It is of course difficult, if not impossible, to deal with this type of argument. The question is: is it any good? Why couldn't it happen, regardless of what the facts show? We are advised that it is absurd to imagine that tens of thousands of vital economic relations can be destroyed and new ones substituted in their place without the action of the masses, and that the Kremlin could only accomplish this in the territories it incorporated into the USSR by physically exterminating or deporting all capitalists, big and medium peasants, the middle classes, etc. Here are the facts. The deportations in the Baltics and Eastern Poland were of the same order as the deportations from the Ukraine after the war; they were motivated, in the first instance, by the political needs of the Kremlin and not designed to effect any social overturns. The big deportations in the Baltics took place in 1940; the collectivization of agriculture occurred only in 1948. The descriptions of the deportations show the Kremlin authorities were trying to wipe out all potential sources of opposition, and not putting through any social or economic program. The Kremlin made no appeal whatsoever to the Baltic masses, even of a limited variety. It was interested solely in clearing 'politically unreliable' elements out of this strategic area, and very likely, solving manpower shortages in its slave labor camps, at the same time. The 200,000 deported out of a population of 6 million in the three Baltic countries were invariably picked on the basis of 'political unreliability', whether it was 'Trotskyism' or 'correspondence with abroad', and not class position. Moreover, we see in the recent dispatches that the Czech Stalinists are deporting recalcitrant capitalists, or just ordinary political opponents, to the uranium mines atjachymov, or the coal mines at Kladno. All the other Satellites, we can be sure, have not been behind in setting up their own slave labor or concentration camps in strict accordance with the latest methods of the Kremlin sadists. It is safe to assume we believe, that 99 times out of 100 a trip to Jachymov is just as effective as a trip to Siberia. Our versatile opponents, as if aware that their foregoing argument may have proven not sufficiently impressive, present us with one - that is its direct opposite. Trotsky said in 1939 in discussing Eastern Europe, we are told, that without an appeal to independent activity on the part at the masses it was impossible to constitute a new regime, even though on the morrow the masses would be suppressed by ruthless police measures. The Kremlin made such an appeal in 1939 in Eastern Poland, but in 1945, instead, the Stalinists first concluded agreements with the bourgeoisie to regiment the masses. How could the bureaucracy accomplish, without mobilizing the masses, that which Trotsky said could only be accomplished by such a mobilization?

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This objection is really laughable. In 1939 the Kremlin came into Eastern Poland by means of an agreement with Hitler, which was the signal for the Second World War. The international working class movement was at its lowest point. The native population was suspicious of the invading Red Army troops. The situation was absolutely cold. In order to win a modicum of support from the masses to constitute the new regimes and wipe out bourgeois influence, the Kremlin had to make some limited appeals to the workers and peasants. In 1945 the Kremlin entered an Eastern Europe aflame with revolution. It wasn't a pact with Hitler that brought them in, but the smash-up of the Nazi machine by the triumphant Red Army. These victories gave an impetus to the revolution, and not only in Eastern Europe. The workers, and to a degree the peasants, were on the move. The problem, from the Kremlin's viewpoint, was not how to encourage the masses, but how to suppress their initiative and domesticate their organizations. To be able to see the limited independent activity of the masses in 1939 in Eastern Poland and not to be able to see the ten-times greater and profounder activity of the masses in Eastern Europe in 1945, is truly a case of steeling oneself against the reality in order to maintain a preconceived thesis. Trotsky considered that the events in Eastern Poland in 1939 added up to a civil war. 'Naturally, this is a civil war of a special type', he wrote. 'It does not arise spontaneously from the depths of the popular masses. It is not conducted under the leadership of the Finnish revolutionary party based on mass support. It is introduced on bayonets from without. It is controlled by the Moscow bureaucracy' (In Defense ofMancism ). If we accept Trotsky's method of reasoning, how can we characterize the events in Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1949 - the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, the crushing of its political power, the setting up of new state structures, the planned organization of the economy - except as a civil war of a special variety that ended with the destruction of the capitalist states and the institution of new anti-capitalist states. 'None of these quotations from Trotsky's 1939 writings apply', we are sternly warned. Trotsky was talking only of territories to be incorporated into the USSR, and these dependent countries have not been incorporated. This is an incomprehensible argument. Trotsky was discussing territories which the Kremlin planned to incorporate into the USSR. But he nowhere said that this development could not take place except on the basis of incorporation into the ussR. Naturally, it is not a question of finding out precisely what took place in Eastern Europe in 1945-49 by reading Trotsky's analysis of 1939. But his method of reasoning applies with full force to the post-war happenings. If the Kremlin in 1939 was able to effect a change in property relations while subjecting the masses

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to its own bureaucratic control in Eastern Poland - because of the prostration of the bourgeoisie, and the insufficient organization of the masses - why was an essentially similar process impossible when similar relationships obtained in Western Poland or Czechoslovakia, irrespective of whether these territories eventually will or will not be incorporated into the USSR? This is to invest borders with mystic significance. But, it is further objected, the East Polish economy was integrated into that of the USSR, while the economies of the Satellite countries have not been. That is true, but not decisive. The property relations of these countries are similar to that of the USSR, and that is what is decisive in considering their sociological character. To conclude this section: Only on the basis of our evaluation are the developments accounted for in strict accordance both with the facts and with the Marxist method, without having to introduce new criteria of 'real planning', without opening the door to a theory of state capitalism, without undermining our position on the USSR and the consistency of our world program, and without the necessity for new tortured formulas of combined developments, where one and the same regime promulgates both bourgeois and proletarian nationalizations, and of Bonapartist regimes without any definite class base.

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Now, we come to the important question of what conclusions flow from this analysis. In the discussion, the argument has been pressed with great vigor that our analysis, willy-nilly, leads to the theory of the bureaucratic revolution; that if Stalinism can overturn capitalism and build the new society by its policebureaucratic methods, what role remains for the Fourth International? We could criticize their excesses and undemocratic methods, but that is an insufficient foundation for the maintenance and building of a new international organization. So runs the argument. Despite its heavy pretense of 'thinking things through', this is just a hollow debater's point. First, the reality in Eastern Europe must be recognized regardless of where it leads. But we do not maintain that the Kremlin everyplace and everywhere can carry through the overturns that it was able to accomplish under the unique conditions that existed at the end of the war in these adjacent countries. We do not maintain that these overturns can furnish the pattern for the road, to power, any more than did the overturn in Eastern Poland in 1939. If, however, despite our precise limitation of the East European events, we simply must - so we are told - give these overturns a universal application, why is the other side relieved of this same necessity? Here are comrades who have

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adopted a resolution which talks of 'the disappearing bourgeoisie of the buffer zone', 'bourgeoisie is not the dominant class', 'the statization of economy', etc., etc. All right. These are not workers' states. Let us say these are neo-capitalist states, state capitalist states, or what have you. Why doesn't this have - using your logic - universal application? If Stalinism could create these types of new capitalist states in Eastern Europe, doesn't that mean it can do the same thing in Western Europe, Asia, and the South Sea Islands? Does pinning a capitalist label on these states relieve you of the necessity of considering the developments in Eastern Europe as unique? How are the comrades who vote together with the supporters of the me resolution, but maintain, nevertheless, that Yugoslavia is a workers state, how are they in a superior position? You comrades have declared that ex-Stalinist centrists, the Titoists, have carried through a successful workers revolution, have destroyed the bourgeois state and created a workers state. Doesn't that - if everything must be given universal application - invest Titoism with a historic future? Doesn't that imply - employing your logic - that instead of trying to teach the Titoists, we ought to enroll in their school on how to make successful revolutions and build workers states? This is a knife that cuts both ways. Stalinist expansion is a fact, not a theory. It stems not from this or that characterization of the East European states but from the Kremlin's emergence from the war as the second world power, and the weakening of the bourgeoisie. This expansion, however, cannot just go on indefinitely. It has sharply defined limits. For two reasons: First, the Kremlin's savagely nationalistic policy has already led to the Tito break, may well produce similar breaks in the Far East on the morrow, and has produced indescribable tensions and crises in all of the Satellites. In the new context, the Kremlin's conduct towards these states reveals anew that this oligarchy has no historic future, that it cannot be the instrument for the destruction of world capitalism and the institution of a new society. Second, the Kremlin's troops cannot move beyond their present spheres of influence without that becoming the signal for the next war; and the Kremlin will not be the initiator of the war. That is why we can discuss the possibility of the Red Army overrunning parts of Europe and Asia only in the context of the Third World War. It may be that under such circumstances the Kremlin would attempt to follow a policy roughly similar to its initial policy in Eastern Europe in 1945. But all this, as well as how much territory each side occupies, would be simply incidents in the war. The future of humanity would be decided by more important considerations: The outcome of the war, and the progress of socialist revolutions. Comrade Germain believes that our analysis implies the possibility of the military victory of Stalinism in a new world war. It is difficult to follow the logic.

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What do our official documents say on this? 'A third world war, in the form of an attack of world imperialism- under American leadership- against the USSR is inevitable if successful socialist revolutions do not materialize in the interim. If the contest between the USSR and world imperialism is confined, however, to military means, the defeat and destruction of the USSR is certain'. The reason? Obviously, because world imperialism is far stronger than the USSR, materially, technically, culturally. How does our characterization of the East European happenings overturn this estimation? But we have every reason to believe that in the event that humanity is thrust into a new slaughter, it will not be imperialism that will be the victor. After the partisan movements that swept Europe in the course of the last war, the uprisings in Italy and Greece, the rise of Tito to power in Yugoslavia, and the revolutionary aftermath in the Far East, we have every reason to believe that this time the socialist storm will be fiercer, and will start earlier. And after the Tito development, we have every reason to believe that it will assert its independence of and opposition to the Kremlin traitors. The socialist revolution will not only paralyze the hands of imperialism, but will inaugurate the process which will disintegrate the parasitic structure of Stalinism. Our basic perspective remains unchanged.

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One final word: We are living in a world of rapidly changing events and many unexpected developments. Our cadres, which still have the job everywhere of fusing themselves with the mass movement, must be able to tenaciously stick to their principles, and at the same time have the capacity to orient themselves in every new difficult situation, and adjust themselves to the necessary tactical requirements. Our militants must feel that it is possible to carry through discussion in our movement in a calm atmosphere, free of bigotry. Any call in the present discussion for the stalwarts to rally round the flag is gratuitous, because the flag is not being assailed. The discussion should be carried through, without factionalism, until all the arguments are in, and the membership, in its collective wisdom, can render its decision.

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The Problem of Eastern Europe (1950)

Joseph Hansen

It has been felt by some comrades that the differences over the characterization of the class structure of such countries in Eastern Europe as Yugoslavia may tum out to be purely terminological and that we who want to call them 'workers' states', at bottom assess the developments in the same way as those who insist on calling them 'capitalist countries on the road toward structural assimilation with the ussR'. 11 This may be the case. The differences may concern only what is the most appropriate label to place on the highly complex and rapidly changing reality we see in Eastern Europe. However, it would be a great mistake to assume that the differences are merely terminological. We are dealing here with the touchstone of the proletarian revolution and the heart of Marxist politics - the class character of the state. When we deal with this question, the utmost scientific scrupulousness is required of us. In the history of our movement, we have seen currents alien to Marxism arise again and again over differences involving this question. While such differences do not always indicate the development, of an anti-Marxist trend, experience demands that we check our conclusions with the greatest strictness and seek to discover why the differences have arisen. The discussion thus should be educational. We are under no pressure to bring it to a hasty conclusion. We have time to think things through to the end. The developments in Eastern Europe are of the utmost importance to the future of our movement. They test our capacity to apply Marxist theory to the most contradictory and dynamic phenomena. They offer the most encouraging political perspectives for the growth of our movement, for the possibility of constructing a lever and a fulcrum for toppling the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy that constitutes the main obstacle in the world labor

11

Hansen 1950.

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movement to socialist revolution. Belgrade's break with Moscow is only the first major indication of the profound opposition to the Kremlin welling up throughout this whole area. We can now see how the fruits of Soviet victories over world imperialism tend not only to temporarily strengthen the Stalinist bureaucracy but also to undermine its position. We can understand more fully why Trotsky was so concerned about our following developments in the ranks of Stalinism in full expectation of deep splits and the appearance of currents that can move in our direction. A correct analysis of the class character of the Eastern European countries should help us win this new opposition movement to the banner ofTrotskyism and thereby hasten the debacle of Stalinism.

The Theses of the Second World Congress

First of all, let us consider some of the propositions in the theses adopted by the Second World Congress of the Fourth International in April of last year. 'It is not excluded', one of the theses states, 'that a certain relation of forces may necessitate a real structural assimilation of one or another country in the "buffer zone." But it is necessary to indicate clearly that the policy of the step-by-step limitation of the privately-owned sectors of industry has not been oriented in this direction up to now. And the specific forms of exploitation introduced by the Soviet bureaucracy constitute entirely new and powerful obstacles to structural assimilation'. (Fourth International, June 1948, pp. 118119.)

From this April 1948 thesis we can draw the conclusion that while this or that country might be assimilated into the USSR, the trend was definitely not in that direction. The limitation of privately-owned sectors was not 'oriented' that way and the Stalinist bureaucracy was introducing 'new and powerful obstacles' to it. The thesis declares, however: 'This situation can only be transitional. It must end either in the bureaucracy's withdrawal from its position, under the pressure of imperialism, or in the real destruction of capitalism, which can take place only as a result of the revolutionary mobilization of the masses, and the elimination of the special forms of exploitation, introduced by the bureaucracy in. their countries'. This seems quite clear. Either the Kremlin must withdraw from the countries of Eastern Europe or it must undertake a 'real destruction of capitalism'. This real destruction of capitalism 'can take place only as a result of the revolutionary mobilization of the masses'.

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I for one took the 'real destruction of capitalism' to mean an overturn in property relations, the ending of private property relations, the ending of private property in the means of production and the institution of state-owned property. This would lay· the foundation of a state in these countries and, with the establishment of common property forms, would open up the road to assimilation within the framework of the degenerated workers' state. The means for achieving this overturn in property relations was categorically specified as the 'revolutionary mobilization of the masses' and from the way it is put in the theses it would seem clear that this revolutionary mobilization had not yet occurred as of April 1948. In fact the Stalinist bureaucracy had done every thing to stamp out such spontaneous mobilizations as had broken out. The theses, however, did place a question mark over the necessity of a revolutionary mobilization, declaring that 'a destruction of this sort did take place in the Baltic countries, Eastern Poland, Bessarabia, Karelia .. .'. It is not made clear precisely what happened in these countries. We are told only that 'this was possible owing to the relationship of forces inside the labor movement and the degree of control exercised by the Stalinists over the mass movement. The bourgeoisie here was, moreover, extremely enfeebled and found itself caught between the pressure of world imperialism, on the one hand, and of the bureaucracy on the other'. One could wonder if the theses do not concede in principle that a revolutionary mobilization of the masses is not required, given the conditions that the Stalinists control the mass movement, the bourgeoisie is enfeebled and world imperialism cannot come to its aid. In any case, the theses emphasized that for the other Eastern European countries the destruction of capitalism 'is impossible without a revolutionary mobilization of the masses'. The slogans elaborated for use in these countries were aimed at mobilizing the masses against the Stalinists and against the capitalist state. Among the demands were 'Expropriation of the big and middle bourgeoisie', 'Expropriation of foreign capital', 'Real planning through the centralization of the industries and banks in trusts and in a state bank', 'Elaboration of a plan for harmonious economic development between city and country, in the interest of the masses, with the active participation of workers' and poor peasants' committees'. The theses declared that, 'The fact that capitalism still exists in these countries side by side with exploitation by the Stalinist bureaucracy must fundamentally determine our strategy. The capitalist nature of these countries imposes the necessity of the strictest revolutionary defeatism in war time'.

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It was emphasized that against the Stalinists and against the native bourgeois elements we are for the independent strategy that finds its essential support in the world forces of the socialist revolution. 'The fundamental aim of our strategy thus remains the establishment of Independent Socialist Republics of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, etc., within the framework of the Socialist United States of Europe'. Since the Socialist United States of Europe cannot be created at one stroke, it would seem that our immediate tactic in carrying out this strategy would be to fight for the establishment of Independent Socialist Republics which would try to extend their revolution as rapidly as possible. It is interesting to note in passing that although the theses point out that the Stalinist bureaucracy has not nationalized the land and that 'agriculture, which is preponderant in the economy of most of these countries, retains its capitalist structure', no slogan was listed calling for the nationalization of the land. This seems strange in view of the great stress which has since been laid upon this factor in determining the character of the economy as a whole. Was it simply an oversight? Or did the comrades who drew up the theses feel at the time that this was not as crucial an issue as the others on which they did work out slogans? It should also be observed that in calling for 'real planning' the resolution could well be interpreted to mean planning within the capacities of an independent socialist republic.

The Resolution of the Seventh Plenum

Now let us tum, to the resolution adopted for discussion one year later by the Seventh Plenum of the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International. 'Important changes have taken place in Eastern Europe during the year 1948', we are told. 'The nationalization of industry, of the banking system, of communications and transport, have been practically completed in Bulgaria, in Yugoslavia and in Czechoslovakia; it is on the road to completion in Poland and in Hungary, and it has had a big start in Rumania. Wholesale trade is equally on the road to statification in most of these countries. Only retail trade and agriculture remain as yet largely in the hands of private proprietors'. Specifying what has happened in the various countries, the resolution declares that in Yugoslavia 'the liquidation of the bulk of the possessing classes as well as the destruction of the bourgeois state apparatus took place by means

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of mass action, that is, the guerrilla warfare which in this country took on the character of a genuine civil war'. We cannot help agreeing that 'important changes have taken place in Eastern Europe'. One of the comrades who holds that the countries where such events have occurred still come under such a finished social category as 'capitalism' has said that this resolution is 'only an extension' of the document adopted by the World Congress last year. It may be an extension in the sense that it still designates countries where such changes have occurred as 'capitalist' but most certainly the reality in Eastern Europe is no simple extension of what we had before. It seems obvious to me that a qualitative change in property relations has occurred which should be reflected in the resolution. A number of most important questions are at once raised by these events. Is the breaking of the grip of the bourgeoisie in these countries progressive? Are the nationalizations in Eastern Europe a necessary step on the road to socialism? Does the capacity of Stalinism to engineer such major changes indicate our analysis of the Kremlin bureaucracy to be wrong? These questions have to be answered no matter what label you put on these countries as a result of the overturn in property relations. But even more is in store. Outside of Yugoslavia where it is admitted a 'genuine' civil war occurred, where was the revolutionary mobilization of the masses without which, according to the theses of only 12 months before, the destruction of capitalism is 'impossible'? The resolution states that the 'resistance of the dying propertied classes in these countries' is up to now being 'liquidated step by step by the Stalinists through "cold" means, without any mobilization of the masses being required'. The quotation marks around the 'cold' are intended to indicate, I take it, that the process did not occur in deep freeze and may at times have been somewhat warm. The explanation for these extraordinary happenings is the same as that offered the year before in the case of the Baltic countries, East Poland and Karelia. The imperialists did not intervene. They 'practically abandoned their extremely weakened bourgeoisie to the crushing political and military superiority of the Stalinist bureaucracy'. Doesn't this raise in principle the question of whether or not the bourgeoisie can be expropriated, broken as a class, property relations overturned and economy nationalized without a revolutionary mobilization of the masses? It seems to me that this question is raised and that hastily placing such a finished social category as 'capitalism' on the resulting economy doesn't help matters. You still have to answer these questions. Moreover, by calling it 'capitalist' you raise additional complications.

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Can such changes occur in other capitalist states? Does capitalism still have room for such progressive developments? Doesn't the alleged capacity of capitalism to make room for changes like these indicate that our analysis of the capitalist system contains a fundamental flaw? This is not all that is called in question. If these Satellite countries which are such evident replicas of the degenerated workers state are 'capitalist' isn't the USSR 'capitalist' or 'state capitalist' as some comrades consider it? Where do you draw the line and precisely why? If it's only the revolutionary origin of the Soviet Union with what's left of the resulting reservoir of mass social and political consciousness that makes it a workers state and not the fundamental property relations, how much longer can that criterion be held to apply? By attempting to stretch such a finished social category as 'capitalism' to cover the qualitative change in property relations that has occurred in the countries listed in the resolution, it appears to me nothing is clarified. We only force ourselves to break away from the orthodox Marxist criteria in determining the character of a state. We force ourselves to introduce innovations in our theory that to me do not seem at all necessary or justified.

Yugoslavia and 'Real Planning' For instance, take the case of Yugoslavia. Here we have had a revolutionary mobilization of the masses; we have had a 'genuine' civil war; the grip of the bourgeoisie has been broken, they are 'disappearing'; the decisive sectors of the economy have been nationalized. Planning has been instituted. According to the November issue of Fourth International measures are being taken 'to accelerate the preparations for the collectivization of agriculture'. The regime is moving to the left. Yet according to the new criterion laid down in the resolution of the Seventh Plenum, Yugoslavia cannot be characterized as a 'workers state'. 'Why not?' we ask in astonishment. 'Isn't there evidence enough that a qualitative change has occurred in property relations?' Here's the answer given by the resolution: 'The sum of these factors does not eliminate any of the structural obstacles to real planning and for this reason leaves Yugoslav economy as yet qualitatively different from the Russian economy'. The structural obstacles to 'real planning' flow from the small area of Yugoslavia, its small population, its limited resources and its backwardness. These obstacles cannot be over come until Yugoslavia can abolish its frontiers either by 'incorporation' in the Soviet Union or in a 'Balkan-Danube Federation form-

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ally independent from the ussR' -provided that the Balkan-Danube Federation 'forms a genuine unified framework for economic planning'. If this occurs, then the incorporation 'could be defined as the decisive point, in the process of structural assimilation of these countries with the USSR, at which the social nature of these countries becomes qualitatively transformed'. This constitutes the decisive criterion laid down by the resolution for determining whether or not Yugoslavia - and of course the other countries can be considered workers states. Since this criterion has not been met we are therefore forced to conclude ipso facto that the buffer countries are 'capitalist countries on the road toward structural assimilation with the USSR'. The resolution continues with the observation that, 'This definition, necessarily awkward and too concise to embrace the different aspects of the buffer zone, thus signifies essentially that in the course of the process of the structural assimilation of these countries the dialectical leap has not yet been produced. It stresses both the historic origins of the present situation, as well as the social physiognomy which is as yet undecided. But it does not at all imply that the bourgeoisie is in power as the dominant class in these countries'. Note that last sentence: 'But it does not at all imply that the bourgeoi.sie i.s in power as the dominant class in these countries'. I take it that the comrades who drew up this resolution knew what they were doing. They are reporting their considered, joint conclusion as to the fact in the countries under analysis. But if the bourgeoisie is not in power as the dominant class 'in these countries' what class then i.s in power? By introducing the new criterion of 'real planning', the resolution opens the door to the theory that we can have countries where the bourgeoisie has been smashed as the ruling class, a different class is in power, but which are still not workers states. The resolution continues: 'This definition implies that the situation in the buffer countries likewise differs from the situation in a "normal" and "classic" capitalist society. It serves exclusively to denote the place of these countries in relation both to capitalism and the USSR, Since Marxist sociology excludes the existence of economies and states that are neither capitalist nor Soviet (workers or degenerated workers)'. I shall presently try to show that although Marxist sociology does exclude states and economies that are 'neither' capitalist nor Soviet, it makes provision for states and economies that are both capitalist and Soviet. Right now I want to emphasize that we are dealing with an innovation so far as criteria is concerned, an innovation for which no justification is offered, the innovation of 'real planning' as the decisive test in determining whether we have a workers state.

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If we were to accept this innovation then we automatically exclude all small, backward, poverty-stricken countries from being designated as workers states, so long as they remain isolated, no matter what overturns might be made in property relations. We could not, for example, call Bolivia a workers state if the workers and peasants smashed the grip of the feudalistic landlords and the mining oligarchy and set up their own government, for the simple reason that they could not possibly introduce 'real planning'. Bolivia by itself could never institute the 'real planning' called for in the resolution. That would require the combined efforts of a number of South American countries at the very least. Comrade Germain explains this, point more fully in his article in the September Fourth International. He says that the Left Opposition drafted the first plan in the USSR against the violent resistance of the bureaucracy and of the Stalinist faction. 'But it does not follow from this that any national framework whatever lends itself to planning on the mere condition that the proletariat had conquered power. It is obvious that a minimum material base is indispensable even to the preparatory work of socialist planning. To make a start in the building of socialism in Rumania, in Luxembourg or in Paraguay is an even more patent absurdity than to pretend that this construction is being completed in the USSR'. This point is essentially correct. For socialist planning you do need a minimum material base. But it seems to me that Comrade Germain should have added for the benefit of revolutionary-minded workers in Rumania, Luxembourg and Paraguay that they can still make a good start toward the goal of socialist planning by conquering power and setting up their own government. That would give them a workers state, and while this is a long way from socialism, still it is a most essential and decisive step in making a start. Comrade Germain could not do this, however, without running up against the criterion laid down in the resolution that the qualitative point of change between a capitalist state and a workers state is the institution of 'real planning' which is possible only on a minimum material basis which neither Rumania, Luxembourg nor Paraguay has available.

What about the USSR?

This, however, raises a difficult question. Does even the Soviet Union have the minimum material basis for 'real planning'? I don't think it does: and the resolution itself is forced to admit that Soviet planning 'is itself the bureaucratic deformation of real socialist planning'. The resolution does not amplify this point, but lets it go at that.

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It seems to me we are forced to conclude that to take the criterion of 'real planning' as the decisive test of a workers state, to make it nothing less than the qualitative point of change in distinguishing such a state from a capitalist state is not valid. Why should it not be applied to the Soviet Union? If planning in the Soviet Union does not meet our subjective standard or what we consider to be the norm of 'real planning' wouldn't we be obligated to bring into question our characterization of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state? And don't all of us have the right and the duty to ask why this criterion has been introduced at the present time and given such decisive weight? Shouldn't it be explained and justified? It appears to me to be a dangerous criterion that can be particularly damaging politically to our movement in all the small countries. Isn't it better to retain the orthodox criteria? I feel that we should continue to explain as we have innumerable times that real socialist planning is possible only with the combined efforts of a number of countries, including at least one or two of the industrially advanced ones; but meanwhile we have the pressing task of establishing the workers' states required as the minimum material basis for that planning.

The Crux of the Discussion

The crux of the whole discussion thus is, in my opinion, what criteria do we use in distinguishing a workers state from a capitalist state? This is the nub of the dispute. If we can agree on that then we should have little difficulty in ironing out the differences. If you can convince me that we should make 'real planning' our decisive criterion, the point of qualitative change, the nodal point where all the quantitative changes pass over, then I would have no choice but to continue characterizing Yugoslavia as 'capitalist' and if Yugoslavia is still 'capitalist' it goes without saying that all the rest of the Eastern European countries remain 'capitalist'. If we agree on a different criterion, however, as the decisive one, say the crushing of the bourgeoisie as a class and the nationalization of economy, then we would have to consider at least Yugoslavia as a 'workers' state' and determine the character of each of the others in accordance with the actual facts. I think it has been fairly well established that the criterion of 'real planning', advanced in the Plenum resolution as decisive in determining whether we have a workers state before us, does not hold up under examination.

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Now we are faced with the problem of accounting for the origin of this criterion. I see one of two possibilities. Those comrades who insist that all of Eastern Europe, including Yugoslavia, must be characterized as 'capitalist' were hard put to find criteria that would apply to all these countries without any exceptions. This criterion looked good because obviously you don't have real planning and can't have any resemblance to it in these countries without assimilation into the USSR or the establishment of a Balkan-Danube Federation. Consequently, the introduction of this novel criterion enabled the comrades to solve the whole problem of the Eastern European countries at one sweeping stroke. That's one possibility. The other is this: The comrades did not distinguish sharply enough between our general category of 'workers state' and our general category of 'socialism'. A careful reading of the official documents and of the writings in support of those documents, or constructed in accordance with their basic line on this question, will reveal, I believe, a kind of mingling of the two concepts, so that we get no clear distinction between them. Comrade Germain's discussion of the impossibility of making a start in building socialism in Rumania, Luxembourg or Paraguay is an instance. If this conjecture at the source of the new criterion is correct, we also have a possible explanation for the extreme reluctance of many comrades to pin the label 'workers state' on any of these countries. The label is too closely associated in their minds with categories properly belonging under the general heading of 'socialism'. They do not make a clear distinction between a workers state and a land of socialism. The penalty for that, however, is the inability to make a clear distinction between a workers state and capitalism. However, whatever the source of the new criterion about 'real planning' may be, it appears obvious to me that the comrades who have sponsored it will be forced to drop it as the discussion brings greater clarity into the questions facing us.

The Category of the 'Workers State' One of the easiest errors to slip into when considering this question is to make a kind of fetish of the category 'workers' state'. All of us tend to think of it as something glorious that arose to put an end to the blood and filth of capitalism. To this day an aura surrounds the words 'workers state' because of all associations with Lenin and Trotsky and the great emancipating struggle they led. We therefore find difficulty connecting it with anything base, and even when

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we insist on its degeneration in the USSR a brightness still clings to it. We want it to be something noble and great and inspiring. This is one of the sources of the incapacity of many people to make a distinction between the workers state and the regime resting on it. The state which has won their adherence is seen in the image of Stalin. Others, who have learned to hate Stalin, tum away from the workers' state with as little true understanding. The attraction has simply turned into its opposite. To make a scientific appraisal, however, we must learn to cut through the superficial appearance. The state should be regarded as expressing a relation between classes. It is a relation of coercion that takes the form mainly of a civil bureaucracy and armed forces. Through this apparatus one class coerces or oppresses another. The expression of this relation is not limited to a fixed form. 'The forms of bourgeois states are exceedingly variegated', Lenin said. He at once added, of course, that 'their essence is the same: in one way or another, all these states are in the last analysis inevitably a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie'. Similarly, Lenin continues, 'The transition from capitalism to communism will certainly bring a great variety and abundance of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be only one: the dictatorship of the proletariat'. (State and Revolution, p. 31.) The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, as we all know, is based on private property in the means of production. To maintain this social relation it oppresses the working class. The dictatorship of the proletariat begins with the elevation of the working class into a ruling class in place of the capitalists. The task of the new power is to end the social relation peculiar to the capitalist class. But this does not occur over night. Even a model workers state is still nothing but a hangover of capitalist society. On top of this, a workers state is forced to maintain for a time, even in the best of circumstances, bourgeois modes of distributing the national income. We have a contradictory reality- a state that is based on destruction of bourgeois property forms and the nationalization of economy but which still retains vestiges of capitalism. When this state eventually begins to wither away as the productive forces expand and all danger of a capitalist restoration vanishes, then we can first begin to speak of socialism, the lower stage of communism. If we call a workers state 'socialist' it is more because of its aims and tendencies than what it is when it first emerges from the womb of capitalism. A workers' state is a transitional state, transitional between capitalism and socialism.

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A healthy workers' state carries this transition through as rapidly as possible by extending the revolution along the international spiral. But history has forced us to include in our general category a workers state that is not healthy, one that is retrogressing toward capitalism. This degenerated workers state, spilling over the frontiers fixed at the close of World War 1, has upset capitalist property relations in Eastern Europe and given rise to formations that are pretty much replicas of the USSR. Their fate is intimately bound up with that of the Soviet Union. If the USSR must be included in our general category of a workers state, I do not think it is incorrect to include Yugoslavia and the other Eastern European countries where the capitalists have been displaced as the ruling class.

Social Content and Political Fonn

In November 1937, Trotsky wrote a most illuminating article on the character of the USSR. The title is 'Not a Workers and Not a Bourgeois State? Political Form and Social Content'. This article was Trotsky's response to Burnham and Carter when they first brought out their doubts about the Soviet Union being a workers' state. Written in a pedagogical manner, it picks up the theoretical threads of the pamphlet written four years earlier, The Soviet Union and the Fourth International. Trotsky explains the difference between the economic and social content of a workers state and the variegated political forms that it can assume. Here is one of Trotsky's illuminating instances: The domination of the Social Democracy in the State and in the Soviets (Germany 1918-1919) had nothing in common with the dictatorship of the proletariat inasmuch as it left bourgeois property inviolable. But the regime which guards the expropriated and nationalized property from imperialists is, independent of political forms, the dictatorship of the proletariat. You will note that Trotsky does not include 'real planning' in his criteria. He says 'the regime which guards the expropriated and nationalized property from imperialists'. By way of symmetry he shows why a fascist regime must be considered capitalist. 'So long as fascism with its barbaric methods defends private property in the means of production, the state remains bourgeois under the fascist rule'. I know that none of our comrades will disagree with this. I cite it only to show

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that Trotsky's decisive criterion for determining a capitalist state was the fact that its regime 'defends private property in the means of production'. 'Only the intrusion of a revolutionary or a counter-revolutionary force in property relations can change the class nature of the State', Trotsky emphasizes. Then he continues: But does not history really know of cases of class conflict between the economy and the state? It does! When the Third Estate seized power, society for a period of years still remained feudal. In the first months of Soviet rule the proletariat reigned on the basis of bourgeois economy. In the field of agriculture the dictatorship of the proletariat operated for a number of years on the basis of petty-bourgeois economy (to a considerable degree it does so even now). Should a bourgeois counterrevolution succeed in Russia, the new government for a lengthy period would have to base itself upon nationalized economy. But what does such a type of temporary conflict between economy and the state mean? It means a revolution or a counter-revolution. The victory of one class over another signifies that it will reconstruct economy in the interests of the victory. But such a condition of transition appearing during the necessary time in every social revolution, has nothing in common with the theory of a classless state which in the absence of a real boss is being exploited by a clerk, i.e., by the bureaucracy. This paragraph deserves the closest study and thought, in my opinion, for the light it can shed on the events in Eastern. Europe. For one thing, it seems to me to place the question of the class relations in agriculture in their properly subordinate place in determining the character of the state. More important, it indicates the contradiction that can exist for a time between the economy and state during a transition period. Finally, it reaffirms the Marxist law that a fundamental change in property relations cannot occur without the intrusion of a revolutionary or counter-revolutionary force. The events in Eastern Europe constitute a test of these propositions. The problem is to work out how they either confirm or invalidate Trotsky's theses. This cannot be done without a thorough understanding of what Trotsky says about the relation between our revolutionary norms and the reality that we must appraise according to scientific criteria.

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Criteria and Norms

'It is the substitution of a subjective, "normative" method for that of an objective, dialectical', Trotsky continued, 'which renders it difficult for many comrades to form a correct sociological appraisal of the USSR. Not without reason do Burnham and Carter say that the Soviet Union cannot be considered a workers' state "in the traditional sense given to this term by Marxism." This simply means that the USSR does not correspond to the norms of a workers' state as set forth in our program'. To illustrate his meaning, Trotsky uses the familiar analogy between a workers state and a trade union. Our norm, embodied in the program we fight for, calls for a trade union to be an organization of class struggle. But reality gives a different kind of trade union, in fact a great variety of them. Some of them are definitely reactionary but that doesn't mean they are not trade unions. Trotsky then tells us by what criteria we can distinguish both trade unions and workers states: 'The class character of the state is determined by its relation to the forms of property in the means of production. The character of such a workers' organization as that of a trade union is determined by its relation to the distribution-n of national income'. Because William Green & Co. defend private property in the means of production they are bourgeois. So long as the AFL bureaucracy is forced to defend the workers' share of the national income, however, they continue to head genuine trade unions. 'This objective symptom is sufficient in all important cases to permit us to draw a line of demarcation between the most reactionary trade union and an organization of scabs'. The function of Stalin, like the function of Green, has a dual character. Stalin serves the bureaucracy and thus the world bourgeoisie; but he cannot defend the bureaucracy other than by defending that social foundation which the bureaucracy exploits in its own interests. To that extent does Stalin defend nationalized property from imperialist attacks and from the too impatient and avaricious layers of this very bureaucracy. However, he carries through this defense with methods that prepare the general destruction of Soviet society. Then comes a most interesting observation: Historical development has accustomed us to the most varied kind of trade unions: militant, reformist, revolutionary, reactionary, liberal, and Catholic. It is otherwise with a workers' government. Such a phenomenon we see for the first time. That accounts for our inclination to approach the

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USSR exclusively from the point of view of the norms of the revolutionary program. Meanwhile the workers state is an objective historical fact which is being subjected to the influence of different historical forces and can as we see come into full contradiction with 'traditional' norms.

As if anticipating the objection that our norms must be based on reality and consequently are not utopian ideals Trotsky observes, 'It is of course necessary not to forget that we expect programmatic norms to be realized only if they are the generalized expression of the progressive tendencies of the historical process itself'. How this works out in practice, Trotsky illustrates as follows: The programmatic definition of a union would sound approximately like this: an organization of workers of a profession or of an industry with the objective of (1) struggling against capital for the amelioration of the conditions of the workers, (2) participating in the revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, (3) participating in the organization of economy on a socialist basis. If we compared this 'normative' definition with the actual reality, we should find ourselves constrained to say: there is not a single fact, that is to say, of the generalized expression of the development to the particular manifestation of this same development - such a formal, ultimatistic, non-dialectic counterpoise between program and reality is absolutely lifeless and does not open any road for the intervention of the revolutionary party. In the meantime the actual opportunistic union under the pressure of capitalist disintegration can and under the conditions of our correct policies within the unions, must approach our programmatic norms and play a progressive historical role. This, of course, presupposes a complete change in leadership.

If we extend this line of thought to the complicated problem of Eastern Europe will it help us reach a solution? I think it will. Certainly it must be admitted in theory that besides the USSR other particular instances of workers states may deviate from the norm. Trotsky did not live to see the appearance of such new eases, but he showed us how to approach them. Once again, let's see how he utilized the example of the Soviet Union: The pressure of imperialism on the Soviet Union has as its aim the alteration of the very nature of Soviet society. The struggle - today peaceful, tomorrow military- concerns the forms of property. In the capacity of a gear wheel in this struggle, the bureaucracy leans now on the proletariat

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against imperialism, now on imperialism against the proletariat, in order to increase its own authority. (How well have we seen this illustrated in Eastern Europe! - J.H.) At the same time it mercilessly exploits its role as distributor of the meager wants of life in order to safeguard its own well-being and power. By this token the rule of the proletariat assumes an abridged, curbed, distorted character. One can with full justification say that the proletariat, ruling in one backward and isolated country, still remains an oppressed class. The source of oppression is world imperialism; the mechanism of transmission of the oppression - the bureaucracy. If in these words: 'a ruling and at the same time an oppressed class' there is a contradiction, then it flows not from the mistakes of thought but from the contradiction in the very situation of the USSR. It is precisely because of this that we reject the theory of socialism in one country. The recognition of the USSR as a workers state - not a type but the mutilation of a type - does not at all signify a theoretical and political amnesty for the Soviet bureaucracy. On the contrary, its reactionary character is fully revealed only in the light of the contradiction between its anti-proletarian politics and the needs of the workers state. Only by posing the question in this manner does our exposure of the Stalinist clique gain full motive force. In the light of these instructive remarks of Trotsky are we not justified in asking whether or not in our approach to the class character of the Eastern Europe countries we have not been guilty of trying to force these states to fit our norm of a workers state rather than making an objective appraisal of the overturn in property relations? Isn't that why we hesitate to call them by their right name, 'workers states'? Up to now I have not added any adjective to this category although it is obvious that one is required. I am quite prepared to take any that seems most appropriate, 'deformed', 'degenerated', 'mutilated' - any word that will indicate most clearly that we mean a monstrous and not a normal instance of the type. In the case of the Soviet Union, Trotsky was willing to go even further on the adjective so long as the noun - the basic category- was preserved. Here is what he says on page 25 of In Defense ofMarxism; Some voices cry out: 'If we continue to recognize the USSR as a workers' state, we will have to establish a new category: the counterrevolutionary workers' state.' This argument attempts to shock our imagination by opposing a good programmatic norm to a miserable, mean, even repugnant reality. But haven't we observed from day to day since 1923 how the

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Soviet state has played a more and more counterrevolutionary role on the international arena? Have we forgotten the experience of the Chinese Revolution, of the 1926 general strike in England and finally the very fresh experience of the Spanish revolution? There are two completely counterrevolutionary workers internationals. These critics have apparently forgotten this 'category.' The trade unions of France, Great Britain, the United States and other countries support completely the counterrevolutionary politics of their bourgeoisie. This does not prevent us from labeling them trade unions, from supporting their progressive steps and from defending them against the bourgeoisie. Why is it impossible to employ the same method with the counter-revolutionary workers' state? In the last analysis a workers' state is a trade union which has conquered power. The difference in attitude in these two cases is explainable by the simple fact that the trade unions have a long history and we have become accustomed to consider them as realities and not simply as 'categories' in our program. But, as regards the workers' state there is being evinced an inability to learn to approach it as a real historical fact which has not subordinated itself to our program. Let us visualize the USSR as a reactionary trade union where the bureaucracy practices racketeering, concludes sell-out agreements with the bosses, strongarms the membership and rubs out opposition voices wherever they are heard. ls it stretching the analogy too much to visualize the bureaucracy of this union, after overcoming one terrible threat of being crushed and facing another even more dangerous threat, now trying to strengthen the union's position in their own peculiar fashion by organizing what they consider vital territory? Is it stretching the analogy to consider these bureaucrats so fearful of the introduction of a little democracy and fresh forces - even though they're hungry for the dues - that they are extremely hesitant and fearful about admitting these new locals to full membership and will even use the help of the bosses if necessary to make sure of their bureaucratic grip? Suppose that some of the membership in these new Eastern European locals rebel against the bureaucrats even though they were trained in the same school of bad unionism and are forced to split. Should it be so difficult for us to determine whether they are genuine unions or not? Why can't we approach these new formations in Eastern Europe with the same assurance we would if they had been, born in a conflict between a unionsmashing employers' association and the bureaucracy-ridden Teamsters' Union headed by Tobin instead of a conflict between German imperialism and the USSR headed by Stalin? It seems to me we can if we stick to the old criteria

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and don't drag in innovations that force us to call them scab outfits and company unions simply because they're small, weak and lack the resources of the giant parent body that gave them the impulse to organize and is now winding them in bureaucratic chains. At the next stage they can provide the spark for a new mighty surge forward, especially if we can find a means of bringing our program to their attention.

Emphasizing the Differences

Before turning to what appears to me to be the correct solution of the problem of Eastern Europe, I want to take up some of the arguments that have been advanced against calling these countries 'workers states'. First, the argument that we should emphasize the differences between Yugoslavia, say, and the USSR rather than the similarities. How this can get us anywhere in determining what kind of state we have before us seems obscure. We can agree to emphasize the differences and still not move ahead an, inch. Emphasizing the differences between a vicious bull dog and a litter of Pekingese pups doesn't help us to determine whether the newly-born animals are misshapen dogs or simply degenerated wolves on the road to structural assimilation with the hungry bull dog. We must still decide on our criteria of what constitutes a dog. You can list all the similarities and differences between Yugoslavia and the USSR, emphasize one or the other, and still you are faced with the questions: Are these quantitative or qualitative differences? How do you tell the USSR from a capitalist state? How do you tell the class character of Yugoslavia? Do the same criteria apply in both cases?What is the qualitative point of change in determining a reversal in the class character of a state? Strangely enough, the comrades who insist on our emphasizing the differences between the USSR and Yugoslavia also insist on our emphasizing the similarities between Yugoslavia and China. They ask, if Yugoslavia is a workers' state, what about China? The truth, however, is concrete. To determine the character of the states in Eastern Europe, each one has to be appraised in its own right. We have to know what has happened to the bourgeoisie, what has happened to property relations. This likewise holds for China where the greatest upheaval since 1917 is occurring. The problem of China fully deserves individual treatment and we need not try to merge it at this stage with the problem of Yugoslavia and so dissolve the concrete in the abstract.

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Dependence on the World Market

It is contended that countries like Yugoslavia are far more dependent on the world market than the USSR and consequently cannot be considered workers states. But this does not determine the class character of these countries. It simply shows that they are weaker and far more easily affected by external pressures than the Soviet Union. This fact offers a positive point of approach in advancing our program. Pertinent to this contention, we should remember that as the USSR advanced, it became more dependent on the world market. This increased the danger to the USSR but did not change its class character. Trotsky pointed to the growing dependence of the uss Ron the world market as another argument against the pernicious theory of socialism in one country. (See Third International After Lenin, 'The Dependence of the USSR on World Economy,' p. 43.) Trotsky could not convince the majority because the selfsufficiency of the USSR loomed too large at the time. In the case of countries with a greater degree of dependence on the world market, this task should be easier. We point to the dependence to show how vital it is to win political allies abroad and to advance the program of revolutionary socialism. This false criterion seems to be derived from our norm calling for an end to dependence on the world market through extending the socialist revolution. It is not, however, one of the classic Trotskyist criteria of a workers' state.

'Instability'

Another 'criterion' advanced is the relative instability of these countries compared to the Soviet Union. Of course they are more unstable. If they are not absorbed by the USSR or do not succeed in winning their independence, their life span will be incomparably shorter than that of the USSR unless they conduct truly revolutionary politics on the international arena. That opens up possibilities for the growth of Trotskyism in these lands if we are able to penetrate them with our ideas. But the relative instability of these regimes certainly is not a valid criterion in determining their class character. At best it cannot be anything but an indication that something fundamental such as civil war, revolution or counterrevolution, an acute class struggle, is occurring, or that the country is weak relative to the big world powers.

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Such considerations seem to have been thrown into the hopper with no thought of their relevance or specific weight but simply on the hunch that they can't do any harm and might do some good. Sheer quantity might produce a qualitative change in the minds of those who have been thinking about calling a country like Yugoslavia a workers state.

The National Boundaries As the Trotskyist movement has insisted thousands of times, the old national boundaries today are as reactionary as private property in the means of production. Our socialist norm calls for their abolition so that humanity can move forward. But does that mean that Yugoslavia, confined within its narrow national boundaries cannot be characterized for that reason as a workers' state? This is really a corollary of the argument about 'real planning' and stands or falls with it. Our norm for building the socialist society calls for 'real planning' and you can't have real planning until you do away with the reactionary national boundaries. That's why we call for the abolition of national boundaries as an essential part of the struggle for socialism. But we are faced with the problem of appraising real formations in which we must find a foothold for our norms. Let's take an example. We call for an independent Soviet Ukraine. Suppose a real movement gets under way and the Ukraine achieves independence under a Soviet regime. The Kremlin of course could never survive the political consequences of such an event. However, in theory it might hang on for a time. Would we then refuse to call the Ukraine a workers' state because planning would be hampered by the narrow, stifling national boundaries?

Objections of a More Fundamental Character These objections are not very solid. However, those reluctant to pin the label 'workers state' on any of the Eastern European countries have much weightier arguments in their arsenal. These can be placed under three general headings: (1) class relations in production, (2) pillage and distribution of the national income, (3) political consequences to the Trotskyist movement. This is of course only a rough approximation. I make it only in order to underline the fact that arguments coming under these different headings thereby carry different weight.

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Of decisive importance are those dealing with the class relations in production. Marxists determine the class nature of a state from the relations in production, not from the forms of distribution (even though the two in the historic sense are reciprocally related) or from the immediate political consequences to revolutionary socialism. First of all it is necessary to underline once again the facts established by the Plenum resolution: that the 'propertied classes in these countries' are 'dying'; that the conclusion of the resolution as to the class character of the buffer zone 'does not at all imply that the bourgeoisie is in power as the dominant class in these countries'. The liquidation of the bourgeoisie as the dominant class in these countries is the cornerstone of the position that they must be considered workers states. If the bourgeoisie still constituted the ruling class, then nationalization by itself would not make these countries workers states. However, the facts indicate that we must characterize that possibility as an abstraction which does not correspond with the true situation. If the resolution is wrong in this respect, if the comrades familiar with the facts have not given us an accurate picture, and the bourgeoisie actually still remains the dominant class, then it would be necessary to say that the states are capitalist. But the presentation of the facts about Eastern Europe appears to me to be the strongest side of the resolution. Besides the displacement of the bourgeoisie as the ruling class, we have the virtually complete conversion of industry, of the banking system, of communications and transport into state-owned property. These are heavy facts and must be given their due weight in any Marxist analysis, for they concern the decisive sphere of class relations in production. Because it comes in. this general sphere, the argument that none of these countries, including Yugoslavia, can be considered 'workers states' because they are predominantly agricultural and agriculture has not been nationalized, is in my opinion the strongest argument for calling them 'capitalist'. It demands careful consideration.

The Question of Agriculture

That these countries are predominantly agricultural is most certainly true. However, as we know, agriculture develops much more slowly toward advanced capitalist forms than does industry. Even in the United States, agriculture is far more backward than industry and consequently plays a much less decisive role in the social and political life of the country. If the bourgeoisie is overthrown in

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a country that is predominantly agricultural, and industry becomes state property, the government replaces the capitalist class as the hub around which the agricultural spokes revolve. Thus the nationalization of the land, important and essential as it is, does not have the same weight as the breaking of bourgeois rule and the nationalization of industry. In Eastern Europe, to gauge the relative strength of agriculture as compared with industry, we must also know what proportion of agriculture was represented by big capitalist farmers, what proportion by medium capitalist farmers and what proportion by peasants producing primarily for immediate family use, and how powerful the feudal vestiges were when the Red Army moved across these lands. Then we must know the result of the peasant attacks on landed property. What proportion of agriculture today still remains in the hands of feudalistic landlords? Of big capitalist farmers? Of small farmers? Of peasants so poverty-stricken they do not produce primarily on a commodity basis? What is the real relationship of class forces today? If, for example, the grip of the landlords has been broken, the land redistributed, and. The big farms either divided or taken over by the state; if the government is pushing a program of collectivization, then the failure up to now to nationalize the land is less important than the other criteria in this sphere. Under such conditions, command of industry is decisive and to cite merely the proportion of agriculture a country has in general - without differentiating its class composition - can be quite misleading in determining the class character of the state. In the case of Poland and. Finland, Trotsky forecast that in the civil war accompanying the advance of the Red Army at the opening of World War I I measures would be taken against the big landholders. He turned out to be right. Similar action was taken against the big landholders after the war in Eastern Europe. The caution and delay exercised by the Stalinists in this field in going further could be ascribed to an effort to win the small peasants or at least neutralize them - to give them guarantees for the time being. Such guarantees can always be taken away, since legal documents are only scraps of paper to the Stalinists. In agriculture as in so many other fields, it is necessary to go by specific actions and not by the official pronouncements of Stalinist 'program', important as they are from a different point of view. An additional observation should be made at this point. In our desire to solve the problem of the character of the Eastern Europe countries we should not overlook our own political problems here at home. One of the problems we have yet to work out in detail is how to win the active sympathy of the farmers. The main line is given in our Transitional Program, but it is only a beginning:

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The program for the nationalization, of the land and collectivization of agriculture should be so drawn that from its very basis it should exclude the possibility of expropriation of small farmers and their compulsory collectivization. The farmer will remain owner of his plot of land as long as he himself believes it possible or necessary. In order to rehabilitate the program of socialism in the eyes of the farmer, it is necessary to expose mercilessly the Stalinist methods of collectivization which are dictated not by the interests of the farmers or workers but by the interests of the bureaucracy. This gives us a good hint of how far back we must lean in this question for political reasons. Note in passing how the bourgeois democratic task, 'nationalization of the land', is combined with the socialist task, 'collectivization of agriculture'. The Transitional Program continues: The expropriation of the expropriators likewise do not signify forcible confiscation of the property of artisans and shopkeepers. On the contrary workers control of banks and trusts - even more the nationalization of these concerns - can create for the urban petty bourgeoisie incomparably more favorable conditions of credit, purchase, and sale than is possible under the unchecked domination of the monopolies. Dependence upon private capital will be replaced by dependence upon the State, which will be the more attentive to the needs of its small co-workers and agents the stronger the toilers themselves will keep control of the State in their hands. The practical participation of the exploited farmers in the control of different fields of economy will allow them to decide for themselves whether or not it would be profitable for them to go over to collective working of the land - at what date and on what scale. Industrial workers should consider themselves duty bound to show farmers every cooperation in traveling this road: through the trade unions, factory committees, and, most important, through a workers and farmers government. One of the biggest crimes of Stalinism has been to forcibly expropriate small farmers and businessmen against their will. We have to 'rehabilitate the program of socialism in the eyes of the farmer'. This attitude toward the petty bourgeoisie is not motivated primarily by political considerations, although it is obvious what weight they have. The tactic is based on much deeper grounds.

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As Lenin explained, 'Theoretically, nationalization is the "ideally" pure development of capitalism in agriculture'. (See Selected Works of V.L Lenin, Vol. III, pp. 139-278 and Vol. XII, pp. 304-335.) Lenin pointed out that nationalization of the land could speed the development of capitalist relations in agriculture. The bourgeoisie, however, never nationalized the land in any of their revolutions against feudalism. They did not do so because (1) they did not carry out their historic tasks to their logical conclusion; (2) on the appearance of the working class as an independent force in society they compromised with feudalistic reaction, permitting certain of its forms of exploitation to remain as vestiges. This extra burden on society was entailed by capitalist fear of the proletariat. Because the bourgeoisie is no longer capable of carrying out this democratic task where it is required, the workers state has fallen heir to the job. But the workers state undertakes nationalization of the land not to speed the development of capitalist relations in agriculture but to move forward to socialization of agriculture, which is its goal. With the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the conversion of industry into state-owned property, a force of completely different order than the capitalist class becomes master of society. At first sight it might seem all the more necessary for the workers state - because it is more advanced - to display utter ruthlessness with all these vestiges of the long outmoded past. But we have a qualitatively different relationship from that which existed between capitalism and the feudal remnants that survived under its rule. It is sufficient at first to expropriate the big landlords intimately interlinked with the big capitalists. This leaves the small farmers, shopkeepers and artisans - the classes, which, 'no matter how numerically strong they may be, essentially are representative survivals of pre-capitalist forms of production'. (Transitional Program.) As the workers' state, particularly in a highly industrialized country like the United States, unfolds its dynamic power, the danger of a rebirth of capitalism from the petty bourgeoisie reaches the vanishing point. Even though the workers state offers them better opportunities for a good living than capitalism while still permitting them to continue their habitual mode of life, the socialist opportunities opening up on every hand are so much more attractive that mast of them of their own free volition will give up the dead past and join in the great work of pioneering the new society. Those incapable of making the change need not be molested. The younger generation, freed from the stifling, fear-ridden atmosphere of capitalism, will grow up with new horizons and completely different concepts of what constitutes the best way to live.

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These considerations compel us to say that nationalization of the land, with all that it entails, must be viewed in a somewhat different light than nationalization of industries expropriated from the bourgeoisie in determining the class character of the state.

Does Pillage Determine the Character of a State?

Let us now tum to the important but less weighty arguments concerning pillage and the distribution of national income. 'In view of the pillage inflicted on the Eastern European countries', it is asked, 'are we not obliged to call them "capitalist"?' If a gangster holds up a worker, takes his pay envelope, his weekend sack of groceries, his shirt, pants, shoes and streetcar fare and gives him a kick down the street, are we obliged to call the worker a gangster too? We determine what class the worker belongs to by his relation in the factory to the capitalist class and not by the assorted loan sharks, trade union bureaucrats, strong-arm artists and other parasites who victimize him. As Trotsky said of the Kremlin vermin: 'To put it plainly, insofar as the bureaucracy robs the people (and this is done in various ways by every bureaucracy), we have to deal not with class exploitation, in the scientific sense of the word, but with social parasitism, although on a very large scale'. (The Soviet Union and the Fourth International, p. 20.) Our opponents rejoin: 'But what about the recognition of foreign debts and the compensation in some instances to foreign capitalists whole holdings were nationalized?' We will not ask how much the foreign capitalists have realized or expect to realize from the Stalinist recognition of these imperialist financial demands. Actual payment will in all probability depend on the international relationship of forces and how essential it is to the Stalinists and the Tito regime to meet the price demanded by the imperialist bandits for essential goods. Like other international 'debts' owed by European countries, they have been 'recognized'. Yet if they are never paid it will not violate the European tradition. Even if they are forced to pay this foreign tribute, however, it does not make these countries capitalist. 'You forget the exploitation imposed on the Eastern European countries by the Kremlin through mixed companies and other means. Doesn't this exploitation oblige us to call them "capitalist"?' Yes, it does- if you consider the USSR to be capitalist and the 'buffer zone' to be a colonial area where this capitalist USSR is practicing imperialist exploita-

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tion. However, if you still consider the USSR to be a degenerated workers state, it does not seem quite accurate to me to call this form of pillage 'capitalist exploitation'. The 'exploitation' conducted by the USSR in Eastern Europe is symmetrical to imperialist exploitation just as the police regime in the USSR is symmetrical to a fascist regime. But the two are not identical. Just as pillage does not necessarily make the victim 'capitalists' so it does not necessarily make those who practice it 'capitalist'. Comes the inevitable outcry: 'You want us to settle for these revolting formations as "workers states"! You call into question the whole idea of emancipating humanity from the filth and decay of capitalism through the workers state. The whole point of a workers state is that the workers create a new type structure in which the most essential item is the participation of the workers themselves in the government. Where does this exist in Eastern Europe?' Our sympathy is wholly with the comrades who feel this way about it. We too would have felt much happier if history had seen fit right now to give us another example of a model workers' state, such as the Soviet Union under Lenin and Trotsky, instead of these deformed offspring of the degenerated workers' state. What can we say except that Stalinism continues to befoul the name of communism and everything associated with it? What can we do but continue the onerous task of trying to clean out this Augean stable? To succeed in this, and especially to help the workers and poor farmers in Eastern Europe develop a powerful opposition movement to Stalinism, demands first of all clarity in theory and a precise scientific accounting of what has happened in these lands. If you can't smell violets don't blame us. We have only a theoretical fork to work with and not a revolutionary river like Hercules. As for the argument itself, let us recall Trotsky's answer to the same argument applied to the USSR: Where and in what books can one find a faultless prescription for a proletarian dictatorship? The dictatorship of a class does not mean by a long shot that its entire mass always participates in the management of the state. This we have seen, first of all, in the case of the propertied classes. The nobility ruled through the monarchy before which the noble stood on his knees. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie took on comparatively developed democratic forms only under the conditions of capitalist upswing when the ruling class had nothing to fear. Trotsky then cites the example of Germany where the bourgeoisie still ruled although 'politically it is placed under complete subjection to Hitler and. his bands'. Despite Hitler's political dictatorship, 'the dictatorship of the hour-

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geoisie remains inviolate in Germany, because all the conditions of its social hegemony have been preserved and strengthened. By expropriating the bourgeoisie politically Hitler saved it, even if temporarily, from economic expropriation'. Examples like this, used by Trotsky, should be studied. They contain the key to understanding the Stalinist role not only in the USSR but in those areas where it extends its rule and overturns property relations. 'Anticipating our subsequent arguments', Trotsky continues, 'our opponents will hasten to refute: although the bourgeoisie, as an exploiting minority can also preserve its hegemony by means of a fascist dictatorship, the proletariat building a socialist society must manage its government itself, directly drawing ever wider masses of the people into the task of government. In its general form, this argument is un-debatable but in the gtven case it merely means that the present Soviet dictatorship is a sick dictatorship'. ( The Soviet Union and the Fourth International, pp. 6-7.)

Trotsky on Poland and Finland

Although it cannot be decisive in a scientific analysis, one of the arguments raised against our position that demands most thoughtful evaluation is the contention that it implies revision of the Marxist theory of the state. It is held that we leave the door open to the possibility that the class character of the state can be changed by manipulation from the top, by 'cold' means. This in tum implies, it is contended, a concession to Stalinism and even to Social Democratic revisionism - to Stalinism because it would then have a historic future; to Social Democratic revisionism, because its theory of achieving socialism through manipulation of capitalist government posts would then tum out to be correct. In that case, what perspective remains open to the Fourth International? If we are to talk of revision, I think that the comrades who support the Plenum resolution should first make sure there are no flaws in their position. A shift has been made on this question as can be seen from the differences between the theses of the World Congress which, say that the destruction of capitalism is 'impossible' without the revolutionary mobilization of the masses and the Plenum resolution which explains how the bourgeoisie were ousted as the ruling class in the Eastern European countries by 'cold' means. My own impression is that the resolution concedes too much. It brings into question the Marxist theory of the state unless abstract references to

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the domestic and world relationship of forces can satisfy you as an adequate explanation of the apparent violation of the laws of the class struggle. To find our way out of this trap it may be helpful to tum again to Trotsky's writings on Poland and Finland and refresh our memories on how he approached the same general problem. First of all on the importance of the Kremlin's actions in these territories for our appraisal of the USSR: 'Let us for a moment conceive that in accordance with the treaty with Hitler, the Moscow government leaves untouched the rights private property in the occupied areas and limits itself to "control" after the fascist pattern. Such a concession would have a deep-going principled character arid might become a starting point for a new appraisal on our part of the nature of the Soviet state'. (In Defense ofMarxism, p. 18.) This is a most important consideration for us today. If the rights of private property have been left inviolate in the occupied territories, as some comrades think, and the Moscow government really has the perspective of limiting itself to 'control' after the fascist pattern or in the 'capitalist' way, it becomes our duty, to begin thinking of a new appraisal of the character of the USSR. In 1939, however, Trotsky foresaw the more probable variant. Instead of limiting itself to 'control' of 'private property in the occupied areas,' said Trotsky, 'it is more likely ... that in the territories scheduled to become a part of the us SR, the Moscow government will carry through the expropriation of the large landowners and statification of the means of production. This variant is most probable not because the bureaucracy remains true to the socialist program but because it is neither desirous nor capable of sharing the power, and the privileges the latter entails, with the old ruling classes in the occupied territories'. Isn't this an accurate forecast of the events in Eastern Europe in the post-war period? Trotsky continues: Here an analogy literally offers itself. The first Bonaparte halted the revolution by means of a military dictatorship. However, when the French troops invaded Poland, Napoleon signed a decree: 'Serfdom is abolished.' This measure was dictated not by Napoleon's sympathies for the peasants, nor by democratic principles, but rather by the fact that the Bonapartist dictatorship based itself not on feudal, but on bourgeois property relations. Inasmuch as Stalin's Bonapartist dictatorship bases itself not on private but on state property, the invasion of Poland by the Red Army should, in the nature of the case, result in the abolition of private capitalist property, so as thus to bring the regime of the occupied territories into accord with the regime of the USSR.

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This fruitful analogy could well be developed it appears to me for publication in Fourth International. A study of the similarities between the consequences of the advance of Napoleon's armies and those of Stalin's armies would be of absorbing interest for the light it would cast on what is happening today in Eastern Europe. To continue with Trotsky's remarks: This measure, revolutionary in character - 'the expropriation of the expropriators' - is in this case achieved in a military-bureaucratic fashion. The appeal to independent activity on the part of the masses in the new territories - and without such an appeal, even if worded with extreme caution it is impossible to constitute a new regime - will on the morrow undoubtedly be suppressed by ruthless police measures in order to assure the preponderance of the bureaucracy over the awakened revolutionary masses. Trotsky followed with the minutest attention the impulse the approach of the Red Army gave to the masses of Poland. He characterized what happened as 'civil war'. It is obvious why he did. Overturns in property relations cannot occur without the revolutionary mobilization of the masses. Consequently he was keenly interested in how the facts forecast by Marxist law would tum out and how far they would deviate, under the influence of Stalinism, from our programmatic norms for a revolutionary mobilization of the masses. Again in Finland, Trotsky watched for similar manifestations. There even such symptoms as brother fighting brother were taken by him as manifestations of 'civil war'. In an article for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, written in January 1940, Trotsky explained: In order to include Finland in the framework of the USSR - and such is now the obvious aim of the Kremlin - it is necessary to sovietize her, i.e., carry through an expropriation of the higher layer oflandowners and capitalists. To accomplish such a revolution in the relations of property is impossible without a civil war. The Kremlin will do everything in order to attract to its side the Finnish industrial workers and the lower stratum of the farmers. Once the Moscow oligarchy finds itself compelled to play with the fire of war and revolution, it will try at least to warm its hands. It will undoubtedly achieve certain successes in this way. Fourth International, August 1942, p. 254

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Observe that Trotsky does not refer to 'real planning'. He calls the expropriation of the higher layer of landowners and capitalists a 'revolution in the relations of property.' Observe too that Trotsky did not expect civil war in its classic form. 'Warm its hands', he said of Moscow's playing with the fire of war and revolution. Speaking more specifically of the civil war in his 'Open Letter to Burnham', Trotsky said: 'Naturally, this is a civil war of a special type. It does not arise spontaneously from the depths of the popular masses. It is not conducted under the leadership of the Finnish revolutionary party based on mass support. It is introduced on bayonets from without. It is controlled by the Moscow bureaucracy'. (In Defense ofMarxism, p. 89.) In other words, this civil war departs widely from our 'norms' but nevertheless the fact that a civil war is occurring must be recognized. Trotsky visualized two stages in the Soviet advance. The first one was the stage of the 'deformed', 'distorted' or, to use Trotsky's phrase, 'special type' civil war. The second stage, he warned, would be the swift political strangulation of the movement by the Moscow bureaucracy when it established its totalitarian rule in the new areas. In a letter, Trotsky wrote: 'It is not necessary to repeat that the civil war in Finland as was the case in Poland would have a limited, semi-stifled nature and that it can, in the next stage, go over into a civil war between the Finnish masses and the Moscow bureaucracy. We know this at least as clearly as the opposition and we openly warn the masses. But we analyze the process as it is and we don't identify the first stage with the second one'. (In Defense ofMarxism, p. 71.) We can add also that Trotsky didn't demand that the civil war meet his norms, which as everyone knows were of the highest, before he would consent to characterize it as civil war, even if of a 'special type'. If you study Trotsky's writings of this period closely, you cannot help being struck at how well his analysis of the Polish and Finnish events anticipated what happened when the Soviet forces moved westward against the German imperialist armies. This follows from the fact that Trotsky's analysis was not simply an analysis after the event, it was a prognosis of what would happen upon the expansion of the degenerated workers state under Stalinist domination. There was the first stage, far more distinct than in 1939-40, of civil war. What had been attempted in 1939-40 under the contemptuous gaze of Hitler and then interrupted by the most frightful war in history, was now resumed on the heels of the retreating German armies and in face of the colossal defeat of the Nazi regime. This stage was more distinct because the uprisings were more spontaneous, welling from much deeper roots and a wider base. After all, the masses were responding to the advance of a victorious Red Army, a Red Army

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victorious over the Nazi military machine, and not one that had been mauled by the small Finnish forces. That was a tremendous new fact. The Kremlin didn't need to issue appeals to the masses as in the pre-war situation. It was faced with a different problem. How to keep the masses in hand? In many instances, the peasants finished off the big landlords. The workers in many factories formed committees to take over. Stage two came fast, the political crackdown. The unbridled character of this crackdown was a measure of the depth of the revolutionary impulse touched off by the advance of the Red Army. That impulse frightened the Kremlin. This was fire that could spread with lightening speed. That was why they utilized sections of the bourgeoisie, particularly their political representatives and functionaries, to bring the political whip down on the face of the masses. The political danger arising from the revolutionary impulse impressed the Kremlin far more than the political, economic and military danger from the enfeebled bourgeoisie bowing and scraping before the bayonets of the eastern conqueror. Protected by the guns of the Red Army, the Stalinists took key positions in the civil bureaucracy and the armed forces, paying special attention to the armed forces, which in conditions of civil war, no matter how attenuated, play a more decisive role than the civil bureaucracy which is normally in control. We can see how this works out almost any week in the Latin American countries when those in control of the armed forces topple the civil regime. Having got the political bridle on the masses, the Stalinists then turned against the remnants of the bourgeoisie and their political agents which they had previously used against the proletariat and began the process of shattering their remaining positions. One cannot help recalling how the relatively strong bourgeoisie in Western Europe used the Stalinists at the end of the war to stave off revolution, gain time, strengthen their political positions with the help of American military and economic might and then tossed the Stalinist officials like squeezed lemons into the garbage pail. In Eastern Europe, with the help of Russian arms and the GPU, the Stalinists were sufficiently strong to reverse this general tactic on the political, field, using bourgeois agents to help entrench their own bureaucratic regime and then discarding or absorbing them. This stage was more or less combined with the acceleration and extension of nationalization. The Stalinists even mobilized the workers against the bourgeoisie where they felt sufficiently sure of keeping the action under control. Paul G. Stevens, reporting in the March 1, 1948 Militant on the Stalinist use of 'Action Committees' in Czechoslovakia, says: 'The Stalinists, in accordance with the new Cominform line, are apparently trying to use mass action in order to align Czechoslovakia with Moscow as completely as the rest of Eastern Europe ...

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While the Stalinist leaders are basing themselves on mass action, they are proceeding with a caution that reveals their fear of its revolutionary impulse'. To be sure, Comrade Stevens apparently does not believe that this constitutes genuine civil war since he continues: 'Should a civil war actually, erupt, the likelihood is that the situation will grow out of hand, no matter what the bureaucratic plans'. And this estimate is quite correct if by 'civil war' you mean an action that corresponds with our norms. Looked at objectively, however, wherein did this action differ from the actions seen in Poland and Finland when the Kremlin moved, or tried to more, forward? Because of the extreme enfeeblement of the native bourgeoisie, the inability of either German or Allied imperialism to come to their rescue, and the profound desire of the masses to rid themselves at any cost of the strangling yoke of capitalism, it did not take much more civil war to dispose of this 'lumpenbourgeoisie', as Comrade Stevens once aptly termed them, than you can get out of a good Flit gun. Still it must be characterized as 'civil war'. Now, if we do not draw air-tight, metaphysical dividing lines between the various stages of this process in Eastern-Europe, but for theoretical purposes consider it as a whole; that is, regard this entire period since the Red Army entered these fringe-lands of the USSR in combat with the German armies as one 'moment', an episode in world history, what is it but a social revolution started by the masses under the influence of the Soviet Union and deformed by the political counterrevolution conducted by the Kremlin? Thus everything is accounted for according to the laws of the class struggle as developed by the founders of Marxism. All we had to do was apply some of Trotsky's teachings and not let our norms of planning and civil war interfere with our appraisal of reality. It appears to me that what has been happening in Eastern Europe offers the most brilliant confirmation of the correctness of Trotsky's analysis and prognosis in 1939-40 and confirms what he taught about the character of the state. What other state in the world could have given the impulse to the events we see today in Eastern Europe in the peculiar form they have taken except the degenerated workers state? You can trace not only the obvious stamp of the rapacious bureaucracy but even the mark of the mutilated, desecrated October Revolution serving notice that it is still alive and carries burning coals.

Our Political Perspective

Will Stalin now withdraw from these countries? The Kremlin is capable of anything. If it could get a sufficiently favorable deal from Washington it might do

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what it could to help liquidate the steps taken so far or at least retire while Western imperialism tried to do what it did in Greece. But will Washington give such a deal or does the Kremlin expect an offer? What guarantees can Washington give that would satisfy the Kremlin sufficiently so that it would dare relinquish its grip on Eastern Europe? Will Washington give up the atom bomb? Its colossal preparations for war? What power politician expects American imperialism to clip it's own wings and claws? The perspective of the Kremlin, if it can be judged correctly from the trend visible in Eastern Europe, is to convert these countries into replicas of the republics of the Soviet Union and to either include them officially in the USSR or to absorb them into the economic framework of the Soviet Union while leaving them formally independent. No one can mistake Stalin's political perspective. It is to crush all signs of the slightest resistance or potential resistance to take this course. Our political perspective must be based on the widespread opposition to Stalinism among workers and poor farmers and the possibility of its breaking out into the open as in Yugoslavia. This appears to me the most realistic political course. That means, against a bourgeois restoration we defend whatever progressive measures have been taken; against the Kremlin we fight for a genuinely independent Soviet Poland, Soviet Czechoslovakia, etc., on the road toward a Soviet Balkan-Danubian Federation. Our course should be based on the perspective of Independent Socialist Republics, and if you want the slogan to develop its full potentialities, that means independent of Moscow-directed planning too. Can there be any doubt that Stalin will mobilize every force possible to smash such Republics, to nip any movements in that direction in the bud and to mobilize all possible resources of the planned economy at his disposal to accomplish this counterrevolutionary aim? We have the Kremlin's actions in the case of Yugoslavia. The price of assimilation, of planning organically linked with Moscow's, is abject dependence. The greatest effectiveness can be given our propaganda if we can point to the truth - that Stalin will stop at nothing, even the liquidation of a workers state, to stay in power. The case of Yugoslavia, explained in these terms, would put an exceedingly sharp edge to our political struggle against Stalinism. As Trotsky said of the USSR, 'Only by posing the question in this manner does our exposure of the crimes of the Stalinist clique gain full motive force'. I think this makes clear too that our position offers no comfort to Stalinism. In fact, if we base ourselves on the possibility of new opposition movements arising in Eastern Europe, this position should strengthen our case against Stalinism. We show why the Kremlin moved forward as it did, undermining the

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defenses of the USSR in its reaction to world imperialism and still worse dealing catastrophic set-backs to the revolutionary socialist movement abroad. Our analysis of the events in Eastern Europe merely points out the positive side of a development that was a major blow to the socialist movement. While the borderlands experienced an upset in property relations, Stalin's henchmen in France and Italy were knifing workers' uprisings in the back. All Europe, including Germany, might have been socialist today were it not for the crimes of Stalinism at the close of the war. Measured against such blows to the world revolution, the progressive steps in Eastern Europe recede into insignificance.

Can It Be Repeated in Western Europe?

Stalinism cannot repeat in the industrially-advanced countries what it did in the backward Eastern European countries. The Western bourgeoisie is too strong. They can get direct help from the arsenals of the United States. They cannot be overthrown without a revolutionary mobilization of the masses that coincides very closely to the 'norms' of the Marxist movement. The events in Eastern Europe do not at all indicate a prolonged lease on life for Stalinism. The whole development constitutes only a brief interlude in history. As Trotsky often said to us, talking about the perspective facing Stalinism in relation to our efforts to save him from assassination, 'The wolf is most dangerous in his death agony'. By this analogy drawn from his hunting experience in Russia, Trotsky meant that precisely when Stalinism faced its debacle, it could give not only the illusion of greatest strength but even deliver some of its most terrible blows. In the rebellion of Yugoslavia, the Kremlin sees the handwriting on the wall. The war merely postponed the denouement as war does with all such processes only to speed them up later by way of historic compensation. Stalinism will commit new monstrous crimes against the struggle for socialism, but precisely in Eastern Europe where it has given the appearance of greatest strength, the threads of the monolithic pattern can begin unraveling. Military-bureaucratic action, which operates in civil war like a flame thrower against isolated detachments, can work only in those specific areas where the bourgeoisie was enfeebled by the war, cut off from the masses, abandoned by its traditional imperialist protectors, subjected to the constrictor-like squeeze of the occupation troops of the Kremlin, and where the masses themselves had illusions at first about Stalinism and the advanced sectors were under its influence.

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These concrete conditions do not hold in the West. 'But what if the Red Army sweeps to the Atlantic, what then?' If the Red Army sweeps even to the Adriatic, the curtain may well, rise on World War III. It would most certainly signal the opening of World War III if the Kremlin actually lost all contact with reality and undertook the military adventure of plunging forward to the Atlantic. They will hardly be that stupid. The whole course of Stalinism from the beginning has been to try to avoid war (but by means that actually help facilitate the outbreak of war). The bureaucracy has not changed in this respect. Its fear of war has not decreased after the experience of the German invasion and its basic political attitude toward meeting the threat has not changed. Consequently a westward march of the Red Army would occur only within the frame of an attack initiated by American imperialism. Aside from the purely military aspect of the question, an overriding political consideration prevents the Kremlin from moving forward. What happened in Yugoslavia is only a mild sample of the reaction that could be expected in Western Germany, France, Italy, Great Britain or the other highly industrialized Western European countries where great masses of workers are rooted in the old cultural centers. The Kremlin knows this. You can imagine what nightmares the Stalinist bureaucrats suffer over small but highly industrialized Czechoslovakia, not to speak of politically awakened Yugoslavia. Their hesitation in moving forward even in Eastern Europe would be multiplied a thousandfold in the cosmopolitan centers of the West. What would result from fraternization between the Red Army and the workers of France! Better let well enough alone. I repeat, a concrete analysis of the contradictory events in Eastern Europe cannot offer Stalinism any comfort. It can only help in destroying the illusions that the overturn in property relations in Eastern Europe is bound to foster no matter what label you put on these countries. Labeling such a country in Eastern Europe as Yugoslavia a 'workers' state' concedes nothing to Stalinism and does not involve a revision of the Marxist theory of the state. On the contrary, it sharpens our attack on Stalinism and is in strict accord with the Marxist theory of the state.

Can the Film Be Reversed? It is argued that things can be reversed in these countries and the film wound back to a capitalist restoration without a civil war. This contention seems to me to bring in question the Marxist theory of the state. How can you have a counterrevolution and the restoration of bourgeois property rights without a civil

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war? You might contend that it would be a peculiar type of civil war, but still it would be a civil war. The events in Greece, bloody as they were, would be eclipsed by the civil wars that would break out in these countries if a restoration were attempted. The contention that the film can be reversed without a civil war simply follows logically from the thesis that these countries are still capitalist in character. The real situation appears to me quite at variance with this thesis. Connected with this is the problem of defending the relative gains that have been made in these countries. In the theses of the World Congress, adopted in 1948, a defeatist position is called for in all these lands in the event of war. The Plenum resolution of a year later refers to this position and declares that it still holds good. It adds that we could reconsider this defeatist position only in the event that a qualitative change occurs in the character of their economies. The qualitative change can occur only if 'real planning' is introduced. 'Real planning' can be introduced only if these states are incorporated in the USSR or in a Balkan-Danube Federation - provided that the Balkan-Danube Federation 'forms a genuine unified framework for economic planning'. Consequently it might well tum out that we will become defensists of a Rumania incorporated in the USSR, but defeatists in an independent Yugoslavia. This seems to me an unnecessarily severe penalty for Yugoslavia's inability to meet our norm on 'real planning' because of its struggle for independence. Certainly this position stands in the way of the most effective intervention in the Tito-Stalin conflict. Why should we be defensists of the USSR and not of Yugoslavia? It seems to me not only highly advisable politically but also correct in theory.

The Key to the Solution

We are faced with an. extremely complicated and very difficult problem that requires all our combined efforts for solution. The political side of the problem is to meet the growth in prestige that will accrue to Stalinism through this undeniable overturn in property relations. The theoretical side is to demonstrate how the Marxist laws of the class struggle are once again validated through the developments in Eastern Europe and why they therefore apply in full force, so to speak, or very close to our 'norms' in a country like the United States. The key to the solution of this problem can be found, in my opinion, in Trotsky's handling of the Finnish and Polish events at the opening of the

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war. He demonstrated how the Marxist law that you cannot have an overturn in property relations without revolution was exemplified in these specific instances. The law did not come even close in its expression to the 'norm' sought by the revolutionary socialist movement. A strong perturbation gave it a pinched, scanty, mutilated, deformed expression. That perturbation came from the Soviet Union, the same source that gave the impulse to the overturn in property relations. Both the source of the perturbation and the source of the impulse can be distinguished. The one was the Stalinist bureaucracy, the other the property relations still remaining from the October Revolution. But the very perturbation, the muffled, strangled form of the law's expression all the more brilliantly demonstrates the operation of that law. This solution of the central problem, hinging on the origin of the Eastern European countries, seems to me to be the correct one.

Yugoslavia and the Other Countries

Some of the comrades who originally considered Yugoslavia to still be a capitalist state are becoming increasingly convinced upon further study and thought that this is an untenable position and that a change will have to be made. They insist, however, that if we are forced to make an exception in the case of Yugoslavia, nevertheless the other Eastern European countries must still be considered as capitalist. To reach this conclusion they utilize the method of 'emphasizing the differences' between these countries and Yugoslavia. This method, I think is not too fruitful. It didn't work very well in the case of Yugoslavia. There, in the attempt to emphasize the differences with the Soviet Union, the Plenum resolution had to bring forward a new criterion, 'real planning'. Even though it was admitted that 'real planning' doesn't exist in the USSR, still a qualitative difference was insisted upon between that planning and the planning you have in Yugoslavia. The criterion that is now advanced as decisive in emphasizing the differences between Yugoslavia and the other Eastern European countries is the occurrence of a 'real civil war'. It might well be argued that what occurred in Yugoslavia departs considerably from what should properly be considered a 'real civil war'. I mention this not to emphasize that difference but merely to show the parallel between the arguments about 'real planning' and 'real civil war'. They are completely symmetrical. What has happened is simply a shift in criteria. 'Real planning' is dropped, which permits us to consider Yugoslavia a deformed or mutilated workers state, while the criterion of 'real civil war' is advanced, in the absence

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of which the other countries are automatically barred from being characterized as deformed or mutilated workers states. This, of course, is an easy solution of the difficult problem facing us. But is it correct? Let us examine again the principal positions in the discussion. ( 1) I will take advantage of the opportunity to list my own position first, although as will be seen, there is also a certain logic to the order. In my opinion, in a country where the rule of the bourgeoisie as a class has been broken AND the principal sectors of the economy nationalized we must place the state in the general category of 'workers' state' no matter how widely or monstrously it departs from our norms. This change cannot occur without a civil war although this civil war may also be a mutilation of the type, differing in important respects from our norms. In Eastern Europe each country must be considered separately to see whether it in fact meets these criteria. (2) The position of those who consider Yugoslavia a workers state but will not admit any of the other Eastern European countries to this category. These comrades agree that destruction of the bourgeoisie and the nationalization of the key sectors of the economy can be taken as decisive criteria provided they are accompanied by a 'real civil war'. In other words, they either deny that civil war has occurred in the other countries or insist that it does not come up to our specifications. The weakness in their position is to hold that the bourgeoisie can be driven from power and the decisive sectors of the economy nationalized without civil war. They thereby leave the central problem of Eastern Europe still unsolved. The mistake here, it appears to me, is to insist on measuring our norm of civil war against the miserable reality and to refuse to recognize that reality because it is so mangled and distorted. (3) The position of those who deny that any of the Eastern European countries are workers states. Their decisive criterion is either 'real planning' or a vague weighing of 'all' the factors and finding that either the decisive one of 'real planning' or the overall bundle does not come up to the standard of Marxist norms. The mistake again is insisting that reality come up to our specifications or suffer the penalty of not being recognized for what it is. (4) The position of those who hold that either in particular or in general not only do the Eastern European countries fail to correspond with our norms but likewise the Soviet Union fails to correspond and that both the USSR and its Satellites must for that reason be denied the label 'workers state' and called 'capitalist' although admittedly an entirely new type of capitalism.

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The position of those who hold that the phenomena in the USSR and Eastern Europe depart so far from the norms for both capitalist and workers states that we must call them a completely new type like 'bureaucratic collectivism'. At the bottom of each of these positions and modifications of them is lodged a variation in the handling of our norms in relation to reality. Thus we reach the problem of methodology. What is the correct method of relating norms and criteria to concrete events? That question has already been answered. It was answered by Trotsky in the long discussion over the character of the USSR and its first ventures into Eastern Europe. That is one more reason why Trotsky's teachings on these questions are so valuable for our discussion today. I will conclude by emphasizing the importance of approaching this problem as a collective one. It would be a mistake this early in the discussion to take a hard and fast position and refuse to listen with the greatest attention and openmindedness to every consideration advanced by those seriously trying to help find the correct solution. Our task is to think things through to the end and to try to contribute what we can to the collective effort to solve the difficult problem of Eastern Europe. If we go about it calmly and with the understanding that this is not a faction fight but a loyal, comradely discussion, I am confident we will succeed. December 1949

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China: A World Power (1951)

Li Fu-jen (Frank Glass)

When Wu Hsiu-chuan, representative of the Chinese government at Peiping, looked blustering Warren Austin calmly in the eye at a United Nations meeting, and said coldly: 'I must tell you, we are not frightened by your threats', his statement was a dramatic emphasis of the fact that a whole epoch in relations between China and Western imperialism had come to a close and that a new epoch had begun. 12 It denoted the fact that the old semi-colonial China, victim of imperialist appetites for more than a century, had gone from the scene and that in its place had come a mighty, independent China, a new world power. Ever since the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, when newly-risen Japan delivered a smashing defeat to the empire of the Czars - the first time in history that a 'superior' white power had been beaten in war by 'inferior' Orientals a frightening specter had haunted the chancelleries of the West: the specter of an awakened, powerful and unsubmissive China. In story and cartoon China was depicted as a slumbering giant who might one day awake to challenge his imperialist tormentors. The Hearst section of the American press harped endlessly on the theme of the 'Yellow Peril'.

The Slumbering Giant Rises

Today, the specter has taken on flesh and blood. Grim foreboding has become alarming reality. The giant has arisen and smashed his fist in the face of the greatest imperialist power on earth. Never before had the arrogant, bullying representatives of Wall Street been spoken to in the tone Wu used to Austin. They were accustomed to the obsequious and servile 'Yes, sir' of Chiang Kai-shek or the Manchu government when-

12

Li Fu-jen 1951.

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ever they made complaints or demands - the proper mode of address by the slave to the master. Here was something strange and disturbing: 'We are not frightened by your threats'. Wu was not using empty words. Eight thousand miles away across the Pacific, Chinese troops in alliance with the Koreans were hurling back an American offensive that was to have ended the Korean war by Christmas. A victorious American advance was suddenly converted into panicky retreat. Involved was the bulk of America's armed forces, using every weapon in the arsenal of war except the atom bomb. The imperialists, used for so long to having their own way with China, were stunned by the blow. It seemed incredible. Clearly, a great change had occurred. To appreciate its scope and depth, it is necessary to recall some of the past, especially since a century of imperialist domination became an essential ingredient of the revolutionary present.

A Review of the Past Century

In the Opium War of 1840-42, the British blasted open China's ports with their naval guns and forced surrender on the weak Manchu government at Peking. By the 'peace' treaty of Nanking, China was reduced, in reality if not formally, to the status of a colony. In this and subsequent treaties, which the Manchus signed on the dotted line with all the major powers because they had no means to resist, treaty foreigners were exempt from Chinese laws and taxes (extraterritoriality), China's Customs were placed under foreign control (repayment of foreign loans and indemnities becoming first charges on the Customs revenues), an indemnity of some $10,000,000 was imposed, Hong Kong was ceded to Britain, territorial concessions were carved out of the principal cities and placed under foreign control, and the imperialists secured the right of free navigation in Chinese coastal waters and rivers. The precipitating incident in the war of 1840-42 was the action of the Chinese authorities in Canton in burning a British cargo of opium brought from India. Britain was forcing opium on China against laws enacted by the Manchu government- a cheap means of evading payment in silver (then a scarce and valuable metal) for the teas, silks and spices which the British bought from China. In the indemnity which Britain imposed at the end of the war, there was included a sum of$ 3,000,000 for the destroyed opium, the remainder being to cover Britain's war costs. It would be difficult to imagine a greater humiliation visited on a great nation by a foreign invader. But the Chinese were compelled to stomach it. There were no means of resistance.

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For more than a century thereafter the humiliation was multiplied and intensified. Warships of the Western powers cruised menacingly in Chinese waters. Among them were American vessels, for the us imperialists were not slow in demanding 'most favored nation' treatment in their treaties with China, insisting on all the 'rights and privileges' accorded to others. When the antiimperialist hatred of the Chinese exploded in some violent incident, as it did quite frequently (often it was some missionary who was the victim of Chinese anger), the warships would bombard towns or villages. There would be a demand for an indemnity and an apology, invariably granted. The Chinese government would be compelled to execute the 'culprits' if it could find them. And new concessions would be wrung from the helpless country.

'Jim Crow' in the Big Cities

In the great cities where the imperialists went about their business of sucking out China's wealth, foreign soldiers, sailors and marines were privileged to kick, cuff and curse Chinese citizens with impunity. These military forces had the task of guarding the concessions. If the Chinese could be humiliated further and made to feel inferior and helpless, the task became that much simpler. The methods were many. Notices in office and apartment buildings owned by foreigners forbade Chinese to ride in the elevators. 'Jim Crow' sections were set aside for them in the streetcars. Shanghai's only downtown park once had this sign at its entrance: 'Dogs, bicycles and Chinese not admitted'. Moreover, the imperialists hung the sign 'inferior' on the superstitious customs of the nation. Flocks of Christian missionaries came from a score of Western lands to impress upon the Chinese the superiority of Western superstitions. Let no one say that the American imperialists were better than the older colonial powers. This writer observed, first-hand, hundreds if not thousands of incidents over a period of years showing the contempt in which Wall Street's representatives held the 'Chinks'. Acts of brutality were as common with them as with all the others. The only discernible difference between the British and the Americans was that while the British, for the most part, matched their words with their attitude and deeds, making no attempt to disguise their contempt for the Chinese, the Americans spoke unctuously about 'equality' and assumed an air of 'fraternization' that was but an ill-concealed condescension. (The American Club in Shanghai was the first to admit Chinese members). As a matter of fact, the seemingly more 'liberal' American attitude was merely a weapon in the competition between the powers for China's trade.

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Anti-imperialist Feeling Mounts

Chinese hatred of the imperialist freebooters crystallized in the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century. Although directed in the first place against the effete Manchu rulers, the anti-imperialist undertones were unmistakable. The Chinese people were alarmed by the endless concessions to imperialism of the court at Peking. The rebellion lasted 15 years (1850-65) and ended with the crushing of the Tai pings by forces organized and led by an American, Frederick Townsend Ward. Anti-imperialist feeling simmered beneath the surface, with only occasional outward flashes, until the beginning of the present century when it crystallized once more in the Boxer Rebellion. The Manchu Empress Dowager, sensing the rising anti-imperialist sentiment of the people, had given notice that China would not consider granting any further concessions to the foreign powers. As a defense against renewed imperialist aggression, she decreed the reestablishment of the old local militia. Militia bands were encouraged to organize. By the summer of 1899, many of these bands had assumed the name of I Ho Chuan or 'Fists of Righteous Harmony'. The foreigners promptly gave them the name 'Boxers'. At the end of the year, the movement had assumed sizable proportions and the foreign powers demanded that the government dissolve it. But the Manchu regime, fearful of overthrow, dared not accede to the demand. In June of 1900, Marines were put ashore from foreign warships to 'protect' the legation quarter in Peking. The Chinese government ordered the diplomats to leave the city within 24 hours. This was a signal for action by the Boxers, who laid siege to the quarter. The imperialists mustered a force of 2,000 men and marched them from Tientsin. Eight weeks of fighting in which many Chinese were killed ended in the lifting of the siege. The imperialists then proceeded to mete out vicious retribution. The foreign army, in which Americans participated, sacked the ancient Chinese capital and subjected its citizens to cruel humiliations. Outstanding among their acts of savage vandalism was the looting of the beautiful Yuen Ming Yuen summer palace of the emperors on the outskirts of the city. After taking all they could, the standard-bearers of Western civilization put the palace to the torch and burned it to the ground. But this was only the initial vengeance. Under the Boxer Protocol, signed by China and the foreign powers on September 7, 1901, China was required to execute the leaders of the Boxer movement, to permit the permanent stationing of foreign troops in Peking and, naturally, to grant additional trade concessions. To cap it all, China was saddled with a huge indemnity of$ 738,000,000. These episodes in the relations of China with the imperialists were thoroughly characteristic and illustrate graphically the cruelty, contempt and arrog-

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ance of the imperialists towards the Chinese and the searing humiliations to which they subjected this vast nation. But the long night of oppression did not end with the Boxer outbreak and its suppression. The next half century witnessed much more of the same thing.

The Aborted Revolution of 1911

In 1911, the Manchu dynasty was overthrown by a revolutionary movement with distinct anti-imperialist antecedents and foundations. But because there was no new, strong class to grasp the helm of power, the revolution stopped where it began, with the liquidation of the monarchy. The native bourgeoisie was then only a class in embryo. It consisted of brokers and agents (compradors) of the foreign capitalists and traders. The proletariat was practically non-existent in a land where handicrafts were still almost the sole form of industry. The national power which slipped from the hands of the Manchus fell apart and passed in segments to local satraps who lost no time in making their arrangements with the imperialists. China was as far away as ever from independence and the formal national unity of the dynastic era disappeared. Moreover, all the acute contradictions of an outmoded social and economic life, exacerbated by foreign domination, remained unsolved. Thus was the stage set for the stormy revolutionary uprisings which swept the country in 1925-27. Before that, however, World War I intervened. After sampling imperialist brutality and oppression for so long, China was now to taste the perfidy of the foreign powers. Placing faith in Woodrow Wilson's talk about freedom and democracy, and the 'inalienable right of self-determination' of all nations, the Chinese government entered the war against the Central Powers on August 4, 1917, hoping at the end of the war to achieve complete independence. Characteristically, the only participation China was permitted in the war was the contribution of thousands of laborers for 'coolie' work behind the lines in Western Europe. The payoff came in the Treaty of Versailles, when, over China's outraged protest, the large Chinese province of Shantung was transferred by the Allies from Germany to Japan! China refused to sign the peace of Versailles and negotiated an independent treaty with Germany. World War I had one more important consequence for China in the emergence of a modem proletariat. Preoccupation of the Allies with the war in Europe, and the tremendous world demand for goods of all kinds, stimulated a growth of large-scale Chinese industry and therewith brought into being an industrial working class. This was to have a decisive influence on the revolutionary events which shaped up less than a decade later.

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Second Revolution Crushed by Chiang Kai-shek

The first strong winds of the gathering revolutionary storm were felt in 1925 when British warships bombarded the Yangtze river port of Wanhsien, killing and maiming numerous peaceful civilians. The action was taken to compel the local warlord, Yang Sen, to release a British vessel carrying a cargo of arms to Yang's rival. In Canton, far to the south, seat of the rising revolutionary movement, a gigantic protest demonstration took place against the bombardment. The British huddled in fear on their island concession of Shameen in the Pearl River, a stone's throw from the city, and mounted machine guns on the bridges leading to it. As the demonstrators approached, they raked them with a murderous fire. The 'Shameen massacre' roused anti-imperialist hatred to fever pitch. The next day, British Hongkong was paralyzed by a general strike and the British ladies were faced with the tragedy of having to do their own washing and cooking. The protest movement spread to Shanghai, which was likewise paralyzed by a general strike. But the great revolutionary movement, which rose to magnificent heights in the ensuing months, embracing both workers and peasants, went down to crushing defeat when in April 1927 it was drowned in blood by Chiang Kai-shek, who led the nationalist movement only in order to betray it to China's imperialist enemies. We have recited the salient facts of China's modem history only in order to indicate the weightiness of the past in the events of more recent times. When Wu Hsiu-chuan hurled the defy in the face of American imperialism, there hovered in the background the memory of a century of wrong, a long trail of bloody repression and galling humiliation. Are we, perhaps, giving undue weight to the subjective factor of righteous outrage? Let us remember that, considered dialectically, not only is there no absolute dividing line between the subjective and objective, but also there always exists an interrelation between them. Marxism rejects the notion of fixed and immutable categories. The subjective anger of a people against its imperialist oppressors becomes one of the objective ingredients of the colonial revolution.

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A People's Anger Explodes

Like the revolution of 1911, the great upheaval of 1925-27 left all of China's urgent problems unsolved. Chiang Kai-shek's bloody march to power paved the way for the subsequent Japanese invasion of the country. But it also placed on the calendar of the future - the Third Chinese Revolution! All the explosive material lodged in class and international relationships remained, ready to be touched off when circumstances favored. The explosion came after World War II had run its course. It is not necessary to our purpose - which is to explain the reasons for China's rise to the status of a world power - to trace Chinese events of the post-war years. This has been done fairly recently in these pages. The question we must answer is this: what were the main factors which in the space of a couple of years converted China from a land of nearly 500,000,000 colonial slaves into an independent world power? The Manchus, the warlords and the Kuomintang regime all bowed down or were forced into submission by the imperialists. Chiang Kai-shek never dared to summon the people to resist imperialism, for a great mass movement would have gone beyond his control and sealed the doom of his regime as the representative of the landlords and capitalists. Chiang preferred a junior partnership with imperialism. But imperialist domination, allied with archaic social relationships within the country, which plunged the masses into ever deeper poverty and misery, lit fires of revolt which flared continuously for twenty years before the great upheaval which followed World War 11. The Communist Party placed itself at the head of the revolting peasantry and built a mighty army which in the end smashed the Kuomintang regime and thereby ended China's subjection by imperialism. During the war, hoping thereby to bolster Chiang and preserve their economic positions in China, the powers 'voluntarily' relinquished their extraterritorial rights and turned back the foreign concessions to China. What remained of imperialist privilege was liquidated automatically with the overthrow of the Kuomintang. Had 1948 been 1848, the foreign powers would have sent their armies and navies to smash the insurrectionary movement. But the termination of the war with Japan saw the whole colonial world, including China, aflame. The victorious powers emerged weakened from the war. Their soldiers wanted no more war, and demanded to be sent home. World capitalism was in crisis. After fruitless efforts to mediate the civil war in China and keep Chiang Kai-shek in power, the powers were obliged to watch helplessly while the armies of Mao Tse-tung swept the country.

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Source of Mao's Power

The source of Mao's power was and is the great mass of the people of China; above all the peasantry. Stirred into action by abysmal suffering, fired by visions of freedom and a tangible stake in the land of their birth - 'the land to the peasantry' - they pounded their way irresistibly to victory. It was the great flood-tide of revolutionary mass ardor and determination, still far from receding, that stood back of the defiant words used by Wu Hsiu-chuan at the United Nations. In the past, if the masses had any program at all, it was the program of suffering and submission preached by reactionary rulers. Today they have a program of their own. Limited it may be, but in it they can readily discern their own interests. The fact of the mass entry of the Chinese people on to the political arena, with the corresponding class pressures, should be pondered by those who contend that Mao Tse-tung is just a 'puppet' of Moscow and the Peiping government merely a creature of the Kremlin. Such a view ignores the reciprocal relationship between party and class. It must be recognized that in recent times Mao has manifestly acted more in response to the pressure of his own popular support than in obedience to any Kremlin directives. The potency of mass pressure caused him to execute an about-face on the land question toward the end of the war, leading the movement of agrarian expropriation when the peasants would no longer wait for the land. Moscow's line was to preserve the 'united front' with Chiang Kai-shek at almost any cost and, to that end, not to encourage social conflicts. Again, when the war was over, Moscow's policy was to engineer a coalition government between Chiang and the Chinese Communists on the basis of a few democratic concessions by Chiang. But the intense hatred of Chiang's regime and the flaming agrarian revolt compelled Mao to break off negotiations and declare all-out war against the Kuomintang. These weighty, incontestable facts should give pause to those who declare that Mao is simply a push-button stooge of the Kremlin.

China's Third Revolution Roars

The China that now speaks to the world is a revolutionary China. It is this dynamic quality that imparts such tremendous power to China's moves and pronouncements in world politics. In this connection, it is also of interest to note that the present-day leaders of China, despite long years of Stalinist corruption, have not forgotten the elementary principles of socialist interna-

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tionalism. At a press conference in New York, Wu Hsiu-chuan was careful to distinguish between American imperialism and the American people when charging the United States with moving toward the abyss of a new war. When we speak of China as being revolutionary, we are not by any means suggesting a completed revolution, but rather a revolution in progress. Properly defined, the overthrow of the Kuomintang, the winning of national independence, the setting up of the Peiping regime, and the partial shake-up of agrarian relations, represent the completion only of a first stage of the unfolding Third Chinese Revolution. That the revolution has not advanced beyond this stage and been deepened in the sense of a fundamental change of property relations in all spheres - above all in industry- is very largely due to the half-way, semireformist program within the confines of which the Communist leaders have tried to keep the movement of the masses. Mao's program of a 'New Democracy' has appeared as a road-block in the path of revolutionary advance. It has slowed down the logical course of development by its insistence, among other things, on the inviolability of capitalist private property, thus preventing a fundamental solution of pressing economic and social problems. This program is destined to collide more and more with the needs of life and with the onward urge of the masses. The Communist Party, under popular pressure, will then either swing to the left or prepare the way for its own replacement by a new revolutionary leadership. It was the masses who pushed Mao to the pinnacle. They can push him off, too.

Pressures on Mao

In considering the factors which will make for a resumption of the interrupted course of revolutionary development in China, we should not overlook the pressures from outside. There are two main factors: 1. Mao's program calls, among other things, for the protection of foreign business enterprises in China, together with those of the Chinese capitalists. But the economic blockade of China which the us imperialists have imposed in connection with the Korean war may force the Peiping government to seize the numerous and large American industrial enterprises and make them serve the Chinese people instead of the Wall Street moneybags. 13 [ 1] Thus Mao would be going considerably beyond his own proclaimed program. Nor would imperialist pressure necessarily mean 13

Footnote by Li Fu-jen: Shortly after this article was written the Chinese government ordered (Dec. 28) immediate seizure of all United States property and all private and com-

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that the Peiping regime would draw closer, politically, to the Kremlin. Beset by external threats and driven forward by the masses, it could take a swing away from its narrow nationalism and toward genuine socialist internationalism, staking its fate on the sympathy and aid of the world proletariat. The whole colonial world in Eastern Asia is being swept by the flames of revolution - Korea, Indo-China, Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, the Philippines. China is the vast powerhouse of this movement. Today the peoples of these lands look to China, much more than to the Soviet Union, as the great leader in their fight for liberation. There can be no doubt that geographical proximity and racial affinity, common burdens and problems, and like aspirations, make for a deep reciprocal sympathy and solidarity. China's masses, feeling far from alone in their fight for a better life, are lifted and inspired by the great movements on their borders. Here is an additional assurance that the present period of marking time in China will be followed by a fresh revolutionary upsurge, one in which the working class may be expected to play the leading role, that will carry the revolution to another and higher stage.

Resources for Revolutionary Victory

China, the powerhouse of the colonial revolution? This is no rhetorical exaggeration. This ancient land with an enviable culture reaching back into the dim ages is the habitat of almost 500,000,000 people. In area it is larger than the United States. The factors of population and area alone are sufficient to place China in the forefront of the colonial revolution. We can add to that immense natural riches and an enormous economic potential. The country's economic and social backwardness is merely the legacy of foreign domination now ended. In the three northeastern provinces of Manchuria, despite considerable looting by Stalin's armies during the 1945-46 occupation, there is a great industrial complex built by the Japanese which draws its raw materials from on-the-spot mercial American bank deposits, in retaliation for similar us action Dec. 16 on Chinese assets in the us. The principal American enterprises in China are: (1) The Shanghai Power Co., largest electric power company in the Far East that burns coal. (2) The Shanghai Telephone Co., subsidiary of AT&T. (3) Numerous Standard Oil and Texas Oil installations throughout the country. (4) Even more numerous missionary properties: hospitals, schools, churches, etc. (5) National City Bank of NY (6) Extensive properties of the us diplomatic establishment Total value is variously estimated at between one and two hundred million dollars, us currency.

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deposits. This can serve as a basis for elevating the whole country economically while giving needed assistance to neighboring countries. Socialism in one country? Not at all. The socialist revolution begins on national grounds but can reach completion only on the international arena. Nevertheless, China's industrial resources guarantee that she will not be strangled into submission by imperialist blockade. By the same token, revolutionary China presents itself to its neighbors as a powerful ally and source of strength in the battles they are waging for national liberation and social advance. Their courage is buttressed, their fighting spirit enhanced as they march toward great and resounding victories.

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6

The Political Meaning of the CIO-AFL Merger (1955)

Tom Kerry

If one thing can be said to be most characteristic of the modem American labor movement, it is that its major leaps ahead have been impelled by dire necessity. 14 It was not until the concluding quarter of the last century that the American working class, driven by the stormy economic development of this country following the Civil War, surged tumultuously forward to overcome its previous limited, local and isolated character, establishing a federation of unions on a national scale. Scarce 70 years old, the American Federation of Labor was born in 1886, the year of the Haymarket massacre in Chicago and a high point in the resistance of the capitalist class to the eight-hour day. After the AFL - the product of the most bitter class struggles - became dominant among workers organized along craft lines, its conservative leadership, concerned primarily with maintaining the position of a layer of relatively privileged workers, lagged behind economic developments and became a barrier to the organization of the millions of workers in the mass production industries. It required the deepest economic crisis in American history, plus the irresistible pressure of the mass of unorganized workers in the giant mills and factories of the twentieth century, plus a split in the AFL to pave the way for the appearance of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Now, after 20 years of division, the leading bodies of the AFL and CIO have reached an agreement, subject to the formality of ratification by their respective conventions, to merge into one national federation. Does the merger, assuming it goes through, foreshadow another gigantic leap forward by the American working class? The answer to that question, as well as the related one of the direction and goal of such an advance, will not be found in the stated aims of the union leaders who agreed to the merger. But it can be found by analyzing the split, why it could not be healed before, and why merger now looms as a certainty.

14

Keny 1955.

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A Victory for the cw?

The contention by some not-too-bright commentators that the merger agreement constitutes a 'victory' for the CIO does not hold water. The CIO entered the negotiations under unfavorable conditions. It was smaller than its rival, with no prospect of overtaking it, was beset by factional strife and bedeviled by centrifugal tendencies following the no-raiding pact with the AFL. It comes into the combined organization as a subordinate industrial 'department', with the old-line, craft-union leaders - in some instances the same and in others little different from their counterparts of the 1930s - in a commanding position. Couldn't a comparable merger agreement have been gained years ago under more auspicious circumstances for the industrial union group? Matthew Josephson, in his biography of Sidney Hillman, 15 discloses that in October 1937 a committee representing the AFL and CIO met to discuss reunification. 'The principal demands of the CIO', he pointed out, 'were that the Federation declare its support hereafter of industrial unions for workers in certain specified industries; establish a CIO Department that was to be autonomous within the AFL; reinstate the CIO unions with full rights; and work out and ratify this program at a joint convention of affiliates of both labor bodies'. These demands of 1937 were included in essence in the agreement of 1955. But in 1937, when unity looked promising, the conference was blown up by John L. Lewis, who questioned the authority of the AFL committee to conclude an agreement. 'The terms of affiliation tentatively agreed upon', asserts Josephson, 'at a time when the CIO claimed the larger membership, might well have resulted in the industrial-union faction becoming the preponderant force'. But John L. Lewis was not too much concerned about 'unity' in the year 1937. He was convinced that the CIO would absorb most of the AFL and elbow the remnant into a comer. Lewis spoke of a c Io movement of 20 to 30 million members. And it seemed, in 1937, that nothing could stop the phenomenal growth of the new unionism. At the time of the unity meeting with the AFL in October of that year the CIO claimed 3,700,000 members to 3,400,000 for the AFL. Since the original group of unions constituting the c10 in 1936 included less than one million members, Lewis' optimism appeared more than justified.

15

Footnote by Kerry: Sidney Hillman: Statesman ofAmerican Labor, 1952.

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A Beneficent Split

The split of the c10 from theAFL involved far more than an academic disagreement over the relative merits of industrial versus craft unions. The forms of organization that suited the needs of the American working class in 1886 were hopelessly inadequate 50 years later. The advance of technology had outmoded the craft union in the mass production industries. Since the tum of the century the Industrial Workers of the World (1ww) had preached and organized industrial unions. The socialist and later the communist movement were vigorous advocates of the industrial form of organization. These efforts had great effect on the advanced elements in the mass production industries. But the leaders of the AFL remained unmoved. Neither argument nor experience convinced them. Preliminary skirmishes in the early Thirties demonstrated over and over again that only the industrial form of organization combined with militant methods of struggle could successfully topple the hitherto impregnable citadels of the open shop in auto, steel, rubber, etc. But the old mossbacks ruling the AFL remained unmoved. They feared the influx of millions of mass production workers organized along industrial lines and had no heart to lead the kind of battles required to bring the arrogant and powerful lords of industry to terms. The more astute labor leaders, who participated in forming the CIO, repeatedly warned that unless the conservative union leadership took the initiative in promoting the industrial organization of workers in factory, mine and mill, it would be done under more radical auspices. They were more in tune with the times. The industrial organization of the American mass production worker had been too long delayed. This invested the movement with an explosive character. The stock-market crash heralded the depression which plunged the country into the profound social crisis that generated the pressure soon to erupt with volcanic force. The split in the AFL eliminated a formidable obstacle to the successful organization of the industrial unions of the CIO and gave tremendous impetus to union organization in general. In the true sense of the word, it was the most progressive union split in American labor history. In the relatively short period of 20 years the American labor movement took a great leap forward, adding some 12 million members to its ranks, tremendously increasing its social weight in the nation and creating a potential force of incalculable power. The split in the AFL was an inevitable prerequisite to this advance. Another signal result of the split was the sharp break from AFL political policy which, following the line laid down by Samuel Gompers, had kept the

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American workers politically atomized and impotent. The deep-going social crisis of the Thirties was shaking the capitalist system to its foundation. Such labor leaders as Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, Dubinsky of the Garment Workers, Zaritsky of the Cap and Millinery Workers, etc., looked upon the reform administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt as the only alternative to social revolution.

Break from Gompers' Policy Heading unions composed largely of foreign-born workers with a strong socialist tradition, they were keenly sensitive to the radical mood of the workers. They set out deliberately to 'contain' the turbulent militancy of the CIO within the capitalist two-party system. Hillman, the outstanding 'labor statesman' of the period, had proclaimed the cw as 'the beginning of the real labor movement'. By that he meant that organized labor in this country for the first time on a national scale was to engage not only in economic but in political action. But unlike the labor movement of Europe which functioned through its own political parties, Hillman and his colleagues gave a peculiar American twist to their creation which they named Labor's Non-Partisan League. Hillman's biographer explains that '... the name "Labor's Non-Partisan League" was chosen to indicate, as Hillman explained later, that it was "nonpartisan" only in that it sought the support of the two wings of labor, but not at all with regard to the re-election of the New Deal President'. To bolster the 'non-partisan' character of the League, George Berry of the AFL Printing Pressmen's Union, was designated chairman. Hillman's new approach to labor politics, his biographer points out, was motivated by the fact that 'Many of the union members, especially in New York and Chicago, had grown up in the tradition of supporting the Socialist Party, and shunning our Tammany Halls. What Hillman advocated now was a distinctly opportunistic approach. The new League, unlike LaFollette's Progressive Party of 1924, was to function mainly through one of the two major parties, and particularly the Democratic Party, in order to ensure Roosevelt's re-election'. The object of the LNPL was to mobilize the labor vote for Roosevelt. The tremendous prestige of the cw was utilized by its leaders for this purpose. While doing so, the cw leaders disclaimed any support to the Democratic Party as such, thus keeping up the pretense of 'independent' political action. Where necessary to corral the labor vote for Roosevelt, Hillman and his cohorts did not hesitate to go a step further. Matthew Josephson tells about the

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... decision of the CIO leaders to launch the American Labor Party in pivotal New York State as a local affiliate of LNPL. The thought was to channel the 'regular' Socialists into the Roosevelt camp. This was done in hasty fashion on July 16, 1936, principally on the initiative of Hillman, David Dubinsky of the Ladies' Garment Workers, and Alex Rose of the Millinery Workers.Joseph P. Ryan, the conservative leader of the International Longshoremen's Association, brought to the American Labor Party the support of the AFL's Central Trades and Labor Council of New York City, which he then headed; while George Meany also helped the new party through the AF L's state body. The new grouping included the rightwing faction of the Socialist Party in New York, but also enjoyed the support of Governor Herbert Lehman, A.A. Berle, and Mayor La Guardia - all in all a remarkable amalgam of AFL and CIO unionists, as well as Republican Fusionists, New Deal Democrats and Socialists. The 'remarkable amalgam' that launched the ALP in New York City to gamer the socialist vote for Roosevelt in 1936 was typical of the labor-liberal-Democratic coalition which, together with the Dixiecrat wing, kept the Democratic Party in power under Roosevelt and Truman until 1952. The CIO leaders, all established bureaucrats of long standing in their own unions, were determined to steer the new union movement into the channel of political class collaboration. None were prepared to carry through the logic of the class struggle from the economic to the political field. Instead of preaching reliance of the workers on their own organized strength, the new 'labor statesmen' advocated increased reliance on the New Deal administration in Washington. They assiduously fostered the myth of Roosevelt as the great 'friend' of labor in general and the c Io in particular. They built him up until he became the most influential leader in the labor movement; and Sidney Hillman became his righthand man. All paid homage to Roosevelt, including the Stalinist lickspittles who were then in their Peoples Front period. All, that is, except the political maverick John L. Lewis after he had demanded payment from Roosevelt for labor's support, especially in the bloody Little Steel strike of 1937 and was rebuffed by Roosevelt's callous 'plague on both your houses' statement. The rift between Lewis and Roosevelt continued to widen thereafter until it led to an open break in 1939 and Lewis endorsed the Republican candidate Wendell Willkie in 1940.

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Vying for Roosevelt's Favor The defeat suffered by the CIO in the Little Steel strike was due primarily to the policy of depending on Roosevelt instead of on the militant methods of struggle devised by the workers in the course of their successful battles in auto, rubber, etc. Although a severe setback, it did not halt the forward momentum of the c IO. In the two years from its first conference in Octoben935 to the unity conference of October 1937, it grew from the 900,000 members claimed by the original founding unions to 3,700,000. In the following two years only 400,000 members were added. The c ro lost its crusading spirit. The limited aims of its leaders had been largely accomplished. Both federations settled down to intensive competition, relying primarily on NLRB collective bargaining elections for new members, fighting and raiding each other's jurisdictions, and competing for the favor of the New Deal administration. As Leon Trotsky pointed out in his penetrating study, Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay, 'The struggle among the tops between the old federation and the new is reducible in large measure to the struggle for the sympathy and support of Roosevelt and his cabinet'. 16 This contest between the labor leaders for the favor of the administration in Washington continued throughout the Roosevelt and Truman regimes and was even extended into the Eisenhower administration. It was this rivalry and the uncertainty over which would emerge as the dominant group that undoubtedly proved a great obstacle to the earlier unity negotiations. The odds seemed to favor, the CIO. It was the more dynamic movement; it had greater attractive power; it had developed a more effective medium for political organization and action; it had a more progressive policy on social questions and greater appeal to minority workers; it appeared to have the inside track with the Roosevelt administration.

The AFL Buries Gompers Another barrier to unification between the AFL and CIO, and not the least, was the prevailing difference over political policy. The c ro's decisive break from the Gompers policy of the AFL, which the establishment of LNPL signified, was no passing phase. The c ro leaders were irrevocably committed to the new policy. They were quick to see the advantage of maintaining the political fiction of

16

Footnote by Kerry: See Fourth International, Feb. 1941.

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'independence' in garnering the labor vote for Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. They were also astute enough to discern the advantage of dealing with the regular Democratic Party machines which their organizational independence gave them. The AFL, on the other hand, persisted in maintaining the old policy. Where the CIO lined up solidly behind Roosevelt and the Democratic Party, the AFL continued to declare its 'neutrality' as between the two capitalist parties. Their policy of 'no politics' in the union applied, of course, only to the rank and file. The leaders were in politics up to their ears. In national elections Hutcheson of the Carpenters regularly appeared as head of the Republican 'labor' committee and Tobin of the Teamsters as head of the Democratic 'labor' committee. The LNPL, on the other hand, as Hillman so carefully explained, was 'nonpartisan' only in the sense that it sought to rally both wings oflabor in support of Roosevelt and the Democratic Party and not at all in the sense of being neutral in relation to the two capitalist parties. There could be no compromise on that score. It was not until the year after adoption of the Taft-Hartley Act that the AFL broke decisively with the Gompers policy by setting up their own version of the CIO Political Action Committee which they dubbed Labor's League for Political Education. It was only in 1952 that the AFL for the first time officially endorsed by convention action a candidate for the presidency. That was the Democrat Adlai Stevenson. Even after that they went through one more experiment in 'non-partisan' politics by sanctioning the entry of Plumbers chief Martin Durkin into Eisenhower's millionaire cabinet as Secretary of Labor. The experiment turned out badly as was inevitable. The AFL break with the Republican Party was signalized by Durkin's demonstrative resignation over the dispute on amending the Taft-Hartley Act. The Republican Party took power as the unabashed representative of Big Business after 20 years of the labor-Democratic coalition. The Eisenhower administration could not make even those piddling concessions the top AFL bureaucrats asked as the price of their support, or at least neutrality. The experience destroyed any hope the AFL 'labor statesmen' might have had of weaning Eisenhower from his dependence on Big Business. An incidental consequence of the dispute was the disclosure that it was Sinclair Weeks, Secretary of Commerce and former head of two large corporations, who was making labor policy for Eisenhower's millionaire club. In an interview published in us News and World Report, April 9, 1954, Weeks summed up the administration's labor policy in a one-sentence reply to the question: 'What are you really trying to do with all these (Taft-Hartley) amendments?' Answer by Weeks: 'To make the labor unions safe for democracy'.

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'To make the labor unions safe for democracy!' That was the slogan under which the labor-hating cabal was pushing its union-smashing 'right to work' laws through the legislatures of the various states. The lesson was not lost on the union leaders. In 1954 they went all out for the Democratic Party candidates. Collaboration between AFL and CI o political units was closer than ever before. Despite a few exceptions like the split in the California AFL where the majority supported the Republican candidate for governor, this was an indication that the unity negotiations then in progress had the best chance of completion since the split 20 years ago.

The Taft-Hartley Act There can be little doubt that the most compelling motive driving the two federations toward merger was politics. The tremendous growth of the unions following the split continued throughout the war. With the end of the world conflict, Big Business decided to test the mettle of the unions. In the strike movement of 1945-46, it became convinced that the organized employers could not stem the growing power of organized labor without the direct aid of the government. They seized the first opportunity after the 1946 elections to mobilize their friends in Washington for adoption of the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act which was jammed through Congress by a majority vote of Democrats as well as Republicans. The Taft-Hartley Act effectively halted the expansion of the trade unions. This was admitted by George Meany in an interview in us News and World Report, Nov. 6, 1953:

(Q)

Have your organizing efforts the last few years been as successful as they used to be? (A) Oh, no! (Q) What has impeded that? (A) The Taft-Hartley Act. (Q) Could you tell us just how that has happened? (A) Well, because any employer who wants to resist organization and is willing to make his plant a battleground for that resistance can very effectively prevent organization of his employees. There's no question about that at all. Any employer who is willing to spend the money and the time and the effort can, under Taft-Hartley, resist organization indefinitely. Meany neglected to add that the same can be said about any employer wishing to rid himself of an established union. The labor leaders have expressed

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over and over again the fear that the employers will utilize the union-busting provisions of Taft-Hartley during an economic depression or at any time they consider favorable. Fear of Taft-Hartley was especially noticeable in the union press and at union conventions during the 1954 recession. It undoubtedly contributed greatly to the pressure for merger. Taft-Hartley practically froze union membership. It settled the question that was implicit from the beginning in the split: Which would prevail? A labor commentator writing in Fortune magazine (April 1953) observed, 'us labor has lost the greatest dynamic any movement can have - a confidence that it is going to get bigger. Organized labor has probably passed its peak strength ... Since 1946 the working population has expanded but union membership has remained stationary'. In a report published a few years ago, the union leaders disclosed that an enormous amount of money and energy had been expended in raiding each other but at the end the gains were balanced by the losses. It was their most effective argument for the AFL-CIO no-raiding pact that proved to be the prelude to the merger agreement. Under Eisenhower the Taft-Hartley Act has become even tougher - not through amendment but through administrative interpretation of its onerous provisions. In addition, under Taft-Hartley the various states responded to the go-ahead sign for adoption of restrictive labor legislation under the misnamed 'right to work' laws. These measures have proved to be particularly harsh on the conservative AFL building trades unions. Seventeen states have already adopted such legislation, the latest being Utah where a 'right to work' law has been pushed through the state legislature and is now before the Republican governor for signature. The several attempts made recently on a state level to repeal such unionwrecking laws have failed. At its recent meeting in Miami the AFL Executive Council admitted that there 'is little likelihood of getting these states to repeal their laws'. They announced that they would concentrate on the national level to change the provision in the Taft-Hartley Act giving state 'right to work' laws precedence over the federal statute. Twelve of the 17 states having such laws are in the South. The labor reporter of the New York Times, writing from Miami on Feb. 6, said there was not too much optimism about getting such a change through Congress as 'AFL officials recognize that they can count on scant help from the dominant Southern Democratic bloc in getting rid of the "right to work" laws'. The leading labor spokesmen agree that the unions are on the defensive; that the anti-labor legislative offensive of the employers has the unions backed up against the wall; that organized labor will have to fight on the political field if

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it is to survive. 'We are never going to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act until we put into Congress men and women friendly to the ideals and principles of this great labor movement', George Meany declared in 1951. Similar declarations have been made on innumerable occasions by the top leaders of the AFL and CIO. Small wonder then that the first question reporters put to Meany and Reuther when they announced the merger agreement was, 'Does the merger herald the formation of a national independent labor party sponsored by the united organization representing over 15 million members?' Both 'labor statesmen' hastily and emphatically disclaimed any intention of sponsoring such a political party of labor.

Their Real Political Aims

But what then were the aims of the leaders who concluded the merger agreement? The diplomatic statement of aims issued over the signatures of Meany and Reuther is a compendium of meaningless generalities about 'service to the public', 'democratic ideals', building 'a better nation and a better world', etc., etc. What of the Taft-Hartley Act and the 'right to work' laws which threaten the very existence of the unions? Both agreed that action on the political field was the only effective remedy. But what kind of political action? Meany answered the question in an article written for Fortune (March 1955) just before the merger agreement: I do not think the membership of the AF of L is thinking now in terms of a national political party sponsored by labor. Yet if the action of the two major parties leaves us no alternative in our efforts to safeguard and raise the diving standards of the workers, labor will go as far as it must down that political road.

If Meany in this way makes a concession to history, Reuther on the other hand maintained at the CIO convention last December that a party of labor was distinctly un-American. In this he stands to the right of such arch-conservative labor leaders as Dave Beck of the Teamsters, who, in a speech at a National Press Club luncheon, reported in the Oct. 21, 1953, New York Times, declared: 'Those who seek to put the chain of the Taft-Hartley Act and other anti-union legislation around labor, will live to see the day when American labor will follow England's and tie progress to political action'. Whatever lip service this or that top labor bureaucrat may occasionally pay to the idea of building a labor party in order to frighten the Democrats or to

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soothe the feelings of union militants fed up with the capitalist parties, it is plain enough that the real political objective of the Meany-Reuther combination is a triple one: - to shape the labor vote into a more cohesive and active block, capable of putting the Democratic Party back into the White House in 1956; - to win a voice in Democratic machine politics; - to gain as a payoff at least some concessions of New Deal coloration. Clearly, insofar as the top bureaucracy wields political control over the rank, and file, the labor movement is in for another experience of coalition politics with the Democrats. What fruits can be expected in the event of victory can be gauged pretty well from 1948. The Truman election was proclaimed as the greatest of all labor victories. The cw leaders even split the organization by expelling the so-called 'communist-controlled unions' so as not to embarrass the Truman administration, then deep in its cold war adventure. Yet they got neither repeal of Taft-Hartley nor amendment of its worst provisions. All they succeeded in doing was to pave the way for the Eisenhower victory in 1952. The political course of Meany and Reuther has even more ominous implications when fitted into the drive of American imperialism toward a third world war. They have already signified their willingness, even eagerness, to act as traveling representatives of the State Department in meeting criticisms and objections abroad to Wall Street's global moves and aims, especially objections that take the form of working-class revolutions and colonial uprisings. That means, of course, a similar perfidious role at home. The top AFL and CIO bureaucrats hope to make big political gains through the Democratic Party. Their own illusions play a role in this, but more important is their function as labor lieutenants of the capitalist class. This impels them again and again to try to prevent the American working class from taking the road to independent political action. The need to form a cohesive labor bloc, organized for electioneering on a precinct level, in order to wield greater influence in the Democratic machine, is, however, not without its political dangers to the AFL-CIO top bureaucrats. The logic of their own course can take them much farther than they expect. In addition a united labor movement can bring to the rank and file a new realization of the strength of the American labor movement and a new growth of self-confidence. The consequences of this can shake the whole structure of American politics. The narrow, limited aims and objectives of those who support, defend or engage in apologetics for an outlived social system do not determine the course of history. When objective necessity required more effective forms of organization, the American working class smashed fall barriers and the CIO appeared.

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Today the American working class has gone about as far as it can within the limits of the policy, leadership and organizational forms so far developed. Objective necessity has now posed before the American workers the need to organize their own political party. How soon this need will find organized expression on a mass scale cannot be foretold; but one thing is certain, when the American workers lose patience with the timid, conservative, class-collaborationist, coalition politics of the Meanys and the Reuthers - as they surely will under the impact of a crisis like the one that gave birth to the AF L 70 years ago or the one that gave us the c Io 20 years ago - the result will be a major political explosion. Fifteen million organized workers represent a potential power of irresistible magnitude. Armed with a correct program and able leadership, nothing can stop them from fulfilling their historic destiny.

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7

Socialism and Democracy (1957)

James P. Cannon

Comrades, I am glad to be here with you today, and to accept your invitation to speak on socialism and democracy.17 It is a most timely subject, and in the discussion of socialist regroupment it takes first place. Before we can make real headway in the discussion of other important parts of the program, we have to find agreement on what we mean by socialism and what we mean by democracy, and how they are related to each other, and what we are going to say to the American workers about them. Strange as it may seem, an agreement on these two simple, elementary points, as experience has already demonstrated, will not be arrived at easily. The confusion and demoralization created by Stalinism, and the successful exploitation of this confusion by the ruling capitalists of this country and all their agents and apologists, still hang heavily over all sections of the workers' movement. We have to recognize that. Even in the ranks of people who call themselves socialists, we encounter a wide variety of understandings and misunderstandings about the real meaning of those simple terms, socialism and democracy. And in the great ranks of the American working class, the fog of misunderstanding and confusion is even thicker. All this makes the clarification of these questions a problem of burning importance and immediacy. In fact, it is first on the agenda in all circles of the radical movement. The widespread misunderstanding and confusion about socialism and democracy has profound causes. These causes must be frankly stated and examined before they can be removed. And we must undertake to remove them, if we are to try in earnest to get to the root of the problem. Shakespeare's Marc Antony reminded us that evil quite often outlives its authors. That is true in the present case also. Stalin is dead; but the crippling influence of Stalinism on the minds of a whole generation of people who considered themselves socialists or communists lives after Stalin. This is testified

17

Cannon 1957.

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to most eloquently by those members and fellow travellers of the Communist Party who have formally disavowed Stalin ism since the Twentieth Congress, while retaining some of its most perverted conceptions and definitions. Socialism, in the old days that I can recall, was often called the society of the free and equal, and democracy was defined as the rule of the people. These simple definitions still ring true to me, as they did when I first heard them many years ago. But in later years we have heard different definitions which are far less attractive. These same people whom I have mentioned - leaders of the Communist Party and fellow travellers who have sworn off Stalin without really changing any of the Stalinist ideas they assimilated - still blandly describe the state of affairs in the Soviet Union, with all its most exaggerated social and economic inequality, ruled over by the barbarous dictatorship of a privileged minority, as a form of 'socialism'. And they still manage to say, with straight faces, that the hideous police regimes in the Satellite countries, propped up by Russian military force, are some kind of 'people's democracies'. When such people say it would be a fine idea for all of us to get together in the struggle for socialism and democracy, it seems to me it would be appropriate to ask them, by way of preliminary inquiry: 'Just what do you mean by socialism, and what do you mean by democracy? Do you mean what Marx and Engels and Lenin said? Or do you mean what Stalin did?' They are not the same thing as can be easily proved, and it is necessary to choose between one set of definitions and the other. This confusion of terminology has recently been illustrated by an article of Howard Fast, the well-known writer, who was once awarded the Stalin Prize. For a long time Fast supported what he called 'socialism' in the Soviet Union, with his eyes shut. And then Khrushchev's speech at the Twentieth Congress, and other revelations following that, opened Fast's eyes, and he doesn't like what he sees. That is to his credit. But he still calls it 'socialism'. In an article in Masses and Mainstream he describes what he had found out about this peculiar 'socialism' that had prevailed in the Soviet Union under Stalin and still prevails under Stalin's successors. This is what Howard Fast said: In Russia, we have socialism without democracy. We have socialism without trial by jury, habeas corpus or ... protection against the abuse of confession by torture. We have socialism without civil liberty ... We have socialism without public avenues of protest. We have socialism without equality for minorities. We have socialism without any right of free artistic creation. In so many words, we have socialism without morality.

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These are the words of Howard Fast. I agree with everything he says there, except the preface he gives to all his qualifications - that we have 'socialism' without this and that, we have 'socialism' without any of the features that a socialist society was supposed to have in the conceptions of the movement before Stalinism. It is as though Fast has discovered different varieties of socialism. Like mushrooms. You go out and pick the right kind and you can cook a tasty dish. But if you gather up the kind commonly known as toadstools and call them mushrooms, you will poison yourself. Stalinist 'socialism' is about as close to the real thing as a toadstool is to an edible mushroom. Now, of course, the Stalinists and their apologists have not created all the confusion in this country about the meaning of socialism, at least not directly. At every step for 30 years, the Stalinist work of befuddlement and demoralization, of debasing words into their opposite meanings, has been supported by reciprocal action of the same kind by the ruling capitalists and their apologists. They have never failed to take the Stalinists at their word, and to point to the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, with all of its horrors, and to say: 'That is socialism. The American way of life is better'. It is these people who have given us, as their contribution to sowing confusion in the minds of people, the delightful definition of the capitalist sector of the globe, where the many toil in poverty for the benefit of the few, as 'the free world'. And they describe the United States, where the workers have a right to vote every four years, if they don't move around too much, but have no say about the control of the shop and the factory; where all the means of mass information and communication are monopolized by a few - they describe all that as the ideal democracy, for which the workers should gladly fight and die. It is true that Stalinism has been the primary cause of the demoralization of a whole generation of American radical workers. There is no question of that. But the role of Stalinism in prejudicing the great American working class against socialism, and inducing them to accept the counterfeit democracy of American capitalism as the lesser evil, has been mainly indirect. The active role in this mis-education and befuddlement has been played by the American ruling minority, through all their monopolized means of communication and information. They have cynically accepted the Stalinist definition and have obligingly advertised the Soviet Union, with its grinding poverty and glaring inequality, with its ubiquitous police terror, frame-ups, mass murders and slave-labor camps, as a 'socialist' order of society. They have utilized the crimes of Stalinism to prejudice the American workers against the very name of socialism. And worst of all, comrades, we have to recognize that this campaign has been widely successful, and that we have to pay for it. We cannot build a strong socialist

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movement in this country until we overcome this confusion in the minds of the American workers about the real meaning of socialism. This game of confusing and misrepresenting has been facilitated for the capitalists and aided to a considerable extent by the social democrats and the labor bureaucracy, who are themselves privileged beneficiaries of the American system, and who give a socialist and labor coloring to the defense of American 'democracy'. In addition to all that, we have to recognize that in this country, more than any other in the world, the tremendous pressures of imperialist prosperity and power and the witch-hunt persecution have deeply affected the thinking of many people who call themselves radicals or ex-radicals. These powerful pressures have brought many of them to a reconciliation with capitalist society and to the defense of capitalist democracy, if not as a paradise, at least as a lesser evil and the best that can be hoped for. There is no doubt that this drumfire of bourgeois propaganda, supplemented by the universal revulsion against Stalinism, has profoundly affected the sentiments of the American working class, including the bulk of its most progressive and militant and potentially revolutionary sectors. After all that has happened in the past quarter of a century, the American workers have become more acutely sensitive than ever before to the value and importance of democratic rights. That, in my opinion, is the progressive side of their reaction, which we should fully share. The horrors of fascism, as they were revealed in the '30s, and which were never dreamed of by the socialists in the old days, and the no less monstrous crimes of Stalinism, which became public knowledge later - all this has inspired a fear and hatred of any kind of dictatorship in the minds of the American working class. And to the extent that the Stalinist dictatorship in Russia has been identified with the name of socialism, and that this identification has been taken as a matter of course, the American workers have been prejudiced against socialism. That's the bitter truth, and it must be looked straight in the face. This barrier to the expansion and development of the American socialist movement will not be overcome, and even a regroupment of the woefully limited forces of those who at present consider themselves socialists will yield but little fruit, unless and until we find a way to break down this misunderstanding and prejudice against socialism, and convince at least the more advanced American workers that we socialists are the most aggressive and consistent advocates of democracy in all fields and that, in fact, we are completely devoted to the idea that socialism cannot be realized otherwise than by democracy. The socialist movement in America will not advance again significantly until it regains the initiative and takes the offensive against capitalism and all its agents in the labor movement precisely on the issue of democracy. What is

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needed is not a propaganda device or trick, but a formulation of the issue as it really stands; and, indeed, as it has always stood with real socialists ever since the modem movement was first proclaimed 109 years ago. For this counteroffensive against bourgeois propaganda we do not need to look for new formulations. Our task, as socialists living and fighting in this day and hour, is simply to restate what socialism and democracy meant to the founders of our movement, and to all the authentic disciples who followed them; to bring their formulations up to date and apply them to present conditions in the United States. This restatement of basic aims and principles cannot wait; it is, in fact, the burning necessity of the hour. There is no room for misunderstanding among us as to what such a restatement of our position means and requires. It requires a clean break with all Stalinist and social democratic perversions and distortions of the real meaning of socialism and democracy and their relation to each other, and a return to the original formulations and definitions. Nothing short of this will do. The authentic socialist movement, as it was conceived by its founders and as it has developed over the past century, has been the most democratic movement in all history. No formulation of this question can improve on the classic statement of the Communist Manifesto, with which modem scientific socialism was proclaimed to the world in 1848. The Communist Manifesto said: All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The authors of the Communist Manifesto linked socialism and democracy together as end and means. The 'self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority' cannot be anything else but democratic, if we understand by 'democracy' the rule of the people, the majority. The Stalinist claim - that the task of reconstructing society on a socialist basis can be farmed out to a privileged and uncontrolled bureaucracy, while the workers remain without voice or vote in the process - is just as foreign to the thoughts of Marx and Engels, and of all their true disciples, as the reformist idea that socialism can be handed down to the workers by degrees by the capitalists who exploit them. All such fantastic conceptions were answered in advance by the reiterated statement of Marx and Engels that 'the emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves'. That is the language of Marx and Engels - 'the task of the workers themselves'. That was just another way of saying - as they said explicitly many times - that the socialist reorganization of society requires a workers' revolution. Such a revolution is unthinkable without the active par-

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ticipation of the majority of the working class, which is itself the big majority of the population. Nothing could be more democratic than that. Moreover, the great teachers did not limit the democratic action of the working class to the overthrow of bourgeois supremacy. They defined democracy as the form of governmental rule in the transition period between capitalism and socialism. It is explicitly stated in the Communist Manifesto - and I wonder how many people have forgotten this in recent years - 'The first step', said the Manifesto, 'in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy'. That is the way Marx and Engels formulated the first aim of the revolution to make the workers the ruling class, to establish democracy, which, in their view, is the same thing. From this precise formulation it is clear that Marx and Engels did not consider the limited, formal democracy under capitalism, which screens the exploitation and the rule of the great majority by the few, as real democracy. In order to have real democracy, the workers must become the 'ruling class'. Only the revolution that replaces the class rule of the capitalists by the class rule of the workers can really establish democracy, not in fiction, but in fact. So said Marx and Engels. They never taught that the simple nationalization of the forces of production signified the establishment of socialism. That's not stated by Marx and Engels anywhere. Nationalization only lays the economic foundations for the transition to socialism. Still less could they have sanctioned, even if they had been able to imagine, the monstrous idea that socialism could be realized without freedom and without equality; that nationalized production and planned economy, controlled by a ruthless police dictatorship, complete with prisons, torture chambers and forced-labor camps, could be designated as a 'socialist' society. That unspeakable perversion and contradiction of terms belongs to the Stalinists and their apologists. All the great Marxists defined socialism as a classless society - with abundance, freedom and equality for all; a society in which there would be no state, not even a democratic workers' state, to say nothing of a state in the monstrous form of a bureaucratic dictatorship of a privileged minority. The Soviet Union today is a transitional order of society, in which the bureaucratic dictatorship of a privileged minority, far from serving as the agency to bridge the transition to socialism, stands as an obstacle to harmonious development in that direction. In the view of Marx and Engels, and of Lenin and Trotsky who came after them, the transition from capitalism to the classless society of socialism could only be carried out by an ever-expanding democracy, involving the masses of the workers more and more in all phases of social life, by direct participation and control.

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And, in the course of further progressive development in all fields, as Lenin expressed it, even this democracy, this workers' democracy, as a form of class rule, will outlive itself. Lenin said: 'Democracy will gradually change and become a habit, and finally wither away', since democracy itself, properly understood, is a form of state, that is, an instrument of class rule, for which there will be no need and no place in the classless socialist society. Forecasting the socialist future, the Communist Manifesto said: 'In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association'. Mark that: 'an association', not a state - 'an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all'. Trotsky said the same thing in other words when he spoke of socialism as 'a pure and limpid social system which is accommodated to the self-government of the toilers ... and uninterrupted growth of universal equality - all-sided flowering of human personality ... unselfish, honest and human relations between human beings'. The bloody abomination ofStalinism cannot be passed off as a substitute for this picture of the socialist future and the democratic transition period leading up to it, as it was drawn by the great Marxists. And I say we will not put the socialist movement of this country on the right track and restore its rightful appeal to the best sentiments of the working class of this country and above all to the young, until we begin to call socialism by its right name as the great teachers did. Until we make it clear that we stand for an ever-expanding workers' democracy as the only road to socialism. Until we root out every vestige of Stalinist perversion and corruption of the meaning of socialism and democracy, and restate the thoughts and formulations of the authentic Marxist teachers. But the Stalinist definitions of socialism and democracy are not the only perversions that have to be rejected before we can find a sound basis for the regroupment of socialist forces in the United States. The definitions of the social democrats of all hues and gradations are just as false. And in this country they are a still more formidable obstacle because they have deeper roots, and they are tolerantly nourished by the ruling class itself. The liberals, the social democrats and the bureaucratic bosses of the American trade unions are red-hot supporters of 'democracy'. At least, that is what they say. And they strive to herd the workers into the imperialist war camp under the general slogan of 'democracy versus dictatorship'. That is their slippery and consciously deceptive substitute for the real 'irrepressible conflict' of our age, the conflict between capitalism and socialism. They speak of democracy as something that stands by itself above the classes and the class struggle, and not as the form of rule of one class over another.

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Lenin put his finger on this misrepresentation of reality in his polemic against Kautsky. Lenin said: A liberal naturally speaks of 'democracy' in general; but a Marxist will never forget to ask: 'for what class?' Everyone knows, for instance (and Kautsky the 'historian' knows it too), that rebellions, or even strong ferment, among the slaves in antiquity at once revealed the fact that the state of antiquity was essentially a dictatorship of the slaveowners. Did this dictatorship abolish democracy among, and for, the slaveowners? Everybody knows that it did not. Capitalism, under any kind of government - whether bourgeois democracy or fascism or a military police state - under any kind of government, capitalism is a system of minority rule, and the principal beneficiaries of capitalist democracy are the small minority of exploiting capitalists; scarcely less so than the slaveowners of ancient times were the actual rulers and the real beneficiaries of the Athenian democracy. To be sure, the workers in the United States have a right to vote periodically for one of two sets of candidates selected for them by the two capitalist parties. And if they can dodge the witch-hunters, they can exercise the right of free speech and free press. But this formal right of free speech and free press is outweighed rather heavily by the inconvenient circumstance that the small capitalist minority happens to enjoy a complete monopoly of ownership and control of all the big presses, and of television and radio, and of all other means of communication and information. We who oppose the capitalist regime have a right to nominate our own candidates, if we're not arrested under the Smith Act before we get to the city clerk's office, and if we can comply with the laws that deliberately restrict the rights of minority parties. That is easier said than done in this country of democratic capitalism. In one state after another, no matter how many petitions you circulate, you can't comply with the regulations and you can't get on the ballot. This is the state of affairs in California, Ohio, Illinois, and an increasing number of other states. And if you succeed in complying with all the technicalities, as we did last year in New York, they just simply rule you out anyhow if it is not convenient to have a minority party on the ballot. But outside of all these and other difficulties and restrictions, we have free elections and full democracy. It is true that the Negro people in the United States, 94 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, are still fighting for the right to vote in the South, and for the right to take a vacant seat on a public bus; or to send their children to

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a tax-supported public school, and things of that kind - which you may call restrictions of democracy in the United States. But even so, with all that, a little democracy is better than none. We socialists have never denied that. And after the experiences of fascism and McCarthyism, and of military and police dictatorships in many parts of the world, and of the horrors of Stalinism, we have all the more reason to value every democratic provision for the protection of human rights and human dignity; to fight for more democracy, not less. Socialists should not argue with the American worker when he says he wants democracy and doesn't want to be ruled by a dictatorship. Rather, we should recognize that his demand for human rights and democratic guarantees, now and in the future, is in itself progressive. The socialist task is not to deny democracy, but to expand it and make it more complete. That is the true socialist tradition. The Marxists, throughout the century-long history of our movement, have always valued and defended bourgeois democratic rights, restricted as they were; and have utilized them for the education and organization of the workers in the struggle to establish full democracy by abolishing the capitalist rule altogether. The right of union organization is a precious right, a democratic right, but it was not 'given' to the workers in the United States. It took the mighty and irresistible labor upheaval of the '30s, culminating in the great sit-down strikes - a semi-revolution of the American workers - to establish in reality the right of union organization in mass-production industry. And yet today - I am still speaking under the heading of democracy - 20 years after the sit-down strikes firmly established the auto workers' union, the automobile industry is still privately owned and ruled by a dictatorship of financial sharks. The auto workers have neither voice nor vote in the management of the industry which they have created, nor in regulating the speed of the assembly line which consumes their lives. Full control of production in auto and steel and everywhere, according to the specific terms of the union contract, is still the exclusive prerogative of 'management', that is, of the absentee owners, who contribute nothing to the production of automobiles or steel or anything else. What's democratic about that? The claim that we have an almost perfect democracy in this country doesn't stand up against the fact that the workers have no democratic rights in industry at all, as far as regulating production is concerned; that these rights are exclusively reserved for the parasitic owners, who never see the inside of a factory. In the old days, the agitators of the Socialist Party and the IWW - who were real democrats - used to give a shorthand definition of socialism as 'industrial

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democracy'. I don't know how many of you have heard that. It was a common expression: 'industrial democracy', the extension of democracy to industry, the democratic control of industry by the workers themselves, with private ownership eliminated. That socialist demand for real democracy was taken for granted in the time of Debs and Haywood, when the American socialist movement was still young and uncorrupted. You never hear a 'democratic' labor leader say anything like that today. The defense of 'democracy' by the social democrats and the labor bureaucrats always turns out in practice to be a defense of 'democratic' capitalism, or as Beck and McDonald call it, 'people's capitalism'. And I admit they have a certain stake in it, and a certain justification for defending it, as far as their personal interests are concerned. And always, in time of crisis, these labor leaders - who talk about democracy all the time, as against dictatorship in the 'socialist countries', as they call them - easily excuse and defend all kinds of violations of even this limited bourgeois democracy. They are far more tolerant oflapses from the formal rules of democracy by the capitalists than by the workers. They demand that the class struggle of the workers against the exploiters be conducted by the formal rules of bourgeois democracy, at all stages of its development - up to and including the stage of social transformation and the defense of the new society against attempts at capitalist restoration. They say it has to be strictly 'democratic' all the way. No emergency measures are tolerated; everything must be strictly and formally democratic according to the rules laid down by the capitalist minority. They bum incense to democracy as an immutable principle, an abstraction standing above the social antagonisms. But when the capitalist class, in its struggle for self-preservation, cuts comers around its own professed democratic principles, the liberals, the social democrats and the labor skates have a way of winking, or looking the other way, or finding excuses for it. For example, they do not protest when the American imperialists wage war according to the rules of war, which are not quite the same thing as the rules of 'democracy'. When the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the most abominable atrocity in all history- the bombing of a defenseless civilian population and the wiping out of whole cities of men, women and children - the best these liberals, labor fakers and social democratic defenders of American democracy could offer was the plaintive bleat of Norman Thomas. You know, he was supporting the war, naturally, being a social democrat. But Norman Thomas rose up after Nagasaki and Hiroshima were wiped off the face of the Earth and said the bombs should not have been dropped 'without warning'. The others said nothing.

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These professional democrats have no objection to the authoritarian rule of the military forces of the capitalist state, which deprives the rank-and-file soldiers of all democratic rights in life-and-death matters, including the right to elect their own officers. The dictatorial rule of MacArthur in Japan, who acted as a tsar over a whole conquered country, was never questioned by these professional opponents of all other dictators. They are against the dictators in the Kremlin, but the dictator in Japan - that was a horse of another color. All that, you see, concerns war; and nothing, not even the sacred principles of 'democracy', can be allowed to stand in the way of the victory of the American imperialists in the war and the cinching-up of the victory afterward in the occupation. But in the class struggle of the workers against the capitalists to transform society, which is the fiercest war of all, and in the transition period after the victory of the workers, the professional democrats demand that the formal rules of bourgeois democracy, as defined by the minority of exploiters, be scrupulously observed at every step. No emergency measures are allowed. By these different responses in different situations of a class nature, the professional democrats simply show that their class bias determines their judgment in each case, and show at the same time that their professed devotion to the rules of formal democracy, at all times and under all colJ.ditions, is a fraud. And when it comes to the administration of workers' organizations under their control, the social democrats and the reformist labor leaders pay very little respect to their own professed democratic principles. The trade unions in the United States today, as you all know, are administered and controlled by little cliques of richly privileged bureaucrats, who use the union machinery, and the union funds, and a private army of goon squads, and - whenever necessary- the help of the employers and the government, to keep their own "party" in control of the unions, and to suppress and beat down any attempt of the rank and file to form an opposition 'party' to put up an opposition slate. And yet, without freedom of association and organization, without the right to form groups and parties of different tendencies, there is and can be no real democracy anywhere. In practice, the American labor bureaucrats, who piously demand democracy in the one-party totalitarian domain of Stalinism, come as close as they can to maintaining a total one-party rule in their own domain. Kipling said: 'The colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under the skin'. The Stalinist bureaucrats in Russia and the trade-union bureaucrats in the United States are not sisters, but they are much more alike than different. They are essentially of the same breed, a privileged caste dominated above all by motives of self-benefit and self-preservation at the expense of the workers and against the workers.

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The privileged bureaucratic caste everywhere is the most formidable obstacle to democracy and socialism. The struggle of the working class in both sections of the now divided world has become, in the most profound meaning of the term, a struggle against the usurping privileged bureaucracy. In the Soviet Union, it is a struggle to restore the genuine workers' democracy established by the revolution of 1917. Workers' democracy has become a burning necessity to assure the harmonious transition to socialism. That is the meaning of the political revolution against the bureaucracy now developing throughout the whole Soviet sphere, which every socialist worthy of the name unreservedly supports. There is no sense in talking about regroupment with people who don't agree on that, on defense and support of the Soviet workers against the Soviet bureaucrats. In the United States, the struggle for workers' democracy is preeminently a struggle of the rank and file to gain democratic control of their own organizations. That is the necessary condition to prepare the final struggle to abolish capitalism and 'establish democracy' in the country as a whole. No party in this country has a right to call itself socialist unless it stands foursquare for the rankand-file workers of the United States against the bureaucrats. In my opinion, effective and principled regroupment of socialist forces requires full agreement on these two points. That is the necessary starting point. Capitalism does not survive as a social system by its own strength, but by its influence within the workers' movement, reflected and expressed by the labor aristocracy and the bureaucracy. So the fight for workers' democracy is inseparable from the fight for socialism, and is the condition for its victory. Workers' democracy is the only road to socialism, here in the United States and everywhere else, all the way from Moscow to Los Angeles, and from here to Budapest.

CHAPTER 6

Confrontations Internal and International Bryan Palmer

The 1940s and 1950s were trying times forTrotskyists in the United States.Jailed by the state, reviled by all and sundry (the liberal mainstream, trade union officialdoms, and orthodox communists in the Stalinist Communist Party, USA), able to win over only a fragment of the American working class, and facing the challenges of the Cold War and McCarthyism, Trotskyists in the Socialist Workers Party (swP) lived through the immediate post-World War II years on the razor's edge of apparent irrelevancy, all the while committed to the prospects of revolution in the most advanced capitalist nation on earth. The challenges posed by the context of the period 1945-55 were unlike any others the revolutionary left had ever faced. On the one hand, there were indications of advances for the international communist movement, including the rupture between the Kremlin and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1948 and the victory of the Chinese Communist Party over the reactionary regime of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949. The former development, accompanied by the creation of workers' councils, the democratization of whole realms of cultural, political, and economic life, and the beginnings of workers' management of socialized enterprise, heralded new possibilities and raised decisively the possibility of a workers' state refusing to subordinate its interests to the Soviet bureaucracy, raising the possibility of a struggle against the deformations long associated with Stalinism. 1 The latter coming to power of Mao-Tse-tung was a world-historic event that placed a significant sector of the world's population under the crimson banner of socialism. 2 On the other hand, both of these revolutionary developments had unfolded in ways that Trotskyists understood contained immense contradictions, and neither would offer much, if any, breathing room to the ideas and advocates of the historic Left Opposition.

1 For a collection of documents addressing Yugoslavia and related issues, drawn from various Fourth International and Socialist Workers Party publications and discussion bulletins, see Socialist Workers Party 1969. 2 Peng and Peng 1972, containing documents of Trotskyist discussion on China in the early 1950s, drawing on the insights of Chinese Trotskyists who managed to survive - which many did not - Mao's Revolution.

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There were other contradictory challenges as well. The United States was now the capitalist world's undisputed political leader and economic pacesetter, emerging from the ravages of World War II relatively unscathed, hegemonic in the international spheres of production, finance, and ideology. Armed with the destructive might of nuclear weapons, the us now called the shots globally, and was assuming its Cold War role as the preeminent imperialist power, keen to police communism on a world scale, as would be evident in its military intervention in the Korean War (1950-53). As the American Socialist Workers Party had learned with the 1941 Smith Act trial, the ruling apparatus of the United States was also not shy in utilizing outright repression to tame revolutionary oppositionists within its borders. The fa~ade of liberal democracy notwithstanding, the political climate of the post-World War II period would be anything but tolerant of homegrown dissidents, as the rise of McCarthyism in the late 1940s and 1950s would indicate. 3 Developments such as these - international and national - tested the revolutionary mettle of Trotskyists. In the United States, the SWP approached the 1950s with a resolve that accented an optimism of the will in the face of the intellectual pessimism the times often conditioned. Fresh fromjail,James Cannon and others in the leadership of the SWP drafted the 'Theses on the American Revolution'. This document exuded an overly optimistic, at times other-worldly, confidence in the revolutionary capacities of the us working class, declaring defiantly that 'the workers' struggle for power ... is not a perspective of a distant and hazy future but the realistic program of our epoch'. Insistent that the world revolution would follow a course charted in global capitalism's mainstay, the United States, Cannon and his comrades saw 'the American Revolution', with its 'hundredfold greater power', as following in the footsteps of Russia's 1917, setting in motion 'revolutionary forces that will change the face of our planet. The whole Western Hemisphere will quickly be consolidated into the Socialist United States of North, Central, and South America'. Dedicated to maintaining a party of revolutionary commitment against the political odds that worked to undermine this difficult project, Cannon was resolute in his understanding that the kind of party that could build the possibility of an alternative to capitalist America had to remain steeled in the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky, remaining distinct and separate from the Stalinist counter-revolutionary forces that had exercised such a debilitating defeatist impact on the class struggles of the 1930s and 1940s. The SWP was this party: 'Its program has been hammered out in ideological battles and

3 For a non-Trotskyist perspective on the period see, for instance, Stone 1952; Stone 1953.

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successfully developed against every kind of revisionist assault upon it. The fundamental core of a professional leadership has been assembled and trained in the irreconcilable spirit of the combat party of the revolution'. These were the ideas that permeated two of Cannon's pamphlet writings of the late 1940s, American Stalinism andAnti-Stalinism (1947) and The Coming American Revolution (1947). 4

Diverging Perspectives

If such ideas seem, in retrospect, out of touch with the Cold War realities of the United States in the late 1940s and 1950s, their tone was set by Cannon and his comrades having weathered the storm of state repression, the SWP making substantial gains in the immediate postwar period. Membership rebounded to roughly 1,500 in 1946, reaching the somewhat inflated levels achieved in 1938, at the height of 'entryist' recruitment from the Socialist Party, and rising significantly from the decline to about 650 in 1942, a consequence of wartime retreats and repression. For the first time, the SWP appeared poised to draw significant numbers of African Americans to the banner of dissident communism, with black militants joining the party, writing for the Militant, and making cause with white comrades in the civil rights struggles of the late 1940s. As the United States seethed with industrial discontent in 1946, strike levels surpassing those of the epic year of Congress of Industrial Organization-led conflicts in 1937, and the numbers of strikers involved rising almost 30 percent from that earlier year of momentous mobilizations, the tempo of class struggle seemed to be quickening. Cannon and other SWP leaders, enthused by the presence Trotskyists had established in industrial sectors such as auto, maritime, steel, rubber, and aircraft, could perhaps be excused for thinking the prospects for revolutionary advances more than bright in 1946. 5 There were, of course, rumblings of discontent within the SWP that manifested itself in criticisms of Cannon and shortcomings in the American Trotskyist leadership's approach to the prospects of revolution, not only in the United States, but also in Europe. This had been central to the factional reckoning of the SWP with a small but significant minority associated with Albert Goldman,

4 Cannon 1947c was a rebuttal to Ruth Fischer and her critique of Stalinism, and is reprinted in Cannon 1977, pp. 345-90. The 'Theses on the American Revolution' are published in Cannon 1947a. 5 On these developments and the political tone of 1946-47 see the essays in Breitman, Le Blanc and Wald (eds) 1996.

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Felix Morrow, and Jean van Heijenoort, addressed earlier in this volume. 6 But in the mid-194os, Cannon and the SWP leadership had the unambiguous support of a leading figure in the Fourth International's French section, Michel Pablo (Michalis N. Raptis), and could rally important proletarian organizers and wide-ranging thinkers among the Trotskyist ranks, such as Bert Cochran (E.R. Frank).7 Things changed dramatically by the end of the 1940s and by the time of the Third World Congress of the Fourth International, held in 1951, there were signs of differentiation among the forces of world Trotskyism. Central to these tensions that would erupt into major confrontations and political division, manifesting themselves in a fractured Fourth International and a significant factional challenge to the continuity of revolutionary politics pursued by the SWP in the United States, was the political character and potential significance of Stalinism in global developments during a period of relative quietude and retreat on the part of dissident communism in the developed, advanced capitalist nations and new uprisings of national liberation and anti-colonial struggle in the developing, so-called 'Third World'. Pablo's rise up the international ladder of the European Secretariat of the Fourth International was an expression of how war, fascist counter-revolution, and Stalinist calumny and worse decimated the ranks of the Left Opposition in a European theater where, by 1943-45, cadre tested in the practice of Trotskyist politics were all but non-existent. Into the vacuum stepped Pablo, an able underground organizer whose practical skills secured him a place of prominence in the fragile European Secretariat, but who had few demonstrable abilities as a public political leader or original programmatic/theoretical contributor to Marxism. He was buttressed by figures like Belgium's Ernest Mandel (Germain), whose loyalties and commitments to Trotskyism were unquestioned, but whose willingness to temporize in the interests of preserving unity at all costs would prove costly in the 1946-53 period and for decades thereafter. 8 The European Trotskyist movement was so starved for leadership in the 1940s that even Pierre Frank, prominent in the discredited group aligned with the mercurial adventurer, Raymond Molinier, a long-time supporter of Trotsky with whom

6 Gaido and Luparello 2014 explore this, albeit in a manner that is highly partisan in its dismissiveness of Cannon, its decontextualization of what was happening broadly within the SWP in the years 1943-46, and its neglect of the ways in which Goldman and Morrow functioned as a faction with respect to elementaiy understandings of party loyalty and discipline. 7 Pablo 1946; Gaido and Luparello 2014, p. 488. 8 Stutje 2009; Palmer 2010.

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the international leader of the Left Opposition finally broke in 1935, rose to prominence in the French section of the Fourth International during the postwar period, in spite of having been expelled in 1938. 9 Cannon and the SWP played a specific American role in these developments, largely as abstentionists. As arguably the strongest national section of the Fourth International, the Socialist Workers Party had a particular responsibility, after the Stalinist assassination of Trotsky in 1940, to guide the global forces of Trotskyism, especially given that, in the Europe of World War II, fascist-occupied countries were inhospitable, to say the least, climates for the Left Opposition. But the Cannon leadership of the SWP was beleaguered during this same period, battling state repression that included not only the Smith Act trials, but also the passage of the Voorhis Act (1940), which constrained the international activity of United States revolutionary organizations. There were ways in which the SWP embraced internationalism, to be sure, and Trotskyists in the United States were, of course, addressing international questions such as the nature of the European revolutionary movement, on all kinds of levels. But on the whole, the SWP leadership of the World War II years, inhibited by its peculiar American circumstances, opted for the kind of isolationism that allowed its leading cadre to survive their particular trials, which were not inconsiderable. With the cessation of hostilities and the tumultuous developments of the postwar period, this isolationism was actually deepened in the buoyant optimism of the 'American Theses' and Cannon's confidence that the economistic struggles of the working class of the United States could be translated, through the SWP, into a 'Coming American Revolution'. This conditioned a certain retreat into the somewhat complacent sensibility that the permanent revolution would be realized through building the American revolution first and foremost. All of this nurtured an inward-looking SWP at the very juncture that a more internationalist orientation was demanded. Forces like Goldman-Morrow were thus not incorrect to question the SWP's analytic overestimation of the prospects for revolutionary breakthroughs, but they then turned a legitimate skepticism in the direction of limiting fundamental Trotskyist positions, something that the majority of the SWP had no taste for amid the seeming advances of 1946. The ease with which GoldmanMorrow were dispatched, however, combined with Cannon's long-standing proclivity to majoritarian intransigence and the inclination to resolve political issues through organizational methods (for which he had been fraternally

9 Deutscher 1963, pp. 51, 295; Alexander 1991, p. 355.

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chastised by Trotsky as early as 1933),10 meant that the fundamental challenges raised within the SWP during the war crisis were likely to resurface in later years. They did so with a vengeance in the early 1950s, the factional situation confronting the SWP being both national and international. The optimism of the will expressed in the 'American Theses' was, in some senses, reproduced in the International Secretariat, with Mandel authoring a 1946 article on 'The First Phase of the European Revolution'. 11 This orientation, lacking in a sober assessment of the realities of the political economy of war-tom Europe and its exhausted proletariat, invested a great deal in the potential of the postwar moment, but did so, as did similar SWP statements, without conceding any ground in the longstanding Trotskyist understanding that Stalinism would, in any revolutionary upsurge, function as a break on proletarian insurgency and possible breakthroughs into socialism. It did not take long for this reasoned orientation to atrophy in a one-sided repudiation of what had emerged within Europe as a degenerated workers' state wrestled with an aggressive capitalist imperialist. Opening forays into theorizing the meaning of those 'buffer states' created in the postwar re-division of Europe tended toward a denial that the consequences of Red Army victories could register in ways that were anything but categorically state capitalist. Cochran (E.R. Frank) produced a lengthy 1947 Fourth International article on 'The Kremlin in Europe', in which he declared that, 'Without Stalin, without Stalinist treachery in sidetracking the revolutionary mass movement in Western Europe, and Stalinist treachery plus direct counter-revolutionary terror and violence on the part of Red Army troops in Eastern Europe - without that, Western imperialism could never have even hoped to pacify the revolutionary upsurge and prop up the sagging capitalist regimes'. Cochran answered the claim that 'Stalinism can fulfill a progressive function in the capitalist world\ entirely in the negative: 'The Stalinist counter-revolutionary adventures in Eastern Europe, rather than endowing it with the aura of a progressive mission in history, have made more urgent the necessity of crushing this bloody fiend, and preventing it from doing any more damage than it already has done to the world working class and its struggle for emancipation'. 12 This was a long way from Trotsky's dialectical appreciation of Stalinism, in which the approach was necessarily two-sided: inevitably forced to confront imperialist capitalism, the compromised workers' state that a Stalinist bureaucratic caste orchestrated in the ultimate interests of counter-revolution, 10 11 12

Prometheus Research Library 2002, p. 480. Germain 1946. Frank 1946b.

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necessarily posed, at specific times and historic junctures, a challenge to the unbridled expansion and expanding hegemony of a regime of exploitative accumulation. This was precisely the case with the creation of the Soviet Union's satellite states in Eastern Europe, which undoubtedly curbed capitalist global expansion and hegemony at the same time as it blocked the ultimate revolutionary potential of the European working class, a potential that had been encouraged and extended by Red Army victories. 13 This initial Stalinophobia of the Fourth International, with expressions inside the SWP, ironically contained within it the seeds of a conciliation with Stalinism. Because if it could be established that somewhere in the experience of the European Revolution, the tide of Stalinist treachery could be reversed, with a movement opposing the Kremlin's bureaucratic stranglehold on the world revolutionary movement arising out of the Stalinist experience itself, then a large question mark would be imposed on the orthodox Trotskyist understanding of the necessity of functioning in a particular way, summed up by Mandel in a 1947 statement on 'Stalinism - How to Understand It and How to Fight It': Liquidation of Stalinism by imperialism would carry with it the danger of the entire workers' movement being buried in the debris; failure of the proletariat to overcome the burden of Stalinism which weights it down would make its defeat inevitable. The historical task confronting the Fourth International is to take leadership in the overthrow of Stalinism by the working class, and thus to prevent the crushing of the workers' movement by imperialism. Whoever understands the dialectical relationship between these two tasks will understand why, in the daily struggle, we must defend the distinctive character ofour party with the most fierce and unrelenting defense. And this character of our party cannot include any trait of adaptation to Stalinism, just as it must be completely free of any trait of vulgar anti-Stalinism.

13

For the significance of adequately assessing the nature of these 'buffer countries' as deformed workers' states see International Communist League 1972, which suggests that in Los Angeles a group was coalescing around Sam Ryan and Dennis Vern that, borrowing insights from the Revolutionary Communist Party in Britain, led by a Jock Haston-Ted Grant majority, was wrestling with necessity of coming to grips with the nature of postWorld War II Eastern Europe, where state power was consolidated in the occupation of territory by the Soviet Red Army. Cochran would subsequently claim (Document 8) that sometime in 1949 he came to the conclusion that 'the states in the Soviet orbit of Eastern Europe could not longer be considered capitalist but had to be characterized as deformed workers' states', but this is not the language he used in his 1951 'Notes on Our Discussion'.

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But Mandel appreciated the horns of the dilemma this appropriate orthodoxy found itself impaled on in 1947: '[N]o workers who really think that Russia is "socialist" and that the Stalinists have abolished capitalism in Yugoslavia will leave the Stalinist organizations', he wrote in implicit recognition of what would feature forcefully in the rise of Pabloism in the Fourth International and the related emergence of a factional challenge within the SWP led by Bert Cochran (E.R. Frank).14

Pablo's Reorientation for the Fourth International

Indications of Pablo's reconfiguring of Trotskyism's basic orientation to Stalinism and how this would affect fundamental work in the mass organizations and mobilizations of the working class could undoubtedly be found earlier, but the most clear-cut statement of this new orientation appeared in a document, 'Where Are We Going', prepared as part of a discussion preceding the Third Congress of the Fourth International held in 1951. In this statement, a wildly oscillating collection of assertions that drew on little if anything in the vast arsenal of Marxist theory, Pablo postulated that: ... the international relationship of forces (encompassed in this general formulation is the relationship of forces between the two blocs) was not tending toward a prolonged equilibrium but was developing to the increased disadvantage of imperialism . ... the Communist Parties retain the possibility, in certain circumstances, of roughly outlining a revolutionary orientation, that is to say, of finding themselves compelled to engage in a struggle for power. These circumstances have revealed themselves during and folluwing the Second World War to be the extreme dislocation of the regime of the possessing classes and of imperialism, and of the revolutionary upsurge of the masses ... People who despair of the fate of humanity because Stalinism still endures and even achieves victories, tailor History to their own personal measures. They really desire that the entire process of the transformation of capitalist society into socialism would be accomplished within the span of their brief lives so that they can be rewarded for their efforts on behalf of the Revolution. As for us we reaffirm what we wrote in the first

14

Germain 1947, pp.143-4.

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article devoted to the Yugoslav affair: this transformation will probably take an entire historical period of several centuries and will in the meantime be filled with forms and regimes transitional between capitalism and socialism and necessarily deviating from 'pure' forms and norms. The experience of what has happened around us with the different anti-Stalinist tendencies in the workers' movement, as well as the still more important experience which the Yugoslav CP is now passing through, clearly demonstrates that without a Marxist orientation on these questions, one can imperceptibly glide over objectively into the enemy camp in the present period of extreme polarization of class forces. In one fell swoop, Pablo redrew the interpretive cartography of modem dissident communism. He suggested new languages of analysis (blocs), new understandings of Stalinist possibility with respect to the realization of revolutionary outcomes, new responsibilities on the part of revolutionaries (who must not slip into the camp of reaction, but should, perhaps, align themselves with Stalinist parties, the inevitable leadership of the left in a time of reaction), and a new assessment of the protracted nature of revolutionary undertakings, which will no longer conformed to pristine models of previous conceptualization, but instead would likely be new hybrids transitional between capitalism and socialism. Perhaps because so little in this text could be located in established Marxist writings, and prodded by Mandel's elaboration of 'Ten Theses' on Stalinism, Pablo soon offered an elaboration, in which he pillaged the textual arsenal of revolutionary classics to buttress his melange of unconventional views (see Document 3). There were a few voices raised in opposition to Pablo's pronouncements. This dissonance was nonetheless either muted and depoliticized, as in Mandel's 'Ten Theses', which insisted that Stalinists could not lead revolutions, and so considered the Communist Parties of Yugoslavia and China as somehow not Stalinist, a position that allowed Mandel to differentiate himself from Pablo at the same time that he continued to support him, 15 or isolated in the French Section of the Fourth International that was soon targeted by Pablo for bureaucratic suppression and disorganization. The leadership of the American Trotskyists temporized, failing to criticize Pablo, ceding the international sphere to him, and adopting a stance of national sectionalism. Cannon, as late as 1952, opted out of the opportunity to defend

15

Stutje 2009, pp. 100, 297; and for a more developed critique of Mandel's 'Ten Theses' see International Communist League 1972.

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the French Section of the Fourth International from Pablo's heavy-handed bureaucratic interventions and overt faction-mongering and, like Mandel, seemed preoccupied with the negative consequences of premature splits; he defended the 1951 Third Congress documents of incipient Pabloism, even as it was becoming increasingly clear of their revisionist substance, and he was adamant that, for the French Section at least (if not the American one), the correct course was a Pabloite one: 'to effectuate the imperatively-dictated entry into the Stalinist workers' movement and eventually into a section of the Stalinist Party itself'. What was sauce for the American goose (an independent proletarian party) was not to be for the French gander. What passed for an SWP engagement with the international perspectives associated with Pablo and the Third Congress, drafted by the Political Committee of the SWP and sent with its representative to the Fourth International gathering, George Clarke, never made it into discussions, Clarke apparently burning the statement. 16 But the fundamental political point was that there was very little of a challenging critical nature evident in the SWP statement.

Crystallizing Opposition in the SWP

As these events were unfolding, Bert Cochran and George Clarke produced discussion notes and a Fourth International article (see Documents 2 and 4) addressing Stalinism, the Americanization of the SWP, definitions of workers' states, the duration of the transition from capitalism to socialism, and the international situation. Cochran's document could hardly be characterized as unadulterated Pabloism, but it did have a similar tone, insisting, 'We cannot afford to live in the past, or in a make-believe world of our own creation'. For Cochran, the 'Stalin-Trotsky fight' had 'receded into history', a position that sat uneasily with many Trotskyists in the SWP, most emphatically Cannon. To be sure, Cochran continued to characterize Stalinism as essentially 'counter-revolutionary', but he designated Yugoslavia a 'workers' state', apparently unaware of the contradiction at the core of these two positions. All of 16

Slaughter (ed.) 1974 remains a useful collection of documents in assessing these developments, in spite of its tendency to scapegoat the SWP and Cannon, and retrospectively elevate the leading role of Gerry Healy in the international struggle against Pablo ism. Cannon's position on the French Section is outlined in 'Letters Exchanged between Daniel Renard and James P. Cannon, February 16 and May 9, 1952', pp. 82-95. The SWP's 'Contribution to the Discussion on International Perspectives' appears on pp. 46-51, with George Novack's claim about Clarke burning the document in Novack's 'Report Given to die Majority Caucus of the New York Local, 3 August 1953', p. 160.

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this converged with Pablo's suggestion of the need to rethink the nature of Stalinism. Clarke was more unashamedly Pabloite than Cochran in his enthusiasms for the new international orientation to Stalinism, gushing that the Fourth International had now 'refined its ideas ... and added a note of realism required by changed world conditions. What it recognizes is that events have changed the relationship between the Soviet bureaucrats and world imperialism, and between Stalinism and the masses it Leads and influences'. Yugoslavia and China were cited as examples of great mass movements that swept over the Kremlin bureaucracy; Communist Parties leading these revolutions, Stalinist in 'all outward appearances, led successful revolutions against old regimes'. This article, in retrospect, tends to reinforce the claim of Cannon and others, apparently not denied by Clarke, that 'Clarke was the closest associate and most authoritative spokesman for Pablo' in the United States. 17 Early in 1953 debates in the New York local revealed a serious divergence in the approach to SWP work, with the Cochran-Clarke forces, led by Mike Bartell (Milt Zaslow), opting for what those associated with the Cannon wing of the party labeled 'liquidationism'. Bartell's annual report to the local accented the limitations of the period, stressed that much mass work necessarily had to be of a propagandistic nature, cautioned against becoming isolated, and focused on breaking down barriers between Trotskyists and Stalinist rank-and-filers, who were said to be 'rife with Trotskyist conciliationism'. Rejoinders from D. Stevens and Harry Ring, and a subsequent document by Farrell Dobbs, stressed, in contrast, the need to build and sustain a revolutionary party with an independent proletarian orientation, and questioned how open Stalinism was to Trotskyist ideas and the class struggle militants who had been espousing them for years. At this point, however, there was little in the SWP to indicate any association of the Cochran-Clarke forces with Pabloism, or indeed, that a forceful critique of Pabloism even existed within American Trotskyism. Stevens and Ring, for instance, invoked the Fourth International leader in their critical engagement with Bartell. The Dobbs invocation of the necessity of preserving an independent party was a direct response to what, by 1953, was a crystallizing Cochranite faction that stood distanced from the SWP traditions, convinced that the ossified leadership was entombed in conservatism, sectarianism, and Stalinophobia. Rather than recruiting working-class activists to the politics of the SWP, the Cochranites favored entering and working with other parties and movements, such as the Communists or the remnants of Henry Wallace's still-born Progressive Party, or aligning with left-wing publications such as 17

Novack, 'Report to the Majority Caucus', in Slaughter (ed.) 1974, p. 159. See also Stone 1986, p.127.

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the weekly National Guardian or Paul Sweezy's and Leo Huberman's radical magazine, Monthly Review. The parting of the strategic ways separated into two divergent streams. The Cochran-Clarke forces were dedicated to propaganda and readjusting expectations away from the exaggerated hopes of the 'American Theses' and the Coming American Revolution, aligning with rather than assailing the Stalinists who seemed to constitute the largest surviving force of the American left in a time of outright reaction if not fascistic triumph. Those who rallied to the established leadership of the SWP, however, insisted on the more orthodox Trotskyist prescription to build a party of the working class, independent and insistent on exposing the ill winds that blew off the wreckage of Stalinism, liberalism, and labor fakirs. With the death of Stalin, and Pablo's proclamation of a 'new international course', the Cochran-Clarke forces, always somewhat heterogeneous, consolidated. On the eve of the May 1953 SWP Plenum, ten signatories offered a fullblown factional statement on the crisis that they now saw engulfing American Trotskyism, and the ways out of the 'Stalinophobe-sectarianism' they attributed to those advocating an independent proletarian party - see 'Roots of the Party Crisis' and Cochran's 'American Tasks', reproduced here. The CochranClarke faction proposed that to avoid a split and secure unity in the SWP it would be necessary to recognize the Third World Congress documents as 'a basic reorientation of world Trotskyism'; recognizing and combatting the danger of 'Stalinophobia' through 'a positive and effective intervention into the deep crisis now prevailing in the Stalinist movement'; making the principal tactical direction of party work 'propagandist in character'; and instituting a true collaborative leadership in which political differences could be overcome through 'harmonious working relationships'. In the crystallization of this SWP faction, the elevation of the Pabloite Third Congress documents to pre-eminence in reorienting world Trotskyism was evidence of the converging of international and national concerns. Indeed, a cult of Pablo was suggested in Genora Dollinger's 'Where I Stand', where 'Pablo's contributions to the new orientation' was described in a language of adulation: 'the most profound and without a doubt the greatest of all since the death of our leader and founder'.

Cannon Versus Pablo Cannon had no difficulty in laying bare the machinations at the core of the Cochran-Clarke proposals. His letter to Farrell Dobbs on the 'Six Points' of

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Cochranism was a distilled expose of the disingenuousness of 'The Roots of the Party Crisis'. That said, in struggling to address the relationship of the CochranClarke faction to Pabloism and the dubious programmatic direction of the Fourth International since the 1951 Third Congress, Cannon seemed unable to come to grips with the political degeneration of the International Secretariat, and the ways this was infusing the factional struggle within the SWP. Instead he tended to collapse the growing crisis into organizational issues of bureaucratic interference, and proceeded within the SWP to challenge Cochran-Clarke as much through organizational alignments as political criticism directed at the substantive revisionism of Pablo's programmatic pyrotechnics. In the raucous May Plenum of the swP's National Committee, where Cannon delivered a report that was constantly interrupted by heckling, he declared that the New York caucus minority of Cochran-Clarke was constantly instructed that the faction fight boiled down to a confrontation between 'Pabloism and Cannonism'. Cannon responded by defending Pablo, noting that he had historically suppressed differences with the Fourth International leader, but that no one could possibly claim that he did not accept the political positions Pablo was elaborating, adding that he had, since the Third Congress, 'given great contributions'. 18 Exhausted by decades of faction fights reaching back to the Communist Party of the 1920s, Cannon simply could not quite bring himself to tackle the Cochran-Clarke minority on the ground of their growing collaboration with the international leadership of the Fourth International. And when this became increasingly evident to Cannon, his critique of Pablo and Cochran-Clarke was not a decisive repudiation of the politics of Pabloism but, rather, of its interference in national sections. Cannon's 'Internationalism and the SWP' came dangerously close to denying the validity of an international leadership in the Trotskyist movement, and conceded far too much to Pablo: 'We appreciate the great work the leaders in Paris have done', he said, 'especially their important contributions to the analysis of the postwar world'. The best Cannon could muster was a rhetoric of national opposition to international infallibility: We regard the International Secretariat - a group of comrades we esteem - we regard them as collaborators, but not as masters and not as popes. We are going to speak out against the revelation of the minority that all you have to do is quote a sentence from Pablo and that settles everything. Pablo is not our pope. He is just a collaborator. He is welcome to give us advice.

18

Cannon 1973, pp. 139-40.

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This kind of thinking was premised on Cannon's insistence that in the SWP there was no consideration of themselves as 'an American branch office of an international business firm that receives orders from the boss'. And this could spiral downward in national chauvinism: We are operating in that section of the world which is a concentration of all the power of capitalism - the United States. The revolutions taking place in other parts of the world - in China, Korea, and other areas of the colonial world - these revolutions cannot be definitive. They can only be provisional - so long as capitalism rules the United States. This was not Cannon at his finest. Cannon did, however, prevail in the Cochran-Clarke confrontation. He was nothing if not adept, as he had been in the earliest days of the American communist movement, in piecing together disparate strands of the SWP sociopolitical-demographic weave, successfully coalescing the New York apparatus led by Farrell Dobbs,Joseph Hansen, and Tom Kerry, a conservative contingent vehemently opposed to the 'liquidationist' sensibilities of Cochran-Clarke, and a younger, more venturesome west coast grouping coalescing around Murry and Myra Tanner Weiss. In the end, his strongest arguments against the Cochranites did indeed prove to be organizational, rather than his much weaker political repudiation of Pabloism. For the Cochran-Clarke faction, ostensibly dedicated to 'unity', agreed to a truce brokered and developed after the May 1953 Plenum. But within months the peace was in tatters. Cochran-Clarke wasted no time in cutting their own throats in a political immolation of abysmal and disloyal acts that included refusal to live up to the financial obligations of SWP membership and boycotting of specific and symbolically important events, like a 25th anniversary celebration. This led to predictable discipline, culminating in the suspensions of five Cochran-Clarke leaders, and the ultimate exodus by choice of the faction. A moderate in Cannon's camp, George Breitman, engaged in a sad correspondence with Ernest Mandel, whose response to the Cochran fight within the SWP revealed how deeply the Fourth International leadership of the time had been overtaken by bureaucratism and how sorry the descent into Pabloism had become. The reckoning with Pablo unfolded at this time as well, with Cannon pressed by an old comrade and ally, Sam Gordon, then the SWP representative in England, working with Gerry Healy's entryist group in the Labour Party. Gordon first raised with Cannon the serious reservations that had to be directed at the Pabloite drift of the 1951 Third Congress. Gordon challenged Cannon to revise

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his view that the documents of this Congress were acceptable 'as they were written'. On the contrary, wrote Gordon: the slant given in the Third Congress documents is too one-sided, too pat and formal in its logic, in reality too superficial to serve as the correct estimate of the objective situation and in outlining perspectives with regard to Stalinism (although the document did introduce important modifications that were valuable). In this sense it lends itself to misinterpretation in the direction of revising our basic theory of Stalinism and makes for faulty analysis of new events which can disorient our movement.

Political Battle and Organizational Split

Against Cannon's fixation on uncovering how the Fourth International leadership colluded with George Clarke in 'the conspiracy against the SWP leadership from the beginning', Gordon insisted that Cannon had put the organizational cart before the political horse: If you conceive of the whole thing as a plot hatched by evil people for unclear motives, then I must say you are putting it on rather thick. There is no doubt about what you refer to as 'Comintemism' in organizational procedure, the long-standing unrealistic concept of super-centralization and all the foibles that have gone with it. But I think we have always asked ourselves in similar circumstances: what are the politics behind the organizational procedures? It is necessary to do so in this case as well . ... I became convinced that the line in Paris was not only not straightening itself, but on the contrary. It was shaping up more and more according to Clarke's conception of it.... I thought it necessary to begin a reexamination of what was written and to speak up critically. It was becoming self-evident that you could not go on very long talking about two different lines and upholding one and the same text as basis. 19 From these and other prods came a more thoroughgoing assessment of Pabloism. Following the Cochran-Clarke split, which saw approximately 18-20 per-

19

Slaughter (ed.) 1974, 'Letter from James P. Cannon to Sam Gordon, 4June 1953', and 'Letter from Sam Gordon to James P. Cannon, 23June 1953', pp. 116-32.

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cent of the SWP membership leave the organized ranks of American Trotskyism, The Militant published a 16 November 1953 Open Letter to 'Trotskyists Throughout the World'. It broke from Pablo and his revisionism, although much of the document railed against the organizational machinations of Pablo and the evils of 'Comintemism'. It outlined the SWP's struggle against the 'American Pabloites', dubbing Clarke the 'high priest of the Pablo cult', and seeing in Cochranism an unprincipled combination of New York-based advocates of Stalinist entryism; conservatized unionists, centered in the Detroit auto industry, enamored of cultivating ties with the trade union tops; and others worn down by the struggle, seeking refuge from rigors of revolutionary politics. 20 The capstone of this late 1953 Socialist Workers Party realignment was a decisive statement, 'Against Pabloist Revisionism'. In 1954 an International Committee was formed to further the fight against Pablo and the revisionism of the Fourth International. It brought together the majority of the French Section, the SWP, and the Healy group in Britain, and claimed the allegiance of other small sections in China and Switzerland. But this International Committee was never an entirely effective alternative to the European-based Secretariat, which continued to convene world congresses. The rift in the Fourth International had now nonetheless widened to a chasm, and the SWP, reduced to boycotting the Fourth World Congress and decrying the illegitimacy of Pablo usurping the leadership of global Trotskyism, was confronted with an increasingly hostile climate in the United States, where the reactionary tum to McCarthyism convinced some fascism was around the comer. 21 The unresolved issues in the SWP's engagement with Pabloite revisionism included the vitally important nature of anti-colonial struggles, which erupted throughout the global South in the postwar era. These national liberation movements, with which Pablo identified closely, and which were part of his understanding of the progressive contribution that might be made by Stalinism and the protracted nature of the transition from capitalism to socialism, raised fundamental questions about strategy and tactics in the armed uprisings that would beset the developing world in the 1950s and afterwards. Especially important was the Pabloite rejection of Trotsky's understanding of permanent revolution and the necessity of a working-class leadership of insurgencies, evident in the lack of critical analysis of the official Fourth Inter-

20 21

Slaughter (ed.) 1974, 'The Open Letter of the Socialist Workers Party, November 16, 1953', pp. 298-313. Disagreements within the SWP emerged as to whether McCarthyism was indeed incipient fascism. See Vern and Ryan 1954.

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national with respect to Mao's orientation in the Chinese Revolution. Given the tendency towards national sectionalism evident in the SWP leadership in the early 1950s, it is not surprising that this large question, which would come home to haunt a reconstituted Fourth International in the 1960s, when the legacies of the Cuban Revolution, and the meaning of guerilla struggle from Inda-china to Latin America, precipitated a fresh round of debate within the world Trotskyist movement, was largely written off the agenda of mid-century American Trotskyism. But in Los Angeles a small grouping of Trotskyists led by Dennis Vern and Sam Ryan, insisted on inserting discussion of the colonial question through an analysis of the failures of the Bolivian Revolution - into the struggle against Pabloite revisionism. 22 As the Cochran-Clarke faction exited the Socialist Workers Party in November 1953, it issued a venomous denunciation of Cannon and his supporters, the 'Old Guard' and the Weiss youth. This 'dictatorial machine' was guilty of many crimes. In its high-handed bureaucratic outrages, dogmatism, and sectarianism, the Cannon caucus rivaled 'the Stalinist movement'. Its ultimate intent was to 'dynamite the International', furnishing a 'rallying center for all the conservative, retrogressive, sectarian tendencies', and 'give by indirection, intrigue, and subterfuge de facto leadership to the Cannon caucus, and convert the other parties into satellites'. This constituted as 'infamous and irresponsible an intrigue as has ever been launched in the history of world Trotskyism'. Ostensibly loyal to Pablo, the Cochran-Clarke forces declared that the future lay with 'the mainstream of world Trotskyism', and asserted unequivocally that the validation of Trotsky's program and struggle would only be confirmed in revolutionists 'fusing themselves with other left-wing forces as they arise in the course of the coming radicalization and class battles'. Confident that 'The Cannonites represent the dead past. We represent the future', the Cochranites embarked on propagandistic activities centered in their journal, American Socialist. 23

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23

The reunification of the Fourth International and the birth of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, orchestrated by the swp'sjoseph Hansen and the Fourth International's Ernest Mandel, was rooted in a common Pabloite orientation to the Cuban Revolution, although Pablo himself was about to exit the Fourth International. Convinced, by the 1960s, that revolutionary prospects were strongest in the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Pablo was an ardent supporter of the Algerian Revolution, and with its success became a minister in the FLN government. By 1965 Pablo was no longer associated with the Fourth International. On Trotskyism and guerilla struggles see Tate 2014, pp. 279-320. The Vern-Ryan group is seldom addressed. For one assessment see Frankel 1953. Slaughter (ed.) 1974, pp. 351-6.

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In spite of considerable literary talent, however, the Cochran forces were unable to sustain their project. Contrary to their declaration, in November 1953, that their allegiance was to Trotskyism and the Fourth International, and in spite of Pablo wanting to invest in them the authority of being the official American Section of the Fourth International, the grouping that eventually put out American Socialist distanced itself from Trotskyism and, as the Cannonled majority of the SWP predicted, followed an eminently liquidationist course. In 1960, with the collapse of American Socialist, Murry Weiss provided a stillcogent post-mortem to this failed propaganda experiment. 24 Trotskyism is associated, in the parlance of the broad progressive left, with hair-splitting factionalism and destructive schism. Many have no taste for this kind of rough-and-tumble arguing through of positions and adherence to what are considered foundational principles. But without this rigorous interrogation of the programmatic essence of the revolutionary left, and the commitment to defend first principles, the prospects for changing the capitalist world we live in seem dim indeed. Dissident communists of the Trotskyist kind value revolutionary ideas and the actions that are guided by them. The confrontations that wracked the Socialist Workers Party in 1953 - both national and international - revealed clearly that no side had a monopoly on truth and principled behavior, and with a different orientation another outcome might have been possible. But it is nonetheless likely, given the oppositional ground that was being staked out, that nothing could have kept the Cochran-Clarke forces, whatever their potential contributions, within the world movement of revolutionary Trotskyism. What seemed, for a time, a national factional confrontation over the orientation of the movement of Left Oppositionists within the United States, was in actuality a significant component of a necessary struggle within world Trotskyism, its leadership decimated by World War II and unable to sustain the programmatic vision and coherence of the revolutionary tradition. What was lost in 1953 was considerable, to be sure, but it pales in comparison to what could have been squandered if the jettisoning of first principles had not been refused. One of the slogans of the Cochran-Clarke forces was 'Junk the Old Trotskyism'. Trotsky himself provided a response to this ill-advised suggestion. 'Those who cannot defend old positions', he wrote, 'will never conquer new ones'. 25

24 25

Weiss 1960. Trotsky 1973a, p. 178.

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Where Are We Going? (Excerpts, 1951)

Michel Pablo

... Some comrades have written that, on the eve of the last war, our theory, that is to say, the way in which our collective thinking (the thinking of our movement) grasped the reality of that time, appeared solid, without cracks and fissures. Now, say these comrades, everything seems out of joint. 26 The truth naturally is far from what these comrades, shedding bitter tears (and we want to believe that the tears are genuine) imagine about the alleged broken harmony in our theory. So far as we are concerned, we have never conceded primacy to theory (no matter what the theory) over life since such an affirmation would be fundamentally contrary to the genuine, non-mystical, non-schematic, undogmatic outlook which is Marxism. We find an entirely different explanation for this phenomenon. It is true that on the eve of the last war our theory appeared more global, more uniform, more harmonious, for it reflected a far less complicated and less dynamic content than is the case today. On the eve of the last war the world seemed to be in relative equilibrium and repose, so far as either the capitalist regime or Stalinism were concerned. Can we, even remotely, say the same for the present period? ... The transformations undergone by the capitalist regime during and after the last war, its perspectives, as well as the changes undergone by Stalinism, its role, its perspectives, have been better understood by our movement. This came about not all at once but step by step, aided by events, and with unavoidable gaps and delays ...

26

Pablo 1951a.

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The Condition of Capitalism

What is the fundamental difference between the present and the prewar condition of capitalism? This difference manifests itself mainly in the many-sided breakdown of the equilibrium of the capitalist regime and in the fact that this breakdown tends to get worse. Capitalism as a regime is characterized, as Trotsky has said, by an equilibrium which is simultaneously 'dynamic' and 'complex' (economic, social, international). That is to say, this equilibrium constantly tends towards breakdowns followed by a reestablishment of equilibrium. Capitalist equilibrium resulted from a certain interrelationship of its economic functioning, the class relations within each country, and its international relations. Since none of these main factors remains static but each is constantly evolving, a corresponding movement takes place from equilibrium towards breakdown - under the influence of an economic crisis, for example, a revolution or a war - to be followed later by a new reestablishment of equilibrium. Up to the eve of the last war, capitalism evolved according to this general outline, the objective foundations for a new equilibrium still proving to be fairly weighty. But this is not true now. The disequilibrium of the capitalist system which was engendered during and following the last war is proving to be basic, chronic and tending to grow worse .... The breakup of the colonial sector of imperialism as a result of the colonial revolutions in Asia, especially of the Chinese revolution; the breakdown of the economic unity of capitalist Europe arising from the formation of the Soviet buffer zone; the apoplectic expansion of American capitalism in the midst of a narrowing and impoverished capitalist market, and the disruptive economic and political role which American imperialism is compelled to play in this capitalist world; and finally the political and economic power which the USSR itself represents. All these new factors act together in the direction of maintaining and aggravating the breakdown of capitalist equilibrium on all levels: those of economic relations, of class relations, of international relations ... It is necessary on the other hand to consider not only what these losses mean in terms of the past condition of capitalism but also how they relate to its future possibilities, to its perspectives. From this point of view, for instance, the loss of the Chinese market is a historic defeat for Yankee imperialism so far as its possibilities for expansion are concerned. The same considerations in their economic significance apply to capitalist Europe, particularly through the loss of those countries which now constitute the Soviet buffer zone.

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All these structural modifications (to which must be added the new relationships between capitalist powers resulting from the crushing preponderance of Yankee imperialism over all the other capitalist countries), add up to this: that the capitalist regime, having lost its equilibrium, now has no possibility of recovering it without restoring a world market embracing the Lost territor-

ies, and without a more equali.zed redistribution offorces within the imperialist camp. Such a perspective is not theoretically excluded In the event of a victorious war waged by imperialism which would also bring with it a marked weakening of American imperialism while in an equal measure not draining the other powers such as England, France, Germany, Japan. Actually, however, we are very far today from such a perspective. Given the fact that all its attempts to restore a certain measure of equilibrium have failed, and that on the contrary it is constantly losing ground, nothing else Is now left for capitalism except to take the road toward ever greater military, economic and political preparations for a new war. This is the initial important point of departure and the initial fundamental perspective in the evolution of the international situation.

To understand that capitalism is now rapidly heading toward war,for it has no other short or Long-term way out and that this process cannot be stopped short of the unavoidable destruction ofthe regime, is equivalent to defining afundamental Line in the evolution of the international situation. Neither the defeatist or 'neutralist' tendencies which are prevailing among certain circles of the European bourgeoisie, nor the 'isolationist' tendencies of certain sections of the American bourgeoisie, will be able in the long run to determine the fundamental line of the central core of the international monopolist bourgeoisie and of the American monopolists in particular. Even by itself, the latter, if it succeeds in maintaining its control over the American masses, would rather risk war than surrender without a fight to the revolution. Consequently, discussion among revolutionary Marxists cannot take place over the question of whether war is inevitable or not, so long as the capitalist regime remains standing, but is limited to questions of how soon, the condi-

tions for the outbreak ofwar, as well as over the nature and consequences ofsuch awar ... Against those who have already for a number of years put forward the positions of the 'immediacy' of the Third World War, the leadership of the International has presented its argument, by and large confirmed by the events,

demonstrating the unpreparedness of imperialism for all-out war, and the fear, on the other hand, of the Soviet bureaucracy to engage in an all-out war which would place its own equilibrium in peril.

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It is nevertheless true that, within this correct general perspective of the international leadership, as it was more concretely set down at the time of the Eighth Plenum of the me, there were two weak points which have been dearly revealed in the light of the Korean war and its international consequences. The first point, which was implicit in this perspective, was the overestimation of the effective forces of imperialism and the corresponding underestimation of the opposing forces. It is with the Korean war that our movement for the first time realized the important factor that the relationship of forces on the international chessboard is now evolving to the disadvantage of imperialism; that the internal dislocation and disequilibrium of the capitalist regime are greater than either we had thought or than the Soviet bureaucracy and the Stalinist leaderships themselves had supposed; that the weight of the colonial revolution in Asia presses more heavily than we had realized on the destinies of capitalism; that the true relationship of forces between imperialism and the forces opposed to it are to be measured not simply on the level of reciprocal material and technical resources, but also on the level of social relations and class relations and that these relations are developing internationally to the disadvantage of imperialism; that the revolutionary spirit of the masses directed against imperialism acts as an additional force, supplementing the material and technical forces raised against imperialism. The second weak point in our perspective (which moreover flowed from this erroneous estimate of the actual trend of development in the international relationship of forces) was to have allowed imperialism the possibility to unleash a general war only after 'many years' (Political Report of the Eighth Plenum of the IEC). This postponement flowed from the estimate that a 'reciprocal neutralization' prevailed between the imperialist bloc and the bloc led by the USSR, and that this neutralization would last 'many years', rendering war 'impossible' in the meantime. Actually the Korean war has demonstrated that the international relationship of forces (encompassed in this general formulation is the relationship of forces between the two blocs) was not tending toward a prolonged equilibrium but was developing to the increased disadvantage of imperialism. On the other hand, in accord with this rectification, it would be wrong to set down as a necessary condition for imperialism to unleash a major war that its preparation should be completed so that it may also conduct and ... have good chances ofwinning ... the unleashed war. It may happen that imperialism, unsuccessful in stabilizing its present positions and finding itself compelled to retreat from certain positions which it considers fundamental will plunge into war, despite all the risks and in spite of its diminishing rather than growing chances of success.

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Such an attitude is above all applicable to American imperialism which constitutes the hard core of capitalist forces today. It is possible that American capitalism, if it maintains its control over the American masses and feels relatively strong by virtue of the progress of its intensive rearmament, may in two or three years, for example, prefer war with all its risks to a new retreat on the Korean model. This possibility, which flows precisely from the dimensions of the setback of imperialism now taking place in the world, and consequently of its crisis (even though that does not manifest itself immediately in all its acuteness), is no longer excluded, particularly for American imperialism. It is the advance offorces opposing imperialism which brings nearer the possibility ofa.final and desperate resort to war by imperialism - unless we can expect the disappearance without a struggle of the capitalist regime as a whole, including the still extremely powerful fortress which Yankee imperialism constitutes. For this reason, in the 'Theses on the International Perspectives and the Orientation of the Fourth International Movement', while we emphasize the reasons which cause imperialism to hesitate in unleashing war and to continue to temporize, we do not exclude the possibility of a general war, even during the period in which the relationship offorces remains, as at present,Jundamentally unfavorable to imperialism. The next question which poses itself is: What can be the nature of a war Launched under such conditions? Such a war would take on, from the very beginning, the character of an international civil war, especially in Europe and in Asia. These continents would rapidly pass over under the control of the Soviet bureaucracy, of the Communist Parties, or of the revolutionary masses. War under these conditions, with the existing relationship of forces on the international arena, would essentially be Revolution. Thus the advance of anticapitalist revolution in the world at one and the same time postpones and brings nearer the danger of general war. Conversely, war this time means the Revolution. These two conceptions of Revolution and of War, far from being in opposition or being differentiated as two significantly different stages of development, are approaching each other more closely and becoming so interlinked as to be almost indistinguishable under certain circumstances and at certain times. In their stead, it is the conception of Revolution-War, of War-Revolution which is emerging and upon which the perspectives and orientation of revolutionary Marxists in our epoch should rest. Such language will perhaps shock the lovers of 'pacifist' dreams and declamation, or those who already bemoan the apocalyptic end of the world which

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they foresee following upon an atomic war or a worldwide expansion of Stalinism. But these sensitive souls can find no place among the militants and least of all the revolutionary Marxist cadres of this most terrible epoch where the sharpness of the class struggle is carried to the extreme. It is objective reality which thrnsts this dialectic of Revolution-War to the forefront, which implacably destroys 'pacifist' dreams, and which permits no respite in the gigantic simultaneous deployment ofthe forces ofRevolution and ofWar and in their struggle to the death. The task of revolutionists fully cognizant of this period and of its possibilities consists above all in solidly basing themselves on the growing objective chances infavor ofthe Revolution,Jructifying these (by the most appropriate means ofpropaganda )for all the laboring masses drawn toward the Revolution. But let us more closely examine the character of this latter process.

The Evolution of Stalinism

Up to now the crisis of the capitalist regime appears to have directly benefited Stalinism. This constitutes the principal reason for the prevalent lack of understanding, even in our own ranks, of the profoundly revolutionary character of the overturns we are witnessing. For revolutionary Marxists who do not want to fall prey to confusion or to petty-bourgeois reactions (resulting in part from this confusion), it is absolutely necessary to return to fundamental criteria, to the fundamental bases of our theory, in order to be able to grasp the direction of the evolution which we are witnessing, and to set their course on the basis of excluding all empiricism, all impressionism, all narrow-mindedness, every conjunctural, transitory, secondary aspect of the situation. The deepest, most revolutionary, most decisive overturns of capitalism and of its imperialist stage, Marxist-Leninist theory teaches us, are engendered despite and against all subjective obstacles, despite and against the treacherous line of the traditional Social-Democratic and Stalinist leaderships, by the contradictions inherent in the present social regime, by the inevitable sharpening of these contradictions in direct proportion with capitalist development. Such is the case today. The capitalist regime, having attained its highest stage, is breaking up, decaying, and thus allowing a series of phenomena to appear which fall into the general framework of an epoch of transition between capitalism and socialism, an epoch which has already begun and is quite advanced.

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This epoch of transition is disorienting the scholasticists of Marxism, the partisans of 'pure' forms, of norms, because it follows a far more complicated, more tortuous, and longer course than that which the classics of Marxism had sketched out before the experience of the Russian Revolution. But in further grasping reality as well as the spirit of our theory (as against what is essentially the letter of certain writings) we see that this epoch of transition exists for profound reasons of its own. Even discounting the role played in the present historical process by the profound bureaucratic degeneration of the USSR and the Stalinist leaderships, it is necessary to single out an objective cause which is exercising its influence upon the epoch of transition: the gradual, partial development of the revolution, isolating it for a certain period and localizing it in countries which, moreover, are not among the most developed economically and culturally. This pattern of development of the Revolution, which is the real pattern and has its reasons for existence, implies a more complicated, more tortuous, longer passage from capitalism to socialism, lending transitional forms to society and to proletarian power. To this fundamental objective cause is added the influence which has been exercised up to now on the course of history by the Soviet bureaucracy and the Stalinist leaderships. Our fundamental difference with certain neo-apologists for Stalinism, of the Gilles Martinet stripe in France, does not involve the fact that there are objective causes at work imposing transitional forms of the society and of the power succeeding capitalism, which are quite far from the 'norms' outlined by the classics of Marxism prior to the Russian Revolution. Our difference is over the fact that these neo-Stalinists present Stalinist policy as the expression of a consistent, realistic Marxism which, consciously and in full awareness of the goal, is marching toward socialism while taking realistically into account the requirements of the situation. And the only reproach they have to make against Stalinism is that Stalinism conceals these realities from the masses and strives, for example, to embellish the situation in the USSR by declaring that it has already succeeded in passing from 'socialism to communism'. These people who pose as sincere pretend to forget that, if things are this way, it is because Stalinism is not the expression of the policy of a 'realistic' proletarian leadership but that of the Soviet bureaucracy, that is to say, of a vast privileged social layer in the USSR which has usurped political power from the proletariat and has theoretically formulated its position of exorbitant privileges, fiercely guarded from the Soviet masses by a monstrous oppressive apparatus, into 'socialism on the eve of passing over to communism'.

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This layer can have neither a 'socialist' consciousness or policy but on the contrary sees its mortal enemy in world Revolution and genuine proletarian power. By virtue of the role of the Soviet bureaucracy in the present historical process and in the international working class movement in particular, the liquidation of the capitalist system in almost half of Europe, and of imperialism in Asia (a liquidation which has been facilitated and made possible primarily because of the internal dislocation of the regime, and of the revolutionary upsurge of the masses, owing to a favorable situation: the recent war), has taken on transitional forms which are even more deformed than objective necessity dictated. On the other hand, the role played by the Stalinist Leadership, impedes,just as in the USSR, the free socialist development of these forms and places all the realized conquests in constant danger. It is nevertheless necessary, for a correct orientation of revolutionary Marxists, not only to bear in mind that the objective process is in the final analysis the sole determining factor, overriding all obstacles of a subjective order, but also that Stalinism itself is on the one side a phenomenon ofcontradictions, and on the other a self-contradictory phenomenon. Only Trotskyist analysis, as it was fundamentally laid down by Leon Trotsky himself, enables us to understand the specific dialectic of Stalinism, its contradictory character and the contradictions inherent in its nature. At issue here is not an abuse of the term dialectic in order to impress others or to further obscure an inadequate outlook nor for that matter in order to contrive a false way out of a difficult situation. To understand Stalinism is impossible for vulgar, mechanical or merely formalistic thinking. We constantly see the bankruptcy of this kind of thinking in the analyses, conclusions, perspectives of all those in the capitalist camp or in the working class movement who strive to explain Stalinism and to define it in this way. The repercussions of such superficial thinking have made themselves felt in our own ranks. Before such phenomena as the formation and evolution of the Soviet buffer zone in Europe, the Yugoslav experience, the present colonial revolutions, the regime of Mao Tse-tung, confusion and perplexity have made their way right inside of our own movement. Are we witnessing an expansion and a worldwide domination by Stalinism? Can the latter really overthrow the capitalist regime in some places? Can the Communist Parties lead a revolution and bring it to victory? Comrades pose these questions and speculate on the validity and future of our analysis of Stalinism with a certain anxiety. But these comrades would be far less troubled and perplexed if they had genuinely and not mechanically assimilated the Trotskyist analysis of Stalin-

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ism, and if, in order to understand present phenomena, they started out from the following principle and the following consideration: In order, as Marxists, to give correct answers to all these questions, it is necessary here, as in all other important social and political phenomena, to grasp the world dialectical process, to grasp its contradictions as they inexorably develop under the new objective conditions.

The bogie of the 'worldwide domination of Stalinism' is proper to people who are incapable of perceiving, for lack of a correct theoretical understanding of Stalinism, that the contradictions inherent in its nature, far from being ameliorated or eliminated in direct proportion to its expansion, are in reality being reproduced on an ever greater scale and will provoke its destruction. This will take place in two ways: by the counterblows of the anti-capitalist victories in the world and even in the USSR stimulating resistance of the masses to the bureaucracy; by elimination in the long run of the objective causes for the bureaucracy, for all bureaucracy, in direct proportion as the capitalist regime suffers setbacks and an ever increasing and economically more important sector escapes from capitalism and organizes itself on the basis of a stateized and planned economy, thereby stimulating the growth of the productive forces. In the prodigious rise of American imperialism which followed the First World War, most people have seen only one aspect of the process: the expansion and trend towards world domination by Wall Street. The other aspect, which we are witnessing precisely at present, consists in this: that this expansion simultaneously includes within the foundations of American imperialism's structure 'the powder magazines of the whole world' provoking the 'greatest military, economic and revolutionary convulsions, beside which all those of the past fade into the background'. This was clearly grasped at the time by Leon Trotsky. This is an example of dialectical analysis of a phenomenon which, despite its outward appearance of power, its fleeting historical successes, rests fundamentally on irreconcilable contradictions.

Stalinism is such a phenomenon. Since the Second World Congress, our movement has succeeded in better seeing, better grasping and better understanding the contradictory process of Stalinist expansion in a definite sphere: that of the relationship between the Communist Parties where they have attained power and the Soviet bureaucracy. Fundamental ideas (several of which moreover are to be found at least implicit in our prewar theoretical arsenal) have been reaffirmed, clarified, developed in the documents of the International and the writings of leading comrades

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on the Soviet buffer zone, the Yugoslav affair, the Chinese revolution, the crisis of Stalinism. We have insisted, and rightly so, on the specific dialectic of the relations existing between the Soviet bureaucracy, the Communist Parties and the mass movements, emphasizing the following principal ideas: The Yugoslav affair as well as the march and the victory of the Chinese revolution, also the other unfolding colonial revolutions (Korea, Vietnam, Burma, Malaya, the Philippines) have demonstrated that the Communist Parties retain the possibility, in certain circumstances, of roughly outlining a revolutionary orientation, that is to say, of finding themselves compelled to engage in a struggle for power. These circumstances have revealed themselves during and following the Second World War to be the extreme dislocation of the regime of the possessing classes and of imperialism, and of the revolutionary upsurge of the masses. Under these exceptional conditions, the mass movement, which found only the Communist Parties available as a channel, compelled these parties to go further than their leaderships and above all the Kremlin would have wished, and literally pushed them into power. By virtue of the weak resistance and at times the virtual nonexistence of the class enemy (internally demoralized and, displaced), the Communist Parties have been able to win despite their opportunism (Yugoslavia, China). In other cases, power was turned over to them by entry of the Red Army (European buffer zone), but it was not monopolized and consolidated until after the break between the Soviet bureaucracy and imperialism, and the beginning of the 'cold war'. Thus the rise of Communist Parties to power is not the consequence of a capacity of Stalinism to struggle for the Revolution, does not alter the internationally counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism, but it is the product of an exceptional combination of circumstances which has imposed the seizure of power either upon the Soviet bureaucracy (in the case of the European buffer zone), or upon certain Communist Parties (Yugoslavia, China). In the case of the Soviet European buffer zone, the overthrow of the economic and political power of capitalism and the installation of the Communist Parties in the government was above all the outcome of the militarybureaucratic activity of the Soviet bureaucracy, the mass movement having played a secondary role (Czechoslovakia) or practically none. In the case of Yugoslavia and of China, the assumption of power was occasioned principally by the internal displacement of the class enemy and of the exceptional upsurge of the revolutionary movement of the masses ... The most important lesson we have drawn from the Yugoslav affair, from the new China ofMao Tse-tung, and other Asian revolutions in progress is this: not to

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confuse every victory over capitalism and imperialism achieved by the revolutionary movement of the masses, although it may be led by Communist parties, with a pure and simple victory of the Soviet bureaucracy ... To the attempts of the bourgeoisie and of the imperialists to mobilize the masses for their war against the USSR, the 'People's Democracies', China and other Asian revolutions in progress, and to crush the Communist parties and the revolutionary movements in their respective countries, large sections will react by revolt, open struggle, armed struggle, a new Resistance, but which would this time take on a far dearer class character. It is possible that, thanks to these reactions of the masses, and to the convulsions and the exasperation which such a war would quickly create, different Communist parties would find themselves obliged to undertake a struggle, under pressure from the masses and their own rank and file, which would go beyond the objectives fixed by the Soviet bureaucracy. Such a war, far from curbing the struggle which would actually unfold to the detriment of imperialism, would intensify it and bring imperialism to its death throes. Such a war would upset all the equilibriums, thawing all forces into the struggle, speeding up the process already initiated of the convulsive transformation of our society which would be abated only with the triumph of socialism internationally. The fate of Stalinism would be sealed precisely within this period ofgigantic overturns. People who despair of the fate of humanity because Stalinism still endures and even achieves victories, tailor History to their own personal measure. They really desire that the entire process of the transformation of capitalist society into socialism would be accomplished within the span of their brieflives so that they can be rewarded for their efforts on behalf of the Revolution. As for us, we reaffirm ... this transformation will probably take an entire historical period of several centuries and will in the meantime be filled with forms and regimes transitional between capitalism and socialism and necessarily deviating from 'pure' forms and norms. We are aware that this statement has shocked certain comrades and served others as a springboard to attack our 'revisionism'. But we do not disarm. A century has already elapsed since the Communist Manifesto and more than half a century since imperialism, 'the highest stage of capitalism'. The course of history has shown itself to be more complicated, more tortuous and drawn-out than the predictions of men who had the legitimate aim of shortening the intervals separating them from their ideals. The best Marxists have not avoided being mistaken, not to be sure on the general line of development, but on its time-spans and concrete forms. What is today, in all countries, the possible strategic aim, is the Revolution, the taking of power, the

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abolition of capitalism. But the taking of power in one country does not settle the entire question. The conditions for a free development toward socialism are still more complicated, and more difficult The example of the Soviet Union, the 'People's Democracies', Yugoslavia and China prove that. However, it would be no less false to minimize the historical importance of the progress accomplished along the road of overturning capitalism and the victory of the Revolution in the world. Those who wish to reply to the anxiety and perplexity of certain people in the face of what is called the victories of Stalinism by minimizing the objectively revolutionary significance of these facts are compelled to sink into an antiStalinist sectarianism at all costs which scarcely conceals, under its aggressive appearance, its lack of confidence in the basic revolutionary process of our epoch, which is the most positive pledge of the ultimate destruction of Stalinism and which will be realized all the more rapidly as the overturn of capitalism and of imperialism progresses and wins an ever more important section of the world.

The Orientation and the Future of Our Movement

... That is why we place such emphasis ... on the need to reaffirm and to define more precisely our programmatic position toward the USSR, the Soviet bureaucracy, the Communist Parties and the colonial revolutions in progress. The experience of what has happened around us with the different anti-Stalinist tendencies in the workers' movement, as well as the still more important experience which the Yugoslav c Pis now passing through, clearly demonstrates that without a Marxist orientation on these questions, one can imperceptibly glide over objectively into the enemy camp in the present period of the extreme polarization of class forces. Our movement is naturally not 'neutral' between the so-called two blocs, that of imperialism and that led by the USSR. First of all because neutralism always works objectively in favor of one of the antagonistic forces. There is no such thing as pure 'neutralism'. Next because, in the relations and above all the conflicts of the bloc led by the USSR with imperialism, we give critical support to the first while we unreservedly contend against the second. Our support to the colonial revolutions now going on, despite their Stalinist or Stalinized leadership, in their struggle against imperialism is even unconditional. Our movement is independent of Moscow's policy, of the policy of the Soviet bureaucracy, in the sense that it is not at all bound by this policy. Our movement does not identify it with the interests of the international proletariat and

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the colonial masses, but on the contrary combats this policy in all its pernicious and hostile aspects toward the world revolution. Without having thought through all these questions, without having clarified and further defined them in our minds, it would be impossible for us in the days ahead to link ourselves with the mass revolutionary movement as well as with the proletarian vanguard, which in Asia and in Europe follow Stalinist or Stalinized leaderships. It would also be impossible for us, in countries where this strong influence of the Stalinist leadership over the masses does not exist, but where on the contrary a powerful reactionary pressure from the bourgeoisie and its reformist agencies is exercised, as in the United States, England, Canada, Australia, Belgium, etc., to resist this pressure and adhere to a dear and firm class line. Without that it would above all be impossible for us, in the event of a general war, to correctly and effectively orient ourselves to assure the triumph of the revolutionary forces over capitalism and, in the course of this struggle, over the Soviet bureaucracy itself. In all those cases where sectarian and mechanistic anti-Stalinism, which identified the leadership with the mass movement or which has not grasped the contradictory character of Stalinism, including the actions of the Soviet bureaucracy, has taken hold in our organization, it has led our movement to virtual disaster and to complete political and theoretical disorientation. Such was the case in certain of the movements during the war and since its end in Europe. Such was particularly the case in certain tendencies of our movement in China and partially in Indo-China. Ought we to repeat such errors? Can we live side by side with a developing revolution which, arms in hand, combats imperialism and simultaneously deals weighty and sometimes mortal blows at the native possessing classes, as is the case in the current Asian revolutions, and be content with our former attitude toward the Communist Parties leading these revolutions, when these parties, applying the rigid policy of the Kremlin, collaborated with imperialism and the class enemy? Can we see the preparation and possibility of an all-out war and neglect getting closer from now on to the ranks of the Communist Parties which in many important countries in Europe and in Asia are still the polarizing force for the proletarian and colonial masses, the readiest for struggle against the war of the imperialists and the most valuable in the struggle for the revolution? How otherwise would we be capable of carrying on our struggle against the war-preparations of imperialism which implies the struggle to disarm and conquer the bourgeoisie through the revolutionary masses? How could we hope to effect our link-up with the revolutionary forces which will emerge from this struggle and will inevitably launch the assault upon cap-

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italism and imperialism and orient them in the course of this very struggle against the Soviet bureaucracy as well? Unexpected as that may seem at first glance, the new conditions in which the Communist Parties in those Asian countries which are currently going through a revolution find themselves, dictate to us, as a general attitude toward them, by and large that of a Left Opposition which gives them critical support. That applies, for example, to China. Following the victory of Mao Tsetung, our movement in China, instead of ignoring or minimizing this victory and continuing to attack the Chinese CP on the absolutely correct basis of the treacherous policy of this party (when it submitted to the political leadership of the bourgeoisie and collaborated with Chiang Kai-shek) should have addressed itself, in my opinion, to the Chinese masses In the following terms: The Chinese Communist Party, propelled and lifted up by the revolutionary movement of the masses, benefitting from the advanced internal disintegration of the native possessing class and the weakness of imperialism, and being compelled in the course of events and under pressure from the masses, to partially change the line which subordinated it to the political leadership of the bourgeoisie in the accomplishment of the revolution in China, has come to power. That constitutes an important victory and opens possibilities for a forward march of the Revolution and for its final triumph through the establishment of a genuine democratic power of the Chinese workers and poor peasants. For to assure the proletarian character of the power remains the key problem of the revolution. We Trotskyists, who have always championed the theory that the Chinese revolution can conquer only under the political leadership of the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard, will defend the conquests achieved as well as each forward step made in the direction of the creation of a democratic power of the Chinese workers and poor peasants. We give critical support to the Chinese CP and to the government of Mao Tse-Tung, and we demand our legal existence as the Communist tendency of the workers' movement. Such a declaration and such an attitude by and large would have chances of being understood by a certain number of conscious elements in the revolutionary vanguard of China, by every class-conscious worker, and would place the leadership of the Chinese CP before this dilemma: either accept our legal existence or impose illegality upon us, which would demonstrate its bureaucratic and Stalinist character. In Europe where the Communist Parties manipulate the proletarian masses to assure the success of the foreign policy of the Soviet bureaucracy and its special aims in each country and does not at all struggle for the revolution and the taking of power, such a policy toward these parties is naturally excluded. On the contrary, to get closer to their ranks, to link ourselves with them in all

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possible united-front actions against the war-preparations of the imperialists and to emphasize the revolutionary possibilities of this period that the Stalinist leadership deliberately hides, is an essential duty of all our organizations operating in countries where the majority of the working class follows the Communist Parties. Much closer to the ranks ofthese parties: such is our slogan in all these countries which results from the analysis of the situation and from its perspectives. In those countries where Stalinism is practically nonexistent or exercises weak influence over the masses, our movement will strive to become the principal leadership of the proletariat in the years ahead: in the United States, England, Germany, Canada, in all of Latin America, in Australia, Indonesia, perhaps in India. The main immediate future of our movement resides far more in these places than in countries where the Stalinist influence still reigns. Certain of these countries play a key role in the international situation and because of the conditions of their economic development remain favored countries for socialist construction: the United States, England and Germany. The future of Stalinism is barred in these countries. The development of our movement in the United States in particular would influence the entire course of the international workers' movement and would accelerate the crisis and decomposition of Stalinism. Other variants are naturally possible, like that which appeared at a certain moment with the progressive development of the Yugoslav revolution before the latest tum of its leaders. It is difficult to foresee the precise form through which the reinforcement of the conscious revolutionary tendency will pass and the forms which the inevitable decomposition and elimination of Stalinism will take. It is also difficult to describe all the tactical moves which our movement will employ the better to link itself with the masses and to move ahead. Since the close of the war and especially since the Second World Congress of our International, the progress of our movement has been undeniable. These gains express themselves in the decisive break effected by most of our organizations with the illusion of revolutionary activity outside the real mass movement and its peculiarities in each country; in the real, conscious quest, felt by the cadres and the militants, for avenues of access to the movement of the masses in each country or to the essential currents of that movement; in the patient, methodical and long-range work undertaken within these tendencies in order to call forth a revolutionary differentiation within their ranks, in accord with the matured possibilities of their own experience and the objective conditions; in the advanced proletarianization of our organizations and of their leaderships, which is the surest pledge of the application and the prosecution of such a policy toward the working class and with that class.

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This progress has been made possible thanks to the solidity of our theoretical orientation, to the indestructible solidity of Trotskyism and thanks to the revolutionary character of the period. It is the reinforcement of this latter in the years ahead, it is the growing revolutionary perspectives that more and more dominate the historical scene which nourish our revolutionary optimism and our absolute confidence in the destiny ofTrotskyism, the conscious expression of the Communist movement in our epoch.

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2

Notes on Our Discussion (Excerpts, 1951)

E.R. Frank (Bert Cochran)

... Definition of Stalinism 27

Agreement has been hammered out again on what Stalinism actually and precisely is, and how to fight it. But we are not yet agreed on a satisfactory definition. The international theses states that the Communist Parties are not 'exactly reformist parties'. Some leading comrades of our party, however, insist that Stalinism 'is a national reformist bureaucracy and an agency of imperialism in the world labor movement'. ... The 1948 theses declared that 'the Stalinist parties have become neoreformist parties', with this as the reasoning behind the definition: 'Just as the old reformist parties endeavor to reconcile the existence of the labor bureaucracy with that of the national bourgeoisie, so the Stalinist parties attempt to reconcile the existence of the Soviet bureaucracy with that of the world bourgeoisie'. The explanation is faulty, and the analogy tends to muddle the problem rather than clarify it. It is incorrect to say that the traditional labor bureaucracy is reformist because it wants to reconcile its own existence with that of the bourgeoisie. We call the traditional labor bureaucracy reformi.st because it advocates a program of reforming capitalism, of achieving Socialism or the 'welfare state', by means of gradual reforms. Because it tries to reconcile the labor movement to capitalism - that makes the old labor bureaucracy an agency of capitalism inside the labor movement, or as Deleon aptly called the labor skates, 'labor lieutenants of the capitalist class'. The Kremlin, in contrast, operates with no fixed or generalized ideology in the capitalist world, even to the extent of Social Democracy. It is completely opportunistic and demagogic. Its 'Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism' covers any and all evils. It is an advocate not only of reformism, but in its time has beat

27

Franki951.

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the drums for right-wing capitalism, authoritarianism, jingoism, united fronts and coalitions with Fascists and Monarchists, pacifism, anti-imperialism, ultraleftism, adventurism, putchism, anything and everything which might give the Kremlin some paltry advantage in its diplomatic maneuvers. A correct definition cannot be constructed by fastening on one feature ofStalinism, and ignoring other equally vital traits. Does the analogy hold, at least, so far as denominating Stalinism as an agency of imperialism? This formula is not accurate either. The justification for considering the reformist bureaucracy as an agency of capitalism and imperialism inside the labor movement lies in the fact that the traditional bureaucracy is enduringly tied to its capitalist masters, and that loyalty to the existing system forms the very warp and woof of its activities. The old-line bureaucrats, it is true, are often thrust into episodic conflicts with groups of capitalists, or sometimes even with the whole capitalist class. But these remain episodes which never affect their fundamental course and role. The reformist bureaucracy has never undertaken a mortal conflict with capitalism. It only assumes the leadership of big class struggles under compulsion, and then only to behead them, or abruptly halt them in return for some secondary concessions. The Stalinist bureaucrats are not the same. Since they are tied to the Kremlin oligarchy, and not to their national capitalists, they do not have the reformists' inhibitions with regard to capitalism or imperialism. In two exceptional cases, Stalinist bureaucracies led successful revolutions. At present, they have assumed the leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle in Korea, Indo-China, Malaya. Critics may reply: 'This can change overnight. Stalin will sell out, or try to sell out all these struggles in a minute, if he can get a deal, or half a deal with Washington'. Absolutely right. That is why Stalinism is the counterrevolutionary force that it is. But these conflicts with capitalism, this leadership of mass struggles against imperialism, are not episodic to the Kremlin's fundamental tie to imperialism. They are the wild gyrations stemming from the Kremlin's attempt to balance itself by maneuvering between world revolution and world imperialism. Yes, the Kremlin would like a new modus vivendi with imperialism. But that is only one side of its concrete activities. The other side involves the fact that it is not a complete master of the mass struggles it provokes, or heads. By its adventurist lurchings, by its desperate maneuvers and attempts to blackmail imperialism, it not only disorients and betrays workers' struggles, but also smashes in capitalism here and there, as it did in Eastern Europe, and helps incite great revolutionary storms elsewhere, which then have a meaning and a momentum of their own. Try as one might, therefore, it is difficult to see how clarity is served, or how anything is added to the wisdom of the ages, by calling the Indo-Chinese

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or North Korean Stalinists, agents of imperialism; or by explaining that the third world war will be fought, in great part, between imperialism on the one side, and the agents of imperialism on the other. Stalinism is so unlike the old labor bureaucracy, it is such a new, complex, contradictory phenomenon, it is not difficult to see why the old definitions do not fit too satisfactorily. That is why it would appear that a summary descriptive definition would be the best. I would simply define Stalinism as the world agency of the counterrevolutionary, nationalist-minded Kremlin oligarchy. This label does not pretend to supply an exhaustive analysis of Stalinism, but at least it is accurate as far as it goes. Further explanations can be made in the analysis, and do not have to be all contained in the definitions itself.

The Criterion for a Workers' State There are still some differences, or nuances, on what is the correct criterion to determine the class nature of a state. It is instructive to pursue this question once again in the light of the recent problems, as the discussion illumines aspects of our traditional Russian position, as well as of general Marxian theory. To begin with, what is a Workers' State from the standpoint of the Marxist program? I would define a Workers State as one in which a revolution has taken place, sociologically speaking. In other words, where real power, that means political and economic power, has shifted from the capitalists to the workers and their allies. Under conditions of civilization, naturally, this shift of power is recorded by new class laws, decrees, government institutions, armed forces, and ownership of property, in a word, by new class or property relations ... In the USSR, as Trotsky taught us over and over again, the workers lost their political power - indeed, their political rights - but the socio-economic foundations of the Workers' State remained. And this matter of property is so fundamental, that given these foundations, the USSR is still a Workers State, although, of course, a badly diseased one. In the Satellite states, the workers never lost political power because they never won it. The destruction of capitalist property and the introduction of new property forms was carried through in this case by bureaucratic means. But sociologically - and only sociologically - power has shifted from one class to another. That is why these states are Workers' States, although, again as in the case of the USSR, they are caricatures of a healthy Workers' State ... With this as our key, we call Yugoslavia a Workers State; we call the five EastEuropean countries Workers States, though Dependencies of the Kremlin; but, in the case of China, a transitional definition like Workers and Farmers Govern-

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ment is more in order, even though we may conclude in a year or two that new property relations have by then been established, and that China therefore fits into the same sociological category as the others .... One can insist, of course, that the programmatic norm contemplated a Workers' State issuing out of a proletarian revolution; and while, at long last, prepared to recognize the reality of the destruction of capitalism in East Europe, one can still refuse, by God, to honor these monstrosities with the same designation as the USSR, which at least had its origin in a glorious revolution. Others then, with equal justice, can, and as a matter of fact, do insist that before they will recognize any Workers States, they have to issue not only from proletarian revolutions, but only those that fully live up to the programmatic norm, and not those in sharp divergence from it. All this boils down to the fact that the old Marxist terminology did not foresee and provide for the many degenerated, repulsive forms that workers' struggles, and even successes have assumed ....

Centrist Parties, Proletarian Revolution, and the Transitional Period

Far from the elimination of the old order proceeding in a rigid, fixed, unchanging manner all over the world, we have already witnessed the destruction of capitalism by bureaucratic-military means in a number of countries in Eastern Europe, in the course of a bastardized revolution in Yugoslavia, and in the process of destruction through a different variation of an equally bastardized revolution in China. While it is incorrect to view any one of these as disclosing the pattern of the road to power in the rest of the world, as the circumstances in all three cases were quite exceptional, it is probable,just the same, that history will reveal to us several more unique forms before 'the final conflict'. It is clear, however, on the face of it, that the possibilities for overturns in other countries by military-bureaucratic means are severely limited, that they can be envisaged in a few countries only, if at all, in the course of Red Army occupation in the next world war. On the other hand, the Yugoslav and Chinese revolutions, despite their unique characteristics, do pose very pointedly the question whether opportunist centrist parties cannot lead revolutions to victory; in other words, whether our traditional stand on this question is not due for some considerable modification. Trotskyism, in the wake of its Marxist predecessors, always gave decisive weight to the necessity of the subjective factor in realizing revolutionary victory. Trotskyism held that while the masses might, in exceptional circumstances, take power through the sheer momentum and sweep of the onslaught,

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without a revolutionary leadership, they could not hold power, much less consolidate it, unless headed by a Bolshevik-type ofleadership. The indispensability of a conscious leadership has indeed been underlined again by the post-war experiences, both in the successes and failures. But history has proven itself a little more flexible, a little less intransigent than our theory. Where the disintegration of the old ruling classes was proceeding apace, as in Yugoslavia and China, it was able to utilize - in the absence of Marxist parties - opportunist, less-than-Marxist working class parties to direct the revolutionary offensive, to secure the victory, and then to carry through some of the historical tasks of the revolution .... What is therefore required is to broaden out and impart greater historical perspective and breadth to our old formula of the necessity of a conscious Marxist leadership to guarantee and consolidate the revolutionary victory; not to narrow it down to the developments inside one single country, but to see it from a world viewpoint, and from the perspective of the world revolution. The tasks of the world revolution, properly understood, consist not only of the destruction of capitalism and imperialism, but the extirpation of the Stalinist tyranny in its domains, as well; to remove the dead hand of this avaricious, reactionary oligarchy, and thereby enable the working classes everywhere to proceed freely and efficiently with the solution of the transition tasks of this epoch.... As for the time interval of the transition period, and the various forms it may assume, and the various struggles it may produce - it is difficult to see that clearly into the future. The definitive destruction of capitalism however, does not appear, so far as we can tell, to be a matter of centuries. A historical analogy suggests itself here between the modem movement and the destruction of feudalism. If we date the start of this overturn from the British revolution of 1640, and its essential completion with the unification of Germany and Italy in 1870, we would conclude that the historic process stretched over two centuries, and that after the British overturn, over 135 years elapsed before the next major revolutionary developments took place in America and France. If we, in a parallel column, date the beginning of capitalism's destruction from 1917 (the deed), and not 1848 (the program), we can conclude that already, in the course of some three decades, despite terrible defeats, the revolutionary masses succeeded in wiping out capitalism in a portion of the globe comprising roughly a third of the total population. If we add to this fact our general knowledge that all social processes are enormously speeded up today in comparison to a century or two ago, that this is an age of revolution, with one rapidly following on the heels of the other, that capitalism already is a wounded beast staggering from crisis to crisis, and that the world hovers again

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on the brink of another world war; if we add up all this, then the evidence seems strong that capitalism as a world system must measure its existence in decades rather than centuries. Be that as it may, our own historic vindication will come to the measure that we succeed in becoming leaders of masses in action, that we fuse the Marxist ideology with the mass movement. That is why this discussion necessarily turns from analysis of the world reality and the general perspectives to a discussion of tactics, to how we can increase our influence and grow strong. In tune with this general development of the discussion, we will conclude these notes with a consideration of some tactical problems of the Socialist Workers Party.

The Americanization of the SWP

Several months ago our committee decided to drop the designation of 'Trotskyist' from our general literature and to discontinue running the pictures of Lenin and Trotsky in every issue of the paper. This decision, long overdue, is to be heartily applauded as part of the process of the Americanization of our party or the elimination of all externals which are unnecessary roadblocks in our path. What is now required is that the practical adjustment in our propaganda be generalized into a conscious and planned orientation. Our movement has not, so far, made the impact on American political life of the revolutionary currents that preceded us. We haven't left the mark on the American working class that the IWW or the Debs Socialists did. We are still looked upon, more than some realize, as a group of hero worshippers, personal adherents of Leon Trotsky, as a sect of eccentrics. Even many sophisticated labor militants friendly to us, (and they are all getting pretty sophisticated nowadays) view Trotskyism not just as a political program that is too extreme, or with which they cannot go along, but as something of an oddity, something that is foreign, far-away, alien to America and its problems. Our movement has not been unaware of this unfortunate impression conveyed by us, and we have made a number of valiant efforts to Americanize the party, to adjust our tone and manners to the American scene, and make it part of the stream of the native labor movement. The policy of proletarianization, executed in campaign fashion in 1940, certainly can be considered, in a broad political sense, as an attempt to Americanize our movement. We tried to tum our backs on the petty bourgeois literati, and place our members in such an intimate relationship to the working class, that our primary attention would, of necessity, be riveted on the solution of the actual problems of workers in the shops; of having the thinking, the feeling, the pre-occupation, the very compos-

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ition of the party so intimately reflect the workers' aspirations and sufferings, moods and struggles, that we would become the vanguard in practice that we proclaimed ourselves to be in theory. Our efforts along this line were mirrored for ten years in energetic activities in strike struggles and union affairs, in the changed character of our press; and epitomized, as it were, in the work around the Minneapolis case, and even more so, in the 1948 election campaign. Here, we made the most integrated and heroic effort to present ourselves to the American people in understandable terms, to relate our movement to a known revolutionary tradition, and to relate our ideas to the daily problems of the masses. There is no question that our party has transformed itself in many respects in the ten-year period; that our party understands, reflects and participates in the American labor movement far better than was the case in the past. But we are still a long way from being a party of mass action. And we are still a long way from erasing our heritage of an isolated propaganda sect. This is due, in the main, not to faulty techniques, or mistaken tactics, but to formidable social obstructions which it was not in the cards for us to overcome in the past. We emerged as an organization in America out of a split in Russia that the American workers, and even their most advanced elements, knew little about and cared less. We had to build a cadre in a fight for an international program in isolation from the labor movement and its life-giving struggles. We had to pit our tiny membership in the industrial unions against the far-flung Stalinist battle formations, as well as against the strongest reformist bureaucracy of the whole capitalist world, with a working class in the grip of Rooseveltianism. We had to brave the full fury of a demonic witch-hunt before we could sufficiently entrench ourselves in the American labor movement. Yes, this party had to be built the hard way. But it is not sufficient to explain our defects, shortcomings, and failures of the past and present. We have to look to the future, and make sure that we leave no stone unturned to prepare ourselves for the next round of struggle, to make sure that it doesn't pass us by the way the CIO did. Especially so, since we are not going to build a party in this country without plenty of competition, not only from the present labor bureaucracy, and even the Stalinists, but also, very likely, from new pseudo-revolutionary or pseudo-Socialist formations. There will be no victories won by default in the USA. Although the proletarian advance is inevitable, our organization will have successes only as it measures up to the requirements of the times. That is why we cannot afford any sectarianism. We cannot afford to live in the past, or in a make-believe world of our own creation. We cannot afford any Quixotism. While our program is based, and will continue to be based upon the international experiences of the work-

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ing class; and while Trotsky was, in the immediate and most direct sense, the teacher and the leader of our movement, it does not at all follow from these two propositions that we will have much success in rallying workers to our banner by trying to straighten them out on the rights and wrongs of the Stalin-Trotsky fight, which has now receded into history - or that it is our revolutionary duty to try and do so. Paying homage to the memory of a great man is not our main task as a political party. We will vindicate Trotsky's struggle - and our own - by becoming a force; and in no other way. And we will become a force only when we succeed in implanting ourselves into the consciousness of the working class of this country as an authentic and indigenous band of American revolutionary militants ... This orientation demands a re-examination of every department of our party activity, and its improvement and strengthening from this point of view. Our theoretical magazine, however, occupies a special place in relation to our work, and has a special function to perform. As I conceive it, the theoretical magazine has the high duty ofkeeping the thinking ofour cadre shared and clear, and of breaking new ground in Marxist thought and development by following and analyzing all the new problems, trends and experiences of our epoch, especially as they relate to America. Any tendency to make the magazine more acceptable, or to increase its sales here and there, by converting it into what would essentially be an elaborated version of the Militant appears to me as incorrect; it would simply result in an unnecessary duplication of effort. The more we popularize our weekly press and literature, the more skilled we become in talking in understandable terms and in resting on an American tradition - the more will we need a theoretical organ which will preserve and continue the Marxist tradition, and which will serve as a true guide to the movement on all questions, from the heights of theory to the tactical problems of the day. As Marxism grows more influential and accepted, the magazine will get a broader hearing. But it can only justify its existence - and it should form an essential and honored part of our structure by more authoritatively fulfilling its role of defender of the science of Socialism against all its traducers, and by applying the science to theoretically solve the social problems of our lifetime ....

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3

On the Duration and the Nature of the Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism (1951)

Michel Pablo

What I wrote ... in the article Where Are We Going? on the subject of the period of transition from capitalism to socialism, its probable duration and its nature, has called forth a series of comments and divergent reactions in our movement, that compels me to undertake a further explanation of this question which has a considerable interest, it seems to me, not only from the theoretical but also from the practical viewpoint. 28 I actually wrote and emphasized that this transitional period would probably take a few centuries. Comrades who find this probable duration excessive may not have paid enough attention to this precise point: that what is involved is the whole interval in which the transition from capitalism to socialism will be consummated. The taking of power is not yet socialism in the economic and social meaning of this term in the Marxist vocabulary. I use the term socialism in its classical sense as first defined by Marx himself, in reference to the regime where the productive forces will have acquired a degree of development permitting the effective progressive abolition of the classes, of the state, of the distinction between physical and intellectual labor, and between the city and the countryside. The consummated socialist society is the direct vestibule to the communist society in which the formula of 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs', will actually be applied and which will put an end to the various birthmarks of the old society - as Marx wrote - which the society emerging from capitalism after the taking of power by the proletariat still bears 'in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually'. This period of transformation of capitalism into socialism, this latter term being understood in its economic and social content, and not simply its polit-

28

Pablo 1951b.

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ical significance (taking of power by the proletariat) is from all evidence an entire historical period extending aver afew centuries. The Marxist classics have conceived of this matter, it seems to me, in this general sense, independently of the nuances we may distinguish between the various exponents. In his letter to Bracke on the Gotha program dated May 5, 1875, Marx speaks of the 'period of the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society into communist society', to which period there also corresponds 'a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat'. One indication of the probable duration of this period, in Marx's estimation, is contained in the key passage of the Criticism of the Gotha Program where Marx gives an economic and social analysis of the future society. Let us review the essential points of this passage which will also serve as well for a better comprehension of the specific character of this period oftransition. Marx insists on the fact that the society issuing from capitalism after the taking of power could not be immediately a 'communist society such as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges'. On the economic and social level, this society is still regulated by bourgeois right, which even though being a constant improvement in respect to a thorough9oin9 bourgeois right, 'is nevertheless still stigmatized by bourgeois limitations. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor'. Nevertheless, the needs of individuals not being equal, 'with an equal output, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on'. But 'these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangsfrom capitalist society'. (Our emphasis.) According to Marx, all this will disappear when the socialist phase of the post-capitalist society will be completed and the higher communist phase will begin, that is to say, when 'the enslaving subordination of individuals under division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor, from a mere means oflife, has itself become the prime necessity of life; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly'. (Our emphasis.)

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In my opinion, it becomes clear, from these passages, that Marx, even while considering, as he says in his abovementioned letter to Bracke, that 'the program (of the Party) does not now deal with this (the period of transition) or with the future state in communist society', envisaged an entire historical period between capitalist society and its transfonnation into a consummated socialist society (in the economic and social sense, we repeat, of the term). Let us now come to Lenin. He found himself both compelled and disposed by the conditions of his time to speak much more concretely on this transitional period and its character, especially after the taking of power in Russia. Trotskyists know the puerile manner in which Stalin and his school have tried to buttress their theory of 'socialism in a single country' with Lenin's name by means of quotations falsified not only in their spirit but even in their letter. The essence of their perversion consists in giving to the term 'socialism' that Lenin actually employed in a number of his articles with the meaning of the possible 'taking of political power' in a single country, the meaning of completing the economic and social content of socialism, a completion in a possible socialist society which can be built in a single country. In reality, both in the spirit and the letter of innumerable writings on this question Lenin does not envisage the possibility of achieving a socialist society except on a world scale. And in what time intervals? Here are some typical quotations: 'It is hardly to be expected that our next generation, which will be more highly developed will effect a complete transition to socialism' (Report of April 29, 1918, to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Government). On December 3, 1919, Lenin declared to the Congress of Communes and Artels: 'We know that we cannot establish a socialist order at the present time. It will he well if our children, perhaps our grandchildren, will establish it' (our emphasis, - Works, Vol. XVI, p. 398). This estimate by Lenin acquires its full importance when it is added that Lenin is not here envisaging the duration of the achievement of socialism in backward and isolated Russia alone but socialism on a much more extensive scale through the victory of the revolution he expected and on which he counted in Europe, and especially in Germany. But naturally, up to now it has been Trotsky who was obliged and who could express himself most concretely on the probable duration and the nature of the period of transition from capitalism to socialism. To combat the confusion and falsifications to which the Stalinist school had subjected such fundamental conceptions of Marxism as what ought to be understood politically, economically and socially by the term socialism, Trotsky

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was above all forced to emphasize the material conditions which characterized a truly socialist regime. 'Socialist society can be built', Trotsky considered, 'only on the most advanced productive forces, on the application of electricity and chemistry to the processes of production including agriculture; on combining, generalizing and bringing to maximum development the highest elements ofmodem technology ... Socialism must not only take overfrom capitalism the most highly developed productive forces but must immediately carry them onward, raise them to a higher level and give them a state of development such as has been unknown under capitalism'. (Third International After Lenin, p. 52 - Our emphasis). Trotsky believed that the 'genuine socialist development' dependent on a high development of the productive forces, advanced well beyond the levels obtained by the most advanced capitalist countries, would begin alter the victory of the proletariat, 'at least in several advanced countries'. Trotsky thereby spoke 'of the epoch of genuine socialist conception' which would be inaugurated only at that stage. (Third International After Lenin, p. 54). However it is later in The Revolution Betrayed that Trotsky was able to best express his views on all these questions, the aim of the analysis set forth in this book being to grasp the real development of the Revolution in our epoch by proceeding from the concrete experience of the USSR. What are the fundamental conclusions of this book on these points? a. The taking of power, which is on the order of the day for all countries in our epoch and which is therefore possible in each country separately, does not immediately establish a socialist regime, in the economic and social meaning of this term, but a transitional regime 'between capitalism and socialism or preparatory to socialism'. This regime will apply 'socialist methods for the [solution of] pre-socialist tasks'. b. The epoch of 'genuine socialist development' will begin with the victory of the Revolution on an international scale, that is to say, encompassing at least a number of advanced countries, on the foundation of a level of productive forces at least equal from the start to that 'to which the most advanced capitalism has attained'. c. Contrary to what Marx thought, and even Lenin who 'based himself wholly upon the Marxist theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat',29 it is impossible to abolish 'bureaucratic deformations' immediately after the

29

Footnote by Pablo: 'Lenin did not succeed ... either in his chief work dedicated to this question (The State and Revolution), or in the program of the party, in drawing all the necessary conclusions as to the character of the state from the economic backwardness and isolation of the country' (The Revolution Betrayed, p. 58).

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taking of power and before having reached a certain level of productive forces much higher than the level of the most advanced capitalism, and these cannot be combated by 'purely political' measures (election and recall at any time of all plenipotentiaries, abolition of material privileges, active control by the masses). 'A socialist state even in America, on the basis of the most advanced capitalism, could not immediately provide everyone with as much as he needs, and would therefore be compelled to spur everyone to produce as much as possible'. (The Revolution Betrayed, p. 53). d. Bureaucratic tendencies and deformations are not confined to the development of the backward and isolated USSR alone. 'The tendencies of bureaucratism, which strangles the workers movement [in capitalist countries], would everywhere show themselves even after the proletarian revolution'. (Revolution Betrayed, p. 55, our emphasis). 'But it is perfectly obvious that the poorer the society which issues from a revolution, the sterner and more naked would be the expression of this 'law', the more crude would be the forms of bureaucratism and the more dangerous would it become for socialist development'. (Page 55, our emphasis). e. 'A development of the productive forces is the absolutely necessary practical premise (of Communism), because without it want is generalized, and with want the struggle for necessities begins again, and that means that all the old crap must revive'. (Marx, quoted by Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed, p. 56). It therefore conforms to Trotsky's spirit (if not to the very letter of his writings) that the transformation of capitalism into socialism will actually take an entire historical epoch,filled with bureaucratically deformed transitional regimes, and that these inevitable bureaucratic deformations (which have basically economic causes) will disappear only to the degree that the Revolution conquers in the advanced countries and the Level of the productive forces reaches and surpasses that of the most advanced capitalism. From this there naturally follows the prime importance of the Revolution in the advanced countries and of the international victory of the Revolution in order to speed socialist reconstruction and attain as rapidly as possible the full economic and social content of socialism. I believe that what I wrote in my two articles on the probable duration and the characteristics of the transitional period completely conforms with these real views of Trotsky on these questions. So far as the duration of the transitional period is concerned I added in Where Are We Going? the remark that it should not be forgotten that we are

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already in the second century since the publication of the Communist Manifesto which put the Socialist Revolution on the order of the day, and more than 50 years since the beginning of 'imperialism, the last stage of capitalism'. Can one seriously believe that all the rest, that is to say, the actual transformation of capitalism into socialism is no more than a matter of a few decades? Even in the event that in the near future the Revolution succeeds in the United States, this indispensable and by far the most important sector of the capitalist system in which is concentrated the highest degree of development of productive forces capitalism has known, the consummation of a world socialist society would remain a work of long duration. 30 On the other hand, in the much more probable event at the present moment that the victory of the world proletarian revolution would yet have to undergo the experience of a third war, with all the destructions caused by it, including this time the USA itself, it would naturally have to cope with still more extended delays and supplementary difficulties. These views have nothing 'pessimistic' in them. What in our opinion would really be illogical, childlike and mechanical is a conception according to which the most profound transformation of society (emerging from its thousand-year barbarism) in all its economic, moral and intellectual relations could be miraculously effected along a straight and direct line of development. And what is the practical importance of insisting so much on the probable duration and the character of the transitional period? It appears considerable to us. It is first of all a question of arming the communist cadres of our movement with a historical perspective and with clear notions of the aims to be attained so that they can master whatever is conjunctural and avoid any activist impatience or impressionism. It is also a question of rendering them capable of grasping the development of the Revolution in our epoch in its real and concrete manifestation unhampered by any formalistic thinking. The developments which have taken place during and after the last war, the formation of the European buffer zone, the Yugoslav and Chinese revolutions, the other colonial revolutions now going on in Asia, have called forth divergent reactions in the revolutionary vanguard. A number of elements have interpreted these events as the expression of a 'progressive' historical role of Stalinism and have been led to 'conciliation' with it, to 'idealize' it or to pure and simple capitulation before it, especially in countries where the pressure of Stalinism remains exceedingly great.

30

Footnote from Pablo: Were it only to raise the level of the productive forces and economic progress of the rest of the world to that of the USA.

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Other elements undergoing a contrary class pressure, which becomes much greater to the extent that we approach the crucial testing moment, refuse to draw any distinction between the social character ofthe regimes and movements and their temporary Stalinist or Stalinized Leaderships, and reject the one along with the others.

These elements have an 'ideal' conception of the real and concrete revolutionary process in our epoch, and admit it only in its pure forms, the 'norms' described by Marx and Lenin. 31 They consider the bureaucratic deformation of the proletarian power which has marked the Russian Revolution, and, because of its degeneration, a considerable part of the revolutionary process in our time, as the pure and simple negation of all class content, different from capitalism and which has been attained only through the struggle against this latter and the destruction of its foundations, that is to say, the relations of production and ofproperty corresponding to it.

Situated between these two tendencies, we are obliged to reaffirm and to defend the fundamental criteria of Marxist theory and the key ideas given by the Trotskyist analysis of the USSR and of Stalinism. We have patiently explained under what exceptional specific conditions the Soviet bureaucracy has been led to the economic and political expropriation of the bourgeoisie in the countries of the European buffer zone and under what exceptional conditions the Yugoslav CP and the Chinese CP were propelled to power by the powerful movement of the masses. In this light we have analyzed and demonstrated most particularly the Yugoslav experience and the crisis of Stalinism in the other countries of the buffer zone, the elements of crisis and of differentiation which exist in the expansion of Stalinism. We have especially emphasized this fundamental idea of our theoretical arsenal, that the bureaucratic deformation of the proletarian power and particularly the monstrous form it has taken with the Soviet bureaucracy in the USSR will be eliminated only with the triumph of the revolution on an international scale embracing the advanced countries. But whoever speaks of Revolution speaks above all of the abolition of capitalism, the abolition of its productive and property relations and the establishment of new relations. Here is the decisive factor. The Stalinist form of the bureaucratic deformation of proletarian power has taken shape only in the case of a backward and half-barbarous country which remained for a long time isolated from new important advances of the world revolution.

31

Footnote from Pablo: In their writings before the Russian Revolution.

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The political expropriation of the proletariat and the formation of an omnipotent and uncontrollable bureaucratic caste like that existing in the USSR is excluded in the event of an international triumph of the revolution embracing the advanced countries, and especially in the event of a victory in the United States. We have never written or wanted to suggest that the political expropriation of the proletariat after the taking ofpower on an international scale could be envisaged as possible, and even less that it can stretch over centuries. Such an affirmation would be theoretically equivalent to admitting the theory of 'bureaucratic collectivism', that is to say, the possibility of an historical regime intermediate between capitalism and socialism. On the contrary, we have written this word for word ' ... the (proletarian) power will inevitably become swiftly bureaucratized and would risk culminating in a complete expropriation of the proletariat ifthe revolution remains isolated in a country encircled by imperialism'. (Now emphasized). ('On the Class Nature of Yugoslavia', Internal Bulletin of the IS, October 1949).

'The modifications of the norm of proletarian power', we wrote further on, 'would diminish only to the degree that the basis of proletarian power would pass beyond the framework ofa single country and would embrace an ever more important sector of world economy'. (Now emphasized). Even for the USSR we have not admitted that the development of the bureaucracy favored by powerful economic causes would necessarily and fatally transform 'the Bolshevik party and through it, the whole Communist International into organs of the bureaucracy' ('On the Class Nature of Yugoslavia'). We locate the downfall of Stalinism in the unfolding of the struggle already engaged between imperialism and the Revolution in all its forms: the USSR, the 'Peoples Democracies', Yugoslavia, China, the colonial revolutions now in progress and the international revolutionary movement. This struggle will not last for centuries but a much briefer period. It will lead, as we have many times repeated in all our writings, through the abolition of capitalism and imperialism, also to the downfall of the Bonapartist power of Stalin and of Stalinism. That is the foundation of our optimism and our revolutionary perspectives.

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4

A Milestone in Internationalism (Excerpts, 1951) George F. Clarke

... Past Wars and the Threatening War3 2 What is new and different in the world today? The character ofthe approaching war i,s new. The position ofthe classes, the circumstances in which the war takes shape and threatens to break out are different from those which surrounded past wars. The major wars of the past were conflicts between imperialist powers for the redivision of the markets and raw materials of the earth. Not so today. The last two wars have led to the ruin or to the exhaustion and decline of all the important imperialist powers but one, the United States. The emergence of the American capitalist colossus, with its unrivaled productive plant, its extensive domestic market, its huge supply of capital, has driven the others powers from the field of effective competition . ... One-third of the area of the world, extending from the Elbe to the China seas and including more than 800,000,000 people, has completely slipped out of the capitalist market. It must be reconquered before capital can safely and profitably be invested in that area again. Irresistible economic forces drive American imperialism to this task. ... The very existence of this huge noncapitalist world unsettles existing markets, spurs the colonial and semi-colonial peoples to take advantage of the palpable weakness of their oppressors, thus creating new military burdens and further instability in the West.

Survival of Capitalism at Stake

... The conflict of two mutually exclusive social systems taking the form of world war means in effect that the class struggle, which has existedfrom the inception of

32

Clarke 1951.

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capitalism as a struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie, has extended in the decline of capitalism into a struggle between states which represent the interests of the hostile and existing classes . ... civilization stands at a turning point[:] ... the people are being called upon to make a fatal, irretrievable, cataclysmic decision. Here is the supreme test of revolutionary leadership, which the Fourth International alone of all tendencies in the working class movement has met. It has not submitted to forces far greater than itself, it has not wavered under pressure, it has not deluded itself or others with false hopes. Prepared by its whole past, which embodies the best of the traditions of revolutionary Marxism, it was able to skillfully diagnose the existing reality, to speak clearly of the march of events, to confidently prepare its strategy for the turbulent tomorrow ...

War and Revolution

... The fact that imperialism aims to destroy the nationalized property relations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, to destroy the revolutionary regime in China, to smash the working class and colonial movements, will tend toward the creation of a natural coalition against a common enemy: counterrevolution .... The merit of the prognosis of the Fourth International is that it frees men from the paralysis of fright and makes them fit for action.

The Fear of Stalinism

... It is not surprising that Shachtman, the leaders of the POUM, the Titoites and other centrists should react to this ideological rearmament with cries and accusations that 'the Fourth International has capitulated to Stalinism'. Part of their venom undoubtedly comes from bad conscience. Most of them at one or another time in their past had promised to defend the Soviet Union against imperialism in case of war. But the threatening war finds most of them either in the other camp or on their way into it, identifying the Stalinist bureaucracy with the Soviet Union as their justification for joining with imperialism. ... The Fourth International has remained faithful to Trotsky's analysis and attitude toward the Soviet bureaucracy and Stalinism While unchanged in fundamentals, it has refined its ideas on this question and added a note of realism required by changed world conditions. What it recognizes is that events have changed the relationship between the Soviet bureaucrats and world imperialism, and between Stalinism and the masses it Leads and influences.

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Stalinism was a product of the reaction that followed the ebbing of the revolutionary wave and the defeats of the workers' movement in the twenties in Europe. It kept is domination by maneuvering between rival imperialist powers and by manipulating the workers' movement to the ends of these maneuvers. Isolated revolutionary developments such as in China, Spain, France, unable to withstand the opposition of their own bourgeoisie in combination with the counter-revolutionary treachery of the Stalinist bureaucracy, went down to defeat. The defeats consolidated the Kremlin's position by freeing it from the pressure of revolutionary asses and by lend plausibility to its defeatist attitude to workers' revolutions.

The Altered Situation

All ofthis is altered today. Imperialism is no longer divided and heading towards a clash in its own ranks but united under American hegemony is preparing for war with the Soviet Union. The bargaining power of the Kremlin is thus considerably restricted. Although willing as ever to bargain away the interests of the revolutionary workers and colonial movements it is clear that imperialism requires more far-reaching concessions as the price of any real agreement. Nor is it such a simple matter to sell out these movements as, for example, the New China. Under such conditions it becomes more and more profitable for the Kremlin to attempt to exploit these movements for its own ends, endeavoring all the while to limit their objectives, then to betray them directly. The revolutionary ferment today tends to remain in an active state rather than being damned up and demoralized as in the past. Far more important however is that the forces of mass unrest let loose upon the world since the last war are becoming too vast, too uncontrollable for manipulation by the Kremlin or any other bureaucracy. What has happened in Yugoslavia during the war, and even more significantly in China, is an illustration of this phenomenon and foreshadows the shape of events to come. In both cases the Kremlin attempted to prevail upon the leaderships of these revolutions to come to terms with their reactionary opponents - the Yugoslav Royalist government-in-exile and Chiang Kai-Shek. Meanwhile, as the record proves, the Kremlin made agreements with these reactionary rulers behind the backs of and against Tito at one time and against Mao at another. Stalin's object ... was to honor his agreements with imperialism and to achieve peace with it at the expense of the revolutionary masses. But what had been possible in China and Spain before the war was no longer possible in Yugoslavia during the war and in China after it. The great

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mass movement was too powerful ... It swept over the Kremlin's head ... This is a new development of the greatest political significance and was recognized as such by this Congress of the Fourth International not only because of the light it throws on the past and present but because it can be a dominant tendency in the event of an imperialist war against the non-capitalist world.

Crisis of Stalinism

... Viewing Stalinism as a by-product of working class defeats and of reaction, we had envisaged its crisis in a period of the upsurge of revolutionary developments. This is precisely what has occurred. Only as so often happens, the reality, while basically conforming to the idea, had its own unique and particular expression. The crisis of Stalinism developed within and through the Communist parties in countries where they head great movements, and not in organic breaks with them. Parties like those in Yugoslavia and China, still Stalinist in all outward appearances, led successful revolutions against the old regime. But by that very fact these parties had ceased to be Stalinist, that is to say mere agencies of the Kremlin, pressure instruments for achieving favorable diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the capitalist governments. In seizing power they had acted in direct opposition to the main purpose of Stalinism. This was to be confirmed in life itself when it later became clear that Stalin's Politburo had opposed and sabotaged their struggle for power. It was furthermore demonstrated when signs of friction and even open hostility appeared between the new revolutionary power and the Kremlin. To contest this analysis because it appears contradictory is to ignore the reality which is itself contradictory. The road to socialism is not like a superhighway. Those who are unprepared to take its unexpected turns, its unexplored paths, and its detours must inevitably lose their way. In fact, the political woods are full of those wretched wanderers who wail about the omnipotence of bureaucracy at the very moment that proletarians and colonial people are smashing the great empires of the capitalist world and thus creating the conditions for the downfall of Stalinism. Far from capitulating to Stalinism, the Fourth International, by its analysis and the tactical course it has charted, prepares the penetration of the conscious vanguard into the mass movement as it is and as it will be. That is the greatest danger for Stalinism and assures the ultimate victory of the ideas of Trotskyism which is already indicated by events.

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The Fourth International came into existence in an epoch of defeats.... Haw different today!

Who dares speak of 'socialism in one country' today when the world decision between capitalism and socialism is clearly in the making? Look at Yugoslavia. Less than two years after the break with the Cominform, the leaders of the regime, who were trained in Stalinist methods and who practiced them themselves ... found themselves denouncing the entire bureaucratic system in the Soviet Union and advocating ideas and plans for workers' democracy which in many ways parallel those of Leon Trotsky.... Look at China. There the victory of the revolution is officially laid to the fact that the Chinese CP broke with the fatal policy of the 20s of subordinating the mass movement to the Kuomintang. The responsibilityfor the defeat ofthat time is shunted offonto scapegoats who had merely applied the Line at Stalin's Comintem. But the fact that the victory of 1949 is attributed exclusively to Mao Tse-tung and never to Stalin clearly implicates the latter in the defeat of1925-1927 and indicates thatfar more is being said in private than appears in the press.

It is the ideas and program of Trotskyism, not in detail, not in all their aspects, but in fundamentals which have triumphed wherever the masses have triumphed over imperialism. The anonymity which still surrounds them can only be transitory....

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543

The New York Local - Report and Tasks (1953)

Mike Bartell (Milton Zaslow)

The past year was a period of sound activity and substantial achievement for the New York Local.33 Our successes must not be measured in ideal terms, but from the point of view of what is possible in an atmosphere of reaction in the citadel of world counter-revolution preparing for war. Our gains are determined in large measure by this objective situation, and our tasks have been set accordingly. We kept up a well-measured pace of propaganda activities. Our campaigns, electoral and otherwise were placed within the framework of these propaganda activities. We sought to break down the barriers between ourselves and the Stalinist ranks and peripheral circles erected by the Stalinist bureaucrats. And in this, we have been moderately successful. A steady stream of new people have been attracted to all our public functions. The internal education of the party has been lively and steadily improving. Our finances have been stabilized and New York has more than maintained its position as the outstanding contributor to the functioning of the national organization. By a realistic view of our tasks, by exploiting opportunities where they existed, by counteracting the process of stagnation which comes with isolation, by keeping the party's ideology fresh and alive, by enlarging our circle of friends and sympathizers; by penetrating into new circles - we did all that was possible and did it well. There were no doubt mistakes and shortcomings but the general orientation was correct and rewarding.

33

Bartell 1953.

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Orientation

The year 1947 brought an abrupt change in the conditions under which our party operated. The grievances of the workers, the Negro people, veterans, tenants, etc., which had accumulated during World War II burst forth at its conclusion in an offensive of considerable scope and power. Our party intervened energetically in these struggles, and turned its attention directly toward new layers of worker militants who were emerging out of the mass. We were rewarded by rapid growth in every respect. By 1948, this situation had turned into its opposite. Although on a world scale great revolutionary upheavals were in the making, in America the labor movement was in sharp decline all along the line. Conservative moods were becoming dominant, among the workers. The witch-hunt had begun. The mass movement rolled back leaving us isolated. With minor ups and downs, this trend has continued for six years. In the past year, we have seen a deepening of reaction, culminating in the victory of the Republican party for the first time in twenty years. Furthermore, while all the conditions of social crisis are maturing beneath the surface, the readings of all social barometers indicate that the unfavorable climate will continue for a time and will probably get worse in the period immediately ahead. It is naturally impossible for a revolutionary party to prosper in such circumstances. On the contrary, for a small tendency such as ours, a lengthy period of isolation presents very serious problems. The danger is a double one. The obvious and apparent danger lies in the contraction of our forces through losses a quantitative decline. But we also face another problem: the danger of succumbing to the conditions of isolation by sinking into the habits, moods and methods of an ingrown sect. In 1948 we began to adjust our activities to conform to the changed conditions. The changes in our general approach here in New York can be summed up as follows: we shifted the axis of our activities from mass action and broad agitation to concentrated propaganda and education; we turned our attention from the general mass of politically uninitiated workers to a narrower but more selective audience ofleft-wing groups, politically-minded workers and intellectuals, and student youth; from expansion of our organization and activities to retrenchment and more modest tasks. This course has demonstrated its validity and we have no need for any major change now. We need only to pursue it more consistently and carry out the indicated tasks more energetically. With this approach in mind, we proceed to an examination of the more important phases of our work.

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545

Trade Union Work

Since the mass movement is quiescent (relatively), and dominated by an unchallenged imperialist-minded bureaucracy, our opportunities for work in the union movement have become extremely limited, and since our activities are to be directed primarily toward more politically conscious circles, the question naturally arises: what about the proletarian, or trade union, orientation? The answer we give to this question (not only verbally- but in action) is of the greatest importance, both for our future possibilities and for the health of our movement today. First, while we are perforce limited in the main to propaganda activities because of the social stability that obtains for the present, we must never lose sight of the very real perspective of great class struggles that will inevitably erupt. We must not so adapt ourselves to the exigencies of the moment, as to be completely unprepared for the stormy movements which will arise in the factories and flow through the channels of the trade unions. We will succeed in influencing the movement, and in putting flesh on the skeleton of the party only to the extent - that we are rooted in the factories. This fact alone dictates the placing of every possible comrade in some factory or union. But there is the additional urgent need to retain and extend our links with the working class as it is - in all of its conservatism and apathy - so that we do not become isolated from the workers physically as well as politically. Such links act as an antidote, at least in part, to the dangers of sectarian decay. They help to prevent unrealistic wish-fulfillment thinking today; and to assure that we will not be caught unawares and lag behind when the workers begin to move on the morrow. Furthermore, it is of course not true that nothing whatever can by done even today in the shops and unions. The class struggle, as we know, is never completely dormant. Indeed, a surprising number of our members have participated in strikes and stoppages in the past several years, in most cases in the capacity of secondary leaders. A half-a-dozen of our comrades are union stewards. We have found that opportunities to speak at union meetings for a labor party and on other issues are not entirely absent either. Finally, there is important political work that can and should always be carried on in factories (or for that matter, anywhere) and that is persistent contact work among one's fellow workers. Even if recruiting is extremely difficult it is surely possible to win friends and sympathizers, who can be turned into recruits when things loosen up. This problem of 'proletarianization' is a peculiarly New York problem, and it always has been with us. We do not suggest that the character of the New York

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Local can be transformed overnight by a big campaign for 'proletarianization'. But we must come back to this question at every convention and persist the year round in our efforts to strengthen our contacts with the mass organizations of the workers. We have made a little progress in the past year. A number of comrades who persisted in their efforts have succeeded in entering some key spots. We now have groups that are fairly well established in four unions and some beginnings in others. There are still some, however, who choose jobs which are most convenient, even though they are useless from the point of view of helping the party penetrate the mass movement, and of maintaining and extending its ties with the class. Young comrades especially, should adjust their lives so as to live as proletarian revolutionists and prepare themselves to become workers' leaders in the struggles that lie ahead.

111

Propaganda

This phase of our work, which refers to the dissemination of Marxist ideas especially the Marxist analysis of our changing world and the socialist perspective - has occupied our main attention for the past year, and correctly so. 'Propaganda' includes public lectures and classes as well as the circulation of our press. It also includes contact work, which is personalized propaganda carried on by the rank and file member, who supplement the work of the lecturer and writer and attempts to complete the task of recruitment. Further, our propaganda work is not only concerned with influencing new people. Taken together with internal discussion it also means the continuous clarification and refining of our own ideas, and keeping abreast of the great events which are occurring with unprecedented speed in all parts of the World. This work is indispensable if we are to keep our concepts in tune with the every changing reality and prevent sluggishness and routinism in our thinking. Above all, it is the best shield against the tremendous pressures bearing down upon us. Our program of public meetings, lectures and classes in the past year was by far the richest in many years, both in quantity and quality. In one year we held 15 public meetings and lectures on domestic and international events, six lectures on the World Crisis, summarizing the views of the World Congress, two lectures on philosophy, a six-week lecture course on the American Revolution, a weekly discussion class for new members and contacts that ran most of the year, and a study course in Capital. Furthermore, all of those undertakings with very few exceptions were distinctly successful. The lectures consistently attracted sizable audiences both from the party ranks and from left-wing circles. The

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success of this propaganda activity was made possible by the great achievements of the Third World Congress which armed us with a consistent world outlook and with clear answers to all the big questions of our time. The weekly forum fulfills a number of important needs for us: it fulfills a major educational need for the party itself; it serves to counteract disintegrating tendencies by providing a strong and attractive political center which draws to it some less active members, and a number of sympathizers, and by keeping constantly before the movement the forward march of the masses on a world scale, and the great revolutionary perspectives for America; finally it has attracted a considerable number of new people, primarily young people from the Stalinist peripheral movements, several of whom have drawn very close to our ideas. To maintain a weekly forum over an extended period of time is an ambitious undertaking for a small organization under present conditions. But if we recognize its importance, and are ready to put in the effort required to sustain it, there is a good chance that it will succeed, and that these efforts will be well rewarded. The four classes on various aspects of Marxist theory and analysis which will open in January under the auspices of the Marxist Labor School will round out our educational program. The circulation of our press (and not only the Militant but also the 'heavier' literature such as the F.I. and the new Pablo pamphlet) is the primary vehicle for our propaganda, for with it we can reach far more people than we can attract to our meetings, and penetrate ever wider circles with our ideas. Our literature activities should be consistent with our overall tasks, and general orientation. We should direct a concentrated fire at the more politically conscious currents in the population, certain unions and schools and other selected points rather than indiscriminate broadsides at the population in general. We should not indulge in door-to-door sub campaigns aimed only at obtaining the maximum number of subs. The results obtained under present conditions of widespread conservatism and fear are not commensurate with the enormous amount of energy required, and such efforts could only divert us from the activities that we are - and should be - engaged in. One sub sold to a real contact made through our propaganda efforts is a step toward winning an adherent, and is worth far more than a sub gotten at random door-to-door that generally leads nowhere. On the other hand, limited door-to-door work which is aimed at culling out contacts through consistent visiting, as is being done in several projects, has proven to be worthwhile, our guiding line should be that 'subbing' is an important part of contact work, and not an end in itself. Within this approach we should get every subscription we possibly can.

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The inevitable decline in our sub list must be compensated for by stepping up the sales of single copies at political meetings, forums, unions and schools. This work has lagged in the last few months, but our own experience shows that a stable circulation can be built up in this way. We should also try to place the Militant on more newsstands, since this outlet has provided a steady sale of 100 copies a week for a number of years. We should not engage in mass street sales as a general practice. However, when a hot issue arouses great interest we should conduct a special demonstration-sale, and intervene at least agitationally in the given struggle. The Harry Moore murder was a case in point. We were able to sell 1,000 Militants by two mobilizations on the streets of Harlem and 200 more at various protest meetings. In addition tens of thousands saw our dramatic display of placards and heard our slogans.

IV

Contacting and Recruitment

In the past several months we carried on more systematic and extensive contact work than ever before. Some forty comrades visited more than 100 contacts including almost all of those who had responded to the radio broadcasts. For the first time we are becoming familiar with the people on our mailing list, who were by and large merely names to us before. Many worthless names were weeded out. We found that most of the radio contacts were not prospects. In many cases they completely misunderstood what and who we were. But a half a dozen subs were gotten from this work, and a few prospective recruits. In the matter of recruiting, we have hit up against a new and peculiar phenomenon. In spite of expanded and improved activities, in spite of the fact that we have attracted more new people than in recent years, recruiting has dropped to a new low. We have won over a number of young people to our viewpoint in the past period - people who accept our ideas, come quite regularly to our functions, read our press, contribute to some degree to our work, and in some cases even bring their friends to our forums - but can't or won't take the final step of joining. We will have to give some serious thought to this problem. First, we should recognize that this represents a gain for our movement. We have won new adherents and supporters, even if they do not take out memberships immediately. Second, we should try to gradually work them into our activities, and get financial contributions, until membership appears to be an easy and natural step formalizing the real relation.

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Election Campaign

We conceived of the 1952 election campaign as a special vehicle for propaganda activity. We decided not to dissipate our energies in wide, thinly spread agitation on street comers or door-to-door canvassing, not to be diverted by the election campaign from our propaganda tasks. We decided, on the contrary, to take advantage of the heightened political activity and interest generated by the elections, to intensify our propaganda work. We decided to limit our outdoor work to a few meetings in connection with the tours of the candidates. We planned, as the central activity, a series of weekly lectures on the major issues in the campaign to be highlighted by a rally for comrade Dobbs and a banquet for comrade Weiss. In addition, we planned a class on the resolutions of the Third World Congress for new members and contacts. We conceived of a broad division of labor between the candidates and the party membership. The candidates were to exploit every possible opportunity to reach the public at large by radio and television, while the membership followed through by systematic visiting of those who had responded to the broadcasts, as well as other contacts, and by coverage of all candidates' forums with literature and leaflets announcing our forum. Some were assigned to enter the Compass clubs in the attempt to bring our campaign into these clubs. We hoped that by this method, when the campaign was over, instead of tallying the results by the thousands spoken to on Street comers, we would be able to total up a few subscribers, contacts and potential recruits. On the whole, our plan worked out splendidly. The forums and class both surpassed our expectation, maintaining a high level of attendance throughout and generating a great deal of enthusiasm. The Dobbs rally and Weiss banquet were highly successful. We drew a small but steady stream of new people to our meetings and we came out of the campaign with a new periphery. Another virtue of this kind of campaign is that instead of going through a whirl of feverish activity followed by a general collapse of activity and morale we are able to continue without seriously breaking our stride. The 1953 municipal elections promise to be interesting. It is impossible to foretell the lineups now, but Rudolph Halley will probably run for Mayor on the Liberal Party line. He has a fair chance of getting elected, especially with new and more sensational scandals breaking over Tammany's head. Under these circumstances, it is possible that other sections of the labor movement will shift to Halley. That does not, however, exclude the possibility that the anti-Tammany Democrats and Fusion Republicans will enter into a coalition with the Liberal Party. On the other side, the ALP, already beset by a lesser civil crisis, and shaken up by its decline will probably face an even more serious internal conflict over

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Halley. The CP, which yearned for a 'broad anti-Tammany coalition' in 1951, is likely to press more vigorously for it in 1952. Meanwhile, others are pushing in the opposite direction, i.e., for the conversion of the PP into a 'socialist' party. All of this will provide opportunities for our intervention, but it is too early to decide on our precise tactics now. We should plan a discussion of our election policy for 1953 later on when the picture becomes clearer.

v1

Opponents' Work

We recognized as early as 1948 the importance of penetrating the StalinistPP [Progressive Party] movement and related organizations, and of proposing united front actions on specific issues. Although this tactical approach is not an easy one to carry out, we scored some very important successes, especially in our intervention in the Stalinist defense movement and the YPA [Young Progressives of America]. It is true that this movement has suffered a sharp decline since 1948, but it remains the only current of conscious opposition to the war and reaction (apart from ourselves) and its very decline has now brought it to a crisis of perspective. [Leo] Huberman, one of the editors of the Monthly Review, is now publicly opining that the PP should have gone out of business in 1948, that there is no future for a party with a liberal bourgeois program, that the movement should adopt a straight socialist program, and advocate a labor party based on the trade unions. Corliss Lamont, the PP candidate for Senator from New York in the recent elections has also spoken in favor of this view. The UE has declared for a new party based on the unions, instead of the PP. A 'discussion article' has appeared in the CP organ Political Affairs advancing a similar line. On the other hand, the Stalinists take issue with the proposal to convert the PP into a 'socialist' party, since this would appear as a direct rival to the CP.

We have already intervened to a limited extent in this discussion. Both the Compass [a left-liberal daily newspaper] and the Monthly Review published contributions by prominent SWP spokesman in their literary discussions. In addition we entered the discussion in the Brownsville, West Side and New School Compass clubs, and in the Monthly Review forum. In all cases we were given a friendly hearing. In the one case where a Stalinist attempted to have our spokesman silenced, the chairman ruled against the Stalinist and the audience applauded the decision. The atmosphere in and around the Stalinist movement is less hostile than ever before. Indeed, their movement could be said to be rife with 'Trotskyist

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conciliationism'. Unity sentiments are widespread even among some leaders and spokesmen of the PP movement. Our victory over the Stalinists in the civil liberties struggle is virtually complete. The Daily Worker editorial on the Kutcher case was the formal announcement of the change in line. Leading Stalinist spokesmen are declaring both publicly and privately that they were wrong both in the case of the 18 and the Kutcher case, and proclaim the need for unity in the struggle. Trotskyism has become legitimized among many Stalinist members and sympathizers who recognize us as a legitimate, although 'ultra-leftist', tendency in the radical movement. We should take the fullest advantage of this exceptional opportunity to penetrate deeply into this movement. We have made contact to one degree or another with quite a number of Stalinist peripheral organizations in the past year: Compass clubs, YPA, Youth Peace Council, ALP, Monthly Review, Citizens Emergency Defense Committee, Civil Rights Congress Youth, LYL [Labor Youth League]. In addition our opponents work committee has some good leads in the Zionist youth movement. With few exceptions, however, this work has been sporadic and inconsistent. Our members have not yet penetrated these organizations, become integrated, developed personal acquaintances, and made party contacts. In the main the experiences have been of a hit and run variety. There were many technical difficulties. Most of these organizations were foreign territory, entirely unknown to us. Time was needed for exploration and selection. The summer months and the needs of our election campaign limited the work. But we have become more familiar with the Stalinoid world than ever before, and we have penetrated this movement more widely than ever before, even if not yet deeply. A few comrades who recognized the importance of this work and persisted, have succeeded in establishing themselves and finding a political milieu in which to operate. One comrade has done this so well that he is invited to present the SWP program on controversial issues and to give educational talks in his neighborhood Compass Club. He has also joined the ALP club to widen his contacts with this movement. The Compass Clubs, have decided to continue their existence in spite of the death of the Compass. These clubs are the most satisfactory places for work since they meet regularly, and their sole activity is political discussion. The ALP is the most difficult to work in since it is primarily an electoral machine although it does carry on other activities. Nevertheless it is the most important of these organizations by far, since it is the heart of the movement and its active core are the politically conscious cadres. Furthermore, the future of the ALP will, after all, be debated and decided by the ALP, not by the Compass Clubs or the Monthly Review. We should send a number of comrades into the

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ALP who are

prepared to participate in its activities and remain in for a considerable period of time. We must take note that one of the difficulties we have faced in this work is reluctance or at best inertia among the members, a tendency to limit their political activities to 116 University Place rather than to enter a strange milieu. Yet, this is one of the most important means we have of avoiding complete political isolation. We noted previously the importance of having a maximum number of our members in the factories to maintain contact with the working class and gain a footing for future advances. We should add that it is also of the utmost importance that our members find a field for political activity today outside of our own party, to maintain contact with the rest of the leftwing political world and to propagate our ideas to people who are equipped to understand them and are willing to listen.

VII

Civil Liberties

This was not one of our major fields of activities this past year, since we had no major national defense campaign. The New York branch of the Kutcher Committee raised the quota of several hundred dollars assigned to it, and our fraction at NYU organized an excellent united front meeting in defense of all victims of the Smith Act. With the Kutcher case now entering its second round we can expect stepped up activities on this front in the coming year.

VII I

Finances

Our active workers conference of approximately a year ago resolved to straighten out and improve the very sad condition of our finances. A number of reforms were introduced at that time which altered the entire situation with the result that this has been one of the brightest sides of our work - and it is by no means the least important. After examining every possible means for cutting expenses and increasing income, we revamped all quotas and worked out a realistic budget which provided for a $200 monthly sustaining fund quota to the N.O. We have maintained a very business-like attitude toward finances all throughout the Local ever since, and have adhered very closely to the budget. Our biggest cut was in salaries for our full time staff. However, we also made substantial gains in income. First by more careful scrutiny of individual pledges

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and greater regularity of payments on both dues and sustaining fund pledges. Second, we did not neglect the financial side of our expanded propaganda activities. Net income from public meetings, lectures and classes for 1952 will show a big increase over the past several years. Our weekly forum has been averaging a profit of$ roo a month. Third by carefully planning social and other fund raising activities for the year and placing a competent comrade in charge of the new 'fundraising' departments. Our greatest success here was our bazaar in May which netted $400 profit, and we hope to do even better with our Christmas Bazaar. As a result, we have been able to pay all bills on the first of every month and build up a surplus. Consequently we are now able to respond to the appeal of the National Office by contributing a substantial lump sum and increasing our monthly contribution to the national sustaining fund by $50. In addition we went $ 200 over our very substantial quota of$ 4500 in the last fund drive. This report will not consider those fields of work which are the province of particular branches, such as youth work and East-Harlem tenants' work. Each branch should discuss its special problems and perspectives in the course of the pre-convention discussion and report to the convention.

IX

Summary and Conclusion

The activities described above add up to a considerable volume of achievements. If we add to all that has been reported that last March we accepted the major responsibility for the Pennsylvania ballot campaign, and completed this very difficult chore in two weeks; that at the end of July we went on to put the party on the ballot in our own state in the record time of three weeks - itself no small task; that in between we conducted a modest sub campaign which netted 121 subs, a bazaar, and organized the arrangements for the national convention; that our NYU fraction organized the biggest event of the semester: a public debate in which the editor of the FI defended Marxism before 300 students; that we organized a tenants league in East Harlem which won protection for thousands of tenants against arbitrary relocation and possible eviction, and established a toe-hold for the party in the area; and that we provided most of the manpower for the construction crew and staff of the camp - when we add it all up we can say that while there is always room for improvement, on the whole it was a year packed with fruitful activities. The record shows that in 1952 we carried out more numerous and successful activities than in recent years, and this has been both a cause and an effect of a

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morale that was consistently high all through the year, without crises or slumps. We must attribute this to the fact that we did the things we should have been doing. The prescription for the coming year should be more of the same. We should penetrate more deeply into the unions and into the left-wing political groups. We should center the activities of the local around propaganda work: regular lectures and classes, the sale of our press at selected spots, and systematic contact work. We must continue the struggle for civil liberties. We should carry on other activities to be sure, but only such activities which can either be fit into this framework, or that will not seriously interfere with our main tasks. While no plan we might devise could bring us big gains in the coming year, we believe that the approach and tasks set forth in this report will best prepare us for the historic role to which we aspire.

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Perspectives for the Period Ahead (Excerpts, 1953) D. Stevens (David Weiss) and Harry Ring

Part I

Our Local pre-convention discussion takes place at a time when the tasks and perspectives for the period immediately ahead are not indicated in an obvious way by an openly manifested, movement of the workers. 34 In a period of great upsurge, strike struggles and mass radicalization, our course can be almost automatically set by the events. Even at such times, problems abound and consciousness, analysis and a correct line are crucial. Such consciousness is all the more required today when the surface manifestations of the situation reveals mainly conservatism, reaction, class peace, and apathy. This is not the total reality. Beneath these surface manifestations lies a molecular process of the growth and development of profound transformations of ideology, and the maturing of a new readiness for great militant actions by the workers, the Negro masses and the youth. To understand this process and to draw the correct conclusions is no simple matter under present conditions. It is to be expected, therefore, that comrades will have various viewpoints on the question of tasks and perspectives, thus providing a profitable exchange of views and the basis for a correct and realistic line of work for the Local. This discussion takes place against the background of great revolutionary upheavals throughout the World with the us standing as the last stronghold of world counter-revolution. We enter the discussion armed with the brilliant analysis of this period arrived at by our co-thinkers at the 3rd World Congress, the subsequent plenums of the me, and the decisions and resolutions of our 15th National Convention. All of this should be our starting point in this discussion. The work of our co-thinkers relating to our tasks in this country is summed up by M. Pablo in the section of his report to the 10th Plenum of the me

34

Stevens and Ring 1953.

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entitled - Essentially Independent Work. There he states that 'for a whole category of very important countries where the obstacle of a strong reformist or Stalinist movement does not exist, the immediate central task of the Trotskyists is to act from now on as the revolutionary leadership of the masses'. The us is placed in this category with one reservation: our work for the formation of a labor party. This concept, 'to act from now on as the revolutionary leadership of the masses' is not a passing agitational phrase. It is not meant for the future. Pablo calls it, 'the immediate central task' and reiterates this view five times on one page alone of the published report. (International Information Bulletin - June 1952, p. 8). This idea may be questioned by some comrades in view of our present size and influence, We must understand the present situation as one of the development of the revolution everywhere. In America, it is not yet manifested. Here it is being temporarily delayed. But all the social conditions are driving towards an inevitable revolutionary eruption. Viewed in this light, the need to conduct ourselves today as the revolutionary leadership becomes apparent. Pablo answers any skepticism on this score as follows: 'The small nuclei of revolutionary Marxists can and must play the role assigned them by history, that of the revolutionary leadership. These nuclei can discharge this task and by so doing develop in a relatively short time into powerful currents, provided they are from now on prepared ideologically and politically, that is to say, if they have from now on a clear and profound understanding of the explosive revolutionary character of the period and if they elaborate a concrete policy and concrete tactic adapted to the particular conditions of their country'. He sums up, 'These nuclei can discharge this task ... if they act from now on not as a general propaganda group but as the nucleus of the revolutionary leadership conscious of the needs and aspirations of the masses of their country and have a concrete political answer to their problems'. This historic task is not for tomorrow. It is for today, 'from now on'. It is 'immediate' and 'central'. This should be our point of departure for estimating our work and elaborating our tasks. In our opinion this approach is absent from comrade Bartell's The New York Local-Report And Tasks.

Essentially, this document proceeds not from the need to act today as the revolutionary leadership but rather to act as a propaganda group. It sees little if any active role for our party in the mass movement and among the workers today and turns its major attention to propaganda directed towards the groups in and around the Stalinist movement as the main axis of our work in

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this period. In this sense it fails to proceed from the analysis of the Third World Congress and from the Political Resolution of our 15th National Convention. This national Political Resolution states unambiguously, 'The work of our party has been and continues to be fundamentally directed toward influencing, winning and recruiting leftward moving militants among the organized workers - especially in the CIO -who owe no allegiance to any radical party. This is our main field of work'. Even the section which underscores the importance of activity directed towards workers in the Stalinist circles concludes, 'This tactic (towards the Stalinists) is a necessary supplement to our main course of struggling for influence and leadership over the principal body of trade union militants and politically unorganized workers'. (Our emphasis). As in Pablo's report this 'main course' is not postponed for the future. It lists as the most important of our 'present activities ... work in the unions, mass organization and electoral activity'. It further asserts, 'The great bulk of the American working class still remains politically unorganized and attached to the capitalist parties and our main strategic orientation in this country flows from that fact. The raising of the workers from trade union to political class consciousness, the transformation of their great industrial power into independent class political action remains the principal political orientation and strategy of the party'. We believe that the Report And Tasks in its primary emphasis is at variance with this orientation. It is necessary to appraise this consciously, carefully- and to correct it. We are quoting liberally from the documents of our movement both nationally and internationally because we are firmly convinced that our New York perspectives and tasks should be based upon them. The section on trade union work in the Report And Tasks begins with a question: 'Since the mass movement is quiescent (relatively), ... and our opportunities for work in the union movement have become extremely limited, and since

our activities are to be directed primarily toward more politically conscious circles, the question naturally arises; what about the proletarian, or trade union, orientation?' (Our emphasis). Whatever the answer to this question may be, and we will deal with it, it must be recognized that the question states that our main tasks are in the direction of 'more politically conscious circles' rather than in the mass movement and the trade unions. This reversal of the order of things is based on an incorrect conception of the relation of immediate tasks and orientation to the main perspective of our party, over a longer period of time. It was put as follows (in comrade Bartell's summation at the city membership meeting of Nov. 30, 1952). 'True, our main tasks are in the mass movement, but that is the strategy for the long run. It will

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become our main work tomorrow when there will be great labor upsurges. The supplementary work directed towards the Stalinists, semi-Stalinists, etc., - that is a tactic and constitutes our main work for today'. The conclusion is clear. Our main orientation becomes a secondary field of work today. The tactic directed at the Stalinists becomes our major work today. This construction is certainly not in accord with the documents of our movement nationally and internationally. The postponement of work in the mass movement as our primary task to some future date is based upon an incorrect and one-sided understanding of the nature of the 'relative quiescence' in the labor movement. It is necessary to understand this quiescence not formally, statically, but dialectically. What is the nature of this particular quiescence? Is it the quiescence of the American labor movement of the prosperous twenties? Or that of the German movement under Hitler? Obviously not. This present quiescence in America, at any rate a very important aspect of it, is one of preparation for pending class battles. New layers of militants are emerging, and together with old militants in the shops are searching and groping on various Levels of consciousness for new ways of struggle. This is what is important to us. Every worker comrade knows too well the limitations for work in the unions. He feels it every day. The task of the party is precisely to develop ways and means of carrying on fruitful work in the mass movement within the limitations: to inspire and guide the work from day to day. The Report And Tasks sees only one side of the present situation in the mass movement. It says only that 'our opportunities for work in the union movement have become extremely limited'. It sees only 'the working class as it is - in all its conservatism and apathy - .. .' ... It accepts our isolation from the workers politically for this period and sees our role among them at present mainly as one of maintaining links with the class 'physically' in order to be on the spot later when great struggles break out. For the present period it contains no perspective, orientation, or concrete program. At its best it speaks negatively about how 'it is of course not true that nothing whatever can be done even today in the shops and unions'. (Our emphasis). It grants that 'The class struggle, as we know, is never completely dormant'. At the city membership meeting comrade Bartell fixed the degree of life of the mass movement more precisely by declaring that it is more nearly dead than not dead. Such 'realistic' formulations can only appeal to moods of pessimism. How different is the Political Resolution on this question. It does not simply accept a state of quiescence. It analyzes it, and views it in all of its aspects. It

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finds that the conservatism 'discemable among the workers, especially the better paid', the power of the bureaucracy and the growth of reaction 'does not mean that the big events and experiences of the post-war period have passed without effect upon the American people. The impact of militarization especially, has already begun to produce certain shifts, in the moods and minds of some parts of the population. The more critical among them are carefully observing the powers above them and are less duped, and confused by their lies. They are interested in such fundamental problems of world and national affairs as war and peace, the colonial uprisings, the USSR and government policy'. This entirely correct analysis shows the other side of the picture; the side that makes, fruitful work possible for us. It is not stated for merely inspirational purposes. The Political Resolution goes on to say: 'The whole course of American imperialism abroad mingled with the aggravation of their personal and class problems is leading the working people to view the great issues of our society in a broader way. Until recently, to consider problems in global terms was the mark of a radical; today attention to world problems is becoming an every day matter. However retarded or confused its first manifestations are, this serves to overcome the traditional provincialism of the workers and makes them more accessible to socialist ideas and education'. This is another important aspect of the state of quiescence and is of the greatest importance for us. It opens up to us the possibilities of political work in the mass movement. All this is for the present, not the future. This is made clear over and over again by our national Political Resolution, which was unanimously adopted. Has anything occurred since then to cause us to depart from it, or to modify it? If so, what is it? Or was the Political Resolution wrong on this question at the time it was adopted? If so, then how and why? It is always necessary to square what we say and do today with what we said and did yesterday. This is scientific procedure in every field. In another connection dealing with the war drive the Political Resolution concludes, 'All the broadening, deepening, basic causes arousing unrest continue to operate on the background of this unresolved political crisis of American labor. This dictates that the militants multiply their efforts in the unions to help clarify the gathering political ferment and further any moves toward progressive breaks away from traditional collaborationist politics and in the direction of independent political action by labor'. This is decisive. To act as the revolutionary leadership, oriented in the main towards the masses. We should declare with Pablo 'It is necessary to start where the masses themselves start ... It is necessary to have confidence in the masses,

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to avoid an over-estimation of their apparent apathy during any period, their inevitable temporary retreats, and it is necessary not to underestimate the constant molecular processes taking place in its depths and operating in the direction of the revolution and which explain the abrupt qualitative transformations, the revolutionary explosions. It is necessary not to be late. It is necessary to act quickly, to be always ready, full of the spirit of revolutionary initiative and boldness. It is the character of the period which imposes this conception. It is necessary to understand it and to demonstrate it by acting adequately'. It is this spirit, this orientation, this analysis which must be a living part of the New York Local. We must proceed energetically and against all obstacles, with a firm revolutionary will to apply these ideas, to carry them out in life in our work in the mass movement. How can we apply this in the trade union movement today? If we view mass work as activities only during periods of strike struggles, or internal struggles within the unions, then it is difficult to see any field for work in this sphere today. Mass work does not start and cease with the rise and fall of the class struggle. It only changes its form. Our work must be continuous and persistent in periods of lull and preparation as well as during periods of upsurge. We must view our tasks in the mass movement today as one of intensive political work on the job together with broader work on the question of the labor party, the Korean war, and the wage freeze. It is often possible to speak quite freely on these questions to broad strata of workers in all mass organizations today. The passing of a labor party resolution at the last national convention of the UAW in the very midst of the period of lull and reaction is highly symptomatic of great changes in the moods and thinking of significant sections of the working class. This was expressed again only a few weeks ago in the passing of a labor party resolution by Ford local No. 600 after an unprecedented attack on the militants and leaders of these workers by the press, the Reuther bureaucracy and the House Un-American Committee. The UE at its last national convention also adopted a labor party resolution. And here in New York one of our comrades, as has been reported, was able to speak on the labor party question before 800 workers of local 65 and before the Stewards' Council. These do not constitute a mass tum towards a labor party. But they are not accidental events. They express serious and cumulative stirrings in the ranks of labor, which is becoming increasingly distrustful of the two capitalist parties and their domestic and foreign policies. It reflects the need felt by a growing number of workers to find a political means to meet the political attacks upon them.

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By speaking for a labor party, against the war and the wage freeze wherever an opportunity presents itself, our comrades can attract and gather the best militants around themselves. As this occurs, we must unfold a process of intensive political education of these elements. Personal discussions with such workers, obtaining help from the most qualified comrades in the local by introducing them to these workers, the use of our press; all this opens up the most important and the most fruitful contact work in this period. Our own cadres must be educated not only on the great problems of the revolution which is sweeping the world, but equally on the great problems that confront American labor today. They must be armed with facts and ideas in order to develop the necessary confidence and firmness which are so much required today in the mass movement. Our fractions, although small and not involved in union power struggles, should meet frequently and regularly in an organized manner. Their business should consist primarily of our political work in the unions and the shops. Reports on each single contact should be made and discussed. How can this worker be developed politically; how can he be brought closer to us; how can the party comrade be aided in his work with his contact? These questions should be the center of fraction work. The fraction members should use The Militant and other literature in the plant and in the union. Here they must, of course, exercise the necessary caution and common sense. But they must do it. Every fraction member should report regularly on literature work. Undertake to handle a sort of bundle order. Begin, let us say, with one Militant a week, or even every two weeks. Build it up to two a week or more, if at all possible. Do it regularly. Discuss its effects. Follow it up. We may have every assurance that this kind of work will 'pay off'. The excellent work of comrades Calvin and Boa, among others demonstrates the fruitfulness of this work. The party leaders are perforce removed from the day to day life in the shops. Regular fraction meetings provide the vehicle for the exchange of experiences, information and ideas between the party leaders and the worker comrades. This link serves to deepen and broaden the work. The fractions and individual members should report frequently to the branches, and on special occasions to city membership meetings on their work. Shop reports should be made and used to inspire other comrades, to learn lessons, and to set examples for activity in the mass movement. The city trade union director should guide this work consistently and report regularly to the City Committee the state and the progress of our trade union work.

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The entire leadership of the Local must periodically review the disposition of our forces in this field from a long range perspective. The question of concentration must be dealt with in an organized manner through the fractions and the leadership of the Local consciously and prepared to make any necessary alterations at every new opportunity and every change in the situation. But we cannot expect to enlarge our work in the trade unions or even to maintain what we have effectively, with a perspective based mainly upon the idea that we are simply accumulating seniority for the future struggles, while we maintain 'physical' contact with apathetic workers today. This will inspire no one to do vital work in the mass movement. Comrades will be convinced to change their jobs, to live as 'proletarian revolutionists' only if the party provides immediate perspectives for proletarian revolutionary activity. The preparation for the great labor upsurges to come is in the labor movement itself. That is where the workers are preparing. That is where we must prepare - along side of them.... [A]s laid down in the political resolution of oun952 national convention and in the report of Comrade Pablo to the Tenth Plenum of the me, ... the national orientation of the party clearly and correctly characterizes work in the trade union movement in this period as primary, and propaganda work in Stalinist and liberal circles as an important but supplementary arena of activity. ... Comrade Bartell's Report and Tasks reverses this relationship between primary and supplementary fields of work for the period immediately ahead. This reversal is not fully expressed in an explicit, clear-cut manner. Much of it must be inferred in our opinion from the over-evaluation of the opportunities, inherent in work directed toward the 'left-wing groups;' the underestimation of the possibilities available to us, in trade union work, a largely one-sided, pessimistic view of the state of the workers movement today and by omission. The lack of a positive perspective for fruitful work within the limitations of the situation in the trade unions and shops today constitutes the principal weakness of the Report's trade union section. A similar lack is even more, strikingly seen in a field of work that the entire party has come to understand as second only to trade union work. We refer, of course, to the Negro struggle, which is completely ignored in the Report and Tasks. A report on 'tasks' which omits the question of our work in the Negro movement cannot be considered complete. On this question too we can obtain guidance from the political resolution of our last national convention. The resolution states: 'The new stage of militancy in the Negro resistance to discrimination and the new techniques

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of Jim Crow brought to bear against them, have already been noted. Incident upon incident arouses indignation and impels the Negroes into organized protest. Our party should continue and expand its support to all actions against Jim Crow undertaken by the NAACP, in the plants and in the neighborhoods. 'In and through these activities our comrades must seek to educate the best militants we meet among the Negro people on the basic causes of the Jim Crow system and convince them that the full emancipation of the Negro people can be achieved only through the struggle for the socialist revolution. In this way we can enlarge the Negro cadres of our party and help give the Negro people the kind of leadership they need .. .'. We believe that, necessary as it is to build the revolutionary cadres in the unions and plants toda:y in preparation for the great upsurges tomorrow, it is, in a sense, even more imperative that we hammer out a revolutionary Negro cadre toda:y. White Trotskyists can prepare to lead the union struggles tomorrow, but only Negro Trotskyists can lead the coming Negro upsurge. This crucial fact must be understood with the fullest clarity. We will win the leadership of the Negro struggle tomorrow only if we undertake the task of forging a Negro cadre today. The absence of this concept from the report is not alone due to the lack of a correct orientation and consciousness. It is expressed not only in the report, but, even more decisively, in our work. We must begin with the fact that for almost a year the Local has not conducted any organized work in this important field. Even where the Local has correctly attempted to gain a toehold amongst the Puerto Rican people, through the medium of the Tenants League, the central task of developing a Puerto Rican cadre, has not been brought forward with sufficient clarity. In Negro work, as in the trade union field, a recognition of the present limitations, and in some ways, even greater difficulties, of carrying out this task cannot become a reason for foregoing it. We realize full well that the task of building a trained Marxist Negro and Puerto Rican cadre is the thorniest problem confronting the New York Local. But this can only mean that even greater attention must be devoted to it. The beginning of the accomplishment of this task must be the conscious acceptance of the responsibility for it by the Local leadership. No significant results can come from a relegation of it to a branch. The New York Branch of the NAACP lags behind other branches throughout the country (particularly in the South) in its reaction to the new wave of Jim Crow terror. This makes even more limited the opportunity for our effective participation in its life. But it does not permit our absence from it. To explain

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the fact that we do not have a single comrade in the NAACP by simply stating that 'there is nothing doing there' misses the point completely. Our long standing estimate of the NAACP as the principal organization of Negro struggle has been strengthened by the post war developments. In his report to the city convention of 1950, that is, two years after the 1948 decline in the working class and Negro struggle, Comrade Bartell correctly declared: 'We determined to persist in our efforts to strengthen and consolidate existing fractions and to establish new ones in the unions and the Negro mass organizations. In this field too, we saw our major task the political struggle against both the Stalinist and the 'right-wing' in order to lay the basis for a genuine left-wing and to recruit advanced workers and Negro militants'. If anything has happened in the past two years to justify altering or forgetting this 'major task' it should be explicitly stated in the Report. The Uptown Branch in the course of this pre-convention discussion has begun to consider specific proposals to send at least one comrade into the NAACP; to investigate the possibility of participation in Negro discussion groups and clubs; and to begin the regular sale of our press at the Negro 'y', the Schoenberg Library and other gathering centers where it may be possible to reach the individuals who will be the potential cadre material that we are seeking. If these proposals are to be executed in an effective and thorough-going fashion it can only be on the basis of their becoming a major responsibility of the incoming City Committee. We are not attempting here to draw up a blue print of concrete activity. It is the orientation and perspective that counts. The arduous, obstacle-ridden path to the Negro cadre cannot be successfully traversed by the Uptown Branch alone. The New York Local from the top down must re-enter the field of Negro work. ...

Part II ... Opponents' Work

The Stalinist movement, although small and in progressive decay in America, is still larger than our small party. To the degree that it exercises influence among sections of workers, the Negro people, and youth, it constitutes an obstacle to us and requires our special attention. The Report's section on opponents work does not present a clearly defined perspective for the comrades assigned to this work. This lack can create the danger of the development, particularly among young inexperienced comrades, of misconceptions that can strip their work of effectiveness.

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Equally important, in our opinion, is the absence of a sober and realistic estimate of the situation in the Stalinist circles and of the scope and nature of the opportunities open to us. We believe the following section of the Report demonstrates this. 'The atmosphere in and around the Stalinist movement is less hostile than ever before. Indeed, their movement could be said to be rife with "Trotskyist conciliationism". Unity sentiments are wide-spread even among some leaders and spokesmen of the PP movement. Our victory over the Stalinists in the civil liberties struggle is virtually complete. The Daily Worker editorial on the Kutcher case was the formal announcement of the change in line. Leading Stalinist spokesmen are declaring both publicly and privately that they were wrong both in the case of the 18 and the Kutcher case, and proclaim the need for unity in the struggle. Trotskyism has become legitimized among many Stalinist members and sympathizers who recognize us as a legitimate, although 'ultra-leftist', tendency in the radical movement'. If the picture were as bright as it is here depicted, it would certainly dictate a major tactical tum towards this movement locally and nationally. One could legitimately raise for consideration the question of some form of an entrist maneuver in order to crystalize this 'widespread sentiment'. If the Stalinist movement were indeed 'rife with Trotskyist conciliationism', we would necessarily deal with it in the positive fashion that we did in the case of the Musteites and the Socialist Party left wing. At any rate, if 'leading Stalinist spokesmen (not one but several) proclaim(!) the need for unity in the struggle (unity with us, we presume)', we should be energetically pushing propositions for the realization of such 'unity'. The only experience of this kind that we can recall occurred during the organization of the Citizens Emergency Defense Committee about a year ago. At that time, with the support of leading non-Stalinists behind us, we proposed that we be given representation on the executive board. Again risking the danger of a fight with the non-Stalinist elements, the Stalinist majority turned the proposition down cold. We are not saying that there is no basis at all for the exaggerated picture of the Stalinist movement contained in the Report. As a result of the serious blows we have dealt to Stalinism on many questions, and by our independent struggle in the civil rights cases of the 18 and James Kutcher, there is today less hostility among their ranks and sympathizers towards us. This is important and good, and should so be recorded in the report. But to exaggerate its scope and depth, as we think the Report does, can only lead to 'wishful thinking' and a softness toward Stalinism. The same lack of sobriety is expressed on relationship to the current Stalinist attitude on our civil rights. The report states that 'our victory' over them 'is virtu-

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ally complete'. It says further that 'the Daily Worker editorial on the Kutcher case was the formal announcement of the change in line'. Should these statements be accepted literally? Has Stalinism actually decided to join the struggle for our civil rights? It should be obvious what is involved here. Under our direct blows and under the pressure of their liberal allies who threatened to break with them they have been forced to abandon their suicidal policy of open struggle against our civil rights. This too is on the profit side and should be exploited to the fullest. But this should not lead to the faintest illusions that Stalinism is now ready to genuinely defend our rights. Their retreat on the question of our civil rights dictates a heightened campaign on our part within their ranks. Every effort should be made within the ALP, the Compass Clubs, YPA, the Monthly Review, the Youth Peace Council, the Citizens Emergency Defense Conference, etc. to bring the Kutcher Case, the Trucks Law case, coupled with our defense of Stalinist defendants, sharply to the fore. Such propositions should be included in the Report, which says only that 'we should take the fullest advantage of this opportunity to penetrate deeply into this movement'. The Report proposes to 'send a number of comrades into the ALP who are prepared to participate in its activities and remain in for a considerable period of time'. What is the precise meaning of this? How many constitutes 'a number of comrades?' What type of comrades? Can young inexperienced comrades accomplish this task? Or will it be necessary to make older politically seasoned comrades available for this? Will the comrades who enter function openly as Trotskyists or will it be necessary for them to establish themselves simply as good ALP builders over a period of time? These are some of the practical, concrete questions that must be posed and solved, if there is in fact 'this exceptional opportunity ... ' for us in and around the Stalinist movements. The Report says further that it is of the 'utmost importance that our members find a field for political activity today outside of our own party, to maintain contact with the rest of the left wing political world and to propagate our ideas to people who are equipped to understand them (!) and are willing to listen'. At this point things are stood on their heads. It is, of course, completely correct to state that it is 'of the utmost importance that our members find a field of political activity today outside our own party'. The Report, however, looks in the wrong place for the primary accomplishment of this necessary task. It finds this field not in the factories, where, we are told, that our role in this period is limited to maintaining 'contact with the working class and gain a footing for future advances', but rather in what it terms 'the rest of the left wing political world'.

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It is mainly there that the Report finds 'people that are equipped to understand them (our ideas) and are willing to listen'. Implicit in this is the conception that the worker in the shop is not 'equipped to understand' our ideas at the present time. If this is so then there is something obviously wrong - not with the workers - but with our ideas and our methods of propagating them. As a proletarian revolutionary party it is our cardinal task to address ourselves to the workers - in a way they will understand. There is no substitute for this process. If we fail in this we fail in everything. Moreover, it is in the course of this process that we can do our most effective opponents work. For it is in the field of the class struggle that Trotskyists can demonstrate in life to Stalinist-influenced workers the correctness of our program in competition with all others. Finally, it must be clearly understood that we cannot recruit from the Stalinist circles on the basis of attempting to demonstrate that we have a better program for the realization of common aims. To the contrary, we must prove and demonstrate that ours is the sole correct program and leadership and that the Stalinist program and leadership can lead only to betrayal and defeats. Only in this way can we convince rank and file Stalinist not, as some of their 'conciliationist' elements tell us, that we 'really belong with them in the ALP', but that they belong in the SWP with us. At this point we want to discuss an aspect of Comrade Bartell's report which he touches upon, in passing, in several places. This is the question of what is termed 'the danger of sectarian decay', to our movement. Page 2 of the Report refers to 'the danger of succumbing to conditions of isolation by sinking into the habits, moods and methods of an ingrown sect'. On page 3 we are told there is the need for 'counteracting the process of stagnation which comes with isolation'. If the need exists for 'counteracting' this danger, we, must assume that it already exists in some incipient form, and is not merely a theoretical possibility considered inherent in the present situation. If this be the case, this certainly is not the way our movement deals with so important a problem. Such a danger should be dealt with in a sufficiently specific way as to make the membership conscious of its existence and thereby able to cope with it. What are the manifestations of this danger? How can it be cured? We should have concrete answers to these questions if the danger is an actual one. If, on the other hand, the danger of sectarian decay is viewed simply as a theoretical possibility - then a more rounded view should be taken. Why take for granted only the danger of sectarian decay? One can speak with at least as much validity of the theoretical possibility of the danger of opportunistic efforts to break out of our isolation. Actually it has been largely in periods

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of proletarian upsurge that history has demonstrated the danger of lagging behind the masses in sectarian isolation from them. Periods of reaction and isolation usually witness the development of opportunist tendencies to leap beyond the limits of the situation and over the head of the mass movement. This is an expression of impatience with the historic process and of a desire to find shortcuts to success. In any event, questions of this scope should not be introduced in a local discussion merely in passing and in a manner that takes anything for granted. In this discussion article we aimed at correcting a marked tendency of the Report and Tasks to underestimate our role in the trade unions and Negro movement today, and to make the Stalinist movement our major preoccupation. We therefore dealt only with a number of questions which have a direct bearing on this problem. Other questions like the youth, our press, the branches, etc., will, however, be dealt with in the course of our pre-convention discussion. Also, we find ourselves substantially in agreement with the report in its sections on the forum, classes, contact work, etc., as questions in and of themselves. The main question before us in this discussion, however, is that of basic orientation. If comrades think that the orientation decided upon by our last national convention no longer applies for the period ahead - they should use the national internal discussion bulletin which has been made available for such purposes. If the major orientation towards the Stalinists today is motivated by the peculiarities of New York City- those peculiarities should be enumerated and examined concretely to see if they dictate a different course. For our part, we don't believe that is the case. Our party acts on many fronts because the class struggle is a complex and manifold process. At different times different aspects of the struggle assume special importance for the party and for the development of the revolutionary movement in the working class. We must be flexible in order to take advantage of various opportunities as they arise in one field or another. But at all times we must view each task in relation to our main job as a proletarian revolutionary party. That is to gather, educate and organize the revolutionary leadership in the mass movement of the workers and of the oppressed. Note: We wish to correct two errors of fact in the first section of our discussion article dealing with the possibilities for propaganda work around the labor party question. Neither the past conventions of the UAW or the UE actually adopted labor party resolutions. In the case of the UAw such a resolution had wide support from the delegates and was defeated only on the basis of Reuther's direct intervention. Even this intervention was motivated solely on the basis of

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a demagogic appeal that the adoption of such a resolution would torpedo the newly formed AFL-CIO United Labor Policy Committee. At the same time he found it necessary to strongly associate himself with the sentiment for a labor party which was held by the majority of the convention. Despite his intervention and parliamentary maneuvering the resolution secured the votes of more than 20 % of the delegates. In the case of the UE the need for the organization of a labor party was put forward in the keynote speech of President Albert Fitzgerald, who was unanimously re-elected. The resolution adopted was sufficiently vague, however, as to permit the endorsement of candidates of the existing parties. We believe that our contention that these and other facts cited did not constitute a mass tum towards a labor party, but were rather symptomatic expressions that indicated the possibility open to us remains fully valid. The report in the December 29 issue of The Militant on the adoption of an excellent labor party resolution by Chevrolet Local 1031 of the UAW in Oakland further demonstrates the point.

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7

For an Independent Party Based on a Proletarian Orientation (1953)

Farrell Dobbs

Titanic social struggles heralding the doom of the outlived capitalist system are today convulsing the world. 35 Over one-third of the world's population has already wrenched itself free from the capitalist orbit. China's liberation from imperialist oppression, and its emergence as a great world power, has given tremendous impetus to the struggles of the colonial and semi-colonial peoples everywhere. The spreading revolution has now reached the Americas. In Bolivia armed detachments of workers are leading the struggle to free their land from the grip of the foreign exploiters and the native capitalist-landlord class. Leftward currents are surging through the working classes of Western Europe and England. Capitalism finds the problem of defeating the revolution increasingly formidable. The revolution, on the other hand, is not yet capable of abolishing capitalism in its main centers, primarily because of the continuing crisis of leadership in the working class. Although capitalism's doom is already signaled by the snapping of the weakest links in the world imperialist chain, the decisive struggles still lie ahead. The developing conflict may in the opening phases have the general appearance of a war between nations. But this will be little more than a surface appearance for the reality will be a war between classes. Every worker must take his place in this developing class battle on the side of the revolutionary working class, no matter what peculiar forms the struggle may take, no matter what treacherous political tendencies may hold leadership over the working class sector at one stage or another. At the present stage of this great conflict, the world Trotskyist movement finds itself a small minority tendency, but a tendency armed with a powerful

35

Dobbs 1953.

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revolutionary program. The task of the Trotskyists everywhere is to fuse this program with the mass movement of their country, polarize a genuinely revolutionary mass leadership around the program and thus assure final victory in the struggle against capitalism. The Third Congress correctly urged that Trotskyists everywhere get into the main stream of the mass movement, regardless of the incumbent leadership, and stay there through thick and thin, through good times and bad. The Congress did not recommend any policy of softness toward alien political tendencies, nor did it advocate any blunting or muddling of the Trotskyist program in executing tactical maneuvers. The Trotskyist cadres were urged instead to maintain theoretical and programmatic firmness, to remain crystal-clear as to their aims, in order to properly execute the difficult and complex tactics they find it necessary to employ. Broad lines of tactical variations were delineated as a general aid to the formulation of precise tactics according to the existing relations within the working class in each country. Three broad lines of reference were set forth: Penetrate the ranks of the Stalinists where they predominate in the mass movement. Penetrate the ranks of the Social Democrats where they predominate. Where neither the Stalinists nor the Social Democrats predominate in the mass movement maintain a course as an independent party acting as the revolutionary leadership of the working class. No matter which of these tactical courses it may be necessary to follow, the ultimate aim remains the same as always - to build an independent revolutionary mass party. We here must build our party in the imperialist heartland, where capitalism remains strong and the class struggle remains at a relatively elementary level. Washington is waging a relentless struggle against the spreading revolution. It is girding for all-out war and striving to stifle all opposition to the war program at home. The atmosphere here is charged with tension. Vast pressures are bearing down on people in every walk of life, on every class, party, organization and tendency. People tend to think and react according to the manner in which they feel these pressures. Some who look beyond our shores at the revolutionary turmoil elsewhere in the world, and then observe the state of relative social tranquility prevailing in this country, get the mistaken feeling that American capitalism enjoys some long-term immunity from the revolutionary tide. They hear no open rumblings of social crisis here. They see no real upsurge in the class struggle. They see political reaction riding high and for the moment not seriously challenged. They react with a mood of gloom and pessimism over the prospects of the class struggle in this country.

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Our party is not at all immune to this process. Manifestations of this gloomy mood, plus our external difficulties in the present political climate here have generated a critical internal situation for us. This state of affairs has been gradually developing across six years of cold-war pressures and it is now beginning to hit us in full force. A factional grouping has crystallized in our party under the leadership of Comrade Cochran. This faction stands opposed to the fundamental orientation under which we have been building our party for the past 25 years. The Cochranite position has not been openly presented to the party. Instead it has been peddled to individuals, hinted at in occasional remarks at branch meetings and to a limited extent in higher party bodies. Evidence of the Cochranite line is to be found, not in clearly formulated documents, but in the pattern of their behaviors After more than a year of surreptitious opposition to the party line, we are now told by the Cochranites that they are preparing documents setting forth their views. Meantime, they have stepped up the tempo of their smuggling operations. We therefore consider a mere ruse their arguments that we, of the majority, should await their documents before opening debate with them in the party. We already have enough evidence to get a clear idea of their line. On that basis we are prepared to make a general statement of what we are for and what we are against. If and when the Cochranites do state openly what they stand for, we can discuss their position more fully. Lenin pointed out that those too weak to withstand reaction betray their weakness in the realms of theory, tactics and party organization. When this occurs, he said, the class conscious workers must take control. Every party member should interest himself in a correct analysis of objective conditions, in the maintaining of a general line of party orientation corresponding to objective needs and in the necessary criticisms of party failings. We hope that every comrade who feels he or she has something to say will speak out without hesitation during this discussion. It will be good for the party. The main points of the dispute will gradually become crystal-clear to all and then the party membership can make its decision. In our judgment, the Cochranites are seeking to introduce a basic shift from our established party orientation thus giving rise to a fundamental dispute involving the following alternative courses: 1. Shall we continue our course as an independent party, or shall we change our orientation to that of a propaganda group? 2. Shall we focus our main attention on work in the mass movement, or shall we direct our main efforts toward work in and around the Stalinist movement?

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Shall we orient toward a showdown fight against the Stalinists for leadership of the workers in the coming mass radicalization, or shall we adopt a conciliatory attitude toward the Stalinist movement? 4. Shall the paper be primarily an agitational organ aimed at influencing the workers by means of our transitional demands, or shall it be primarily a propaganda organ aimed at influencing intellectuals and politicallyinformed elements? 5. Shall we maintain a general program of activities as demanded of an independent party, or shall we confine our activities to work consistent with a propaganda-group perspective? To answer these questions correctly, we must grasp the essence of the objective conditions in this country today. We must determine what general pattern the coming class battles in the United States are most likely to assume as foreshadowed by trends discemable in the present objective reality. The convention resolution described the total situation for American imperialism today in general terms as one of irreconcilable conflicts on the international field and of unsolvable economic contradictions at home. Imperialism has failed to smash any post-war revolutionary development through the internal strength of capitalism within countries in revolt. Military intervention by the imperialists, when limited to single countries like Korea and Inda-China, has thus far produced no more than a stalemate. Imperialism thus finds itself driven toward an all-out counter-revolutionary war, aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, in an attempt to crush the revolutionary mass movement now striking hammer-blows against the capitalist system. American imperialism, as the only remaining viable section of the world capitalist class, must carry the main load of such a war. The modem capitalist state, however, can wage full-scale war only with the support of the labor movement, or with the labor movement crushed. The capitalist state would find itself in extreme peril if it should be confronted simultaneously with all-out war abroad and serious class conflict at home. The American imperialists thus face a dilemma. Can they go to war with the expectation of preserving relative internal stability on the home front? Can they depend on labor quislings successfully duping the mass, thereby enabling the capitalist government to deal with dissenters through acts of repression? If not, can they risk, under present world conditions, provoking a showdown fight with labor before enlarging the war? Or can they go ahead with the war plans, depending on aid from the labor quislings long enough to permit preparations for a military dictatorship? Can they hope to impose fascist rule at a fast tempo? What can they do? A lot of midnight oil is being burned in Washington over this dilemma.

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Some within the movement, who draw pessimistic conclusions from the present ascendency of reaction and the ebb in the class struggle here, seem ready to concede in advance that us imperialism can go a long way with its war program, trusting to improvization to ward off any serious opposition on the home front. They seem to consider the American workers generally corrupted into conscious defenders of capitalism by their present relatively high standard of living. They seem to foresee imperialism carrying through its war program for a prolonged period with a favorable relation of class forces for it here at home. It is true that the present relative prosperity of the American workers has acted as a conservatizing factor. Yet it is equally true that this conservatism will steadily give way to militancy as the workers experience serious cuts in their living standards. These cuts are bound to deepen as the war program unfolds and, together with the general suffering and sacrifice imposed by the war program, will lead to a profound social crisis. Still another dilemma facing imperialism - the ever-present danger of an economic depression - can also serve to speed the mass radicalization. This danger can be minimized to a degree by the war program, but not entirely eliminated. In fact, a serious threat of economic crisis could impel the capitalist government to speed up the war tempo, under disadvantageous conditions both at home and abroad, in an effort to ward off the greater danger of a depression. Nor is it excluded that an unexpectedly sharp economic downturn could hit so fast that it would cause serious disruption of the present class equilibrium, Worker militancy can also be generated by pressure from the capitalists who are eager to cash in, at the expense of labor, on their 1952 election victory. Further impetus toward worker militancy can be expected from the policies and general attitude toward labor of the present government, dominated as it is by brass hats, millionaires, career witch hunters and a large conglomeration of reactionary and ultra-reactionary capitalist politicians. These factors that will serve objectively to generate worker militancy are heavily discounted by those who are becoming deeply infected with pessimism. They seem to hold a dark view of the prospects of any serious class struggle manifestations before the workers have experienced extremely harsh blows. They seem to take this view on the ground that America still remains a middleclass country or at least that a middle-class mentality still prevails. This gloomy view manifests a tendency to attach undue significance to such superficial phenomena as the present relative economic prosperity and the continued political monopoly of the capitalist two-party system. Beneath these superficial phenomena lies the reality of a class polarization in the basic social

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structure of America that is probably the greatest there is anywhere in the world, a class polarization that has the most profound political significance. The vast growth of monopoly capital in America has reduced the actual ruling class numerically to a relatively small gang of extremely wealthy people wielding tremendous economic power, in consequence of which they have sufficient political power to fasten a stranglehold on the government. This growth of monopoly concentration and its fusion with the state apparatus have led to a constant decline in the specific gravity of the middle classes in industrial production. Middle-class holdings in agriculture have similarly given way on an increasing scale to the development of corporation farms, which in tum speeds the growth of a property-less class of agricultural laborers. There has been a steady decline in rural population caused by migration of rural elements to the cities, largely to become industrial workers. In the cities, the middle classes have tended to become atomized into managers, technicians, lawyers, doctors, etc. Taken as a whole this is a picture of profound decline in the real power of the middle classes and their capacity to play an influential role on the American political scene. They can be led but they can't lead. The only real power counterposed to that of the monopoly capitalists is the power of the workers, who have the greatest power of all, a power that is already present and is only waiting to be fully realized. The workers today constitute a decisive majority of the population. They have already demonstrated their ability through their unions to halt production, despite the combined opposition of the capitalists and their government. Once they take the road of independent political action they can soon demonstrate their ability to control production, to take the reins of government into their own hands and regulate the entire social life of the country. Preliminary signs have appeared that the organized workers are beginning to act politically along class lines. They tend more and more to vote the way the unions officially decide. This tendency is a mark of both their already highly developed union consciousness and their ripening class political consciousness. Even though they still vote for capitalist politicians, the fact that they tend to vote more and more as a bloc is a progressive sign of class political solidarity This tendency of the workers to move in a body, progressive though it is, creates a problem for us at the present stage. We are thrust into a general position of what the convention resolution called 'organized' isolation. Only a social shock can radically change this situation for us in terms of the broad mass of workers. Yet it does not follow that our isolation is at all absolute because the workers presently follow the leadership of the union officialdom. The action of the masses is determined in the long run by objective conditions and only secondarily by the policies of the leadership. Of these two

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controlling factors, the objective conditions will in the end be decisive because the laws of historical change are far stronger than any union bureaucrat. The masses don't always move when their leaders tell them to, nor do they always refrain from moving when their leaders tell them not to act. In the long run international and national forces determine their actions. The policies of the union officialdom are already in gross violation of the objective needs of the workers. Here and there we already observe outbreaks of opposition to the union bureaucracy. Militant demands are raised that go beyond present official policy. As the workers' objective position becomes more difficult for them, we will find greater opportunities to win adherents to our program and party. To the extent that the union bureaucrats delay taking even partial measures to allay mass unrest, a vacuum in political leadership will be created that will give us a better chance to win new strength in the union ranks. We do not have in mind a vacuum of leadership in the sense of the NRA period, when workers were entering the unions in such great masses that the existing bureaucracy could not begin to fill all the necessary union offices and members were swiftly elevated from the ranks into high official posts. We mean in this regard a vacuum of the objectively necessary political leadership in the unions. Our task is to fill this political void with a body of left-wing militants, armed with our program, who will become the actual leaders of more and more workers even though they hold only minor union posts or no official posts at all. When we speak of a vacuum, we don't mean to assume the probability that we will fill this political vacuum in the total sense of stepping directly to full leadership of the mass movement at the first big scale explosion and radicalization. We mean that the greater the vacuum and the longer it exists, the better opportunity we will have in the fight for decisive leadership of the mass when the social crisis develops. When we speak of a vacuum, we don't mean that a decline in activity on the electoral arena of opponent radical parties signifies the creation of a vacuum on the parliamentary field that will enable us to win mass political leadership through election campaigns. We mean only that to meet less opposition from other radical tendencies on the electoral arena would eliminate an element of confusion in the popular mind as to who speaks for socialism in this country. This would directly aid our work in the mass movement where the real fight for political leadership must take place. The great body of workers who will form the basic contingent of tomorrow's mass revolutionary party are today to be found in the unions. There will be a wide-open fight of the 'left' tendencies for leadership of the workers when the mass radicalization comes.

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At present Social Democrats of the Reuther type appear to have a big edge over us in the unions. However, they will not loom so formidably once the workers begin to demand action from them instead of their double-talk and fancy promises. As mass radicalization develops and the demands for action grow, we shall find ourselves in an ever-stronger position to break their grip on the official leadership of the union movement. The Stalinists, in tum, are in a qualitative sense as isolated from the mass movement as we are. Moreover, the Stalinists no longer hold any sizeable advantage over us in the contest for influence in the mass movement as they did during the rise of the CIO. Their abominable past record is against them, as will be the new betrayals they commit. And we intend to stand in their way. We intend to fight them every inch of the way. That is the course charted by the convention resolution which calls for a clear and consistent policy of independent struggle by our party in order to emerge as the most formidable contender for leadership of the masses in the coming radicalization. We anticipate the probability of a Labor Party development in the first stages of the mass radicalization. However, a Labor Party in the United States would not pass through so prolonged a stage of reformist politics as the British Labor Party. In this country there should be a substantial left wing in the Labor Party from the start. We should have large influence in such a left wing if we maintain a firm orientation of primary and major attention to work in the mass movement. A Labor Party could be expected to have a turbulent existence. It could be expected to serve essentially as a preliminary stage of the political radicalization of the workers, helping to speed their preparation for direct leadership by the revolutionary party. We believe that the mass radicalization when it comes will probably arrive with explosive force and that its initial manifestations can be expected to appear in the unions. We recognize, however, that under conditions of the present relative prosperity, the occasional outbursts of class militancy that now occur reflect only the first waves of resentment against the present cushioned shock of the war policy and can therefore be only restricted and transitory in effect. These circumstances warn us to watch our step today in our mass work, not to engage in reckless ventures or take careless risks. Yet we cannot avoid risk entirely because the element of risk is present to a degree in all motion and there is some definite forward motion we can maintain right now. It is from this overall evaluation of the objective reality in this country that we, of the majority, derive our basic position on the fundamental issues of ori-

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entation now in dispute within the party. We consider it vital to the future of the party that our organization in its entirety adhere firmly to the following main line of orientation: 1. Continue our course as an independent party, based both in principle and in practice on a proletarian orientation. 2. (a) Focus our main attention on work in the mass movement. (b) Carry on work among opponent radical tendencies as a secondary tactic subordinated to our main orientation toward the mass movements 3. Prepare at all times for a showdown fight against the Stalinists for leadership of the working class in the coming mass radicalization. 4. Publish the paper as a fighting agitational organ aimed primarily at influencing the workers by means of our transitional demands. 5. Maintain a general program of activities as demanded of an independent party commensurate with our forces and resources, This main line of orientation is clearly defined by the political resolution adopted at the last party convention. Yet the Cochranites give only lip service to the central line of the resolution. They focus their main attention on secondary formulations concerning subordinate tactical points. These secondary formulations, they now claim, give them the right to interpret the resolution in support of their efforts to smuggle into the party a different central line. The main thing the Cochranites have in common, with regard to their false orientation, is a sentiment of frustration and defeatism in relation to the American working class. They are losing faith in the fighting abilities of the working class at this stage. Therefore they can have no faith in an independent role for our party in the mass movement. They manifest a desire to restrict our party to a propaganda-circle existence. They show a tendency toward a conciliatory approach to the Stalinist movement on the ground that it constitutes the only element in this country presently susceptible to revolutionary propaganda. When we object to their false orientation, the Cochranites accuse us of 'conservatism', 'sectarianism', 'Stalinophobia', and 'capitulation to the pressure of American imperialism'. They charge that we have not taken sufficiently into account the basic changes of Stalinism, especially on the world scale. When we insist, upon sticking to our independent course, the Cochranites sneer that we cannot just sit and wait, clinging to our independent party in the fatuous belief that we are fore ordained by history to lead the American revolution. We know that. In fact, you don't even have to be a genius to figure that out. We intend to work every day to build the party just as we have been doing right along. We intend to carry out our work with confidence that the working class will produce an increasing flow of vanguard elements for our party if we go

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out after them. Such an approach is certainly a whole lot better than preaching pessimism, contending that nothing of importance can be done in the unions in this period, running up and down the dead-end street of Stalinism, and thus utterly disorienting the party. When we object to the manner in which they are trying to smuggle their new orientation into the party, the Cochranites claim we are 'persecuting' them. When Comrade Hansen wrote a discussion article polemicizing against their demonstrated views on Stalinism, they yelled 'frameup'. The Cochranites claim that we are really opposed to the world program, but that we are afraid to say so openly. We predict they won't get away with their attempt to smuggle in an exaggerated, soft tactical line toward the Stalinists in this country under the smokescreen of a false accusation that we who oppose them are blood-brothers of the Bleibtreu tendency. We are against the false policy of the Bleibtreu tendency which stands opposed to the application of the world program to France. We are against all such tendencies who orient toward sectarian abstentionism, including the Cochran tendency. The only issue in the present internal dispute with respect to the world program has to do with its proper application, as dictated by the specific objective conditions, to this country. We are acting in full accord with the world program when we advocate the preservation of our independent party with our main activities directed toward the mass movement. The Cochranites, as can be demonstrated by the accumulated evidence of their sneak attack on the party, propose an orientation for this country that is in direct contradiction to the spirit and text of the world program. Their line has virtually nothing in common with objective reality in the United States. Let us begin our examination of the evidence revealing the essence of the Cochranite policy by turning to Comrade E.R. Frank's article, 'Notes On Our Discussion', published in the August 1951 Internal Bulletin. In this article, Comrade Frank stated: 'Our theoretical magazine, however, occupies a special place (our emphasis) in relation to our work, and has a special function to perform. As I conceive it, the theoretical magazine has the high duty ofkeeping the thinking ofour cadres sharp and clear, (his emphasis) and of breaking new ground in Marxist thought and development by following and analyzing all the new problems, trends and experiences of our epoch, especially as they relate to America'. As we shall see, this commendable suggestion that we improve the quality of the magazine was intended as something more than a mere attempt to help strengthen the party's work under our established orientation. The magazine is to have a 'special' place. A few months later the Cochranites presented to the National Committee proposals for a general overhauling of the magazine to transform it from a

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primarily 'cadre organ' into an instrument for the broad propagation of Marxist ideas. Raising of a special fund was recommended to help streamline the magazine and launch an extensive circulation and publicity effort. About the same time another Cochranite proposal was presented for the launching of a 'Marxist Propaganda Campaign'. Their proposition contained the assertion: 'This work of propaganda and analysis must become a central task (our emphasis) of the party leadership in the next period ... Leading comrades should be freed, as much as possible of other tasks, material means placed at their disposal within the financial resources of the party and subordinated to the needs of maintaining a functioning national center and press'. This proposal assigns propaganda the status of a 'central' task for the party. It calls for a full-time staff to perform this task. The proposal was presented, by the way, in such a manner as to counterpose it to the Trotsky School. However, they did seem to concede some limited function for the Trotsky School as a vocational training center for writers. Still another Cochranite trend in this general direction is their grumbling about the paper containing 'too much agitation and not enough education'. It is also said we must recognize to whom we 'are' selling the paper and not to whom we would 'like' to sell it. We find in these examples tangible evidence of proposals and criticisms, introduced in the guise of strengthening party work under our independent party orientation, that actually serve to shift a step at a time toward a new orientation - convert the magazine into a broad propaganda organ; finance a special department of thinkers and writers; cut out the agitation in the press; don't kid ourselves that we can sell the paper to workers just because we would 'like' to - in short, an orientation toward a propaganda group aiming at intellectual and politically-informed elements. We come next to the Cochranite attitude with regard to union work, toward which our main attention is supposed to be directed, as was once again reaffirmed by the last party convention. At the May 1952 Plenum of the National Committee, Comrade Cochran stated that for years yet socialism will not be the common ground on which we can meet union militants. It is clear from this remark that we and Comrade Cochran had altogether different thoughts in mind in voting to approve the political resolution which described the labor movement as being in a state of 'relative quiescence'. We place our emphasis on the relative character of the quiescence. He tends to stress the quiescence. Comrade Cochran's attitude in this respect is made more explicit in his union report to the last convention. He called upon the party to nourish and tend with care those tender shoots that we possess in the labor movement. He

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called upon the young people to sacrifice, to stay in the plants year after year, braving the speedup and the isolation. He declared that we must enrich, make more profound and real our role as left-wing propagandists in the broad labor movement. The question arises, what beyond his propaganda perspective did Comrade Cochran have to recommend to the comrades concerning their day-to-day activity in the unions? The only remark we can find that may deal with this question is a reference to 'mechanical effort' which we shall discuss later. Comrade Cochran's line on the unions appears in crassest form in Comrade Bartell's report to the New York membership at the beginning of the Local's pre-convention discussion. Comrade Bartell stresses in his report that opportunities for work in the union movement have become 'extremely limited'. In a polemic later with Comrade Stevens, published in No. 2 of the current Internal Bulletins under the title, 'The Struggle in the New York Local', Comrade Bartell asserts that there is 'absolutely no evidence' to indicate 'a serious trend' in the direction of a Labor Party at the moment. Having squelched any false rumors that something can be done in the union movement and having ruled out any immediate prospects of agitation for a Labor Party, Comrade Bartell tries to burlesque the supposed activities of comrades who want to do some serious mass work. He writes on Page 12 of 'The Struggle' a description of our alleged approach to mass work as follows: 'the organization of left-wing groups inside the unions, mass distribution of leaflets and literature at plants, open-air meetings at factory gates, public meetings designed to attract industrial workers, consistent and extensive literature sales and distributions door-to-door in workers' districts and on the streets in Harlem, the organization of Negro masses in struggle for equal rights, etc.'. One must conclude that Comrade Bartell is trying either to make fools of the comrades or to provoke them into undertaking adventuristic actions, beyond the limits imposed by the present objective conditions, in order to prove that nothing can be done. A bit of evidence appeared recently of his eagerness to show that any attempt to become active would prove adventuristic. A worker comrade suggested the possibility of getting out a small paper to facilitate Labor Party propaganda among his fellow-workers. More experienced comrades explained to him that this particular approach was not practical in his situation under the present conditions. He accepted their opinion and everybody thought the matter was settled. But when Comrade Bartell got wind of it, he made a special point of denouncing the proposal as 'adventurism' before a New York branch meeting.

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These examples demonstrate the following Cochranite precepts concerning mass work: We won't be able to talk socialism to the workers for years yet. In the broad labor movement we can be nothing but left-wing propagandists. There is no real basis for Labor Party agitation in the unions. Activity in the unions will lead to adventurism. In short, the mass movement is pretty barren ground for us today, according to the Cochranites. Where then can we find a milieu that will offer us opportunities for fruitful work? In their quest for an answer to this question, the Cochranites claim to have hit a real bonanza. To begin the story let us return again to Comrade E.R. Frank's 'Notes On Our Discussion'. 'While our program is based, and will continue to be based upon the international experiences of the working class', he wrote, 'and while Trotsky was, in the immediate and most direct sense, the teacher and the leader of our movement, it does not at all follow from these two propositions that we will have much success in rallying workers to our banner by trying to straighten them out on the rights and wrongs of the Stalin-Trotsky fight, which has now receded into history- or that it is our revolutionary duty to try to do so'. This arbitrary abstracting of the subjective from the objective is a classic piece of miseducation. Comrade Frank reduces the 'Stalin-Trotsky' fight to the level of an argument as to whether or not Dempsey got a raw deal in the Tunney fight at Chicago. Statements like this serve to obscure the fact that the 'Stalin-Trotsky' fight is still going on in dead earnest, that the living followers of Trotsky are still battling the living followers of Stalin for the leadership of the working class, and that the success of the world socialist revolution hinges on the victory of Trotsky's followers. It could be that Comrade Frank fell into this crude and misleading formulation through his overwhelming desire to prove that we are 'sectarian'. The results he obtained demonstrate the dangers involved in playing with important historic questions for the purpose of grinding a factional ax. This statement by Comrade Frank helped open the way for Comrades Clarke and Bartell to indulge their well-known flair for impressionistic and experimental politics, this time with regard to the Stalinists. Comrade Clarke proposed at the May 1952 Plenum that in dealing with the Stalinists we should first establish points of agreement with them before proceeding to points of difference. Subsequent experience has shown that he intended this policy to apply not merely to comrades working directly within Stalinist organizations, but even to our own paper, disregarding the need to have the paper back up comrades contesting with the Stalinists for influence and recruits in the mass movement.

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Comrade Clarke moved a step further toward reorienting the party in the direction of the Stalinist movement in his circular as National Campaign Manager on 'Our Aims in the 1952 Election Campaign'. In this circular he recommended that the comrades work 'primarily by a pinpointing of campaign activities aimed at contacts and prospective contacts and at the politically most advanced elements who are most susceptible to our propaganda'. In referring to the elements who are most susceptible to 'our propaganda', he had in mind primarily the Stalinist movement but he wasn't yet ready to say so openly. In objecting heatedly at a Political Committee meeting to the action of a comrade who designated the Huberman tendency in the Stalinist periphery as an enemy, Comrade Clarke said: 'Whether in the final analysis Huberman is an enemy or not is an academic question, just as the question would be academic in discussing Bevan or John L. Lewis'. It is indeed striking that an experienced Marxist should be so careless in his thinking as to sweepingly equate politically a Huberman, who represents at most a thin layer of Stalinoid petty-bourgeois intellectuals, with Bevan or Lewis, who have powerful mass followings in the working class. There can be only one explanation for this farfetched comparison. Comrade Clarke has been searching so hard for a radicalized milieu to enter that he is beginning to see mirages. Comrade Bartell has been running neck-and-neck with Comrade Clarke in the quest for a radicalized milieu, and like Comrade Clarke, he claims to have found a red-hot proposition. In his recent report to the New York membership, Comrade Bartell told the comrades to 'maintain contact with the rest of the leftwing political world and to propagate our ideas to people who are equipped to understand them and are willing to listen'. He gave as the address of these people 'equipped to understand' our ideas, the Stalinist movement, which he announced could be said to be rife with 'Trotskyist conciliationism'. This orientation of the Cochranites toward the Stalinist movement has led them into an attempt to soften and minimize our criticism of the Stalinists in the press. They seem to wince when the Stalinists are forthrightly attacked. They are sharply critical of articles in which we differentiate ourselves from the Stalinists. Adding up these examples, we find the following pattern of Cochranite line: Aim our activities at people who are equipped to understand our ideas. These people are to be found in the Stalinist movement which can be said to be rife with 'Trotskyist conciliationism'. Don't be sharply critical of the Stalinists. Establish points of agreement with them before proceeding to points of difference.

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Their line represents an attempt to shift the main axis of party work away from the mass movement and toward the Stalinist movement. Since this line implies a clash with our established orientation as an independent party, let us see what has been happening in that regard. At the last party convention, Comrade Cochran delivered a trade union report which he obviously intended to be in large measure a counter-report to Comrade Cannon's political report. In his report, Comrade Cochran stated: 'We cannot just shout promiscuously at the general mass, for that would be like hurling seeds into a storm, hoping that by good fortune a few would find their way into productive soil'. This statement was aimed against our campaign activities as an independent party. It was made at the very moment when the convention was mobilizing the party for a maximum effort in the 1952 presidential campaign. Hesitating to openly attack the campaign, he just projected his sour note into the convention activities and let it go at that. By December of last year Comrade Cochran was ready to be a bit more specific about his opposition to party election campaigns, but not entirely specific, really not much more forthright than he was at the convention on the subject. The Los Angeles Local had requested the approval of the Political Committee to conduct a mayoralty campaign. Comrade Cochran introduced a motion in the Committee to the effect that he thought it incorrect for the branch to enter the campaign in the light of the party's financial difficulties. His motion added that he believed it wise as soon as feasible to 'raise a special fund to invigorate our propaganda work around the magazine and allied work, with a full-time man to carry through that project'. Comrade Cochran's motion counterposed to the election campaign, which he wanted called off, a proposition based on his propaganda group perspective. This action on his part constituted a thinly veiled attempt to shift the party's position without first openly presenting a fundamental political justification for the change in line. It was in effect an attempt to freeze all external activities of the party involving the expenditure of any money until a special fund had been raised for his pet propaganda project. So obsessed have the Cochranites become with their abstentionist propaganda orientation that they find it increasingly difficult to attach importance to any of our activities as an independent party. Take, for example, their attitude toward sub work for the paper. In his report to the New York membership, Comrade Bartell advised the comrades not to indulge in door-to-door sub campaigns 'aimed only at obtaining the maximum number of subs'. He asserted that the guiding line should be that sub work is an important part of contact work and 'not an end in itself'. That is to say, selling a sub won't make

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a contact, you must make a contact in order to sell a sub. Speaking in the same vein, he also discouraged mass street sales of the paper as a general practice. During our preparations for the current national sub campaign Comrade Bartell interposed an objection to the publishing of a campaign scoreboard in the paper. He seemed to think a scoreboard would put too much pressure on comrades to go after subs as 'an end in itself'. Comrade Clarke showed his opinion of independent party activities in writing a year-end review of events in 1952 for the paper. He mentioned Stalinist civil liberties cases but he didn't make a single reference to the Kutcher case or to the Trucks Law fight. Yet we have produced some significant results in both these cases. The Cochranites claim that the present change in the public attitude of the Stalinists toward our democratic rights is a sign of their 'Trotskyist conciliationism'. Not at all. It was our impressive work in cases like the Kutcher and Trucks Law fights that caused the change. The CP ranks and periphery were compelled to pay attention to us; the CP officials were prevented from disposing of us by slanders; and they had to accord us recognition in an effort to woo support for their own cases from liberals who were enough impressed by our work to demand that our fights receive support. These examples of Cochranite policy illustrate their attempts to change the established party orientation through sneak attacks, such as: An attempt to shift the presidential campaign into propaganda circle channels, especially after the main series of radio-TV broadcasts were completed. Demanding their 'propaganda offensive' have priority over election campaigns. An effort, in effect, to freeze external party activities until a special fund is raised for propaganda work. Attempts to straight jacket within the framework of their propaganda-circle perspective all efforts to expand circulation of the paper. A growing disinterest in party campaign actions against the witch hunt. From all the examples previously cited to disclose the true nature of Cochranite policy, we are now in a position to present a broad description of their general line. Before doing so, however, it is necessary to examine yet another covering device they have employed in an effort to conceal their real aims. The Cochranites argue that their policy, as revealed most fully by Comrades Clarke and Bartell, is intended for New York only and has no implications for party orientation in general. They contend that people outside the New York Local should keep out of the argument over policy, including members of the Political Committee who don't happen to agree with the Clarke-Bartell line.

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However, Comrade Bartell, in his eagerness to prove the wisdom of his policy by a study in contrasts, has given their game away. At Page 12 of 'The Struggle' he writes that it has been 'precisely those branches in the purely industrial factory towns that have been the hardest hit in these years' and that 'a number of these dried up and disappeared altogether while others barely survive in a stagnant condition'. These branches, he goes on to say, 'only wish they had some Compass Clubs or Monthly Review forums or universities in their cities'. He then declaims against 'our super-proletarian critics' who propose that 'we unnecessarily and artificially impose on ourselves the conditions of Pittsburgh, Akron or Flint'. 'That, in my opinion', he adds, 'is a sure road to ruin'. We hear of a young Cochranite in a midwest town, no doubt inspired by Comrade Bartell's polemic against Comrade Stevens, who is bemoaning the fact that there are no colleges and no CP periphery in town and that the only work there is to do locally is to contact industrial workers. These examples should make it clear to all that the dispute in New York is not a dispute over local issues. What may not be so clear to some comrades is that Comrade Bartell's line in New York was never intended as a local line but as a national policy. An effort was made to smuggle it unchallenged into the New York Local, under the guise of strictly local policy, in order to establish a bridgehead for a further projection of the line throughout the country. This business of smuggling in their line a step at a time, without any open declaration of their intentions before the party, without giving a basic political motivation for their policy, without submitting it for open discussion and decision in the party, and with cries that they are being 'persecuted' everytime somebody raises a question about their policy - this unprincipled method, which is in complete violation of the whole party tradition, has become stamped upon the Cochranite faction as their hallmark. Through this unprincipled method the Cochranites are attempting to smuggle into the party a change in basic orientation that can be summarized as follows: 1. Adopt the perspective of a propaganda group. 2. (a) Focus our main attention on work in and around the Stalinist movement, (b) Confine our function in the mass movement to that ofleft-wing propagandists. 3. Take a conciliatory attitude in our approach to the Stalinist movement. 4. Transform the paper into a propaganda organ aimed primarily at influencing intellectual and politically-informed elements.

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5.

Confine party activities within the framework of a propaganda-group perspective. The Cochranites will learn that they can't maneuver the party into an acceptance of their false line by attempting to smuggle it in one piece at a time. They will learn that the party is not simply a tractable instrument in the hands of the leaders. It is a conscious, self-acting instrument. The membership will demand that the Cochranites disclose their full tactical line and show how it squares with our strategic orientation. Our strategic orientation is to build an independent mass revolutionary party. All our tactical maneuvers must be subordinated to and coordinated around this strategic aim. To build a mass party our primary tactical orientation must at all times be toward the mainstream of the organized working class. The Cochranites, in their futile attempts to get around the present difficult objective situation, have sought to maneuver into an orientation toward the Stali nis ts. Should the Stalinists happen to predominate in the organized working class, as they do in France for example, it would be necessary to adopt a tactic of penetration into the Stalinist movement to facilitate the task of getting into the mainstream of the workers' movement. In the United States, however, the Stalinists are isolated from the mass movement. To orient toward the Stalinist movement under these conditions would mean to tum our backs on the mainstream of the organized working class. Opponents work among Stalinists in this country must therefore be strictly subordinated to our main orientation toward the unions, and it must be subordinated not only in words but also in practice. The truth is that the Cochranites commit a fraud when they accuse the majority of 'sectarianism' because we oppose their false orientation toward the Stalinists. The 'clear and present' sectarian danger to our-party- is not in under-

estimating the importance of the Stalinist circles but in neglect of the living labor movement where the masses ofworkers are to be found. We do not minimize the importance of opponents work against the Stalinists. We are fully in favor of opponents work in Stalinist organizations, to whittle down their strength and increase our own forces at their expense, and to loosen their hold in the mass movement wherever we can. But we won't win over any Stalinists, or beat them in the contest for influence and recruits, by being soft or by slurring over questions of program. In our work in the mass movement we must appear as rivals of the Stalinists, not as people having friendly differences with them, We recognize that the Kremlin bureaucracy, in defending its privileges and power against imperialism, sometimes finds it necessary to go along with a

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powerful revolutionary mass movement so long as it remains essentially subordinate to Moscow's basic aims and general control. However, we concede no historic revolutionary mission to Stalinism. On the contrary, we warn that counter-revolutionary Stalinism will yet commit some of its most abominable betrayals. We have a current example of Stalinist betrayal right here in the United States in a draft resolution recently published by the National Committee of the Communist Party. This resolution contains the following passages: 'It was incorrect to have favored the departure of the Wallace forces without masses from the Democratic Party.... The Progressive Party cannot be a major vehicle in the emergence of a mass people's party led by labor ... We must exert our maximum influence toward bringing into being a coalition of forces which will work toward the development of forms through which labor can exert a unified class influence on the national political life and on the Democratic Party ... forcing on sectors of the Democratic Party to the maximum extent and wherever possible a genuine program of struggle against the pro-war and profascist course and measures of the Republican Administration. The formation of blocs of legislators in Congress and state legislatures that will fight for this program'. This announcement of revised Stalinist policy means much more than a declaration of their intention to scuttle the Progressive Party. It means they are going to join the union bureaucrats' game of playing footsie with Democratic and Republican liberals against the 'main enemy' of right-wing Republicans and Democrats. It means Stalinist demagogy, parallel to Reuther's demagogy, serving to disorient the workers from taking the road of independent political action. Any doubt about what the c Pleaders mean by their resolution can be cleared up by the following report of a debate over the Labor Party in a Flint UAW local. A left-wing militant was pushing from the floor for adoption by the local of a resolution in favor of a Labor Party. The chairman and the leader of the biggest caucus in the local had indicated that they feel strongly about labor putting up all the money and work while liberals run the show in the Democratic Party. They did what they could to help get the resolution adopted. The leader of the Stalinist fraction in the local offered an amendment to the proposal that 'the Labor Party shall feel free to endorse liberal Democrats like Williams and Moody'. We can't take a conciliatory attitude toward this kind of class treachery on the part of the Stalinists. The Cochranites, by the way, insist that there is no evidence to indicate a serious trend in the direction of a Labor Party at present. Apart from such evidence

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to the contrary as that manifested by the Flint episode, they forget something Comrade Trotsky stressed. It is dangerous to base ourselves on secondary oscillations of disinterest in questions of this kind, Trotsky often explained. As the need for a major movement in the direction of a Labor Party becomes more imperative, he pointed out, objective necessity will find its subjective expression. We must stress that necessity in language the workers will understand. If we were to adopt instead the Cochranite propaganda group orientation and begin talking to political highbrows who are 'equipped to understand us', we will be talking over the heads of the mass of the workers. The Cochranites also contend that you can't talk to the workers about the war. Yet a Milwaukee comrade recently sent in a report of developments at an educational conference of his local that indicate otherwise. He reported the following: I started a conversation with several workers about a Labor Party ... there were other discussions about shop grievances going on. These were stopped by the workers themselves by such remarks as 'Let's forget about these petty problems and listen to the discussion'. From then on the group of workers numbering 40 to 50 men and women concentrated on political discussion. The Korean war was discussed and condemned in no uncertain terms ... The American foreign policy toward the colonial nations was condemned ... The people who made up the group were very interesting. There were about a dozen colored workers and the rest were young ex-GI's or even younger workers ... I cannot believe that these young workers exist only at my plant. They too are subject to the influences of their family, friends and social groups in which they mingle. Certainly some of their ideas must come from influences outside of themselves. It is the task of the party to fill this vacuum in the best possible manner. At my plant we have a lot of opportunity and a lot of hard work. This is, of course, the experience of only one worker in one plant. But we think he is right when he says, 'I cannot believe that these young workers exist only at my plant'. Comrade Bartell, on the other hand, says that we must get together with the Stalinists to oppose the war because we are part of the same anti-war camp and because the Stalinists are the only other current of conscious opposition to the war. To justify his line he even tends to slur over the sharp differences between the Stalinist peace policy and our class anti-war position. He also

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glosses over the fact that the Stalinist peace front in this country actually amounts to very little. In our opinion, the most vital place to carry on anti-war agitation and participate in anti-war actions is in the unions where the masses are. We have always envisaged the struggle against war as an extension of the class struggle onto a higher plane. The fight against the war can really be effective only to the extent that the workers adopt class-struggle policies in defending their interests. If we are to help this process along we must be in the unions. That means the party must become reinspired with our proletarian orientation, which is precisely what is being challenged by the Cochranites. We freely admit that our own neglect of union work, our failure to give union comrades the full attention they deserve, has made it easier for the Cochranites to de-emphasize work in this vital field. This condition must be corrected, as must the disorientation caused by Comrade Cochran's pessimistic trade union report at the last convention. Before we take up the major omission in his report, let us first examine an important error it contains. A big section of the report was devoted to a review of our tactics with regard to power blocs in the unions. In speaking of our blocs with the so-called 'progressive' bureaucracy in the early years of the 1940s, he states: 'The alliance afforded us more elbow room in the unions, strengthened our ability to recruit, and provided us with a greater audience for our ideas and program. And that is its sufficient justification'. Comrade Cochran's statement is not accurate. We have been excessively preoccupied with power blocs in the unions to the point that our policy has in reality tended to impair recruitment. We can't afford to take the attitude now that since such blocs are not feasible today there is no problem to discuss. Unless we analyze the element of error in our past policy, we can fall into the same error again. In taking up this question we are not looking for a scapegoat. The leadership of the party is collectively responsible for this mistake. But the mistake must be recognized and corrected. There has been a tendency in the past to push too far in contests for union leadership from too narrow a base of our own in the ranks. This tendency has often led us into excessive preoccupation with bloc politics in the unions. Comrades have often tended to get too 'practical' in developing contacts, paying too much attention to union politicians, who are seldom party material, and too little attention to workers who stand out as militant fighters and could therefore be attracted to our program and party. This tendency has sometimes given rise, especially where comrades were elected to union office or played a key role in a power caucus, to a policy of excessive caution in carrying out political activity. On occasion there has been

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an inclination to reduce our program below the level imposed by objective conditions for the sole purpose of getting deeper into union politics through power blocs. Unusual openings to present our program with special force when some big event occurred have sometimes been missed for the same reason. These unnecessary omissions of political effort have helped to impair our ability to recruit in the unions. In the days to come there will be greater need than ever for us to be alert to this problem. In times past we have had experiences where comrades appeared to be making remarkable headway in their union work through participation in bloc politics. But when such blocs could no longer be held together, or when they became politically untenable, we found ourselves high and dry with little to show for the entire effort except the experience that the comrades themselves gained. We don't mean to imply that we cannot under any circumstances have anything to do with bloc politics in the unions. We must take a practical attitude toward this question in internal union struggles. It is sometimes profitable for us to intervene in a limited way, supporting this or that candidate or slate of candidates to help our cause. With respect to union posts for ourselves, we will advance or withdraw according to the climate. Under favorable objective conditions we can go a limited distance in a coalition around an acceptable program. But even then we shouldn't get out beyond our base in the ranks to the point that we become captives of the coalition. Above all, it is vital that we entertain no idea that we can either be active or do virtually nothing in the unions according to whether we can fight for posts. Leadership of the masses in the real sense is gained not by title and office, but by energy, ability, confidence in ourselves and in the workers, consistent participation in the workers' struggles, and constant effort to build a solid base of class conscious workers in the ranks on the foundation of our program. We should work always in the unions with a view toward recruitment into the party, to build our own party fractions around which a left-wing can be polarized. We called attention in a previous connection to Comrade Cochran's advice in his trade union report that the comrades play a role as left-wing propagandists in the broad labor movement. We mentioned that the only remark we could find in his report that may deal with the question of day-to-day activity in the unions was a reference to 'mechanical effort'. Here is the full quotation: 'In the present period our trade union forces are often augmented by mere mechanical effort. But to really maintain and integrate trade union groups in these difficult days, the mechanical aspect is the least of the problem'. What Comrade Cochran dismisses by his reference to 'mechanical effort' is obviously the daily activity in the unions which is the essence of all mass work.

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He seems to think that the most important need for our work in the unions is to rush through his project to organize a committee of high-powered thinkers and writers. However, the comrades who carry on the foot-slogging day-to-day work in the unions know their work is important. They like to have their leaders think it is important, too. They want their leaders to give some attention, some thought and some aid to them in the ever so important daily grind out of which our union cadres are being forged today. They even like to have their leaders help them do a few chores now and then, and they do have chores because there are things that can be done in the unions. It is true that the workers are at present in a state of relative quiescence, but the labor movement has not been put in mothballs, as the 1952 strike statistics will testify. The workers are not tired or defeated, nor are they universally contented with present conditions. They only lack a class-struggle program and leadership to help them defend their interests. The efforts of our comrades in their day-to-day relations with the workers, going through with them the many small, often indirect, but yet important manifestations of class struggle that occur in an almost routine way, will enable the comrades to win the workers' respect and confidence. If political discussions based on our transitional program are carefully woven into this activity with reasonable skill, the comrades will find it possible to recruit at a modest rate in the unions. One of our comrades recently made the following comment about a factory worker who was about to join the party: 'Some may say she is an exceptional person; she's not. She's the average semi-conscious union militant. What has made a qualitative difference is personal contact for 18 months. If not for that, she would be basically a fighter, but a disillusioned one, because of the union situation'. In Los Angeles a slate of left-wing militants recently led the field in the election of delegates to a union convention. They drew their main support from a new strata of young militants and from Negro, Mexican and other minority workers. They had been consciously directing their attention toward this section of the workers for some time. The young worker militants can in many instances be expected to show a lively interest in our program if we pay proper attention to them. Their services are invaluable in putting juice in the unions, the fractions and the party. They will also be most helpful in putting class-struggle shoes on young intellectuals. Negroes and other minority elements already constitute a significant component of the industrial working class and they are steadily gaining in numbers in industry. Because of the racial discrimination and double exploitation they must undergo as second-class citizens, they tend to be above-average in their militancy. What they need most is a class-conscious outlook. They need

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a proper understanding of the inter-relationship of their struggle as a minority people and the struggle of the working class. As a worker, regardless of color, the Negro worker must take his place in the vanguard of the daily struggle to win the maximum gains possible under capitalism for the workers. As a Negro, he must take the leadership of his people to win the maximum gains possible under capitalism in the daily struggle for equality. As a Negro and a worker, he must play a key role in uniting the Negro people and the entire working class in the fight to abolish the capitalist system and create a socialist society. In their fight against discrimination, the Negro workers, spearheaded by those in basic industry, should take over the leadership now largely held by the Talented Tenth. The fight for equality, which they begin in the plants, should be carried under their leadership into the communities and onward throughout the nation. Demands for equality right now for all Negroes should replace the old program of gradualism with its token gestures of equality to 'representative' Negroes. Mass action should supersede legal and parliamentary maneuvering as the principal weapon in the fight against discrimination. Because of the important position the Negro workers now hold in industry, most union officials find it necessary to give at least lip-service to the demands of the colored workers for equality, whether these officials believe in it or not. They can therefore be compelled to respond in a certain degree to pressure for action in, the fight against discrimination in the plant. With a carefully worked out approach, taken in collaboration with white militants, the Negro workers should be able to compel these union officials to go a certain distance in helping to throw the weight of the union behind the struggle for equality in the communities. These undertakings should help both the struggle for equality and the development of a greater degree of militancy in the unions. To the extent that we may be able to aid Negro and other minority workers in shaping and developing an action program along these lines, seeking to acquaint them with our political program in the process, we will be in a better position to win recruits to our party. Our work in the mass movement can be made more effective if we are able to get out a paper better suited to the needs of mass work. It is not necessary to have literary supermen to improve the paper. However, it would be most helpful if we could find a way for the editorial staff to get more cooperation from the party leadership, including the leaders in the field. We need to correct a mistake that has crept into the paper of tending to write for a highly political audience and one moreover under heavy Stalinist influence. We need more attention to issues that preoccupy the workers in

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their present state of consciousness, like the speedup, prices, truces, housing, the Korean war. We need to hammer home the Labor Party slogan with all the arguments we can marshall. We must be fully alive to the grievances and struggles of the workers. We used to get out a fine socialist paper for workers. To do so again, we must find the necessary ties with the workers' thinking. We must establish contact at the workers' present level of consciousness, help them generalize their grievances and demands at a higher political plane. If we let the situation drift any longer we will get more and more on the wrong track under pressure of the Cochranite opposition. Our course must be corrected, not by new propaganda cure-alls of the Cochranite variety, but by getting deeper into the union movement and by reflecting the life and problems of the mass movement more adequately in our press, The party educational system likewise needs some overhauling, but not through the Cochranite propaganda-circle touch. We must not allow ourselves to be jockeyed into an abandonment of the Trotsky School. This valuable institution should be preserved; it should remain a party university; it should not be transformed into a vocational training center. The Trotsky School needs, however, to be better organized, its schedule of study courses more thoroughly planned and systematized. Still more is needed than the preservation and improvement of the Trotsky School. Our entire educational system throughout the party needs a thorough going over. There is too little over-all planning and too little general supervision in our educational work. The branches are left too much on their own resources. They don't get enough help from the party center. These problems can't be solved overnight, but we must get to work on them as soon as we can and keep at it from then on, because education is a never-ending process. Yet another shortcoming we need to correct is the tendency toward local autonomy that has developed in main lines of branch orientation. Divergences in branch perspectives have appeared that are not fully explained by variations in local conditions. The main lines of divergence appear about as follows: Different approaches as to the extent to which mass work should be supplemented with other party-building activities. Wide variations in branch participation in national party campaign actions. Major differences of emphasis on opponents work. In a somewhat similar connection we should add that an increasing lack of cooperation and coordination has become manifest in the functioning of national union fractions. These divergences in branch orientation, together with the trend toward a breakdown in fraction coordination; tend to impair the party's capacity to function as a homogeneous national unit. The method whereby the Cochran-

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ites have sought to smuggle their line into the party has contributed to this divergence. But that is not the only cause of this trouble. There has been an element of general drift involved for which the party center must assume primary responsibility. Lenin taught us that we can't have a real united movement if the center is isolated too much from practical local work, or if the center fails to keep the branches fully informed of the general party plans and experiences. The center must know what is being done locally, who has learned or is learning to do party tasks well, who is going off the beam and why. It must know the internal conditions, activities and perspectives of all the branches. In general, the center must establish closer touch with the branches to get a more accurate feel of the mood, thinking and activities of the comrades in each locality. The branches give voice to this need through their demands for more tours by national leaders. A real effort should be made to fulfill this request, because the tours help a great deal to establish closer contact between the center and the field, and to provide direct help for the field comrades from the party leadership. With proper planning; it is important to note, our experience has shown that such tours can be made virtually self-financing. Another task to which the party must give its attention is the need to improve collective leadership throughout the party. It is not too good for party units to find themselves heavily dependent upon a single leader. These circumstances sometimes tend to blunt individual initiative and thereby to a certain extent restrict progress in the party units. We need to establish collective leaderships everywhere in the party and develop a working pattern suitable for their cooperative effort according to the nature of their tasks. This concept of collectivity must also include a spirit of close team work between leadership and membership. Numerous problems have arisen in our party work out of the complex situations that can easily develop in relations between the branch membership, the branch executive committee and the branch organizer. The national leadership must help the branches work out adequate solutions for these problems. We have sought in this article to sketch the objective difficulties before the party and the course of action we, of the majority, believe it necessary to follow under present conditions. Our first task, however, is to ward off the Cochranite attack on the party's basic orientation. That means the entire membership must become aware of the profound issues at stake in the present internal dispute and take a position. For our part, we shall fight to defend our course as an independent party with our main attention focused on work in the mass movement. We shall fight any attempt to sidetrack the party through a false orientation.

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s The Roots of the Party Crisis - Its Causes and Solution (Excerpts, 1953) Bert Cochran, George Clarke, Erwin Baur, Irving Beinin, Harry Braverman, E. Drake, Sol Dollinger,Jules Geller, Ernest Mazey, Mike Bartell (Milton Zaslaw)

Origin of the Internal Struggle 36

Every responsible party member must view with alarm the new eruption of factional conflict within the leadership and in the party as a whole. It is a grave matter for the party to be plunged into violent internal struggle in the midst of increasing reaction, isolation, and preparations for war, and when the class struggle cannot provide the necessary tests and healthy correctives of differing positions. This is especially serious when the differences, although sharp, have not crystallized along clearly defined programmatic lines that lend themselves easily to an objective judgment by the party membership. Forour part, we take no responsibility for the outbreak of the conflict. We did not seek nor instigate this struggle. On the contrary we have favored every proposal, every compromise that would postpone its outbreak or allay its intensity. We do not deny that we have vigorously - perhaps sometimes even over vigorously- presented our point of view in the PC and weekly paper staff on current political and organizational questions. How can that constitute a reason for a faction fight to the death, unless the price of peace for an opposition is complete silence? This fight has been deliberately forced upon us and on the party. That is the real significance of the Dobbs-Stein-Hansen statement (submitted to PC,January 6, 1953). In reality, however, this is only the latest of a series of attempts to precipitate a showdown faction struggle that have been made for well over a year. In this time there has been an unceasing and sometimes even frantic hunt for 'fundamental' differences, for deviations and motives. The ground for the

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Cochran, Clarke et al. 1953.

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attack has at least twice been shifted, and it will undoubtedly be shifted again before this struggle is over. Each time the minority point of view was adopted (and that was the case in most of the political questions under discussion), the search for 'fundamental' differences became more frantic. Compromises have been interpreted by the majority as a license to present a one-sided view, ignoring the essence of the agreement and making a solitary sentence or paragraph the basis of a line. We intend by a full recitation of the record to demonstrate where the major responsibility for the present struggle in the party rests. Our aim is far more important than merely placing the blame on the guilty side that 'fired the first shot' or committed the first act of 'bad faith'. For behind the attempt to aggravate incipient differences to the breaking point, to divide the party into irreconcilable factions over divergent views that can still be reconciled, we believe there are deeper causes than transient incidents or the conflict of personalities. Behind the present struggle is the shadow of the Third World War which, even more than its two predecessors, is creating the deepest crisis in all social relations, in states, institutions, political movements. Our party, as is now obvious, has not escaped the effects of the crisis. To find the remedy - a matter of life and death - it is first necessary to seek the causes. A description of the conflict, which now follows, will lead us unerringly to both cause and solution.

The First Differences The first differences broke out in the PC and the weekly paper staff in the fall of 1951 soon after Clarke's return. They concerned our attitude to the Stalinist movement and our approach to it in the press. It had become clear to many of us that our position needed a sharp correction. The Stalinist movement, regardless of its desires, had been thrust into opposition to imperialism; it was persecuted and hounded as the chief target of the witch-hunt. At the same time, it was being shaken internally by the contradiction of a class-collaboration policy that could not be realized in practice, for lack of any important bourgeois allies. Our press, however, was operating as though the war-time collaboration between the Stalinists and the State Department had never ended. Every time we raised problems of this kind - our attitude to the CP trials (the emphasis to be placed on them), the ALP, the Monthly Review, and a series of others, our motives were called into question: Were we proposing a 'soft' line, a line of 'conciliation to Stalinism'? Was Stalinist work 'Point One, Two or Three'? It was impossible for us to speak or make a proposal in the PC on some point relating to Stalinism without prefacing it with ... our good intentions. There was clearly a hunt for 'Stalinist dangers'....

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[T]he line of attack shifted, although the accusation of 'conciliation' was never dropped and still is utilized today. Presumably we were then prepared to write a common document for the plenum and the convention that would follow. A previous plenum on Labor Day 1951 had failed to produce a single word on the changed world situation, on the trend of developments in the interim period before the outbreak of war, and on our tasks. This was particularly incumbent upon us, among other reasons, because the World Congress analysis attributed to the us a key role so far as the war question was concerned: continuing social stability or a radicalization of the workers and great social struggles here being the determining consideration in the war plans of us imperialism. Hence the added importance of the coming plenum: it had ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

initiated. The original resolution drafted by a committee of Cannon and Wright turned out to be thoroughly inadequate. It failed to provide any overall review of America's role in the developing war, of the social and economic factors that would precipitate the conflict, its analysis of the economic situation was wrong, even the facts were faulty. The labor party was mentioned in a brief sentence, almost as an afterthought. The Stalinists were roundly condemned in a paragraph or two, and that finished that question. The party tasks in the period ahead were very inadequately posed. The document was severely criticized by Comrades Bartell, Clarke, and Frankel, who made proposals for rewriting, changes, and additions. The very next meeting of the PC (March 1952 ), called to continue the discussion on the draft resolution, was blown up and the possibility of an objective discussion wrecked by Comrade Cannon's threat of a split. It took the form of his reading a projected 'personal' letter to Pablo which was also to be sent to all members of the N c. The letter concluded with a postscript saying that he (Cannon) was pessimistic about the internal party situation and that he believed we were heading into a split because of the existence of an 'unprincipled combination' (meaning Clarke and Cochran) or an 'incipient faction'. Taxed with this ominous threat, Cannon innocently declared that he was merely making a prediction. This has been the alibi for the document ever since. The alibi is refuted by the letter itself. The body of the letter contained a pledge of support to Pablo, while making reservations on Eastern Europe and on Pablo's tactical qualifications. But the last Line of the postscript was an admonition to Pablo to keep his hands off the internal situation. Unless words and politics have lost their meaning, how else could this letter be interpreted than as a threat to split? It was a quid pro quo offer to Pablo: support in return for noninterference in the drive for a split.

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But if the split were inevitable and were going to occur despite anyone's desires or intentions - as Comrade Cannon tried to maintain - what were the fundamental differences, we asked, that were driving fatalistically to this disaster? He admitted ... that there was no danger of 'Stalinist conciliationism' although this was the battle cry against us in the committee for at least six months. There would be a split, he said, precisely because there were no fundamental differences,(!) and yet in their absence, the tone of discussion continued to be sharp and the atmosphere tense. Obviously this was reducing a big question to the barren searching for hidden motives. (It did not interest him that the atmosphere might have been charged by the fact that our many practical proposals had been met by him and others by a searching for our motives, by shameful innuendos or charges of 'conciliation' to Stalinism.) Before the meeting was over, the letter was so clearly exposed as an irrational act or a willfully malicious project that it was withdrawn. But let this be clear - it was withdrawn at our urging! Although there was obviously factional advantage to be gained from the publication of such a scandalous, unprincipled document - which would have shocked the party and the world movement - we urged its withdrawal to avoid a factional struggle that would be harmful to the party because the differences were admittedly only in their incipient stages. The tactic to precipitate a sudden split situation had failed, but the determination to organize one remained unaltered. The May 1952 Plenum Once again we returned to the plenum resolution. Comrades Clarke and Frankel revised or rewrote at least one-third of the document in the form of amendments. Although these revisions embodied most of the points that had been so vehemently combatted in the previous six months, they were accepted with very little alteration by the PC subcommittee and later by the PC. Naturally complete clarity was not attained, and as was inevitable under the circumstances, the new document took the form of a compromise resolution. Nevertheless it marked a great step forward. The one important proposal rejected by Comrades Cannon and Stein - and with particular obduracy by Comrade Cannon - was a project for an organized propaganda campaign. In effect it was nothing else than a revival of Comrade Cannon's own project for an 'Ideological Offensive' ('Proposals for a Propaganda Campaign', submitted by J.P. Cannon, November 1948) which had been adopted in December 1948 but had never made much headway. We felt that the needs for such a campaign were even more decisive in 1952 than four years previously. The proposal was bitterly fought at the PC meeting, a countermotion by Comrade Cannon was finally adopted that if funds were available, a new ses-

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sion of the Trotsky School should have priority. The incident is of more than passing significance in view of the present fraudulent claim that the big dividing issue is the 'independent party versus the propaganda group'. The Trotsky School - that is, a strictly internal educational activity - was counterposed by those who presumably favor the 'independent party' to a propaganda campaign - that is, an external activity primarily directed outside the party- advocated by those who are charged with wanting to liquidate the party into a propaganda group. With this, once again Comrade Cannon came forward with a declaration of war. Now, he informed us, he knew what the 'fundamental differences' were (although he failed to specify their exact nature); he insisted that the 'situation in the committee' be placed as a special point on the plenum agenda. We pointed out that in the absence of any written position on his part concerning these so-called differences, such a discussion could only be a brawl. We furthermore pointed out that we had just unanimously adopted the amended resolution, and therefore apparently were proceeding from a common line. Again Cannon withdrew his proposal, but not his determination to convert the plenum into a brawl, and to again lay the basis for the split. On April 25, he dispatched a private letter to a selected group of NC members urging them to come to the plenum without fail because a big fight was expected; he compared the plenum to the one that preceded the split convention in 1940! This deliberate attempt to repeat the presplit 1939 plenum - despite the unanimity now on fundamental and tactical questions! - quickly became apparent at the May 1952 plenum. Cannon opened with a one-sided and provocative report on the resolution. It was as though the original resolution had not been altered from top to bottom. The stage was now set for the provocative conclusion of his speech, a thinly veiled attack against us. It dealt with the dangers of degeneration in the leadership, and cited the cases of C. Charles, Manny Mills and ... Max Shachtman. The danger of degeneration of individuals in the leadership, according to this theory, came not from the murderous pressure of anticommunist imperialism, from the failure to understand and draw confidence from the new world revolutionary reality, from succumbing to Stalinophobia in one form or another. No, strangely enough, it was attributed to the loss of faith in the independence of the party. This, despite the inescapable lessons of the splits in England and France, where a majority of the leadership, and of the ranks, had marched out of the Trotskyist movement denouncing the International for 'liquidating' the independence of the party. Cannon's theory was to receive crushing refutation only a few weeks later from one of the participants at the plenum, not from our ranks, however, but

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from one who had not the slightest doubt about 'independence', not the slightest tendency toward 'conciliating Stalinism' - from Grace Carlson's desertion to Roman Catholicism. But his speech had its intended effect. It was the signal for a sustained barrage on the part of his supporters against Clarke, who had attempted to present the resolution in its rounded character and to set straight the theory of degeneration so that the leadership could recognize the real dangers and how to combat them. The hysterical tirade was redoubled after Comrade Cochran sharply characterized the irregularity of Comrade Cannon's launching a factional attack under cover of presenting, as the official PC reporter, a unanimously adopted political resolution. Weiss' motion that Cannon's tendentious and factional report be adopted along with the resolution proved too much for a large part of the committee to stomach, and they demanded, in the absence of clearly revealed differences and because of political agreement on the resolution, that the struggle be suspended. We for our part associated ourselves with this point of view as we had already done on two previous occasions. Once again Cannon backed down in his attempt to aggravate the struggle and drive it to a crisis. Under pressure of the committee he withdrew the motion for the adoption of his factional report. But again, as in the two previous cases, his retreat was accompanied by the sullen warning that he had no confidence that the agreement would last, meaning of course, that to the best of his ability he would not permit it to last.

The 1952 Convention and Its Aftennath The agreement did last, however, through the convention, and with entirely salutary results for the party. There were, it is true, as the Stein-Dobbs-Hansen statement says, 'divergent evaluations of the objective situation and of party tasks ... (reflected) in reports and speeches'. This was not unnatural in view of the compromise nature of the resolution and above all because Comrade Cannon's convention report continued to have the same one-sided nature, although not nearly so marked as at the plenum. The section of the membership aware of the previous disputes breathed a sigh of relief at the outcome of the convention. They were satisfied that we had avoided a bitter, frustrating factional struggle. But not so Cannon. He began at once, no sooner was the convention over, to attempt to organize a personal faction. This attempt was openly made at the camp, and was witnessed by at least a score of comrades. The almost universal reaction was one of revulsion at this irresponsible and unprincipled action. A section of the National Committee, which had supported Comrade Cannon, now decided that something had to be done to halt this degeneration of the

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party situation. Comrade Dobbs drafted a resolution, an excerpt of which was subsequently sent to the membership, calling for a regularization of the party situation during the campaign and for the opening of an objective political discussion after the campaign. Formally, the resolution was unanimously adopted by the PC. But the reality was quite different. Comrade Cannon absented himself without reason from this PC meeting, but sent word through Dobbs that he would go along with the agreement. At the next meeting of the PC, Comrade Cannon put in a request, again in absentia, to leave New York and go to Los Angeles. The reason was not ill health, or special party work. There were a few vague remarks about a 'sabbatical leave', and that was that. Once again, unity was to be a strictly unilateral matter. Thus, a new outbreak of the internal struggle was inevitable, the only question being when Cannon would deem it advisable from the point of view of his factional aims. The promise in the Dobbs proposal to establish collaboration and make possible the reopening of a political discussion free from factionalism has never been carried out, nor has any attempt been made to carry it out. It has remained, from the moment of its adoption a dead letter. Dobbs proved incapable, or unwilling, or both, of making good on his big promise to attempt to ameliorate the internal situation. He simply was responsible for a 'holding operation' until Cannon and his supporters felt the time was propitious for reopening their factional offensive. We repeat: No attempt of any kind was made after the convention and particularly after the election campaign to reestablish collaboration in the leadership. The weekly paper was being run in high-handed fashion by Comrade Hansen. When a controversy arose over some issue or method of handling a problem, he invariably assigned the writing of the article to someone sharing his views, and it was only seen by the others if specifically requested, in departure from the regular staff custom of passing around important articles. When the financial crisis broke on us after the campaign, no attempt was made to permit an inclusive representation of all points of view on the full-time staff. In truth, how could there he genuine collaboration if two leading comrades, Clarke and Cochran, the representatives of a distinct tendency in the leadership and reflecting the views of a considerable section of the party, were not to have the possibility of fully participating in the propagandist and organizational work of the center? True, a number of other comrades were also removed from the full-time staff, but that begs the question because those that remained were exclusively supporters of Comrade Cannon. Thus, instead of collaboration, we were confronted with the last representative of our point of view being removed from the full-time party staff, and an increasing exclusion from possib-

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ilities of political leadership. At the same time, we witnessed the organization of a faction in the New York Local by Stevens and Ring, under the tutelage of the Cannon leaders, against the local organizer, Bartell, on the flimsiest and most artificial lines imaginable. The New York Local has experienced one of its most successful years of activity since the onset of reaction; it has attracted many new friends to its public affairs and its work is now resulting in the recruitment of new members; the morale of the membership has been excellent and steady, free of the feverish ups and downs of exhilaration and depression that come from disorderly and falsely oriented activities; its finances have never been in better shape. All of this was made possible by a realistic appraisal of the objective situation, by an understanding of the peculiarities of the New York labor and radical movement, by emphasis on propaganda activities and opponents work. Comrade Bartell's report to the City Convention codified the premises, methods, and practical steps of the year's work and proposed, in view of the unchanged objective situation, that the New York Local continue on the same road. Instead of hailing the report as a model effort in adapting a national policy to the peculiarities and needs of a local situation, the majority of the Secretariat pounced on it for factional ends as one of the grounds to precipitate an internal struggle nationally. Once again they charged the atmosphere with suspicion, once again we saw the now familiar hunt for hidden motives and secret aims. 'ls he (Bartell) not tending to modify our basic evaluation of the party's character, perspectives and tasks?' With this loaded question, they announced their support of one of the most infantile, miseducated, and sectarian groups that the New York Local has ever known, a group that has been repudiated by the bulk of the experienced, responsible local activists and trade unionists. We will return to this question later. Suffice it to say here that this group is the first fruit of the year of effort by the Cannon-Weiss faction to precipitate a factional struggle to cover up their own confusion, their constant shifting of issues, and their no less constant searching for hidden motives and deviations. It is a warning of what the party will look like nationally if they are not called to order and corrected in time. We sat for months in the PC meetings and made no attempt to contest or struggle against these factional and warlike moves against us. We did not even fight over Clarke's removal from the full-time staff as we still hoped that the matter would be straightened out when the financial situation improved. We were waiting for the majority to present to the National Committee, with the conclusion of the election campaign, a practical program of action for 1953, on what practical tasks and projects we would concentrate our efforts. Nothing was ever submitted or proposed. But on December 30, 1952, the Los

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Angeles leaders proposed to involve the party in a series of new local election campaigns. The issue involved was not the need or merit of participating in election campaigns. The national party and the Los Angeles Local had just concluded a major electoral activity only two months previously. We believed, therefore, that the Los Angeles proposal was made in contemptuous disregard of the fact that we were still in a precarious financial condition, that Clarke had recently been removed from full-time work, that the project for improving the magazine, under consideration by the PC after the convention, was abandoned because of the financial crisis. When we protested against this preposterous proposal, this method, or lack of method, of determining party activity for 1953, and when Comrade Cochran dared suggest that the personnel arrangements were being handled along factional lines, the Cannon leaders decided the moment had arrived to renew battle for the split.

The Political Causes of the Crisis

The roots of this irresponsible behavior, this erratic method of dealing with orientation and tasks, this panic in the face of political differences, are primarily political. They grow out of a six-year-old disorientation in the face of unexpected changes in the world and at home, out of disappointment over the collapse of exaggerated hopes, out of an inability to cope soberly and analytically with the new reality created by the deepening reaction and the coming war. It has taken the form of Stalinophobia and frustration. The nature of this tendency toward Stalinophobia - let us make this unmistakably clear so that there will be no confusion or misunderstanding - is not capitulation to imperialism but a barren sectarianism that makes a doctrinaire panacea of'independence' and attempts to meet all problems of the moment and of perspectives by the mysticism of faith and hope and making a mystique of the party. In frustration at the impotence of such politics, they have turned against those whose approach and policy is more in tune with the reality with a ferocity out of all proportion to the magnitude of the questions involved. Despite its background, tradition, and experience, this tendency bears many of the characteristics of all those groupings in revolutionary leadership who have proved unable to adjust themselves to great historic turns. We say this sadly because we had hoped for better in view of our common heritage. But facts are stubborn things; to ignore them is to court disaster. Let us preface this documentation of the record by a word of caution. We do not cite the record because some or all of us were right on all questions while others were wrong, nor to demand any breast-beating for errors made. That to

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us would be a futile game of prestige politics. We cite the record because the same type of errors, and particularly the method of thought responsible for them, are still being repeated without any consciousness of their real cause or any genuine desire to correct them, and because they are the chief cause of the present internal struggle. The turning point in our party's recent history was the party's 1946 convention and its aftermath. The party's hopes had been greatly buoyed by the postwar rise in the class struggle and its consequent expansion numerically and in influence in the mass movement. We saw a curve of increasing and more rapid party expansion and influence. Our resolution spoke of transforming the party into one of 'mass action'. We believed the class struggle would move steadily forward, and with an oncoming depression, which we were predicting, would be transformed into a great social crisis that in tum would lead to the American revolution in which the Trotskyists would play the leading role. In the process of these great events all the complex problems of world politics, of Stalinism and of reformism, would naturally be more or less speedily resolved. Not only had the axis of world power turned to the United States, but also the axis of the class struggle and of world Trotskyism. We had become the children of destiny - at least in our own minds. Unfortunately, this idyllic picture was to be quickly dispelled. Within four months, the cold war broke out between American imperialism and the Kremlin, and reaction began to mount the offensive against the labor and radical movement at home. Instead of the scene being dominated by pure class struggle in the United States between the corporations and the labor movement, increasingly led by Trotskyists, we were to be again faced with the complicated problem of the more powerful anti-capitalist movement in other parts of the world being led and misled by the Stalinist bureaucracy. In the meanwhile, instead of the American workers engaged in mortal combat with capitalism, the gigantic red-baiting campaign to purge Stalinist influence out of the trade union movement began to occupy the center of the stage. We were distinctly slow in reacting to these new developments. That in itself is not a fault, or if it was it was also a fault of the whole world movement. The human mind, even the Marxist mind, is slow in grasping a new reality particularly when it changes sharply and suddenly. Our fault, or rather the fault of the majority of the leadership, is that they have not to this day reoriented themselves to the new world situation. 1

The Auto Crisis

The leadership came to the August 1947 plenum of the NC, the first gathering after the ill-fated 1946 convention, without an analysis of the new situation. But

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if we could ignore or postpone an examination of the big questions, we could not avoid a discussion of their practical consequences as manifested in our most important field of activity, the trade union movement. A struggle broke out over the policy to be pursued in the auto union, where we had our biggest and most influential fraction. The leading comrades, and the majority of the fraction, were proposing that we shift our support from Walter Reuther, who was fast becoming the center of reaction in the union and the open agent of the State Department, first to an intermediate position, and possibly later, if developments justified, to support of the Thomas-Addes group in which the Stalinists were involved. The proposal was violently opposed by Comrades Mills, Swabeck, and Dunne, with Comrade Cannon giving them support until the very end of the discussion when it had become obvious that the majority of the plenum was going to support the position of Comrade Cochran and the auto fraction. Cannon then announced that he would go along with the decision but was greatly worried lest we cut ourselves off from the 'mainstream' and become contaminated by our association with the Stalinists. The self-same fears had in essence been the principal reason for the opposition of the others. The correct decision was taken but not before the committee had been inhibited by this fear of Stalinism which was to be thrust again and again into all serious questions of policy, ranging from tactics to theory. Thus, if analogies are needed and are correctly applied, the present conflict like the conflict in 1940 began with a dispute over policy to be followed in the auto union and over the self-same issue. At that time, 1939, Burnham and Shachtman bitterly opposed the policy of Cochran, Dunne, and Clarke in Detroit of joining with Reuther and the Stalinists against Homer Martin in the UAW split (we had previously been supporting Homer Martin). They said the new UAW-CIO, minus Martin, would be nothing but a rubber stamp for the CP. This is more than a coincidence; in both cases a section of the leadership oriented themselves from Stalinophobe considerations against the policy of the auto fraction. Viewing the events of the 1939 auto crisis and the eruption of more virulent Stalinophobe tendencies that seized the party after the Russo-Finnish war, Trotsky issued his famous cry of alarm. The party, he said, had to be proletarianized or it would succumb to overpowering and alien class pressures. We were to see the first test of his warning in the struggle over auto policy in 1947. It was thanks to the effective and successful proletarianization of the Michigan party, thanks to its flexible tactics over the years which had never made a fetish of alliances with reformist bureaucrats, that our movement was saved from the disgrace of a Shachtmanite trade union policy, from discreditment among the

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best militants in the UAW and the labor movement as a whole. When, because of old habit patterns or plain disorientation, a section of the party leadership became motivated by phobias of Stalinism rather than by Marxist understanding of class criteria, it was the worker-revolutionists of Michigan who brought them up sharply and kept the party on its true course. If we insist on this point, it is because of the factional distortion of the real nature of the groups in the present party conflict. It is charged that our tendency, which is in the forefront of the struggle to correct the Stalinophobe tendencies now so manifest in a section of the party leadership, consists of despairing, pessimistic petty-bourgeois types. Were that true, the party's future would be grim indeed. It would be wrecked on the rocks of Third Campism. Past history and present facts, however, tell an absolutely different story. It was important sections of rank and file militants in the UAW who were the first to resist the red-baiting witch-hunt instigated in the union by the reformist labor bureaucracy at the behest of the State Department. They knew by class instinct that Reuther's program was aimed at smashing the traditional democracy and militancy of their union. It was the worker-revolutionists of our party in Michigan who first saw the class lines of this struggle in the auto union. They were determined to link up with and penetrate this movement regardless of Stalinist participation in it. But here they encountered the resistance of a section of the leadership which had become a transmission belt for alien class influences into the party. Fortunately the proletarian section of the party proved strong enough to counteract these pressures and save the Marxist integrity of the party. We are still fighting the same disease today, although it has become more malignant than in 1947. Now as then, the drive to proletarianize the party goes hand in hand with the struggle against Stalinophobia. Even though countless workers are afflicted with it, Stalinophobia is essentially a petty-bourgeois poison. It destroyed Shachtman because he lacked the antidote of a proletarian base and a Marxist program. We have both - that is why we are confident that the party will overcome the dangerous wavering of a section of its leadership. The opposition to the auto fraction's policy was not simply an incidental difference over union tactics. In essence, although generally unrecognized at the time, it was resistance to making an important political tum required by a new world situation. Our trade union policy during the war had been a relatively easy problem to resolve: Stalinist and reformist union leaders were joined in a program of class peace; together with other militants we led the left-wing opposition. Then ensued a very brief interlude which created no end of confusion. Under great pressure from below, the reformist bureaucrats shifted to more militant actions, while the Stalinists still bound by Moscow's remain-

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ing wartime alliances continued to preach class peace. This created a certain opposition between the Stalinists and reformists and threw us into a temporary alliance with the latter, one aspect of which was the bloc with Reuther. It appeared to some that there was a revival of the prewar situation where our main tactic in the unions was that of blocs with more progressive reformist leaders against the Stalinists. This conception went so deep that it was codified politically in Comrade Cannon's pamphlet American Stalinism and AntiStalinism, which appeared a few months before the August 1947 plenum. But the underlying reality after the war was the emergence of a powerful new labor bureaucracy, in avowed alliance with the State Department, and executors of its war preparations both at home and abroad. The underlying reality was the cold war, which was injected into the union movement by this bureaucracy and resulted in the destruction of Stalinist power in the c Io, and the isolation of all radicals and left-wingers in the process. The outlived 'anti-Stalinist' line of Cannon's pamphlet - a product of our failure to make the necessary political reorientation - was at the bottom of the resistance to the tum needed in the auto union. It became part of the vulgar 'anti-Stalinism' which was to plague us repeatedly in one field after another. 2

The Debate on Eastern Europe

The second big dispute where 'fears of Stalinism' were thrust into the debate and became the determining consideration occurred over the new developments in Eastern Europe. Sometime in 1949, Comrade Cochran had come to the conclusion that because of economic, social, and political transformations, the states in the Soviet orbit of Eastern Europe could no longer be considered capitalist but had to be characterized as deformed workers' states. He was joined in this view on the Political Committee by Comrades Hansen, Bartell, and, later on, by Wood. For a time, the discussion on the question, which was also proceeding abroad, was conducted objectively through an examination and debate as to the facts and events and their interpretation. Suddenly Comrade Cannon entered the debate with the demand that an immediate plenum be called to decide the question because the conception that deformed workers' states existed in Eastern Europe created the danger of conciliation with Stalinism and loss of faith in the Fourth International. Called to New York on short notice in February 1951, and without time to give sufficient thought to the question, the majority of the NC members voted not on the merits of the dispute but because of the fears Comrade Cannon had induced in them. The method was a fatal one and was to create endless ideological damage and confusion. For if in fact, and according to Marxist analysis, the Eastern

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European states had become deformed workers' states, and if that signified that Trotskyism had lost its reason for existence, then it was beyond our power to reverse that situation. All we could achieve by denying the facts and the Marxist analysis would be to cease being Marxists, or to retreat into an ivory tower, or both. The world congress was to demonstrate later how the events of the countries of Eastern Europe, their transformation into deformed workers' states, was a vindication of Trotskyism, although not in the form we had predicted before the war. This great work of Marxist analysis was to be of little aid to Comrade Cannon and a majority of the committee in arriving at a correct position. Motivated by subjective considerations, they shifted helplessly from one position to another, entirely too confused to be committed to paper or explained openly to the membership. They emerged from one of the most significant discussions in the history of world Trotskyism not with a political line but with a mental reservation. Six months after the decision had been so definitively taken by the plenum, uncertainty and the feeling that an error had been committed began to pervade a section of the leadership which had voted with the majority. To the Yugoslav developments, which had begun to shake our thinking out of traditionalist, routinist ruts, was added the overwhelming demonstration of the facts that a social transformation had occurred in Eastern Europe. In September 1950, Comrade Clarke submitted a memorandum to the Secretariat. It said, in substance, that it was false to continue to characterize the buffer zone as capitalist, but it was also wrong to say that workers' states had been established because there had been no proletarian revolutions as in Yugoslavia and because the countries had already been absorbed into the USSR, as the Baltic countries had been in 1940. This hybrid position, although no longer supported by Clarke, was subsequently to become the position of the Political Committee. Unmotivated and unexplained, it was less a political position than a refuge against unanswerable facts and arguments, a safe haven, it seemed, against the encroaching 'dangers of Stalinism'. Comrade Cannon, who had angrily insisted in February that a position had to be reached forthwith, now became the very paragon of patience: there was no need in probing the question once again, although he was now ready to accept the hybrid stand; we could expect important developments in the international situation which would throw a new light on the question; and, in any case, comrades were still in the process of thinking through their positions. The consequence of this erratic behavior on the part of Comrade Cannon, and the lack of political self-confidence on the part of others, was the exclusion of the membership from the privilege of participating in the discussion on the

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new basis and from finally deciding the question as is their right. For those who were waiting for an answer from the leadership, the whole discussion was to end on a note of confusion and disorientation. No resolution formulating the new position was presented to the 1950 convention for its consideration. Nor was a resolution, which would have reopened the discussion, presented after the convention. For nine months, the majority of the committee maintained an unbroken silence on the question. The International Secretariat resolution, to be submitted to the world congress, characterizing the Eastern European countries as deformed workers' states (which together with the other theses and resolutions finally resolved the crisis of perspective faced by the Trotskyist movement), elicited no comment from the leadership - until September 1951.

At the very end of the Labor Day 1951 plenum of the NC, without previous warning or discussion, an amendment to the IS resolution was suddenly presented by Comrade Cannon and others, and then adopted by the majority of the committee It was the position of the previous year developed just prior to the 1950 convention: the states of Eastern Europe could no longer be considered capitalist, and therefore they had to be defended from imperialist attack, but neither were they workers' states because they had already been absorbed into the USSR. No facts or political motivation were given to substantiate this position. What was involved was no simple factual dispute over the degree of Kremlin control in Eastern Europe but continuing fears over the dangers of Stalinist conciliationism and a continuing crisis of perspective. This was revealed by the motley bloc that voted for the resolution - among them Comrades Wright and Stevens (Paul G.), who still opposed the designation of Yugoslavia as a workers' state. The amendment was never to officially see the Light ofday in the party. The motion to accept the world congress decision on Eastern Europe at the 1952 convention was unanimously adopted without any opposition, abstention, or reservation from anyone, although Comrade Cannon and others have repeated again and again that they have not changed their position. A more bankrupt, disoriented method of resolving political questions, which was to reappear again in the discussion of the world congress, and to seriously distort the political thinking of many comrades, had not been known in the whole previous history of the Political Committee.

The Third World Congress The Third World Congress was a landmark in the history of world Trotskyism. It was to inaugurate a reorientation in outlook and a change in tactics probably as significant as the tum toward the formation of a new international proposed 3

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by Trotsky in 1934 after Hitler had taken power in Germany. A crisis of perspective had begun to develop in our movement internationally with the close of the Second World War and particularly with the advent of the cold war. It manifested itself in the struggles and splits in England and France and in the form of the Morrow-Goldman tendency here. But neither the nature of the crisis nor its solution was immediately apparent. It remained for the developments in Eastern Europe, the Yugoslav events, and finally for the Third Chinese Revolution to pose the question in all its sharpness and clarity. That what was involved was not some abstract theoretical problem but the fate of our movement itself was demonstrated by the catastrophe that had overtaken our Chinese comrades. Mired by outdated slogans and conceptions, they failed to recognize the Third Chinese Revolution when it happened, viewing it as another betrayal of the 1925-27 variety, and were left completely on the sidelines in the midst of the greatest upheaval since the Russian October. (In answer to those who speak of the difficulties of participating in a Stalinist-led movement, we can only say with Trotsky that a correct policy does not guarantee victory, but without it defeat is inevitable). These events precipitated an international discussion which lasted over two years and culminated in the Third World Congress. The Third Congress refined and readjusted our conceptions of the role of Stalinist parties in the light of the Yugoslav and Chinese developments. It analyzed the course of events after the outbreak of the Korean War as being one of rapid drift to World War III between two hostile class camps; it excluded the possibility of any lasting deal between the Kremlin and imperialism; it predicted that the new war - which imperialism would have to unleash without first being able to smash the colonial revolutions and the revolutionary workers' movements - would quickly take the form of an international civil war. In view of this irreversible trend and the effects it would have on the workers' movement, the congress called for a reorientation of outlook for the International as a whole and for a reorientation of tactics for an important section of the world movement. Perhaps the chief significance of the congress was that it had ceased to be the prisoner of outlived formulas, of 'museum relics', and had readjusted itself, in true Leninist fashion, to the new world reality. Unfortunately the congress failed to make any deep impression on an important section of our leadership. A few among them who had a glimmer of its profound meaning drew back in fear at the dangers of 'conciliation to Stalinism' they thought might arise as a result. To this day, two years after the discussion on the congress began, important party leaders are still asking: 'Why are the resolutions of the Third Congress more important than those of any other con-

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gress?' 'What is all this nonsense about reorientation and rearmament?' 'What have these decisions to do with us in the us anyway?' The discussion and handling of the world congress resolutions was a pathetic demonstration of political ineptitude and confusion. After two PC sessions in February and March 1951, devoted to the question, which were marked chiefly by doubts, hesitation, disagreement, the committee emerged neither for nor against but with a series of mental reservations. These were catalogued under the title 'Contributions to the Discussion on International Perspectives'. Because of strong criticism of it by Clarke and Cochran, demonstrating its untenable position, this document, also, was never to see the light of day, although it was actually mimeographed and had been sent to the members of the NC. (We are appending to this article the sole statement of position to emerge from the majority, entitled 'Contributions to the Discussion on International Perspectives', and Clarke's reply.) Its authors never proposed its adoption by the PC, nor was it presented to the Labor Day 1951 plenum of the NC which voted without discussion to adopt the general line of the world congress, together with the above-mentioned amendment on Eastern Europe. As in the discussion on Eastern Europe, the membership was again to suffer most from this fumbling, maneuverist method of the PC in handling big political questions. Deprived of the opinions of its leadership, and naturally unclear as to the actual significance of the world congress orientation, there was to be no serious, organized discussion in the ranks as a whole until Comrade Clarke's tour, that is, one year after the main document for the world congress had been issued in an internal bulletin. The confusion in the leadership was never to be cleared up in an organized way. The mental reservations, incorporated in 'The Contributions, etc.', were never to be confronted directly by the PC or NC as a body, and have persisted to this day and these self-same false concepts are smuggled in repeatedly, even though its authors lacked the courage to defend the position when it was under consideration. Clarke's report in October 1951 upon his return to the enlarged PC (including those attending the Trotsky School) was met with a round of objections of the same order as those which had been presented at the first discussion eight or nine months before, although in the meantime the NC had formally gone on record approving the general line. There was an outcry in the meeting on the part of Cannon and others when Clarke proposed that the committee should now strongly recommend the congress decisions to the party in its own name as a decisive reorientation of the world movement, and urge the branches to make these decisions the central axis of discussion and education for the entire ensuing period. It was contended that this proposal would gag members of the committee from expressing their differences which they had a

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right to do until a convention passed a definitive decision. A bare motion was then adopted accepting the report and submitting the world congress documents to membership discussion. That the clamor for discussion in the committee at this late date was only a means of withholding the authority and wholehearted support of the committee from the world congress decisions, was to be proved by the failure of any member of the committee to come forth with a single word of criticism, orally or in writing, in the ten subsequent months which included the party preconvention discussion. The same silence prevailed when the NC and later the convention were to be presented with a resolution which hailed the congress resolutions and accepted all of them unreservedly and without amendment. The struggle over the unaltered mental reservations of the leading comrades on the NC was to continue in the form of uninterrupted conflicts and friction in the weekly paper staff and sometimes in the PC over the line and approach to be taken to events in our propaganda. Politics, not psychology, explains the atmosphere and the relationships on the Political Committee. How could it be any different when the party and the press are being directed by that group of comrades who consider it indispensable to present and defend their mental reservations to a line they have formally adopted against those who completely agree with and fully understand this line?

Vulgar 'Anti-Stalinism' in Practice

Trotsky long ago pointed out that a deficiency in theory would eventually corrode the entire political organism. Shachtman's evolution, and later Johnson's, proved his point to the hilt. What he meant was that without correct theory the basic guarantee for correctly orienting policy in sharp turns and resisting alien pressures would be lost. In that case, even if the leadership succeeded empirically and by instinct in arriving at the correct position, it would constantly face the danger of defections in the ranks and in the leadership among those left politically unprepared, or falsely prepared, and who do not find in these empirical motivations a strong enough shield to resist alien pressure. It is undoubtedly true that the tradition of the 1940 struggle with the pettybourgeois opposition acts as a powerful antidote to Stalinophobe degenerations, and has tended to prevent this disease from assuming malignant form. It is because of this tradition also that we are confident that the party will succeed in correcting these dangerous tendencies now manifest in a section of the leadership. But it must not be forgotten that tradition is no permanent guaran-

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tee; an important section of the ranks entered the party after the split; and even more important is the fact that while the principles on which the 1940 struggle was waged remain essentially sound, the perspectives upon which it was based have since been altered by the unexpected turn of world events. Two important instances, which we shall cite, demonstrate how imperfect a shield tradition is in warding off the Stalinophobe mode of thought in formulating party policy on big questions; and how confusion in theory spells disaster in formulating current policies. 1. The Korean War. The first reaction of the weekly paper, operating under the immediate direction of the PC, to the Korean War was a Third Camp position calling down a plague on both houses, the Kremlin and American imperialism. Our position was not dissimilar from that of the POUM and the Yugoslav CP, and not too far from that of the Shachtmanites. Now, the Korean War was the first big postwar crisis, testing all prior conceptions. It proved forthwith the complete fallacy of Cannon's basic contention that the main danger came from tendencies toward 'conciliation with Stalinism'. On the contrary, under the great pressures of the moment, the first inclination of the PC was a position that yielded in the opposite direction, toward Third Campism. It is true that the PC corrected its position in a relatively brief time under pressure of protests from leading comrades. But the fact remains that a semi-Shachtmanite position was taken. That should have been a warning signal, a cause for great concern in a leadership desirous of avoiding such pitfalls in the future. What was needed was not hollow 'self-criticism', but a reevaluation of the false criteria which had dominated the previous debates, and which was the principal source of the present error. That opportunity was to come in the most favorable way in the shape of the world congress resolutions which were presented as a collective product reorienting strategic conceptions without passing judgment on previous positions or errors. But the opportunity was to go unheeded. A majority of the committee reacted to the world congress just as they had to Eastern Europe, as though the mistake on Korea had never occurred, still worried about the main danger of 'softness' to Stalinism. 2.

The theory ofthe progressive character ofthe anti-Stalinism ofthe American workers. This theory pervades the thinking of a large number of comrades, it provides the Leitmotif for the position and tone of the weekly paper, it is often the determining consideration for tactical conclusions. It is based on two essentially false conceptions: First, that the workers, or an important section of them, are not opposed to the Stalinists as Communists but because of their record of wartime betrayals and bureaucratic rule in the

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unions. Second, that the opposition of the workers to the Soviet Union is not necessarily an opposition to communism or socialism but to forced labor, concentration camps, purges, frame-up trials, etc. (We discount the opportunist notion as alien to all our conceptions that we should seek through anti-Stalinism to buy legality for ourselves.) From these conceptions, there is derived the conclusion that if we are to maintain contact with the American worker, if we are to gain his ear for our propaganda, we must ever be preoccupied with avoiding being 'tarred with the brush of Stalinism', that we must go out of our way to 'differentiate' ourselves from it, that we must even pass up opportunities in Stalinist circles if such a tactic could associate us in any way with Stalinism in the eyes of the socalled average militant worker. It would take almost as many pages as we have already written to detail the incidents in which this conception of 'anti-Stalinism' has been the deciding factor; in fact, most of the disputes in the PC for the last year or more revolved around this disputed question. We shall limit ourselves here to a few of these incidents. (We shall also publish the views of Comrade Trotsky on this question as he set them forth in his 1940 discussion on the question of granting critical support to Browder, then CP candidate for President.) a. The prosecutions against the Stalinist leaders. The party and the press had taken a magnificent position in the first Foley Square trial, in which defense of the Stalinists was joined with a direct appeal to the CP for a united front. That action, culminating in the Bill of Rights conference in 1949, far from leading to any Stalinist conciliationism, constituted one of the most telling blows we had struck against the Stalinist bureaucrats in years, leading to a split between them and their entire intellectual periphery on the question of the principles of the struggle against the witchhunt. But by the time the second trial of the Stalinist leaders occurred, a new position, never formally adopted but apparently taken for granted as policy, had edged out the old one. The weekly paper practically buried the news of the arrests and trials, and this was deliberate policy- not an oversight. When Comrade Clarke inquired at a PC meeting in the fall of 1951 for the reasons of this neglect, the reply was given by Comrade Hansen to the effect that the arrests had been deliberately underplayed in order to avoid antagonizing or frightening prospective readers of the weekly paper whom we were then approaching in a sub campaign. b. The Rosenberg case. For almost an entire year, the weekly paper remained completely silent on this case which has since become the cause celebre of the witch-hunt. To our shame, the first recognition of the case appeared in the weekly paper (in the form of an editorial written by Comrade Clarke)

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after even the prowar Jewish Daily Forward had registered its protest. This position, still to be handled gingerly later on, was taken after months of evasion, first of a proposal by Comrade Breitman to publicize the case, and much later of Comrade Clarke, and then only on a strong demand from the ranks. But before this stand was to be taken, a comrade in the New York Local who had raised the question in his branch was told by Comrade Hansen that the Rosenberg case was a spy case and we didn't want to get mixed up in it. Others expressing the same point of view in the ranks declared it to be an issue involving GPU agents with whom we had nothing in common. Throughout the country, comrades remarked bitterly that the week the Supreme Court refused to hear the Rosenberg appeal, the weekly paper relegated that news to an editorial while splashing the story of Kutcher's threatened eviction all over the front page. Without any damage whatever to the Kutcher story, it could well have taken second place to the Rosenberg news that week. If the resistance of the weekly paper editors and a section of the leadership has finally been overcome, it is not because there was any change in their basic attitude, but partly because their position had become untenable (even Labor Action was protesting on the Rosenberg case) and partly because of the exigencies of the internal struggle. Propaganda about Stalinism. Most of the time our propaganda about Stac. linism is practically incoherent, lacking in the most elementary pedagogical qualities so necessary in these days of unabated witch-hunt and threatening war when the entire press and all organs of bourgeois public opinion are screaming about Stalinism at the top of their lungs. Our only concern seems to be to attack the Stalinists wherever possible without second thought as to the new circumstances under which this attack has to be made and to the consequent methods to be employed. Our purpose seems to be to distinguish ourselves from the Stalinists - period. The trouble with this method is that very often either the distinction cannot be understood, or the distinction between us and the bourgeois anti-Stalinists gets lost in a flood of invective, epithet, and incomprehensible characterizations. The tone for this blunderbuss approach was set in Comrade Cannon's pamphlet The Road to Peace. Nobody can tell - not even Cannon himself - to whom that pamphlet is directed. If its main direction is toward 'militant nonpolitical workers', as he claims, that would require convincing them first of all that America's aims in the war are counterrevolutionary and imperialist, that us 'democracy' can in no sense be considered the 'lesser evil' to Stalinist totalitarianism. On the contrary, one would think from the advanced concepts used ('The Road to

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Peace: According to Lenin and According to Stalin') that it is directed toward the rank and file Stalinists. If that were the case, it completely misses the mark. The attitude is so fierce and unfriendly to people who mistakenly consider their movement to be genuinely fighting imperialism, and being persecuted by it, as to cause them to drop the pamphlet before reading the second paragraph. The only conclusion one can come to is that it was written for the party membership - another case of excessive preoccupation with mythical Stalinist 'dangers' in our ranks. Because of Stalinophobe considerations, the press fails completely to make itself intelligible precisely to the average nonpolitical militant. Sometimes the weekly paper seems a throwback to the thirties when we were arguing politics in a radical and pro-Marxist movement; other times it returns to the approach of the People's Front or World War II period of alliance of Stalinism with the State Department. But it is rarely adjusted to the present, i.e., to the cold war between the two class camps. For some comrades the question boils down to one of a 'hard' or 'soft' tone on Stalinism. If only life or politics were that simple! Obviously, the intent is hard. It is to destroy Stalinism as a contender for leadership of the radical vanguard of the workers, to disintegrate that movement from within to our own advantage. But the method is determined by objective circumstances, nationally and internationally, by the level of political development of the workers, by the question of whether Stalinism or the proimperialist bureaucracy is the main enemy at the moment. Every season has its vegetable - but for us that vegetable is never Stalinophobia!

On the 'Progressive Anti-Stalinism' of the American Workers

Let us return to the concept of the 'progressive anti-Stalinism' of the workers, because all of the positions cited above, and many more, would be justified if such a sentiment actually existed among the masses. The entire conception is a myth, a product of wishful thinking all too prevalent in the leadership of the party. The American workers in their vast majority, unfortunately, are anticommunist not anti-Stalinist. Stalinist crimes have simply made it easier for the rulers to inculcate the masses with hysterical antagonism to communism. If any sizable section of the workers in the unions were basically motivated in their opposition to the Stalinists by the wartime betrayals of the c P and its bureaucratic methods primarily, then we or some other progressive anti-Stalinist grouping, would have replaced the Stalinists as the leadership of the left wing. On the contrary, the fact that a reformist bureaucracy, tarred with the brush of

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the same crimes, could eliminate the Stalinists and rise to unchallenged domination over the unions indicated that this type of progressive anti-Stalinism was not widespread. Moreover, in 'left-wing' unions (such as the UE; the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers; the ILWU) or left-wing locals, notably Ford Local 600, the progressives have continued to work with the Stalinists, and primarily because they consider the main danger coming from the side of the State Department lackeys, and not the American agency of the Kremlin - and they are correct! The existence of 'progressive anti-Stalinist' sentiments among broad masses is revealed to be an even greater myth in the realm of decisive class questions. This should be obvious to anyone with even the most general understanding of the political history of the American working class. It is embarrassing to have to repeat elementary truths to those who should know better. The American workers, outside a tiny segment, have no experience whatever with the struggle of working class parties for leadership of the mass movement. They have not yet been confronted with this problem because they have not reached the stage of class consciousness of rejecting capitalist politics, let alone of rejecting capitalism in favor of socialism. Representatives of radical parties have at times been accepted in the leadership of the mass movement, hut always on the basis of a superior minimum program, or because of their special qualities of leadership, but never because of support of their socialist ideology. This was also seen in Minneapolis during the time of the heyday of our influence in the union movement there. 'Progressive anti-Stalinism' does exist in England and is based on the anticapitalist consciousness of the working class as a whole. It is demonstrated by the fact that the workers in their revolt against the right wing of the Labour Party have turned to the left Social Democrat Bevan and not to the Communist Party. It is further demonstrated by the relative absence of any witchhunting or red-baiting in the British labor movement. This does not mean that the 'progressive anti-Stalinism' in England is free of all political backwardness, because the British workers are just beginning to experience the conflict between reformism and revolutionary politics. The British comrades understand this situation perfectly, and for that reason Socialist Outlook is the best product of revolutionary working class journalism in the entire international workers' movement. The reason is not because they use smaller words or shorter sentences than we do in our paper, but because they understand their own working class, they know its problems and preoccupations and address their propaganda to that movement and not to some mythical conception of the proletariat concocted in an editorial office. We could do worse than to drop some of our false pride and hollow boasting and learn something from the English experience.

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'The proof of the pudding is in the eating'. If this progressive anti-Stalinism really existed as a current, it would show up in the growth of the anti-Stalinist parties. The 1952 election returns were a remarkable demonstration of the contrary. The insignificant vote received by all the radical parties combined indicated that the masses, even in their confused opposition to the Korean War, remained anti-communist and made no distinction between treacherous Stalinism, the SP's State Department socialism, sectarian De Leonism, and the revolutionary Marxism of the SWP. If they had made such distinctions on a mass basis, we would now be faced with the beginnings of great social struggles. The relatively stable social base upon which our ruling class rests, and which is its chief asset in its drive to war, is built upon anti-communism, not progressive anti-Stalinism. Moreover, none of the pseudo-socialist groups, assuming that our revolutionary socialism is still too advanced for the masses, have benefitted from this so-called progressive anti-Stalinism. The SP and the Shachtmanites, who made this conception the focal point of their political orientation, are now recording the results in their own virtual liquidation. Basing themselves upon 'progressive anti-Stalinism' signified for these tendencies an adaptation to the most backward prejudices of the masses and to the logical next step, conciliation or capitulation to the imperialist camp in the u.s. which now encompasses virtually all of the anti-Stalinists outside of the radical movement. The evolution of these groups should be a warning signal to us of the terrible consequences of adaptation to the political backwardness of the masses based on wishful thinking about the prevalence of'progressive anti-Stalinism'. We have no magic protection that exempts us, when following a false course, from political degeneration, either in the direction of adaptation to imperialism or sectarian Third Campism. Our only armor is our revolutionary program and strategy based upon a realistic Marxist conception of the world as it is, not as we would like it to be.

Party or Propaganda Group Stalinophobia has led the Shachtmanites and others to a conciliatory position toward imperialist public opinion. Our tradition and training against this type of conciliationism is still so powerful that it has effectively barred this path of development and produced instead an opposite tendency - the tendency to petrification in the sphere of Marxist thought and to turning one's back on the real world and its struggles and lineups, and finding refuge in a revolutionary ivory tower. That is why the question of the independence of the party was arti-

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ficially pushed to the fore and is discussed in a vacuum, removed from time, place, circumstances, and converted into a mystique - to which all the disoriented, confused, and bewildered can cling. Whence the big furor about this question today? With the formlessness and lack of precision with which they pose all questions, Cannon and the others first attempted to make the 'independence of the party' the main axis of the discussion at the May 1952 plenum, and it remained one of the main themes of his July convention speech. Originally it was the corollary of the slanderous accusation that Clarke and others wanted to orient toward or liquidate into the Stalinist movement. When this charge, made out of the whole cloth, wore itself pretty thin, it was discreetly shoved into the background. Today, Dobbs-SteinHansen trot out the second version of the 'independent party'. It is the question of the hour, we are informed, not because we are trying to liquidate into the Stalinist movement, but because we have 'lost faith' in the party, and we want to convert it into a propaganda group. We propose to leave the vagaries of 'faith' to the medicine men, and to get down to politics. Let us address ourselves to the fundamental problem. At the risk of shocking some, let us restate a few truths that have been generally accepted in our movement until recently. Are we a party? Yes and no. That is, we are not a party as Marxists have understood this term as a relationship to the two fundamental classes in society; neither the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat recognizes us as such; our positions on important political questions are either unknown or considered of little importance to either class; we are unable to mobilize or lead the class or any significant section of it except in accidental or isolated incidents, and then usually as one of the participants in a broader movement. In fact, despite our election campaigns, we still remain unknown to the class as a whole (and election campaigns alone are not the panacea to becoming a party, as fifty years of SLP election campaigning proves). It is still necessary when introducing the SWP to a new contact to distinguish it, at his request as a rule, from the CP and the SP, indicating that while they have made a certain impression on him as political parties, we have not. We have no nationally known trade union leader with the popularity of Bill Haywood or even Harry Bridges, no well known political figure like a Debs or even a Norman Thomas, with whom the masses can easily identify the party. Like it or not, we are still the 'Trotskyists' to that segment of the workers who know us, i.e., a political tendency distinguished from others primarily by our ideas. Through no fault of our own we are a party in the nature of our program, and our intentions and hopes, but not yet in fact. Are we then a propaganda group? Yes and no. We are a propaganda group in that we must still recruit a sizable section of the vanguard of the class without

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which we cannot become a party. Above all, we are still engaged in a struggle with other tendencies for influence over the workers' vanguard. It is pure selfdeception to believe that the struggle has already been won. The chief factor in the decline or disappearance of this or that rival organization has been the impact of reaction-prosperity, not the triumph of our ideas in the workers' movement. The struggle of tendencies has not been settled in our favor or anyone else's, but merely postponed to the next onset of social crisis. We are not a propaganda group because where possible, in accordance with the opportunities provided by the objective situation, and in keeping with a realistic appraisal and proper disposal of our own forces, we attempt and should attempt to act as a party. We are not a propaganda group in that we assert our right and our qualifications from the point of view of record, program, and cadres to fulfilling the role of a party. This contradiction between our political aims and our physical and historical limitations, between our will to be a party and the reality of our present forces, is best demonstrated by the tactic of 'caution' we are obliged to follow in the unions. Were we a full-fledged party, we would today follow a carefully planned course of defensive combat in the unions which would lead undoubtedly to certain victimizations but would at the same time be compensated by the class education of certain sections of the workers' vanguard, many of whom would be probably won over to the party. But because our numbers are so limited, i.e., because we are essentially a propaganda group, we cannot in the main pursue such a line because, for one, we lack the influence to carry it out, and secondly, any important victimizations can lead to the total elimination of our forces from the unions. Now, all of this is elementary, and has always been considered ABC in our movement. Even in the flush of our greatest progress, the watchword of the 1946 convention was 'From a Propaganda Group to a Party ofMass Action'. We did not make the grade in real life - through no fault of our own. But obviously we did make the grade in some people's dreams.

'Independence' and 'Liquidation'

Ordinarily, the question of the independence of the party arises when someone proposes to liquidate it as Stalin did in the case of the Chinese Communist Party in 1924 into the Kuomintang, or as Browder did into the Democratic People's Front coalition during the Second World War. Even the crazy Oehlerites rested on some concrete ground when they set up a howl about the 'independence of the party' because Cannon-Shachtman proposed - entirely correctly - an

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orientation, and later, an entry into the Socialist Party. But no one has made any proposals in our party vaguely relevant to this subject. How is one to deal with this will-o'-the-wisp, unless we decide to completely abandon the ground of Marxism in favor of an unrestrained search for motives, and of psychoanalysis? But Cannon's making the 'independence of the party' one of the main planks of his faction platform has nevertheless a logic of its own. It tends to strengthen the tendencies toward sectarian ossification, especially observable in the changing attitude on the labor party question.

The Question of the Labor Party

The independence of the party is conditioned and limited by what has presumably been our common perspective of the rise of a labor party. The labor party is not just a good slogan for the day; it is a strategic orientation based upon the most probable course of development of the working class to independent politics through the unions, and not over the unions directly to a revolutionary party. In saying this, we are merely paraphrasing one of our own amendments now in the political resolution. No one can today foretell whether the SWP will have to 'liquidate' into the labor party as our comrades were obliged to do in England, whether we will be able to enter the labor party as a recognized party, or whether we will retain formal independence while operating through a left wing from within the labor party. Speculation on this point should be left to armchair philosophers. Yet there has been a great deal of nervousness on this question. From some of the comments made, it almost seems as though the party were doomed unless all shared a crystal ball conception of the future; a perspective isn't enough, it has to be a blueprint measured out with slide-rule specifications. Because of the slow maturity of the American workers to political consciousness, the party leadership has not yet been put to the test of a concrete practical application of the labor party strategy. Different approaches to this question have remained mostly in embryonic form. The labor party has been the main emphasis for the trade unionists, for that part of the ranks and leadership most clearly linked to the working class. But for Comrade Cannon and others, the labor party has in recent years been a minor theme, a temporary expedient, perhaps a good slogan for the moment but strictly subordinate to the doctrinaire pronouncement of the SWP as the coming leadership of the masses and of the revolution. The years of reaction have demonstrated how false and sectarian this approach was, as it would have been equally demonstrated had the period of

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upsurge in labor struggles continued. The defensive actions of the labor movement against the Taft-Hartley Act put the question of independent labor politics back on the agenda. A split between the unions and the Democratic Party was narrowly averted by Truman turning the helm of his party sharply in the direction of 'laborism'. In that situation the PC correctly oriented its strategy and tactics not according to the conception of the coming primacy of the SWP in the workers' movement, but rather in line with its labor party position and on the slogan of the congress of labor as its vehicle. As reaction deepened in the country, and domestic conflicts were overshadowed by the cold war, a sectarian approach to the labor party and its corollary of illusions about the SWP became more marked. It remained for Comrade Dobbs, in a letter to the PC from Chicago on November 29, 1951, to elaborate an election campaign strategy based upon a perspective which practically excluded the labor party from our program. 'I believe such wrong thinking arises in part from our one-sided treatment of the labor party question. We confine ourselves too exclusively to agitation for a labor party. We go off balance by failing to give sufficient explanation to the membership that, although one can argue the probability of a labor party development, it is not an indispensable step to the formation of a mass revolutionary party'. 'We should explain that we advocate the building of a labor party at this stage because it would help speed mass radicalization. However, the absence of a labor party obviously does not prevent the sharpening of class antagonisms under the impact of the imperialist war program; instead it tends to create a political vacuum of which we should take full advantage' ... Comrade Cannon immediately seized upon this letter, proposed that the PC (December n, 1951) adopt its general line and that he be instructed to write a series of articles in the weekly paper based upon them. The proposal was withdrawn, after objections by Clarke, who declared that such letters could not serve as the substitute for a political resolution giving our rounded views on American developments and party strategy in the light of the analysis of the Third World Congress and the new realities of the objective situation in the us. Cannon had withdrawn his motion, but not his support of the line in Dobbs' letter. He was to present it in his first version of the political resolution by the omission of all reference to the labor party. When we protested, he said the point was of small moment and it could be added to the resolution if we insisted. This omission was not an oversight, as is now explained, but part of a political line. Nor was it correct to say, in extenuation for this omission, that the political resolution was to serve merely as a guide for the elections. (Even there

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it was a vital question as our election campaign would have been reduced to a vacuous SLPism without the labor party conception and the labor party slogan.) Far from it. The document essayed a statement of the fundamental causes for labor's conservatism and a prognosis of the premises for a future radicalization, an analysis that had no necessary inherent connection with the coming elections. No. The labor party was omitted because it did not easily fit into the author's sectarian conceptions of the role of the SWP. This was made clear from Cannon's line in his plenum and later convention report on the political resolution, in which the labor party orientation had now been incorporated as an amendment of Clarke's. The burden of his remarks on the point was a fear (always phobias!) that we might have to liquidate like the British into a labor party. We were not, he emphasized, 'a holding operation for the labor party'. We were to guard against this 'danger' by telling ourselves that the SWP would become a party of some tens of thousands of members in the first period of the social crisis and thus be strong enough to dictate terms of participation in the labor party, or to tell its bureaucrats to go to hell. This is a symptomatic manifestation of sectarianism which, growing essentially out of lack of confidence in program, shuts its eyes to the reality of the workers' movement and its complicated forms of evolution. In trying to construct another image of the reality more to its own liking, it creates a conception of the party as an end in itself instead of the catalyst within the mass. It discards Lenin's idea of the party as the fighting instrument which, because of its program, experience, and cadres, can successfully penetrate the mass movement, as it is, provide leadership to those currents among the workers farthest to the left, and thus create the force, integrally tied to the mass, that will become the party and leadership of the American revolution. Dobbs-Stein-Hansen put the issue falsely when they speak of 'independent party versus propaganda group'. Correctly posed, the difference is between their developing conception of the party as an institutionalized sect against ours of a fighting instrument, using propaganda or agitation, as required by the times, for the penetration and leadership of the real workers' movement. We, for our part, are not frightened by the prospect of a labor party - yes, even if it fails to assume the 'pure' English class forms - nor by the possibility that the Trotskyists may have to go through many complicated stages to establish their alliance with the left wing of the labor party, and ultimately their leadership of it. We believe that the labor party will constitute such a drastic break in the traditional American class pattern that it will become a tremendous revolutionizing force in this country regardless of who leads the labor party or even its left wing in the first stages. That is what is decisive, and that is what will provide us with our greatest opportunity if we know how to recognize the

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reality and take advantage of it. If Marxism is to serve as a guide to action, not as a sterile dogma, then it must not view history as a succession of optimum perspectives, as a repetition of the Russian 'norm' (which was not at all a 'norm' at the time), it must not nourish illusions about pure forms of working class evolution. Otherwise, we might as well throw dialectics out the window and write a copybook of perfect formulas and maxims. At the bottom of this tendency, already sprouting like bad weeds in the much-advertised Los Angeles sunshine, and being transplanted elsewhere, is a terrible pessimism about the future, and a lack of confidence that the Marxist program can sustain the party cadres in a period of reaction. Alongside the fear that the Fourth International will not survive its tactic of entry into Stalinist and Social Democratic movements, is the fear that the SWP will succumb if it takes the labor party perspective too seriously. The movement, according to this conception, has to be kidded, important truths have to be left unsaid or sweetened to make them palatable, illusions have to be encouraged while the analysis of the reality is discouraged or labeled 'pessimism' lest the party membership becomes de-moralized or falls by the wayside. We leave aside the fact that Carlson, Charles, Mills, were not saved by this magic formula. We tum instead to Leon Trotsky for an accurate description of the method: 'It is difficult', he wrote, 'to plumb the depths of the theoretical debacle of those who seek in a program not for a scientific basis for their class orientation but for moral consolation. Consoling theories which contradict facts pertain to the sphere of religion and not science, and religion is opium for the people'. Trotsky was writing in Third IntemationalA.fter Lenin about Comintem leaders who considered the theory of socialism in one country 'unfounded' but thought 'it provides the Russian workers with a perspective in the difficult conditions under which they labor and thus gives them courage'. What would he have thought of leaders who advance a perspective based on wishful thinking to maintain 'morale', not even among the working class as a whole, but among the vanguard of the vanguard which, for almost a quarter of a century, has been undauntedly cultivating the ideas of Marxism in the most inhospitable political soil in the entire world? Seeing the record, some may say, 'Dobbs and Cannon made a mistake, but they adopted your proposal and corrected it. Your labor party amendment was incorporated into the resolution and accepted, the labor party slogan was one of the main propaganda themes of the election campaign, and the question as such was treated at length in one of Comrade Cannon's speeches in Los Angeles. The problem is therefore already resolved'. Unfortunately, this does not exhaust the question. What this thinking fails to note, is that those who

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attempted to correct the labor party position were first roundly abused as 'pessimists' and 'liquidators'. And after the correction was made, those who had been wrong have redoubled their attacks against those whose position they accepted. A line is guaranteed not merely by what is written down on paper, but by how the differences over it are resolved and by the relationships established among those who had been in disagreement. As an illustration: The 'Troika' (Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev) accepted Trotsky's line on party democracy in 1924. But then they redoubled the offensive against him for other reasons, i.e., the defense of the 'old guard' and 'Bolshevism' against Trotsky's 'Menshevism', etc. In the end there was no party democracy.

Stalinophobe-Sectarianism in Practice

The 'independence of the party' school has succeeded as its first accomplishment in blurring, if not actually disfiguring, our broad political perspective as it relates to the labor party question. Their sectarian 'achievements' in the field of practical day-to-day tactics have been even more immediate. According to the Dobbs-Stein-Hansen manifesto, we are guilty of 'an exaggerated estimate of the possibilities of opponents work'. Naturally, they disdain to demonstrate their accusation. Behind this charge, however, there appears again the cloven hoof of sectarianism, as we will demonstrate from the record. As far back as December 1948, the political resolution adopted by the NC plenum predicted that the poor showing made by Wallace in the national elections would create a crisis in the Progressive Party. The NC decided to 'organize a planned campaign toward winning over the best elements in this movement'. This campaign was to be 'specifically directed to the Stalinist workers and students who had hoped for a return by the CP to an independent class and revolutionary policy after the Browder purge'. Little was done to implement the resolution, partly because of Stalinophobe inhibitions and partly because of plain political lethargy. By the fall of 1951, it became apparent that we had long been asleep while the crisis of Stalinism, predicted in 1948, had been steadily maturing all the time. The experiences of the 1951 ... elections in New York brought this development into bold relief. On January 8, 1952, Comrade Bartell proposed to the PC, therefore, that we direct special attention to this movement in New York; that a group of comrades be sent into the ALP to take advantage of the split between Marcantonio and the Stalinists; that our false characterization of the Progressive Party (the ALP in New York) as a capitalist party be changed (particularly now that Wallace

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and the bourgeois wing had left the party); that under certain circumstances, where ALP candidates ran independently, we grant them critical support; that we propose united-front actions against the war and the witch-hunt. At the same time it had been noted that the Stalinoid grouping around the Huberman-Sweezy magazine, the Monthly Review, was showing clear signs of conflict with the CP leadership, and a tendency toward independence from them. There had been a public controversy between Bittelman (the CP leader) and the Monthly Review editors over Yugoslavia and over economic problems in this country. They had published a letter (written on their invitation) of Comrade V.R. Dunne in memoriam to the writer Matthiessen. At a large open forum, attended by 300-400 persons, Comrade Clarke took the floor to attack the 'coexistence' theory and was well received. It was proposed in the PC that more attention be paid this grouping and that we attempt to contribute articles in discussions conducted in their magazine. All these attempts were met with suspicion, hostility, resistance. Bartell's proposals were flatly rejected in a subsequent PC meeting. But three months later, virtually all of the proposals made by Bartell were written as amendments by Comrade Clarke to the political resolution and then accepted by Comrades Cannon and Stein! Their acceptance, however, was a mere formality as is revealed by the present Dobbs-Stein-Hansen document which returns now, despite the political resolution, to the suspicion, hostility, and resistance of the fall of 1951. Another example of what happens when the program of critics is adopted but the struggle against the critics is intensified. Meanwhile, life provided a test of the differing conceptions. The approach of the 1952 elections brought on a new crisis in the Stalinist ranks, this time over the 'lesser evil' theory. Marcantonio, far from capitulating to imperialism as Cannon had predicted, led the fight in the ALP against the liberal protagonists of the 'lesser evil' theory in the ALP and their secret allies in the CP leadership. We succeeded in participating in this controversy with articles stating our point of view and written by us as representatives of the SWP in the Compass and Monthly Review. Our comrades debated Stalinists and liberals in Compass Clubs, etc. The results of the work were good, already attracting people from that milieu to a prospering forum of the New York Local. However we have a grand total of two people active in the ALP to utilize this opportunity. Because of the haggling, backbiting, and Stalinophobe accusations, the New York Local cannot take proper advantage today of the split inside of the ALP in the interests of our program and recruitment work. That is the end result of all sectarianism: to declaim majestically about the masses in the abstract, but to put obstacles in the path of the movement in winning masses in practice, even if it be one or two dozen as a starter, in this case.

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The aftermath of the 1952 elections, which had practically decimated the Progressive Party's electoral following, brought with it a deepening of the internal crisis in the Stalinist movement. On the one side, Foster proposed in the Daily Worker that the party be dissolved and its members enter the Democratic Party to lay the basis for a new third party formation. On the other side, Huberman attributed its failure to the lack of a socialist program, saying that without such a program the party had no reason for existence. Marcantonio, on his side, began to rally the ALP against the Stalinist plans for dissolution, and a number of branches in New York and Chicago independently adopted resolutions to that effect. On top of this crisis of electoral policy, serious ferment in the Stalinist ranks was created by the Prague trial and the outbreak of official anti-Semitism in the Soviet orbit Bartell catalogued these developments in his organizer's report and proposed that the New York Local continue its attempts to intervene in this Stalinist crisis, for which, moreover, clear provision had been made in the political resolution of the 1952 National Convention. The comrades are now familiar, through reading the New York bulletins, with the infantile and sectarian opposition raised by Stevens-Ring against Bartell's proposals. Theorized by Stevens with the vulgar Shachtmanesque formula that 'Stalinism is counterrevolutionary through and through', an opposition program was concocted to keep the party 'acting like the revolutionary leadership of the masses'. When Stevens ran into trouble with his line in the New York membership, Dobbs-Stein-Hansen stepped into the picture to come to his aid. 'Bartell' - they say in their document without proof but with clear intent of arousing suspicion among the innocent - 'places such heavy emphasis on opponent's work that one must ask: Is he not tending to modify our basic evaluation of the party's character, perspectives, and tasks?' A model of diplomatic protocol, but really sectarian 'through and through'. The Lessons ofAmerican Trotskyism Is it 'an exaggerated estimate of opponents work' to view this crisis of Stalinism as the most important in many years? Is there a modification of our basic evaluation of the party's 'character, perspectives, and tasks' to desire to intervene in this crisis and to reap whatever harvest there is for our views and our party, and thus to strike a heavier blow against Stalinism than can be done by literary assaults from afar? No, the 'exaggeration' is all the other way - an exaggerated sectarianism. We recall the same type of arguments from Oehler and Ahem against our approach to the Musteites and later the SP. They too railed at 'exaggerated estimates', sneered at the size of these organizations in comparison to the mass movement in general, and predicted that there were no mass gains

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to be made - and from the point of view of numbers, they proved right. But had we followed their criteria, the Trotskyist movement would have perished, a hopeless sect. There is a revision of 'the evaluation of the party', but on the side of those who, like the De Leonists, seem now to believe that we need have no further truck with other radical currents and have only to wait until the masses start to move, and naturally come to us as the most undefiled tendency of all. Meantime our swelling corps of 'leaders', for whom Capital classes have become a substitute for an understanding of the real workers' movement, will have been readied to meet the masses in the millennial moment. Speaking of the organizational fetishism which makes a principle of independence, Comrade Cannon says to the Oehlerites in his History ofAmerican Trotskyism, 'You set up the principle in such a way as to make it a barrier against the tactical moves necessary to make the creation of a real party possible'. The minds of the sectarians were too rigid to understand the many detours it was necessary to take in order to travel the road of establishing our party as the independent force directly influencing the mass of the American workers. They could not begin to understand that our fusion with the Musteite American Workers Party or our entry into the Socialist Party were not in violation of our main orientation but were necessary tactical moves in order the more effectively to apply it later. The living reality, as it will be expressed in the coming upsurge of the American workers, will be far richer, more varied, complex and unexpected than our thought can now conceive. In that moment, least of all will it suffice to be guided by the ultimatist expectation that because we alone have the correct program, therefore the masses will naturally come to us. Our 'independent' orientation will seemingly be contradicted by the many new formations that will inevitably arise on the arena of the working class mass movement, and by the tactical turns we will have to make to avoid being left on the sidelines as a perfect but isolated sect. In the end, however, these tactical turns will prove to be the means of finding our way and of influencing the broad stream of the mass movement, and thus of effectuating our main orientation. The aspect of the struggle in the party today over the attitude to be taken to Stalinist formations highlights a vast difference in method and approach. It is not and never could be a conflict between those who want to keep an independent orientation to the workers against those who want to convert the party into a propaganda group oriented toward Stalinist circles. That is either a deliberate fabrication of the issues or a wish-projection on the part of those seeking simplistic formulas to dear up their own confusion. The real issue is between the ultimatism of doctrinaire and sectarian rigidity.

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The Post-Stalin 'New Course' (1953)

Michel Pablo

In the space of the few months since Stalin's death, the scope of the 'new course' being inaugurated by his successors has become such that even the most incredulous of the doubting Thomases have now been obliged to recognize the reality of the 'sharp change' occurring in traditional Stalinist policy. This is true internally as well as on the foreign field. 37 A new policy is gradually shaping in more precise form in the USSR itself, in its European satellite countries, in relations with the capitalist world as well as with Yugoslavia. Naturally there is an interdependence and interaction between these various spheres where the 'new course' is now undeniably developing. In contrast with the almost total surprise caused by these 'new' facts in all thinking political circles in the working-class or capitalist camp, our movement sees in them the most striking confirmation of its general views on Stalinism, and particularly of the analysis it has made over a number of years on the consequences that 'expansion', the world revolutionary upsurge, the technical and cultural advances in the USSR would have on Stalinism. On the other hand, the significance which Stalin's death could have in the processes long germinating in the USSR was immediately and thoroughly grasped by our movement. We underscored the fact that in reality Stalin died at a time when the objective bases of Stalinism had already been irreparably undermined and its decline begun; that there could not be a second Stalin, that is, a successor playing the same historic role; that Malenkov faced the prospect of remaining only a candidate for the Stalin succession, and no more; that the internal situation in the USSR and its evolution could prove a factor of great importance for the tum of post-Stalinist policy. Events have confirmed our prognoses and justified our optimism.

37

Pablo 1953.

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Weeping over the sad fate of the workers' movement and of socialism, depressed by the perspective of a long world reign of an immutable Stalinism extending over an entire historic period, the Cassandras are now distressed and worried. Have we not seen some of them find consolation in the service of the western 'democratic bourgeoisie' and even of American imperialism, the 'lesser evil' to 'Soviet totalitarianism'? But let us return instead to the facts of the 'new course' and establish its real scope, its meaning, its perspectives. It is not difficult to derive from the welter of political actions, events and writings which have occurred since Stalin's death the lines indicating the direction of the 'tum'. In recent years, the Stalinist political structure had accentuated the preponderance of the Great Russian bureaucracy at the expense of the Soviet working masses as a whole, of the other nationalities in the USSR and at the expense of the satellite countries of Eastern Europe. The high-tension areas, which also constituted the weak points of the regime, where a break could occur were the relations with the working masses, the nationalities and the buffer-zone countries. Stalin's successors are now acting in a way to give the impression that they want to ease the tension in these three spheres, and in a certain sense they are acting with effectiveness. Take the question of relations with the working masses. What causes the discontent of the working masses in the USSR? While their material conditions have been improving absolutely in conjunction, with the economic progress of the USSR, they have remained relatively poor as regards their needs as well as regards the share received by the bureaucracy, especially its upper strata; it arises also from their political conditions which are subjected to an excess of bureaucratism and police control despite bureaucratic declarations that the workers constitute the ruling class of the nation. Working conditions in the factories and on the collective farms, the pressure of Stakhanovism, piece work and the statutes of the penal code have been especially onerous. The contradictions between the social, proletarian and socialist character of the USSR, its economic and social foundations, the economic and social progress attained on this foundation and the bureaucratic and police regime instituted by Stalin became more and more glaring and intolerable. Not less important was the tension which prevailed and still prevails between the various nationalities which make up the USSR and the Great Russian bureaucracy which has been a particular bulwark of the Kremlin's power. Some of these national groupings, like the Ukrainians and those of the Baltic countries still preserve old and powerful cultural and revolutionary traditions. They

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have always constituted active arenas of propaganda and agitation against the central Great Russian power which wanted to dominate them, denationalize and Russify them. Following the Second World War a new element of disintegration entered the Stalinist regime: the step-by-step incorporation of 'the buffer zone' into the Soviet orbit. Some of these countries, like Czechoslovakia, certain parts of Hungary, Eastern Germany, boast a high cultural level, and especially a very advanced proletariat politically and technologically. Others like Poland have been noted for their deep-rooted nationalism which conducted long revolutionary struggles against Czarist rule. The Kremlin's attempt at the beginning to plunder these countries purely and simply so as to fill urgent and specifically Soviet needs, and then to impose on them its own methods of'socialization' and to Russify them has met with steadily growing resistance.

Stalin's Method Less Effective

Taken in the complex of all these difficulties, centrifugal forces, contradictions, tensions, the Kremlin apparatus directed by Stalin tried to cope with them until his death mainly by force, by the rigidity and monolithism of the system. Any relaxation, any faltering threatened to blow up the entire system. But at the same time the relationship of forces between the apparatus; ruling by sheer force, terror, monolithism, and the masses became more and more unfavorable to the apparatus. Two main reasons joined together here the world revolutionary upsurge in process since the Second World War, the economic and cultural progress of the Soviet masses themselves. It became extraordinarily risky to attempt to persist with the same rigidity as in the past in the reign of terror and monolithism represented by Stalin's regime. Even during his lifetime, as was observable most clearly at the 19th Congress of the Russian c P and in the preoccupations revealed in his last work Problems ofSocialism, there were attempts to slightly alleviate the tension and adumbrations of much more important changes in an early future. His death catalyzed the development. Those who say that everything that is now happening is in reality merely the execution of Stalin's testament by his successors are obviously wrong. For the general impression which emerges from the 'new course' is that of the liquidation of Stalinist tradition in a number of important spheres, including, as we shall see, in that of his own 'cult' and even his name. It is much more probable that long before his death his successors were conscious of the need of a whole range of radical measures; that they had exercised

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a certain pressure on Stalin so that he himself initiated some of these measures; and that when he died - naturally otherwise - they hastened to put them into effect. They are, afraid of being overtaken by an explosion of the masses who had been encouraged by the death of the man embodying the despotic and bureaucratic regime in their eyes.

Concessions to the Workers

The following measures have been taken to date by Stalin's successors for the purpose of improving the relations of the working masses and the regime: A new reduction of prices, the most important since 1947, in articles in common consumer-goods merchandise; this price reduction was supplemented by placing essential goods for sale on the market for the first time, and by the speeding up of the production of the means of consumption as well as new and old housing construction. The theme of the 'welfare' of the Soviet masses, as a permanent concern of the State and the Plan, has assumed an importance in the Soviet papers it never had under the old Stalinist regime. The Soviet papers devote an important place to describing of difficulties Soviet families encounter in finding lodging, in comfortably furnishing their apartments, in obtaining cheap good-quality utensils and other articles. They provide great detail on all these problems and conclude that 'this cannot go on'. (Litumaya Gazeta,]une 26, 1953.) It's the tone and the theme of these feature stories which mark a break with the Stalinist area. In addition, the new state loan of 15 billion rubles; which under the conditions of the regime resembles forced taxation, was reduced by half this year and is supposed to contribute particularly to the development of 'consumers' goods industries'. Other measures have been taken affecting the improvement of working conditions as well as the democratic rights of the masses. The amnesty along with the promise to liberalize the penal code which were announced simultaneously with the sensational exoneration of the doctors, 'the white-coated assassins', in reality is intended; to affect the victims of the coercive regime which prevails in the factories and on the collective farms and has been used to 'discipline' labor and to extort the maximum work possible; that is, it covers the broad masses, of ordinary workers. The exact number of those released from concentration camps is not known but even conservative bourgeois journals like The Economist (June 13, 1953) estimate it at 'several hundreds of thousands'. The first official reference to the

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liberated prisoners was made by Vice-Minister of Justice who requested local officials and trade unions to find work for persons benefiting from the amnesty. The theme of 'the constitutional rights of Soviet citizens' now replaces in Soviet papers that of 'revolutionary vigilance' of the Stalinist era. Formerly the writers of these features provided a certain type of assistance to the agencies of repression, to the judges and police by calling attention to and often by accusing state officials of the lack of 'revolutionary vigilance'. The change now consists in the fact that the writer becomes the attorney for the unjustly accused. During the doctors' affair and later of the Georgian leaders the party and the government openly attacked 'criminal activities' of the judicial and police apparatus. Now there are frequent attacks in newspaper reporting and features directed against sub-ordinate personnel of these agencies.

New Attitude on National Question

In the sphere of relations with the national minorities, Stalin's successors while adhering to the 'Leninist-Stalinist' doctrine in this sphere have already taken a series of measures which are squarely and palpably opposite to those applied during Stalin's lifetime. A first indication of this change was the vehement denunciation of all racist, chauvinist propaganda at the time of the exoneration of the Jewish doctors. The new leadership yielded to the pressure brought to bear by the various national minorities on the central Great Russian regime of the Kremlin so as to lessen the tension in this sphere and to avert serious explosions. It started a purge of the party and government apparatus in many of the Federal Republics, replacing Great Russian officials appointed by Stalin himself with native cadres. This is the general meaning of the measures taken in such sensitive spots as the Ukraine, the Baltic countries the Far Eastern Republics bordering on China, Georgia and Bielo-Russia. The most significant of these measures were those involving the Ukraine and Lithuania. First in the Ukraine, there was the sudden unexpected reappearance in the political scene ofl.G. Petrovsky, old Bolshevik, the First Peoples' Commissar for Internal Affairs and former, President of the Ukraine who was disgraced during the great purge of 1936-1938. He had escaped death but was relieved of all functions and probably arrested. Stalin's death was necessary for Pravda to again mention his name in connection with the award of 'The Order of the Red Flag of Labor' bestowed on him on his 75th anniversary! This event heralded other changes in the upper circles of the Ukrainian apparatus. Soon after, in fact, came the announcement of the replacement of

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G.L. Melnikov, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, and of his elimination from the Politburo of the party principally for his erroneous national policy. A very important figure in the Soviet hierarchy, Melnikov was accused of having tried to 'Russify' the Ukraine and especially the western areas (belonging to Poland) for one thing, by the compulsory introduction of the Russian language into the schools. He was also censured for his excessive zeal in imposing collectivization of agriculture in these areas. To understand the full importance of this measure, both the rank of the censured person who had been appointed by Stalin himself should be kept in mind as well as the policy followed in the Ukraine during Stalin's lifetime when the emphasis was placed on 'the nationalist deviations' of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. Similarly with the events in Lithuania where the policy of the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party was criticized for like extremes of'Russification' and where several Great Russian officials were replaced by native cadres. Moreover there now appears more and more frequently in the Soviet press articles which carry a refrain denouncing 'nationalism' and 'chauvinism' which is far different from that of Stalin's lifetime. The most striking example in this sphere was undoubtedly the article by P.N. Fedoseev, which appeared in The Communist, June 25, 1953, principal theoretical organ of the Russian er. Fedoseev had been removed from his position as editor of The Communist last December after a bitter criticism by M. Suslov, a Stalinist flunkey, who had accused him of having at one time propagated the ideas of N. Voznossensky. Now rehabilitated, Fedoseev writes in his article that it is now necessary in the USSR to struggle 'against the survivals of chauvinism and nationalism' which poison 'friendship between peoples'. He denounces the way some Soviet historians 'attempt to prettify the reactionary policies of Czarism'. Further on he protests against any attempt to 'fence off the Soviet people from the culture of foreign lands' and adds that 'the culture of any people, great or small, is viewed by us as a contribution to world culture ... Contemptible adventurers have repeatedly attempted to touch off the flames of national hatred in the Soviet Union, which is thoroughly foreign to Socialist ideology'. Still, the time when 'Soviet culture' and especially 'Great Russian' culture outclassed all others and when all the inventions of modem times were credited to 'the Russian genius' is not so far behind!

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Relations with Eastern Europe

Finally, there is the sphere of relations with the satellite countries of Eastern and Central Europe. One after another, although undoubtedly lagging behind the tempo of events in the USSR itself, these countries are aligning themselves with the 'new course'. In Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Eastern Germany, an amnesty on the Russian model has just been granted. Little by little the press of all these countries is beginning to pick up the new emphasis of the Soviet press on the 'welfare' of the people and on 'the rights of citizens', on the same 'laws' and the same 'discipline' for leaders and masses. The extremes of industrialization and collectivization are beginning to be recognized and the term 'NEP', as a necessary policy of retreat in some cases, is now becoming fashionable with others besides Walter Ulbricht (German Stalinist leader). It is now clear that all the 'NEP' measures taken in Eastern Germany last June 10th, several days before the big events, were initiated by Semyenov (Soviet Commissioner for Germany) under the instructions of the Kremlin and contrary to the policy followed until then by the leadership of the SED (Stalinist Socialist Unity Party). There is no doubt also that the very substantial concessions given the Eastern German masses after the June 17th events were also initiated by the Russians, this time probably in agreement with the leadership of the SED. The idea of revising the plans in the direction of expansion of the production of the means of consumption, which is apparent in the USSR itself, is also gaining ground in the satellite countries. The time has came everywhere for a 'reconsideration' of the policies followed in the economic as well as in the political and cultural spheres.

Attacks on the Leader Cult

Changes of such scope naturally cannot remain limited and in reality they affect the very nature of the regime as it was shaped during Stalin's lifetime and personified by him. By entering on the 'new course', his successors could not avoid the need of calling into question the character as well as the personnel of the regime, the cult and the name of the 'Chief' himself. And that is how it has happened also. Malenkov was obliged to relinquish the post of party secretary and to content himself with being President of the government so as not to monopolize positions and to emphasize the team and not the personal character of the new

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leadership. Repeated articles in Pravda and The Communist have attacked the 'leader cult', the impossibility of 'infallibility', its consequences of 'servility' and 'corruption', and praised the collective character of the leadership. The method of teaching history has also been called into question. It is no longer required that such teaching begin with or be based on the biography of 'great men' but rather on an understanding of objective conditions and the role of the masses. Those who always refer to 'appropriate quotations' and utilize them indiscriminately, even to explain the Five Year Plan, are becoming the butt of ridicule. The spheres are numerous in which there are scarcely concealed attacks against the cult, against the extravagant praise and the ossified byzantine mode of thought of Stalin and his era. But just his name alone is actually less and less mentioned in the public proclamations of the new leaders as well as in the press. It would be difficult to attribute such a plunge into oblivion to chance. It speaks too much of repudiation which for the moment, it is true, still remains an indirect one.

Changes in Foreign Policy The changes in Russian foreign policy have been in large measure determined by the tum internally in a twofold sense: a) as genuine changes which extend to the foreign sphere the new outlook internally on the relations with the masses and the national minorities; b) as a means of attenuating the tension with imperialism even if only temporarily, to avert an early war with imperialism so as to normalize the internal situation in the USSR and the buffer-zone countries on the basis of the 'new course' The first meaning is indicated in the more 'democratic', more 'socialist' way of viewing relations with countries like Turkey and Yugoslavia, by abandoning nationalist, annexationist demands toward the former, by normalizing diplomatic relations with the latter and by removing the quarantine placed upon it. The second meaning is manifested in the concessions made on Korea, Austria, Eastern Germany, in the many cordial and appeasing gestures, in the new tone of the diplomatic notes addressed to the capitalist countries and in the articles in the Soviet press concerning them.

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The Dynamic of the New Tum

Thus, we believe that these various manifestations of the post-Stalinist tum, even set down in this summary way, cannot fail to be impressive and to clearly indicate its meaning. Naturally it would be fundamentally and dangerously erroneous to conclude that the new leaders have reformed themselves and that they are successfully undertaking a 'cold democratization' of Stalin's bureaucratic and police regime. It is the pressure of the masses which constrains them to act this way and it is the constantly changing relationship between the masses and their own rule which will determine the subsequent development of the 'new course'. Stalin's successors, because of their special position as subordinates of the Despots and free of the chief responsibility, have the merit only of having better sensed than he the enormous pressure, the subterranean explosive forces in Soviet society as well as in Eastern Europe. To survive as the Bonapartist leadership of the privileged Soviet bureaucracy, they are now trying to ease the tension and to thus consolidate their own rule by a series of important concessions. They are proceeding in this not directly, frankly, democratically but bureaucratically. Their aim is to avoid by these methods new serious explosions and if possible to 'peacefully' build a new floor for an equilibrium favorable for the bureaucracy. However it is more difficult for them than ever to control the entire process and to dominate it at each step in the present global relationship between the revolutionary forces within and without the USSR and the 'buffer zone' and the conservative forces of the bureaucracy. The dynamic of their concessions is in reality liquidatory of the entire Stalinist heritage in the USSR itself as well as in its relations with its satellite countries, with China and the Communist Parties. It will no longer be easy to tum back. In reality events will oblige them as is being demonstrated in Eastern Germany, and partly in Czechoslovakia to quicken and extend the concessions to keep the impatient masses in the other buffer-zone countries and in the USSR itself from taking the road of action. But once the concessions are broadened, the march forward toward a real liquidation of the Stalinist regime threatens to become irresistible. What form will it then take? Will it be that of an acute crisis and of violent interbureaucratic struggles between the elements who will fight for the status quo, if not for turning back, and the more and more numerous elements drawn by the powerful pressure of the masses? The timetables of the war will play an important and perhaps decisive role in the entire first period in one direction or the other. In any case what is now clear is that the decline of Stalinism in the form of the iron grip of the Soviet bureau-

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cracy over the Soviet masses, the buffer-zone countries, the Communist Parties, is henceforth speeded up, and that the renovation of socialist democracy in all these countries, as in China, as well as the renaissance of the international workers' movement, is now on the order of the day. In the years visible ahead, the junction of the ideas and the forces of the Fourth International with the revolutionary elements until now organized or influenced by Stalinism will realize in part this first stage of this renovation. It is toward this that we should work now with the greatest determination and the most robust optimism.

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10

The Six Points of Cochranism (Letter to Farrell Dobbs) (1953)

James P. Cannon

Dear Farrell:38 I received your letter of April 1 with the enclosure of the point program of the opposition [concluding 'The Roots of the Party Crisis' - Internal Bulletin No. 8.] I will study it carefully and discuss it with other comrades here. I suppose we will have to have the full document at hand to get a clear picture. My first impression of the summarized points is about as follows: 1. They reject the perspective of the development of an independent party, but don't want to say so in so many words. They are fishing for support on both sides of this question. 2. They want to make the Third World Congress the axis of the discussion in order to avoid concretization of problems and perspectives in this country. 3. They want to rehabilitate the Stalinists as having been 'thrust into the same class camp with us', without saying anything about the new post-election policy of the Stalinists which calls for entry into the Democratic Party. (Which camp is that?) This policy has its first implementation in the present Los Angeles municipal election - the election campaign which, it seems, was fated to bring many political issues to a head. The c P here has just issued a statement declaring that 'socialism is not the issue' and calling for the support of those candidates who are 'endorsed by the labor movement'. This turns out to be Mayor Bowron, who just by an unfortunate coincidence, received an endorsement on the same day from the Board Chairman of the Southern California Edison Co. which is currently waging a vicious strike-breaking fight against the union, refusing even to negotiate unless the strike is called off. The Cochranites can call that policy 'in the same class camp with us', but Murry Weiss, in his first campaign speech tonight, is going to say the election

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policy of the Stalinists today,just like their strikebreaking policy during the war, is that of traitors to the working class. 4. Point 4 puts the 'propaganda group' orientation as forthrightly as they can put anything, without being specific enough to alienate support from those who have doubts on the question. Real cute are the qualifications tacked on to the end or their Point 4. As a sort of after-thought, they allow us to continue agitation about the Korean War and our defense activities, and even permit election campaigns 'on a rational basis and where genuine gains can be expected'. This is tongue-in-cheek ridicule of the party. They voted against our mayoralty election campaign in Los Angeles, where we have a tradition of such campaigns since 1945; where we have a strong local with a lot of experience in election campaigns and a good many election-minded activists to do the work; where we have an experienced, skilled and rather widely-known candidate who has ready access to popular radio and TV programs, and to all kinds or unions and other organizations; where our candidate for Mayor is the only working class anti-war candidate; the Communist Party, the Socialist Party and the Progressive Party all abstaining; and where all hands agree the local has had the most successful campaign ever, which is already yielding numerous contacts and some recruits. We have to say flatly that when the Cochranites disapprove an election campaign under such favorable circumstances they are against election campaigns in general. Even the qualified and hypocritical concession permitting election campaigns 'on a rational basis' is taken away by the last sentence of their point 4 which assigns to the so-called propagandist activity 'the main orientation and order of priority'. As you say, we have to meet this head-on, as that is probably the central issue. In doing so, however, we must be careful to state our own view correctly and not allow ourselves to be pushed by the factional situation into a one-sided and indefensible position. As long as we are not in a position to lead mass actions much of our work necessarily has a propagandist character. But we insist on combining it with agitation around the burning issues of the day such as the Korean War, and so on. And instead of putting such agitation at the bottom of the 'order of priority', we put it at the top. And even our propaganda 'directed toward advanced and thinking workers and students, etc.' takes as its point of departure our fighting position on the Korean War and the other burning issues of the day. In other words, we are a fighting party, not a wretched circle of commentators. We find here in LA, where a modest amount of recruiting goes on steadily all the time, that very few if any of the new recruits consist of this remark-

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able selected breed known as 'advanced elements' who are supposedly 'best equipped to understand our world program'. On the contrary they are contacts flushed out and attracted by our activity in the election campaigns, by our agitational fight on the issue of the Korean War, and in general by our rounded program of activities suitable to an organization which calls itself a party. This week, for example, the local here took in a new member who first heard of us through one of your broadcasts. Another was first contacted on the picket line of a strike in which some of our members were active. Others were first attracted by my lectures on Socialism. The point is, nobody gave us a list of especially qualified hot-shots to canvas. The contacts and recruits were attracted by our activities. We never heard of them before. They heard about us, because we were out in the open trying to attract attention by all kinds of activities. That, I have no doubt, is the experience of active branches everywhere. The trouble with 'propaganda groups' which retire to the cloister; take no part in public activity; never get their names in the paper in connection with action of one kind or another; shrink from the microphone and TV cameras in election campaigns - the trouble with them is that they soon run out of contacts because nobody seems to know their address. 5. Point 5 of their 6-point program is the 'sleeper' that ought to be studied under a microscope. After condemning the whole line and tradition of the party, and condemning the leadership and offering themselves as a substitute - they suddenly stop short and remark that the differences are still in the 'embryonic stage'. This looks to me like preliminary preparation for a softtalking peace proposal at the Plenum. This would be designed to stop the open struggle and discussion and give them another year to work underground - on the condition, of course, that 'both sides' have equal rights in the leadership and 'in the writing of articles on disputed questions'. They may catch a few suckers with this bait, but our answer should be absolutely clear and unambiguous: We don't consider the disputes 'embryonic' but deadly serious, and some of them even fundamental, which have to be discussed to the end throughout the party and then decided by the democratic action of the membership. As far as 'consultation' between 'both sides' is concerned, the Cochranites are represented on the political committee and have free speech there, as well as in the Internal Bulletin. But we are not interested in any compromises in the writing of 'articles on disputed questions'. We are interested in putting forward the line of the majority and rejecting the line of the minority. 6. I see, by Point 6, that the Cochranites are red hot for party unity. I never knew or heard of an unprincipled combination that didn't holler the same thing at the top of their voices while cynically proceeding to undermine and

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disrupt the unity of the party. We had a first class illustration of that in 193940. We can hope that the present experience will be an exception to the general

rule. Meantime we'll watch and see, and promise anybody who is interested that we won't be caught napping. Their final statement that the 'decision' on unity, etc. 'rests with the majority' is almost go years old in the Marxist movement. Up till now it has always been translated to mean: 'If we make a split it's the fault of the other side'. Fraternally, J.P. Cannon

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11

American Tasks (Abridged, Speech in debate with Farrell Dobbs before New York membership,1953)

Bert Cochran

... You heard the beginning of the debate on Stalinism and the Third World Congress positions. 39 You have had an opportunity to read our document. You know something about the official position of our party when the debate started three years ago on Eastern Europe. The facts are incontestable that the majority of our leaders in New York were unnerved by the cataclysmic events that were taking place all over the world, were overwhelmed by them, did not understand them, and their sole contribution was to malign the people whose understanding was greater than theirs, to organize a witch hunt around the party against non-existent dangers; and to inoculate people against the wrong diseases. Finally, as their own positions got blown out from beneath them, they precipitately abandoned them without explanation or analysis and formally, and as we see now- only formally, adopted the World Congress positions. No sooner was the vote recorded, however, than they tried to tum their backs on all this, to learn nothing from the experience, and to construct for themselves a new world here in the United States out of the whole cloth. Here, in their imagination we had the finished leadership, the full-blown revolutionary party, and we would move triumphantly forward toward the American revolution, looking neither to the left nor right, without having to trouble about Stalinism, without Social Democratic or Centrist blockades, without other bedeviling and harassing problems which were besetting our parties abroad. This new perspective has been germinating and unfolding, in reality, only in the recent past, despite all the tall talk and misdirected history about our granite line and 25-year tradition. And, as some or us watched with dismay, especially in the last year, this wretched,jerry-built structure taking shape (with the architects in New York and Los Angeles each contributing their own rickety wings) we could see that the Stalinophobe-Third Campist Escapist-Sectarian

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traits, displayed so pronouncedly and unmistakably in the debates over Eastern Europe and the World Congress resolutions had come back to haunt and plague the party on the American question as well.

A Vulgar Anti-Stalinist Tendency

Our Document demonstrates irrefutably from the record - not from the gossip of the corridors - that over a number or years comrades in the leadership have been manifesting a vulgar anti-Stalinist tendency, revealed for all to see in the debate over Reuther in 1947; revealed in the debate over Eastern Europe in 1950; revealed again in the debate over the World Congress resolutions a year later, revealed over our attitude toward the Stalinists in the recent months. Now, Stalinophobia led the Shachtmanites to conciliate with imperialist public opinion. Occasionally, some of our own leading comrades took a half a step in this direction as in the case of Reuther and again over the Korean war. But our tradition and training against this type or conciliationism is so powerful, our stand on the Soviet Union so firmly implanted in the thinking of the membership, that the road is still effectively barred toward this path of development. Instead, we saw people infected with this same type of Stalinophobia attempt to find succor and refuge in a revolutionary ivory tower by a tendency to petrifaction in the sphere of Marxist thought. They were turning their backs on the real world, its struggles and line-ups, in favor of Third Campist declamations, lofty pronouncements, and an almost mystical faith in the elemental process. I will begin first with the September 1951 plenum of our National Committee. The meeting took place when all the documents of the World Congress were in, when the major positions were all established, and when our new world outlook had presumably been perfected. It was the duty of the leadership ... I say, to draw up an analysis of what the objective reality was in the United States, what problems the party faced, and on what tasks we would concentrate our efforts. Instead the pronouncement of that Plenum on America was - zero. Just plain zero. It said nothing. It analyzed nothing. The party membership was waiting for an answer, for a lead. It didn't get it. Some perfunctory memorandum was submitted, and it was such a canned, worthless product that it was withdrawn by common consent all around. The only proposal for that Plenum was to have a Presidential Campaign in 1952, and even that was not motivated and fitted into an over-all perspective. In his article, I notice Comrade Dobbs criticizes 'a tendency toward local autonomy that has developed in main lines of branch orientation'. His pre-

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scription for the trouble is laughable. If you want to know the reason for this developing so-called autonomy, it is because the branches got no proper lead from the National Committee and had to depend on their own intellectual resources to answer the problems of political life. To hold a group together in times of reaction and repression, you need an ideology, a clear and correct perspective, a political tactic. If you don't provide that, centrifugal tendencies and even worse will set in; and all your Coordinating Commissions, and mimeographed exhortations will not halt the process. I know what I'm talking about on this matter. The party in 1951 was thirsting for a political perspective and integrated line, not for some new administrative gimmicks. Only on the basis of a correct line does administrative coordination have sense and worth. Without it, it is the most barren of barren pursuits.

Third Campist Manifestations

My next exhibit in outlining the evolution of this sectarian tendency is the letter of Farrell Dobbs to the Political Committee on November 29, 1951. Here was the perspective he sketched out for the movement: 'We confine ourselves too exclusively to agitation for a Labor Party. We go off balance by failing to give sufficient explanation to the membership that, although one can argue the probability of a Labor Party development, it is not an indispensable step to the formation of a mass revolutionary party ... Class antagonisms are bound to grow sharper and sharper. The longer the union bureaucrats block the formation of a Labor Party, the greater the political vacuum will become, and the more opportunity we will have to recruit workers directly into our party ... If the rise of a Labor Party should be long delayed, it is not excluded that the American workers might leap over, very quickly if not entirely, that intermediate stage of their radicalization'. What is wrong with this? Only that it misunderstands the most important fact of the American labor reality; the fact that the American working class is strongly, superbly organized today, that it is dominated by an entrenched and politically conscious labor bureaucracy, and that when this working class becomes radicalized, it will move in its first stages, and probably for a whole period hereafter, as a mass, through its organizations, and not jump over the head of its organizations. Whoever does not understand this does not understand the American labor movement. Our considerable discussions and writings in 1947 and 1948 on the emergence of a new socially-conscious bureaucracy and its meaning was all in vain so far as Comrade Dobbs was concerned ....

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His talk of a vacuum existing is similarly inept. A political vacuum means the absence of a leadership. There was such a vacuum in America in the NRA period, because masses were plunging headlong to organizing the basic industries, and the old AFL leadership was trying to hold them back; and as Lewis explained at that time to the AFL mossbacks, if they didn't move in and offer the leadership, somebody else would come along to supply it. A vacuum can appear, theoretically anyhow, if a mass movement develops for a labor party and the official union leadership resolves to block it. But how was a vacuum appearing in 1951 with reaction deepening, with living standards maintained, and the unions on the defensive and in the grip of the witch hunt? Definitely, nothing of this is comprehensible! Well, Dobbs and his co-worker Swabeck had a thesis accounting for all these developments, which they submitted to the Political Committee a little earlier. I can give it to you in a nutshell: War preparations and mounting inflation would slash the workers' living standards and lead to the eruption of great class battles; and thus, to a change, in the whole objective situation. As a matter of fact, Swabeck sent in a memorandum to the Political Committee as far back as January 1951, where he saw even then all hell busting loose. Here is his prognosis: 'It would seem to be a foregone conclusion that the projected bourgeois onslaught at home - already beginning - and the resistance ensuing must drive a wedge of the realities of the class struggle deeply into the most vulnerable point of this great deterrent. As the working class presses forward in its resistance against the onslaught on its standard of living and the democratic rights, the labor bureaucracy faces the alternative of which road, toward breaking its reliance upon and support to the bourgeois state, or toward rupturing relations with its own rank and file membership? 'I think these considerations will lead to the conclusion that we are now definitively reaching a turning point in American imperialist developments which will be reflected, above all, in sharpened class relations at home carrying the impact of deep repercussions within the trade union movement. We are reaching the point at which the quantitative changes of this movement will begin to take on new qualitative characteristics'. Now, this is an analysis, it's a perspective, even if unreal and fanciful. You know what they're talking about, anyhow: Workers' living standards are being slashed; Great class battles loom on the horizon; A vacuum of leadership will arise; We can move ahead as a revolutionary party whether a labor party is or is not formed, and probably preferably without one. At the Political Committee meeting of December 11, 1951 Comrade Cannon snapped up Dobbs' letter. He made a motion to adopt its general line and that he be empowered to write a series of articles in the paper based upon it. Luckily,

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we got a reprieve from this plunge into the void, when Clarke objected saying that what was needed was a political resolution giving our rounded views on American developments, strategy and tactics.

The First Draft

I now proceed to March 1952 when the Secretariat Sub-Committee brought in the first draft of the Political Resolution. And what did we discover? The DobbsSwabeck letters were no individual aberration. The theme was written into the resolution draft: 'the raging inflation', 'the slashing of living standards'. About the labor party, as a perspective, or even as a slogan - not a word, not a mumbling word! The resolution contented itself with the thundering proclamation that 'We intend to challenge and engage in direct combat all rivals', and 'that we intend to proceed from the maximum, not the minimum possibilities'. I don't say this first draft contains a clear-cut policy to jump over the head of the existing labor movement and march in a straight line to the Socialist emancipation. I say it simply lends itself to that kind of a sectarian concept - and it is in that spirit that its authors and supporters apparently understood it, and understand it. Well, Clarke and Frankel drew up a whole series of amendments, and rewrote the resolution pretty much from top to bottom. And it is the second, rewritten draft that was adopted by the Political Committee, the National Committee, and the convention. That draft - and only that one - is the position of the party. The Raging Inflation - Crisis around the Comer - Early Big Upsurge Theory was tossed out the window. It was replaced - not by a blueprint, a sure-fire prediction of just what would take place on what day or month - but by a realistic Marxist appraisal of what lies ahead and how to orient oneself with some degree of coherence and reality in an uncertain and fast-moving world. Here are a few key sentences: 'The equilibrium of American capitalism at the present time, based as it is upon a breakneck race between crisis and war economy, is an equilibrium of dynamic components. The unprecedented growth of production in a narrowing world and domestic market is counter-balanced by the unprecedented growth of the peacetime war budget. It is clear that the slightest relaxation of the war drive conjures up the immediate specter of depression and collapse in the sole remaining bastion of world capitalism. This depression, the capitalist class well knows, would be all the more explosive for having been artificially repressed over a period of years by means which only aggravate the crisis tend-

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encies. It is quite obvious therefore that the capitalist class will move heaven and earth to plunge the nation into war before the explosion of the American economy. 'It must be kept in mind, however, that the present equilibrium of us economy, loaded with explosives though its basis may be, is an equilibrium nevertheless. It provides full employment for the American workers on an unprecedented scale, and has continued to provide a large outpouring of consumers' goods for the people, even though this flow is beginning to diminish ... Since the workers will be impelled on the road to struggle only by important changes in their material status, it is clear that the American social crisis waits upon the destruction of the present explosive equilibrium by either war or crisis'. Next, a section was written in on the labor party question, straightening out the previous lopsided perspective. Thus, on these two crucial matters of analysis and perspective, we, it would appear, carried the day, and that is the party policy. Now, make a mental note of this FACT NO. 1.

Our Approach toward the Stalinists

My next set of exhibits begins with the Political Committee meeting of January 8, 1952. For months, you know, there had been debates, frictions and wrangling over our attitude toward the Stalinist-front, or Stalinist-influenced organizations. As climax to this discussion, Bartell submitted a memorandum at this meeting on the question. (I wasn't in New York at the time, so I don't know whether he smuggled the memorandum into the meeting; or just brazenly walked right into the meeting with it. But through one means or another, he got it into the meeting, past the electric eye.) Bartell said that we ought to pay special attention to the ALP in New York and the Progressive Party; that we ought to send in a group or comrades in there to take advantage of the split developing between Marcantonio and the Stalinists; that we have to correct our false characterization of the Progressive Party, which up to that time we designated as a Third Capitalist Party; that under certain circumstances, we should give critical support to ALP and PP candidates, when they run independently. Well, that's all our PC majority needed to hear! You can just picture to yourself the righteous indignation. Cannon went after Bartell bell, book and candle. Let me give you a few of the pearls. ls the Progressive Party a third capitalist party? Yes Sir! And how! 'There is a strong trend', says Cannon, 'which is apparently a decisive one by now, to sacrifice its policy of running independent candidates

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and to adopt the so-called 'coalition' tactic, that is the support of candidates of one or the other progressive bourgeois parties and to act as a faction of one or the other party in primary campaigns. I don't believe these changes imply our previous designation was wrong. They rather tend to confirm it'. Is Marcantonio in conflict with the Stalinists over the question of running independent candidates? He couldn't fool our PC. 'The real motivation of Marcantonio', said Cannon, 'is to get rid of the 'stigma' of the unpopularity of the Soviet Union before the war' and that Marcantonio was heading back to the imperialist camp. What did Cannon and the others offer as against Bartell's proposals? What positive line did they propose as to how to deal with the Stalinist followers, the rank and file, not a few of whom, most of whom, are workers? Nothing! They voted Bartell down, and that disposed of the issue. The party line, apparently, was to have no approach to the Stalinist ranks. But two months later, the following amendments were 'smuggled in' by us into the resolution, unnoticed by our astute critics, were adopted by the National Committee Plenum, and subsequently by the Party Convention - and so, I presume, they constitute Party policy. What are these amendments? Every essential position taken by Bartell, which was haggled over for months and voted down is incorporated into the resolution. What does the resolution say about the Progressive Party? A third capitalist party? Not this time: 'Shorn of its bourgeois allies, who put the stamp of a popular front coalition on the party in its heyday, the PP survives today as an alliance between independent radicals, petty-bourgeois politicians and intellectuals on the one side and the Stalinists on the other who play the dominant role providing most of the cadres and active man-power. This change in the character or the party has removed it from the arena or direct competition with the big capitalist parties and placed it in the camp of radical left-wing politics'. Is it important to have an approach toward the Progressive Party. The Resolution says it is. 'Our attitude toward the Progressive Party must be determined by the following considerations: That it is the sole electoral organization of importance in the anti-imperialist camp besides ourselves; that it still groups around itself a considerable number of radical workers and students; that the coalition policy of the leadership is in contradiction with the desires and aspirations of a part of its membership and following. In fighting the PP for the support of the radical workers our propaganda tactics must be devised toward exposing the fundamental fallacy of its basic program while demonstrating by example how a realistic anti-war struggle is conducted. On the other hand, a carefully formulated program of fraction work where warranted by the situation and not in conflict with the needs of our election campaign, united front proposals on specific issues relating to democratic rights, the struggle against

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war and the Negro question, can help raise the Socialist political level of the rank and file ... We must not allow Stalinist domination over these radicalminded workers and students to go unchallenged'. - Followed by ten paragraphs on the importance of an approach to the Stalinist ranks. The record is unmistakable that in March you retreated on this series of questions; on the over-all perspective, on the labor party, on our approach toward the Stalinist-influenced movements. You did not insist on your previous unrealistic positions, and went along with our amendments.

An Unprincipled Operation

On these questions then, at any rate, one would imagine we ought to have agreement. These matters should be removed as points of difference in the present debate. Instead, the minute the discussion reopens, we are attacked as Mensheviks and liquidators - and offered as proof are all the exploded arguments and positions of yours of a year ago, which were specifically discarded by the Resolution. We are confronted with the identical Lovestoneistic operation that we witnessed on the International questions, of adopting promiscuously, and with indifference, the positions of your opponents only to immediately thereafter launch a ferocious onslaught against the very same people whose position you have accepted. This unprincipled operation can be demonstrated from the record. Dobbs voted for the Resolution. He claims to be a proponent of it. Yet listen to his present document: 'Some within the movement, who draw pessimistic conclusions from the present ascendency of reaction and the ebb in the class struggle here, seem ready to concede in advance that us imperialism can go a long way with its program ... They seem to foresee imperialism carrying through its war program for a prolonged period with a favorable relation of class forces for it here at home'. What do you mean, 'Some within the movement?' Leaving aside your invention about the 'prolonged period' that's what the resolution says, and I read it to you! Dobbs states further: 'They seem to hold a dark view of the prospects of any serious class struggle manifestation before the workers have experienced extremely harsh blows'. Again, you're paraphrasing the resolution! And what are you trying to prove anyhow? Do you think there are going to be major class battles before a thorough-going shake-up occurs? This is phrase-mongering, childish prattle, without a pretense of analysis, without a glimmer of thought or maturity. As you wade through this mass of verbiage, what emerges is that, first, Dobbs is slipping back to his perspectives and

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analysis of 1951. And secondly, that he is polemicizing against positions of the resolution under cover of attacking us.

The Labor Party Question

Let me proceed next to the position on the Labor Party which Dobbs thought we were over-emphasizing terribly much in 1951, and which his co-thinkers didn't even bother to mention in their draft of the party resolution, so determined were they not to have anything detract from the independence of the party. Here he can say like the great Dante: 'Though somewhat tardy, I perchance arrive'. But he's not only arrived. He's arrived in a cloud of dust. He not only has comprehended the labor party perspective, but he is seeing big labor party movements under every bedstead. He refers to us scornfully because he claims we see 'no evidence to indicate a serious trend in the direction of a labor party at present'. I take this to mean that he does see 'evidence to indicate a serious trend in the direction of a labor party at present'. Well, this must have taken place very recently. The Party Resolution adopted in July 1952 states: 'Labor party sentiment is now at low ebb'. Has anything of special importance occurred in this field since that time? I don't know of it. I know the UAw convention five years ago had a considerable debate on the labor party. I know the recent one had nothing of the kind. Dobbs in all seriousness offers as evidence 'to indicate a serious trend in the direction of a labor party at present' the fact that a labor party resolution was discussed at a meeting of the Chevrolet local in Flint, and that the local chairman favored it. I must confess on this point you surprised me. Don't you know they've been discussing the labor party for years in Flint? Several years ago, the Chevrolet · 1ocal was on record officially for the labor party. They set up a committee to work for the establishment of a labor party. They issued a pamphlet under the auspices or the union advocating a labor party, and circulated the pamphlet throughout the country. What we are witnessing at the present juncture is the ebb of a stronger movement of the recent past. And please don't muddle everything by telling us about objective necessity. A trend means that the objective necessity has found subjective expression. Before it does, you don't have a trend. You have objective necessity, and subjective inadequacy and lag. There have been only two periods in Dobbs' and my time in the labor movement when there was a serious trend for a labor party that I am acquainted with. The first was in 1936-37 when a virgin movement at the floodtide of its

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militancy instinctively sought to hurl itself beyond the confines of capitalist politics. You didn't have to drill a hole in somebody's head in order to discover the trend. It was there, palpable and observable. In New York State, Hillman, Dubinsky and the Stalinists were forced to organize an ostensibly independent labor party, the ALP, as the only method by which they could snare a whole sector or radicalized workers to vote for Roosevelt. Nationally, Lewis had to organize Labor's Non-Partisan League in order to channel and control the many leftward currents, and deliver - in distinct advance over Gompers policy labor's vote in an organized and cohesive fashion. The second time a trend was developing for a labor party was in late 1943 and early 1944, when at the height of the agitation against the no-strike pledge a segment of the Michigan labor movement led by Emil Mazey and other leftReutherites began a serious fight for the labor party. This was climaxed with the formation of the Michigan Commonwealth Federation, which for a short period had the support of a small section of the Michigan unions, and was, behind the scenes, supported for a while even by Walter Reuther. The 1945-46 strike wave refurbished the authority of the CIO officialdom. The continued prosperity made the conservative mood dominant. The witchhunt and reaction hurled the labor movement onto the defensive. That's the spot on the map at which we are standing at this moment. After all, we must exhibit some capacity to assess and evaluate the various whisps and incidents, some capacity to see a movement in its dynamic flow and ebb, and to understand whether it is advancing or receding. Else, all analysis becomes impossible, and politics is reduced to an uncorrelated and unintegrated mass of undigested details, incidents and fugitive impressions, with the loudest bawlers and the biggest boasters enthroned as the best Marxists.

A New Edition of Musteism

I have tried to demonstrate, and I believe I have demonstrated from the documents that Dobbs is cavalier with the party positions on our analysis of the objective trend, and on the labor party developments. On the Stalinists they're back to where they were a year and a half ago, and pages n, 12, 13, 14 and part of 15 of the Party Resolution might just as well not be in existence, so far as they are concerned. Every attempt, every suggestion, no matter how modest, to find an approach to the Stalinist or Stalinist-influenced ranks is construed as showing a conciliatory attitude toward the Stalinists, going soft on Stalinism, abandoning the independence of the party, etc. You can ignore the history of their tendency on

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a whole series of major questions. You can take this by itself, and there is no question but that it constitutes proof of Stalinophobia, and adaptation to the present prejudices of the American working class. And to justify their highly unreasonable, highly unrealistic tactic, a new version of the theory of A.J. Muste is being constructed, and offered to us as the last word on the subject of building the party in the United States. Muste, as you know, had the idea that we don't have to bother or occupy ourselves with the Stalinists or the Socialist Party, that the majority of the workers in America had no interest in either organization. The way to build the party, therefore, was to go straight to the factories, the mines, the mills, and talk Socialism, to the unaffiliated masses. This theory sounds very appealing, especially in this country. It has a little flaw, however. The very militants that you approach for your party are also approached by your rivals, and if they are larger and stronger, their attractive power is greater than yours. You cannot, in life, therefore, ignore a big rival, without reducing yourself to a sect of wishful thinkers, and often, smug braggarts. But the Stalinists, you say, are weak in this country. That is true. That's why we don't need an orientation toward the Stalinist movement. But they are still far stronger, far more influential, above all, in the labor movement, than we are; and that is why we need an approach, a tactic toward their ranks. And we cannot tum our hacks on them, under penalty of having this cadre,far bigger ours, block off our path to the politically unorganized workers in the mass movement when they become radicalized. But I ran across somewhere that you're not really against opponents work if it is handled right. On page 16 of Dobbs' article I read: 'We do not minimize the importance of opponents work against the Stalinists. We are fully in favor of opponents work in Stalinist organizations'. They don't minimize the importance of opponents work! Then what did you start a war against Bartell for? Oh, I forgot, he was over-emphasizing this work, he went overboard by opening all the sluice-gates and flooding the ALP in New York with two people! How many people in your opinion should be sent in to properly keep this work in a subordinate position? They don't minimize! We have a memorandum from Dobbs' faction associates in Chicago on opponents work. Listen to it: We have recently recruited a young member from the Progressive Party. He was impelled to the SWP by the Stalinist move to scuttle the PP. Since his joining the SWP the Stalinist proposal was over-ridden and he still retains his membership in a suburban branch now consisting of about ten members. It is proposed that he remain a member of the PP and one other comrade be assigned to help him. The age range of the PP group runs from the middle thirties to over sixty. It contains some workers.

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Our political aim, in whatever work in this milieu proves appropriate and feasible, is two-fold: 1) recruit to the SWP; 2) destroy the remnants of the PP as an independent organization. We recognize the progressive aspects of the internal revolt against the Stalinists within the PP on the part of those who do not wish to dissolve into the Democratic Party. This is outweighed however by the continued existence of an opponent organization. Therefore we have no interest in conducting ourselves in this party in such a way as would help its reconstitution and reorganization. Our tactic within the PP has nothing in common with fraction work within unions, NAACP, etc. This is opponents work as traditionally considered. In making personnel assignments for opponents work in the PP we consider that the following activities take priority in the next period (not necessarily in order of importance): 1. The paper campaign 2. May Day banquet 3. Regularization of trade union fraction meetings 4. Assignments for fraction work in NAACP 5. Internal discussion As you can see, they're just like Dobbs, they don't minimize the importance of this work, provided you give it its proper subordinate position - item 6 of a 5point agenda. It reminds you of the old doggerel, where the daughter is asking her mother: 'Mother, may I go put to swim? Yes, my darling daughter: You may hang your clothes on a hickory limb, But don't go near the water'.

•• •

In the light of this damning record, which I recited to you from the documents, Comrade Dobbs has the cool effrontery to write that the stew that he dishes up is 'the course charted by the convention resolution'. He must have the first rejected draft in mind. Oh, you may say, you have only read sections of the Resolution which bear out your case, but there are paragraphs that lend themselves to Dobbs' interpretations. I have read sections which demonstrate that on a number of questions, he is in clear opposition to the party position. But I don't deny that there is an element of ambiguity in the resolution. And that is the precise purpose of the present discussion: to help resolve all ambiguities, and seeming or real contradictions.

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The Trade Union Question

Let me now proceed to the trade union question. First, some factual information. Our present tactical course in the unions dates from the beginning of 1950. I presented, as the official PC report, a trade union report to the same Plenum where we discussed Eastern Europe. I analyzed the reasons for the shattering of the progressive oppositions in the three unions where we had the greatest influence - auto, rubber, and the NMU, I presented the statistics of the workers relatively high living standards and the mood of conservatism deriving from it. I gave the reasons for the consolidation of the new Social-imperialistic labor bureaucracy. 'All these considerations now dictate the necessity for us', my report stated, 'to adjust our perspective to the present slower tempo of development and therefore to drastically modify our trade union tactic. The modification of our tactic must start with the resolve to get ourselves disentangled and free from the power caucuses in which we are participating, both the national ones and those of a local scale. We have just got to make that tum to save our cadre in the unions and be in a position to organize and shape the new struggles when the mood of the workers begins to shift and the radicalization process gains momentum. If we exhaust our resources and reserves now in indecisive engagements in which the mass of the workers are not yet involved, we will have no effectives left when the big opportunities arise at the next tum of events ... 'We don't want our new trade union tactic to add up to doing nothing in the unions. We don't want to simply preserve ourselves and nothing else, or as the Old Man once remarked, we'll only become dried preserves. We don't want to spread the false notion that the alpha and omega of our trade union work is to avoid victimization, or that we can devise some sure-fire prescriptions that will guarantee our people against getting hurt in the witchhunt. No, our revolutionary trade unionists have to be trained in an opposite spirit. They have to take it for granted that there are no fool-proof methods of avoiding danger, that a revolutionist discounts ahead of time that fact that risks and losses are often inevitable and are the necessary accompaniment of the fight. 'We do not maintain that the proposed tactical adjustment will guarantee to save our cadre and deflect away from us the wrath and fear of the bureaucracy. All we can safely claim for the new tactic is that it will make it harder for the bureaucracy to pick us off and will provide us with the best safeguards against our people, or the bulk of them, getting needlessly thrown out of the unions ... 'What is the positive content of this tactic? We're going to become for the next period left wing political educators and propagandists instead of caucus politicians. We are going to raise on all appropriate occasions political ques-

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tions from the shop steward system to the labor party to war. We will explain frankly the facts of life, as we see them, to our erstwhile caucus allies and try to convince them that the old-type caucuses are out of season now, that what is required are educational groups working to train the members on issues and prepare the ground for the next stage with its renewed spurt of insurgency and its more authentic left wing formations. We will concentrate more on educating a few workers in the shop and building the party there'. This report was adopted, if I recall correctly, unanimously by the Plenum, and I repeated the report to possibly a dozen branches in the course of my national tour. I presented the same line, brought up to date, to the Political Committee before the May 1952 Plenum. It was adopted. I made the report to the Plenum of the National Committee in May 1952. The Plenum adopted it. I presented it, as the N c reporter, to the National Convention in July 1952. The convention adopted it. I am therefore not guilty of factional slanting when I state that that is the party policy for our trade union work. Now, Comrade Dobbs is highly critical of the policy. That is his right. A man has the right to change his mind. But I ask you, in all faith, can anyone reading Dobbs' article, can anyone glean that what he is doing is polemicizing against the official party policy on the trade union question? Mind you, I say he has a right to polemicize against it. He has a right to try to overthrow it. But wouldn't it be in keeping with the fitness of things to make clear to the membership what he is about, and the true status of the opposing positions, before he presumes to lecture us about smuggling and sneak attacks? I hope he gets around to explaining this in his rebuttal.

Infantile Sectarianism

Now, I read those sections that relate to trade union work over and over and over again. And my final conclusion - so far as I can make head or tail out of it at all - is that either Dobbs is working himself up to the idea to form now a new left wing in the unions; or the policy consists simply of verbiage, reducing the whole question to foggy verbosity, to cliches and banalities. And there are sections in the article that lend themselves to either theory. We find Dobbs' vacuum theory of 1951 back with us again in the current document, although so qualified now as to virtually drain it of all content. Then we read: 'Our task is to fill this political void with a body of left-wing militants, armed with our program, who will become the actual leaders of more and more workers even though they hold only minor union posts or no official posts at all'.

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If this has any meaning, it is to build a new left wing. And if the infantile adventuristic policy is not enough, an additional infantile sectarian twist seems to be added that the left wing is to be built around the SWP and its program. I see that the Organizer's Report of Los Angeles issued in February of this year, and unanimously adopted out there by your co-factionalists declares very bluntly: 'The main task of our fractions is to work for the building of a left wing in the unions'. I'll not discuss now who gave your co-thinkers in Los Angeles authority to reverse our national trade union policy. Let me say this on the question itself: If you are bracing yourself to advocating the building of a left wing in the unions today on the basis of your unreal analysis of what the score is in the labor movement, you have a policy that will disorient our cadres; and if they are sent out into the mass movement with this YPSL adventuristic line, they are guaranteed to break their necks. And I warrant you that our leading trade union comrades, who have over fifteen years of variegated experience in the battle, will rise up and repudiate any such imposition upon them, and upon the party. You write: 'We have been excessively preoccupied with power blocs in the unions to the point that our policy has in reality tended to impair recruitment'. You can't make a sweeping assertion like that without attempting to prove it. Do you think Marxist analysis simply consists of pompous proclamations? As an overall proposition, I question the correctness of the criticism. The criticism leaves me with the feeling that the problem of party recruitment is tom away from the context of the complex of our activity in the class struggle and viewed too exclusively from its administrative side. Let us take a cursory glance, for a moment, of our leading trade union fraction, the auto fraction. After our break with Homer Martin in 1938, for a variety of reasons, we were not involved, nor did we support either of the major blocs in the UAW for a period of five years. We concentrated instead on trying to create local left wing groupings, pushing our programmatic demands, distributing literature, analyzing the broad trends in the union, and recruiting workers. We did yeoman's work along these lines for five years, but our successes in recruiting were quite modest. Only in the latter part of 1943 did we begin to cooperate with the left Reutherites, which developed into our cooperation with the No-Strike Pledge Caucus the following year, and then the support of the Reuther bloc during and following the GM strike of 194546. Contrary to Dobbs' impressions, it was precisely in this latter period that recruiting into the Michigan organization reached its highest point. We recruited more workers from the unions in the 1943-1945, period than we had

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at any time before or since. I could relate a similar story by describing the work of our leading fractions in the other unions. This was the period, as everybody knows, that recruitment nationally was at its zenith.

Dynamics of the Labor Movement

There is no mystery about the reasons if you understand the ups and downs and flow of the labor movement. The trade union has a life of its own. The most virile, the most intelligent members of the union inevitably get caught up in the activity and the political life of the organization. They become the local activists, the shop stewards, the chairmen of various union committees and bodies, the officers, the strike leaders, and in a period of inner-union struggle, the leading forces of the factions. At a time such as the present, when the unions are stagnant, these elements often become conservatized and corrupted, and are least susceptible to our message, least inclined to join our type of organization. In a period of upsurge and struggle, it is these activists who form the secondary leadership, and sometimes even the prime leadership and expression of the workers' struggles and aspirations. These struggles inevitably produce different and opposing organized tendencies inside the unions. It has been our invariable experience that the periods when we are able to participate on a good basis with the militant activists in union political struggles are the very periods when the branches involved are blooming, find the greatest milieu for their efforts, when we have more workers coming around to our headquarters and affairs, and when we register the biggest successes in recruitment. Because periods of inner-union struggles represent only one aspect of rising militancy and activity of the organized workers. I am not speaking now of the wisdom of this or that tactical bloc, or relationship. That can only be discussed in the concrete. But to counterpose, in a sweeping generalization, recruitment to participation in the political struggles of the trade union movement reveals lack of understanding of the dynamics of building a party, at best, an over-simplified Socialist agitator's approach to the problem of recruitment, rather than that of a political, a Marxist mass leader. In his resolve to draw every possible construction against us, Comrade Dobbs erupts with this in his concluding statements on the unions. He quotes the following remarks from my convention trade union report: 'In the present period our trade union forces are often augmented by mere mechanical effort. But to really maintain and integrate trade union groups in these difficult days, the mechanical aspect is the least of the problem'.

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Then Dobbs goes on to say: 'What Comrade Cochran dismisses by his reference to "mechanical effort" is obviously the daily activity in the unions which is the essence of all mass work. He seems to think that the most important need for our work in the unions is to rush through his project to organize a committee of high-powered thinkers and writers. However, the comrades who canyon the foot-slogging day-today work in the unions know their work is important. They like to have their leaders think it is important too. They want their leaders to give some attention, some thought and some aid to them in the ever so important daily grind out of which our union cadres are being forged today. They even like to have their leaders help them do a few chores now and then, and they do have chores because there are things that can be done in the unions'. Now, as everybody who listened to my Convention report knows, I was talking about people gettingjobs in industry, colonizing comrades - I repeated the point three-four times - to augment our trade union forces. When my report was printed in the paper, the phraseology was slightly edited. Several comrades who were not present at the convention wrote me letters discussing my report with me, and none of them had any difficulty catching the meaning. But Comrade Dobbs, in his factional abandon to construct a case, could not even read my report without revealing his prejudice. And while I'm on the subject, whom are you lecturing about 'the footslogging day-to-day work in the unions?' Me? Our leaders in Detroit and Flint? Jules? Or our union activists in New York, Youngstown, San Francisco and Seattle? Aren't you forgetting who's who, and what's what? Do you really think that after 15-20 years of experience in the mass movement we have to have a report made presenting us with the revelation that - Oh, yes! - work can be done in the unions such as taking up a grievance, or talking about the Kutcher case? And do you think our leading trade union comrades are going to buy that kind of a report as presenting any kind of a line or policy for our work? Above all, what stands out in your report and remarks is the lack of any unified conception, the absence of any guiding thread running through your random observations, which sometimes border on the preposterous. And this final outburst will impress itself least favorably on our trade union leaders, who may conclude that beneath the solemn exterior is concealed a woeful lack of grasp of the dynamics of the labor movement; and an attempt to reduce all big questions to school-masterish exhortations, and homilies. We cannot win workers today by demonstrating our program in action. Therefore, in the main, we have to win people by our ideas, our solutions, our ideological perspective. And to canyon in that capacity, and by those means, you need an understanding, and you need proper materials in the form of analysis, pamphlets, studies. We will impress advanced workers today, not primar-

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ily by good works, but by our clear outlook, an integrated perspective a cohesive line; and a tenacity to hold to our path; and keep our heads.

What to Do Next

I don't know how extensively it is necessary for me to go into questions of whether we are an independent party, or a propaganda group, as our document deals fully with this aspect of the discussion. We have heard in the past months the pronunciamento delivered dozens if not scores of times that our strategic aim is to build an independent mass revolutionary party, as if some new profound message is being uttered. We all know about that. We are all for it. That is why we are members of the Socialist Workers Party. But when you have stated this proposition, you haven't disposed of the question. You are just at the starting point. All kinds of people wanted to build an independent mass revolutionary party in this country. Oehler wanted to build it. Weisbord wanted to build it. Muste wanted to build it. But they did not know how. The question inevitably arises, after you have established your aim and program, what to do next, what to do at every stage of the game to advance you toward your objective, how to seize hold of those threads available in the actual movement that will enable you to move forward toward the realization of your final goal. We had to make that decision, time and again, when we fused with the Muste group, when we entered the Socialist Party, when we left the Socialist Party, when we executed a proletarianization policy, when we supported and blocked with groups in the mass movement. If we contented ourselves with simply proclaiming the independence of the party, and agitating the broad masses in favor of Socialism, that would have netted us very meager results, and very possibly we would not have even survived. Now, we are up against this very problem today: What to do next; what to do now. The country is in the grip of reaction and the witchhunt. We are isolated from the masses. And despite all the revolutionary chattering in our midst, no one knows exactly how long reaction will persist. Our strategic orientation is toward the mass trade union movement, because it is in that movement that the big struggles will find expression, and out of those ranks that the effectives for the revolutionary party must come. But that does not dispose of the question. Today this movement is quiescent. Today we are unable to recruit those workers, except for isolated individuals. We cannot, we do not, approach the general mass, or sizeable sections of the mass in the unions. We approach individuals. If all the factors that go to make up the present situation do not cry out

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aloud for a thorough-going propagandistic approach to build in this period a significant cadre in the mass movement, then just what is the proper approach to the labor movement today? ... The United States is the country par excellence of capitalist ideology and mode of thinking. Marxism has no standing in any sector of the population. The working class is hostile to it and views it as an alien philosophy. The youth in the colleges are brought up today in the spirit of militant anti-Marxism. A combination of circumstances, into which enter the treacheries of Stalinism have conspired to bring Marxism to the lowest state in its American history. To organize a mass party in a vast and advanced country such as this one is a big and complicated work. It will never be done by simple Socialist agitation and good works alone. Other tendencies, with a more realistic grasp of the dynamism of the mass movement will inevitably overwhelm the simple-simon Socialist do-gooders. To talk seriously about organizing a mass revolutionary party in the United States means that you have to establish a definite political physiognomy for yourself. You have to conquer your enemies in ideological struggle. You have to win intellectually the most advanced elements of the working class and of the radical intelligentsia, especially the youth. The task is still ahead of us, not behind us. Those who do not understand this had better stop talking about our tradition and Trotsky's teachings.

A Propaganda Campaign

Well, it is in line with this approach that we proposed that the party organize a propaganda campaign, and devote sufficient thought, effort and finances to ensure its proper execution and success. Why this proposal, demanded by the entire situation in the country and our party's position, should have evoked the pious horror, the venom, the misrepresentations, the accusations of liquidationism and attempts to scuttle the independent party - why it should have had this reaction is difficult to understand, except on the basis that some leading comrades have become disorientated. And, in an attempt to find something sure and solid to cling to, they have embraced a neo-Musteite orientation - the thin, superficial viewpoint that by good works alone, ignoring and going over the heads of the vanguard straight to the virgin masses, we could outflank our opponents and avoid all complexities in the building of a party. This fierce and hostile reaction of a section of the leadership is all the more unexplainable as there is nothing new or original about the proposal. Cannon

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made the identical proposal four years ago - and if you delved into Trotsky's correspondence you would find the thought wasn't even original with Cannon.... As our Document goes to great pains to make clear, the fact that the Propaganda Campaign is one of our primary tasks in no wise invalidates all sorts of other activities, election campaigns, defense work, etc., etc., which we are pursuing and should continue to pursue, commensurate with our over-all resources, capacities and strength. Comrade Dobbs complains, however, that we want a propaganda campaign as the top plank of the tasks of the party. He wants it, presumably, as the bottom plank (if at all). Why can't we compromise the issue? Let us agree on Cannon's 1948 formula, 'a synthesis under which the thought and time and energy of the party will be about equally dtvided between agitation and propaganda'. Let us settle it on that basis. Fifty-fifty.

Sectarian and Ultamatist Moods

Our attempt to circumvent this necessary tactic, this unpostponable re-arming of the party, and your false counter-position to it of the independence of the party, as a new mysticism, is creating havoc with your own thinking, and driving you towards sectarian and ultimatist moods, toward Musteite conceptions and over-simplifications of how the mass party is going to be created. The first fruits of your campaign have already appeared. Your supporters in New York are embarked on a path of infantile adventurism. Your people in Los Angeles are advocating the building today of a left wing in the unions. Your supporters in Seattle are whirling dizzily on a pin-wheel of synthetic activity, propelled by a self-appointed 'professional leadership'. These are the real results of your artificially contrived campaign for the so-called independence of the party. You are leading yourselves and your supporters to disorientation and demoralization. And we urge you: Get back to the tradition of our movement. Get back to our old way of viewing and resolving problems of the class struggle and partybuilding. Get back to the path and the world of Marxist reality. For the good of yourselves. And the good of the party.

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Concluding Remarks Outline of Party Tasks in concluding remarks of Cochran's rebuttal speech: 1. We propose that we act as an independent party to the degree that we can, that it is practically possible. We propose to engage in general party activities commensurate with our resources, and our over-all tasks. 2. We propose to continue to pursue propagandistic aims in the mass movement, and to make a determined and special effort to supply our comrades with the most effective possible propaganda material to enrich and fructify their work in the unions. 3. We propose to launch a major propaganda campaign, and devote to it sufficient resources and finances to ensure its success; we propose that it be done on the basis of Cannon's 1948 formula: An equal division between agitation and propaganda. 4. We propose where practicable a tactic toward the Stalinist workers and the Stalinist-influenced organizations along the lines prescribed in the Party Resolution. 5. This platform of party activity, to be governed by a correct over-all political understanding, must be based upon a recognition of the Third World Congress positions as a basic re-evaluation and re-arming of our world movement; and a recognition of the Resolution of our latest Party Convention, in all of its aspects, as providing the necessary flexible approach to solving our tasks in the immediate period ahead.

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665

Where I Stand (Abridged, 1953) Genora Dollinger

Comrades: From reports I have received there is a great deal of misunderstanding as to my having a separate position, having no position or 'sitting on the fence'. 40 As a result I feel obligated to explain just where I stand in the present dispute in our tanks. It is true that I have refused, for the past months since the '52 convention to take a position on so serious a matter on the basis of isolated facts, rumors, charges, or what individual comrades averred were the issues in dispute. I have never hesitated to take a stand on any question when I felt I possessed enough information to justify such an act. But in the present dispute I have persistently maintained my right to wait until documents appeared with the main positions outlined clearly and unambiguously. When comrades on the NC - and at least one on the PC - state frankly they don't know just what is involved it certainly stifles the neutral independence of a comrade in the field when such a serious controversy is even indicated until he or she has carefully studied and weighed the opposing positions. We have spent too many precious years building our cadre party to jeopardize this glorious and historic accomplishment in any way. We have broken off too many comfortable personal relationships in the past when these associations have become inimical to the welfare of our revolutionary program to lightly let ourselves be personally influenced by comrades - even those whom we revere deeply and respect highly for past contributions to our movement. For 16 years the party has been my life and the comrades my closest and dearest travellers along this chosen path. It is not easy to take a principled stand against some of my comrades of long years - but then it was not easy to watch our former comrade Grace abandon our great cause and become again a part of the biggest single fort of reaction and oppression. Every adult is forced to make important and difficult decisions in his life; and a principled person professing to be a Bolshevik cannot decide issues on the basis of special friendships - nor waver nor hesitate when the facts are laid on the table. 40

Dollinger 1953.

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For these reasons I refused adamantly to take a position until I had in black and white the fundamental facts and the statements of the opposing sides on something more than possible 'embryonic differences'. This, I can assure you, is not a popular position to take either; but it is the only honest one. From the bulletins on the New York discussion I first got a glimmer of what was involved; but I awaited the statements in the national dispute before I felt I could evaluate and compare from my own understanding and experiences. First let me state categorically and emphatically that when the Thesis of the Third World Congress appeared I accepted it as a truly gigantic and historic document, a great signpost and marker that will go down in the history of world Trotskyism. This Congress, meeting in the period of world confusion, for the first time threw the spotlight of clarity on such difficult questions for us in the march of world events as Yugoslavia, the Eastern European states, and China. It gave me reassurance that Trotskyism is a living, breathing, dynamic force in spite of its present numbers. When Pablo's popularization of these Theses was issued I read and re-read it. Pablo's contributions to this new orientation, this fundamental realignment of our forces in the struggle toward our final goal, has been the most profound and, without doubt, the greatest of all since the death of our leader and founder. It never occurred to me once that the magnificent achievements of the Third World Congress could be otherwise considered than just that - by the world movement or any part of it. Admitting my optimism and naivete in this respect I refused to believe that differences in the American party could have its roots in acceptance or non-acceptance of the essence and method of this big contribution to our thinking and our revolutionary re-orientation in general. I was convinced that the factional differences arose from an incorrect appraisal of the stage of development on the home scene. Realizing that a faction fight is often the price we must pay to obtain theoretical clarity- and rejecting all verbal reports - I awaited with great eagerness and expectations for the discussion bulletins summarizing the disagreements. As one of our many comrades in the movement who has been ever ready and willing to carry the revolutionary banner of our party in line of duty, regardless of personal consequences, I have had confidence in our collective leadership and in our collective decisions. Never having had any illusions about the infallibility of any individual leader of our party I have watched while they, like I, have made mistakes. But those minor mistakes over the 16 years of my party membership have been corrected before they became major ones, and my confidence in the collective leadership has only been strengthened through these experiences.

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The World Congress and Comrade Hansen

When Comrade Hansen's article in the first bulletin arrived I read it with anticipation, hoping that some light would be shed on the differences that every comrade knew existed - at least from the '52 convention on. Leaving aside Hansen's synthesis of the opposing position -which one could not think of accepting as legitimate - the obvious lack of agreement with the Third World Congress thesis was most apparent. It stood out in bold relief in Hansen's paraphrasing of their emphasis on the nature of Stalinism in the present period. (And this is his famous 'summary statement' that he 'thinks' our co-thinkers abroad would 'possibly' agree with.) To quote from What the New York Discussion Has Revealed on pg. 13: ' ... Stalinism can no longer betray with the samefacility (my emphasis - G.D.) as when it could maneuver between opposing imperialist powers and make perfidious deals with one camp or another. But the same general conditions that narrow the possibility of a longterm deal also foster revolutionary movements which the Stalinist caste fears. Hence the betrayals of Stalinism tend to take other forms besides open deals with imperialism at the expense of the proletariat. It is evident that in the period now facing us of settlement offinal accounts, the soviet bureaucracy will provide with some demonstrations of the most abominable betrayals ever perpetrated by it against the world socialist revolution'. (my emphasis, G.D.). This last sentence is but one of the main keys to Hansen's rejection of the whole intent and purpose of the theses. Contrast these quotes from Pablo's interpretation of the same thesis: 'The relations between the Soviet bureaucracy, the Communist Parties, and the revolutionary movement in each country, are in the process of changing under the effect of this new dynamism of the proletarian revolution ... We have already seen what changes have been produced in the specific relations between the Soviet bureaucracy, the Communist Parties, and the revolutionary movement of the masses during the recent war and since, both in the Yugoslav example and in the case of China ... Under pressure from a situation which is evolving toward war and the decisive and final struggle, wherever they maintain a genuine mass influence the opportunism of the Stalinist leaderships is obliged to yield less to the arbitrary swings ordered by the Kremlin, and thus to transform itself into centrism .. .' (The Coming World Showdown, pp. 46-7). To me, Hansen's summary is a complete contradiction and rejection of the present nature of Stalinism which the theses took such pains to evaluate and explain to the world movement as justification for the reorientation and redeployment of its forces.

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In this period world events are not long in substantiating or refuting a position. Stop and reflect for a moment on the developments of extreme significance that have taken place in the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc just since the death of that 'infallible leader' Stalin! All recent reports in the world press indicate an accelerated process of fermentation in the Soviet world, the jockeying for positions on the part of the 'collective leadership' of the Soviet bureaucracy, the freeing of common prisoners and the lowering of prices, the public repudiation of the latest Moscow purge frame-up - its significance and resulting consternation in the Stalinist parties of the world - the enhancement of Mao Tse-tung's prestige, the hesitation and wavering of the Stalinist bureaucrats all over the world. What does all this mean but more elbow room (to use a union term) for the masses under their leadership? This is proof renewed that Stalinism is in a state of crisis and change. And given the flow of objective world circumstances, the depth of this crisis, the tempo of this change will tend to become more rapid, and will sound the end of Stalinism. The period has passed when the Kremlin bureaucracy - or Stalinist reaction - can create an absolute bureaucratic obstacle in the path of inevitable revolutionary upsurges. Indeed Pablo is a hundred times correct when he says in a certain sense Stalinism died before Stalin. Add to this the all-out drive of imperialism against the Soviet bloc that cuts off the possibilities of durable deals with the imperialist nations. Agreed that Stalinism, until its rotten carcass is buried by world revolution, is capable of gross betrayals, where does the certainty of 'the most abominable betrayals ever perpetrated by it against the world socialist revolution' fit in? What factors in the present trend of world development will give rise to such an inevitability? (Hansen does not even give it as a probability.) How does this jibe with the Theses and the prediction of the direction and trend toward centrism? To sing the same tune in the same key now, comrades, reflects the fact that you have not grasped the new reality. I was left with the distinct impression that one comrade,Joe Hansen, did not understand, or only deludes himself when he says he accepts, the theses of the World Congress; and for these reasons was certainly unable to apply it to the United States. I am waiting for the so-called majority to officially repudiate this lack of understanding or, in my opinion, this outright rejection of the changing nature of Stalinism. The articles of the majority ... have ... only carried on this theme in a different and more disguised form .... Much space has been devoted to erecting a smokescreen to hide the real issues....

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Independent Party- What Is Meant by This?

There has been so much said about giving up our role as an independent party and yet I, for one, cannot understand the sense in which it is used by spokesmen for the majority. Cannot an independent party emphasize its propaganda activity - or even consider itself a propaganda group under circumstances such as the present - if the needs of the times so dictate, without losing its identity and independence? What determines the type of party we shall be? Objective circumstances and the consciousness of the American workers is going to determine basically whether we are going to have a propaganda group or a Little, medium or big party of mass action. We cannot get around this. Certainly if all that was necessary to have a mass action party is our desire, our will, or our determination we'd have it without delay. It is not for us to worry that we might 'degenerate' into a small propaganda group if present objective conditions do not permit us to operate as we did in 1945 or 46 - but to adapt ourselves realistically to the limitations imposed by the period. Comrade Dobbs tells us all the ways 'worker militancy' can be 'generated' by objective circumstances. I agree with him. And all of us know that it is inevitable that the American workers will move in due time and in their own inimitable fashion .... All my adult life I have done little else but work, eat, talk and live with mass production workers. After the privilege I've had of living through and actively participating in the great days of industrial union organization there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that can shake my confidence in the American working class. And if one needed any further optimism in this respect, my n years active role in the NAACP and Negro work has only enhanced my confidence in the American working class and this particular section of it. But for the whole past period and today and tomorrow we can't proceed on the basis of the inevitable upsurge of the American workers. The majority spokesmen speak much of 'molecular processes' going on in the American working class; but they pose this question in an entirely vacuous fashion. It is given no content and has no particular use for us when posed in such a manner. When we speak of a 'molecular process' it has significance only in so far as it is used concretely within the framework of the experiences of the American working class. A 'molecular process' has an entirely different significance when used in understanding the present developments in the English working class than when used in gauging the present developments of the American working class. The differences may be one of degree - but that degree is what makes the qualitative difference and determines the nature of our tactics in these two countries.

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The mills of the gods grind exceedingly slow but exceedingly fine. And from my experience the American workers are slow to move but once moved they are exceedingly volcanic. Is Comrade Dobbs afraid that we'll be organizationally unprepared to detect or take advantage of the beginnings of awakening of this quiescent giant? Does our past record give any indication of this? Does the record, for instance in auto, show this? This section of the party - the auto fraction - has proven its ability to rush into the slightest possible opening in the union movement to put forward our transitional demands. Recall our work (and our tiny forces in this huge union) on the Labor Party, No-Strike pledge, the Detroit Cadillac Square demonstration against the Taft-Hartley Act, the sliding scale of wages known as the escalator clause (which still has the Stalinists gasping and grumbling) to mention only some of our accomplishments. These parts of our program were put into effect by our experienced and trained comrades taking consistent and often very rapid - action; and sometimes under the most unexpected circumstances. Recall, please, that this whole proletarian section of the party is now being charged by Comrade Dobbs with drawing 'pessimistic conclusions from the present ascendency of reaction and the ebb in the class struggle here .. .', and having an incorrect 'attitude toward perspective and present possibilities lodged in the class struggle in America', by Hansen. Comrades, the danger is a clear and present one now. In the past it was not too difficult (although it took some powerful persuasion on more than one outstanding occasion) to convince the leadership of what was the indicated course of action in a given period. But today the majority leadership refuses to listen to the rank and file worker comrades operating with all their experience and training in the movement. Or if they listen they give no indication that they have heard. Instead these proletarian cadres are charged with 'pessimism' and looking for 'substitutes'. For many years Michigan comrades have requested that our role in the organization and building of the UAW be published in pamphlet form. This record of ours is one of no small accomplishments in the world's largest and most progressive union. It could be used to full advantage, not only in the auto section, but by all comrades and sympathizers in unions - and particularly in such a period as we face today. This request was not acted on until the faction fight broke out in earnest - and then not done in anything resembling a serious manner. The comrades of the leadership made the gesture in acceding to the demands of the Michigan comrades for the writing of such an important pamphlet by proposing a comrade for the task who has never been in auto and knows little of the past history of the UAW. This, in spite of the fact, that we have fully qualified people available to do a thorough-going job. It's an unfortunate

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commentary on the attitude of the leadership toward those possibilities that really are open to us today. Is it heresy to want to educate workers in the Trotskyist method by means of such an instructive pamphlet? If objective conditions make us what we are, in reality today, a propaganda group in the working class movement, should we not publicize our role and accomplishments in former mass actions - in preparation for the next upsurge of the workers? Again I repeat: Objective circumstances and the consciousness of the American workers is going to determine basically whether we are going to be a propaganda group or a little, medium, or big size party of mass action. And I reiterate that the charge of pessimism is facetious against comrades in this section of the mass movement who are not writing their views far removed from the class struggle, but facing living reality every day of their lives. When comrades today brave threats of physical violence in carrying out their consistent activity as revolutionary propagandists in the trade union movement and courageously proceed, step by step, to give the more advanced workers a Trotskyist understanding of present developments - is this pessimism or optimism? And what in thunder does the recent Sub campaign of the paper prove? That our whole cadre has suddenly become lazy or indolent or pessimists? On the contrary. Each branch can report the number of old time subscribers who are now afraid of receiving the paper through the mail or having any connection with the ideas of Marxism. I don't need to tell you this after all the work put into this campaign. Yet the results might better have been announced in letters to the branches. Worker militants here expressed surprise that we advertised our weakness. In a coast to coast campaign we didn't get subscriptions and renewals expected in the state of Michigan alone. Ordinary unionists know that there are times when publishing an actual strike vote would be a mistake and weaken their cause. Certainly, for good reasons, we don't have to advertise that we are so small with so few actual readers of our weekly press. And yet, after such free advertisement we're deadly afraid of being called a propaganda group!

The So-called 'Unprincipled Bloc' Now I wish to raise just one final point in this short and by no means complete article. The grave charge of the minority being called an unprincipled bloc. A faction fight is not known for praising the work or contributions of individual comrades. A faction development presupposes political differences,

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and actions substantiating these disagreements are ferretted out to prove the line of demarcation. But an unprincipled bloc is a serious charge against a faction as a whole. Certainly there will not be complete agreement on every question raised on either side. However, unprincipled bloc means none other than grouping together for unprincipled and un-Bolshevik reasons. I take my stand openly and frankly with the minority faction because it is a principled grouping within our party based on a principled Marxist position. The minority comrades are basing their whole program and winning adherents to this position on the basis of a correct understanding and appreciation of the Theses of the Third World Congress. The comrades of the minority have demonstrated by their official position and their writings that they have a more thorough-going and penetrating understanding of the American working class and its present stage of development, the relationship between this stage of development and our world perspectives, and flowing from this understanding a more realistic program of action for our Trotskyist cadre here in the United States. This and this alone binds together the comrades of the minority tendency. I can assure you, comrades, that I was not won over by any means calculated to win friends and influence people. Quite the contrary! The statement of position signed by ten leading members of our party titled The Roots of the Party Crisis - its Causes and Solution is what decided my place in this dispute. It is the tendency that I endorse completely and wholeheartedly. And due to my revolutionary optimism - both in regards to the proletariat and its advance guard, the American Trotskyist party- I firmly believe that this position will become the majority position of the party. I am firmly convinced that the worker comrades will cut through all the subterfuge and detective story drama and Preis-Winchell reporting of comrades' reactions and facial expressions, the slanderous denigrations, and decide on the basis of the issues involved. And those of our top leadership who have grasped the essence of the Theses of the Third World Congress and have consulted the vanguard ranks as to the American climate, will be with us. We all remember Lenin's remarks about major turns of the revolutionary party. Events will not be long in showing the correctness of our tactics flowing from our understanding or Marxist principles. In this respect some of our comrades may be saved from old habits and going afield in a sectarian manner. A great step in the right direction would be a repudiation of the Hansen method. In spite of Hansen's throwing around words, phrases, and quotes with ease - and apparent abandon! - he uses formal logic and produces nothing but confusion when we so sorely need the dialectical materialist approach to aid us in solving the big problems that face us and the bigger ones to come.

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I look forward to the discussion proceeding on a higher level, to a further education of our party in the principles of Marxism, and to a qualitatively better trained American cadre as a result. The Third World Congress has shown us the road in the present period. Let's not hesitate to diligently assimilate the lessons contained in this political re-orientation and apply them to the reality of the American scene in any given period. In this way and only this way will we be armed for the American revolution - the decisive phase of the decisive coming world show down.

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13

Internationalism and the SWP (Abridged, 1953)

James P. Cannon

We have heard that the Cochranites are claiming in the party that they have the support of what they call 'the international movement'.41 Some comrades have asked, 'What about that?' Now we are internationalists from way back. We started our movement 25 years ago under the banner of internationalism. The thing that brought us to Trotsky, and got us thrown out of the Communist Party, was our belief in Trotsky's program of international revolution against the Stalinist theory of 'socialism in one country'. Our very first impulse, when we found ourselves out on the street in 1928, was to begin searching for international allies with whom we could collaborate. We couldn't find many of them, because the Opposition had been completely smashed in the Soviet Union. Trotsky himself was in exile in Alma Ata. And in America, as far as we knew for sure, we were about the only representatives on the international field of the banner of the exiled Trotsky. But eventually we established contacts with some German and some French groups; and in the spring of 1929 Trotsky was deported from the Soviet Union to Constantinople. We wrote to him there as soon as we heard about it, received an answer from him, and in cooperation with Trotsky began to tie together the first threads of the new - and what eventually became the Fourth - International. On the record, I believe the American Trotskyists can be described, above all others, as internationalists - to take a phrase from Comrade [Joseph] Hansen through and through.

41

Cannon 2001.

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International Collaboration

The question of the attitude of the international movement toward us is an important one -with this understanding: that we are a part of the international movement, despite the fact that we have no formal affiliation, and we are going to have something to say about what the international movement decides on the American question, and every other. We don't consider ourselves an American branch office of an international business firm that receives orders from the boss. That's not us. That's what we got in the Comintem. That's what we wouldn't take. And that's why we got thrown out. We conceive of internationalism as international collaboration, in the process of which we get the benefit of the opinions of international comrades, and they get the benefit of ours; and through comradely discussion and collaboration we work out, if possible, a common line. Now it isn't possible that the international movement supports the minority in this fight, any more than it is possible that it supports the majority, because the international movement - as we understand it, that is, the membership in all comers of the world - hasn't yet heard about the fight, is only just beginning now to get the first bulletins, and cannot possibly have decided the question. The thing narrows down to the claim - if what we have heard is correct - that the International Secretariat, which consists of a few people in Paris, supports the minority. If that's so, we know nothing about it. We haven't been told that. And we don't like the very suggestion that the 1s is taking a position on the American question behind the backs of the official leadership. The very suggestion that that is possible casts an insult upon the 1s, upon its responsibility, and even upon its integrity. Because it is not possible to function as an international organization without proceeding through the official elected leadership in each and every party. As I said, we know nothing of any such decision there. They have never even intimated anything of the sort to us. In the eight years since the international organization was reconstituted after the war, with headquarters in Paris, they have never once intimated any serious conflict or any lack of confidence in the American party and its leadership. On the contrary, they have always recognized the SWP as the firmest base of political support of the international leadership. And that has been the case ever since 1929, when the new international took its first 'embryonic' - to use the Cochranites' term - form. Ever since 1929, when the international leadership was a man named Trotsky in Constantinople and half of his troops in the whole world were those we had organized in the United States, the International has been, in the essence of

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the matter, not just a mechanical combination of different parties and groups. There has been an axis in it, an axis ofleadership. And in then years from 1929 to 1940, that axis was the collaboration of Trotsky and the American Trotskyist leadership. That's the essence of the matter. Trotsky made no secret of it. We were his firmest base of support. We weren't by any means 'hand-raisers', as Burnham said in 'The War and Bureaucratic Conservatism'. We had more than one disagreement with Trotsky. But in the general work he carried out, in his efforts to bring about a selection of forces and to get rid of misfits and people who had wandered into our movement by mistake, and in his fight for a clear political line - he always had the support of the American party....

Fight against Stalinophobia

Since 1945, with the close of the war and the re-establishment of the movement in Europe and the setting up of the International Executive Committee and International Secretariat there, the same relationship in essence as previously governed our collaboration with Trotsky, has prevailed in the new ParisAmerican axis on all the big political questions. In the first period after the war, the Russian question aroused a great dispute in our ranks throughout the world. There was a big wave of Stalinophobia, which had understandable reasons. For with the end of the war, the terrible stories about the Stalinist slave-labor camps and the monstrous conduct of the Stalinist armies in Eastern Europe and Eastern Germany came out. Those tales of horror - which were not exaggerated but were the living truth - created such revulsion in the ranks of the advanced workers throughout the world, that there was a big echo in our ranks, and great hesitation in our own ranks in Europe. There was a split in France over the Russian question in the immediate postwar period. Comrades said, 'We can't any longer call that a workers' state. That's a slave-labor state' - and so on. At that time, the really strong, decisive force supporting two or three of the leading comrades in Europe, which really decided the Russian question once again in favor of defense of the Soviet Union, was the SWP. As far as I know, the first really outspoken, categorical, unambiguous declaration on the question came in a speech by me, made in agreement with our party leadership, on the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, in November 1945 in New York. This speech was printed in the paper and was supported as a program by our cothinkers in Europe. It was a factor in stopping all hesitation and in clarifying, once again, the fact that we were defenders of the Soviet Union.

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I did not defend the Soviet Union's slave-labor camps or any of those horrors. I said, paraphrasing Trotsky: 'We do not defend what is degenerate and reactionary. But we see, in face of all of that, that the power of the nationalized economy was strong enough to prevail during the war and still stands. That's what we see, that's what we defend'. That is how we defined our position on the Russian question at that critical time. In 1947 there was another wave of Stalinophobia, especially in the most advanced circles. We began to get reports not only of what had happened in Europe but what had happened inside the Soviet Union itself. What those monstrous, unbelievably treacherous scoundrels had done! We began to get such stories as those of Margaret Huberman, the wife of Heinz Neumann - both of them lifetime Communists. He was a former leader of the German CP - not a Trotskyist - and had been shot by the Russians because of some political disagreement. His poor wife was thrown into a concentration camp in Russia and kept there three years. And then, when the Soviet-Nazi pact was signed and the war started, she and a carload of other veteran German communists were put into a freight car, shipped to the border, and handed over to Hitler as a goodwill gesture from Stalin and his gang. And she then spent five more years in Hitler's concentration camps! Stories like that came out, one after another - and then began this new wave of Stalinophobia. Morrow and Goldman fell victim to it. They said: 'This is too much! We can no longer defend the Soviet Union as a workers' state'. There were new hesitations also in Europe. That is when I wrote the pamphlet American Stalinism andAnti-Stalinism which these fools are now attacking in their document as some kind of evidence of Stalinophobia. But the whole thing was directed against the Stalinophobes, page after page, chapter after chapter. It was written in reply to Ruth Fischer, who had come out in Shachtman's paper denouncing us because of our position on the Soviet Union and calling for a united front of everybody against the Stalinists. I wrote that pamphlet to show that we would unite only with genuine socialists against Stalinism - not with red-baiters and reactionaries .... Our relations with the leadership in Europe at that time were relations of closest collaboration and support. There was general agreement between us. These were unknown men in our party. Nobody had ever heard of them. We helped to publicize the individual leaders, we commended them to our party members, and helped to build up their prestige. We did this, first because we had general agreement, and second because we realized they needed our support. They had yet to gain authority, not only here but throughout the world. And the fact that the SWP supported them up and down the line greatly reinforced their position and helped them to do their great work.

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We went so far as to soft-pedal a lot of our differences with them - and I will mention here tonight some of the many differences, known for the most part only in our leading circles, that we have had in the course of the last seven years.

Differences with Pablo Leadership

One difference was a tendency on their part toward 'Cominternism' in organizational matters - a tendency to set up the International as a highly centralized body on the order of the early Comintern, which could make decisions, enforce orders, and so forth in the old Comintern fashion. We said to them all the time: 'You can't do that. The International is too weak, you are too weak. You can't have that kind of an International under present conditions. If you try it, you will only end up in weakening your own authority and creating disruption'. The old Comintern of Lenin's time had the concept of a highly centralized international organization from the first days, but there was a reason for it then. The reason was that there had been a revolution in Russia, and the whole world movement of socialism was reacting to it. The leaders of the Russian Revolution had an absolutely decisive moral and political authority. There were Lenin and Trotsky and Zinoviev and Radek and Bukharin - new great names that the revolutionary workers of the world were recognizing as the authentic leaders of the revolution. These were the men who set up, with the aid of a few others, the Comintern, the Third International. They had state power in their hands. They had unlimited funds, which they poured out generously to subsidize and support the foreign parties. When there was a difference of opinion in any party, with two or three factions growing up, they could subsidize delegations to travel from any part of the world to Moscow. The differing groups could have full representation before the executive body to discuss the issues. The international leaders could get a real picture on the spot, hearing the representatives of the different tendencies themselves, before offering advice. And that's what they mainly offered in the early days - advice, and very few orders .... After the degeneration of the Russian party and the emergence of Stalinism, the centralism of the Comintern - which Trotsky and Lenin had handled like a two-edged sword, which they didn't want to swing carelessly - became in the hands of Stalin an instrument for suppressing all independent thought throughout the movement. Instructed by the past experience, we understood the dangers for the present international movement. We believed it would be absolutely wrong to try to

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imitate a highly centralized international organization when we were so weak, when the ability to send delegates from different parties for common consultation was so limited, and when we could communicate only by correspondence. Under these conditions, we believed it would be better for the center there to limit itself primarily to the role of ideological leader, and to leave aside organizational interference as much as possible, especially outside of Europe. In Europe, where the parties are close at hand, it might be organized a little more tightly. But even there, we had misgivings. Comrades who were there several times had misgivings about the tendency toward organizational centralization and discipline, even as applied to the different national parties close at hand in Europe. That's one difference we had - a sort of running, smoldering difference. We did not press our criticisms to the very end, although we had many. Such interventions as they made in this country were unfortunate. It was a double mistake that they made in the case of Morrow and in the case of Shachtman. We here have had 100 times more experience - I don't say it in boastfulness, but that's the fact - 100 times more experience in dealing with faction fights and splits than they have had. Besides, we knew the people we were dealing with. You who were in the party at the time know the story. Morrow, who had done a lot of good work in the party before, began in 1945-46 to develop Stalinophobia. I don't know how others deal with that. But I'm the kind of political doctor who says, when I find a case of Stalinophobia, that I've never seen anybody with a cure for it, and it's time to isolate and quarantine it. That disease leads straight to social patriotism and reconciliation with imperialism. That's what Stalinophobia is. Stalinophobia led Morrow to begin to betray the SWP. He suddenly discovered that the party he used to love and admire so much was no good whatsoever. He was as much against the party record as 'The Roots of the Party Crisis' is. The party was not only wrong then, but always had been. Next, he began sidling up to the Shachtmanites, acting disloyally and carrying information to the Shachtmanites when we were in struggle with them. He even went so far as to report to them about our Political Committee meetings in which we discussed our struggle with the Shachtmanites, telling them what we said and what we were planning. One of our young comrades went over one evening to the Shachtmanite headquarters to buy a pamphlet or a copy of Labor Action and there was Morrow, sitting with half a dozen grinning Shachtmanites and regaling them with a report of our own Political Committee meeting that he had just come from. We had a number of illustrations of that kind of disloyalty. Finally we yanked up little Felix - what is he called, the Joan of Arc, the hero-martyr of the Cochran-

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ites? - we just yanked him up and said to him in a plenum resolution: 'You've been doing so and so, which isn't right, not loyal. We censure you for that, and we warn you to cease and desist'. That's all - just a little slap on the wrist. A few months went by, and he didn't cease and desist, and we got more evidence of treachery on his part. Finally, we reported it to the party. There was no rough stuff, just a general education of the party on the facts. Then we came to the convention in 1946, the convention where we adopted the 'Theses on the American Revolution', against which he spoke. (I don't know whether there is any coincidence in this or not, but he spoke against it.) And when his case of discipline came up, the convention declared that in view of the fact that loyalty to the party had been violated by Morrow, that he had been warned and had not heeded the warning, he was hereby chucked out, expelled, by the unanimous vote of our convention. That's the way we do things in the Socialist Workers Party. You know, it's deceptive. This is such an easygoing party that some people who haven't been in any other party don't know what a paradise they've got. So easygoing, so democratic, so tolerant. Never bothers anybody for anything, never imposes any discipline. Why, our National Control Commission has gone by three conventions without having anything to report. The only time the good-natured somnolence of the SWP begins to stir into action on the disciplinary front is when somebody gets disloyal. Not if he makes a mistake, not if he fiddles around, but if he begins to get disloyal and to betray the confidence of the party - then comes the surprise! All of a sudden this somnolent, tolerant party gets out the axe and comes down with it - and off goes the offender's head! That's what happens when you betray the confidence and the loyalty of our party. And it causes a little shock - especially on the head that rolls! But it's a literal fact that the only time we ever expelled anybody for anything was for violating discipline after repeated warnings not to do it. That's the only time. Over in Paris, the International Secretariat - which was under the pressure of the right wing in the French PCI, who were in alliance with Morrow- the 1s had no sooner seen what we had done than, without waiting forour report, they adopted a resolution which without saying so directly amounted to disagreement with the unanimous decision of our convention. It gave the Morrowites a new lease on life in the party. We thought: 'That's not right, boys. You ought to consult us first. You ought to take into account the fact that the 1500 people represented at our convention have some rights to be considered. If you want to be democratic, then you ought to pay some attention to what the majority thinks'.

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It was a very rash, precipitate action by a small group in Paris. We just told them: 'Please don't do that any more'. And we didn't pay any attention to their intervention on Morrow's behalf. The only result of their action was to stir into new life a group of former Morrowites in San Diego. They had just about reconciled themselves to the convention decision. But on the assumption that the International was supporting their faction, they stirred into new life, and we lost the San Diego group of the swP on that account. Our next difference was in the case of Shachtman. We entered into negotiations for unity with Shachtman in 1947. We laid down strict conditions, which the Shachtmanites signed on the line. First, during the period of the unity negotiations neither side would attack the other. Second, neither side would admit into its ranks any member of the other side - in other words, we weren't going to raid each other during the unity negotiations. Third, neither side would admit into its ranks anyone who had been expelled by the other side. A little time went by, and the Shachtmanites promptly printed Ruth Fischer's letter denouncing the SWP for its attitude on Stalinism. Then they printed a letter from Weber, a deserter from our party, in which he said the SWP by its policy on Stalinism was even abetting the GPU. What did we do? We looked first at the signed agreement: 'What does it say there, point one, two, three?' We checked and found that the agreement had been violated. Decision: Negotiations off - finished. And we just put a little notice in the paper: 'In view of the fact that the Shachtmanites have violated the agreement in this and that respect, negotiations are hereby discontinued - goodbye'. That's all. It was settled by the unanimous vote of our committee. We knew exactly what we were doing. The Shachtmanites were not loyal in their unity negotiations, and we didn't propose to let them monkey with our party. We have learned how to handle these questions. It isn't a gift from any divine power. It isn't any great genius on our part. It's just that we have had so much experience with faction fights and splits, that we know what to do with them. It becomes a trade .... Do you know what the comrades over in Europe did then? Germain, with the agreement of Pablo - and again without consulting our people and even without a majority of the people there knowing it - decided that they would be more clever than we were. Without consulting us, Germain addressed a letter to Shachtman saying that he was sorry negotiations were broken off but hoped they would be resumed, and that he personally would stand for unity and support the unity movement in the International. It was an open invitation to Shachtman to grab hold of this rope and make more trouble for us in the party and in the international movement.

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As I said, that was done without consultation with us. Comrade [Morris] Stein heard about it only after the letter had been sent - and we didn't even get a copy of the letter. I don't attribute this to any malevolence on their part, just to their inexperience. They don't know how to deal in the formalities of organization as well as they should. Now, if Shachtman had known what the score was, he could have used this letter to advantage. But there he became a victim of his own cleverness. He thought he knew too much to be caught in another 'Cannon trick'. He was convinced that Cannon had put Germain up to this letter in order to inveigle Shachtman again - but he was out of our clutches and he was going to stay out. He disregarded the letter with a sneer. So nothing happened. No harm came. But we noted it - all of this within the framework of our general agreement and collaboration, we noted it as an error on their part, and we let them know that that is not the right way to proceed. Another difference arose in connection with the developments in the French party. A few months after the world congress, where the French party had supposedly accepted the congress decision, we suddenly heard that there was a split - or a partial split - in the PCI. The International Secretariat had intervened, upset the majority of the Central Committee, and placed a representative of the rs as impartial chairman over a parity committee. This meant, in effect, that they had removed the elected leadership of the French party. Did you know that that really happened? Well, when we heard that we hit the ceiling. We didn't sympathize at all politically with the French majority, which I believe was fooling around with the world congress decisions. But we thought: 'How are you going to build an International if you think you can upset an elected leadership of a national party?' ... Then there was another difference. When Pablo wrote his article about 'centuries of degenerated workers' states', we again had the most violent disagreement. We said, 'What in the world is he talking about - "centuries of degenerated workers' states"? In a world where capitalism is collapsing, revolution is on the order of the day, and revolution is going to be victorious - is it going to take centuries to liquidate the bureaucratic excrescences?' ... But we kept quiet about all this in the party. I did speak about it in the Political Committee at some length, when we were discussing the draft resolution of the Third World Congress. My remarks were incorporated in the minutes to be sent over there, so they would know what we thought about this and know that we would not support any implication in the congress resolution of centuries of Stalinism after the revolution. That's as far as we went.... I have spoken of all this to show that we have had differences, and fairly serious ones, but that we have considered them to be within the framework of an

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overall agreement. We appreciate the great work the leaders in Paris have done, especially their important contributions to the analysis of the postwar world. We appreciate the fact that they are working with a narrow organizational base, and that they are entitled to loyal support and collaboration. These have been the general considerations. I cite them to show that if there is a Pablo cult in the party, we don't belong to it. No one has the right to assume that we, with all our respect for the work of Pablo, consider ourselves puppets who can be pulled on a string. That's not our conception of proper international relations. When Comrade Warde [Novack] was travelling in Europe, while this fight was brewing in our party, he had definite instructions as to what we wanted. They asked him, 'What shall we do?' His answer was: 'It's up to you what you do, but my advice is, let it alone. The American party is a living organism, there are very experienced people there, just let it alone and see how it develops. Wait till everything becomes clear and then, if you want, express your opinion. But don't jump in, and above all don't make any decisions, because you might make the wrong ones'. That was our general attitude. The whole implication of their questions was: 'What can we do to help you deal with this new faction?' Our answer was: 'Nothing, we don't need any help. And if we needed help, it would be very bad; because if we can be elected and placed in leadership only with the help of outside forces, we are not the real leaders of the party. And we won't accept leadership on that basis'. These were the reasons for our not wanting intervention on their part. First, we didn't need their support. Second, we don't want leadership that is not the natural and normal and voluntary selection of the rank and file. And third, if they should intervene with any kind of decision to support the Cochranites, we would have to tell them that we would pay no attention whatsoever.

Internationalism vs. 'Cominternism'

Now don't take that to indicate some kind of anti-international sentiment; that's just putting the cards on the table. Why wouldn't we pay any attention? Because we don't believe parties that will permit proconsuls to be imposed upon them as leaders are worth a damn. We don't think a revolutionary party anywhere amounts to much until it is able to throw up a cadre of indigenous leaders who have grown up out of its struggles, who are known to its members and trusted by them. You can't monkey with the question of leadership. We came out of the Comintem, as I said, and we remembered the crimes of the Comintem. 'Socialism in one country' was not the only crime. One of

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the greatest crimes was the destruction of the self-acting life of the individual Communist parties. The Stalinist Comintem overthrew the indigenous leaders everywhere. Where they couldn't overthrow them directly, they would conspire against them, set factions on foot with secret backing to undermine and finally get rid of all the independent characters in the leadership. That is what they did in this country. They first got rid of the so-called Cannon group of leaders (the Trotskyists); then they got rid of the Lovestoneite leaders; and then they tamed the Fosterite leaders and reduced them to the ignoble status of functionaries. When they had reduced the whole party to a docile herd, they said who should be the leader - Browder. It was only under those conditions that Browder could become the leader. He was a man of such weakness of decision, such lack of independent character, that he couldn't fight his way to leadership. He became an appointed leader and ruled the party all these years as nothing more than a proconsul of Moscow. That he had no power of his own was proved when they got ready to ditch him: they just snapped their fingers - and out went Browder. That's the kind of business we don't like. We didn't have anything like that with Trotsky. Not at all. Trotsky wrote about this question once - I am not quoting literally because I don't have the document before me, but I remember it almost word for word - about the Comintem practice of getting rid of leaders. He didn't mean only Trotskyist leaders; he referred also to Germany, for example, where the right wing, the Brandlerites, were thrown out by organizational machinations and a new set of puppets put in. Trotsky said: 'Leadership is the natural outgrowth of a living party organism. It cannot be arbitrarily removed by outside forces without leaving a gaping wound that does not heal'....

Collaboration, Not Orders

... We regard the International Secretariat - who are a group of comrades we esteem - we regard them as collaborators, but not as masters and not as popes. We are going to speak out against the revelation of the minority that all you have to do is quote a sentence from Pablo and that settles everything. Pablo is not our pope. He is just a collaborator. He is welcome to give us advice. But what if Pablo and the IS should come out in support of the minority? If such a thing should occur - and I'm not saying it will; I'm just assuming that the absolutely incredible arrogance of the Cochranites is based on some rumor that they are going to have the support of the IS - if that should occur, it wouldn't oblige us to change our minds about anything. We wouldn't do so.

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I was disturbed when I heard some comrades saying that if there should be a decision of the 1s in favor of the minority, it might swing some of our people over to the minority. I remember what Trotsky wrote when he was fighting in the Russian party and the Comintem to mobilize the comrades to dare to have a thought and stand up for it. In his appeal to the Sixth Congress of the Comintem, Trotsky said: 'That party member who changes his opinion at command is a scoundrel'. He meant by that that such a member is disloyal to the party; because the least the party can expect from the most inexperienced, the newest rank-and-file member is that he be honest with the party, tell the party honestly what he thinks, and not change his opinion when he gets the command from this or that leader, or this or that committee. That is not to say that the party member doesn't have to obey discipline. But one's opinions should be sacred to himself. I hope it will be this way in our party, no matter where the instructions come from-from the Political Committee, from the plenum or from the convention. No one should change his mind because authority tells him to. That is not the mark of a revolutionist. You are obliged to submit to discipline, you are obliged to carry out the decisions of the majority. But if you think you are right, then, as Trotsky said, you bide your time until new events occur and a new discussion opens up[:] ... a Bolshevik is not only a disciplined man but also an independent thinking man, who will raise his point of view again and again, until either he convinces the party he is right, or the party convinces him that he is wrong. We understand what the fight in our party here means. This party, comrades, is the most important party in the whole world. Not because we say so, not because we are braggarts, as Cochran says whenever anyone puts in a good word for the party. It is because we are operating in that section of the capitalist world which is not collapsing. We are operating in that section of the world which is a concentration of all the power of capitalism - the United States. The revolutions taking place in other parts of the world - in China, Korea, and other areas of the colonial world - those revolutions cannot be definitive. They can only be provisional - so long as capitalism rules the United States.... [I]f this party is in a crisis, and we know what the crisis is about; if it is a crisis not only of program and perspectives, the perspectives of the country and the labor movement and the party; if that is involved, and not some little difference over this or that; and if involved also is the problem of leadership, which is the decisive question of every party and every workers' movement, and every revolution, in the last analysis - if all that is involved, then this fight has to be carried through to its conclusion by the people who know what the fight is about, who know the people, who know the answers, and who are determined to carry out the answers.

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That is what we are committed to. We hope to have the sympathy and support of the whole international movement. But if we don't have the sympathy and support of one individual here or there, or one group or another, that doesn't mean we give up our opinions and quit our fight. Not for one moment. That only means that the fight in the SWP becomes transferred to the international field. Then we take the field and look for allies to fight on our side against anyone who may be foolish enough to fight on the side of Cochran. Then it would be a fight in the international movement. I am absolutely sure that we will be victorious here, and I don't see any reason why we wouldn't be victorious on the international field if it should come to a fight. We hope to avoid such a fight. We are not looking for it. We have no tangible evidence to prove that there is any conspiracy against us, or any actions against us, on the international field. But if a fight should come, we will be prepared for it. That is the way we size this thing up.

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Against Pabloist Revisionism (Abridged, 1953) Socialist Workers Party National Committee

The draft resolution of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International on 'The Rise and Decline of Stalinism' sets out to bring up-to-date the Trotskyist appraisal of the Soviet Union, the Kremlin bureaucracy and the Stalinist world movement especially in the light of the events following Stalin's death. 42 However, its method of analysis misrepresents the real state of affairs and leads to political conclusions diverging from traditional Trotskyist views.

I

Three Periods of the World Revolution

This can be seen, first of all, in its manner of breaking up world historical developments since 1917 into three main periods: the period of revolutionary rise from 1917 to 1923; the period of revolutionary ebb from 1923-43; and the period of revolutionary resurgence on a higher level since 1943. This division provides the fundamental framework for the resolution and serves as the starting point for a revision of our conceptions on the nature and role of the Stalinist bureaucracy. According to the resolution, the third period has created a relationship of class forces on a world scale and in the Soviet Union which requires a new appraisal and approach to Stalinism in this period has already had two phases. The years from 1943 to 1947 represent a transition from the second to the third period, partaking of the features of both. This was the time when the Soviet bureaucracy appeared to reach the peak of its power. The world revolutionary rise was still not powerful enough to permit the bypassing and engulfing of Stalinism. The Kremlin and its agencies

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were able to restrict and control the revolution, except for Yugoslavia. The deals with imperialism, the right turns, the betrayals of the revolution continued the former era; the Yugoslav revolution prefigured the new. But since 1947 the old equilibria have been definitively broken and cannot be regained. The new international revolutionary rise disrupted the equilibrium between the world working class and imperialism. The aggravation of the crisis of the capitalist system and the crushing supremacy of American imperialism has upset the equilibrium between the different imperialist powers. These international changes combined with the domestic changes have broken the equilibrium of social forces in the Soviet Union and undermined the objective foundations of the ruling caste. The victory of the Chinese revolution marked the turning point in this world transformation and ushered in a new and higher stage, basically 'marked by a relation of international forces favorable to the revolution and evolving on a global scale more and more favorably for the revolution. The revolutionary wave spreads from country to country, from continent to continent. It has recently reached the Soviet Union itself and the buffer zone'. This revolutionary wave of global dimensions and unlimited duration, will continue to mount higher, despite minor refluxes, up to the war. The war itself 'will coincide not with an ebb but with a new leap forward of the world revolution'. This will continue until the end of the Third World War. Nothing can long withstand this all-engulfing revolutionary torrent. It will sweep all established forces into its vortex; both imperialism and Stalinism will crack up and perish in the process. The victory of the world revolution is henceforth assured. Such is the line of development projected in the resolution. If this is really so, it will have to be recognized that we have entered upon a qualitatively different epoch in which all previous political values would have to be reevaluated. The political ideas, revolutionary strategy and organizational perspectives of the vanguard would have to be revised to bring them into line with the qualitatively transformed world reality and its main trends of development.

II

Changes in Stalinism

The resolution undertakes to do this in connection with Stalinism and draws some extremely far-reaching conclusions in respect to it. Let us summarize them. The fundamental historical, world and national conditions for Stalinism have disappeared. It has irretrievably entered upon its period of decline.

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The dynamic of the world relationship of forces evolving favorably to the revolution has now struck the Soviet Union, undermined the positions of the bureaucracy, upset its stability and already promoted the disintegration of Stalinism in a number of unforeseen ways. 'The objective foundations of the dictatorship are in the process of rapidly disappearing'. The relationship of forces between the Bonapartist bureaucracy and the masses is shifting in favor of the latter. The pressures exerted by these changing conditions and by the demands of the masses is more and more determining the Kremlin's course and policies. The post-Stalin regime is no longer able to rule as before; it is instead obliged to liberalize itself and make more and more concessions to save its rule. This tends toward the liquidation of the heritage of Stalinism. These developments release centrifugal forces which differentiate and split up the ruling caste. The changes in the Soviet Union since Stalin's death constitute the relaxation of the Kremlin's brake upon the Communist parties. Its tight hold over the buffer countries and upon the Communist parties in capitalist countries is being loosened. These are developing new relations with the Kremlin in the direction of greater independence from it while oppositional ideas and anti-Stalinist tendencies more and more manifest themselves. 'Caught between the imperialist threat and the colonial revolution, the Soviet bureaucracy found itself obliged to ally itself with the second against the first'. This enforced alliance wit h the colonial revolution is mediated through Mao's regime with whom it must share direction of Asian Communism. The Kremlin is less and less able to conclude deals with imperialism at the expense of the revolution. Its room for maneuvers with imperialism and against the revolution is diminishing all the time. 'This new situation restricts more and more the capacity of counter-revolutionary maneuvers by the bureaucracy'. Not only are its capacities for sell-outs decreasing, despite its intentions, but the practical effects of its diplomatic maneuvers and Popular-Front experiments with certain sections of the colonial bourgeoisie are more and more restricted and ephemeral. Moreover, 'the revolutionary tide which the Soviet bureaucracy is no longer capable of smashing and arresting is even being nourished by the methods of selfdefense applied by the bureaucracy .. .' The Kremlin's capacity for repressive measures likewise grow more restricted. It is less able to proceed to repressions and purges at home, or

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to stamp out opposition in the buffer countries, because of the drastic shift in the relation of forces. Just as the bureaucracy must liberalize its dictatorship, so the Communist parties, despite right oscillations here and there and now and then, tend to radicalize their policies. This is the dominant tendency. In countries where the CP's are a majority in the working class, they can under pressure of the masses be led to project a revolutionary orientation counter to the Kremlin's directives.

To What Degree Have the Fundamental Conditions for Stalinism Disappeared?

To arrive at these far-reaching conclusions on Stalinism the resolution has to present a picture of the world situation which is not in accord with reality and to take partial and limited changes for decisive and fundamental ones. Thus the resolution states: 'The fundamental conditions under which the Soviet bureaucracy and its tight hold over the Communist Parties developed, namely, the ebb of the revolution, the isolation of the Soviet Union, and the backward conditions of its economy - these conditions have disappeared'. Let us examine the post-war world and see to what degree these sweeping assertions conform to the real state of affairs. We are here dealing with matters of fact. Let us analyze each one of these three fundamental conditions to see to what extent they have vanished. 1

The Development of the World Revolution

The international revolution has undoubtedly experienced a considerable resurgence since 1943. The Second World War generated a revolutionary wave of greater scope, intensity and persistence than the First World War. The Soviet victory over Nazism, the revolutionary victories in Yugoslavia and China, the extension of nationalized property into the buffer states by bureaucratic-military means, the spread of the colonial revolution have all dealt hard blows to world capitalism and enormously strengthened the anti-capitalist camp. However, this trend in the world situation has been combined and crisscrossed with another. The immense revolutionary movement which has produced such transformations in Eastern and. Central Europe and in Asia, came to grief in Western Europe during this very same period. The Soviet bureaucracy was chiefly responsible for this reversal and betrayal of the European revolution.

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This has generated a series of opposite effects in the unfoldment of the world revolution. The proletarian offensive was curbed, the working class became weaker, Western European capitalism was rescued, and became relatively stabilized for a period of years. This has enabled the imperialist counter-revolution directed by the us to take hold of these countries and use them as drill grounds and springboards for its war preparations and prospective attacks upon the anti-capitalist countries and revolutionary forces. Thus the revolutionary process since World War II has experienced an uneven and contradictory development. While the revolution moved forward in a number of backward countries, triumphed in Yugoslavia and China, it has undergone set-backs in a number of the more advanced countries. The victories for the revolution represent gains for the working class and oppressed peoples. But they must be considered in connection with the recession of the revolution in Western Europe and its effects in order to arrive at a more balanced and accurate reckoning of the progress of the revolution. Had the revolution succeeded in one or more of the highly developed industrial countries, from Germany to Italy, along with these victories in certain backward countries, that would have sealed the fate of capitalism in Europe and Asia and pressed the Soviet bureaucracy to the wall. The Kremlin is well aware of the threat to its dominance implicit in the European revolution. That motivated its efforts to block and crush that development which continues up to this very day (French General Strike). The prevention of an independent socialist workers power arising in Western Europe is an indispensable condition for preserving the rule of the Soviet bureaucracy. The Kremlin can, up to a certain point, tolerate and maneuver with revolutions in the colonies and the backward countries. But it dreads the extension of the proletarian revolution into Western Europe because that means the sentence of death for it. A rounded review and realistic resume of the net result of the march of the international revolution from 1943 to 1953 leads to this conclusion. With all its great achievements and greater potentialities the failure of the revolution to conquer in one of the major industrialized countries has thus far prevented the revolutionary forces of the working class from growing strong enough, to overwhelm the Kremlin oligarchy and give irresistible impetus to the disintegration of Stalinism. There has not yet been such a qualitative alteration in the world relationship of class forces. Up to date the counter-revolutionary intervention of the bureaucracy itself in world politics has forestalled the objective conditions for such a consummation. It caused the revolution to recede in Western Europe, weakened the working class in relation to its class enemy, and facilitated the mobilization

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of the world counter-revolution. The struggle between the forces of revolution and counter-revolution is still inconclusive, and far from being settled. This very inconclusiveness, which it strives to maintain, at the present time works to the advantage of the Kremlin. 2 The Isolation of the Soviet Union This first factor is directly connected with the second: the encirclement of the Soviet Union by world imperialism. The post-war developments certainly succeeded in loosening and unsettling the imperialist encirclement to a certain extent and breaking through the previous tight isolation of the Soviet Union the linking together of the countries from the Elbe to the Pacific, however much they may be bureaucratically governed and oppressed, is a strong bulwark to the USSR. The anti-capitalist states now embrace one-third of mankind but they confront a combine of imperialist powers centralized under us hegemony being openly mobilized against them. The failure of the revolution to break through to victory in Western Europe, which would have radically altered the balance of class forces throughout Europe and Asia, has permitted imperialism to reassert its encirclement and intensify its pressures against the Soviet Union on all planes. This isolation is felt in the economic, political and military fields in varying degrees. Despite all their achievements, the industrial capacity of the states in the Soviet bloc is far below that of the capitalist states. This unfavorable balance could be rectified only with the inclusion of the industrial complex of Western Europe. But this is now cut off in large part by the economic blockade which is an element in the isolation of the su. The moves being made by the Kremlin to curry favor with the bourgeois governments of France and Italy, and its maneuvers around the German question, testify to its attempts to overcome its isolation. Instead of attracting workers in the advanced countries, the Kremlin's policy helps to repel them and thus aggravates the social isolation of the su from the class forces which alone can guarantee its defense. Finally, the us is engaged in forging a military ring around the periphery of the Kremlin-dominated territories, and exerts unremitting pressures from all directions upon it. The Soviet bureaucracy must reckon with this at all times both in its domestic and foreign policies. The looming menace of A and H bomb attack determines its plan of production. This takes first place in the strategical plans of the Soviet General Staff. The menace of imperialist encirclement and aggression determines the policies of those Communist parties under the Kremlin's control.

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Before the last World War the Soviet bureaucracy could and did maneuver between two opposing blocs of imperialist powers. Today its capacity to exploit the inter-imperialist contradictions is extremely restricted. The Soviet Union won in the Second World War through an alliance with the strongest sector of world imperialism. In a new war the Soviet Union, its satellites and China would have to fight against a coalition of all the imperialist states. How, then, can it be so unqualifiedly asserted in the resolution that the isolation of the s u has disappeared? The isolation has been modified and mitigated, but not at all removed. The pressures of the imperialist environment weigh upon the entire life of the Soviet peoples. The Soviet workers, with memories still fresh of the last war, fear the outbreak of a new one. This is still a potent factor in restraining them from open conflict with the bureaucracy for fear of aiding imperialism. Thus, the very encirclement of the s u which the policies of the Kremlin serve to sustain, and even augment, remains one of the factors in maintaining its grip upon power. 3

The Development of Soviet Economy

Marked advances have been made in Soviet economy, especially since 1947. However these have been extremely uneven. Agriculture lags far behind industry, far behind the needs of the mass of the Soviet people. Soviet advances have led to an improvement in the living conditions of its citizens, especially in urban centers. They have still greater hopes and expectations of betterment in their material conditions, which the post-Stalin regime has had to take into account. The new rulers have made certain concessions in the sphere of consumption and promised still more. But the question at issue is this: has there been so drastic a change in the Soviet economy as to eliminate the objective material basis for the bureaucracy? That would entail the production of consumers' goods and food in sufficient abundance to guarantee necessities to everyone, satisfy the demands of the working people, and thus eliminate any need for bureaucratic arbiters to decide the distribution of the available products. Has Soviet economy, with all its indubitable successes, reached that point, or even approached it? The citing of general production figures and their global comparison with those of other countries will not help here. The decisive point is not how much more is being produced than before, but is enough being produced now to take care of the basic demands of the people? The facts are that the rise in the economy has sufficed to provide a minimum for most workers, to eliminate famine conditions, and ease some economic tensions in the sphere of consumption. But side by side with the general improvement, there have been considerable increases in consumption for the

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more favored layers. From the aristocrats of labor, up to the tops of the bureaucracy there is an inclination to grasp for more. Malenkov is compelled to give a bit more bread and other articles to the masses. But at the same time the Kremlin makes sure to provide more new cars, refrigerators, television sets, etc. which are exclusively within the reach of the upper layers of Soviet society. All this accentuates the contradiction between the rulers and the ruled, heightens social inequalities, and makes the situation more intolerable to the workers. There is a sharpening conflict between the working class growing in numbers and skills and the bureaucratic guardians of privilege. The economic and cultural backwardness is in the process of being overcome. But to assert that this has already taken place is to falsify the real state of Soviet economy today. This does not at all mean that the bureaucracy can or will perpetuate itself in power indefinitely. That depends upon further developments of the world revolution which can definitively remove the hostile pressures of world imperialism, and not simply temporarily ease them, and overcome the scarcity of consumer goods by placing the industrial resources of more advanced countries at the disposal of the Soviet economy. It depends even more upon the development of the deepening conflict between the bureaucracy and the masses. The Soviet people will not wait for the elimination of the economic roots of the totalitarian bureaucracy in order to embark upon a mortal struggle against it. As Trotsky pointed out, the social conflict can explode into political revolution as a result of the intensification of antagonisms to the boiling point. 'Economic contradictions produce social antagonisms, which in turn develop their own logic, not awaiting the further growth of the productive forces'. (Revolution Betrayed, p. 48). Thus a sober analysis of the world situation and its development during the past decade discloses that the three major objective factors responsible for the rise of the Soviet bureaucracy have not been changed in a fundamental sense but only to a certain extent. The Kremlin bureaucracy has to operate today under new but not decisively different circumstances. Its further life-span will depend upon the struggle of the living forces in the world arena and in the Soviet Union over the next period and the emergence in this struggle of a Trotskyist party capable of leading the Soviet masses in insurrection against the ruling caste.

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The New Relations and Role of the Soviet Bureaucracy

Proceeding from its wrong and one-sided estimation of the fundamental conditions in which the bureaucracy finds itself, the resolution says that the bureaucracy has acquired such new relations with imperialism, the world working class, the colonial revolution, the buffer countries and its own people that these substantially change its policies and activities and their results. The Soviet bureaucracy is objectively playing a different role than in its past. a The Kremlin, Imperialism and the World Revolution This is purportedly to be seen in respect to imperialism. The resolution correctly affirms that 'the global balance of the Soviet bureaucracy's international policy is a reformist one, because the bureaucracy aims not to overthrow world capitalism, but simply to maintain the framework of the status quo'. It has played this role of an agency of imperialism not only from 1923 to 1943 but from 1943 to the present. 'It is more correct than ever to say today that the domination of imperialism subsists over half of the globe only thanks to the role played by the bureaucracy and its agencies'. However, the resolution contends, the victory of the Chinese revolution 'marked the opening of a new phase in the world situation in which the Soviet bureaucracy finds itself'. This new situation has the following features. It 'restricts more and more the capacity of counter-revolutionary maneuvers by the bureaucracy'. And 'the practical effects of these attempts (to utilize the inter-imperialist contradictions, to gain the support of certain bourgeoisies in colonial and semi-colonial countries to arrive at a temporary and partial agreement with imperialism) become more and more limited and ephemeral .. .' The actual relations between the bureaucracy and imperialism are highly contradictory. On one hand, the Kremlin has to take the necessary measures to safeguard its own positions and domain from imperialist penetration, aggressions and attack. But the policies and methods it employs to achieve this end serve to aid imperialism and weaken and discourage the working masses, thereby undermining the defense of the anti-capitalist countries and the Soviet Union. Neither the counter-revolutionary imperialists nor the revolutionary forces fundamentally aim to preserve the existing state of affairs. Both of these irreconcilable antagonists, for opposing reasons, are driving toward a showdown which brings them into ever-sharper collision. Moscow comes forward in this contest of class forces as the foremost defender of the international status quo, and therewith a key conservatizing factor in the world situation. It does not aim to aid the revolution or to overthrow imper-

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ialist rule. It is anxious to maintain the present division of the world between its own power and that of imperialism and to arrive at a new deal on that basis. This is consciously formulated in the conception of 'peaceful co-existence between socialism and capitalism' repeated by the new Kremlin leaders and echoed by the Stalinist parties. This is more than a theory; it provides the main guiding line of an active policy which predominates the diplomacy of the Kremlin and the conduct of its agencies. The Kremlin exerts its utmost influence to preserve even the prevailing cold war status quo as a lesser evil. It aims to uphold this by acting simultaneously on two fronts: against further aggressions by imperialists on the one side and against any disruption of the present equilibrium by eruptions and expansion of the revolutionary movement. For fear of provoking retaliation from imperialism and becoming involved directly in war, the bureaucracy will hamstring revolutions and permit them to bleed to death. The cases of North Korea, Iran, and Malaya are instructive in this respect. Moscow gave the North Koreans supplies enough to drag out the war but not enough to win, even when its armies were sweeping the invaders toward the sea. Whereas Washington did not hesitate to intervene with full force and openly in Korea, Moscow stayed discreetly within its own preserve. Then when MacArthur approached the Yalu, the Chinese were forced to enter the war even though they had just come out of a prolonged civil war. The narrow caste interests and protective fears of the Soviet rulers obliged the Asian revolutionists to bear the brunt of the anti-imperialist fight. As the pressures from imperialism mount, the Kremlin's disposition is to gain time for itself at the expense of the world working class and the struggles of the colonial peoples. This explains the conduct of the Tudeh Party in Iran which refrained from launching a fight for power at the peak of its mass support and thereby permitted the military coup d'etat which overthrew Mossadegh and restored the Shah. The Kremlin's anxiety to prevent the upsetting of the equilibrium in this sensitive spot and avert the risk of precipitating war accounted for this triumph of the counter-revolution in Iran. The supposition that the cold war between Western imperialism and the Soviet Union plus the mounting pressures of the mass movement restrains or prevents the bureaucracy from committing deadly treachery is not confirmed by recent events. Quite the contrary. The French CP's behavior in the August 1953 General Strike shows how the Kremlin's agents will let a revolutionary opportunity pass by and ruin it. The Kremlin can stab the workers in the back, not only when it is in open alliance with the imperialists, but also when it is seeking an alliance with them. The treachery may be more devious but its effects are as real and disastrous.

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The inevitable outcome of all this maneuvering with imperialism and against the revolution will be the same as before the Second World War. The maneuvers will not avert the war. But the imperialists will be helped to strengthen their positions and make advances while the revolution is crippled and the workers are thrust back and disoriented. Unless the workers in the advanced capitalist countries undertake a revolutionary offensive of powerful proportions, the imperialists will be enabled to unleash the war at a time and under conditions most advantageous for them. The bureaucracy hates and fears the world revolution and strives to head it off, restrict, control, subvert and strangle it. But it is not omnipotent. It cannot do what it wants, in the way it wants, when it wants. But this does not mean that the Kremlin has abated its hostility toward the world revolution or altered its treacherous attitude toward it. This can be seen even in the victories of the revolution in Yugoslavia and China. These occurred against the Kremlin's advice and in defiance of it. The Kremlin was obliged to accommodate itself to the accomplished fact. The limits to this accommodation depend upon how closely the development of the revolutions touches its most vital interests. The Kremlin went along with the Yugoslav revolution up to the point where Yugoslav influence over the Balkan countries threatened to create an alternative pole of attraction. Then the Kremlin turned mercilessly upon it. To what degree can it be maintained, as the resolution does, that the Kremlin is now obliged to ally itself with the colonial revolution against imperialism? It has had to back up China and North Korea up to a point. The victories for the revolution in Asia have so far been no direct threat to the Kremlin's domination, even though it has had to acquiesce in the co-direction of the Asian Communist movement with Mao. On the whole they have worked to the immediate advantage of the Kremlin. China has broken the imperialist encirclement in the Far East and kept the us forces tangled in the Korean war. This drained China and tied up the United States at minimum cost to Moscow. So long as the Kremlin can use this or that sector of the colonial movement for its own ends, it will do so. But it remains a very perfidious ally in the best circumstances. It has already been pointed out that it deliberately withheld military deliveries that could enable the North Koreans to win. The current seven-year civil war in Inda-China stems back to the Stalinist coalition politics in 1945-46 which handed French imperialism the positions for fighting the national independence movement. Most recently, the Kremlin sabotaged the revolution in Iran. It is true that world conditions militate against the Kremlin's consummation of any lasting deals with imperialism or its bargains with the national hour-

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geoisie. But the objective consequences of its attempts to maintain the status quo or arrive at such agreements have much more than 'limited and ephemeral' practical effects. Its maneuvers help block the advance of the revolutionary movement and adversely affect the world relationship of forces. The bureaucracy together with its agencies is not simply a passive reflector and acted-upon object of the world relationship of forces; the bureaucracy acts and reacts on the international arena as a potent factor in shaping the latter. For example, the Kremlin's whole postwar policy toward Germany, the key country in Europe (its participation in the division, its regime over East Germany, its diplomatic maneuvers regarding West Germany), aid capitalist reaction and facilitate the imperialist objectives. Can the effects of its attitude toward this one country be classified as 'limited' and 'ephemeral' whether these are assessed from the angle of the European revolution, the German workers, the march toward war or the defense of the anti-capitalist states? Not only is the vanguard miseducated by this minimizing of the pernicious results of the Kremlin's course but it is disarmed in the struggle to dispel illusions about Stalinism among the workers in order to break them from Stalinist influence. The resolution says: 'the revolutionary tide which the Soviet bureaucracy is no longer capable of smashing and arresting is even being nourished by the methods of self-defense applied by the bureaucracy .. .'. Both parts of this statement are one-sided and misleading. The fact that the Soviet bureaucracy couldn't 'smash and arrest' the Yugoslav and Chinese revolutions where the revolutionary tide broke through its dikes, doesn't wipe out the fact that elsewhere, by and large, the bureaucracy succeeded in turning the revolutionary tide in the opposite direction. This has influenced the relationship of forces for an entire period. Nor do its 'methods of self-defense' necessarily 'nourish' 'the revolutionary tide', even where the revolution has come to power. The Kremlin's 'methods of self-defense' drove Yugoslavia into the embrace of imperialism and has made China more and more dependent economically upon it. It is not clear just what is specifically meant by 'methods of self-defense' which can nourish the revolutionary tide. Does that refer to supplying arms to China and North Korea? Or to its action in defense of the Soviet Union in case of attack? But even in these instances 'its methods of self-defense' do not in all respects coincide with the self-defense of the workers' movement and can even go counter to it. We have always recognized that when the bureaucracy defends the Soviet Union against imperialist attack, it can under certain conditions give an impulsion to revolutionary struggles in capitalist countries. It will be obliged to do this still more in the event of the Third World War. But now when it is seeking

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a modus vivendi with imperialism or trying to create rifts amongst the capitalist nations, its 'methods of self-defense' do far more to drain than to swell the revolutionary wave. In several places there is the implication that the bureaucracy, faced with the war-danger, will have to be more tolerant of independent revolutionary developments and refrain from proceeding against them. For example, the resolution says that the Kremlin's preparations for World War II 'was accompanied by a halt of mass purges'. Actually, the purges were part of Stalin's preparations for war. He aimed to eliminate all potential centers of opposition to the regime. The beheading of the Soviet General Staff, which led to the military fiasco in Finland, showed to what lengths the bureaucracy can go in preventive measures against even potentially independent forces precisely when war loomed. Later, the resolution attempts to explain the campaign against Yugoslavia on the ground that 'it was above all able to indulge in such a counter-revolutionary attitude because the preparations for the capitalist war were only in their preliminary stages .. .' etc. This will not hold water. The break took place at a time of high tension between the USSR and the capitalist world. But the overriding caste interests of the Kremlin took precedence over the practical need of defending the USSR although that meant alienating the one country with morale and armed forces reliable and powerful enough to furnish genuine aid for that purpose. b

The Significance of the Events in the Soviet Union Since Stalin's Death The Kremlin regime has been characterized by our movement as a regime of crisis. The parasitism of the bureaucratic caste continuously conflicts with the productive relations established by the October Revolution. As the product of a political counter-revolution arising from the delay of the world revolution and the backwardness of Russian economy and culture, the totalitarian bureaucracy could maintain its power only by repressive measures directed against the Soviet masses. The extension of the Kremlin's rule over the buffer zone countries, the Yugoslav and Chinese revolutions, and the growth of Soviet economy and culture have confronted the bureaucracy with many new acute problems. As a result the objective factors for a mass uprising against the bureaucratic power are ripening in the Soviet Union. The working class especially, which has grown considerably in numbers, culture, skill, and social power, is becoming impatient with insistent demands for continual exertions and sacrifices, enforced by the bureaucratic apparatus and its agencies. The privileges of the bureaucracy appear ever more monstrous, unjustified and intolerable in their eyes.

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The bureaucracy is extremely sensitive to this developing danger. The new rulers act on a higher level, and under different and more difficult circumstances, the resistance and resentment of the masses against the relentless pressures exerted upon them which Stalin periodically encountered. Stalin coped with these situations not by purges alone. He resorted also to temporary relaxations and propaganda campaigns centered around promises of concessions, improved living conditions, and a happier life. As Trotsky pointed out, 'Stalin is compelled from time to time to take the side of "the people" against the bureaucracy- of course, with its tacit consent'. (Revolution Betrayed, p. 271 ). Stalin's death unquestionably released a flood of hope among the people that with the death of the dictator they would get a new deal. The bureaucracy had the twofold problem of reestablishing the hierarchy of the top command, while preventing the masses from intervening in the situation with their own demands and independent actions. The inheritors of power hastened to create the impression that the masses would get a genuine new deal as a gift from the top. They promised a series of political and economic concessions: a broad amnesty, the revision of the criminal code in 30 days, no more purges, more consumers' goods, etc. It would seem that the political concessions would be easiest to make since, unlike improved living conditions, they do not require large-scale economic reorganizations. However, these have yet to materialize. There has been another large reduction in prices, the fifth since the war. But a genuine improvement in living standards first necessitates a drastic readjustment of the economy, and above all, a tremendous increase in agricultural production, which has remained stagnant for many years. The bureaucracy is aiming to do this by raising the incentives of the individual peasant and the well-to-do members of the collectives. At the same time the bureaucracy had to decide quickly who would assume the role of principal arbiter and purger-in-chief to remove all ambiguity on that score and forestall any moves by the masses to take advantage of fissures in the bureaucratic apparatus. This was the meaning of Beria's downfall which has been followed by a purge of his associates in the various Republics. These developments proved that the bureaucracy cannot devise new methods of rule. It may make concessions but must maintain intact at all times the mechanism of repression which guarantees its regime. Between the totalitarian methods of the bureaucracy and the democratic methods of working-class power there will be no intermediate methods of rule. A new power and new methods of rule can come into being only through forces outside the bureaucracy and in opposition to it, through the overthrow ofBonapartist rule by the masses.

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The Trotskyists base their revolutionary perspectives upon the maturing contradictions between the bureaucratic set-up and the working masses which will lead the latter toward a forthright challenge to the totalitarian dictatorship. The East German events prefigure the developments within the Soviet Union in this respect. We must analyze the concessions in the light of the nature and position of the Stalinist bureaucracy and the developing contradictions within Soviet society. The resolution, however, exaggerates the changes in the objective situation, endowing them with an automatic propulsion which obliges the bureaucracy to liberalize itself, introduce new methods of rule, liquidate the heritage of Stalinism, suppress its most hideous and characteristic features, and deliver more and more concessions. The resolution states: 'That regime (Malenkov's) can now maintain itself only by suppressing - temporarily or definitively - the most hideous aspects, that is to say, the most characteristic ones of the regime'. It does not specify which one of these 'hideous aspects' has been eliminated or is about to be. ThE; privileges?The police regime?The relentless squeeze on the workers in production? The national oppression? Concentration camps? Purges? The implication is that 'the terror of Stalin's epoch' is on its way out. But there were fluctuations in the application of this terror during Stalin's day too. The difference now seems to be that the diminution of terror under the Malenkov era is a growing trend, the most distinctive feature of 'the decline of the Bonapartist dictatorship'. The essential liberality of the new regime is only underscored by the next prognosis that 'It is not excluded that before falling, the Bonapartist dictatorship will suddenly once again have recourse to the bloodiest terror'. This signifies that terror has become not an essential but an exceptional episodic and incidental expression of the bureaucratic state. To reinforce its contention that the post-Stalin regime is compelled not only to do away with the most terrible traits of Stalinism, but to placate the masses to an ever-increasing degree, the resolution exaggerates the scope of the concessions. It refers to a broad amnesty which seems to have died ... since it was not mentioned at the last session of the Supreme Soviet in the decrees submitted for approval. It speaks of the revision of the penal code which was promised within 30 days and still remains to be promulgated seven months after. The liberation of the doctors was originally interpreted as an irreparable blow to the system of frameup trials and purges. But since then Beria's purge and trial has been announced. It takes the condemnations of police arbitrariness for good coin, setting aside the fact that verbal criticism of police excesses

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were not unknown under Stalin. Indeed, the GPU was purged several times during Stalin's regime. It regards the stress upon collective decision as a definitive dismissal of the cult of the chief. But this is only a transitional stage between the demise of the former chief and the elevation of a prospective replacement. During his rise to power, Stalin likewise counterposed the collectivity of the Central Committee against the 'aristocrats', that is, the Bolshevik leaders most popular amongst the masses. As we have pointed out, this does not mean that no concessions have been made or that they amount to nothing. They are largely economic in character. What Malenkov has done is to dramatize the gradual improvement in living standards since 1947 and even expedite them. But even in the sphere of consumption the Kremlin will be unable to satisfy the demands of the masses. It will give to one section of the population at the expense of another. While offering new incentives to the peasants, it does not increase the general level of workers' wages, and it takes care to increase the privileges of the bureaucracy itself. How should the concessions be judged? Concessions are of genuine value if they open opportunities to the masses for self-action which can then be used to further their own aims. The new regime has not yet offered the slightest opening of that kind and it is not difficult to understand why. The totalitarian government cannot tolerate the least freedom of action for the workers which would weaken its stranglehold upon them. The resolution occupies itself with dubious speculations about the centrifugal forces which are cracking the monolithism of the ruling group and generating differentiations within the party and its leading circles. It says that the monolithism of the Bonapartist type is being ruptured beyond repair under pressure from other segments of the bureaucracy and the masses. The Beria purge is adduced as evidence of this growing disunity. There is no doubt that the death of Stalin upset the regime's stability, set a swarm of centrifugal forces into motion, and provoked a crisis which has still to be overcome. The transfer of power in a tyranny is always a delicate operation containing dangers. Having lost its old personal center, the bureaucracy as a whole is impelled to seek, create, and rally around a new one as the principal point of support to safeguard its privileges and regulate its internal conflicts. That is the principal reason for the elevation of Malenkov and the speedy removal of Beria. The resolution makes much of the heterogeneity of interests amongst the various layers of the bureaucracy as the material groundwork for its growing differentiation and conflicts. It refers in addition to the aging top layer of the

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bureaucracy as presumably not so much concerned with increasing privileges as conserving them. This overlooks the fact that even at the top the bureaucracy steadily renews its personnel and at all levels its appetite for privileges grows with eating, especially in a country which has far from reached the living standards of the Western world. The bureaucracy as a social layer is stratified according to its conditions of life, its positions of power, scope of privileges, etc. which give rise to jealousies, rivalries and clique contests of many kinds. But as the sole commanding and favored stratum, it is united against the bulk of the population by common bonds of material interest. It is the sole force in the Soviet Union and buffer countries which is armed and organized. The bureaucratic caste cannot tolerate any deep divisions of policy within its ruling circles for any length of time or permit any crack in its repressive apparatus which the masses may utilize for their own purposes. It hides them and hastens to cement them as promptly as possible. Since it has no constitutional or democratic ways of resolving internal conflicts, it resorts to the method of purges. The purge is a weapon directed against the bureaucracy itself from on high as well as against the people. It is an indispensable mechanism of Bonapartist rule. Will the purge method be more and more shelved as the liquidation of Stalinism proceeds, as the resolution implies? Apart from a vague reference to the changing relationship of forces, the resolution brings forward no evidence for this. In fact, the opposite would be indicated. If antagonisms within the bureaucracy deepen, it would seem that purges to resolve them would be in order. If opposition is growing among the people, it would seem that the commanding caste would be obliged to resort to its time-honored methods of repression. Trotsky observed that 'the more the course of development goes against it, the more ruthless it becomes toward the advanced elements of the population'. (Revolution Betrayed, p. 277).

Now it appears, according to the resolution, that the more the course of development goes against it, the more lenient and conciliatory the regime must become. The resolution revises Trotsky's basic concept of the Soviet Thermidor which viewed the Stalinist bureaucracy as representing the first stage of bourgeois restoration. The privileged caste, viewed qualitatively in the structure of Soviet society, is a bourgeois-minded formation still confined within the integument of the remaining conquests of the 1917 Revolution, nationalized property, planned economy. By its position in Soviet society, the inherent tendency of the caste as such is anti-Soviet, restorationist. This orthodox Trotskyist view has been dumped by the authors of 'The Rise and Decline of Stalinism'.

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The concept of the counter-revolutionary stage of Soviet Thennidor has been liquidated, surviving in the document only as a vestigial phrase - a 'reduced' number of Thennidorians, 'old revolutionary militants of the pre1917 vintage'. As a substitute for Trotsky's basic sociological concept, we are given an impressionistic view of the psychology of the 'tops of the bureaucracy', who, we are assured, 'are in their majority no longer a young and rapacious social layer, striving to conquer privileges in the field of consumption in the midst of prevailing poverty, the majority constitutes a layer of men of mature years or heading into old age, attempting to conserve the best possible living standards for themselves'. In line with this superficial view, the document sees 'reflexes of capitulation and desertion to the bourgeois camp' (under the impact of 'signs of proletarian awakening') confined to 'very limited layers of the bureaucracy'. By dumping the orthodox Trotskyist concept of the caste as in essence representative of the tendency toward capitalist restoration, the development of which can be followed in a wealth of forms in Soviet life, the Pabloites open the road to the completely revisionist concept that the bureaucracy can right itself. This is not explicitly stated, but certain conclusions in the resolution flow from this revisionist premise. For example, that in place of the 'reinforcement of restorationist tendencies within the peasantry and the bureaucracy' the opposite development 'is the more likely .. .'. The document emphasizes the new revisionist position (and also its confusion): 'The coming decisive battle within the Saviet Union will not be waged between the restorationistforces aiming to restore private property and the forces defending the conquests of October. It will be, on the contrary, waged between the forces defending the privileges and administration of the bureaucracy and the revolutionary working-class forces fighting to restore Saviet democracy upon a higher level'.

In opposition to this view, which opens the road to capitulation to the bureaucracy, we emphasize the orthodox Trotskyist position: The coming decisive battle within the Saviet Union will be waged between the restorationist tendencies in the country represented by the Stalinist bureaucracy as such and the regenerative tendency represented by the revolutionary working-class forces. On one side will appear the bulk of the bureaucracy, defending its privileges and police rule and thereby the tendency to restore private property; on the other, the proletarian vanguard leading a political revolution that will sweep out the usu,ping bureaucracy, restore Soviet democracy upon a higher level, and thereby directly align the Soviet regime once again with the world socialist revolution.

The proposition that no significant segment of the bureaucracy will align itself with the masses against its own material interests does not mean that the bureaucracy would not manifest deep cleavages under the impact of an upris-

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ing. Such disorganization, disintegration and demoralization was observable in East Germany. But the function of a revolutionary policy is to organize, mobilize and help lead the masses in their struggles, not to look for and even less to bank upon any breaks in the bureaucracy. In its whole treatment of the events since Stalin's death and the new course of the Malenkov regime, the resolution lays down the political premises for a reappraisal of the nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy and the kind of action the workers must take to overthrow it. While it does not spell out these revisions, it opens the door for others to do so, as we shall see later. c The Kremlin and the Communist Parties The resolution states that the Kremlin's rigid grip on the mass Communist parties is weakening. It gives three reasons for this deduction: the growing power of the mass movement exerted on these parties, the loosening of their relations with Moscow, and uncertainty about the Kremlin's authority and policy in recent months. No specific evidence is cited to substantiate this speculation, although the development cannot be ruled out in advance in specific cases. Such has certainly been the case with the Yugoslav and Chinese CPs. But there are no overt signs of a similar occurrence elsewhere yet. To buttress this point the resolution cites the Kremlin's inability to reestablish any International since 1943. Actually Moscow finds any International more of a liability than an asset. It wishes to keep the CPS separated and to control them by other means. This alleged relaxation of Kremlin control is associated with 'the penetration of ideas opposed to the interests of the Kremlin bureaucracy within these organizations; and a process of modification in the hierarchical, bureaucratic relations previously established'. That is how the disintegration of Stalinism is beginning. Vague as these observations of tendencies are, they seem to point to the growth of new ideological currents and organizational relations within the shell of the CPS which will apparently continue inside them until the reformed and rebellious parties become strong and independent enough to throw off the Kremlin's stranglehold. Does this not project the perspective of such reformed Stalinist parties escaping the Kremlin's clutches and proceeding on the road to revolution? This conclusion receives reinforcement from the assertion that the mass Communist parties are forced to radicalize their policies more and more. This is the fundamental and inescapable course of their policies. The resolution grudgingly admits 'the possibility of the mass Communist parties to carry through temporary turns to the right within given conditions, so long as the mass pressure has not reached its culminating point'. The direc-

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tion of Stalinist policy in such parties is thus made to depend in the last analysis on the degree of mass pressure exerted upon them. Up to now there has been no such direct correlation. The history of the French CP is instructive. From 1929-33 when the workers were not yet energetic it pursued an ultra-left line. In 1936 when the mass movement reached its height the CP took a People's Front line. In 1944-47 at the crest of the revolutionary wave generated by the war the Stalinist leaders disarmed the workers and helped de Gaulle restore the capitalist regime. In 1952, when the workers had relapsed into passivity thanks in large measure to the previous gyrations of Stalinist policy, it summoned the Paris workers into the adventure of the anti-Ridgway demonstrations. Finally, in August 1953 during the General Strike the CP remained passive and maintained its 'National Front' mixture of opportunism and sectarianism without radicalizing its policy an iota. This record shows that, far from coordinating their line with the rise in mass pressure, this mass CP ran counter to it. The diplomatic needs of the Kremlin got the upper hand over the demands of the masses. This does not mean that the CP can get away with anything at any time. It too must adjust itself, like other mass parties, to the radicalization of the masses, more in words than in deeds. But in and of itself the pressure of the masses does not suffice to push the er closer to the revolutionary road. The conception that a mass CP will take the road to power if only sufficient mass pressure is brought to bear is false. It shifts the responsibility for revolutionary setbacks from the leadership to the mass, according to the following reasoning: if only there had been more pressure, the c P could have been forced to drive for power. The interaction between the insurgent masses and the leadership is thus reduced to the simple equation: maximum mass pressure equals revolutionary performance, however inadequate, from the er leadership. Actually, the pressure of the workers in the 1953 French General Strike was formidable enough to start the offensive for power. But it was precisely the momentum of this mass power and its implications that caused the CP leadership to leap away in fright from it and prevent its organization. In this not unimportant case, instead of radicalizing Stalinist policy, the heightened mass pressure had a different effect. Obviously, there is not a direct but a dialectical relationship between the two factors. Yugoslavia and China show that under certain exceptional conditions the leadership of a Stalinist party, caught between extermination by the counterrevolution and an extremely powerful revolutionary offensive of the masses, can push forward to power. This can be repeated elsewhere under comparable conditions, especially in the event of a new world war.

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But it would be unwarranted to generalize too broadly and hastily on this point. It should be remembered that while the Yugoslavs marched to power, the CP's in other countries remained subordinate to the Kremlin and facilitated the work of the counter-revolution. Two Communist parties, the Yugoslav and Chinese, met the test in one way; the others in a directly opposite manner. The specific conditions which forced the Yugoslav and Chinese CPS onto the revolutionary road must be analyzed and understood. Both parties had been in conflict with the existing regimes and operated illegally for long years. Both fought prolonged civil wars during which the leadership and cadres were selected, tested and hardened and their forces organized. The Chinese c P had armed forces of its own for years before launching the struggle for power. The domestic capitalist regimes were exceptionally weak and imperialism was unable to intervene with any effectiveness. In any case, as the Manifesto issued by the Third World Congress declared: 'The transformations which the Stalinist parties might undergo in the course of the most acute revolutionary crises may oblige the Leninist vanguard to readjust its tactics toward these parties. But this in no way relieves the proletariat from the task of building a new revolutionary leadership. What is on the agenda today is not so much the question of a projection of a struggle for power under exceptional conditions in this or that isolated country, but the overthrow of imperialism in all countries as rapidly as possible. Stalinism remains obstacle number one, within the international labor movement, to the successful conclusion of that task'. d The Kremlin and the Buffer Zone The exposition of the contradictions inherent in the postwar expansion of Stalinist domination over the buffer zone countries: the resistance of the native CPS which have acquired their own state interests and material base against the dictates of the Kremlin; the clash between the regime and the peasants; the conflict between the regime and the workers is in general correctly delineated. There are, however, three main points of difference to be noted.

The National Question First is the neglect of any treatment of the national question in the resolution, although this is one of the most explosive issues in the Kremlin-subjugated domains. There has long been bitter resistance to the autocratic Russification of the Ukrainians and other minorities. The extension of Moscow's rule, its plundering, overlordship and Russification has provoked no less intense national feelings in the buffer zone. 1

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The political revolution against the Moscow despotism cannot be visualized without the rekindling of the national independence movement in these areas. This demand will be one of the keenest weapons against the Kremlin overlords. Yugoslavia has already shown how powerful a factor of rebellion this resistance to national oppression can be. The program for the political revolution must therefore include slogans for a free and independent Socialist Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, etc.,just as we continue to call for an independent Socialist Ukraine. In East Germany, split by joint agreement of the Big Three, this demand takes the form of the reunification of the German nation on a Socialist basis. The unity of the German people, and above all its working class, is indispensable for the promotion of the European revolution. Even though this demand was raised by the demonstrators themselves and was called for by the entire situation, it was missing from the IS declaration on the East German events. The omission of such a slogan in both the resolution and the IS statement requires explanation. Is the present bloc of anti-capitalist states under Kremlin dictatorship to be regarded as a solid and, untouchable entity which the demand for independence disintegrates? Actually the struggle for socialist independence undermines the grip of the Kremlin, helps unify the revolutionary forces, increasing their striking power against imperialism. This omission is all the more glaring in the light of its inclusion in the Third World Congress Manifesto. 'Long live the independent Socialist Republics of Poland, of Czechoslovakia, of Hungary, of Rumania, of Bulgaria and of the Ukraine! Down with the Stalinist dictatorship'. 2 The East German Events Second, in place of the dubious hypotheses advanced in the resolution on possible variants of development, the revolutionary perspectives for the buffer zone countries should be based upon concrete events from which lessons can be drawn and applied. This means that the treatment of the overthrow of the Kremlin autocracy and the disintegration of Stalinism must take the East German uprising as its point of departure. This uprising demonstrated in life how the political revolution against Stalinism originates and unfolds. A correct appraisal of the East German events has the utmost importance for our movement because it provides the opportunity to check our program with the actual events and see whether and in what respects it was verified and where in it requires correction and amplification. Important divergences in appraisal are equally significant. Briefly, what did the East German uprising reveal? 1. It showed that the working class was the initiating and decisive force in leading the people to revolt.

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3.

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It disclosed the colossal power and potentialities of the workers' movement which united all currents of labor opinion in massive protest. Virtually the entire working class opposed itself to the regime and all its agencies, beginning with the SEO. The unpopular government was sprung into mid air without any support amongst the people. Its main props, the party, the police and the top bureaucracy, crumbled and collapsed under the impact of the uprising. The advanced workers broke in action with the government party, the SEO.

5.

They evinced determination to overthrow the regime, not to reform it. This repudiation and rejection was implicit in the demand for 'a metalworkers government'. The sum total of the other demands were incompatible with the continuance of the dictatorship. 6. The general mass political strike, sparked by immediate economic demands and directed against the government, became the means for mobilizing the masses and pitting them against the regime. 7. The Trotskyist program of the necessity of political revolution against Stalinism by a mass uprising was vindicated and adopted in action by the insurgent workers. 8. The unarmed and unsupported masses had to fall back. They felt the need for the formation of a revolutionary leadership and a party to organize the next stages and link it up with the struggles in the West and the buffer zone countries. g. The events exposed and underscored the utterly counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism. a. It required a series of repressive measures, mixed with concessions, to save and prop up the battered regime. Armed force and police actions against the most militant and conscious elements had to be used to subdue the insurgents. b. The occupying Soviet troops rescued the regime and pushed back the revolution. c. The Stalinists launched a despicable slander campaign against the workers as 'fascists'. d. The SEO undertook a purge of its personnel who proved weak and conciliatory. Contrast the above appraisal with the aspects stressed in the IS resolution written after the East German uprising. The resolution singles out three points. a. Special economic conditions caused the resistance of the masses to culminate in open revolt. (Actually, they touched off the rebellion which had profounder causes.)

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b.

This revolt accentuated 'the new course' which includes an improvement in economic conditions for all layers of the people and a softening of the atmosphere of extreme tension in the mass organizations. c. This new course is designed to strengthen the grip of the Stalinist parties by making them more flexible, less rigid. This is the sum total of the principal lessons drawn by the resolution from the East German uprising! 3 Entrism into the CP in the Buffer Zone Countries Third, the resolution recommends an application of the entrist tactic toward the Communist Parties in the buffer zone countries. In these countries, 'our forces must seek to realize their tasks, which are in general similar to those we have in the Soviet Union, through an entrist tactic toward the CP, while remaining prepared to join quickly any other mass organization which may appear at the beginning of the upsurge'. The question naturally arises why the resolution does not make a specific entrist proposal for the CP of the Soviet Union, if the tasks are 'in general similar'. This becomes still more puzzling when we are given as one of the motivations for entrism in the buffer zone countries, that 'the more the outbreak the revolutionary rise is retarded, the more will the young generation awaken to political life. This generation will have known no form of political organization other than the c P and the latter will tend to become the natural arena in which the leadership of the new revolutionary rise will develop'. Several young generations have already awakened to political life in the su knowing no other party than the CP. If this becomes a decisive criterion, the entrist tactic should be applied there above all places. Why doesn't the resolution call for it? Why is such a glaring contradiction permitted? Can it be because the Transitional Program opens no door for an entrist tactic toward the c Puss R? It insists on the contrary that the Soviet masses must be mobilized to rise up against the bureaucracy under the leadership of the Soviet section of the Fourth International. But the way is being paved to get around this in stages. In quoting the Transitional Program the resolution drops out the above clearly-stated programmatic conclusions. It substitutes the vaguer proposition that 'the conditions are being created for the reconstitution and the upsurge of the Bolshevik-Leninist Party'. There is no explicit reference to entry but it is not excluded. In addition, the resolution prescribes an entrist tactic for the buffer zone countries which is so motivated as to apply with greater force to the USSR. Such an entrist proposal is fundamentally different from any other adopted by our movement in the past.

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Up to now the Trotskyist movement has practiced three types of entry. The first involved reformist or centrist parties which, under the impact of events, gave rise to a significant leftward-moving tendency. A Trotskyist grouping or party may temporarily give up its organizational independence to enter such a movement to promote the crystallization of a principled revolutionary tendency and augment its own forces in the process. The size of the party is not of decisive consideration in an entry of this kind, which is a temporary detour on the road to the construction of the revolutionary party. It serves the twofold purpose of gathering forces and if possible, disposing of a centrist rival in the arena of the class struggle. This was the sort of entry the Trotskyists carried through in the Socialist Party of the United States in 1936. The second type of entrism involves parties enjoying the allegiance of the working class in its entirety, like the British Labor Party. Trotskyists enter such a movement because within it is concentrated the political life and development of the decisive elements of the class. Basing themselves in their activity on the contradiction between the socialist aspirations of the working class and the capitalist-minded party bureaucracy, the Trotskyists articulate the fundamental interests of the ranks, give them leadership and programmatic expression, and collect the forces for the revolutionary party in subsequent stages of struggle for socialism. The third type of entrism has been developed since the Third World Congress. It essentially represents an extension of the second type to the Stalinist parties enjoying a considerable mass base in the capitalist countries, such as France or Italy, or fighting a civil war for power as in lndo-China. Here the Trotskyists base themselves upon the contradiction between the urge of the masses for the conquest of power and a fundamental social change and the policies of the CP bureaucracies subservient to the Kremlin, with the aim of directing the movement into revolutionary channels. Because of the monolithic character and bureaucratic regime of these parties which does not permit opposition tendencies to operate, this entrism encounters great difficulties and complications and must be of a special kind. This tactic remains in the experimental stage and must be carefully checked at every point to assess the results. The entrist proposal so lightly introduced into the resolution for the buffer zone countries is of an altogether different type. It involves entering a party that holds state power and is the direct and principal oppressor of the working masses. The fundamental antagonism within these countries, as in the Soviet Union, is between the organized and armed bureaucracy, ruling through the CP, and the unorganized and disarmed working class. To go into the CP is not to acquire closer contact with the best elements of the working class but to

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become identified with the bureaucracy in the eyes of the most militant workers. A party member is forced to become an instrument of oppression in the day-to-day friction between the bureaucratic regime and the working class. A revolutionary worker would seek to make contact with the discontented workers repelled by and from the CP in as prudent a manner as possible. The resolution does not proceed from the existing antagonisms between the workers and the Stalinist regime and the revolutionary impact the development of these antagonisms is bound to have, proposing organizational forms in preparation for that day. Instead it bases itself on the static concept that Stalinist workers will continue to remain in the c P while the Social Democrats will remain in the Social Democracy. Or on the conservative concept that the youth will flock into the sole party they see at hand. The revolutionary wave which, according to the resolution, is spreading from country to country and continent to continent will evidently engulf everything except the traditional parties. It will engulf Stalinism, but leave the c Ps intact. There is something wrong here. One effect of powerful revolutionary uprisings is to break the ties of the workers to their traditional organizations, disrupt the old parties, and lift up from obscurity the most revolutionary elements. The East German uprising did not reinforce the s ED or bring workers closer to it. It dug an unbridgeable gulf between the rebellious advanced workers and the SED. It prepared the conditions for creating a new leadership and bringing forth a new party which alone could guarantee the victory in the succeeding stages. It is wrong to prescribe a blanket policy of entry in general. An entrist proposal for any country has to be justified by a concrete analysis and appraisal of the specific combination of circumstances in the given country (the party to be entered, its relation to the working class, the Trotskyist forces available, the real possibilities, etc.) The resolution, however, motivates its general prescription for entry by the conciliationist concept that the leadership of the workers' insurgence in the buffer zone countries will necessarily come out of the CPS. This notion that the parties of the ruling bureaucracy will produce the leadership to overthrow the regime directs the workers away from reliance on their own forces and the formation of their own instruments of struggle. Since entry is a tactical, not a principled question, a Trotskyist group might enter a given c Pin the buffer zone to take advantage of a serious crisis within it. But its decision would be predicated on the specific favorable conjuncture for such intervention, and not on illusory general characteristics of these parties. An entrist tactic may be dictated in regard to the Yugoslav and Chinese CPS, which led revolutions. To this day the leaderships have to lean to some

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extent upon the masses and appeal to their self-action to undertake some of the uncompleted tasks of the revolution. The bureaucratic stratum is not yet petrified and is not regarded by the workers as an instrument of foreign domination. They still believe the c P s can be the vehicle for their revolutionary aspirations. It should be noted that the Third Congress Manifesto explicitly calls for the formation of new parties in the USSR and the 'Peoples' Democracies'. 'At the same time the Fourth International resolutely supports all proletarian movements of opposition to the police dictatorship of the Soviet bureaucracy and fights for the constitution of new Bolshevik-Leninist parties in these countries, parties which will take the leadership of the necessary political revolution for freeing socialist development from its bureaucratic shell'. There is no such call in the present resolution. A shift in position has been introduced without explanation.

v

How the Line Is Being Applied

The recent writings by Pablo and Clarke on the East German uprising and the events in the Soviet Union since Stalin's death show how the line of the resolution is being applied, how it distorts the real situation, disarms the FI and would disorient its ranks.

Pablo and Clarke on the East German Uprising a As the first proletarian revolt directed at the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy and its agents, the East German uprising possesses immense significance for the entire world working class, and especially for its Trotskyist vanguard which alone heralded and worked for this line of action. What does the declaration issued by the IS during this gigantic mass movement do and propose? Instead of exposing and denouncing the Kremlin and East German Sta1. linist leaders as mortal foes of the workers and heads of the counterrevolution, the 1s statement plays up their concessions and assures that these will continue. 'They have been obliged to continue along the road of still more ample and genuine concessions to avoid risking alienating themselves forever from support by the masses and from provoking still stronger explosions. From now on they will not be able to stop halfway ... They will be obliged to dole out more concessions ... '. This is tantamount to telling the workers that they can expect ever-greater concessions from their oppressors, not that these will be limited to the minimum and withdrawn unless the workers exert their full powers of resistance and follow through to the end.

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Instead of warning that the Stalinist apparatus will inflict repressions and stop at nothing to defend their dictatorship, the IS statement promises a general and growing attitude of appeasement of the masses by the Stalinists. 3. There is no clear call for the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy through the organization, strengthening and consummation of the uprising. 4. Instead of a program specifically adapted to the conditions and needs of the East German workers, a general program for the political revolution in the Soviet Union and all the 'Peoples' Democracies' is put forward. 5. This program raises the slogan for 'real democratization of the Communist Parties' as though these organs of the police regime could and should be transformed into vehicles for the revolutionary actions and aspirations of the masses. At the very time they are breaking in action with this party, the Stalinist workers are directed to seek its reform. 6. By implication, since this program is presented as applying to the Soviet Union as well, the slogan to democratize the Communist party would be on the order of the day for the CP USSR too. This would be a direct break with the established position calling for the formation of a Trotskyist Party in the Soviet Union. 7. On the other hand, while there is a demand for the legalization of other working class parties, there is none for the formation of a new revolutionary party around the Trotskyist program. 8. There is no call for the withdrawal of the Soviet occupying troops which shot down workers and served as the ultimate prop of the shattered regime. g. Although demonstrators themselves put forward the demand, there is no slogan for the reunification of Germany on a Socialist basis. The need for unity is concentrated instead upon the solidarity of the Soviet Union and the 'Peoples' Democracies' as a bloc. The resolution concludes with acclamation for 'the socialist rebirth of the Soviet Union, the "Peoples' Democracies" and the international working class movement'. Wouldn't the German workers also care to hear acclamation for the socialist reunification of their own divided country? 1 o. While the Stalinists slander the workers as 'fascist hirelings', the statement cavalierly observes: 'The Soviet leaders and those of the various "Peoples' Democracies" and the CP could no longer falsify or ignore the profound meaning of these events'. Where is the revolutionary spirit of irreconcilable combat to topple a powerful and perfidious enemy in such a line? It is not designed to focus the attention 2.

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of the masses upon the need for a new revolutionary leadership. At the very time when the workers are in revolt, it is permeated with a conciliatory attitude toward the bureaucracy. Clarke's article on the East German events in the March-April magazine displays equally conciliatory features. He plays down the counter-revolutionary intervention of the Kremlin as well as of its puppet regime. He takes careful note of the moderate conduct of the occupying forces but fails to point out their counter-revolutionary function in rescuing the regime and blocking the workers bid for power. He does not bring forward the inescapable necessity for the mass uprising to get rid of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Nor does he assert the need of a revolutionary party in order to lead such a mass uprising to victory. Much is made of the split in the bureaucracy, although no definite conclusions are drawn from this development. It is clear that the SEO bureaucracy became panic stricken and differences set in on how best to handle the situation and that the movement found sympathy and support among certain elements in its lower ranks. This happens in every revolutionary uprising and it would be wrong to deny or ignore such developments. But the question is: what place and significance do they have in the process of the revolution? They are not and cannot be the decisive factor or the central line of the struggle. The rs preoccupation with these subordinate aspects of the struggle tends to shift the axis of revolutionary strategy from the mobilization of the workers as an independent class force relying on their own strength and organs toward reliance for leadership from elements within the bureaucracy. The excessive attention given to the differentiations and splits within the bureaucracy, the embellishment of their concessions, the failure to stress their repressive and counter-revolutionary role, can be explained only by illusions that, under pressure from below, a section of the Stalinist leadership will head the movement for the liquidation of Stalinism, at least in its earlier stages. There is a sharp break with the traditional Trotskyist concept of the decisive role of the independent mass movement under its own revolutionary leadership. b Pablo and Clarke on the Post-Stalin Developments Pablo's article on 'The Post-Stalin's New Course' in the March-April magazine proceeds along similar lines. He grossly exaggerates the scope and significance of the Malenkov concessions. He says that in addition to measures effecting an improvement of working conditions there has likewise been an extension of 'the democratic rights of the masses', with less labor discipline and speed-up for the workers under the dictatorship.

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He does not prescribe any limits to the concessions. On the contrary, the bureaucracy will have to quicken and extend them. 'In reality events will oblige them, as is being demonstrated in Eastern Germany, and partly in Czechoslovakia, to quicken and extend the concessions to keep the impatient masses in the other buffer zone countries and in the USSR itself, from taking the road of action'. This is leading to the liquidation of the entire Stalinist heritage. 'The dynamic of their concessions is in reality liquidatory of the entire Stalinist heritage in the USSR itself, as well as in its relations with the satellite countries, with China and the Communist Parties. It will no longer be easy to tum back ... once the concessions are broadened, the march toward a real liquidation of the Stalinist regime threatens to become irresistible'. He thereupon raises the question: 'what form will it (the march toward a real liquidation of the Stalinist regime) then take?' 'Will it be that of an acute crisis and of violent inter-bureaucratic struggles between the elements who will fight for the status quo, if not for turning back, and the more and more numerous elements drawn by the powerful pressure of the masses?' Pablo does not answer the question but the very posing of the question in this tendentious manner implies the answer. In his article in the January-February magazine Clarke introduces other variants. He writes: 'Will the process take the form of a violent upheaval against bureaucratic rule in the USSR? Or will concessions to the masses and sharing of power - as was the long course in the English bourgeois revolution in the political relationship between the rising bourgeoisie and the declining nobility - gradually undermine the base of the bureaucracy? Or will the evolution be a combination of both forms? That we cannot now foresee'. The inherent and unavoidable need for the mass uprising against the Kremlin bureaucracy, he offers simply as one of several variants of development of a 'political revolution'. That is not all. He then counterposes the diametrically opposite variant of the progressive reform of the bureaucracy. These are two mutually exclusive variants of 'political revolution'. The one insists upon the political expropriation of the bureaucratic rulers by the Soviet masses; the other, as Clarke tells us, envisages the 'sharing of power'. The idea advanced by Clarke that the Kremlin bureaucracy is capable of 'sharing power' with the Soviet people challenges both the program of political revolution for the Soviet Union as well as the Trotskyist concept of the nature and role of this parasitic caste. This idea runs counter to reality. The bureaucracy needs its totalitarian apparatus of terror and repressions precisely because it cannot share the power required to maintain its privileges, income and unbridled rule. Its police regime acts to oppress the masses, keep

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them politically expropriated, and deprive them of the slightest chance or intervening in political life. It leaves the masses no alternative but to take the road pointed out by the Transition Program. Clarke does not say by what ways and means the Kremlin despots will 'share power' with the masses. Through what existing governmental and party institutions can the bureaucrats share power? Through the completely bureaucratized party? Through the secret police or the Army? The masses will gain a say in the country again only through the revival of their own mass organizations which will signalize, not the 'sharing of power' with the Kremlin gang, but the inception of the political uprising against it. Pablo and Clarke see in both the German uprising and the post-Stalin developments the emergence of a deepening conflict between the stand-patters and a leftward-moving wing within the bureaucracy which tends to tear it apart into contending factions. In the showdown the reform elements appeal to and lean upon the masses; the masses in tum, it is implied, should back them up and look to them for leadership. This is presumably the beginning of the path to socialist regeneration, which is already discernible in 'the New Course'. This shifts the axis of the development of the political revolution away from the self-action of the masses and focuses it upon the rifts inside the bureaucracy. Thereby the Trotskyist concept that the extension of the world revolution will inspire the Russian workers to rise up on their own account and overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy gives way to a different concept. The changed international and internal situation coupled with mounting pressure from the masses, unlooses forces within the bureaucracy itself which work toward the liquidation of Stalinism. The transformations emanate from on top as an outcome of the mass pressures from below. The working class is transformed into a pressure group, and the Trotskyists into a pressure grouping along with it which pushes a section of the bureaucracy leftward toward the revolution. In this way, the bureaucracy is transformed from a block and a betrayer of the revolution into an auxiliary motor force of it. What Must Such Conclusions Point to? Such sweeping conclusions on the changing characteristics of the Kremlin dictatorship and the dissolution of world Stalinism have a logic which is bound to assert itself. If the objective processes are marching along so fast and so far, then an equivalent reorientation must be effected by the revolutionary vanguard if it is to be on top of the unfolding events. A general tum would have to be made toward the Communist parties and into the Communist parties to c

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help along the disintegration already proceeding at an accelerated rate and take full advantage of the transformation and impending breakup of Stalinism. The conclusion of Pablo's article on 'The Post-Stalin New Course' envisages such a perspective for the immediate future. Pablo writes: 'What is now clear is that the decline of Stalinism in the form of the iron grip of the Soviet bureaucracy over the Soviet masses, the buffer zone countries, the Communist parties, is henceforth speeded up, and that the renovation of socialist democracy in all these countries, as in China, as well as the renaissance of the international workers' movement is now on the order of the day'. How is this to be accomplished? 'In the years visible ahead, the junction of the ideas and forces of the Fourth International with the revolutionary elements until now organized or influenced by Stalinism will realize in part this first stage of this renovation'. Isn't this a signpost toward a general entry into the Stalinist movement? The recent writings by Pablo and Clarke go beyond the stated positions of the resolution on 'The Rise and Decline of Stalinism'. But the point to be emphasized is that the resolution contains, or at least indicates, the political premises for their more extreme conclusions. These premises are not clearly and fully expressed in all respects. But they are there. Tendencies conciliatory toward Stalinism have begun to emerge in several Trotskyist organizations. These have recently culminated in splits in the United States and Ceylon. A resolution on Stalinism must take cognizance of this dangerous development and guard against any ambiguities from which it can draw sustenance. For example, the question of the political revolution against the Kremlin bureaucracy is now in dispute. How does the resolution treat this problem? In citing the Transitional Program for the political revolution in the Soviet Union, the resolution stops short of the following: 'Only the victorious revolutionary uprising of the oppressed masses can revive the Soviet regime and guarantee its further development toward socialism. There is but one party capable of leading the Soviet masses to insurrection - the party of the Fourth International!' These categorical statements leave no room whatsoever for different interpretations of what is meant. However, they are replaced in the text of the resolution by two vaguer propositions that: 'The conditions are being createdfor the

reconstitution and the upsurge ofthe Bolshevik-Leninist party in the Soviet Union' and later on: 'The task of smashing the dictatorship and the privileges of the bureaucracy, the task of a new political revolution in the Soviet Union remains more burning than ever'. This may well have gone unnoticed and uncriticized if an attempt had not already been made by Clarke to substitute new concepts of the political revolu-

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tion for the established positions. The ambiguities in the resolution lend themselves to such revisions whereas the clear and unmistakable terms of the Transitional Program preclude them. Complete clarity and precision on all these questions are indispensable to arm the movement for effective revolutionary intervention in the mounting crisis of world Stalinism.

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15

The 25th Anniversary Plenum of the SWP (Abridged, 1954)

James P. Cannon

Our 25th Anniversary Plenum (November 7-8, 1953) reviewed the developments of the internal situation since the May Plenum and based its decisions upon them.43 The May Plenum had followed five months of discussion on a national plane. It was quite an extensive discussion, as you know; more Internal Bulletins were published than even in the great fight with the Petty Bourgeois Opposition in 1939-40. This discussion had already shown quite clearly, we thought, the revisionist positions of the Cochranite minority on the most basic questions of the American movement - on the perspectives of this country, of the labor movement, and of the party. The minority had shown a revisionist position on the crucial question of the role of the party; a tendency to transform our organization, which from the very beginning had striven to become a revolutionary action party of the masses, into a propaganda group of critics, renouncing all aspiration to be the future party of the working class. The discussion had already shown at that time, that although the careful formulations of the minority could not then be justly called pro-Stalinist or Stalinist conciliationist, the leaders of this faction had nevertheless recklessly encouraged a sentiment of Stalinist conciliationism in the ranks, and did nothing to restrain it or oppose it. They permitted people of their caucus to state openly in branch debates, their conviction that the Stalinists 'could no longer betray'. In one of my letters published in the Internal Bulletin, I stated that this sentiment of Stalinist conciliationism had been most glaringly illustrated in Seattle. That was before the May Plenum, and before the Seattle development oflater months, when four members of the branch passed over from the minority faction to the camp of Stalinism.

43

Cannon 1954.

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Finally, before the May Plenum, the minority had shown a revisionist position on the organizational principles upon which we have built our party. The minority faction attempted to set up a 'dual power' in the leadership, exercising veto power over the majority and denying the right of the majority to do anything without their consent and approval. That's what the discussion had shown politically at the time of the May Plenum. At that time we also had a clear indication of the relation of forces in the party. It was demonstrated, both at the Plenum and in the reports from the branches, that the minority was a quite small minority- it could make no pretension that it was a leadership enjoying the support of the majority of the party. That's the way things stood - both as to the development of political positions and as to the relation of forces in the party at the time of the May Plenum....

Why We Saw No Need of Split

We were of the opinion at that time that the positions of the minority were not fully developed. They had started on a certain course but it remained to be seen whether they would draw back, or develop their positions to their logical conclusions. We wanted to give them time to do the one or the other; and we wanted to give the party an opportunity to see more clearly what the line of development would be. For that reason we saw no need of split at the time of the May Plenum. Despite all the talk of the minority about the majority desiring a split, our position at the May Plenum showed the contrary. We had not advocated a split and had no intention of taking the initiative to bring it about. We wanted to test things out in the course of further discussion and experience in the party activity. While the minority was half disposed for a split, or half expected that they were going to be thrown out of the party, we took no such position. On the contrary, on the basis of our political position and our organizational strength, as demonstrated at the Plenum and the reports from the branches, we made our truce proposal. That proposal, which we offered to them and which they finally accepted, was nothing new, as I've explained here before. It was exactly the same proposal we made to the Musteite minority in the 1936 Convention after we had settled the fight in the party ranks over the question of entry into the SP. (This proposal - accepted by the Musteites at the time - secured the unity of our organization during the entire period of our work in the Socialist Party.)

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Our truce resolution at the May Plenum was almost identical with the proposal we offered to the Burnham-Shachtman minority at the 1940 Convention that is, that they remain in the party and retain all normal rights; they could have a limited discussion after the Convention in the magazine; they could have representation on the leading bodies, according to their strength - on the condition that they accept the decisions of the Convention and remain loyal. The resolution adopted at the Plenum in May was even broader than that, because it placed no restrictions on further discussion. The Internal Bulletin would be open, and they could write anything they pleased. We have a peculiar bureaucracy in the party - I don't know whether anyone ever encountered such a bureaucracy in any other movement - which does not suppress discussion, but on the contrary extends it and insists upon it, so that everything will become clear in the minds of the party members before the final decision is taken.

Was It Correct? Was the Plenum Resolution, which embodied these proposals, correct? It can be answered in two ways. I would say, the Plenum Resolution was absolutely correct and would have secured peace in the party, as I predicted in my concluding speech, under certain conditions which could not be judged in advance. I might say, in parentheses, that the prediction I made at the Plenum was also intended as a suggestion to the minority. I predicted that they would work loyally; that they would conduct a friendly struggle of rivalry to show that they were better party builders than we were; and that we would have a free, calm and objective discussion. It was not merely a prophecy; it was also a suggestion to the minority as to what the best course would be. The resolution would have worked out on the following conditions, as we see it now in retrospect: First, that the issues in dispute between the majority and the minority were only national issues, and that the factions were only national factions. We had discussed, up till then, only on a national plane. We, for our part, had not raised any international questions. We tried, for five months, to confine the discussion to the problems of the American SWP, which are fairly important in themselves and well worth a discussion. The second condition for the resolution to work out successfully was that the minority was, as we urged them to be, and predicted that they would be, a loyal minority. That is, that they would be content with their democratic rights of discussion and their representation in the leading bodies, and that they would

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do their share of the party work and conduct themselves in general as a loyal minority. I believe it was correct for us to assume that that would be the case and to give the minority the benefit of the doubt. We never considered ourselves merely as the leaders of a faction. As leaders of the party, it was certainly correct to give the minority the benefit of every doubt and every opportunity to conduct themselves in a loyal manner, to develop their positions fully and freely in a democratic discussion, and to let the members finally decide. I don't know where or when or how a minority of any party could be offered a better proposition than that which the resolution of the Plenum gave them: the right to continue the discussion in the Internal Bulletin and in the branches; the right to representation approximately according to their strength; no harsh characterizations of their position, which we had written into our original draft resolutions and later deliberately took out, in order not to exacerbate the situation. Everything that a minority could legitimately ask was provided for in the Plenum Resolution. If we should be a minority in some other party or organization at any time, or in our own party; if we should sit down to compile a list of demands of what a loyal minority wants - we couldn't include more than we gave freely to the minority at the May Plenum.

Why the Truce Didn't Work Out But still the truce didn't work out. Both assumptions, upon which the resolution of the Plenum was based, proved in further development, to be false. The minority, as we know now, and as it was clearly revealed in the period from May to November, was not simply a national faction. It was the emanation of an International revisionist tendency, which we know now, as we didn't know then, has been organized in a secret international faction for a long time. The minority had been a part of that secret international revisionist faction from the very beginning. We began to suspect this toward the end of the discussion before the May Plenum. But we didn't know it; and we did not act, as one should not act, merely on suspicion. We noted the extraordinary assurance of the minority, their repeated insistence that they were Pabloites, and that they represented the real thought of Pablo. In the beginning we thought this was absurd. We saw absolutely no justification in the documents of the Third Congress for the revisionist policy they developed in this country. But the more their claims were repeated, the more we heard about it, the more we began to have premonitions that there might be something to it.

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A couple of weeks before the Plenum we received a statement from Comrade Stone in New York, who had belonged to the minority caucus, and had changed his position and joined the majority. He gave us a statement that one of the main themes of discussion in the minority caucus, upon which the caucus had been recruited and held together, was the assertion that Clarke was the real agent and representative of Pablo. He wrote this statement for us and signed it. I sent a letter to Pablo under the date of May 22, a week before the Plenum, in which I quoted this statement of Comrade Stone, a statement that the minority in our party, fighting to overthrow the leadership, was claiming to represent him. At the Plenum I took the floor after Clarke had spoken and asked him a number of questions: whether he had received any instructions in Paris to begin a factional struggle against the majority of our party; whether he had been told that if he organized a faction against the leadership he would receive the support of the International Secretariat. I asked him a half a dozen questions on this theme from various angles. And what do you think Clarke answered? He stood on his Constitutional Rights and said, 'I decline to answer'. I didn't press him. I said, 'That's your privilege'. But we took his evasiveness into account; that, confronted with this frank interrogation as to whether he was acting independently or whether he was an agent of an international faction, he declined to answer. At this same Plenum, Clarke in the course of his speech, admitted that a series of amendments which our National Committee had sent to him prior to the Third World Congress, never reached their intended destination. He said he did not bring them to the attention of the Congress, but on the contrary, had burned them. That was admitted by Clarke at the Plenum. Right after the Plenum, on June 4, I wrote a letter to Comrade Tom in England, which has been widely commented on. In the course of this letter I told him our conviction in putting all things together, that the SWP had been the guinea pig for some experiments in duplicity and intrigue; that the minority faction in our party was receiving clandestine support, and that we didn't like that. In that letter I referred to the 'answer' of Pablo to my letter of May 22, which we received a day after the Plenum. The answer evaded the question raised by the statement of Comrade Stone. That put the finishing touch on the mysterious business; it transformed our suspicions about the role of Pablo in our American faction fight into a conviction. My letter was a wide open invitation to Pablo to openly repudiate the claims of the minority or anybody else to represent him in a factional way. Instead of that he hummed and hawed and evaded the question. That convinced us that he was in reality acting in collusion with this faction all the time. This was fur-

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ther confirmed by his admission in this letter, that he had been corresponding with the minority faction behind the backs of the official leadership for a long time before.

The Experience in England

Then, after the Plenum, the majority of the National Committee began to feel that it was accumulating overwhelming proof that our revisionist minority in the SWP, which we had tried to debate on national grounds, and prevent it spreading into the International, was in reality the American extension of an international revisionist faction. The Pabloite operations in England gave a striking demonstration of that. The British movement has scored magnificent successes in recent years, after a long, hard faction struggle to separate the Trotskyists from the charlatans and adventurers of the Haston gang. When Bums, the foremost builder and leader, took an outspoken position in sympathy with the majority in our party, Pablo responded by organizing a faction against him in England. That's not all. He promised Bums, if he would withdraw his support for the majority in our party, that he would let him alone. At the same time he threatened Bums, that if he supported the majority in the SWP, they would make trouble for him in his own party. This crooked and cynical procedure, right out of the Comintem book, finally culminated in an ultimatum which Pablo sent to Bums in England, demanding that he act in the British Party, before his own National Committee, as a disciplined member of the IS in Paris; that his criticism of the draft resolution prepared for the Fourth Congress should not be made known to the members of his own National Committee, to say nothing of the members of his party; that he remain under discipline of the IS and present only the IS position. Well that, of course, caused us to explode, because that's precisely the device the Stalinists used to corrupt the Communist International. To impose committee discipline on members before their own rank and file; to take a majority vote in a committee and then bind all the members to it - not, as is quite correct, against the outside world, but in discussion with one's own members - that absolutely deprives the rank and file of the party of any real information and discussion. The leaders are more informed on the questions in dispute; they discuss them in committee; and if a minority in a committee is bound by committee discipline during a discussion, that means the absolute stifling of any real democracy. We told Bums our opinion about that; that we, for our part, would throw any such instructions into the wastebasket.

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All these things, taken together one after another, convinced every single member of our national leadership in New York, and the Plenum members throughout the country, that the minority in our party had been secretly inspired by Pablo from the beginning. We had been fighting in the dark up to the time of the May Plenum. It was only between May and November that we got the real score.

'Junk the Old Trotskyism' The picture became clearer to us as a result of the disloyal course of the minority after the May Plenum, a course which could not be otherwise explained. We couldn't understand why the minority so soon, within two weeks after the Plenum, had immediately resumed the most violent factional attitude. In Clarke's speech on the Plenum at the New York membership meeting - I think you heard it on the tape recording - he brought forward the slogan: 'Junk the Old Trotskyism'. That was a much bolder assertion than we had ever heard before. All the 'old Trotskyists' began lifting up their ears when they heard that, because they don't want to 'junk' any part of Trotskyism. Then we heard about the Plenum reports at the Detroit and Cleveland meetings. There the minority, instead of reporting in the spirit of the Plenum Resolution, as Myra did here in Los Angeles, made completely factional reports, as if nothing had happened and no resolution had been signed. The same thing took place in San Francisco. The San Francisco minority got the word from New York and erupted in a factional manner very shortly after the Plenum. Then factionalism began rolling like a snowball. The Plenum Resolution, signed by both sides, provided explicitly that majority rule, whichever side had the majority locally, should prevail in the branches in relation to local administration, and that on the other hand the minority must be guaranteed its democratic rights. In New York we had the majority, and our comrades proposed to have a calm convention where that majority would be formally registered and a new executive committee elected accordingly. The minority objected violently to this simple, normal and necessary execution of the Plenum Resolution. It was a sin and a shame, they said, for the majority to 'dump Bartell' - as if Bartell was organizer of the New York Local by divine right. That isn't our opinion. Our opinion is that the organizer of a Local holds office by virtue of the wishes of the majority of his local organization. If they want to change organizers or change executive committees that's no offense at all; that's merely the exercise of their democratic rights, which was specifically re-iterated in

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the Plenum resolution - that the right of majority rule in branches and locals should be respected.

'The Sin against the Holy Cow'

Then, at the City Convention in New York, they sprang their big 'sensation'. The method of 'stampeding' a meeting of party comrades by 'sensations' the method of 'exposing' something they have never heard about, and have no means of verifying at the moment; the tendentious quotation from letters and documents they have never read and have had no chance to study in their entirety - that is the method of demagogues; and Lenin said, 'a demagogue is the worst enemy of the working class'. It seems that Pablo, in addition to, or rather as a part of his general Stalinist methods of organization - when I say Stalinist, I don't mean that as a factional exaggeration; I mean pure and simple Stalinist organization methods, without any trimmings or reservations; that's what they are - it seems that in addition to that, as a part of all that, he has a sort of stool pigeon and spy service to intercept private letters and purloin documents circulated privately among the leaders of the majority faction. One of Pablo's spies and letter thieves, in pursuit of his grimy assignment, picked up my caucus speech on 'Internationalism and the SWP' and my letter to Tom in England. This notorious 'Tom', by the way, whom the Pabloites have tried to cast out as a pariah, happens to be one of my best friends, a comrade whom I esteem very highly, in whom I have complete confidence. He is one of the oldest Trotskyists, one who has done more than any of us to help the international movement during and after the war. Bartell, the great sensation-monger, 'exposed' my letter to Tom at the New York Local Convention last August, as though a great crime had been committed. He offered the letter as definitive proof that this Cannon, who is not satisfied with his long record of criminal activity, has committed now the unmentionable crime - the sin against the Holy Ghost. And what do you think that was? I criticized Pablo. I took the name of the Holy Cow in vain. I said, openly, in a letter and in a speech, that I didn't consider Pablo my Pope; that a sentence from him does not settle any question for me. That was the crime. The significant thing about the big exposure that Bartell waved before the New York City Convention was not the merit of my particular criticism that could be debated - but that I had criticized. And everybody began to wonder: What kind of eerie world have we wandered into? It's as though we have a cult

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and a Messiah here, and the question is not whether the criticism is just or unjust but the fact of the criticism itself. They expected to stampede the whole party organization around the slogan of defending Pablo's untouchability. Of course, they got a big surprise there. Instead of stampeding the party, they simply aroused the anger of the party members in New York, who don't want to be put in the category of cult followers of anybody. Moreover, when they got a chance to read the whole text they didn't see anything wrong in the criticisms I had made nor in the fact that I had made them.

'Our Faction Comes First'

Coincident with this development of a Pablo cultist attitude in the party, you heard repeated reports that the minority began an almost total abstention from party activity, and that they were defaulting in a body on their financial pledges .... The Cochranites did something that I personally had never seen in the movement before; never, that is, a minority faction going on a sit-down strike against the party. In my time I've seen all kinds of factions and faction fights, but I never saw a minority undertake to sabotage party work; and not only that, party finances too. Their participation in the activities of the New York Local dwindled down to 'token' participation. Right after the Plenum they had made pledges to our Party-Building Fund, similar to the pledges they had made in the past. This showed that at the moment they had accepted the truce and were going along as a loyal minority. They never paid their pledges. When they were called to account for that, they answered brazenly: 'Our faction comes first'. In the New York Bureau of the Executive Committee, the great Bartell was taxed with the conduct of the minority: 'Your people are not paying their pledges and that looks like factional sabotage. Can't you do something about it?' He answered: 'We don't tell them not to pay their pledges to the party. All we tell them is that their pledges to the faction come first'. That's the kind of cynical answers that were given. In the branch meetings when it came to finances and the role was called, each member would come forward with his payment on his pledge - according to the established custom. The minority members would come up with 'token' payments. If they were due to give ten dollars they would give fifty cents or something like that, to add insult to injury. And if they were asked, 'What does this mean?' they would say, 'We have to support our faction'.

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... Every minority that has any sense knows that if you sabotage party work and party funds you only antagonize the loyal party members and destroy all chance to get a hearing from them. The Pabloite minority didn't seem to care about that. They acted for months as people who were already outside our ranks.

A 'Cold Split' The comrades kept writing to me from New York, as they wrote to the other NC members in the field, and they called it a 'cold split'. Even Breitman, who is the most restrained and moderate of all our people, referred to it in a personal letter as 'a de facto semi-split'. And I, out here in the halcyon land of the Sundown Sea, with the smug objectivity of one who is not involved in the immediate faction fight, kept counseling the leaders in New York to be patient: 'Don't crowd them too hard; give them a chance to straighten out', and so on. But they didn't straighten out at all. They went from bad to worse in that respect, until the party members throughout the country began to ask the national leadership: 'How long is this to go on? How long must we not only do all the party work and contribute all the funds, but then have to come to the branch meeting and have it thrown in our faces that they are supporting their faction before they support the party?' We puzzled over the reasons for such unprecedented conduct. What had caused this sharp tum of the minority, from the stand they took on the last day of the Plenum when they signed the truce resolution? It was not any provocation from the majority, because we had no interest whatever in stimulating a factional atmosphere. Then we heard of the same kind of disloyal conduct by the Pablo faction in England. Finally, everybody had to conclude that there was only one explanation. It was absolutely clear that this was part of the international policy - the international policy of disrupting and breaking up the old Trotskyist cadres, the old Trotskyist parties, and getting them out of the road ....

The Test of Events But since the Plenum the proof of the revisionist line was revealed by events and their reaction to them. These events, which crowded one on top of another, obliged people to take positions and show what they meant by the resolutions. The first jolt came from an article by Clarke on the developments in the Soviet Union since the death of Stalin. This was published in Fourth International

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magazine soon after the May Plenum. The article envisaged a possible selfreform of the Stalinist bureaucracy, and the gradual reestablishment of Soviet democracy without a revolutionary uprising of the masses led by a revolutionary party. This is directly contrary to the program of the Fourth International. This article, which raised great alarm here and throughout the world, because it appeared in such an authoritative magazine, was sneaked into print without the knowledge of the other two editors who were supposed to edit everything published in the magazine and control the policy. The real Pabloites combine treacherous policy with a certain treacherous method of working. The other two editors, and all the rest of the party leaders, found out about the article only after it appeared in print in the magazine. You should recall that when you hear accusations that we started the controversy in public. Fourth International magazine, which is sold on the newsstands, is as 'public as the Post Office'. Next came the attempt to cover up the counter-revolutionary course of the Stalinists in East Germany. Then the whitewash of the Stalinist betrayal in the French General Strike. All this is documented in our 'Letter to All Trotskyists' issued by our 25th Anniversary Plenum. It was on the basis of these three concrete events and the line taken by them, that our National Committee made up its mind definitively about the real policy of the Pablo faction. We didn't try to read something into a resolution which might not possibly be there. We didn't interpret doubtful, paragraphs out of proportion. We judged the Pabloites by the way they conducted themselves in action; on the events in Russia, in East Germany, and in France. And on that basis we say the Pabloites revealed an anti-Trotskyist position in the most important questions of external politics.

Cadre-Wrecking Expedition Parallel with that, we saw them speeding up their internal program of disrupting the Trotskyist cadre formations in the different countries one by one. That may seem like an utterly fantastic accusation to make; that people in the central leadership of the International would set out deliberately to break up the historically created cadres who are the living carriers of the doctrine, our sole link to the past and the sole forces capable of leading us into the future. But that's exactly the way it looks to us. It is now clear that the cadre-wrecking expedition of the Pablo faction began, not in our party, but more than two years ago in the French party. It appeared to us then, that the fight in France was merely a fight over tactics, as to what extent

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and how deeply the Trotskyists should penetrate into the workers movement controlled by the Stalinists, including the Stalinist party. Now, as you know, we have no sectarianism in our bones at all. We may be convicted of other faults but never of that. We are mass workers by instinct, experience and training, as well as by theory. We're in favor of getting into the mass movement no matter who leads it, or what country it is. It appeared to us, taking it merely as a tactical question, that the majority of the French party was a little hesitant in this respect, and we stated so in the letter I wrote to Comrade Renard. It is clear to us now, as it was clear to the French already then, that what was involved was far more than tactics. The majority of the French party was stubbornly resisting the liquidationist course, and for that reason there was a deliberate, sustained, factional campaign to break up that cadre. We became convinced of that later; especially after the French general strike, in which the expelled majority showed themselves to be revolutionists in action, and the Pabloite faction acted as apologists for the Stalinists. That's why we changed our position on the French question, and did it openly, unambiguously and straightforwardly. Tactical questions are important only after questions of principle are settled. We will not even discuss tactics with anybody until we first come to agreement on principles. In England, a real Trotskyist cadre was finally consolidated in a long internal struggle. After long stagnation of the movement there, a cadre organized by Bums finally broke out of the Haston jungle of unprincipled clique politics. They got into the Labor Party in England and began doing mass work on a scale never done by any Trotskyist party in the world, possibly outside of Ceylon. Great progress has been made there - England has been the pride of the Fourth International now, for years. We in America have never even approximated what the Trotskyists have been able to do in England in recent years; we never had so favorable an opportunity. They got into the mass movement just when the left swing was taking place, and found opportunities opening up on every side. They soon became an effective part of a big left-wing movement of semi-revolutionists and centrist elements turning to the left. Right in the midst of this tremendous work Pablo hurled a destructive faction against the leadership, for the crime of sympathizing with the American majority. All of a sudden, without previous notice or warning, Bums was confronted with a hostile faction. This faction, pronouncing themselves 100% Pabloites, demanded that Bums obey the 'Discipline of the 1s' in internal party discussion, and keep his mouth shut when the draft resolutions for the Fourth Congress were up for consideration.

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The majority of the National Committee in England told them: 'We don't like this business at all. We don't like the fact that you coming up here all of a sudden with a secret faction, have an accidental majority in the Editorial Board. We are going to reorganize that Board'. That's something, I think, they may have learned from the history of the SWP. The minute the Plenum of our National Committee finds that the Political Committee, or the Editorial Board or any other sub-committee is not reflecting its will - it simply reorganizes it. That's the invariable rule recorded in the history of our party. That's what we did at the October Plenum in 1939, at the beginning of the fight with the Petty Bourgeois Opposition. They had a majority in the Political Committee, but at the Plenum they were a minority. The Plenum said: 'That won't work very well, will it? If the majority in the Political Committee is against the majority in the Plenum, the conflict of authority has to be resolved one way or another. And since the Political Committee has no authority to reorganize the Plenum, then the Plenum has to reorganize the Political Committee. So some of you boys are out'. Oh, they hollered, 'Blue Murder! Bureaucracy!' But we said, 'No, that's democratic centralism. You'll have to get used to that. The majority has to rule. That's democracy isn't it? At least, that's the first principle of it'. The British majority seemed to have the same idea. So they reorganized the Editorial Board and made a few shifts to bring sub-committees into line with the NC majority. Then, what do you think happened there? A comrade, who had been dropped from the sub-committee, as we dropped several of the Burnhamite minority from our Political Committee in 1939, challenged the right of the elected majority of the National Committee to remove him. He said: 'I am going over to Paris and see what my position is'. And he wasn't laughing. So he goes to Paris, and comes back, and announces that he can't be removed, that the IS says he should stay. This monstrosity was justified on the ground that the Fourth International is a world party with international discipline, and IS discipline is higher than national discipline. This great principle of international organization is prostituted in the present faction fight to mean, in practice, that Pablo's factional agents have special rights in the national sections; that they can run wild and the National Committee can't discipline them. The National Committee, which is elected by a Conference and is responsible to the rank and file, is deprived of all power and might as well resign. And then came Pablo's ultimatum to Bums that he himself had to obey the higher discipline of the IS and that he defend the line of its majority 'until the Fourth Congress'. Simultaneously with that, within recent weeks, the Pabloite minority in the British section began to openly violate the discipline of their National Committee in the mass movement. Now, if there's one unpardonable

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crime, it's that. I surely don't have to explain that to a Trotskyist trade unionist. Open violation of discipline in the mass movement creates an absolutely impossible situation; it is the most disruptive thing imaginable. It can blow up all your mass work in a short time. That's precisely what the British Pabloites undertook to do, and this brought the struggle in the British section to a head very quickly. Confronted by open and provocative violations of discipline, the leadership had to decide: Either the National Committee must abdicate, or it can remain in office only as a puppet of a madman in Paris, and say, 'We have no rights'. Or, as a third alternate, it can throw the disrupters out of the organization for violation of discipline. That's what was done in England, and we heartily applaud the action of the British majority. The split, made unavoidable by these provocations, was consummated in England in about two weeks from the time of the first violation. A large majority of the party rose up in arms against the disruption in England, as they did in the United States, and supported the majority of the National Committee.

The Pabloite Formula You knew that for months the Cochranites were violating discipline: in the essence of the matter, that is, by neglecting to participate in party activity and by sabotaging party funds. They have not done this simply out of stupidity. It has been a deliberate program, carried out on the theory, assiduously cultivated by the Pablo faction, that international discipline is higher than national discipline. Now, formally, that's right - if the 1s is a really representative body, and there is some control over it, some way of checking it. But as the Pabloites employ it, it is the perfect formula to disrupt any section of the Fourth International before the discussion gets a good start. Under that formula, as the Pabloites invoke it, no matter how big a majority you have in the National Committee, elected by your membership, under observation of the membership, subject to control and recall by the membership, its authority is cancelled out immediately. The Pabloite cultists are under no obligation to obey the Political Committee, or the Plenum, in New York or London, because they have received a special license from Paris. They can do as they please. At least they thought they could. And they did- until they finally came to the high point of our 25-year struggle; not only the high point of this year's work, the point to which we were building for six months, but the 25th Anniversary of our struggle in this country, against all obstacles and difficulties.

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The celebration of our 25th Anniversary coincided in New York with the wind-up rally in our election campaign - the best we ever had. The Cochranites organized a boycott of this Anniversary Celebration and campaign meeting. They deliberately organized it. They put their supporters under discipline to boycott the meeting. They even tried to induce sympathizers to remain away. When that happened we said: 'This is a public demonstration against the party's 25-year struggle. In effect, if not in actual design, it is a demonstration of solidarity with the Stalinists who expelled us 25 years ago'. That's what we were celebrating, among other things. We were celebrating the action of the original nucleus of American Trotskyism which raised the banner in the Central Committee of the Communist Party and were expelled 25 years ago, almost to the day of the meeting. We took that boycott as a demonstration against the party, and a demonstration against our candidates in the election campaign. And we said: 'This is enough: These people are no longer comrades of ours. They are a gang of strikebreakers. By walking out and boycotting our 25th Anniversary celebration they have consummated a definitive split in our party!' That was the opinion all the National Committee members expressed as they assembled for the 25th Anniversary Plenum. We said that the task of the Plenum was simply to recognize the fact, and to act accordingly; to recognize that the internal debate was ended and that no more compromises are possible. You can compromise with people in a union in a discussion and debate as to whether to go out on strike or not. But you can't compromise with anybody who walks through the picket line after the strike has started. That's the way we felt about these people. Our whole attitude changed when they boycotted that meeting. We said: 'No more internal debates with these people. The rights of a minority in our party are very many and they are carefully guarded, and always have been. But nobody has the right to be disloyal, no matter who sponsors him'. That was the sentiment of the Plenum; and on that basis, as you know, it adopted a motion to suspend the NC members who organized the boycott. A constitutional provision gives the National Committee the right to suspend members of the National Committee, for cause, by a two-thirds vote. And that's what we did - we didn't expel them, we suspended them. They have the right of appeal under the party constitution. They, and others who solidarized with their strikebreaking action, have the right to ask for reinstatement. The Plenum attached only one condition: The boycott of our 25th Anniversary celebration must be disavowed. Anyone, anywhere, who objects to this condition brands himself thereby as an enemy of our party and has no right to remain in our party.

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One may ask: 'Why such a drastic sweeping action? ... Why not merely warn them?' The answer is: They were warned. We warned them at the May Plenum. And we gave them another chance, a wide-open chance, after the August Plenum. They were warned at every meeting in New York - 'You are not doing your party duty; you are sabotaging party funds; you know the party cannot tolerate that'. They paid no attention; the warnings were all disregarded.

Our Tradition

As a matter of fact, they were warned by the whole 25-year history of the party. All anyone would have needed to know what the Plenum was going to do about this boycott of our 25th Anniversary, would have been to read the party history. It is all written down in the precedents of the past. This is the most democratic and easy-going party in the world. It lets its members do any damned thing they please. It never invokes any rigorous formalistic discipline; never drives people too hard - at least I've never seen anybody driven too hard. But this same party, from the very beginning, never permitted anybody to challenge the party in a public action. No matter how big they were nor how big they thought they were. Never once .... The boycott, and this is the way you have to look at it - was not an individual dereliction; it was an organized public action. I believe the party should be patient and careful and go slow when an individual comrade gets out of line. We shouldn't be in a hurry to expel an individual the first time he stubs his toe or does some things he shouldn't do. We've never been in a hurry in that respect. But this boycott was not a case of individual indiscipline which could be handled in leisurely fashion by the Control Commission. This was an open insurrection against the party, an act of war. Debate ends when the shooting begins. The party had to shoot back; that is, if it wanted to survive. We considered this boycott a deliberate split, part of an international conspiracy, and it had to be met as such. If we had not acted at the Plenum, if we had let the boycott of our 25th Anniversary go by as a mere peccadillo, we would have condemned the party to months of chaos while the Cochranites prepared a formal split at their leisure, without paying any attention to any discipline whatever. If they could get away with a public boycott of such a meeting, the Cochranites would have concluded that they had a license for anything. They would have run wild, internally and externally, and there would have been no way to restrain them. The Political Committee would have been powerless. Between Plenums the Political Committee - under the Constitution - has no right to suspend NC

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members. The Constitution gives that right only to the National Committee as a whole. A mere censure and a warning, after all that had been done, would have been a betrayal of the responsibility of the Plenum, which would have been greatly resented by the party members.

The Party Showed Its Trotskyist Caliber

This fight, as I see it, has been a big test for the party; hemmed in as it is by all the spears of reaction, under all the pressures of the most powerful imperialism in the world. The SWP is the only revolutionary party in this country, and it has to meet the full weight of opposition from every comer. It is simply an objective statement of fact to say the party stood up under this test and showed its Trotskyist caliber. That's the basic fact, and we have to proceed from that. From that standpoint - at the moment of concluding the internal struggle and facing the revisionist splitters as a rival and enemy organization externally, and simultaneously opening a struggle forTrotskyism on the international field - I think it would be out of order to divert attention with a carping criticism of the leadership, or any section of it. The party ranks are in no mood to welcome such an attitude at the present moment. There will be plenty of time and opportunity to review everything later on. Right now we want complete solidarity in the fight to protect the Trotskyist heritage in this country and throughout the world. This fight is being led by our National Committee as a whole. It would be a disservice to the party to divert attention from that main fact, and seize the opportunity to pick a flaw here and there in the way things were done by one individual or another. The important thing to remember now is that the overwhelming majority of the leading cadre of the party saw the situation before it was too late. It doesn't matter if some were a little too fast or others were a little too slow.... Now as to how the split left the party. This split, like others we have gone through in the past, was thoroughly prepared and motivated. For that reason, like the other splits in the past, it caused no demoralization whatever, as far as I know. On the contrary the party is bounding forward with intensified activity and stronger confidence than ever in its great historic mission. I witnessed that personally in New York, at the first membership meeting after the Plenum. There was no moaning or whimpering, no disloyal complaints or carping criticisms; nothing but a confident, matter-of-fact discussion of plans and proposals to develop the party work. It was the same all over the country, according to reports. I didn't visit any other sections, but such were the reports received by the National Office in New

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York. The party members, who had gone through the long struggle with the Cochranites, all thought the time had come to bring things to a head. When they heard about the boycott they were sure it was time to call a halt, and they were fully ready for the Plenum decision. There was no opposition, no trace of complaint, from one end of the country to another, when the Plenum decision came out. On the contrary, there was immediate approval from the rank and file of the party. They had had enough of the 'cold split' and the 'sit-down strike'. The formal split in all the branches was carried through with precision, without the slightest hesitation, within one week after the Plenum. That wouldn't have been possible without thorough preparation, because our party members, like any other rank and file, are not anxious to have splits. Our hands are now free to help the orthodox Trotskyists in the other parties, in the struggle against revisionism on the international field. The National Committee is now turning its attention to this responsibility. The Open Letter of our 25th Anniversary Plenum - addressed to all Trotskyists throughout the world - presents our indictment of Pabloism for its pro-Stalinist policy, as revealed in action in great events since the May Plenum. The plenum's Letter also indicts the Stalinist organizational methods of Pabloism. This letter signifies a definitive break with Pabloism and there will be no turning back.

The Rebirth ofTrotskyism It may be charged against us that we were late in discerning the revisionist character of Pabloism. That is only partly true. We characterized and fought the American manifestations of revisionism from the very beginning. We were late, it must be admitted, in tracing the revisionist faction in our party to its fountainhead in Paris. We were late also, a quarter of a century ago, in getting a clear picture of Stalinist revisionism in the Comintern. We didn't catch up with the real meaning of Stalinism until 1928 - five years after the fight first broke out in the Russian Party. But even at that, we were earlier than some others. The fight of 1928, out of which our party was created, evolved in about the same way as the present one, from the national field to the international. And in my opinion, the Plenum's Letter has no less historic significance than our declaration against Stalinism on October 27, 1928. The reason for our delay in joining the international fight this time, as I have said before, was the deceptive, two-faced methods, the treacherous double talk, by which the Pablo cult, like all other revisionists in the past, concealed its real program. The Third Congress Resolutions - as written - gave no sanction for

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the policy actually carried out in recent months on events in the Soviet Union, East Germany and France. They gave no sanction to disrupt and split all the old cadres. In my opinion, the most that can be said against the Third Congress Resolutions is that they contain some ambiguous formulations which can be 'interpreted' in different ways. That was the trick. The ambiguous formulations were put in the resolutions on purpose. The Pabloites showed us what they meant by them in their policy on the Soviet Union, East Germany and France in the past six months, and by their attempts to split and break up the old Trotskyist cadres. It certainly must be admitted that we did not see what was really going on too soon. We were a bit late, as in 1928. But not too late. We are caught up now and we are going to stay caught up, as we did after 1928. It is our duty to help the international struggle because we have the strongest organization, the strongest cadres, which have had the most benefit of direct collaboration with Trotsky, and probably the most collective experience. The revisionists have turned out to be a small minority in every party where the fight has come to a showdown. We have reason to believe that it will be the same in the other sections, now that the fight is brought out into the open by the Open Letter of our 25th Anniversary Plenum. The aims of our Letter are quite simple and clear for all to see. It calls, not for a split but for the unity of all Trotskyists on the basis of their common programmatic principles. It proposes an honest, democratic discussion among Trotskyists- to prepare an honest, representative, democratic Congress ofTrotskyists. That will be accomplished. Morris Stein aptly characterized the open struggle against revisionism as the 'rebirth ofTrotskyism'. The international fight will not be the 'funeral' ofTrotskyism - as our wish-thinking enemies say- but its triumphant resurrection.

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739

Trotskyism vs. Pabloism: Correspondence (Abridged, 1953-54)

George Breitman and Ernest Germain (Ernest Mandel)

To Breitman44 November15, 1953 Dear George: Unfortunately your letter of August 22 reached me only yesterday, when I returned home from my journey to the East. Unfortunately so many sad and unbelievable developments have taken place in the meantime that it may look odd to answer now this letter of yours. I'll do it anyhow, be it only for friendship's sake. Nobody was happier than I and all of us in the Center about what happened at the one but last Plenum. We all were as enthusiastic as you were about the maturity shown by the majority leaders at that occasion. We hoped sincerely that a period of calm and positive discussion would set in. That's why we wrote our letter, meaning every single word of it (but it's quite difficult to convince of that people who start looking for 'duplicity' behind every move you do). That's why we were shocked in the rudest manner by reading comrade Cannon's letter to Tom, written 24 hours after the Plenum letter which convinced anybody who isn't a babe in the wood that not only was there going to be no truce but that the war was going to be introduced immediately from your party into the whole international movement (the word 'war' being no exaggeration because the very word 'military discipline' was used). I think this fact, as well as comrade Cannon's speech to the majority caucus before the Plenum on 'Internationalism' of which the minority got hold only after the agreement, turned the tables. I am not responsible in any way for the minority's attitude after the Plenum and neither is Gabe nor anybody else in

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Paris. I don't know what they did and if they really broke the truce. But if they did it the only real cause was Cannon's speech and Cannon's letter.... I had not much sympathy for the minority's point of view on questions of American policy; it is quite possible that some nervousness got into their leaders. But it seems to me clear as day that after the majority openly attacked the International's line, the minority had no interest whatsoever to leave the party, at the contrary! That is why I cannot accept the charges made, at least not to the extent they have been advanced. The minority had now finally succeeded, through no merit of their own, to get into the position ... to appear before the membership as the defenders of the International, in political association with the International, against a tendency, which was brutally and violently attacking and insulting the International's line, leadership and discipline. Under such conditions, the minority had every interest to stay in the party and to let a political discussion develop. Under such conditions, the majority had every interest to break any discussion prematurely by organizational means. The answer to the question: who is responsible for the split, is easy when we start from the old method of asking 'Cui prodest?' - 'In whose interest was it?' And this brings me to the crux of the matter: the unbelievably light-minded, irresponsible way in which the leaders of the majority, in which I have had for many years the utmost respect and confidence have started an international faction fight which, to all intents and purposes, can only result in a major split from the international movement. In comrade Cannon's speech before the majority caucus on Internationalism there was not one word expressed on matters of political differences. Even in comrade Cannon's letter to Tom, instructing him to build an international faction, the point was stressed that there were no political differences with the lnternational's line. Suddenly in August comrade Stein sprang on the movement his political thesis, obviously written in agreement with the other majority leaders, which I cannot interpret otherwise as deliberate and cynical attempt to find some political justification for an organizational 'struggle of power' launched upon the International leadership. Comrade Stein's document is written in such obvious bad faith, and overthrows so obviously established points of policy commonly accepted by the American comrades and ourselves not only since 1951 but since 1945 that it is hard for me to see how anyone can escape that conclusion. Is it necessary to enumerate once again for you the innumerable points which show that bad faith? Do you really believe that we are 'capitulating before Stalinism', we who have been busy building the Trotskyist movement, not without success, all over the world? More concretely: do you believe that I, who have predicted perhaps alone in the whole world what would happen in

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Russia and the rest of the Stalinist sphere of influence this year 12 months ago, have 'capitulated before Stalinism'? I am the author of the first draft of 'Rise and Decline'. How can you hope to convince anybody in the movement with such incredible slander as that saying that this draft proposes to do away with our orientation toward political revolution in the USSR and puts instead the perspective of 'self-regeneration' of the bureaucracy, when in the most explicit way the opposite is stated in the document? When we explicitly warn the movement against any illusion as to the possibility of regenerating the Soviet Union in a 'reformist' manner? When over and over again we identify socialist regeneration and political revolution? When we try to awaken the movement to the huge possibilities opened up by the new objective situation in the USSR for a reappearance of our movement and the beginning of the mass struggle against the bureaucracy? Who is rendering Stalinism a service: those who try to mobilize our movement for profiting from the crisis of the bureaucracy in order to launch our movement again in the countries where it actually disappeared, who try to reassemble forces for Trotskyism in Eastern Europe and look for means for doing the same thing in the USSR, those who want to organize for helping the masses overthrowing the bureaucracy, or those who concentrate in exactly the same conditions upon launching their forces not against Stalinism but against the FI leadership? ... The strength of the revolutionary movement is a necessary precondition for revolutionary victory, but not a necessary precondition for the unfurling of mass revolutionary struggles. At the contrary, these struggles, which originate in the objective historical process, must create favorable conditions for solving the crisis of revolutionary leadership. And now comrade Morris comes along and throws at us the same kind of accusation about 'revolutionary romanticism' which we heard from all these skeptics, and that after China, Korea, Malaya, Iran, Egypt, North Africa, Bolivia, Eastern Germany, Ceylon and the literal spread of world revolution naturally not world revolutionary victories 'from continent to continent'! ls it necessary to tell you that we have come out for the withdrawal of occupation troops from Germany in the QI, in the German review, in the resolution on Germany published in the IS Internal Bulletin? Anybody can read it for himself! If this slogan was not put in the first appeal of the IS, it is only because we wanted at that time when the struggle was still going on to concentrate on the slogans the fighters in Berlin had used themselves (where no one had used that slogan and for good reasons! Did the people come on the street in the February revolution with the slogan: Withdrawal of the Cossacks? When you are busy making a revolution, and not only writing about it, the winning of the troops

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wherever it is possible becomes task Number 1, not the deliberate provocation of these troops into hostile actions. Even the correspondent of Shachtman's review understands this simple basic truth). How is it possible that a member of the New York City committee writes this unbelievable slander that 'the international Pabloites refuse (!) to call for the withdrawal of the Russian troops'? Who has whipped up such a hostility towards the International that such kind of hysterical lies can be spread and believed? The basic thing, dear George, is that for reasons of wrong suspicions and unjustified fears, the majority leadership has launched a preventive faction fight against the International, and this faction fight having acquired now a political basis will develop with all its internal logic, with the immediate threat of a major international split. The challenge that the majority leadership has thrown at the International is a challenge of the very principle of a democratically centralized world party, with one line and one discipline applicable to strong as well as to weak groups. It is a challenge to our whole line, worked out in many years of efforts, to break away from sectarian isolation and sterile dogmatism and to build in practice not in talk - groups intimately linked with the mass movement of their countries and capable of applying revolutionary Marxism to all new events and phenomena. All the successes we have obtained, in Britain, in Bolivia, in Ceylon, in Germany and elsewhere, are exclusively due to this 'new course' ofTrotskyism which was unanimously adopted at the 3rd we. To try and tum back the wheel of history, and re-establish a kind of movement as that which existed in 1939 is suicide for the FI. We shall never tolerate such an attempt to destroy our movement. We shall oppose it with all means at our disposal. And we shall gather the overwhelming majority of the International in this fight. Make no mistake about it, dear George. Our movement is now passing through its worst crisis since its inception. We were proud of the SWP, its achievements, its 'regime', whatever it stood for. I was proud to be called a Cannonite by all the hostile elements and deserters of our movement. I have been traveling up and down Europe for 7 years defending Cannon and Cannonism without any feeling of bad conscience. I knew, as all of us knew, that Cannonism stood for principled politics. Till we received Stein's document, I would have never tolerated any intervention of the International in the swP conflict, convinced as I was of the principled way the SWP leadership acted in the past in party conflicts. But our confidence is now completely shattered. Our main allegiance is not to a person, or a cadre, but to program, principles and a world organization. Nobody will blackmail us into abandoning ideas which we know to be correct, the only ideas on which our movement will be really built. We wanted to build the movement in the closest collaboration with Cannon. We

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shall build it, if necessary, without and against Cannon. And we 'petty scribblers', as these people now suddenly say, will succeed building this movement, because the correctness of our ideas, confirmed by huge historical events, will bring to us everywhere the best people from the entire labor movement. The kind of arguments which are now used everywhere against the International have a very particular smell to anybody who knows the history of the communist movement, dear George. One should be very, very prudent throwing about accusations of 'capitulation before Stalinism'. You will have read- the Militant wrote a fine story on it - Silone's anecdote about the manner in which the Old Man was expelled from the 3rd International. When Stalin wanted the EKKI to condemn the Old Man's letter about China, the members were asked to vote without having read the document. The Italians refused. The meeting was adjourned and old Kolarov came to see Togliatti and Silone, telling them: 'What do you want to see that document for? What's going on here is in reality a fight for power between Stalin and Trotsky in the Russian party. You have to line up with Stalin who is winning that fight, because without the support of the Russian party it is impossible to build the International, etc.'. In the last weeks I have heard many people repeat this kind of argument. As much as we understand the importance of cadre and leadership, we can have nothing but contempt for such arguments. Surely, Trotsky and the Trotskyists didn't break with the Soviet State in order to repeat the same type of unprincipled bankrupt politics on a petty scale. We shall never stand for it, never, never. Among the many correct things comrade Cannon has been saying for a great many years was that beautiful sentence on the party becoming suddenly a prison for people with wrong ideas or under pressure of hostile forces. When that happens, every petty incident, every misunderstanding is used to kick up constant violent fights. I ask you, comrade George: why has the International suddenly become a prison for the American majority? Why do they suddenly attack in a ruthless, disloyal, unpolitical and slanderous manner a leadership with which they have been associated in the closest manner, with which they have been so intimately collaborating, and to whose construction they contributed more than anybody else? The International has neither provoked, nor attacked, nor threatened the SWP majority in any manner whatsoever! Why did this majority feel itself suddenly like in a prison in that International? Why do they undertake one step after another to break out of that prison? It will be difficult to answer that question without noticing a grave danger to the future of the SWP and its leadership, for anybody who is a principled Trotskyist. All political differences which may have been arising on matters of interpretation or tactics toward the events in the USSR since Stalin's death could

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have been discussed calmly and easily without even leading to a faction fight, I'm quite convinced of that. Because in as much as there are real differences not cynical slander - they are yet of a minor nature. Such a discussion could have been useful if it had been first led in such a manner as to prevent premature crystallization. Even after that crystallization it would have been a lesser evil. But with organizational measures, reprisals, threats and ultimatums, the International will not compromise. Our movement, which is still very weak, will collapse before bigger enemies, if its leadership will not uphold the basic principles of its discipline and political cohesion. To the surprise of some clever despisers of 'scribblers', we shall show the movement that we shall be quite able to defend it in an efficient manner against any attempt to disrupt it. I'm still ready for any initiative or any move which could eliminate the threat of a major split in the International movement. If you could suggest anything useful in that line, I'm willing to listen to any suggestion, to undertake any action, privately or officially, as long as it is not a betrayal of our organizational and political principles. If anything can be done to avoid the catastrophe, it would be criminal not to attempt it. But you will believe me that I have little hope left after what happened. Warmest greetings, Ernest

•• •

To Germain

December 3, 1953 Dear Ernest: Thanks for your letter dated Nov. 15, the same date as the letter to the leaderships of all sections by the 1s Bureau, to which you also signed your name. I answer your letter, and in part that of the Bureau, not only out of friendship's sake, but also because I have always felt closer to you politically and methodologically than any of the other European comrades and because I have always highly valued your contributions to the movement and want you to avoid making a terrible mistake. If this reply is poorly organized, it is because I have so much to say and so little time to say it in, and I hope you will make due allowances. If what I say is offensive to you, you will know that is not my intention. If you do not care

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to answer me, I still believe that you will ponder what I write here, and I hope that you will do so objectively. The first differences we had with Clarke, and the first signs we had of an unhealthy development in the IS, appeared at the beginning of 1951, at the start of the 3wc discussion, when Clarke wrote to us that it would be necessary to crush and maybe even expel the majority of the French party, Frank and you because of the incipient differences around the discussion. (You then were the 'Stalinophobes'.) Knowing Clarke, and knowing his close affinity with Pablo, we realized that he was not expressing a personal opinion. We were alarmed by the ultimatist, bureaucratic conception that it expressed about the international leadership, and Stein, on our behalf, wrote him a sharp letter, warning him that the view he expressed was ruinous and would destroy all possibilities of collective leadership. This marked the beginning of Clarke's break with us, as he told us at our May plenum: our reproach to him was a 'stab in the back'. Evidently, however, it had a restraining as well as an embittering influence, because although he wrote us back a hot letter, he decided he had to be more careful. We were all happy to see a united IS leadership emerge from the discussion. But we could not help wondering what was going on in Pablo's mind that would enable him to even tolerate the course that Clarke had projected. Then, after the 3wc, came the fight in the French party, ending in the intervention that removed the leadership from direction and the split. Before the split occurred, we heard a report from Warde. We were appalled by what the IS had done. No one denies the right of the international leadership to suspend or even expel the leadership of a party, or even the party itself. But this is a power that must be used with the greatest care and discretion - when a leadership is betraying or muffing a revolutionary situation, for example, and not over tactical questions. Lightly used, or abused, as it seemed to us was done in this case, the movement can degenerate grotesquely. We told Warde of our view, and urged correction. We went along with the IS on the particular issue involved, because we agreed with it on that issue as we understood it. But we were against the organizational measures that had been so light-mindedly applied, and disturbed by the split. We saw no evidence that the French majority was Stalinophobic (and the year and a half since then, in which time and experience have had opportunity to confirm or refute this charge, has certainly not demonstrated it to us; on the contrary). Pablo s periodic boasts about how the International is growing bigger and better all the time struck us as rather hollow after the loss of the majority of the French party and of the workers in the party. When Clarke returned, it was not to collaborate with us on the line of the 3wc, which we welcomed and accepted although the Congress had never acted

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on our amendments because Clarke, in consultation with Pablo, had burned them (hardly an act of the maturity and principled conduct that Pablo claims), but to fight us, in the same way that he had fought the French party. As you say, the Minority has for two years been trying to put itself in the position where it would appear to be the defender and representative of the International (rather the 1s, and still more precisely, Pablo). (I don't claim to be the first to recognize what Clarke was up to; on the contrary, I was among the last.) He proceeded to form an unprincipled combination of those who blamed our difficult objective situation on the leadership, those who were looking for a bridge out of the party, and those who had become so disoriented by the new situation in the world that they took the 3wc line to mean that Stalinism is the wave of the future, everywhere, including countries like the us, Ceylon and Bolivia. Knowing Clarke, both his limits and his strong side, some of us began to wonder about the source of his arrogance and assuredness as he set out to divide the party over a line that all of us had agreed on. And when he began to recruit people on the ground that he really 'represented Pablo' and that the party leadership did not really accept or understand the line it had voted for, there was a growing uneasiness as to just where Pablo did stand. When a member of the Minority broke away from it and informed us of what basis he had been recruited on originally, we felt it necessary to let Pablo know about it, in order to clear the air. But Pablo refused to give us a clear answer. He refused to say that Clarke's claim was a lie. His reply was evasive and weasel-worded. To us this was not the behavior of a principled collaborator. Abe Lincoln was fond of the story about the backwoodsman engaged in a struggle to the death with a bear, and the man's wife who watched the struggle and showed her 'impartiality' by shouting, 'Go it, husband! Go it, b'ar'. In the American view, this is not real impartiality, considering the relation of the woman to the man. Throughout its history our party has been accustomed to getting the support of the International against all revisionist developments that arose in our ranks. We always got it from Trotsky, that is sure. But perhaps the Is, not as experienced as Trotsky and not as well acquainted with our Minority as we are, did not yet recognize its revisionist character? Good - or at any rate if not good, then at least understandable and permissible temporarily. But under the circumstances if the IS was hot to help us against the revisionists for whom our party had become - yes - a prison, then the least that we could expect of its members was that they should not give backhanded help to the Minority - which was what Pablo was doing when he refused to disavow the Minority's claim of his support. Was this too much to expect from one with whom we had collaborated in the most loyal fashion? Against our wishes the

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conviction began to grow that apparently it was too much to expect. Try to put yourself in our position, Ernest - wouldn't you have been put on guard by all this? At the May plenum we defeated the Minority, and extracted from them a pledge to abide by majority rule. Put on our guard by Pablo's evasions and feeling that the truce in the party could last only if the Minority did not see a chance for help from outside the party ranks, we decided to investigate Pablo's attitude. Read non-factionally, that was the purpose of the Tom letter: to discover the reason for Pablo's attitude in the past, to be alert to his moves in the future. I do not have the letter before me but it ( or the speech on Internationalism and the SWP) explicitly stated that we had no intention of making the first hostile move on the international field. How then was this a declaration of war against Pablo or anyone else? No, it was a declaration that we were on our notice - and after what had happened, we would have been fools to take any other attitude. Meanwhile, we intended to remain in a state of military discipline in our partyjust as the Minority was - until either the differences were resolved or the fight broke out anew. This is the simple truth. The Minority's different interpretation was factional from beginning to end, the pretext (not the reason) for breaking the truce and renewing a fight that could only end in split. I tum now to the charge that our course has been unprincipled in this fight (in contradiction, as you admit, to our entire past). 'Their 100% about-face of today dates only a few months back. How then to explain it? When were they sincere: when they affirmed their total solidarity with the line of the Third World Congress, or when they today affirm, with an unheard-of cynicism, that we are quite simply Stalinists and even agents of the GPU?' (1s Bureau letter, Nov. 15.) This is what we call a 'have you stopped beating your wife?' question. Has it occurred to you that it is possible both that we were sincere then and are sincere today (I leave aside the tendentious way in which the quotation is phrased?). At any rate, please consider the possibility. About our sincerity and the principled character of our support of the general line of the 3wc, there never was any doubt. I can assure you of that personally, Ernest, because I was among the last to understand and come to agree with this line, and I was aided in this not only by the general correctness of the line but by the patient, persistent and helpful persuasion of most of the Majority leaders. What reason was there for them to do this if they secretly did not accept the line or had so many reservations about its correctness? It wouldn't make sense, and it flies in the face of our whole tradition. We were all sure that the 3wc line was not the real basis of our differences with our Minority, and that is not involved today either. No one will profit except factionally in trying to rewrite this section of our movement's history. As to our relative understand-

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ing of the line, we did not interpret it to mean a tum to the American CP, and could not. The Minority did, despite their protestations to the contrary, because it was so flagrantly in conflict with the text of the documents, and that will be proved now in action, and already has been proved by their first independent activity - an influx into the ALP as their major point of concentration in New York. At the same time, we could not help realizing that there were some important deficiencies in the 3wc documents when it could be interpreted so differently by groups which both claimed adherence to it. At best, therefore, it suffered from some ambiguity. This was not a mere suspicion: real life in our party demonstrated it. This was the first time in the history of our movement that such a thing had happened. It pointed to the possibility that the documents straddled two different conceptions. In that case, two different views had converged around the line of the 3wc, and it was going to take time to determine how different they were .... As our fight here developed it became evident that our common line meant different things to different people. Yet we were extremely careful not to leap to conclusions of a drastic character about the IS, and Pablo especially, because we know that not every difference becomes basic and develops all the way to the point of irreconcilability. This responsible approach guided us in our attitude to Pablo; we refused to declare differences that we were not sure existed in reality; we moved slowly, extremely slowly, not light-mindedly suspicious, but ready to give Pablo the benefit of every doubt, despite his peculiar attitude toward us. The fact that we now see vital differences is cited against us as a sign of lack of principle since 'only a few months back' we didn't or weren't prepared to declare them. Does that really make sense to you? Would we be principled to suppress differences now because we did not see them, or because they did not exist, a few months back? Great events took place in these few months, and they tested the differences and showed that they were not minor. (I refer to the events in East Germany, France and the conceptions about the political revolution in the su.) Could this have been foreseen a year or two ago? I don't think so. At any rate we didn't foresee them. Ah, but it was foreseen! So says Shachtman. So too now say the Cochranites. But Shachtman's premise was all wrong (the premise that defense of the su leads to Stalinist conciliation) and the Cochranite premise was no more correct. (Anyhow, we know that even a correct conclusion or prediction is no proof that the reasoning employed to reach it was necessarily correct.) We still hold to the main line of the 3wc, but new events have shown that we have different conceptions of the analysis to be made today. To us the entrist conception of the 3wc is only that - a method for building our own movement.

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To the Minority and Pablo it is a bridge to liquidationism (maybe that's what the 3wc was to them two years ago too - but that's not certain, maybe it wasn't that to them then; but anyhow it is a secondary question). And there is a third tendency, which I am not sure but I think you represent, which has failed to understand what the real issue in the International is today, and makes the mistake of accepting the Cochranite interpretation of the relation between the 3wc and the present struggle. Try to get it clear, Ernest: this is not a fight over the 3wc. We have been angered by the devious, and miseducational campaign of the Minority to make something sacrosanct of the 3wc. A wc is only a wc - it's not for all time. That's our attitude to all the congresses of our movement - the first, the second, and the third. Time tests all the predictions and prognoses they contain. We must retain what is still useable, and replace what is not. We hold to what is good in it, but we're not bound by every word for all time, any more than Lenin felt bound by last year's resolutions. Otherwise, we become truly sectarians and fossils. We must review everything in the 3wc documents, and we will - the imminence of war, the effects of revolutionary upsurge in Europe on war, the possibilities of an American depression before a war, despite Washington's wish to have it otherwise, etc. We no longer will permit our movement to be frozen in its thinking by our Minority's campaign around the 3wc. To us the 3wc documents as written contain no support for liquidationism or conciliation - not when they were written, not now. And if it did (which I deny, although I admit it's a valid question for examination in view of certain ambiguities in the text) then it's our job to correct it now. What's unprincipled about that? The same criteria apply to leadership. The fact that we supported Pablo up to a certain point and don't after that point is no proof that we're unprincipled (unless it can be shown that he hasn't changed - and that can't be shown). We went along with him at the 3wc forone reason - we agreed with him, or thought we did. We broke with him for one reason - we found ourselves in disagreement with him on basic issues. What's unprincipled about that? We weren't liquidationist or conciliationist then, and as far as we could make out he wasn't either. We aren't liquidationist or conciliationist, now, but the test of events shows that he is today. What could we do but break with him? Wouldn't it have been unprincipled ifwe hadn't? (I must add here that a genuine Pablo cult has been developed by the Minority in this country. The mere idea that we would dare to differ from Pablo on any question brought a scream of anguish and even astonishment from the Minority - sincerely from the Clarke wing, and for factional purposes from the Cochran wing. We're not cultists, and I hope never will be. No one is immune from criticism in our movement- Pablo, or Cannon, or anyone else. Our attitude to leaders is based on what they are and do as well as

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what they were and did. The hand-raisers are not on our side, despite all the slander to the contrary, as you will find out yourself if you choose to associate with the Cochranites.) ... We have different ideas over who launched the fight; you think we did, we think Pablo and Clarke did. But who launched it is really secondary if the issues are fundamental. Far more important and revealing is the relationship between politics and organization struggle, and I'd like to go into that a little in connection with this fight. I think you're making a mistake in the way you view the relationship in this concrete case. Let me put it another way. Suppose yourself in our position. You have just endorsed the 3wc line, and a most vicious campaign is opened up on you by a faction in which you recognize all the earmarks of revisionism and which attacks you as an opponent of the line you have voted for. This faction derives its strength not from its own views but from its claim that it represents the International leadership with which you have worked in honest collaboration. You present the claim to the IS secretary, and he refuses to disavow it. The party heads for a split. You prevent it for the time being and create conditions of truce in which party work can go forward - a test for the minority. They accept, and then break the truce at the first pretext. You become convinced then that the minority no longer wants to be in the party, it feels stifled, it wants to break out. Then you begin to detect signs that the IS secretary is not only continuing, but deepening his collaboration with this minority - all the while (to use the phrase used against us) that there are no apparent political differences between you and him; for the truth is that he has never up to this point expressed a single difference with the policy you follow. What do you do then? If you are a responsible leader, then you ask yourself: 'Why is he behaving in this fashion? Why does he ally himself with a revisionist faction in our party, though he does not yet do so openly? ls it merely that he finds Clarke's character more charming than Cannon's?' And you are forced to a different conclusion: 'No, it must be more fundamental than that, it must be that he has an affinity for Clarke's politics and a distaste for ours. If faction fights have any meaning - and they generally do - there must be a political basis for his behavior'. And unless you are something other than a Bolshevik politician, you begin to search to find the answer to the puzzle. What's unprincipled about that? Isn't that what the Nov.15 IS Bureau letter also purports to do? Yes, faction fights, if they are deep-going, have a political basis, even though it may not be fully clear to everyone involved at the start. And organizational practice has a meaning in such a context - a political meaning - and one can go very far astray if he overlooks this fact. When a faction begins by challenging

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organizational tradition, by departing from democratic centralism, by resorting to intrigue and deception, then you can be sure, if the history of the Bolshevik movement means anything at all, that behind it or at the bottom of it revisionist politics is also being hatched. The way the Minority faction was formed, the way it conducted itself, was even more revealing than the political arguments it found it expedient to put forward at the start - half-way arguments, half-presented arguments, the traditional method of revisionists, who naturally cannot begin by fully presenting their own real views at the beginning. What applied to the Minority also applies to its behind-the-scenes ally and protector, Pablo. There is, there must be, some political basis behind his role, we concluded. But even so, when the IS resolution on 'The Rise and Decline of Stalinism' arrived, we did not leap to rash conclusions, and we weighed the matter carefully. I don't mind telling you my initial reaction: I thought it was on the whole an excellent document, despite some deficiencies and ambiguities I wanted to question you about (as I said in my letter to you). There were others who shared this view. We began to discuss our attitude toward it. There were those who thought that we should prepare a number of questions to be submitted to the IS to clarify ambiguous or uncertain sections, with the thought that depending on the replies we would either vote for the document as it was, or propose amendments, or prepare a counter-document. One thing we were sure of - we did not again want any document adopted unanimously, after which we would be confronted with the same situation that arose after the 3wc, when we were told we did not know what we had voted for, that we were not carrying out the line, etc. We had barely begun the discussion among ourselves when Clarke put out the FI, without showing it to the majority of the editorial staff, which contained his new thesis about the 'sharing of power' between the bureaucracy and the workers as an alternative to the revolutionary upheaval of the masses against the bureaucracy. This revision he labeled as 'political revolution' and, he assured us, it was in full accord with the resolution on Stalinism. Is it hard to understand that this decided to make us take a second, third and hundredth look at the resolution? The text of resolutions is important but I need not tell you that we have learned that in the hands of unscrupulous people the text itself alone is not enough to indicate the real line intended. And it soon became clear to us that whatever you, the author of the resolution may have meant by it, and whatever we thought it meant, Clarke - and Pablo - clearly meant something else. Such a resolution, whatever merits it may have, is inadequate under such circumstances.

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Then came the IS letter of Aug. 10, signed by you, Frank and Pablo. I don't have the documents before me, but I recall that you said you had seen Cannon's speech and letter and were distressed by their false implications, etc.; you also said twice that you did not intend to do anything about it. Because of the French strike, we did not receive the letter until Aug. 31. We began to compose a reply. Before we had finished it, and without waiting for the reply, the IS three days later sent another letter. (This one was not signed; I assume and hope that you had left on your trip by then.) The tone of this was altogether different, although nothing new had happened in the meantime. Pablo denounced us for 'the latest issue of the FI'. What was this issue? It was the one in which, in the most guarded language, we let the readers know that we repudiated the conception on 'sharing of power' that Clarke, in violation of his post, had smuggled into the previous issue of the FI. (In addition, we reprinted without comment Pablo's own article on the post-Stalin period, despite our strong opposition to much of it.) What did this mean? One would have to be blind not to understand it. Pablo, instead of congratulating us for repudiating a revisionist article, was condemning us for doing so. To us that spoke more clearly than a thousand resolutions as to where he stood in the fight against revisionism. Furthermore, he demanded that we stop printing what we were saying about the Soviet Union, Germany, etc., because our articles were not in line with what he was saying. This - mind you - in the midst of a pre-world congress discussion, on the events on which the International had not yet adopted a position. And to make his attitude clearer yet, he attacked us for distributing our bulletins directly to sections, instead of through the IS. In other words, he wanted us to publish Clarke's line and held over our head the threat that if we didn't we'd be acting in violation of the 3wc, which never even took a line on these questions, and he threatened us because we were distributing bulletins in a way we have been doing ever since our movement was formed, with the knowledge and approval of the Is. To us, it was clearly an effort not to promote an international discussion on a correct and objective basis, but to strangle the discussion by creating an atmosphere of organizational threats which could only muddy up the political discussion. This was followed by his organization of a faction in Britain, ... followed by what for me was the final straw. He had asked us to meet with either you or him. As soon as we heard that your trip, unlike his, was actually going through, we accepted. On the same day that we got your letter saying that for financial reasons you might not be able to complete the trip (to which we replied in a wire you may not have received that we would raise the money for the completion), we got a letter from Pablo informing us that it would not do for us to meet

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with you because you were not an 'official' representative. What had changed your status from Ceylon to here he did not explain. But it was plain enough that something had changed. All this, plus the political issues clarified by East Germany and France which I do not go into here because they are in our Letter, which by this time you have seen, cleared away the last doubts. We were dealing with a revisionist opponent who did not scruple to use his post for the most devious maneuvers and deceptions. He was bent on splitting the British party because the majority there opposed him,just as he had done in France. Turning minorities into majorities, while the real majority is expelled, is his forte (also known as great advances on all fronts). He was bent on splitting our party too, and that was what his allies proceeded to try to do here. Perhaps we were late in recognizing this reality. Perhaps we did not recognize it in the ideal order - from theory to politics to organization - but in another order. But we have recognized it now, and we will fight it to the end. Lenin, you may recall, failed to recognize the revisionist ulcer in the Second International until the war showed him what Kautskyism was. This took him a long time. But it did not take him long to recognize revisionism in his own party, and he fought it from the beginning. We too recognized Pabloism in our party fairly soon (although we did not know its full name at the start) and it was only as the fight developed that we recognized its kinship with the International revisionist leadership. But our slowness, if that's what it was, does not overshadow the fact that we did catch on before it was too late. We hope you'll do the same. Your method of determining who is responsible for the split - find out 'Cui prodest?' - is interesting, but rather limited. In some splits (politically unmotivated) it's in no one's interest. In others it can be shown (and I think this is the case most of the time) that it's in the interest of both sides. You say, 'Under such conditions (where the Minority appeared to be the defenders of the International politically and organizationally) the minority had every interest to stay in the party and to let a political discussion develop'. That sounds reasonable, I admit. If I was in such a situation as you describe, that's probably what I would do: I'd not only want to remain in the party, but I'd fight to remain in, and I'd subordinate every other consideration of an organizational character to stay in just so long as I'd have the right to continue to present my political views. But the question then arises: Why didn't the Minority do that? Why, on the contrary, did it follow precisely the opposite course? Why did it start sabotaging party work? Why did it insist that it was bureaucratic for the Majority to publish its Plenum resolutions in the magazine unless it also published the Minority resolutions? Why did it discontinue daily

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activity? Why did it withhold party funds? Why did it insist that there could no longer be educational discussions in the branches but only debates ('even on The Origin of the Family')? Why did it refuse to accept the offer to run Bartell for Mayor in New York? Why did it refuse to allow a debate on East Germany? (With regard to your explanation on the slogan or withdrawal of the troops in East Germany, I don't find it very strong. The fact is that in action the masses were demanding such a withdrawal, whether or not they raised it vocally- and while I won't dispute that point, we have considerable evidence that they did and it was our job not only to repeat what they were saying but to go beyond that and raise the slogans that were needed, even if the masses were not in position to voice them then. This whole business of East Germany, which I can't go into properly here, was most revealing to us. When the news came, we were happy, elated; the faces of the Cochranites became grim and moody; it was evident even physically that the news was not welcome to them: they no longer wanted to learn from events. And one of their top leaders (not a rank and filer) told us that it was correct not to demand the withdrawal of the Soviet troops because that would play into the hands of us imperialism! That was how the American Pabloites were educating their followers, not along the lines of your explanations.) And why did they impose faction discipline on all their members, subject to expulsion from the faction, not to attend the 25th Anniversary meeting in New York? Is that the behavior of people who think they have every interest in remaining in the party? Is that the kind of behavior that supports your theory? The truth is that there was nothing in the world that could keep them in our party any longer - at least not on a basis acceptable to the practices of democratic centralism. They were eager to go, they were wild to go, not even a brick wall would have kept them from going, and as they left they heaved a sigh or relief. (Only five of them were suspended by the plenum; the others could have remained by simply repudiating the anti-party boycott, and without giving up any of their rights as a minority, including the right to differ on the suspensions or the five. But they didn't even respond to this possibility; they fled.) This is the only revolutionary party in this country; the only one that has a generally correct position on all the basic questions, but they were acting under pressures that made it impossible for them to remain any longer as a minority within it. There was also another reason, to which I will return. As for us, we had no intention of trying to do the impossible. Moreover, we had no intention or destroying the party in the process. What kind of party would it be if we surrendered to such a boycott without any disciplinary measures? If they could get away with that, what couldn't they get away with? It would mean the end of the party as a disciplined organization. That price

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would be too high to pay under any circumstances, and we certainly would not pay it under these. There was another reason why they wanted to leave now, and I will tell it to you in case you do not know it. Shortly after Clarke left, the Minority began to take stock of the International situation and, under pressure of questioning of its members, began to tell them that although it had Pablo, that is, 'a majority of the ideological leadership in the International', it unfortunately did not have the support of a majority of the International itself, which tended to give the Majority tendency a 'mechanical majority' in the International. Simultaneously Bartell and others began to denigrate the size and influence of the International just as he did that of the SWP after it became clear that they had the support of no more than one-fifth of our members. We took stock too, and came to the conclusion that in an honest 4wc our view would be able to win the support of a decisive majority of the International. Note, I said 'honest' - that is, unrigged, on the basis of the real relationship of forces in the International. But that was just the rub. Neither Pablo nor the Cochranites wanted an honest congress to settle all questions. That was the reason for their raising organizational questions to embitter and confuse the atmosphere. That was the reason for their wanting and organizing a split in our party and in the British party. With such splits, Pablo would use his position to recognize the minority in each case, and thus tum up with a 'majority' at the we - as he showed he knows how to do by the French split. And that, Ernest, is another reason why there was nothing we could do to prevent the split of the minorities either here or in Britain - or elsewhere if necessary. You refer to Cannon's remark about the party suddenly becoming a prison for those under pressure of alien forces. You don't try to explain why that happened to our Minority, or maybe you haven't yet figured it out. But you tum it around and ask why has the world movement become such a prison to us? The answer is that it hasn't. This is our ideological movement and we have no reason or wish to break out of it. On the contrary, we intend to live in and build it, and we are quite confident that we will succeed. But Pablo's regime has become a prison to genuine Trotskyists - for the reasons given above. We do not trust it any longer, we have no confidence in it politically or any other way. We see an irreconcilable conflict, and we propose the genuine Trotskyists replace the Pablo regime by a Trotskyist regime, free of all trickery and manipulation and guided by a line that will be both orthodox and alert to all the revolutionary opportunities for building the party of world revolution. We hope that you will join in this work. I know that such a step will not be easy for you, but I hope that you too can reconsider and review the past and not hesitate out of such subjective factors as the fact that you wrote the resolution which means one

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thing to you and another to the Pabloites who will have the power to enforce it, to take this course if it seems the correct one to you on further reflection. I haven't touched on everything I'd liked to, but my time is running out, and I want to finish by posing a few questions to you: 1. Why should the SWP leadership, which you acknowledge has always practiced principled politics in the past, suddenly change so radically? (The 'explanation' in the IS Bureau letter is hardly worth discussion and I cannot believe you take it very seriously. Why should it be assumed that the SWP Majority rather than the Minority has succumbed to the difficult objective conditions here? One must do more than make arbitrary statements.) 2. Sweeping aside the Pabloite bombast, why is it that the International has suffered so many losses and splits since the 3wc? ls 'Cannonism' to carry the brunt for this too, and is Pabloism free of the responsibility? 3. Why is it in your letter to me you say you have always considered us to be principled up to now, while on the same date you allow your name to be signed to an IS Bureau letter which repeats every calumny that has ever been directed against us and applies them not only to the present but to the past? With warmest greetings, George Breitman

•• • ToBreitman

December 9, 1953 Dear George, Thank you foryourletterof December 3. Frankly, I was quite a bit astonished by it. If I am to follow your representation of events knowing persons, facts and thoughts on this side of the Ocean as I do, I should arrive at the conclusion that the most serious and deep-going crisis in the history of our movement is nothing but a tragi-comedy of errors and misunderstandings. Pablo failed to write explicitly to Cannon that Clarke was not his agent and that he had neither instigated nor advocated nor even supported the minority's faction fight (a fact which stands established not only from what I know but from the very letters of the minority itself!). The second IS Bureau letter of August 1953 - which, it

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is true, I did not sign because at that time I had already left - destroyed the positive effects of the first letter. The IS failed to express its disagreement with the idea of 'sharing of power' in the USSR, with which it most certainly disagrees. I myself didn't get in time money and mandate to arrive in Canada ... If all these small incidents wouldn't have happened, i.e., if Pablo would have given the clear answer asked for, if there wouldn't have been a second August Bureau letter, if we would have published have a criticism of the 'sharing-ofpower-idea' and if I would have succeeded to complete my trip with a clear mandate in hand (by the way: I did not receive your cable) - then there would have been no international split no public attacks against the Stalinophile leadership of the FI, no break between the majority of the American cadre and the quasi-totality of the world cadre ... Do you really believe that this is the way things usually happen in our movement? Of course, you were due to say that a posteriori, the split reveals 'deep going political differences', 'differences of a fundamental nature, on basic issues', which, again a posteriori, justify the organizational course taken. Pardon me, what are these 'fundamental differences'? If one cuts through the obvious slander contained in the paper's Open Letter (that the IS is 'revisionist', that it 'capitulates before Stalinism', that it is 'working consciously and deliberately to liquidate the FI'), one sees differences in appraisal of the events following Stalin's death in the Soviet Union and the glacis countries; one sees differences in policy toward the workers' uprising in Eastern Germany; one sees differences in estimation and approach toward the public servants' general strike of August 1953 in France. That's all. Even to arrive at that sum, it is necessary to stretch things quite a bit. I myself have failed to grasp till today the differences in approach to the Eastern German events, for example. Surely, by repeating a thousand times that the IS 'capitulates before Stalinism', 'is in reality opposed to a political revolution in the Soviet Union' or is 'revisionist through and through' (what part of our program we are charged with 'revising' nobody yet bothered to tell us), you will not change the fact that these charges are untrue and slanderous, which is proved not only by resolutions, articles, speeches, appeals, but also by practical action. Now all the differences which are till today actually revealed are of course of a tactical nature. They don't put a question mark on any of the basic principles of our estimation of Stalinism and the ussR. They are, in fact, slighter than the differences between the French majority and minority in 1951-52, differences which involved the whole of the practical work of that section and which, nevertheless, in your opinion remained 'purely tactical'. They are certainly slighter than the differences between the 1940 majority and minority in the USA, differences which, in the Old Man's opinion, wouldn't have necessitated a split even

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if the Shachtmanites happened to find themselves momentarily in a majority at the convention. Yet on the basis of such tactical differences you go ahead and break publicly with the International, attack publicly its leadership, call publicly for a worldwide extension of the split, in short disregard completely all established organizational rules and behavior of discipline and act like our movement acted not even in 1928 but in 1933 toward the Komintern, like Lenin acted not in 1903 but in 1914. This is a principled difference, the main and only fundamental difference which I see at the present stage of the fight: the overthrow of the principle of one World Party in a manner which, I regret to have to repeat this, I cannot characterize otherwise as criminally light-minded, irresponsible and cynical. I don't know if you understand how we - and I don't say this for five Is members but for the great majority of the World movement's cadres - felt about this action of yours. For us it denotes a basic break with the principle of the World Party which is the only organizational framework in which our movement can be built. One doesn't break with an International for tactical reasons. One doesn't break with an International because, hypothetically, it is wrong on the issues of your own country. One doesn't break with an International even when the first basic principled differences develop. One sees in an International a whole epoch of world history and of the development of the labor movement. One breaks with an International when it has finished its historical mission. Remember when Lenin and Trotsky broke with the Second and Third International: after the betrayals or 1914 and 1933. Historical betrayals of such a dimension as the capitulation toward the imperialist war or the fascist dictatorship were necessary to convince our principled masters that the International they lived in till that time had become hopeless and could not be reformed any more from within. Even when such grave events happened as participation in a bourgeois government and acceptance of this betrayal by the Second International, Lenin didn't break with it, not because he 'underestimated' or 'misunderstood' the gravity of the event but of course because he rightly thought that one had to correct these deviations from within. When such grave events happened as the betrayal of the General Strike in England with the co-responsibility of the Third International or, worse, the betrayal of the Second Chinese revolution, Trotsky did not break with the Komintern, did not bring the conflict out in public, did not attack in the public press a single time the criminal leadership of the Third International. He didn't even do that when mass expulsions of Left Oppositionists had already started, and he and his followers were ready to accept discipline even after 1927 if only they would have received the right to defend their positions inside the movement. Was this course wrong? Did it prove, like Shachtman and other neo-Mensheviks today

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have discovered, that Trotsky 'underestimated' the degree or degeneration of the Komintern? Not at all. This course was the only principled course to be taken, i.e., the only course which corresponds to the Marxist understanding of the meaning and the role of the Workers' International. Now compare with this principled attitude of our masters on the basic question of international democratic centralism the attitude of you people. Let us admit one minute that all your suspicions and misgivings about 'Pablo' - in fact the IS myself included-were correct. Has the IS betrayed any revolution? Has it done anything comparable to participation in a bourgeois cabinet or allying itself with counter-revolution in the midst of a growing revolution? Have we lived our 1923 or our 1927, not to speak about our 1933? Surely the very question sounds so incongruous that no one can hesitate one second how to answer it. Surely, all differences, should then be exposed first inside the movement, probed and discussed inside the International. Surely then the correct course to follow was to attempt reforming the movement misled by Pablo from within. Surely then the correct course to follow was to come to the normal leading bodies of the International, to bring the differences before these bodies, to wait for the verdict of these bodies and, in case this verdict would be negative, to start patiently convincing the rank-and-file of the incorrectness of the leaderships decisions, culminating in a proposal to the next we to do away with that leadership. But what you did was in fact to pick up the characteristic Shachtmanite-IKD sentence ofi947-48, 'to disregard all IS, me, we' and to address yourself to the 'real movement'. Which is this mysterious 'real movement', outside of the normal sections and the normal leading bodies of the International? You say you don't want to quit the International, you want to live in it and to build it? You say only the 'Pablo regime' has become a prison to you? Pardon me: haven't we heard that before? Didn't all the people who run away from us use the same subterfuge? Didn't they always claim in the States they ran away not from the Trotskyist organization, but from the 'Cannon regime'? Doesn't Shachtman claim even today to be a genuine representative of the 'real Trotskyist movement'? Unfortunately, Lenin - and Cannon! - have educated us to be very suspicious of people who love 'the movement' a lot but just hate 'the regime' and therefore betray the organization. You think the 'Pablo regime' is bad? That is your full right. You want to fight that regime? We may disagree, but we certainly will not deprive you of your rights to do so within established rules of organizational behavior. But when, under the pretext of 'breaking with the regime' you publicly break discipline and trample down with heavy boots of 'military factionalism' the normal framework of international democratic centralism, anybody with some

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experience will tell you: 'Please drop these silly pretenses and speak out openly that you broke with the FI as an established organization, with its established leadership and statutes, whatever may have been the reasons which led you to do such a thing'. The Old Man never played around with the fact that Stalin succeeded in precipitating a split between the Left Opposition and the Komintern - not just a break of the Left Opposition with the 'Stalin regime'. That split he considered at that time historically unjustified. You, by your action, consider today the break between your part and the FI - not the 'Pablo regime' - as inevitable and justified. That's where you act in the most cynical and unprincipled manner imaginable. You say you have the support of the world movement, but that this would not find expression in a 'rigged world congress'. This is again a subterfuge too cheap to be used in our movement. Either you consider the FI your organization, whatever may be the 'regime' and its tactical mistakes. In that case, surely, you could find or at least propose some organizational device for rigid guarantees of internal democracy. Why, even Shachtman found them as late as 1947, and God knows he had more 'fundamental differences' with the FI than you people have. We could get together any time and draft rules of representation of sections which would satisfy everybody, e.g., give voting rights to all sections or expelled groups of sections which were members of the movement at the time of the Third we, or any other expedient. If you were really eager to have a democratic we with all members expressing their opinions, there could be no difficulty in finding such a device. If you thought you had the slightest chance to get a majority or even a strong minority under such circumstances, you would have rushed forward with such proposals, as in fact you intended to do first if I'm not mistaken. You would have sent your criticism to the me, prepared a strong plea for the we and fought it out in that forum. But that precisely is the course you have not taken. You have acted implicitly on the presumption that the FI is no more your organization, that you don't want to abide to any discipline regardless of the fact that you are minority or majority, that whenever the movement puts you in a minority you will grandiosely 'disregard' the movement. That is the meaning of disregarding IS, me, we, etc. That is the meaning of this new talk about a 'rigged we'. In that frame of mind, any we is going to be declared a priori 'rigged' if it places you in a minority. This opinion was already clearly expressed in Cannon's speech on 'Internationalism'. Suddenly he discovered that, in opposition to what had been his practice in his own party and his advice to us in the past, one had to be extremely liberal in the International. Suddenly he discovered that the International was composed of 'weak groups', that the International leadership was even 'weaker' and especially 'young and unexperienced', and that under these

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conditions it should limit itself to ideological work and 'advice', i.e., it should dissolve the movement as a World Party and keep only a federation of national sects, 'an international letter-box' like the Old Man used to call contemptuously similar set-ups of the pre-war centrists. What else was the meaning of this sudden revision of our basic organizational principle - democratic centralism on a world scale - if not the fact that your party's leadership was not going to recognize any discipline towards international bodies in which it happens for once to be in a minority? What else was the meaning of the mechanically theoretical justification Cannon tried to give to this behavior - 'The American revolution will decide world revolution; the SWP will decide the American revolution; the present leadership will have to lead the SWP if it has to fulfill its role; therefore the fate of world revolution hinges not on the building of the FI as an organization but on the permanency of the SWP leadership; therefore, the basic allegiance of the world Trotskyist has to be not to the FI as an organization (it's much too weak!) but to the SWP leadership'-? The same opinion is even more clearly and naively expressed in your own letter, dear George. You write about Pablo's letter in answer to Cannon's request concerning his dissociation from the minority, that this answer was not 'the behavior of a principled collaborator (!)'. You write that 'throughout its history our party has been accustomed to getting support of the International against all revisionist developments that arose in our ranks'. You write: 'Was this too much to expect from one(!) with whom we had collaborated in the most loyal fashion?' In other words: you only saw a relationship of friendly collaboration, with an individual, not a relationship of organizational allegiance to a world organization! What do all your sentences mean but one single thing: that your adherence to the world movement is subordinate to complete and full endorsement by the international leadership of every single move of your party's leaders? That, in other words, your basic organization is the SWP and not the FI, and that the FI is only accepted, tolerated, and helped with 'freedom of criticism' as long as it 'goes along' with the SWP leadership? Can't you visualize how the world movement reacts to opinions like these? Don't you see this is exactly the same thing Stalin asked for the Russian party in the mid-twenties from the Komintern, and got away with it, and destroyed the International for that reason? Can't you visualize a situation in which, not because of sordid maneuvers, but for valid- even if you think incorrect- political and organizational considerations the International leadership may disagree with your party, may want to end a faction fight by a compromise and not by a split, may have misgivings about the political turn the fight takes, without therefore either 'aiding and abetting' that fight or becoming ipso facto 'proStalinist', 'revisionist' and 'liquidationist'? If you can't visualize such a move-

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ment, in which its leadership takes a principled stand on matters in dispute following its own convictions and not always and automatically supporting the SWP leaders' actions, then really the building of the FI was a big misunderstanding on your behalf right from the start. You will never build a Trotskyist International with people ready to act in that way - real agents in the worst sense of the word. You will only build an international clique. Is that what you want? Perhaps it is not unnecessary to repeat once again that it was never in Pablo's or the I s's or the I Ec's intention to 'remove from office' the present SWP's leadership - only a mind grotesquely distorted by fear can conceive such a ridiculous proposition. Even if we thought, and wrote, that Hansen's article on Stalinism was not very good or that we didn't like the harsh tone of the discussion, this surely does not imply such diabolic intentions. Isn't it the right of an International leadership to judge things in their own merit? But I'm afraid Cannon himself did not believe the story that Pablo wanted to remove him from office. What he feared, with some reason indeed, was that the 1s was not ready to accept passively any form of bureaucratic expulsion of the minority. You may think this wrong. But frankly is it a principled and justified reason to split the International? In the mass movement, the masses themselves put a check on all irresponsible factionalists and splitters. These drift away or are driven out, and when they represent no historical necessity of any kind, just wither away; in any case, nobody cares. In our movement, unfortunately, the check of a strong mass basis does not yet exist. Irresponsible people can start all kinds of fights and splits and think, at least temporarily, they can get away with it. Given a minimum material basis, they can put up quite a show for a certain period. Even today the Shachtmanites continue to exist on a level which is not qualitatively different from ours, and so do even the De Leonists. Under such conditions, in a movement like ours where every talented cadre looks upon himself as a Lenin or Trotsky in being and where sad experiences of the past have taught everybody to be over-sensitive for ideological nuances, there would be an uninterrupted series of brawls and splits without some basic loyalty which checks such people. This basic loyalty cannot be only the one to the program, although, of course, this is a fundamental one. It is well-known that a common program has never prevented a periodic appearance of tactical differences and will never do so. Therefore, there is only one basic loyalty possible to keep our movement together: the loyalty to the International! One has to penetrate oneself in one's most intimate consciousness with the conviction that the International, not only as a program or a body of ideas but as an organization with a given structure, represents all hopes of mankind in our epoch. Thousands of people have

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died, not for Cannon or Pablo or the SWP nor even for the Old Man, but for that International. To split the International before it has demonstrated its inadequacy in events of colossal historical scope is a real crime against the labor movement. It is a 1,000 times preferable to find some organizational modus vivendi and to have confidence in the ultimate lucidity of our world cadre, a healthy cadre, which in due time will correct all mistakes it occasionally makes. As long as everybody does not adopt such a rule of behavior, any national section or faction of a national section will be liable to split away light-mindedly on the basis of some occasional difference or organizational dispute. We shall never be able to build the movement as long as people show such an attitude. And that is precisely the attitude your leadership has shown in an extreme manner during the final stage of the present dispute. Surely these ideas are neither new nor surprising for you. You yourself express the very same principles - when you think of your party on a national scale. You write that if you would happen to find yourself in some tactical difference with your party, but would be sure of the support of the majority of the world movement - isn't that what you claim today for the SWP majority? - you would then act in the following manner: 'I'd not only want to remain in the party, but I'd fight to remain in, and I'd subordinate every other consideration of an organizational character to stay in just so long as I'd have the right to continue to present my political views'. I am therefore justified to ask: Why didn't you people act in this same way - on an international scale? Why on the contrary did you follow the opposite course to rush out and denounce the whole outfit as 'pro-Stalinist' and 'liquidationist'? Don't tell me you were afraid Pablo would have you expelled because you sent Internal Bulletins to all sections or that you feared to be confronted with a 'rigged' we. If one really wants to stay inside an organization, one always finds organizational expediencies for such kind of problems. So the question remains: Why has the International suddenly become a prison to you? Because the IS wasn't ready to approve the expulsion of the minority, didn't give Cannon 'loyal support' in his fight against the minority? But isn't this utterly unprincipled and cynical? Isn't this destroying the basic principle of internationalism, of democratic centralism on an international scale, of the meaning and mission of the FI?

Need I add that what you think to be 'stages of Pablo's intrigue' against the leadership are mainly misunderstandings indeed? Need I add that Clarke most definitely was not, 'Pablo's agent', that Pablo urged him in many letters not to attack the party's leadership, to stop the fight, to accept every reasonable organizational truce? We shall publish the letters and you will be able to see for yourself. Need I add that our June 1953 IEC letter to your leadership SWP

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was a genuine expression of satisfaction with the truce ... Need I add that the second IS-Bureau letter of August was a natural reaction upon the Stein document and all other many indications that you were rapidly heading for an international split? Need I add that Pablo wrote to you about my trip in the sense you indicate only because I had not yet received the information about the latest developments and was therefore unable to represent IS opinion after these developments? Need I add that even given all these misunderstandings, some organizational compromise could have easily been found at the eve of your last Plenum? Really, the organizational procedure we have followed in the past should have warranted that to you. Didn't we discuss with the Bleibtreu group for over two years, notwithstanding repeated and open breaches of discipline (recognized by Cannon himself as late as his May speech on 'Internationalism')? Haven't we cohabited with the Swiss section, which violently disagrees with us on every major political issue which cropped up since the end of the war? Even if you were so afraid of Pablo's 'apparatus', haven't we got a world cadre of fine comrades who think and judge by their own mind, their own convictions? Your party's action implies in fact a terrible contempt of the real world movement, which is only the sum of our sections. The break-away from the movement is a logical outcome of that contempt. The political nature of that contempt is unprincipled through and through. As for its social nature, what name can you give it? Faction fights and splits have a logic of their own, dear George. This logic has already brought you in few months' time to a radical change of opinion on our 'Rise and Decline of Stalinism'. Yesterday you thought it 'on the whole an excellent document'. Today you accept Stein's view that it is 'the most revisionist (!) document ever written in the history of our movement'. To justify your retreat, you write: 'The text of resolutions is important, but I need not tell you that we have learned that in the hands of unscrupulous people the text itself alone is not enough to indicate the real line intended (!)'. You certainly need tell me that, for it is the first time I hear about it in our movement. The Stalinists used to tell us that all our theses, resolutions, articles, books, speeches, were of no importance. Important, you see, were only the hidden intentions of that arch-traitor, Trotsky. You try to get away with the same method in our movement, by simply substituting Pablo for Trotsky? You won't succeed, I can tell you that in advance. I told Bleibtreu the same thing three years ago. Ours is a principled, serious movement, a conscientious cadre. If you have misgivings about a document, you present amendments or counter-documents, and everybody will judge them for their own merit. But if you use the smeartactic, if you don't discuss what people say and write but what they intend and hide, i.e., what they don't say and don't write - you won't get the sup-

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port of any serious principled revolutionist. Cannon, not so long ago, wrote the very same thing to Renard. Have you already forgotten this serious lesson? It will not be possible to convince the movement that 'fundamental issues' are involved in the 'suppressed sentence in the quotation of the Transitional Program' or in one wrong sentence in Clarke's article (sentence with which we disagree, I repeat once again). We shall put the 'suppressed sentence' back in our document this very minute. We shall dissociate ourselves in the same document from any 'sharing-of-power-ideas'. You can't go on living just on 'intentions'. You need more substantial nourishment.... I shall answer presently your questions: 1. The immediate reason why the SWP leadership changed so radically its course of principled politics in the past is the fact that for the first time it was confronted with a situation in which it was not sure of the International's support for its actions. This was a test of the seriousness of its international allegiance - and in this test it failed miserably. Underneath there is a reaction of self-consciousness and self-delusion towards the growing objective difficulties - an escape from reality of a sectarian type. I would add that objectively this is a result of alien class pressure, without saying that your party has already succumbed to that pressure. (But breaking away from the FI definitively would certainly be a very bad sign indeed.) 2. You are profoundly misinformed about the International situation if you think we have suffered 'so many losses and splits' since the 3rd we. Until the crisis your party started in the International, I know only of 2 splits, the one in France and the one in the Indochinese group (where we lost 1/ 4 of the membership in France but gained important forces in Indochina itself); much less than in the period between the 2nd and 3rd we when there was no question of the 'Pablo regime'. In Ceylon we didn't have a split but an expurgation of the party which was due for a long time given the character of that party. In most cases, as in Ceylon itself, there have not been 'losses' but big organizational gains, as in South America, in Germany, in Britain ... in Italy, etc. The only serious crisis that existed at the time of the 3rd we, the split in Austria, has been healed in the meantime. And the one important section which had been much weakened, the Indian section, has greatly recovered since. 3. I consider the FI the only organization I owe allegiance to. When my organization is attacked in the most unprincipled and slanderous manner, I'm not going to squabble about words with my comrades who defend my organization. Isn't that the way you also act - on a national scale?

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It is now my tum to ask some questions: 1. Why should Pablo, Frank, Germain and the other n 'followers of Pablo', i.e., 17 or 18 of the 23 members of the me unanimously elected by the 3rd we, comrades in whom you always had the fullest confidence, after having faithfully built the movement for many years, suddenly transform themselves into criminals who 'are working consciously and deliberately to liquidate the FI', i.e., into Stalinist agents and spies, for what else can be the meaning of that formula? 2. Is it true or isn't it true that the basic reason why your Plenum wrote the 'Open Letter', i.e., called publicly for a split of the FI, was the fact that you had become convinced that IS and me wouldn't approve the expulsion of the minority? Is it tolerable from a principled point of view to break with the International on such an issue? 3. If you really don't want to break with the FI, but only want to 'fight the Pablo regime', are you ready: (a) To participate in a we of our movement representing all the sections at the stand of the 3rd we, on the basis of the representation modus adopted at the 2nd and 3rd we or any other basis usual in the revolutionary movement and acceptable to both sides? (b) To declare at the beginning of that we, like we ourselves would do without hesitation, that you would abide by its decisions, regardless of the fact that your proposals would be adopted or not? (c) To accept an organizational compromise for reestablishing the unity of the world movement, e.g., the reunification of the British section and the recognition, both in France and the USA, of both groups as affiliated to the FI with certain forms of non-aggression agreements, based on a functional division of labor? (d) To call publicly (in forms adapted to security), on the basis of an agreement with points (a), (b) and (c), upon all sections of the FI to participate in the 4th we regularly convened by the regularly elected leading bodies of the movement (in which, if you wished, you could of course occupy the position you always occupied in the past), while keeping all your rights to defend your political views in the pre-Congress discussion, with the clear understanding that any public attack on the international leadership would be answered publicly by that body? To accept such proposals would have been of course normal procedure for all groups, tendencies, parties or individuals who recognize the principle of democratic centralism not only on a national but also on the international field. Allow me to repeat what I already wrote in my last letter on the basis of your

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friends' actions of the last months, I do not have much hope left as to your and their answer to these questions. Fraternally yours, E.Germain

.. •

To Germain

January 15, 1954 Dear Ernest, Your letter of December g was painful to read. I had hoped that a meeting of minds was possible. Instead, you have so far chosen to misunderstand, employ debaters' tricks and ignore most of what I wrote you. You evidently feel you must defend 'the International' against us, and this has led you to indefensible statements. I asked why you had signed your name to the November 15 IS Bureau letter containing numerous gross slanders against us, applied to our past as well as present course, when in your letter to me you said you did not consider our past course ever to have been unprincipled. In the December issue of the French Pabloite paper, which I had not seen when I wrote you, you claimed among other things that our minority represented 'more than a third of the members' and that they committed 'no public act of indiscipline'. Do you know how ridiculous this makes you appear here, where everyone knows they represented only 18 % ? Do you see why no one can give the slightest credence to your equally inflated figures about the British Pabloites? And don't you feel silly, writing there was 'no public act of indiscipline' at the very same time that Cochran, weeping on Shachtman's shoulder, publicly refutes you by explaining that his faction deliberately organized the boycott of our 25th Anniversary celebration? By the way, what do you think of this boycott? Why do you evade all mention of it? Are you, like the real Pabloites, an enemy of our 25-year struggle and all that it represents? If you had been in New York, would you have joined the boycott? Your answer to the question I asked you last time is, 'I'm not going to squabble about words with my comrades who defend my organization'. Does this mean that you will sign or write anything, no matter how far from the truth, just so long as it is conceived as a defense of the IS? What kind of defense is it, and what is being defended, that requires lies? How can I have confidence in what you write when you tell me in advance that you will not 'squabble about

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words' with slanderers because they are on your side, or because you are on theirs? How can I tell what part of what you write is actually your opinion of the facts, and what part is concession to your slanderous allies? Nevertheless, I want to try again to reach through to you - for your sake, for ours, for the sake of the International. You make a joke of my letter when you ask if I think the present situation is the result of 'nothing but a tragi-comedy of errors and misunderstandings'. No, what my letter tried to do in good faith was answer the charge that our course was unprincipled by reciting the events and the evolution of our thinking under their impact. What we reached was not a misunderstanding, but an understanding. An understanding (1) of the profound political differences that separate us from the Pablo faction, which are set forth in our Letter and to which I shall return. An understanding (2) of the new slogan, 'Junk the old Trotskyism', not as an expression of a desire to bring our program up to date, correct our errors and adjust our tactics to new needs (although that is how it was represented), but as an expression of a desire to junk Trotskyism itself as outmoded and to replace it with an opportunist orientation to Stalinism as the channel through which the revolution will pass everywhere in the world. And an understanding (3) of the necessity to determine who the real Trotskyists in this International are. You condemn us for openly publishing our Letter in which we broke politically with the Pablo faction, an act which you claim represents 'a break with the International'. The reasons why we published the Letter have already been stated by Cannon in the December 28 paper. What do you mean when you accuse us of 'a break with the International' by publishing a defense of orthodox Trotskyism against deliberate public attacks on it? Didn't Clarke publicly violate our program by forecasting the possible self-reform of the Soviet bureaucracy in the magazine behind the backs of its editorial board? Haven't the new Pabloite conceptions about Soviet development, to which we object, been published? Didn't the French Pabloites publicly defend the Stalinists against the criticism of the French Trotskyists of the majority in a public leaflet? Is it 'loyalty' to the International to defile its program and tradition in public, but 'a break with the International' to defend this program and this tradition in public? The members of the SWP don't think so, and no pontifical pronouncements, factional expulsions, excommunications or 'removals' will change our opinion. I agree that, as a general rule, internal disputes in our movement would perhaps better be discussed internally, although a public discussion is nothing new. We conducted a limited public discussion before the 1940 split in the SWP, and Trotsky did not hesitate to attack in the public press the capitulationist position of Roman Weil and others in the German section in 1932. Trotsky's polemic against

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Urbahns, in the formative stage of the International Left Opposition, was also published in The Militant. In any case, we will never agree to a one-sided rule whereby revisionists enjoy the right to attack the program in public and the orthodox have no right to defend it in public. And I urge you: Please don't pretend that the publication of the Letter marked a qualitative change in the relations between the IS and us. Because on November 15, before you had even heard of the existence of our Letter, the IS Bureau, writing to the leaderships of all sections, had already excommunicated us (and without even waiting to hear of the circumstances under which we had disciplined the organizers of the boycott, had already pledged to 'never permit the expulsions effected by Cannon'). Elaborating on 'the main and only fundamental difference which I see at the present stage of the fight: the overthrow of the principle of one World Party', you write many things about international discipline and democratic centralism that we would never quarrel with. But many of these things are also beside the point. I said we want to know who the Trotskyists in this International are. With Trotskyists we always have found and always will find agreement on organizational procedure. With Trotskyists we are willing and eager to discuss. But we want to be sure that they are Trotskyists, and not something else. Stalinists and apologists for Stalinism we will fight as enemies, not engage in discussion on the basis of democratic centralism. This is not a difference of nuance; it is the first condition of democratic centralism. (The American Pabloites understood this and that was why they refused to be bound by democratic centralism.) The selection is now taking place in the International. Far from having contempt for the majority of the International, as you charge, we have the greatest confidence that a decisive majority will understand the real issues and show themselves to be Trotskyists. I would make a second condition. When someone talks to us about democratic centralism, we want to make sure we are talking about the same thing. Tell me, do you think democratic centralism is possible internationally where an international leadership does not recognize and defend democratic centralism on a national scale? I don't believe it is, and I think this question is most pertinent to our discussion. Here we were in the SWP, contending with a minority that blatantly violated discipline in the name of a 'higher allegiance'. The Pabloite faction in England were doing the same thing at the same time. This, you will recall, was what happened first, before there was any disciplinary action against them before there was any letter. What, in your opinion, were we supposed to do - grit our teeth, smile and console ourselves with the merits of democratic centralism as applied internationally? Oh, you tell us, 'some organizational compromise

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could have easily been found at the eve of your last Plenum'. Really? Such as what? Without anyone else's help, we found the means for a truce at the May plenum. But it wasn't worth the paper it was written on as soon as the minority saw it could not survive a truce. Why should we have your faith in 'some organizational compromise' when we could see that the minority was driven by fundamental political pressure that made them feel we were incompatible? Does your conception of international democratic centralism require the leadership of a national party to permit it to be wrecked as the price of international democratic centralism? It's not our conception anyhow. As I say, the minority violated democratic centralism. Here then was an excellent opportunity for the IS to show how devoted it was to this principle. Did it do it? On the contrary, Pablo directly instigated and encouraged the deliberate violations. (You may not know the whole American story, but you certainly know that this was what happened in Britain.) Is that how you expect to create devotion to this principle on the international field? Instead of joining us in our defense of democratic centralism in our party, the Pabloite Is attacked us for bureaucratism and brutality and degeneracy and pledged that it would 'never' permit the violators of democratic centralism to be disciplined. And after that you expect this IS to be taken seriously when it preaches the necessity or democratic centralism on an international scale? I am not sure, because I don't know all your ideas on the subject, but I have the feeling that your views on the International suffer from a tendency to regard it as a sort of collective substitute for national parties. I know that is the real Pabloite conception; that is why the Pablo faction is so eager to break up the solid national cadres who assert independence of judgment. Without the International, in our view, there can be no national parties worthy of the name of Trotskyist. But that doesn't mean that the International can substitute for them, for their organic development, for their selection of a leadership that really represents them, for the experiences they must pass through if they are to be fit for their historic role. Against these truths, which must be accepted as the necessary basis for a healthy relationship between parties and International leadership, we are offered a caricature of Cannon's remarks, according to which the International must be a 'letter-box', exercising no discipline, having no common line. Will it really surprise you to learn that we reject this caricature. Don't you know, or have you forgotten, that we got along with the International for 25 years? At the same time we flatly reject the genuinely bureaucratic - to speak plainly, the Stalinist - conceptions and practices of Pablo, which enabled him to dispose of a critical majority in France by disposing of the majority of the party, and which supplied him with the gall to issue his ultimatum that we'd better abandon our revolutionary anti-Stalinist lines on Germany and the Soviet

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Union because they didn't conform to his private line, or else! We reject the caricature of Cannon's views and the tested reality of Pablo's views, and demand a healthy relationship between parties and International leadership, which will permit the parties to grow, and the International leadership, expressing the positions of the majority, to guide, coordinate and where necessary discipline, all this, of course, being possible only on the basis of a common general (that is, Trotskyist) line. On the basic point in your letter: You emphasize 'loyalty to the International ... as an established organization, with its established leadership and statutes', while our main emphasis is on loyalty to Trotskyism, that is, the program, the body of doctrine and the tradition that the International had up to and through the 3rd World Congress. Where we see fundamental political differences between ourselves and the Pablo faction, you see only differences of a 'tactical nature', none of which 'put a question mark on any of the basic principles of our estimation of Stalinism and the ussR'. That, in our opinion, is where you make the biggest mistake of all. You will end in a blind alley, totally unable to influence the development of this struggle in a revolutionary fashion, unless you probe the already visible differences to the bottom and take your stand on the basis of the political lines that are tearing the International apart, rather than on the basis of an organizational loyalty, and an essentially abstract organizational loyalty at that. I won't repeat what has already been written about these differences in our Letter, resolution and press. But I am forced to return to the German question when you say, 'I myself have failed to grasp till today the differences in approach to the Eastern German events'. (I believe you when you say this, but that amazes me all the more. Why don't you ask Pablo? He grasped it sufficiently to use the authority of his post - without any protest from other IS members - to try to bludgeon us into substituting his approach for our own. Instead of accusing us of 'inventing' differences, why don't you find out from Pablo why he regarded our differences on this issue so important that he felt he had to resort to the heavy hand to try to stifle our views?) I don't know what Pablo would tell you, but here is what we think: There was a fundamental difference between him and us on the omission from the IS manifesto of our demand for the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from East Germany in June. I know what you wrote me on November 15 - that it was omitted 'only because we wanted at that time to concentrate on the slogans the fighters in Berlin had used themselves (where no one had use that slogan and for good reasons! Did the people come out on the street in the February revolution with the slogan: Withdrawal of the Cossacks? When you are busy making a revolution, and not only writing about it, the winning of the troops wherever

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it is possible becomes task Number 1, not the deliberate provocation of these troops into hostile actions)'. Fundamentally this explanation strikes me as a lawyer's argument. (1) As I told you before, the evidence we have collected shows that the demand for the withdrawal of the troops was raised; but let that go - I will agree that it probably was not raised as widely as other demands. (2) But must the raising of such a demand necessarily constitute a provocation of the troops into hostile actions? Not necessarily; in fact, such demand, linked with appeals and acts of fraternization, etc., could have just the opposite effect and win the troops to friendly actions - it all depends on the way it's done. (3) Let's distinguish a little. There well might be situations in which the masses in the street could not raise such a demand, no matter how much they wanted to. But the IS statement was not written in the street. If it is true that the masses didn't raise this demand because they couldn't, then it all the more became the duty of a Trotskyist IS to express the demand for them, to voice it in their behalf, to use the occasion to drive home the lesson that the withdrawal of the occupation troops is an indispensable necessity for the successful completion of the revolution they had begun (I don't think your comparison of invading, occupying troops with Cossacks is a helpful one in this situation). (4) Don't say that the IS wanted to concentrate on the demands that the Berlin fighters had used themselves - say why it wanted to do only that. Since when are we constrained to limit ourselves only to those demands already raised by the masses - isn't that called tail-ending? (5) And finally, in support of my opinion that you have given us a lawyer's argument, I want to remind you that the IS statement was dated June 25 - more than a week after the Soviet troops had already engaged in hostile actions, that is, had saved the regime from almost certain overthrow by shooting down and jailing revolutionary workers. How could the omission of the demand in the IS statement on June 25 have had any effect in warding off the counter-revolutionary actions of the Soviet troops? 'But', you can say, 'even if this was a mistake, couldn't it be a mistake in tactics?' It could, and that was why we were slow to draw conclusions, and why I wrote to ask you about it last summer. But when we began to hear the arguments of the American Pabloites, we saw that it went far beyond tactical differences. For their basic point in support of the IS's omission was that to demand withdrawal of the Soviet troops from East Germany while imperialist troops remained in West Germany would be to play into the hands of imperialism. Ask yourself: ls that an expression of a mere tactical difference? Since the Soviet troops are the chief obstacle to the political revolution in East Germany, doesn't such a line of reasoning itself become an obstacle to that revolution? Doesn't it raise at least a question mark over our attitude to Stalinism, partic-

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ularly to our traditional positions that the way to defend the Soviet Union is by extending the revolution and that the defense of the Soviet Union is subordinate to the extension of the world revolution. Those who refuse to recognize such a line as a danger signal pointing to the growth of sentiments conciliatory to Stalinism will probably never recognize as a danger signal anything short of a proposal to dissolve the International. Now the rotten thing and the infuriating thing is that those who hold these ideas refuse to express them openly, confining them for the present to verbal discussion and private correspondence while they build a faction around them. And when we see what is reality at the bottom of their 'tactical' proposals and how much damage it is causing in terms of morale and when we want to bring the thing out into the open, we are met with evasion and duplicity and denial and you reproach us as users of the smear tactic for wanting to discuss what people 'don't write'. The procedure they follow is the infallible hallmark of revisionists: unable to present their full position at the start because then they could make no headway, they nibble away at things, putting out a feeler here and a feeler there, retreating when they have gone too far and exposed their real hand, refusing to discuss the real orientation behind their tactical proposals, furiously denying any intention of abandoning principles, and vilifying those who want to come to grips with them as sectarian, ossified, helpless in the face of changing reality, etc. You are wrong if you think the troops-withdrawal issue is the only important one involved in the dispute over Germany; the conception in the 1s statement that the bureaucracy can't stop half-way on the road of concessions is a wide open bridge to the theory of Deutscher. You are wrong when you say there is only 'one wrong sentence' in Clarke's article on Stalin's death. The only thing exceptional about that sentence, which mislabels the harmonious sharing of power between a section of the bureaucracy and the workers as 'political revolution', is that there Clarke slipped and let too much out of the bag. But the entire article is drenched with Deutscherism and could easily have been written by Deutscher if he were a member or our party and under the compulsion of unfolding his revision of Trotsky's analysis of Stalinism cautiously and step by step. I really am surprised that you didn't see that, and I urge you to re-read it, noting among other things the new terminology: Stalin, you see, may have been 'anti-revolutionary', but never, God forbid, must we say that he was counterrevolutionary because all the time he was an unwitting and blind instrument of the revolution, etc. And because we dared to differ from this article, Pablo condemned us as not expressing the Intemational's line. There was a time not too long ago when Pablo and Clarke both considered Deutscher the most adroit apologist for Stalinism; but that time is past, and they fight us because we don't

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want any concealed Deutscherism in our press or in the International. And it isn't Deutscher who has changed, I assure you. But, you say, you'll dissociate yourselves from any sharing of power ideas, you'll put back the sentence on the Soviet revolution dropped from the Transitional Program, you'll reaffirm that you really wanted the troops withdrawn from Germany - in short, you'll clear up all the 'misunderstandings' on these and other questions we have raised. Again, I don't question your sincerity. You want to do these things, and they may even be done. The Pablo faction is now up against the wall; they need all the help they can get from people with prestige as orthodox Trotskyists who are foolish enough to give it to them; tactically, it may serve their factional interests to retreat until the present crisis is eased for them; they may not only permit you to add or alter these sentences, they may even ask you to do so. But it won't solve anything because it will be at the expense of blurring actual differences, of covering up their real orientation. The Pabloites won't mind such a thing happening if it will help them to maintain their control over the International apparatus, because with that control they will be able to interpret as they see fit whatever resolutions are passed. But you would regret contributing to such an evasion as long as you lived. To lend yourself to such an operation would be shameful because it would obscure differences which you know exist even if you think them tactical - and when has the revolutionary movement ever been helped by the suppression of differences? That was the role played by Shachtman in 1939-40. Burnham was breaking with Marxism but Shachtman covered up for him, softened his sentences, helped him to conceal his departure in the interest of their factional alignment at least until the factional fight was over in our party; and that was the beginning of Shachtman s ruin as a revolutionist. We called Shachtman Burnham's advocate. I hope you won't serve as Pablo's advocate.

••

•

On a few other matters handled in your letter: I asked why you think the SWP leadership, whose principled conduct in the past you voluntarily affirmed, has now become unprincipled. The 1s Bureau letter in the French Pabloite paper of December, which I presume you endorsed, talks about our 'complete degeneration', resulting from our 'prolonged isolation from the masses and from the terrible pressure exerted on all social milieu in the United States by American imperialism preparing its counter-revolutionary war' and says our leaders are 'really adapting themselves to the atmosphere prevailing in the citadel of imperialism and camouflaging under "extreme left"

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language their own buckling under this reactionary pressure'. You yourself, in the same paper, write that our leadership 'has lost its principles under the pressure of the reactionary atmosphere imperialism imposes on its country'. (In your letter to me, in slightly more restrained fashion, you say that 'objectively this is a result of alien class pressure, without saying that your party has already succumbed to that pressure'.) As I said last time, you must do more than make statements, you must support them concretely. The only concrete attempt you make goes like this: The SWP has 'broken with the International' (to use your words) - ipso facto, it is and must be buckling to the reactionary pressure of imperialism. But I repeat: We have not broken with the International, we have no intention of letting anyone drive us away from the International; we are fighting its anti-Trotskyist faction precisely because we don't want to break with the International. There is a terrible pressure exerted on the revolutionary party in this country, and its results are extremely harmful. But you don't understand its results because you don't see how they manifest themselves; you have the thing upside down. How is the pressure manifested concretely? By a desire, an instinct, a hysterical drive to get out of the line of fire. That is, by a movement to get out of our party, which is branded subversive, hounded, persecuted, threatened with legal prosecution. Those who are buckling under the pressure feel uncomfortable in our party. They want the party to stop resisting the pressure - to discontinue activities that can result in casualties (in Michigan the Pabloites were bitter about our election campaign in 1952 because, according to their reasoning, 'they might not have gone after us under the Trucks Act if we had not been running an election campaign that forced us to their attention'). The last thing in the world they wanted was the line of the Third World Congress that in this country we should act as an independent revolutionary party. And when they see that they can't persuade our party to try to escape persecution by playing dead (that's their concept of 'propaganda activity'), then they want to get out of the party. Leaving our party also has certain attractions for opportunist elements - in the unions: It is dangerous for party members to run for union office today because if elected they run the risk of being indicted and jailed for perjury under the Taft-Hartley Act, which requires an oath that you do not belong to any 'subversive' organizations. Those who leave the party and thus can swear that they don't belong to any group on the 'subversive' list can run freely for union office, regain a position of respectability in the eyes of the union bureaucracy, etc. In other words, the way in which buckling under the pressure manifests itself is by a tendency to find pretexts to get out of this party, membership in which entails serious risks. But what about the International? Since we are not form-

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ally affiliated to it anyhow, our relation to the International does not and cannot play the same kind of role in this process I have described. Whether or not we actually do break with the International (and not merely with the Pablo faction) does not affect the status of the SWP on the 'subversive' list because the SWP remains on it and the International does not. That is why I say your easy little formula stands everything on its head. It is the Pabloites here who have buckled under the pressure and are driven by a desire to duck, not we. Your abstract explanation about us applies to them perfectly in the concrete. If you really believe what you have written, you must think it over again in the light of the Pabloites' uncontrollable frenzy to get out of our party as soon as possible and under any pretext. Surely their sigh of relief as they left us must have been audible over the Atlantic. Determined to shut your eyes to the political differences that motivate our conduct, you seek another explanation. Only one has suggested itself to you, and you recur to it at least nine times in your letter. Here is how I would summarize your explanation: We never would recognize any discipline in the International when we happened to be in a minority; we denied the IS the right to reach its own, conclusions on matters concerning the SWP; what we wanted was a clique in the IS that would obediently raise its hands whenever Cannon gave the signal. These are hypotheses, and nothing else; you know very well that nothing ever happened in the past 25 years to give them the slightest shred of confirmation. Now, however, you contend that they are supported and even proved by one thing: We resolved to put through a brutal and bureaucratic expulsion of the minority and demanded that the IS passively accept it, and when we saw that that was not forthcoming, we decided to 'break with the FI', wrote the Letter in order to Justify' the break politically, etc. According to this conception, everything would have remained harmonious if only the IS had acquiesced in the alleged bureaucratic expulsion. But first we must ask: Why should the SWP leadership want to expel the minority, bureaucratically or otherwise? What reason could they have? Merely because the minority expressed differences? But that had never happened before in our party.... How could the leaders justify a bureaucratic expulsion to the members, who you admit have not been trained in such a school? What would the leaders have to gain from such an expulsion when everyone understood that the 18% minority could not hope to win the party leadership for a long, long time, if ever? Your entire explanation, you see, rests on one assumption - that a bureaucratic expulsion, or an expulsion of any kind, was wanted and needed by the leadership so badly that everything else must be subordinated to it. But this assumption had no validity.

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The swp leadership had neither the need nor the desire to expel the minority - it had contained them, contained them so successfully that the minority began to disintegrate right after the May plenum and would have disintegrated further if the minority leaders had not resumed all-out factional warfare in order to whip up and hold together their followers. You say the May truce could not work; your proof - [there was] already information ... 'from Cannon'. This is not true. He had no such information, and neither did anyone else. We regarded the May truce as workable, and expected it to work if the minority wanted it to work and if Pablo did not encourage it to wreck the truce. We told the party we expected it to work. We wrote it in the press. Do you think the members of our party are so blind that such a double game can be played on them? No, you've got it all wrong, as I explained at some length in my last letter. We didn't want to expel them, we did everything we could to keep them in the party on the basis of democratic centralism. If they had wanted to remain in the party, nothing could have removed them. They wanted to get out and away, and there was nothing we could do to prevent them from going except to make an unconditional surrender and a shambles of our party. So your simple explanation falls to the ground. It explains nothing because it evades the question of why the minority left our party, of what pressure was driving them. It substitutes psychological speculation for political and organizational analysis. It answers no questions and raises many. Either your previous estimate of our party was completely wrong, or your present one [is wrong]. The truth is that we were not interested in expelling the minority, but in keeping them in the party, if possible. That this was not possible. That we were not greatly concerned about what the IS thought about the minority split because we knew that no one claiming to speak in behalf of democratic centralism could possibly get away with a defense of their provocations. That our opposition to the Pablo line, expressed in the Letter and resolution, had crystallized before the minority's boycott action and before our decision to take disciplinary steps against them. That we were determined to break with Pablo and go to the International with our appeal for his removal even if the minority had remained in the party. Believe this or not, as you please. But don't deceive yourself into thinking that your explanation rests on anything but thin air. It has no more foundation in reality than the American minority's charge that the SWP leadership has suddenly become 'mad', 'irrational' and 'senile', which they offered in our fight to explain so many otherwise unexplainable things. But the charges against Pablo that I outlined to you last time are based on solid fact: He did prepare and was on the verge of expelling you and others before the Third World Congress because you dared to resist the orientation that was evidently at the bottom

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of his proposals for that Congress. He did succeed in bureaucratically getting rid of the overwhelming majority of the French party. He did foment a split in the British party by directing his faction to ignore its discipline and by trying to oust the majority leadership without having even the feeble pretext that is employed against us. He did encourage and support the American minority in their violations of discipline that could only end in split. These are not hypotheses, conjectures or 'misunderstandings' - they are facts, facts with the most sinister implications for the future of the International. How much longer are you going to refuse to look them in the face? How much longer are you going to tell yourself that such acts are motivated by merely tactical differences? You have made some dire predictions about what going to happen to us. I want to touch on only one of the points you raise - our attitude to the French and Chinese parties. For over two years the Pabloites here (and I imagine elsewhere) have made them the whipping boys, the bogeymen and the horrible examples of what we would become if we didn't follow Pablo's course without deviation. The French were denounced as incorrigible Stalinophobes, capitulators to imperialism and hopeless sectarians who refused to participate in the real mass movement. The Chinese were condemned and ridiculed as 'refugees from a revolution', including, I presume, those who were murdered at their posts inside China. Whenever anyone would say anything about the need for an independent party, the answer hurled at him was: 'Look at China. Wasn't the revolution made there without our party? Keep on talking that nonsense about the independence of the party and you will end up the way the Chinese did, unable and unwilling to see the revolution before your eyes, blinded by old schema, running away from the revolution'. When someone would question the correctness of a major orientation to American Stalinism, he would get hit over the head with the French example of 'Stalinophobia', etc. At first we didn't know what to make of all this. But we began to catch on. Real life helped us. We watched the French closely for evidences of Stalinophobia as our own internal fight developed. We never found any. The policies followed by the two groups in the French general strike clinched the matter for us. In that test the majority unquestionably acted as revolutionists, which is more than could be said for the Pabloites. Whether or not they actually have shown traces of sectarianism, which is harder to detect from afar than Stalinophobia, two things are sure: this is a matter on which we will no longer be content to take Pablo's word; and the French majority have shown themselves to be Trotskyists, and therefore people with whom we can discuss and work. Similarly with the Chinese. That they made errors during the revolution we know; these were errors that were at the time shared to one degree or another by everyone else

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in the International, including those who now try to make them scapegoats for our common errors. But we also know now that the claim that they have refused to recognize the Chinese reality or learn from past errors is a lie. Their letter of last January, which we never saw until a few months ago because Pablo suppressed it and this was not the least, scandalous of his bureaucratic crimes - convincingly refutes this lie. They have recognized and adjusted themselves to reality, they have adopted a generally correct attitude to the government and the c P. We can work with them too, and not on the basis of any wrong position on the Chinese question, which they have corrected and are correcting. So we are no longer impressed by horror tales slanderously directed against the French and Chinese comrades, or predictions that collaboration with them will inevitably drive us to fall into errors that they have already corrected or never actually committed in the first place. And we're not going to tolerate any longer the Pabloite campaign to discredit, isolate and excommunicate them. While we're on the subject of predictions, maybe you'd better devote some thought to the future of the Pablo faction and your relations to it. First of course there will be a period during which the undecided will be wooed, when the Pabloites may find it imperative to blur the distinctions, protest their orthodoxy and screen the course they are contemplating. But that will be only an interim period. When the dust has settled and all the anti-Pabloites have been expelled, what will there be to restrain them? They will be indisputable masters in whatever is left of the Pabloite house; their need for you will be diminished; freed of the restraints imposed by the presence of the orthodox wing of the International, there will be nothing to stop them from proceeding at a greatly accelerated pace along their opportunist, impressionist road toward Stalinism. You know Ceylon: if you want an image of the future of the Pablo faction, look at what happened to both the groups that broke with the Ceylon party after they were released from the pressure of the real Trotskyists. And make no mistake - at best you will be a captive, and sooner or later an unwelcome one, because these people will want nothing to do with those who are unwilling to accompany them all the way down the road of the junking of Trotskyism .

•• • At the end of your letter, you ask some questions about our readiness to accept 'an organizational compromise for reestablishing the unity of the world movement', which, if I understand it correctly, is aimed at ending or restricting the public struggle that is going on between the two factions in the International. It seems to me, however, that such proposals should be addressed first of all

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not to us, but to those who started the public struggle. If you are serious about these proposals, are you willing to and will you: 1. Demand that the Pablo faction discontinue all public announcements of political positions not authorized by orthodox doctrine and previous congresses, and submit their revisions of such positions for discussion in the internal bulletin? 2. Demand that they cancel all summary expulsions and 'removals' of elected leaders of the national sections? Don't you recognize that these are necessary conditions for the consideration of your proposals, especially since it was the Pablo faction that started the 'expulsion' game? Without these conditions your proposals cannot fail to have the appearance of an unworthy maneuver. You have made important contributions to the movement, which we all have valued greatly. But now you are at a crossroads - or rather, you have already taken a first step down a road that will be fatal for you as a revolutionist. I urge you: Reconsider what has happened. Subordinate all subjective considerations. Rid yourself of all fetishistic conceptions about the International. Restudy the political differences, and where they lead. Recognize that a historic selection, overriding all secondary issues, is now taking place in the International. I earnestly hope that you will take your place on the side of those who want it to remain a Trotskyist International, and against those whose political and theoretical disorientation is driving them inexorably to conciliation with Stalinism and other alien forces. If you do, we will be ready to discuss a common line of action with you. Organizational accommodations are not now, and never have been, a primary consideration for us. What we are concerned with, first of all and above all, is political agreement. Comradely, George Breitman

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781

The Bolivian Revolution and the Fight Against Revisionism (Abridged, 1954) Sam Ryan

For Pablo the historical mission of the Fourth International has lost all meaning. 45 The 'objective revolutionary process' under the aegis of the Kremlin, allied with the masses, is taking its place very well indeed. That is why he is mercilessly bent upon liquidating the Trotskyist forces, under the pretext of integrating them into the 'mass movement of the masses as it exists'. The salvation of the Fourth International imperatively demands the immediate eviction of the liquidationist leadership. A democratic discussion must then be opened within the world-wide Trotskyist movement on all the problems left suspended, befogged, or falsified by the Pablist leadership during three years. Within this framework, it will be indispensable for the health of the International that the greatest self-criticism be carried through on all phases and causes of the development of the Pablist gangrene . ... these ideas and this liquidationist tactic were subsequently extended to the reformist parties and to all mass organizations under petty bourgeois leadership (the Bolivian MNR, the Peronist movement in Argentina, the Ibanist in Chile, etc.... ) - From International Committee Bulletin No.

1

•• •

This article is intended as a contribution to the discussion on the 'development of the Pablist gangrene'. At the same time it is also intended as a contribution

45

Ryan1954

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to the struggle against Pabloism. In my opinion such a discussion, long overdue, is an indispensable part of the struggle and must not be postponed any longer; that one of the major victories of Pabloism is precisely the fact that problems of major theoretical and practical importance have been 'left suspended, befogged, or falsified'. The 'greatest criticism', which is indeed necessary, will show that Pablo's greatest help in betraying Marxism came in the silence and the acquiescence of the 'orthodox Trotskyists'. One of the crimes of revisionism during the past two years is the betrayal of the Bolivian revolution. That the Bolivian revolution has indeed been betrayed should be plain for all to see. Last November the Bolivian Trotskyist party, the POR, was publishing a weekly newspaper, Lucha Obrera. For a working-class party in a tiny, backward country with a high rate of illiteracy this was a tremendous achievement, an indication of powerful mass support. In December Lucha Obrera was suppressed by the government, with hardly any resistance. There has been no struggle since then important enough to be reported in the paper here. This fact is itself a very significant piece of news. Marxism is a science. That is to say, its generalizations are not God-given imperatives but the distillation of past events. And the distinguishing characteristic of all science is not simply that it yields true generalizations (more correctly, approximations of the truth) but that it yields generalizations which can be tested in terms of material reality. To fail to examine any important event in its relation to Marxist theory is to tum Marxism into a dogma, with truths that are given once for all. And once Marxism is turned into a dogma, it is both useless and unnecessary for the solution of practical problems. What events, above all others, demand investigation by Marxists? If Marxism be regarded not as a contemplative exercise but as a guide to action, the answer springs to mind immediately. Revolution is the supreme test of theory. Revolution strips away all pretense, lays bare the real class character of all parties, all programs. No brand of revisionism can pose as Marxism in time of revolution; no Marxist can ignore a revolution. It is only logical to expect that close attention should be paid to the Bolivian revolution, for more than one reason. Not only is it a test of theory and practice, especially in view of the fact that a Trotskyist party is playing an important role; it takes place under the very walls of the bastion of world reaction. But the Bolivian revolution is now more than two years old, and there has been no discussion on this important event. Only two discussion articles have appeared, both by the present writer. And, though both articles were sharply critical, they have elicited no reply. Even the news from Bolivia has been very meager. Pablo, the advocate of a centralized international, has not even conducted a decent letter-box!

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What a crushing answer Pablo would have had to the charges of revisionism! 'Can revisionists pursue a revolutionary policy in the very course of a revolution?' But Pablo chose not to make this reply, and this is a clear mark of his revisionism. Revisionists prefer to act rather than explain; the longer they can keep silent the longer they can mislead revolutionists. And Pablo was left in peace to do his work of betrayal. That it is Pabloism which is the inspiration for the line of the POR is easy to prove. The POR's characterization of the MNR and of the MNR government as 'petty-bourgeois', its prognosis of the possibility of the reform of the government, its stubborn refusal to make any criticism of the treacherous and anti-revolutionary line of the labor leaders, and its complete silence on Stalinism - these come not from the arsenal of Marxism but of revisionism.

Revolution by Appointment

At its tenth national conference, held injune, 1953, the POR adopted a political resolution which, though full of admirable Trotskyist phrases, contain a few paragraphs which are sufficient to tum the whole document into an exercise in revisionism. This resolution (Etapa Actual de la Revolution yTareas del POR ['The Present Stage of the Revolution and the Tasks of the POR']) has been published in the Mexican publication, Que Hacer? but has not been translated into English. 'The petty-bourgeois government', says the resolution, '... acquires a transitory and Bonapartist character ... Submitting to the powerful pressure of the proletariat as well as of imperialism, it vacillates constantly between the two extremes. From this situation follows the twofold possibility for the development of the present government. If the masses with a new impulse decide the political defeat of the right wing by the left, the possibility is opened that the government will transform itself to a stage antecedent to the workers and peasants government (se abre la possibilidad de que el gobiemo, se transforms en etapa previa del gobierno obrera-campesino ). This process would be accompanied by a whole series of measures of a revolutionary character, such as the spread of nationalizations, the agrarian revolution, etc. If the right wing with the aid of imperialism bars the governmental scene to its adversaries, it will have consolidated a petty-bourgeois government in the service of the "Rosca" and of finance capital'. Two paragraphs further we read:

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The right wing is definitely compromised with landlord and imperialist reaction and therefore we cannot simply disregard the possibility of a future split with the left wing. Complete predominance of this faction would profoundly alter the character of the MNR and permit it to move closer to the POR. Only under such conditions could we speak of a possible coalition government of the POR and the MNR which would be a form of the realization of the formula 'workers and peasants government', which in tum would constitute the transitional stage toward the dictatorship of the proletariat. A bonapartist regime can appear to be only between the classes to people who have forgotten the class nature of the state. All governments have always been, for Marxists, the instruments of the ruling class, incapable of being reformed, in their class nature, by any amount of pressure. Bonapartism is simply a form which a bourgeois or a proletarian regime assumes under certain conditions. The POR was not the first to forget that there can be neither an in-between regime nor the reform of a regime. It was the Third World Congress, with its 'intermediate status' of the buffer 'countries', and the me with its characterization of the Mao regime in China as neither a bourgeois nor a workers state, but an in-between, a 'workers and peasants government'. A bonapartist regime is a dictatorial regime, rule by an arbiter. Marxists have never favored this form of rule; they always promote the intervention of the masses in politics. Thus, the Bolsheviks demanded a constituent assembly elected by universal suffrage to replace the bonapartist rule of Kerensky. The demand for democratic elections is one of the foundation-stones in the Trotskyist program for the revolution in backward countries. This slogan is certainly not a 'putschist' one; it can be raised by - it is most suitable to - a revolutionary party which is not yet in a position to take power. And raising this demand is certainly not incompatible with giving defense to the government against counter-revolutionary attempts.

Yet nowhere in the whole resolution of the POR is the demand for elections raised! And this despite the fact that the present government was elected five years ago, and a military coup and a revolution have occurred since then. There is no mention, even of the existence of an elected legislature or of the desire to elect a new one. There is no mention ofthe question ofpopular elections. The PO R is obviously satisfied with the present bonapartist government; is convinced of its capability of being transformed, step by step, into a workers government. In the light of the refusal of the POR to demand general elections, what is the significance of the slogan it raises: 'Complete control of the State by the Left wing of the MNR'? How does it expect this to come about? Naturally, through

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appointment by the Bonaparte, Paz Estenssoro. This is not a mere deduction. This is actually what the POR proposed. In August, 1953, a cabinet crisis erupted, a division between the right and left wings in the government on the question of division of the landed estates. In a situation like that, with the peasant movement on the upsurge, it is obvious what a Trotskyist party should propose: Resignation of the government, including the president; national elections of a president and a congress; the left wing of the MNR should run independent candidates, including a candidate for president; the POR should give critical support to the campaign of the left wing and raise the slogan: the Left Wing to power. The POR did not demand general elections; it did not demand that the masses be allowed to settle the disuse within the government. It proposed that the Left wing be gtven 'power' by appointment by President Paz Estenssoro. In No. 43 (August 23rd, 1953) of Lucha Obrera, we read the following touching appeal to the Bonaparte of the bonapartist government: To the revolutionaries, the conduct of the President appears ambiguous and we believe that it indicates the intention to save some right-wing positions undermined by the rising pressure of the masses. Granted that a Chief of State has responsibilities, but he has these before the people. In reality it is the toilers who alone have the right to judge the acts of the government especially since it is the working class which with its sacrifices put him in Power. If these masses, who are the sole support of the President, out of their class instinct, out of distrust of the right wing, appeal and demand that men emerging from their ranks be put into the cabinet, replacing the elements linked to reaction, there would exist no grounds for denying them this right. And if Paz Estenssoro respects his responsibilities before history, he is motivated primarily by a desire to respect the will of the people and carry out the aspirations of the toilers, organizing a cabinet composed exclusively of men of the left of his party. Would such a 'labor' cabinet make any difference in the character of the government? Not the slightest. It would make no more difference than the 'labor' cabinets of the Spanish Loyalist government, or the 'labor' cabinet of Kerensky. It would mean as little as a cabinet appointed by Eisenhower or Truman composed not of 'nine millionaires and one plumber' but of 'ten plumbers'. A 'labor cabinet' appointed by Paz Estenssoro would be responsible not to a legislative body elected by universal suffrage, as in England or France, but to a supreme ruler responsible to no one but his class. Such a cabinet would not be the res-

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ult of a break of the labor leaders with the capitalist class. On the contrary, it would make them the official representatives of this class.

What ls a Petty-Bourgeois Party?

It is now possible to see what the P0R means by characterizing the MNR as a 'petty-bourgeois' party and the MNR government as a petty-bourgeois government. All the literature of the PO Ris very consistent in this; the MN Rand its government are never called anything but petty-bourgeois. Far from being merely a terminological question (petty-bourgeois means bourgeois, I have been told by a defender of the P0R line - orally, of course), this is a formulation that conceals the rejection ofTrotskyism in theory and the betrayal of the revolution in practice. If politics is concentrated economics, then political parties are the expression of economic interests. But the dominant fact in present-day society is the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Political parties, therefore, are, and cannot help but be, expressions of and instruments in the class struggle. They serve the interests of either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. This is what gives them their class character. Not their social composition, not the composition of their leadership, but which of the two major classes they serve. This is true in the backward countries as well as in the advanced. There are parties which Marxists call petty-bourgeois - the social-democratic and labor parties. We use this term by convention; not because these parties serve the interests of the petty bourgeoisie - the petty bourgeoisie has no independent class interests - but because these parties are in a certain sense between the classes. They speak for socialism and the working class but they act for capitalism and the bourgeoisie. The petty-bourgeois parties are largely or predominantly proletarian in composition and bourgeois by political character. To prove this it is sufficient to ask whether the class nature of any government has ever been changed by the accession to office of a petty-bourgeois party. The victory of the British Labor Party, for example, did not change the character of the government from bourgeois to petty-bourgeois. The MNR is not a petty-bourgeois party in this sense. It is not a labor party; it does not claim to represent the working class or advocate socialism. Its program is typical of a bourgeois nationalist party in a backward country. It claims to speak for all the people; it is for peace and prosperity. It is the conception of the P0R that since native capital is very weak and very reactionary (bound up with imperialism), and since the MNR is trying to accomplish the bourgeois

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national revolution but is not a working-class party, therefore it represents the petty bourgeoisie and is a petty-bourgeois party. To find the precedent for such a conception of a petty-bourgeois party - a party which represents the petty bourgeoisie and fights against the bourgeoisie for the bourgeois revolution - we have to go back to the pre-October Bolshevik writings. This is the conception put forth by Lenin in 1903 as a prognosis for the Russian revolution. The Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry, according to Lenin, would be headed by a peasant party and supported, perhaps in the form of a coalition government, by the proletarian party. In justice to Lenin it must be added that he did not conceive of such a government as an in-between or 'petty-bourgeois' government, but as one which would stay within the bounds of capitalism, removing the vestiges of feudalism, building capitalism, and thereby strengthening the capitalist class. This was to be a transitional government, not one of transition to socialism, but of transition from feudalism to the bourgeois democratic republic. Lenin's April Theses and then the October revolution mark the definitive rejection of the conception of a petty-bourgeois party, a party which is neither proletarian nor bourgeois. Thereafter all Marxists have accepted the theory of Permanent Revolution, put forth by Trotsky in 1905. According to this theory, the government which carries out the bourgeois revolution cannot stay within the bounds of capitalism; it must begin the socialist transformation. But this government cannot be 'a government of a peasant' or a 'petty-bourgeois' party; it must be a government animated by the party of the proletariat. Stalin betrayed the second Chinese revolution using as a pretext for his Menshevik policies a vulgarization of Lenin's conception of the Democratic Dictatorship. It is not without significance that Mike Bartell, a leading American Pabloite, defended the line of the POR ( orally, of course) by maintaining that Lenin's theory of the Democratic Dictatorship had not been completely invalidated. Nor that Murray Weiss, in defending the Pabloite position on the in-between character of the Mao government (orally, of course) seized on what he asserted was Lenin's belief, in 1903, on the possibility of a petty-bourgeois, transitional government. The PO R, while claiming to support the theory of Permanent Revolution, believes that a 'petty-bourgeois' party can be reformed and its government become a workers and farmers government, 'the transitional stage toward the dictatorship of the Proletariat'. 'The zig-zag line between imperialism and the proletariat which characterizes the conduct of the government', says the POR in its resolution, 'does not permit it to plan its actions and causes it to fall into a formless empiricism, suited to giving isolated and improvised answers to problems as they present themselves. Thus the observer discovers that the government policy is charac-

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terized by lack of consistency and the thought of the leaders by total absence of coherence and a unified doctrine'. This is, of course, a characteristic of all petty-bourgeois and bourgeois thought. ls it, then, the chief characteristic of the activities of a 'petty-bourgeois' government? No. The activities of the petty-bourgeois politicians, however inconsistent they may appear to themselves and to others, have a consistency which scientists can uncover. They are governed by law just as completely as are the actions of physical bodies or chemical elements, which have no thoughts whatever. Marxists can see the consistency in the seemingly inconsistent actions of the petty-bourgeois politicians. Marxists can see that, however they view themselves, they actually serve the interests of the bourgeoisie.

The Real Question of Power

The conception that the MNR and its government are petty-bourgeois is the betrayal of the Bolivian revolution. It implies that the MNR and its government are not fundamentally the enemy of the working class, that they may be reformed. Not to warn the working class that this government will smash it when it can is to leave the workers politically disarmed and helpless, a sitting duck whenever the enemy is ready to strike. How can we know the character of the MNR? First of all, we can study its past, especially when it held state power. The MNR of Paz Estenssoro is the MNR of Villaroel. Estenssoro was Villaroel's vice-president. Villaroel suppressed the working class, executed protesting students. He was hanged from a lamp-post in an uprising led partly by the Stalinists. The MNR was so exposed as an enemy of the working class that in the 1949 elections Juan Lechin, head of the Miners Federation, refused its nomination for vice-president and instead made an electoral bloc with the POR. This election showed that the MNR, although it got a majority of the votes, was already discredited with the vanguard of the proletariat. The Trotskyist and the Miners Federation each elected four deputies. Then came a three-year military dictatorship, which naturally strengthened democratic illusions among the masses. Yet during the April 1952 revolution an incident took place which indicated that the MNR did not have the confidence of the working class. The MNR appealed to the workers for support in the uprising. The textile workers demanded as a condition for their support that two trade union leaders be accepted into the new government. The demand was granted and the workers supported the uprising. Guillermo Lora, who gave these details in an interview which was printed in the paper in May 1952, did

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not say whether the PO R supported this demand; but the fact that the PO R has never criticized the presence of the labor leaders in the cabinet indicates that it did. In the course of the uprising the army and police were disarmed. The workers, led by Lechin and the POR, possessed ten thousand rifles and machineguns, all the arms in the country. What did the government do? It proceeded to reorganize the army and police force and to rearm them with new and more modem weapons. Then it began slowly and cautiously to take steps toward disarming the proletariat. And this is the measure ofits bourgeois character. The state is armed force in the service of the ruling class. To allow the government to rebuild the special bodies of armed men means to put the fate of the revolution in the hands of the bourgeoisie, its mortal enemy. Only by keeping their fate in their own hands, by preventing the rebuilding of the special bodies of armed men, by maintaining the state as the people in arms, can the working class safeguard itself and its revolution. The POR should have warned that those who rebuild the police force and army are preparing civil war against the workers and peasants. This is not the same as proposing the overthrow of the MNR government. But it is an exposure of its bourgeois character: if the MNR were truly for the workers and peasants, if it were going to carry through the revolution, it had no need of special bodies of armed men, it could base itself on the people in arms. Its 'betrayal' (not really a betrayal, since it only acted in accordance with its real class character) dates from the moment it began to reestablish the army and police - that is, from the moment it assumed power. The betrayal of Lechin and the labor leaders dates from their failure to oppose the rebuilding of the bourgeois state. The POR did not expose the bourgeois nature of the government; it did not criticize the betrayal by the labor leaders. It completely overlooked the question of the rebuilding of the armed forces of the class enemy. In the aforementioned political resolution of the Tenth National Conference there is not one word on this question, not one warning against the rebuilding of the counterrevolutionary army and police force; Literally not one word on the military question as the real question ofpower. The POR obviously believes that questions of power are decided not by armed force but by shifts and maneuvers in the top circles of the government. The Trotskyist transitional program is totally ignored. And this program was worked out precisely for a revolutionary situation, such as exists in Bolivia. Following this program, the POR should have demanded that the defense of the country and of internal order be entrusted not to special bodies of armed men, but the workers militia, that these be armed by the government with the most modem weapons, including heavy ones, and trained under the control

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of the workers and peasants organizations; and that the officers be chosen by the workers and peasants. There is no hint of these demands in the political resolution nor in all 1953 issues of Lucha Obrera. Lucha Obrera cannot, however, completely ignore the military question; and what it says is a damning supplement to its refusal to recognize the transitional program. By August 1953, the government had gone so far as to set up a military academy, to train an officer caste for its counter-revolutionary army. No. 43 of Lucha Obrera (the same issue which carried the touching appeal to the president) protested in an article headed: 'Military Academy, Danger to the Revolution'. 'The reactionary right wing', says the article, 'wishes desperately to create an armed force in which it can support itself against the advance of the unions. This is the mission assigned to the reopened military academy which will be a den of counter-revolution for the petty-bourgeois militarists. The only force which can destroy the counter-revolutionary conspiracy is constituted by the armed masses'. 'Undoubtedly', continues the article, 'the Revolution will achieve the building of a regular Army, but this will occur when the workers and peasants organize their own government, without any subterfuge permitting counterrevolutionary infiltration. The class feeling of the toilers should not permit the organization of any military force while the whole power is not in their hands. Only a Workers and Peasants Government can organize a true proletarian and revolutionary military force. In the meantime, it is an inescapable revolutionary duty to strengthen the trade union militias in each factory, each mine, and prepare them for whatever repressions which will utilize as their instrument the military academy'. Here is the opening renunciation of the transitional program, of the proletarian military policy. This is a completely unrealistic and unworkable policy, one which absolutely cannot be carried out by the Party, and is incapable of convincing anyone. We should we not permit the government to organize any military while the whole power is not in our hands? Who and what, then, will defend the country in case Yankee imperialism succeeds in provoking a military attack by one of its satellites? A standing army is absolutely necessary. The trade union militias are not sufficient. No one can be convinced, least of all the revolutionary militants, that there could be no army 'in the meantime'. That is why the government is able to win such an easy political victory and build up its army (a counter-revolutionary army) without any opposition. Because a concrete alternative to a counter-revolutionary army cannot be no army, as the POR advocates, but a revolutionary army. And there is no reason in the world why this alternative has to wait 'until all the power is in our hands'. If enough mass pressure can be brought to force the government to build such a revolu-

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tionary army (by arming and training the workers under trade union control) then the power will be in our hands. If, as is infinitely more likely, the government resists all such pressure, its counter-revolutionary character is exposed and all the necessity for its overthrow made much more clear. That is what the transitional program is for. The POR, instead of posing the realistic alternative of the transitional program, is going to wait until 'all the power is in our hands', by appointment of the very president responsible for rebuilding the counter-revolutionary army. This is the policy of watching quietly while the axe is being sharpened and then waiting for it to fall.

Innocents Taken Unaware

Who, then, is responsible for the betrayal of the revolution? Who is responsible for the fact that the workers and peasants have sunk into apathy. The MN R simply carries out its appointed task - to save capitalism in Bolivia. The labor leaders have collaborated fully in saving capitalism. They entered the government at the beginning and have remained in it ever since. They gave silent consent to the rebuilding of the counter-evolutionary armed forces and to the suppression of the POR. They allowed the workers' militia to fall into decay, as was shown in the fascist insurrection of November 9, 1953. The Falange, a comparatively small group led by officers of Paz Estenssoro's army, was able to seize Cochabamba, second city of Bolivia and center of the peasant movement, and hold it for six hours before the militias could mobilize in sufficient force to drive them out, The POR has never criticized the labor leaders for entering or remaining in the cabinet. It has never criticized them for their silence on the rebuilding ofthe counterrevolution. It does not even criticize them for their silence ofthe suppression ofLucha Obrera. Guillermo Lora, writing in the March issue of Que Hacer?, complains that the MNR is betraying the aspirations of the masses. The betrayal, according to Lora, consists in the fact that the government is holding back the agrarian revolution, is reversing the nationalizations, has unloaded the burden of the economic crisis on the backs of the workers and peasants, has bureaucratized the COB, the trade union center. It is noteworthy that Lora does not even mention the suppression of Lucha Obrera! This, apparently, is as unimportant to him as is the suppression of the Chinese Trotskyists to Pablo and Germain. Lora is consistent in accusing the MNR of betrayal, since he expected better of it. But who and what made this betrayal possible? Without the support

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of the labor leaders, Paz Estenssoro could not have succeeded in his counterrevolutionary role. Lora does not mention that the labor leaders remain in the cabinet to this day. Lora, of course, claims to be superior in perspicacity to the average worker. 'For the bulk of the militants (of the MNR)', he writes, 'and for many other people, the year 1954 will be the year of betrayal. We speak of the betrayal by the petty-bourgeois leadership of the aspirations of the masses. For us it will be the year of the verification of our theoretical conclusions on the capability of a petty bourgeois party to carry out revolutionary and anti-imperialist tasks'. And the POR did indeed state that the petty-bourgeois party cannot carry out the revolution, that it will be overthrown by the left or by the right. But the POR also made precisely the opposite prediction, as has been shown above. This method has nothing in common with Marxist prognosis and is useful only to revisionists to bolster their claims to infallibility. The prognosis that the MNR would suppress the working class and its party was not made by the POR, because the POR has never regarded the MNR as a class enemy. The 'prediction' of the POR which has, according to Lora, been verified, was completely useless in preparing it or its followers for a struggle against the MNR. Such a struggle, in fact, was characterized by Lora in his interview as 'hysteria'. 'One cannot exclude the possibility', said Lora in his interview, 'that the right wing of the government, faced with the sharpening of the struggle against it, will ally itself with imperialism to crush the so-called 'Communist' danger'. In a letter commenting on Lora's interview (Internal Bulletin, June 1952) I wrote as follows: One thing does appear clearly: Comrade Lora does not regard this government as an enemy of the working class and of the POR. This formulation is wrong, very wrong! This is an error which, if it actually represents the position of the POR, can have tragic consequences for the very physical existence of the cadres of the Bolivian Trotskyist party. This is the warning the leaders of the POR must give the working class and above all its own supporters: 'We must expect with absolute certainty (not merely "not exclude the possibility") that the government (not merely its right wing) will ally itself with imperialism and try to crush the mass movement and first of all its vanguard, the POR'. In the same letter: 'I think it is incontestable that the present Bolivian government is a bourgeois government (I didn't dream that anyone would contest it!) whose task and aim are to defend by all means available to it the interests of the

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bourgeoisie and of imperialism. It will, if it can, harness and disarm the working class, smash its revolutionary vanguard, and rebuild the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which has been shaken and not destroyed by the first phase of the revolution. This government is therefore the deadly enemy of the workers and peasants and of the Marxist party'. And one more: 'Lechin's is a treacherous, an undependable friendship. Lechin will capitulate again, and again. He will help disarm the workers. He will help smash the P0R, no matter how it may try to placate him. And Lechin's betrayal will be facilitated if the P0R continues to support him'. It does not take a genius, as can be seen, to make correct and useful predictions. Armed with the Marxist doctrine and the Marxist method, quite ordinary people can see the direction of events and prepare for them with a revolutionary policy. But without the Marxist method, there is no possibility at all of projecting and carrying out a successful policy. Marxism is not the guarantee of victory, but revisionism is the guarantee of defeat.

Maoism Wins a Recruit

Matching the P0R's capitulation to the reformist labor leaders was its proStalinist conciliationism. In this the P0R outdoes Pablo. On this question I can do no better than to reproduce portions of a letter that I wrote to Murray Weiss on January 2, 1954 (unanswered, of course): I was pleased to see you take cognizance of the 'counter-revolutionary role of the Stalinists in Bolivia' in the paper of December 21st. However I find your passing reference entirely inadequate, since it is completely unsupported by any facts .... Do you have such facts, Murray? I, for one, would be very interested in seeing them ... I wonder where you got your facts about the counterrevolutionary role of the Bolivian Stalinists. Certainly not from the Bolivian Trotskyists. As you no doubt know, they never criticize the Bolivian Stalinists, not in public print. Look over the Political Theses adopted at the June, 1953, National Conference. In these theses, titled Present Stage of the Revolution and Tasks of the POR, you will find not one single reference to the Stalinists. Even in the concluding section of the theses, titled 'National Revolution and Permanent Revolution', there is no mention at all of the rich experience which enabled Trotsky to verify and elaborate this, his major contribution to the political life of our time; and there is no mention, naturally, of the chief opponents of Trotsky's theory, the Stalinists.

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Look over the issue of the Lucha Obrera, the paper of the P0R. In all the issues of 1953 you'll find just one single reference to the Stalinists. This is an announcement of a split in the Stalinist PIR and the formation of the 'Workers and Peasants Communist Party'. Aside from that there is no other reference to the Stalinists. This fact, so incredible and so glaring, is no doubt known to you. How do you explain it? Has anyone asked the P0R for an explanation? Even when Lucha Obrera mentions the assassination of Trotsky, it does not say who was responsible or for what reason. (This is No. 43, the same issue I have twice quoted from. The article mentions the assassination and deals with Trotsky's contributions - led the Russian revolution, built the Red Army, elaborated the theory of Permanent Revolution, and founded the Fourth International. But it manages to omit any mention whatever of the dominating theme of the last seventeen years of his life - the struggle against Stalinism ). Lucha Obrera carried two articles on the fall of Mossadegh - and it did not so much as whisper of the existence of a Stalinist party in Iran, much less denounce its betrayal. 'The fall of Mossadegh', says Lucha Obrera, 'is indubitably a triumph for British imperialism, but it is at the same time the product of a vacillating policy, which attempted to limit the Iranian revolution, turning its back on the aspirations of the masses'. And Lucha Obrera means the 'vacillating policy' not of the Tudeh Party, which would be bad enough (it does not even hint of the existence of such a party); it means the 'vacillating policy' of Mossadegh. 'The Pabloite talk about the "inadequacy" of the Stalinist policy during August, of the "failure of the Stalinists to project a revolutionary orientation" is false and misleading. It is a question of calculated betrayal'. So say you in the paper. Isn't also the P0R's failure to go even as far as Pablo in criticizing, the Iranian and above all the Bolivian Stalinists at least 'false and misleading'? For the sake of accuracy, I must make a reservation to the foregoing. I find that Nos. 38 and 39 of Lucha Obrera are missing from my collection: I cannot therefore say that I have examined all the issues of 1953. Also, I have found one other reference to the Bolivian Stalinists - a reply to their calumnies against the PO R, in No. 35 (March 1953). On international Stalinism, there is an article translated from the paper here on the case against the Jewish doctors in No. 34 (February 1953) and a small item on the Berlin strike in No. 40 (July), which reported, oddly enough, that one of the demands of the strikers was withdrawal of the Red Army. These reservations do not change the picture of conciliationism to Stalinism.

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In No. 36 (April 1953) there is the following panegyric to Mao Tse-tung: On the first of March the central Chinese government adopted an electoral law which is fully democratic and allows the revolutionary forces to crush reaction. Full democracy for the exploited and Liquidation ofall guarantees for the reactionaries, is the spirit of the law.

The new law establishes that all Chinese (men and women) over 18 'With the exception of the counter-revolutionaries' and former landed proprietors who have not been converted to productive labor, have the right to vote. The illiterate are included and will vote by sign, raising their hands. The Chinese Communist Party and all the other democratic organizations may present their lists, common or separate. The elector will retain the right to vote for candidates on no list. The elections will be by proportional representation. One delegate for each 800,000 inhabitants of non-proletarian regions. The proletarians will elect one delegate for each 100,000. Mao Tse-tung explains that the electoral law reflects the leading role of the working class. As has been seen, the electoral law is fully democratic for the peasants and proletarians (fundamental forces of the revolution). It concretely establishes that the right to vote cannot be exercised by counter-revolutionaries and old landlords who have not been converted to production. In the China of Mao there is no democracy for the reaction. This item appeared at about the same time that the paper here printed the appeal of the International Executive Committee against the persecutions visited on the Chinese Trotskyists. During the rest of the year, until it was suppressed, Lucha Obrera had not one word to say on the subject. It did not even report the news to its readers. And, indeed, why should it care? If the revolution is so well-led by Mao Tse-tung, then are the Trotskyists not truly 'fugitives from the revolution'? As one result of the post-war revolutionary events, Maoism has found a place in the Fourth International.

This is no academic question for the POR, for it involves the whole question of the colonial revolution. Maoism is class-collaborationism, the idea of the possibility of a 'Peoples Democracy', which is neither a proletarian nor a bourgeois state, but a transitional government. The POR believes in the same possibility; it believes that the Mao government is such an in-between government. The POR has many nice things to say about the theory of Permanent Revolution. Its actual theory, however, is a caricature of Trotskyism. The theory of Permanent Revolution holds that the bourgeois-democratic tasks of the

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colonial revolution can be carried out only by a workers state; the POR holds that socialist tasks can be undertaken by a non-proletarian government. The POR is not alone in this, of course. It finds its inspiration and support in Pabloism, which is one of the names of Maoism. Could Maoism lead a revolution in Bolivia, as it did in China? While this is not absolutely excluded, it is extremely unlikely, much more unlikely than it was in China. 'The revolution advances under the whip of the counterrevolution', said Marx of the French revolution of 1848; and this empirical observation has turned out to be a general law. Faced with a powerful class enemy, the revolution can be successful only ifled by a resolute, fully conscious leadership, that is, the Marxist party; under the tempering blows of the counter-revolution, the leadership will develop, become theoretically and politically hardened, and gain the confidence of the working class. In China the native ruling class was very weak and very corrupt; deprived of the effective support of imperialism, it could be overthrown by a weak revolution, held back and sabotaged by a bureaucratic and class-collaborationist leadership. Wall Street will not dare allow such an easy victory in any part of its Latin American empire, and it will have much more power, both political and economic, to prevent it than it had in China. One additional condition is necessary for the success of Maoism; this is the absence of a mass revolutionary Marxist party. For Maoism is not completely revolutionary; while leading the revolution into which it has been forced by the weakness of the class enemy, it deforms the revolution, it expropriates the working class politically. The victory of Maoism results in a deformed workers state. The political expropriation of the working class can take place in no other way than by the smashing of its class-conscious vanguard and of its Marxist party. Mao left the bulk of this task to Chiang Kai-shek; that is the meaning of what the IEC delicately calls 'the lack of coordination' between the workers' upsurge in 1945-47 and the peasant movement, which the Communist Party halted; that is the meaning of the persecution of the Trotskyists, who are not, as the Pabloites shamelessly and heartlessly quip, 'refugees from the revolution', but rather refugees (if they are lucky) from the counter-revolution - the Stalinist counter-revolution which Mao also represents. Between Maoism and the Marxist party there can be no peaceful coexistence. Maoism is incompatible with Marxism. That is why Pabloism in Bolivia and everywhere else is the betrayal of Marxism and the liquidation of the party.

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Maoism in the International

It has been objected (orally, of course) that I have criticized not Pablo but Lora and the POR, and that Lora is now 'on our side'. If Lora is indeed on the side of Marxism, this would not invalidate the conclusion that he and the PO R were the instrument through which Pablo betrayed the Bolivian revolution. Lora can, of course, repudiate the reformist line he has been following. This would be a great help in rearming the Bolivian revolution, and could only be welcomed. But if Lora is accepted as an orthodox Trotskyist on the basis for being for revolution in the USSR while he is for reformism in Bolivia, then the orthodoxy of the 'orthodox Trotskyists' is called into question, and they would share with Pablo the onus of the Bolivian betrayal. The fight against Pabloist revisionism cannot be confined to the slogans of 'No capitulation to Stalinism' and 'The right of the party to exist'. For the past two years the POR has been organizationally independent while capitulating politically to the bourgeois government. Why? Because the revisionism of the POR is on a more fundamental question: the class nature of the state. And Pabloite revisionism as a whole is also based fundamentally on the rejection of the Marxist position on the class nature of the state. Before the Third World Congress Comrade Cannon recognized the danger. In 1949 he, together with the majority of the national committee, rejected the position put forward by Cochran and Hansen that the bourgeois states of Eastern Europe had transformed themselves into workers states without revolution. 'If you once begin to play with the idea that the class nature of the state can be changed by manipulations in the top circles', said Comrade Cannon, 'you open the door to all kinds of revision of basic theory ... It can only be done by revolution which is followed by a fundamental change in property relations'. This prophecy has been completely fulfilled; yet the prophet prefers to remain without honor for his prophecy. He prefers to fight some of the manifestations of the revisionism he predicted and ignore the foundation on which it rests. When the Third World Congress adopted the very position which Comrade Cannon had attacked so sharply, he and all his supporters joined in its unanimous endorsement. They accepted the 'intermediate status' of the 'buffer countries' from 1945 to 1948; they accepted Pablo's and Cochran's economist criteria on the class nature of the state; they accepted the idea of a fundamental social transformation and of a change in the class nature of the state without revolution. They weren't happy with this position; not one article has ever appeared defending or explaining it. They later also accepted Pablo's position that there was in China not a workers or a bourgeois state but a transitional, an in-between, a 'workers and peasants government'. They never defended this

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position either - in writing - and defended it orally only when they had to; when they were faced with the attack of the Vern tendency in Los Angeles. Murray Weiss and Myra Tanner showed then that this position could be defended only with the most blatant and open revisionism - such revisionism as they would not dare put on paper. They also accepted Pablo's betrayal of the Bolivian revolution, also refusing to defend it in writing and consenting to an oral debate - in Los Angeles - only after much hesitation and several changes of mind. For the last four years the political line of the international movement has been in the hands of Pablo, with the 'orthodox Trotskyists' following docilely behind. They were, as Murray Weiss said, 'in the arms of Pablo'. 'The right of the party to exist' and 'no conciliation with Stalinism' were nowhere to be found when Pablo and Germain presented their Maoist position on China. They voted for a resolution that declared: 'By putting itselfin matters ofdoctrine on the plane ofMarxism-Leninism, by affirming that its historical aim is the creation of the classless Communist society, by educating its cadres in this spirit, as well as in the spirit of devotion to the ussR, the Chinese cp presents by an large the same characteristics as the other mass Stalinist parties of the colonial and semi-colonial countries'. (Is this why the POR refuses to criticize the Stalinists?) They accepted the line of 'critical support' of the Mao government, even when Germain showed that this really meant solidarity with the Mao government against the Trotskyists. With a brutality worthy of a Stalin, but unprecedented in the Trotskyist movement, Germain declared that the refusal to give support to Mao, put forth in the IEC by Comrade Jacques, was 'counterrevolutionary'. Not one member of the International, or of any party in the movement, raised a voice against this piece of Stalinist brutality. To callJacque's position counter-revolutionary signified that the difference over whether to give critical support to Mao was no terminological dispute; it signified solidarity with the secret police against all independent thought, against all Trotskyists.

Comrades who emitted shocked gasps at a much more insignificant defection, that of Grace Carlson, took this with equanimity. Not only were there no protests, but this Stalinist position was actually defended by Max Geldman, a leading majority supporter, in a debate. 'You have no trust', said Geldman, you are suspicious of the IEC'. This was in April, 1953. Yes, Vern and Ryan, and the comrades supporting their position, did not trust the me, led by Pablo and Germain; they were more than suspicious of their revisionist line. And they had much less concrete knowledge than Geldman and the rest of the National Committee were in a position to have. We didn't know what Peng knew. But Marxism is a better guide to people and events than empiri-

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cism or faith. Murray Weiss had faith in Pablo. 'How do you know', he asked in a debate with Dennis Vern in May, 1953, 'that the Chinese Communist Party cannot become a Marxist party?' 'I am willing', replied Comrade Vern, 'to stake the whole validity of my position on this: when the pressure of the Korean war lets up, the government, rather, than, as you and Germain say, unfurling the proletarian power, will become even more bureaucratized; it will intensify its repressions against the Trotskyists'.

Why Are They Silent? Now the comrades are indignant at the Pabloite jibe that the Chinese Trotskyists are 'fugitives from a revolution'. But indignation is no answer to a political position. The Pabloites are confident; they believe that Maoism is or can become completely revolutionary. What do his opponents say? Nothing. They still formally retain the Pabloite position. All attempts to raise the question are met with stony silence. Comrade Stein made an attempt to approach the question in an internal document of the Majority Caucus, but he was rebuffed and has since kept his peace. The National Committee resolution criticizing Pablo's line on Stalinism, ('Against Pabloist Revisionism', FI, Sept.-Oct. 1953) retains

Pablo's position on China. Why have they remained silent? Why do they still remain silent, as the International Committee admits, on problems left suspended, befogged or falsified by the Pabloist leadership during 'three years'? Is it because, as we have vapidly been told, they didn't want to 'dignify' the Vern tendency by replying to its criticisms? But the questions on which they hold such a stubborn silence involve the life and death of the movement! ls the tiny Vern group so powerful that it can lock the minds and typewriters of the party leadership on such vital questions? No. The 'orthodox Trotskyists' have a much more important reason for having defaulted to Pablo. While Pablo has taken up and answered important problems as they arose - in an empirical revisionist manner - his opponents have been unable to give any answer to these problems. Both Pablo and his opponents find that they cannot make reality conform with their doctrine; that, in the aphorism used by both Harry Frankel and Max Geldman, 'theory is grcry and life is green'. Pablo turns his back on doctrine and rivets his eyes in an empirical and impressionistic manner on 'the new world reality'. His opponents tum their back on events and maintain their doctrine as revealed dogma.

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Stalinism cannot be reformed - says Comrade Cannon in public statements. Then has the Chinese c P, which certainly was Stalinist, been reformed or not? No answer. The Soviet bureaucracy must be overthrown by revolution. What of the Chinese bureaucracy; is a refusal to give it critical support still counter-revolutionary? No answer. The class nature of the state, says Comrade Cannon, cannot be changed without revolution. What of the changes that took place in Eastern Europe? When and how were these states transformed from bourgeois to proletarian? On this question, once having voted for Pablo s position, they have neither defended (in writing, that is) nor attacked it. And they have answered no questions on the Bolivian revolution. Is it then not possible to face the post-war reality and at the same time maintain and defend the Marxist doctrine? Yes, it is. Both the empiricism of Pablo and the abstentionism of Cannon have their common foundation in the rejection of Marxism on the nature of the state; and this has its origin in the Russian Question. The belief that the Soviet bureaucracy is completely counterrevolutionary, which is the origin of the errors of both sides, signifies the rejection of Trotskyism on the nature of the Soviet state. When a working class organization, no matter how bureaucratized, carries on a struggle against the capitalist class, no matter how inadequately, that is a class struggle. If the Soviet state is a workers state, then its struggle against Nazi Germany was a class struggle. A class war is a class struggle on the plane of state power - that is, revolution-war and counter-revolution-war. This thought, which has been hesitatingly and equivocatingly accepted in regard to the Third World War, has been rejected in regard to the Second. Yet this is the only position which can bring all the post-war events, the whole 'new reality', into conformity with Marxist theory. With the victory over the Germans the Red Anny was left as the only real power - the only state power - in Eastern Europe. That was the revolution, the transfer of power from one class to another. Without this transfer of power, the subsequent economic and social transformations would have been impossible. This revolution is ignored by the International. The Stalinist bureaucracy was completely counter-revolutionary, it was held, and therefore could not carry out a revolution. The buffer states could not be workers states, concluded the International; they must still be bourgeois states - degenerated bourgeois 'states, on the road to structural assimilation' into the Soviet Union. But the Third World Congress could not ignore the fundamental economic and social transformations that had taken place; there must be workers states. How had they come into being? Bourgeois states on the Road to Structural Assimila-

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tion turned out to be states with an 'intermediate status', transitional states, the betrayal of Marxism on the state. The 'orthodox Trotskyists' assented to the theoretical betrayal because they had no way out. And they still hold to their original error, the cause of their abdication to Pablo. Is the Soviet bureaucracy counter-revolutionary completely and to the core? The 'old Trotskyists' can get no support from Trotsky on this point. They can find only one quotation which can in any way be made to appear to support their point of view. And this sentence is part of a passage in which Trotsky explains to Shachtman that the Soviet state is counter-revolutionary, but nevertheless still a workers state. The comrades have their own good reasons for calling the Vern tendency 'Talmudist' and 'scholastic'. Admitting that the bureaucracy does do progressive work, Comrade Weiss maintains that bourgeois politicians also do some progressive things without changing their completely reactionary character. This shows a complete disregard of class distinctions. Building roads, scientific research may be progressive in the general sense of the struggle to control nature; but for Marxists the terms progressive and reactionary have political meaning only in relation to the class struggle. A capitalist who gives a concession in response to a struggle is no more progressive than one who resists; the effect of capitalist resistance may even be more progressive, in that it forces workers to organize and fight more militantly. While a capitalist who makes the most liberal concessions is not doing anything progressive, a trade union leader who organizes a picket line is. And the activity of the Soviet bureaucracy in organizing the struggle against the Hitler counterrevolution was profoundly progressive. If the bureaucracy had deserted (and many bureaucrats did) the Soviet Union would have been conquered. It will be objected that the absence of an alternative, a Marxist leadership, was due entirely to ferocious suppression by the bureaucracy - and that is true. But this merely serves to point up the dual role of the bureaucracy, both progressive and reactionary. If the Soviet state is really a workers state, then how can the administrator of the state, faced not only by a rebellious working class but also by a ferociously counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, be completely and to the core counterrevolutionary? This position cannot be held consistently; the supporters of the International Committee still cannot deny the fundamental changes in Eastern Europe. They insist that the changes were carried out by 'military-bureaucratic action' and that the Chinese Stalinists are no longer Stalinists. How this proves the completely reactionary nature of the Soviet bureaucracy no one has yet shown. The choice cannot be evaded: either give up the theory that the Soviet bureaucracy is completely counter-revolutionary, or give up more and more com-

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pletely and openly Marxism on the state. The choice will have to be made. The silence will have to be broken. Until it is, the struggle against Pabloism cannot be carried to a conclusion. Above all, and first of all, the silence on the Bolivian revolution must be broken. Pablo's betrayal must be exposed and combatted. If Pablo's silence on Bolivia is a sign of his abandonment of Marxism as a science, what shall we say of the silence of his opponents? To remain silent is to shield the betrayers and share in the betrayal.

We Need International Solidarity

Not only has there been no discussion of the Bolivian revolution, as though we have nothing to learn from it and no political aid to give; the Bolivian revolution has been almost completely absent from the propaganda activity of the Party. When the revolution began, two years ago, the paper responded quickly and carried a goodly amount of material in the first few weeks. George Breitman wrote several good articles, which shows that he knows what a revolutionary policy should be. He even called the MN R government a bourgeois government, and wrote that 'Lechin's stay in the cabinet had better be brief'. But after the first few weeks the paper carried only occasional references to the Bolivian revolution. Breitman apparently lost interest until, stung by the suppression of Lucha Obrera, he wrote a brief article in which he again called the MNR government 'a capitalist government'. Even when Labor Action accused the POR leaders of having accepted posts on governmental commissions, no reply was forthcoming. Even a letter written by the Secretary of the POR denying the charges was denied publication. (On this point, I admit an extenuating circumstance: the denial by the POR appeared to be a diplomatic one. The secretary of the PO R denied being in the government, but said nothing about being on commissions. An open letter to Labor Action, promised by the Secretary of the PO R, has never appeared.) Since the first weeks, the paper has aped the line of the POR, calling the MNR government petty-bourgeois, pointing to the presence of labor leaders in the cabinet as proof of its progressive character, and later accusing the MNR of betraying the revolution. The last time, until this writing, that mention was made of Bolivia was on December 28 [1953]. That was an editorial dealing with the suppression of Lucha Obrera. The editorial denounced the cowardly labor leaders for their silence on Bolivia! The paper did win one victory. After two editorials calling for recognition of the MNR government, without any mass

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demonstrations, public meetings, or petitions, the State Department was convinced. Two later editorials protesting the suppression of Lucha Obrera did not have the same effect. The Party has done nothing to popularize, defend, or explain the Bolivian revolution to the public. In two years there has been just one (1) public meeting on Bolivia; not one meeting per branch, but one meeting for the whole party! This was held in New York, and Bert Cochran was the speaker. The Bolivian revolution is sometimes mentioned in holiday orations, usually not at all. There has been just one branch discussion on the Bolivian revolution in the whole party, a debate in Los Angeles; and this took place six months after it was requested. 'You have a fixation on Bolivia', I was told, 'we are busy with the American revolution'. This from the organizer of the branch in Los Angeles, with its large Latin American population! This shameful neglect of the elementary duty of international solidarity is in glaring contradiction to the directives given by the Founding Congress of the Fourth International: Just as the Latin American sections of the Fourth International must popularize in their press and agitation the struggles of the American labor and revolutionary movements against the common enemy, so the section in the us must devote more time and energy in its agitational and propaganda work to acquaint the proletariat of the us with the position and struggles of the Latin American countries and their working class movements. Every act of American imperialism must be exposed in the press and at meetings, and, on indicated occasions, the section in the us must seek to organize mass movements of protest against specific activities of Yankee imperialism. In addition, the section in the us, by utilizing the Spanish language and literature of the Fourth International, must seek to organize on however a modest scale to begin with, the militant revolutionary forces among the doubly-exploited millions of Filipino, Mexican, Caribbean, Central and South American workers now resident in the us, not only for the purpose of linking them with the labor movement in the us but also for the purpose of strengthening the ties with the labor and revolutionary movements in the countries from which these workers originally came. This work shall be carried on under the direction of the American Secretariat of the Fourth International which will publish the necessary literature and organize the work accordingly.

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Due to reactionary laws, international affiliation is barred. But no capitalist law can prevent genuine orthodox Trotskyists from acting like internationalists. The Bolivian revolution should have the same importance for us as a strike in Minneapolis or Detroit.

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Index Ahem, Martin 628 abolitionists (opponents of slavery) 205, 243,273 Africa 6, 10, 32, 78, 87,130,171,207, 221, 244, 275,277,279, 280, 28m24, 342, 504n22, 741 African Americans (Negroes) 14, 15, 16, 159282, 328,334, 483-4, 490,544,555, 562-4,568,581,592,593,651,669 black liberation struggles: as a national question 16, 182, 188, 207, 208, 218, 232,233,235,242 central to the development of the class struggle 237,241, 242, 247-9 civil rights (democratic rights, equal rights, human rights, Negro rights) 16, 163, 164, 165,176,177,178, 184, 190, 191, 192, 198, 199, 200, 203, 204, 211, 214, 222, 233, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 244, 248, 251, 255, 256, 261, 262, 263,265,266,272,274,490,551,581 independent (black-controlled) struggle vital and valid in itself 237, 241, 245 inherently revolutionary 238, 239, 241,242,245,255,269,270 international dimension 167, 258-9, 269-70,275-82 mass action required 163, 165, 188, 194, 222, 250, 266 permanent revolution and 235 question of "anti-white racism" 196, 221 radicalization 155, 159, 208, 213-2, 235, 237-40, 245, 251, 255, 490 economic victimization - substandard wages, living standards, etc. 15-6, 109, 155, 177,201,215, 219-20, 225-6, 230-1, 233, 234, 235, 246 economic improvement in late 1940s and 1950s 14 history 165, 170-2, 177-8, 184, 185, 204-5, 224,230-2,242-4,258,275-82 Jim Crow (racist segregation, oppression) 162, 165, 166, 178, 180, 183-9, 191, 192-3, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200-5, 209, 210,

211, 215-9, 224, 225, 226, 232, 258, 259, 267,270,274,455,463 "middle class" or "petty bourgeois" stratum 14, 187-8, 191,236,245,247, 253-4593 northward migration, urbanization 155, 159, 227-9, 231, 232-5 proletarianization 153, 155, 159, 227-35, 241,245 racist ideology 171,173, 174, 177, 180, 196-7, 198, 212-3, 214, 217-8, 219, 222, 275-82 racist violence - "legal" brutality, lynching, mobs, murder 167, 186, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200-1, 202,203, 214, 215, 216, 221, 222, 224, 244, 245, 246, 256-74 wrestling with white chauvinism, prejudice, "subliminal racism" 159, 170, 181, 183-4, 192-3, 195, 199-200, 206-7, 208, 212-3,216,218,232,245,246,252-3,254 See also slavery AFLNews Reporter 265 Afro-American 166 Albania 10, 65 ALCOA (Aluminum Company of America) 92,94,95,97,98,99,108 Alexander the Great 279 Allen,Joe 160 Amalgamated ClotliingWorkers of America (ACWA) 467 Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen 264 America First Party 222 American Century 21, 24, 286, 340, 385

An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (Myrdal) 23om5, 23m17, 233, 236

American Socialist 504, 505 America's Sixty Families (with greatest wealth and power) 89-101, 106, 353, 365 American Federation of Labor (AFL) 11,105, 137, 197, 206, 226,232,264, 265, 362, 363,364,380,427,464-75,647 American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) 464-75,569

816 American Labor Party (ALP) 468,549,551, 552,556,567,597,626,627,628,649, 653,654,748 American Revolution (1775-83) 4 American Sta/inism andAnti-Stalinism (Cannon) 343-82,490,608,677 American Workers Party (AWP) 629 anarchists, anarchism 4, 16-7 Anaconda Copper Company 96 Anaconda Wire and Cable Company 103, 105,112 anti-Communism 7, 285-6 contrasted with revolutionary antlStalinism 343-82, fog related to red-baiting, McCarthyism, persecution in the United States 13, 213, 286,343,348,349,350,360,361,363, 364,369,371,372,373,376,479,483, 484, 488, 489, 503, 528, 544, 597, 605, 607,615,616,618,627,677 Anti-Diihring (Engels) 406 anti-Semitism See Jews, persecution against Antonelli Fireworks Company 104 Appeal Caucus (Association, Institute) in Socialist Party of America 17 Arabs 174 Are the Jews a Race? (Kautsky) 271 Argentina 37 Armenians 182 Army and NavyJournal 28, 29, 32, 37, 38, 41, 80, 81, 83, 85, 86 Arnold, Thurman 89, go, 91, 93-4, 97, 99, 110,111 Aronowitz, Stanley 16 Asahigraph 35, 36 Asia 6, 10, 23, 25, 30, 79, 117, 126, 127, 128, 130, 145,258,270,278,279,305,412,462, 504n22, 507, 509, 510, 513, 515, 518, 519, 535,689,690,691,692,696,697 Asian-Americans 16 Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU) 349, 364, 371 atomic bomb See nuclear weapons Attlee, Clement 125 Attucks, Crispus 165 Austin, Warren 453 Australia 37, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 123, 518, 520 Austria 4, 65, 127, 637, 765

INDEX

Axis Powers (Germany, Italy.Japan) 22, 31, 32,34,38,40,79,82,83,84,89,91,122, 196 Baldwin, Hanson 80, 81, 84, 85-6 "Bandiera Rosa" (Red Flag- Italian revolutionary song) 32 Barrons 28, 33 Bartell, Mike 498, 543-54, 556-86, 589, 596, 598,603,608,626,627,628,649,650, 654,726,727,728,754,755,787 The Battle ofBritain (1940) 27-9 Beck, Dave 473, 485 Belgium 37, 65, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 77, 491, 518 Benedict, Ruth 212mo Bennett, Harry 199, 222, 312, 319 Beria, Lavrenti 700, 701, 702 Berle, Jr., A.A. 96 Berry, George 467 Bethlehem Steel Corporation 109 Bethune, Mary McLeod 217 Bevan, Aneurin 583, 618 Bevin, Ernest 124, 125 Bias, Thomas 159-61 Biddle, Francis 99, 100, 103, 104-6, m, 227 Bill of Rights 263, 268, 615 Black Legions 197

Black Reconstruction: An Essay Taward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (DuBois) 234 Bleibtreu, Marcel 579, 764 Blitz (intensive military attack) 50 Blum, Leon 70 Boggs, James 14 Bohn Aluminum and Brass Corporation 104 Bolivia 421,504,570,741,742,746, 781804 Bolshevism and Bolsheviks 55, 61, 191, 237, 240, 245, 296, 304, 331, 526, 635, 702, 710, 713, 718, 750, 751, 787 distortion of 325, 344, 537, 626 qualities of 61, 148, 182-3, 252, 254, 299, 300,335,338,356,366,367-8,378-9, 665,672,685,784 role in the Russian Revolution 55, 182, 220-1

INDEX

Stalinist repression against and betrayal of 55,62,86,324,325,344,356,357 task of Americanizing Bolshevism 145, 148,332-3,497,527 Bonaparte, Napoleon 55, 441, 442 Bone, Homer 103 Boston Globe 31 bourgeois (bourgeois-democratic) revolution 4,487 bourgeois state 47,238,369,401, 402, 407, 408,417,424,425,647,789,795,797, Boo power and fragility 47 See also capitalism, state under capitalism Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901) 34, 456 Brandlerists 684 Braverman, Harry (Frankel, Harry) 18,596, 598,599,648,799 Breitman, George 24, 102-14, 160, 161, 1628, 169-95, 25-74, 275-82, 501, 616, 729, 739-80,802 Bridges, Harry 620 Bring the Troops Home movement (1945-6) 25 Britain 4, 15, 27-31, 32, 33, 34, 37-39, 40, 41, 42,44,52,53,65,72,74,78,79,83-4,85, 86, go, 93, 95, 96, 97, 102, 103, 108, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 171,244, 293, 303, 311,341,373,407,430,448,454,455, 458,503,526,577,618,624,725,732, 733,742,752,753,755,765,766,767, 770,778,794 British Broadcasting Company (BBC) 50 British Empire 22, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 37, 82, 167, 174, 175, 182, 183, 197, 454 British General Strike (1926) 430 British Labor Party 125, 407, 577, 711, 786 British Trotskyists 303, 341, 494m3, 497n16,501,503,618,733,767 Brotherhood of Pullman and Sleeping Car Porters 162 Brotherhood of Timber Workers 231 Browder, Earl 351, 386, 615, 621, 626, 684 Brown, Corinne 277, 278, 279, 280 Brown,John 224,257 Buberman, Margaret [Margarete BuberNeumann] 677 Budenz, Louis 377 Bukharin, Nikolai 678

817

Bulgaria 10, 21, 35, 122, 124, 126, 389, 390, 393,395,397,399,400,405,406,417, 708 bureaucracy 121, 167, 194,308,309,319, 320, 322,324,332,335,341,342,365,373, 380,407,414,487,496,497,500,501, 504, 522, 525, 528, 533-4, 537, 540, 541, 656,676,682,732 alleged bureaucratic developments in Trotskyist movement 722, 732, 745, 753,762,770,776,778,779 in capitalist entities 84, 203, 308-9, 310, 318,320,324,342,407 in labor movement 250, 251, 307, 3124, 330,332,335,342,353,354,360,368, 479,482,485,487,522-23,524,528, 6o7-8, 617, 624, 647,656,690, 791, 796, 800,801 aim to thwart revolutionary inclinations within working class 55, 58, 313,332,362,364,403,414,416,487, 696,697 in Social Democratic movement 307, 328, 356, 360, 367, 711 in Stalinist-dominated Communist movement 8, 189, 201, 206, 307, 325,328,329,353,354,355,358,359, 361, 364, 366, 368-9, 372, 374, 376-7, 414,416,480,523,524,525,528,537, 539-40, 542, 543, 605, 606, 614-5, 617, 696, 698, 705-7, 710-11 in trade unions 14, 135, 137, 164, 206, 313, 329, 331, 349, 351, 360-4, 367, 368,372,378,379-80,468,470,474, 482,485,486,487,522-23,528,545, 559,560,576,588,590,607-8,646, 656,775,791 "labor lieutenants of capitalist class" (De Leon) 352,464,522 transformation of working-class militants into conservative bureaucrats 309,353 within Soviet Union and similar states 7, 9, 10, 42, 56-63, 182, 189, 191, 201, 222-3, 259, 306, 311, 314, 315, 316, 318, 322,324-5,330,341,342,344,353,354, 355,356,358-9,374,389,395,403,404, 409-11, 414,415,416,417,480,481,487, 488, 493, 494, 498, 508, 509, 510, 512-6,

818

within Soviet Union and similar states (cont.) 517, 518, 519, 536, 542, 587, 631, 633, 638, 667-8, 687, 689-90, 691-705, 707-10, 713-6, 717, 718, 730, 741, 751, 768, 773, 800, 801 See also workers' state, bureaucratically deformed and bureaucratically degenerated bureaucratic collectivism 7, 341, 452, 537 Burch, Arthur 160, 169-208 Burma 25, 34, 81, 82, 87, 124, 462, 515 Burnham.James 384,425,427,443,606, 676,722,732,774 Bums See Gerry Healy Byrnes.James F. 123,124,127,128 cadres

g, 250, 252, 296, 333, 334, 335, 338, 351, 413, 491, 492, 511, 520, 528, 529, 535, 551, 561, 563, 564, 571, 579, 580, 592, 621, 624,625,634,635,650,654,656,658, 660, 662, 665, 670, 671, 672, 673, 683, 707,729,730,731,736,738,742,743,757, 758,762,763,764,770,792,798 making sacrifices vs developing one's capacities 337 Canada, Canadians 29, 150, 518, 520, 757 Cannon,James P. 2, 7, 8, g, 13, 14, 17, 20, 25, 26, 115-21, 144-58, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287,293,299,300,301,302,330,332, 340,342,343-82,383-7,476-87,48991, 492, 496, 497, 498, 499-502, 504, 505, 584, 598, 599-603, 604, 606, 608, 609, 610, 612, 614, 616, 620-4, 625, 627, 629,640-3,647,649,662-3,664,674686, 720-738, 739-40, 742-3, 749, 750, 752,755,756,759,760,761-3,764,765, 768,769,770,771,776,777,797,800 Capital (Marx) 309-10, 546, 629 capitalism 4-7, 115-6, 117, 172 achievements 11-3, 15, 155 alleged new form - "state capitalism" 8, 286, 287, 303-26, 334, 341, 407, 411 business cycles, depressions, economic crises 5, 151-52, 155, 176, 186,219,364, 464, 466,472,507,574, 605, 648, 749, 791 class struggles within See working class domination by super-rich 106, 142, 353, 364-5,392

INDEX

exploitation and profits 42, 48, 114, 116, 119,129,155, 164, 172, 174, 175, 184, 185, 189, 191, 198,204,217,218,220,246,267, 276, 277, 281, 282, 286, 308, 313, 318, 350, 351, 357, 359, 371, 392, 438-9, 480, 481, 483, 485, 486 imperialism, war and violence 4-5, 67, 11, 117-20, 124, 128-9, 174-5, 213, 220, 258,270,272,345,346,371,398,457, 479, 571, 574, 697 racism 172-5, 176-8, 197-8, 213, 218, 220, 267,276-7,280-2,592 stages early (progressive) 3-4, 89-90, 172, 277 late (death agony) 2, 5-7, 11, 15, 87, go, 118, 176, 219-20, 246, 274, 304, 370,447 state under capitalism 47, 101, 116, 117, 177, 178, 198, 215, 217-8, 238, 272, 351, 364, 365, 369, 378, 424, 439, 440, 481, 483,485,793 strength in United States 8mo, 11, 12-3, 147, 149, 571 Capitalism and Slavery (Williams) 28m24 Carey, James 105, 106 Carlson, Grace 601, 625, 665, 798 Carter,Joseph 425,427 Central America 145, 489, 803 Central Intelligence Agency (cIA) 286 centrism, centrists 306, 328, 412, 525-7, 539, 644, 667, 668, 711, 731, 761 Chamber of Commerce 106 C. Charles See Charles Curtiss Chicago Defender 203 Chicago Sun 226 Chiang Kai-Shek 34, 36, 84, 85, 259, 453, 458,459,460,488,519,540,796 Chile 37 China 10, 25, 31, 34, 35, 36, 80, 81, 82, 84, 87, 122, 124, 127, 145, 221, 281, 342, 368, 431, 453-63, 488n2, 496, 498, 499, 501, 503, 504, 515, 516, 517, 518, 519, 523, 524, 525, 526,537,538,539,540,541,542,570, 573,634,638,639,666,667,684,685, 690, 691, 693, 697, 698, 706, 711, 716, 718,741,743,765,778,784,795,796,797, 798,799 See also Chiang Kai-shek; Kuomintang;

INDEX

Mao Tse-tung; Opium War of 1840-42; Taiping Revolution Chinese Communist Party 23, 342, 460, 488,519,621,795,799 Chinese Revolution ofi911 457, 459 Chinese Revolution of 1925-27 430, 458, 542,758,787 Chinese Revolution of 1949 342, 459, 461, 488,504,507,515,519,535,542,611, 688,695,698,699 Chinese-Americans 174 Christian-Americans 197 Chrysler Corporation 137, 138, 199 Churchill, Winston 52, 54, 63, 83, 126 civil liberties, civil rights, democratic rights 51, 69, 87, 176, 178, 184, 211, 214, 222, 233, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 251, 256, 261, 263,265,266,270,272,274,479,484, 486,490,551,552,554,565,585,633, 647,650, 715, 722, 726 Civil Rights Congress 551 Civil War (u.s., 1861-65) 4, 177, 184, 185, 224, 229,230,242-44,272,276,282,464 Clark, Tom C. 109 Clarke, George 18, 497-505, 538-42, 582-3, 585, 596-629, 648, 713, 715-8, 724, 726, 729-30, 745-6, 749-52, 755, 756, 763, 765,768,773 Caste, Class, and Race (Cox) 277 Cliff, Tony 341 CloudAtlas 18 Cochran, Bert 18, 20, 25, 26, 131-43, 341, 388-413, 491, 493, 494m3, 495, 497, 498-505, 522-9, 572, 578-84, 590-2, 596-629,644-64,685,686,749,767, 797,803 Cold War 6-7, 10, 340-2, 394,397,403,474, 488, 498, 490, 494, 515, 572, 605, 608, 611,617,623,696 anti-Communism 7, 12, 267-8, 285-6, 343-82, fog basis ofu.s. policies in 128-30 beginnings 122-30, 493-4 Eastern Bloc 6, 126, 127, 130, 398-401, 494,523,525,676 Western Bloc 6, 127, 130, 258-259, 270, 478 Collyer Insulated Wire Company 104 "The Coming American Revolution" (Can-

819

non) 8, 25, 144-58, 284,330,333, 336, 490,499 Cominform (Communist Information Bureau, Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers' Parties) 394, 444, 542 Cominternism 502, 503, 678, 683-4 The Communist 635 Communist International (Third International, Comintern) 4, 5, 17, 54,117, 147, 189, 206, 296, 305, 311, 321, 323, 351, 355, 356,366,368,378,432,502,503,523, 537,542,625,675,678,683,684,685, 725,737,758 Communist League of America 17 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) 285, 480-1, 482, 516, 535 Compass and Compass Clubs 550, 551, 556, 586,627 Congress of Cultural Freedom 286 Congress of Industrial Organizations (c IO) 11, 13, 14, 24, 105, 113, 132, 134-5, 136, 1379, 140, 143, 155, 156, 170, 183, 190, 193, 197,199,222,226,232,233,236,245, 246,247,248,262,264,265,267,312, 319,322,362,363,364,372,376,380, 464-75,528,557,577,606,608,653 Constitution of the United States of America (and Constitutional rights) 171,178,261 Coolidge, Calvin 133 cordon sanitaire (barrier against infection; containment) 128 Corey, Lewis 384 Costa Rica 37 Cox, Oliver C. 277, 278, 279, 280, 281 Crouzet, Maurice 15 Cuba 37 cultural assimilation of racial and ethnic minorities 12, 153, 233, 271, 279 Curtiss, Charles (C. Charles) 600,605 Curtiss-Wright Corporation 3, 6, 7, 11, 12 Czechoslovakia 10, 65, 69, 72, 39, 390, 393, 394,396,397,398,399,400,401,402, 403, 405, 406, 411, 417, 444, 446, 448, 515,632,636,638,708,716 Daily Herald 125 Daily Worker 25, 62, 101, 201, 202, 349, 551, 565,628 Daladier, Eduoard 70

820 Darlan, Fram;ois 70 Dalton, Hugh 83 Dante (Dante Alighieri) Deat, Marcel 68

INDEX

225, 652

Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (Trotsky) See Transitional Program De Bolt, A.R. 210 Debs, Eugene V. 17, 485,527,620 defense guards 222, 265-6 De Gaulle, Charles, and Gaullists 53, 127, 293, 324, 706 De Leon, Daniel 352, 522, fag, 629, 762 democracy 179, 184, 222, 239, 342, 364, 430, 476,477,479,480,484,633,647,650, 784 bourgeois (capitalist) democracy 15, 31, 46, 73, 122, 124, 126-9, 154, 165, 169, 176, 178, 184, 186, 188, 189, 201, 204, 205, 210, 215,238,258,259,270,289,309,345, 346, 351, 364-5, 439, 457, 479, 481, 483, 485,486,489,647 democracy in revolutionary party 182, 358, 626, 642, 680, 722-3, 725, 726-7, 732,735,738 See also democratic centralism democracy in unions 194, 342, 363, 371, 607 workers' democracy and socialist democracy 58, 113,178,179,359,382,477, 479,480-1,482,484-5,486-7,700,704 becomes a habit, leading to withering away of the state (Lenin) 482 believed by some to have been advanced by Yugoslav and Chinese Revolutions 488,517,519,537,542,795 state property and economic planning must be subordinate to workers' power 321, 481 democratic centralism 301, 732, 751, 754, 769,777 international democratic centralism: critique 9, 675, 731-3, 769-70 defense 742, 759-60, 761, 763, 766, 769 Democratic Party 11, 12, 114, 167, 185, 186, 194, 196, 212, 238, 240, 244, 349, 359, 467,468,470,471,472,473,474,549, 588,623,628,640,655

Denmark 38 de-radicalization 11-7, 26, 284n3, 285-6, 383-7 Detroit Race Riot (1943) 196-200, 202 Deutscher, Isaac and "Deutcherism" 773-4 dialectics, dialectical materialism 18, 227, 242,315,323,332,333,420,427,458, 493, 494, 511, 513, 514, 515, 558, 625, 672, 706 dictatorship of the proletariat (political domination by the working class) 310, 424, 425,426,439,531,533,784,787 See also democracy: proletarian (workers') and socialist democracy; Workers' and Farmers' Government; workers' state Dimitrov, Georgi 54 Dobbs, Farrell 265, 266, 498, 499, 501, 549, 570-95, 596, 601, 602, 620, 623, 624, 625,626,627,628,640-3,644-8,651-5, 657-660,663,669,670 Doheny, Ed 133 Dollinger, Genora 499, 665-73 Dollinger, Sol 596 Dominican Republic 37 Doriot,Jacques 51 Douglass, Frederick 165 Dow Chemical 92

The Draft Program of the Comintem: A Criticism ofFundamentals (Trotsky) 305 Dubinsky, David 467, 468, 653 Du Bois, W.E.B. 234 Dunayevskaya, Raya (Freddie Forest) 8, 17, 160,227-35,284,287,303-26 Dunne, Vincent Raymond 606, 627 DuPont (E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company) 90,92,93,95,98,99,108 Durkin, Martin 470 Durtee, Carl T. 212 Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) 31, 34, 37, 98 (National Liberation Front-Greek People's Liberation Army) 126 East German Uprising (1953) 10m3, 701, 708-10, 712, 713-5, 748, 754, 771, 772 East Germany 10, 698, 705, 708-710, 713-5, 716, 717, 730, 738, 741, 748, 753, 754, 757, 771,772 EAM-ELAS

821

INDEX

Eastman, Max

384

Economic Record 132 The Economist 30, 399, 406, 633 Education, Propaganda and Agitation (James) 333 Egypt 32, 218, 278, 741 Ehrenburg, Ilya 400 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 270, 468, 470, 472, 474,785 Engels, Frederick 13, 181, 195, 308-9, 319, 391, 406, 477, 480-1 entryist (entrist) tactics and perspectives 490, 501, 503, 565, 710-3, 731, 748-9 Erber, Ernest 331 Eritrea 124 Estonia 56 Ethiopia 278 European Crossroad (Ehrenberg) 400 Evart, Herbert Vere 123 Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) 229, 269 Fall of Paris (1940) 43-53 Fall, Albert 133 Farben, I.G. 89, go, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99,101 farmers 37, 48, 220, 244, 272, 276, 392, 3945

well-to-do (rich and also "middle class") 59,75,392,393,401,435,437,575 poor and small-holders 59, 75, 146, 155, 182, 183, 266, 273, 391, 401, 435, 436, 437, 439,442,446,575 working-class allies 220, 276, 436 See also: peasants; tenant farmers and sharecroppers; Workers and Farmers Government Farrell, James T. 284, 285-6 fascism 4, 5, 22, 23, 41, 60, 62, 70, 72, 73, 116, 130, 164, 173, 174, 176, 178, 179, 196, 199, 289,293,303,306,312,384,399,4256, 440,441,479,483,491,492,523,588, 758,791 in specific countries Belgium 73 Bulgaria 400 Denmark 73 France 50, 51, 73 Germany n, 51, 78, 213

Hungary 400 Italy 33, 50, 96 Netherlands 73 Norway 72, 73, 77 Spain 289 United States 132, 140, 146, 176, 197, 199,222-3,263,366,499,503,573 on false equation of fascism with Stalinism and communism 366 See also: Hitler, Mussolini, Nazism Fast, Howard 477-8 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 262, 263,286,366 Fedoseev, P.N. 635 Fetzer, Fritz 81 LeFeu 70 Field, Marshall 226 Filipinos in the United States 174, 803 See also Philippines Finland 32-3, 37, 65, 122, 435, 440-5, 699 First International (International Workingmen's Association) 4,323,408 Firth, L. Gerald 93 Firth-Sterling Steel Company 93 Fischer, Ruth 49on4, 677, 681 flies (police) 45 Ford, Henry 150, 154, 199, 230 fm6, 246, 318 Ford, James 386 Ford Motor Company 96, 137, 138, 199, 207, 222, 23om6, 246, 312, 318 Foreign Affairs So Forest, Freddie See Dunayevskaya, Raya Forman, Philip 99-100 Forrestal,James 99 Fortune 21, 25, 81, 314, 385, 472, 473 Foster, William Z. 386, 628, 684 Four Freedoms (of speech and expression, of religion, from fear, from want) 120,211 Fourth International 3, 5, 7-9, 23, 117, 191, 283,290,293,295,296,299,304,307, 311, 320, 324, 325, 327, 329, 330, 332, 341, 356, 357, 411, 415, 417, 440, 491, 488805 danger of fetishism, abstract organizational conception 770, 771, 780 Fourth International 131, 288, 289, 291, 293, 297, 322, 326, 391, 396, 406, 415, 419, 421,440,442,493,497,729,730

822

INDEX

4, 7, 10, 27, 37, 42, 43-53, 65-72, 74, 76, 77, So, 86, 87, go, 108, 122, 126, 127, 292, 296, 324, 326, 347, 391, 404, 430, 447,448,508,512,526,540,579,587, 600, 611, 676, 692, 711, 730, 738, 748, 753, 757,765,766,770,785 FranceSpeaks 66-7 La France au Travail 50-1 Franco, Francisco 37, 258, 289 Frank, Pierre 491, 745, 752, 766

Goebbels, Joseph 71 Gold Coast (Ghana) 50 Goldman, Albert 7, 8, 18, 20, 283, 284, 285,

Frankel, Harry See Braverman, Harry Frankensteen, Richard 247-8 Free World See Cold War, Western Bloc French-Indochina War (1946-54) 462,504,

GPU

France

286, 287, 298-302, 490, 49106, 494, 611, 677 Gompers, Samuel 206, 466, 467, 468, 470, 653

Goodrich Rubber Company 94 Gordon, Sam ("Tom") 501-2, 724, 727, 739, 740,747

(Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie, State Political Administration, repressive political police in Soviet Union) 41, 62, 318,326,345,346,444, 616,681,702,747

523, 573, 697, 711 407 1789-94 210, 281 1848 796

Gramsci, Antonio 1-2 Grant, Ted 494013 Great Depression (1929-39)

French Revolution

Freud, Sigmund, and Freudianism (psychoanalysis) 336,622

5, 130, 150-1, 186,220,228,364,375,466 Greece 31, 32, 33, 65, 123, 124, 126, 278, 279,

Gabe See Pablo, Michel Gabriel [Prosser] 165 Gale, Charles A. 210 Garvey, Marcus (and Garvey movement)

Green, William 105, 106, 135, 427 Groveland Case 257, 260, 261, 262 Guomindang See Kuomintang Gypsies See Roma

399, 413, 446, 449

244

Geldman, Max 798, 799 General Electric Company

92, 93, 96, 97,

98, 99, 100, 108

General Motors Corporation

96, 108, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 199, 313, 314, 318

Germain, Ernest See Mandel, Ernest Germany 4, 5, g, 10, 13, 22, 23, 27-32, 34, 37, 39, 41, 42-4, 48-53, 54, 55, 60, 63, 6577, 78-9, 81, 83, 84, 85-6, 87, 89-93, 96-8, 108,117,118, 125, 126, 127, 174, 176, 189, 213, 215, 221, 222, 246, 291, 293, 294, 295,312,319,329,348,356,359,365, 366,367,391,397,400,405,425,430, 439,443,445,447,448,457,508,520, 526, 532, 558, 611, 632, 636, 637, 638, 674, 676, 677, 684, 691, 692, 698, 708, 741, 742, 752, 765, 768, 770, 771, 773, 774, 800

See also East Germany; West Germany Gestapo (Nazi secret police) Ghana See Gold Coast Gitton, Marcel 68 Glass, Frank 342

46

Halley, Rudolph 549, 550 Hanford, Ben 141 Hansen.Joseph 23, 27-42, 78-88, 341, 41452, 501, 504022, 579, 596, 601, 602, 608, 615,616,620,624,626,627,628,667, 668,670,672,674,762,797 Harding, Warren G. 133 Harlem 200-5, 239, 240, 274, 548, 553, 581 Harlem Riot (1943) 200-5

Hart, Thomas C. So Hastie, William H. 221 Haston.Jock 494013 Haymarket Affair (1886) 464 Haywood, William D. 156, 485, 620 Healy, Gerry (Bums) 497016, 501,503,725, 731,732

Hearst, William Randolph and Hearst press 80,384,453

Hegel, G.W.F. 286 Henry, Milton R. 209-11 Herodotus 278 Hickman.James 160, 224-6, 249 Hickman Defense Committee 226

823

INDEX

Hillman, Sidney 465, 467-8, 479, 653 Hinduism 197, 208 Hiroshima 115, 118-9, 485 Hitler, Adolf 9, 22, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 37, 412, 52-3, 54, 59, 60, 62, 63, 66, 68, 73, 76, 81, 84, 86, 91, 96, 101, 189, 190, 197, 201, 212-3, 268, 271, 272, 312m5, 323, 359, 366, 410, 439-40, 441, 443, 558, 611, 677, 801 Hodges, Donald Clark 16-7 Hook, Sidney 384 Hoover, Herbert 133, 384

House Un-American Activities Committee 460

Howard, Frank 94, 95, 98 Huberman, Leo 499,550,583,627,628

L'Humanite

70, 71

Hungarian Uprising (1956) 10 Hungary 4, 10, 31, 65, 70, 122, 126, 389, 391, 393,395,397,399,400,406,417,632, 708 Hutcheson, William 470

Ibanism (Carlos Ibaftez) 781 Iceland 78 Ickes, Harold 110 imperialism See capitalism In Defense ofMarxism (Trotsky)

376,383,387

International Brotherhood of Teamsters 362,363,430,470,473

International Business Machines 96 International Harvester 96 International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU)

467, 468

International Left Opposition (and International Communist League) See Fourth International International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) 618 International Telephone and Telegraph 96 International Printing Pressmen and Assistants' Union 467 intersectlonality (overlapping oppression based on class, race, gender, etc.) 153, 173,221,223,233,235,238,242,245,246, 247,592-3

The Invading Socialist Society (James, Dunayevskaya, Lee) 320-1 Iron Curtain countries See Cold War, Eastern Bloc Islam (Muslims) 197,280 Italy 4, 7, 10, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 42, 65, 79, 86,

410, 429,

441,443 India 10, 25, 50, 79, 80, 82, 83, 87, 145, 174, 175,182,221,234,454,520,765 Indians (native-Americans) 174,216, 280m24 Indo-China (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) 25, 31, 34, 82, 124, 462, 504, 518, 523, 573, 697,711 Indonesia 10, 25, 462, 520

See also Dutch East Indies Industrial Revolution 4 Industrial Workers of the World (1ww)

17, 156,231,351,362,369,379,466,484,527 Insull, Samuel 133 intellectuals 1, 5, 10, 43, 62, 117, 179,190,207, 337,375,376,544,573,580,583,586, 592,615,646,650,662 de-radicalization among 149, 286, 352, 353,349,352,353-4,383-7 352, 383, 385-6

the New York Intellectuals

role of revolutionary intellectuals in socialist and workers' movements

87, 122, 123, 125, 126, 290, 292, 294, 323, 324,347,404,413, 447,448,526,691, 692, 711, 765

1ww See Industrial Workers of the World Izvestia 122

Jackson, Carl James, C.L.R.

See Keemer, Edgar

8, 17, 159, 160, 236-255, 284, 287,303-326,327-339,407,613 Japan 11, 23, 31, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 42, 78, 79-82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, go, 91, 108, 118, 119, 124, 127-8, 145, 174, 183, 196, 215, 258,453,457,459,462,486,508 Japanese-Americans 174,215 Jeffries, Edward 247,248

Jewish Daily Forward

616 Jewish Bund 72 Jewish War Veterans 265 Jews 215,266,271,634 persecution against 51,174,176,182, 197, 222,265,271,291,628,794

Jim Crow

See African Americans

824

INDEX

Johnson, Charles S. 235m8 Johnson, J.R. See C.L.R. James Johnson-Forest Tendency 8, 17, 20, 159-60, 284,285-7,303-26,327-42

Jones, Jesse 95 Jordan, Virgil 132 "Junk the Old Trotskyism"

Jurassic Park

505,726,768

20

Kaiser Wilhelm 32 Kamenev, Lev 296, 626 Kant, Immanuel 308 Kautsky, Karl 271, 483, 753 Keemer, Edgar (Carl Jackson)

160,169, 209-

Kerensky,Alexander 47,784,785 Kerry, Tom 342, 464-75, 501 Khrushchev, Nikita 10, 477 Kilgore, Harley 103 40-1

Knox, Frank 99, m Knudsen, William S. 38 Korea 174,270,462,501,515,523,637,685, 741

North (Communist dictatorship)

10,127,

524,696,697,698

South (anti-Communist dictatorship) 127,259

Korean War (1950-1953)

14,256,270, 286, 454, 461, 489, 509, 510, 560, 573, 589, 594, 611, 614, fog, 641, 642, 645, 696, 697,799

Krock,Arthur 83 Krupp industries 92, 96 Kuhn, Thomas 19 Ku Klux Klan 155, 177, 197, 199,224,257,261, 264,268

Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) 459, 460, 461, 542, 621 Kutcher,James 551,552,565,566,585,616, 660

Labor Action labor party

467,

468,469,470,653 Labor Youth League (LYL) 551 Lafollette, Robert M. 467 LaGuardia, Fiorello 201, 202, 268 Lamont, Corliss 550 Latvia 56 Laval, Pierre 37 La Varre, William 96 Lawler.Johnny 256 Leahy, William D. 37 Lechin, Juan 788, 789, 793, 802 Lefebvre, Henri 18 Left Opposition 354-6

See also Trotsky, Leon; Trotskyism 'Left-Wing' Communism - An Infantile Disorder (Lenin) 296

11, 212-3, 214-23 Kennedy,Joseph 31

Kiplinger Washington Newsletter

Labor's Non-Partisan League (LNPL)

331, 616, 679, 802 114, 143, 146, 167, 194, 222, 252,

359,473,545,550,556,560,561,568, 569,577,581,582,588,589,594,598, 622-6, 646,647,648,649,651, 652-3, 657,670

Leggett, John C. 14 Lehideux, Fram;;ois 75 Lehman, Herbert H. 468 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 1, 2, 43, 310-1, 3156, 321,324,354,392,437,527,532,533, 536,572,595,627,727,749,753,758, 759,762,787 critique of ultra-leftism 296, 379 democratic orientation 309, 316, 319, 324, 481, 482 leader of Russian Revolution 55, 58, 62, 64, 182, 309, 356 Leninism 246, 285, 308, 310, 324, 333, 355,367,611,707

no continuity between Leninism and Stalinism 41, 190, 310, 323-4, 355, 356, 477,489,522-3,524,532,678

on self-determination of oppressed nations 238, 242, 246 on the state and revolution 309, 407-8, 424,483

revolutionary internationalism

41, 189,

351, 532, 678

revolutionary party 323, 324, 624 revolutionary aura and perspectives shared with Trotsky 41, 54, 55, 58, 64, 182, 189, 191, 195, 238, 242, 351, 356, 357,423,439,489,678

united front 367-8 See also: Bolshevism and Bolsheviks; democratic centralism; Russian Revolution

INDEX

Lens, Sidney 2 Leontiev, A. (Lev Abramovich) 317 Lewis,John L. 136,465,468,583,647,653 Lewit, Morris See Stein, Morris Liberal Party 549 liberals, liberalism 12, 101, 112, 128, 187, 190, 196,202,203,213,223, 226, 238n20, 257, 263,266,270,271,306,352,427,455, 460,482,483,485,488,489,499,550, 562,566,585,588,627 Liberte 70 La Libre Belgique 66, 71 Libya 31, 32, 83, 278 Liebknecht, Karl 367 Life magazine 21, 385 Lincoln, Abraham 185, 186, 276, 746 Lipsitz, George 24-5 Lithuania 56 "Little Black Sambo" 217 Little Steel Strike (1937) 468,469 Liu Fu-jen See Glass, Frank Lord Lotliian (Philip Henry Kerr) 29-30 Lora, Guillermo 788, 791, 792, 797 Loris, Marc See Van Heijenoort, Jean Lovell, Frank Smo, 11 Lovestone, Jay and Lovestoneites 358, 651, 684 Luce, Henry R. 21 Lucha Obrera 782, 785, 790, 791, 794, 795, 802,803 Luxembourg 65, 73, 391 Luxemburg, Rosa 367 MacArthur, Douglas 82, 486, 696 Madagascar 83 Mainichi 118 Malaya 37, So, 124,462,515,523,696,741 Malaysia 85, 87 Malenkov, Georgy 630, 636, 694, 701, 702, 705,715 Mandel, Ernest (Germain) 19, 23,341,491, 493,494,495,496,497,501,504n22, 739-80 Mangan, Sherry (Terence Phelan) 23, 43-53 Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) 342, 459, 460, 461, 488, 504, 515, 519, 540, 542, 668, 689,697,784,787,795,796,798 Maoism 793, 795, 796, 797, 798, 799 Marcantonio, Vito 626, 627, 628, 649, 650

825

Marchale, Marcel 51 March on Washington Movement (1941) 160, 162-8, 186, 190, 193, 227, 239, 240, 265,268 Marshall, George C. 129 Marshall Plan 6, 394 Marx, Karl 1, 4, 13, 15, 142, 150, 151, 154, 181, 190, 195, 217, 218, 219, 277, 285, 308-9, 312,318,319,323,336,346,348,4078, 477,480,481,530,531,532,533,534, 536,796 Marxism (scientific socialism) 17, 20,157, 181, 191, 195, 239, 242, 358, 370, 391, 414, 458,480,506,529,742,782 Masses and Mainstream 477 Matthews, Herbert L. 125, 127, 130 Matthiessen, Francis Otto 627 Mazey, Emil 25 Mazey, Ernest 25 McCall, Willis V. 257 McDonald, DavidJ. 485 McGrath, J. Howard 262, 263, 264 McKay, Claude 206 The Meaning of the Second World War (Mandel) 23 Mekeel, H. Scudder 216 Melnikov, G.L. 635 Menshevism and Mensheviks 367 Metaxas, loannis 32 Mexican-Americans 174, 592, 803 Mexico 37,783 Meyer,]. See James, C.L.R. middle class 16, 56, 136, 140, 187-8, 406, 409,574-5 middle-income working class 14, 16 pejorative political characterization 187-8, 191, 574 small business people and independent professionals 187, 406, 575 white-collar workers 140, 187 See also petty bourgeois Militant 24, 120, 160, 196, 200, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 215, 222, 264, 266, 284, 336, 363,444,490,503,529,547,548,561, 569,743,769 Military Review 32-3 Mills, Manny 600, 606 Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers 618 Minneapolis Smith Act Trial (1941) 528

826 "Mission to Moscow" 358 Molinier, Raymond 491 Molotov, Vyacheslav 31, 41, 55, 123, 124, 125, 128,316 Moltke, Helmuth von 32 Moore, Harriette Simms 257,263,264,266, 268 Moore, Harry T. 256-8, 259, 263, 264, 265-6, 267,268,269,270,272,274,548 Monthly Review 499,550,551,566,586, 597, 627 Morgan, J.P. 119, 351 Morrow, Felix 7, 8, 18, 20, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288-97, 611, 677, 679, 680, 681 Moscow Trials See Stalinism, purge trials, executions, labor camps (1936-39) Mossadegh, Muhammad 696, 794 Motley, William 226 Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR - Revolutionary Nationalist Movement) 781, 783-4, 785, 786-7, 788-9, 791-2, 802 Murray, Philip 132, 135, 137, 138, 143, 267, 269,270 Mussolini, Benito 31, 32, 33, 62, 404 Muste, A.J.; Musteites and "Musteism" 565, 628,629,653-54,661,662,663,721 Myrdal, Gunnar 23om5, 231m7, 233, 236 Nagasaki 115, 118-9, 485 The Nation 258, 274 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 193, 221, 226, 233,244,250,251,257,262,264,265, 266,267,563,564,655,669 National Association of Manufacturers 106, 349 National Bronze and Aluminum Company 104 National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) 469 National Maritime Union (NMU) 154, 369, 372,373,656 National Socialism (official Nazi ideology) 49 Nazism 4, 6, 10, 24, 30, 43, 45, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53,54,55,60,65,68,72,73,76,78,84, 85, 86-101, 164, 174, 183, 222, 258, 291-

INDEX

2,293,294,295,324,347,356,359,374, 376,398,399,400,410,443,444,677, 690,800 Negro Labor, A National Problem (Weaver) 227 Negroes See Africans, African Americans Nelson, Donald m Nelson, Steve 12-3 Neumann, Heinz 677 New Deal 11, 110, 186, 467, 468, 469 New York Age 274 New International 141, 305 New York Times 68, 81, 83, 107, 109, 122, 123, 125,127,215,265,384,472,473 New York World-Telegram 123 New Zealand 37 Nomura, Kichisaburo 34 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 6

Norway 37 Novack, George 24, 122-30, 497m6, 683 nuclear weapons 115, 118-9, 129, 256, 346, 348,349,384,446,454,485,511,692 October Revolution See Russian Revolution Oehler, Hugo 621, 628, 629, 661 Oil Workers International Union 132, 135, 154 Opium War of 1840-42 454 opportunism 145, 187, 221, 296, 331, 352, 372, 401,428,467,515,522,525,526,567, 568,615,667,706,768,775,779 source of opportunism 149 Pablo, Michel (Raptis) 8-9, 303, 304, 306, 326, 491, 495-500, 501, 503, 504, 505, 506-21, 530-37, 547, 555-6, 557,559, 562,598,630-39,666,667,668,678, 681,682,683,684, 713, 715, 716, 717, 718, 723,724-33,737,745-52,755,756,757, 759-64, 765, 766, 767, 768, 770-1, 773, 774,776,777,778,779,780,781,782, 783,791,793,794,797,798,799,800, 802 "Pabloism" 8-9, 495-505, 704, 723-38, 742, 753-6,767-70,772,774-9,782,783,787, 794, 796, 799, 802 centuries of degenerated workers' states 304, 306, 496, 682

INDEX

Pablo seems to assert 516, 530-31, 534 Pablo seems to reject 537 entryism (entrism) perspective 497,501, 503,571,625,629,710-3,731 factional and undemocratic mode of functioning 777-8, 779 imminence of Third World War 508, 611 imposition of "international democratic centralism" 9, 675, 682, 725, 731-3, 742,759-60,761,763,766,769-70 opportunist adaptation to Stalinism and other "alien" forces 768, 780 self-reform of Soviet bureaucracy 638639, 768, 773-4, 729-30 pacifism, pacifists 38 Palmer Raids (1919-20) 154,351 Palmer, Bryan 3, 488-505 Panama 2 Pantaguel 70 Parade 256 paradigms 19 Paris Commune (1871) 4, 45 Parish, W.S. 93, 95, 98 Partido de Izquierda Revolucionaria (PIR) 794 Partido Obrero Revolucianario (PORRevolutionary Workers Party) 782-8, 802 Partisan Review 285 Patterson, Robert 99, m Paz Estenssoro, Victor 785, 788, 791, 792 Pearson, Drew 124, 127 peasants 10, 68-9, 75, 221, 230, 347, 391, 393, 394-6, 401, 409, 410, 416, 435, 441, 444, 707,785,787,789,790,791,793 as working-class allies 290, 421, 783, 784, 787, 789-90, 794 in China 458, 459,460,519, 795, 796, 797 in Russia/Soviet Union 22, 56, 59-60, 62,392,700,702,704 democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry 787 differentiation among peasants 59 Stalin's forced collectivization of land 59,392,394,436 revolutionary socialist policy regarding peasants 59-60, 391, 436, 437 See also farmers

827 Pendergast, Thomas 256 Peng Shu-tse (Peng Shuzhi) 798 People's Front (popular front) 45,359, 617, 621, 650, 689, 706 People Wasn't Made to Burn (Allen) 160 permanent revolution 235, 304, 492, 503, 787,793,794,795-6 Peronism (Juan Peron) 781 Les Petites Ailes 70 Petrovsky, I.G. 634 petty bourgeois 43, 56, 68, 207, 236, 245, 246,247,251,253,324,337,367,426, 527,583,607,781,783,786,790 class 44, 56, 59,146,207,247,324,325, 345,385,426,436,437,787 ideology, politics (often as pejorative term) 43, 56,236,245,251,308,328, 337,345,367,385,511,527,583,607, 650,720,732,783,786,787,788,792, 802 peasants, farmers 56, 59, 392, 396-6 See also middle class Le Peuple de France 70 Phelan, Terence See Sherry Mangan Philippines 25, 79, 81, 82, 462, 515 The Pictorial Orient 35 Pittsburgh Courier 203, 215, 233 Pittsburgh Post Gazette 106 PM 97,101 poilu (infantryman) 44-5 Poland 10, 37, 41, 65, 68, 70, 72, 75,389, 390, 393, 394, 396, 397, 398, 399, 400, 401, 404, 405, 406, 408, 409, 410, 411, 416, 417, 418, 435, 440, 441, 442, 443, 445, 446, 632, 635, 708 Political Economy in the Saviet Union (Leontiev) 317 Popular Front See People's Front Populist movement (in United States, 188os189os) 244 Portugal 65, 280, 281 POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificaci6n Marxista - Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) 539, 614 Pravda 61, 128, 634, 637 Praxis 18 Preis, Art 24, 25, 89-101, 363, 672 prejudice (ethnic and racial) See racism Progressive Party (founded 1924) 467

828 Progressive Party (founded 1948) 498, 550,588,626,628,641,649,650, 654 proletarian military policy 790 Protestant Church 72, 173 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 308 Pucheu, Pierre 67, 75 Puerto Ricans 174, 563 Quatrieme Internationale (QI) 741 Que Hacer? 783, 791 Quisling, Vidkun 72 quisling (traitor collaborating with an enemy force) 221, 394, 395, 397, 573 Races ofMankind (Benedict and Weltfish) 212,217 Radek, Karl 678 Randolph, A. Philip 160, 162-8, 190, 203, 239-40 Randolph-Reynolds movement 239 RCA (Radio Corporation of America) 137 Red Army 6, 9, 22, 33, 54, 55, 58, 60, 62, 63, 85, 86, 126, 290,307,311,312,347,398, 399, 400, 402, 410, 412, 435, 441, 442, 443, 444, 445, 448, 493, 494, 515, 525, 794,800 Red Cross 37 religion 57, 173, 174, 182, 183, 199, 218, 226, 267,280,349,625 Remington Arms Company 93, 97 Renard, Daniel 731, 765 Renault, Louis 75 Republican Party 114, 184, 185, 186, 194, 236, 238,239n20,243,267,349,468,470, 471,472,544,549,588 Reuther, Walter 13, 14, 135, 136,137,142, 143, 267,269,314,329,363,473,474,475, 560, 568, 577, 588, 606, 607, 608, 645, 653,658 The Revolution Betrayed (Trotsky) 322, 388, 407,533,534,694,700,703 Revolutionary Communist Party (Britain) 303, 494m3 Reynaud, Paul 51 Reynolds,Grant 239n20 Rhee, Syngman 258 Ring, Harry 498, 555-69, 628 Rockefeller interests 95, 119, 23om6

INDEX

Roman Catholic Church 72, 173, 214, 265, 280,281,349,364, 371,427,601 Roosevelt, Eleanor 217 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 11, 27, 28, 29-30, 31, 34, 37-8, 39, 40, 42, 55, 63, 99, 100, 111, 126, 132, 142, 166, 167, 186, 189, 197, 198, 215,216,217,222,227,239,357,359,363, 386,467,468,469,470,528,653 Rosenberg Case 616-7 Rumania 10, 31, 65, 122, 124, 146, 127, 389, 390,391,393,395,397,399,401,405, 406, 417, 421, 423, 449, 636, 708 Russian Civil War (1918-21) 55, 58, 59, 60, 62,63,64 Russian Opposition See Left Opposition in Russia Russian Orthodox Church 63 Russian Revolution (1917) 7, 41, 42, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 62, 63, 64, 87, 181-3, 189, 210, 221, 302, 311, 315, 324, 345, 351, 374, 381, 404,431,445,450,487,489,512,526, 536,611,676,678,699,703,787,794 Russo-Finnish War, Soviet-Finnish War (1939-40) 32,606,699 Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) 453 Rustin, Bayard 239n20 Ryan, Sam 494m3, 504, 781-804 Ryder, Noble 216 Sacco and Vanzetti case 224 Sanders,John See Burch, Arthur Sandusky Foundry and Machinery Company 104 Sato, Naotake 86 Scott, Dred 224 Second International (Socialist International) 4, 5, 6,305,323,753,758 sectarianism 9, 71, 498, 499, 504, 517, 518, 527,528,544,545,567,568,578,579, 582, 587, 603, 604, 619, 622, 623, 624, 626-9, 644, 646, 648, 654, 657-59, 663, 672, 706, 731, 742, 749, 761, 765, 773, 778 Semyenov, Vladimir 636 Sergei (Russian Orthodox Patriarch Sergius, Ivan Stragorodsky) 63 Serge, Victor 5n6 Shachtman, Max 7, 8, 17, 20, 141, 159, 284, 285, 328, 331, 341, 539, 600, 606, 607,

829

INDEX

613, 621, 677, 679, 681, 682, 722, 742, 748, 758,759,760,767,774,801 Shakespeare, William 476

share-cropping See tenant farmers Shepherd, Samuel 257 Shlyapnikov, Alexander 316 Silone, Ignazio 473 Simms, William Philip 123 Sismondi,Jean Charles Leonard de 308 slavety and anti-slavety in the United States 4, 128-9, 165, 170-2, 177,184,185,204, 205, 217, 218, 224, 229, 243, 272, 273-4, 275-6, 277, 280-2

See also abolitionists Slick, Thomas 105 Smith Act (1940) 263, 286, 483, 489, 492,

affirmative self-definition cohesion entails democracy and discipline 145, 683, 685, 722, 723, 732-3

confidence In mission

145, 273, 391,

591,683,669,685-6

critical-minded, independent-minded membership 685 engagement in actual struggles 148, 220, 249, 528, 560, 591, 592, 663, 669-70, 731

guided by revolutlonaty program 114,117,121,145, 148, 283, 352

552

Smith, Gerald L.K. 222 Smith, Lillian 236 Social Democracy (reformist socialism)

guided by Marxist perspectives and revolutionaty traditions 17, 148, 7,

45, 207, 298, 345, 366-7, 398, 401, 403, 425,440,480,482,485,486,511,522, 571,618,625,644,712,786

accommodating toward and influenced by capitalism 5, 6, 150, 482, 485 allied with imperialism 6, 356, 482 anti-Communism 7, 11, 128, 349 functioning and influence in the United States 11, 101, 349, 479, 577 Johnson-Forest Tendency perspectives regarding Social Democracy 286, 305,307,325,328-31,333,337

liberalism sometimes as preferred selfidentification in the United States

191, 195, 251, 355, 370, 505

leadership dominated by those reflecting views of majority: at local level 726-7

at national level (Political Committee and Editorial Board) 732 leadership includes minority representation 722, 723 loyalty to organization involving distinctive elements: accept basics of program 738, 768, 769, 771

do one's share of the practical work 722,723

honestly, openly state one's views 685,722

342

mass support and political influence in Europe 6, 7, 9, 11, 293, 284, 367 reformist rejection of revolutionaty socialism 117, 366-7, 523 See also: Second International; Socialist Party of America Social Revolutionaty (Socialist-Revolutionaty- SR) party 367 socialism defined and described 41, 116, 178-9, 180,220, 282, 381, 477-8, 480, 481,482,484-5,530,532-3 Socialist Appeal 33 Socialist Outlook 618

Socialist Party of America

468,484,490,565,622,629,641,654, 661, 711, 721 Socialist Workers Party 120-1, 178, 191-5, 223,340,352,376,488

17,350,351,467,

respect majority decisions 680 rights of minority protected within framework of loyalty 734 outreach and recruitment through activism 641-2 revolutionaty internationalism 1478, 528, 674-5

must not be passive commentaty on foreign affairs 148 must not be escapism from realities at home 148 rooted in us historical and current realities ("Americanization") 145, 148,527,529,669-70

830

dissident criticisms delusion regarding its own importance 761,765 disappointed expectations 336-7 inadequacies in analytical and theoretical approach 285, 296, 304, 305, 335, 528, 597-8, 604-8, 624, 645 leadership clique and monolithic tendencies 299, 301, 302, 335, 598-602 leadership is mad, irrational, senile 777 national (us) chauvinism 501,761 problematical self-conception (as "small mass party") 331, 335, 337, 604, 619-21 refusal of Cannon leadership to be a minority 776 rigidities within 285, 301,544,597, 604-8,622,629 routinism within 336, 604 Socio-Economic Approach to Educational Problems (Brown) 277 Soupe, Henri 68 South Africa 207, 342 South America, Latin America 6, 10, 29, 37, 96, 174, 175, 421, 441, 489,504,520, 764, 796,803 Southern Tenant Farmers Association 244 Soviet Union (ussR) 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 41-2, 54-64, 283, 286, 305, 306, 328, 340, 341, 346,347,353,380, 388-413, 414-45, 446,447,449,450,451,452,507,509, 512-14, 516, 517, 524, 525, 534-7, 559, 609, 610, 630-9, 692, 699, 710, 713, 714, 716, 741, 743, 757, 771, 797, 798 achievements of and gains within 42, 54,56,182-3,445,450,693,699,704 afflicted with repressive bureaucratic dictatorship 57,191,322,344,445,450, 481, 512, 638, 694, 699 origins and composition 62 privileges of bureaucracy 57, 191, 322, 344,354,360,381,441,477, 4801, 486, 512, 587, 693-4, 699, 702-3, 716-7 as bureaucratic-collectivist 7, 341, 452, 537 as degenerated workers' state 42, 126,

INDEX

341, 416, 419, 420, 422, 425, 429-30, 438-40,443,445,493 as state-capitalist 286, 303-26 New Economic Policy (N EP -1921-28) 57 peasants 56, 59 and revolutionary agricultural policy 59-60 differentiation among 59 peaceful co-existence with capitalist world 627, 696 political revolution needed within USSR (and similar formations) 7, 22, 24, 42, 63-4, 487,694,704,708,709,713, 714, 718, 741 Soviet people's role in World War II victory 22, 42, 63-4, 84, 183 traditions of October Revolution and Civil War 41, 42, 55, 58, 63-4, 87, 3156, 445,450 working class 55, 56-8, 84,487, 693 differentiation within 57, 693 privileged layer, Stakhanovists (zealous workers - named after Alexei Stakhanov) 57 youth ferment within 60-1, 86 See also Stalinism Spain 4, 5, 31, 35, 37, 65, 281, 290, 291, 324, 357,430,540,785,803 Sparks, Chauncy 216 spheres of influence (pre-Cold War division of the world) 116,124,126,128,412 Stalin, Joseph and Stalinism 4-5, 6, 7-10, 11, 22, 24, 31, 34, 41-2, 45, 51, 53, 5464, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129,134,136, 137, 138,147,149,182,196, 202, 203, 221-2, 284, 285, 286, 340-2, 343-382, 386, 388-413, 415-52, 4767, 493-503, 506, 509, 511-20, 522-4, 526,528, 535-7, 539-40, 541-2, 543, 547, 550-2, 556-8, 562-8, 571, 572-3, 577,578,579,582-90,593,597-600, 601, 604-11, 613-9, 620, 621, 625, 626-9, 630-9, 640, 641, 644, 645, 649-51, 6535, 662,664,667,668,670, 677-8, 679, 681, 682, 684, 687-719, 720, 725, 727, 729,730,731,734,737,740,741,743,745, 746,747,748, 751, 757, 760, 761-4, 766, 768,769,770,771,772-3,778,779,780,

INDEX

783,787,788,793-4,796,797,798,799, 800,801 antithesis of genuine communism (anticommunist) 182, 190,191,221, 344-5, 350,351,386,477 authoritarian organizational practices 189,402,403-4,446,478,480,486,684 betrayal of Bolshevism, struggles of the oppressed, October revolution 41, 86, 117, 130, 183, 201, 221, 268, 344, 350, 357-60,386,399,447,477 bureaucratic dictatorship in Soviet Union 7, 57, 58,191,344,445,450,481,512,638, 694,699 contradictory aspects 365-9, 388-413, 414-52, 523-4 conception of "socialism in one country" 55,147,354,358,376,391,394,395,396, 429,432,463,542,625,674,683 degeneration of us Communist Party 189, 350-3, 684 domination within Communist International and world Communist movement 54,117,147,189,537,305, 355,356,678,684,705-7,725 in Eastern Europe, generating disillusionment within working class 347 in Western Europe, based in classconscious, revolutionary layers of working class 345-7 in United States, demoralized a generation of radical workers 4 78, 4 79 Johnson-Forest Tendency perspectives regarding Stalinism 303, 304, 30522, 323,324,325 murderous repression and violence 4-5, 10, 60, 62, 115, 290-1, 344, 346, 386, 394, 409, 446, 478, 481 opportunist and reformist tendencies 45, 101, 189, 268, 270, 352, 355, 461, 515, 522-3,607-8,667,695,706,768 see also People's Front origins ofStalinism 354,381 reflects compromise with (subordination to) world imperialism 130, 189, 353, 522 undermined by spread of revolution and revolutionary internationalism 348 See also Soviet Union

831

Standard Oil of New Jersey 89, go, 91, 92, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 108, 111 Standley, William 86 State and Revolution (Lenin) 309, 407-8, 424, 533Il29 State-Capitalism and World Revolution (James, Dunayevskaya, Lee) 303-26, 334 State Department socialism 618 Stein, Morris (Lewit) 596,599,601, 620, 624,626,627,628,682,738,740,742, 745,764,799 Stevens, D. See Weiss, David Stevenson, Adlai 470 Stimson, Henry L. 99, m Stone, Ben 724 strike wave of 1945-46 in u.s. 24-5, 131-43, 332 Sulzberger, C.L. 122, 123 Sufter, Ramon Serrano 31 Suslov, M. 635 Swabeck, Ame 606, 647, 648 Swados, Harvey 16 Sweden 65 Sweezy, Paul M. 499, 627 Switzerland 65, 503 Taft-Hartley Act 470-3, 474,623,670,775 Taft, Robert A. 270 Taiping Revolution (1850-1864) 456 Taylorism (Taylor system, "time-and-motion" studies to control labor process) 311-12 Teamsters Union See International Brotherhood of Teamsters Teapot Dome Scandal 133 tenant farmers and sharecroppers 244 Thailand 128 Third American Revolution (future socialist revolution) 227 "third camp" 7, 607, 614, 644, 645, 646 Thomas, Norman 485, 620 Thorez, Maurice 71 Time magazine 21, 23,385 Tito, Josip Broz 333, 394, 396, 397, 400, 405, 412, 413, 438, 439, 540 Titoism 328, 333, 329, 412, 539 Tobin, Dan 363, 430, 470 Togliatti, Palmiro 473 Tom See Sam Gordon

832 totalitarianism 4, 21, 42, 63, 83, 128, 283, 292, 303, 312, 314, 315, 320, 344, 346, 349, 377,380,384,386,404,443,486,616, 631, 694, 699, 700, 701, 702, 716 Townsend, Willard S. 190 Transitional Program 290, 303, 305, 306, 312,321,322,325,435,436,437,592,710, 718,719,765,774,789,790,791 Treaty of Versailles 54, 130, 457 Trotsky, Leon 1, 115-7, 159, 205-8, 235, 238, 242, 293, 294-5, 304, 305, 306, 316, 322, 324, 325, 330, 331, 332-3, 341, 347, 357, 379-80, 384, 386, 388, 394, 396, 401-2, 406-7, 408,409,410,415, 425-6, 435, 439-40,441-443,445,446,449-50, 452,469,491,493,497,503,504,505, 507, 513, 514, 527, 529, 532-4, 539, 542, 582, 589, 606, 611, 613, 615, 625, 662, 663,675-6,684,694,700,703,704,738, 743,746,759,762,768-9,773,787,793, 801 assassination of 62, 115, 357, 447, 492, 794 defending "gains of October Revolution" 7,341-2,427-9,493,524,677 forecast of outcomes of the approaching Second World War 21-2, 283 main ideas 115-7 relationship with Lenin 1, 41, 54, 55, 58, 64, 182-3, 189, 195, 238, 242, 351, 356, 423,481,489,678,758 role in Russian Revolution and Civil War 41,55,56,58,63,64,182-3,356,794 resistance to Stalinism 191, 341, 350, 355, 356,358,388,396,438,493,524,674 revolutionary democracy 481, 482, 524, 626,685 revolutionary internationalism 54, 116, 144, 189, 351, 358, 396, 432, 533, 674, 678,794 prediction of triumph of Fourth International and its perspectives 3, 5-6, 117, 283 slanders against 62, 355, 764 using Trotsky as a smokescreen 334 Trotskyism 8, 20, 61,335,342, 347, 377, 415, 521, 525, 541, 542, 551, 565, 609, 610, 666, 741, 742, 768 concerns regarding "orthodoxy" 8, 19,

INDEX

20, 305, 307, 321, 322, 325, 401, 419, 422, 494,495,499,703,704,737,755,768, 769,774,779,780,782,797,798,799, 801,804 defined 61, 115-6, 304, 521, 771 denigrated 355, 380, 527 denounced as fundamentally flawed 286,304,305,307,321,322,327,341 fragmentation 3, 6-g, 17-20, 488-505, 605, 608-9, 628-g The Trotsky School (swP cadre educational center) 580, 594, 600, 612 Truman, Harry S. 104, 125, 135, 138, 236, 256, 261, 262, 263, 266-7, 269, 270, 272, 274, 344,348,385,386,468,469,474,623, 785 Truman Senate Investigating Committee 89, go, 93, 94, 95, 99, 102, 103, 106-7, lll use of atomic bombs 346, 348 truth, reality 18-9, 50 Tubman, Harriet 165, 257 Tudeh Party (Iranian Communists) 696, 794 Turkey 31, 41, 124, 637 Turner, Nat 165, 258 Urbahns, Hugo 769 Ukraine 41, 60, 409, 433, 631, 634-5, 707, 708 lflbricht, Walter 636 ultra-leftism, ultra-leftists 156, 295-7, 551, 565,706 Underground Railroad 243 underground, resistance and partisan movements during Second World War 9-10, 33, 49, 53, 65-77, 399-400, 413, 491 unemployment and unemployed movement 24, 52-3, 75, 151, 189, 228, 229, 376 uneven and combined development 277 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (ussR) See Soviet Union United Association of Plumbers and Steamfitters 470 United Auto Workers (uAw) 13, 14, 25, 113, 135, 138, 142, 143, 160, 233, 262, 362, 369, 371, 484, 560, 568,569,588, 606, 607, 652,658,670 United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America 470

INDEX

United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (u E) 131, 137, 154, 362, 369, 372, 618 united front 348,349,359,365,367, 368, 520,550,552,616,627,650-1 united front against Stalinism cannot be "all-inclusive• 350, 360, 364, 371, 460, 523,677 United Hatters, Cap and Millinery Workers International Union 467 United Mine Workers of America 231-2 United Nations (Allied Powers during World War II; international institution after World War II) So, 81, 83, 84, 123,125,259, 269,453,460 United Packinghouse Workers of America 131, 137, 138, 153, 154, 264 United Rubber Workers of America 131,137, 155, 156, 362, 466, 469, 490, 656 United States Steel Corporation 102 United Steelworkers of America 131, 134, 137,138,154, 155,156,232,246,267, 466 United Transport Service Employees Union 190 Urban League 228m4 us News 28, 29 us News and World Report 470

Va/my 70 Van der Linden, Marcel 341-2 Van Heijenoort, Jean (Marc Loris, Jean Vannier) 7,23,65-77,284,285,491 Vanzler, Joseph See John G. Wright La Verite 70 Verites 71 Vern, Dennis 494m3, 504, 798, 799 Vern tendency 494m3, 504, 798, 799, 801 Vesy [Vesey], Denmark 165 Vichy (French collaborationist) government 51 La Vie Nationale 51 Villarroel, Gualberto 788 Voice of America 259 La Voix de Paris 70 Voznossensky, N. 635 Wallace, Henry A. 37, 384, 498, 588, 626 Wang Ching-wei 41 "war communism" (1918-21) 315

833 Ward, Leonard Townsend 456 Warde, William F. See George Novack Weaver, Robert C. 227 Weber,Jack 681 Weeks, Sinclair 470 Weill, Roman 468 Weiss, David 498, 555-69, 581, 586, 603, 628 Weiss, Murry 501, 504, 505, 601, 603, 640, 787,793,798,799,801 Weiss, Myra Tanner 501, 504, 549 welfare state 15, 313, 522 Weltfish, Gene [Eugenia] 212mo Westinghouse Electric Corporation 131, 137, 369 Weston,John 142 West Germany 6g8, 772 West Indians 174 White, Walter 262, 267, 269, 270 White Circle League 264 Whitney, John Hay 133 Williams, Eric 28m24 Willkie, Wendell 468 Wilson, Charles E. 199, 314 Wilson, Hugh R. 125 Wilson, Woodrow 457 Wobblies See Industrial Workers of the World Workers' and Farmers' Government 114, 167, 178-81, 183-5, 220, 222 Workers Party (wP - Shachtman group) 7, 8,159,284,285,298-302 as small mass party 331 critique of 327-8, 329, 330-31, 333, 334, 336,606 problematical self-conception 337 Workers Party of the United States 17 workers' control of production 101, 114, 310, 315 workers' state 82, 173, 179-81, 182, 183, 330, 341,392,393,404,414,422,423,4245,427,430,437,439,448,451,481,488, 497,524-5 bureaucratically deformed 414-52, 534, 536 bureaucratically degenerated 8, 42, 126, 304, 306, 341, 416, 419, 420, 422, 425, 429,439,443,445,512,525,536,677, 682 workers' power 309, 310

INDEX

834

See also: dictatorship of the proletariat; democracy, workers' democracy and socialist democracy working class 4-6, 12, 14-6, 30, 47, 116, 131, 132, 134, 140, 141, 150, 153-8, 166, 172, 173, 181, 191, 196, 200, 275, 285, 286, 292, 300, 310, 312, 313, 320, 323, 336, 341, 348, 350, 358,359,363,370,372,386,391,402, 408, 424, 437, 462, 480, 481, 482, 487, 494,495,520,526-7,529,539,545,552, 558,568,570-1,578,582,593,622,625, 630,647,662,691,694,699,711,727, 785,788 class struggle 4-5, 116-7, 120, 13143, 153-8, 172-3, 191-4, 195,221,223, 233,236,238,245,253,254,267,273, 276,292,308,309,336,350,353, 366, 369, 373, 375, 379, 427, 432, 441, 445,449,464,468,482,485-6,489, 490, 498, 511, 523, 538,545,560, 567, 568,571,574,590,592,596, 605, 647, 651, 658, 663, 670, 671, 711, 786, 800, 801

See also intersectionality

elemental consciousness not backward, but revolutionaiy 332 false consciousness (prejudices, racism, etc.) 174, 191, 195, 199, 206, 207, 211, 336, 617-8, 662 57, 59,206, 207, 316, 362,403,487,694

labor aristocracy

labor movement must become a social movement if it is to survive and prosper 143 sectors of working class: agricultural workers 59, 60, 184, 393, 401, 575 craft (skilled) workers 57, 111, 153, 173, 176, 193, 198, 232, 362, 464, 465, 466 11, 12, 131, 153, 154, 155, 156, 183, 198, 217, 220, 227-35, 311, 436, 442, 457, 464, 465, 466, 490,528,557,575,581,586,592,669

industrial workers

unemployed workers ("industrial reserve army") 24, 52, 75, 77, 151, 189,228,229,313,318,376 57, 171,173,227, 232,362

unskilled workers

reform struggles

5, 13, 15, 132, 184, 222, 233, 237-40, 251, 464, 484, 647, 650 revolutionaiy struggles 4, 45, 158, 189, 191, 210, 221, 311, 315, 345, 351, 374,381,387,512,676,794 trade union struggles 4, 5, 9, 11, 124, 47, 53, 101, 105, 106, 112-4, 117, 131-43, 145, 153-7, 163,164, 167, 170, 183-4, 188, 190, 191-3, 194, 196, 197200, 222-3, 226, 231-3, 250, 268, 283, 313-4, 318, 332, 34207, 347,353, 362-3,365,369,378,399,430,458, 464-75,484,490,528,545,555,560, 592, 642, 653, 658-60, 670, 671, 691, 696, 706, 728, 730, 731, 734, 757, 758, 778 assessing victoiy and defeat 141-

white collar and "professional" workers 140, 142,173,187,220,257 vanguard layer of 55, 135, 246, 333, 359, 374,375,518,519,528,535,541,578,593, 617,620,621,625,662,672,688,698, 704,717,757,788,796

See also: capitalism; democracy; intersectionality World War I 4, 6, 23, 28, 29, 38, 65, 71, 87, 119, 125, 154, 227, 233, 271, 311, 345, 366, 425,457,514, 690 World War II 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 14, 21, 22, 27121, 122, 125, 130, 142, 144, 147, 154, 159, 189,214,227,228,230,232,233,268, 270, 271, 283, 285, 305, 318, 340, 345, 354,410,435,459,488,489,492,495, 505, 544, 611, 617, 621, 632, 690, 691, 693,697,699

43

disunity 138-9, 166, 188, 213, 267 solidarity, unity 139, 154, 173, 181, 188, 191, 200, 218, 221, 369

consciousness: class consciousness

191, 197,198,248,299,336,476,479, 544,545,559,573,656

4,

13, 16, 17, 173, 191,193,235,344,557,618 confused, mixed consciousness 185,

five conflicts within 23 impacts of 23, 117-20, 122-30 Worthy, William T. 239020 Wright, John G. (Vanzler, Joseph) 24, 54-64, 598,610

Wu Hsiu-chuan

453, 454

835

INDEX

Yalta Conference 126 Young Communist League (YcL) 60 Young Peoples Socialist League (YPSL) 658 Young Progressives of America (YPA) 550, 551,566 Yugoslavia 10, 31, 65, 68, 123, 124, 303, 304, 388-91, 393, 394, 396-400, 402, 4056, 412, 413, 414, 417-8, 419-20, 422-3, 425,431,432,433,434,446,447,448, 449,450,451,488,495,496,497,498, 515, 517, 524, 525, 526, 537, 540, 541, 542,

609, 610, 627, 630, 637, 666, 688, 690, 691, 698, 699, 706, 708 Yugoslav Revolution (1945) 303, 399-400, 402-3, 405-6, 412, 413, 417-8, 419, 450, 451, 496, 498, 515, 517, 520, 525, 688, 697, 699, 706, 708

Zaritsky, Max 467 Zaslow, Milt See Bartell, Mike Zinoviev, Gregory 296, 626, 678

Dissident Marxism in the United States This book is Part II of a documentary trilogy on US Trotskyism. It is also the third volume of a six-volume series on Dissident Marxism in the United States, published within the Historical Materialism (HM) book series: 1.

The 'American Exceptionalism' ofJay Loves tone and His Comrades, 1929-1940. Dissident Marxism in the United States: Volume 1. HM 83, ISBN 9789004224438 (Brill 2015).

2.

US Trotskyism 1928-1965. Part I: Emergence. Left Opposition in the United States. Dissident Marxism in the United States: Volume 2. HM 156, ISBN 9789004224445

(Brill 2017 ). 3.

US Trotskyism 1928-1965. Part I I: Endurance. The Coming American Revolution. Dissident Marxism in the United States: Volume 3. HM 183, ISBN 9789004224452 (Brill 2019).

4.

US Trotsky ism 1928-1965. Part I I I: Resurgence. Uneven and Combined Development. Dissident Marxism in the United States: Volume 4. HM 184, ISBN 9789004224469

(Brill 2019 ). 5.

'Leftward Ho!' Revolutionary Intellectuals, 1928-1948. Dissident Marxism in the

6.

Independent Marxism in the American Century, 1949-1965. Dissident Marxism in

United States: Volume 5 (Brill, forthcoming). the United States: Volume 6 (Brill, forthcoming).