Wohlforth Archive | Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Written: 1964-1969.
First Published: 1971.
Source: A Bulletin Book for Labor Publications Inc., New York 1971.
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American Radicalism again
Within a few short months of the fundamental split with the Shachtman-Burnham-Abern faction in 1940, the Socialist Workers Party was to receive another severe blow, the death of Trotsky. This was a particularly difficult blow to the movement, for it came precisely at a time when Trotsky was beginning to make what could have been his most important contribution to the development of the American Trotskyist movement. While his role in the 1940 factional struggle was essential in order to save the movement, his role after the split was becoming critical to the process of developing that which was saved. But this learning process was terminated by Stalin’s axe and the party was forced to carry on as best it could on its own resources – not the least of these being what it had learned from Trotsky in the preceding period.
It was not an easy period in which to learn, for World War II was going full blast and the United States was being drawn increasingly into the bloody battle. The American movement was largely cut off from active collaboration with Trotskyists in other parts of the world and virtually the entire responsibility for the continuation of the Fourth International fell on to its shoulders. Nor was the situation within the United States an easy one. The war boom was beginning to eat at the militancy of the working class, and pro-war chauvinism was rampant in the country as a whole. Soon the party itself was to feel directly the weight of state persecution. No, it was not an easy time to learn, but revolutionaries are not revolutionaries if they cannot survive difficult times.
Forced to rely on its own resources, it is quite natural that that element in American Trotskyism, most specifically reflected in Cannon himself and those close to him, which was both the strength and the weakness of the American movement, should re-assert itself – American radicalism. American radicalism, as we have seen, is not a homogeneous tradition but rather a combination of some quite contradictory outlooks. The two most important of these are populism, the struggle of ‘democracy’ against plutocracy, and syndicalism, the elemental class-consciousness of an emerging working class. We will see the various ways these divergent radical traditions reflected themselves through the SWP as it was put to some very severe tests during the war period.
Soon after Trotsky’s death the federal Government began the prosecution under the Smith Act of 18 leaders of the party and of the Minneapolis Teamsters. Clearly, its aim was to remove an obstacle within the labour movement to its drive to rally the workers behind its imperialist war aims. The Minneapolis Trial was a very serious challenge to the Party which threatened its very legal existence in the United States. It would be foolhardy to underestimate the responsibility for the protection of the Party which fell upon the shoulders of the SWP leadership. But the situation faced by the American Trotskyists was by no means a unique one for Trotskyists during World War II. In other so-called ‘democratic’ countries the Trotskyists also faced persecution, and in occupied Europe Trotskyists were forced into illegal existence where they were hounded by the Nazis, the ‘democratic’ imperialists, and the Stalinists. Important cadres of our movement lost their lives.
The dual task facing the American Trotskyists was both the preservation of the party’s legality to the extent this was possible and the political exposure of the American capitalists and the international imperialist was as a whole. It had both to preserve the existing cadres and to lay the political basis for the growth of the American and international movement as disillusionment with the war grew in the world working class.
The SWP leadership saw its role as a dual one through posing it somewhat differently. Cannon states it this way:
From the first moment after the indictment was brought against us in the Federal Court at Minneapolis last July we recognised that the attack had two aspects, and we appraised each of them, we think, at their true significance. The prosecution was designed to outlaw the party and deprive it, perhaps for a long time, of the active services of a number of its most experienced leaders. At the same time it was obvious that the mass trial, properly handled on our part, could give us our first real opportunity to make the party and its principles known to wide circles of workers and to gain a sympathetic hearing from them. 1
While Cannon sees a dual role in the SWP’s approach to the trial, the propaganda aspect of the trial is seen only in narrow American terms. Cannon does not see the role of the SWP as the spokesman for Trotskyism internationally during the critical war period. Rather he states: ‘At the trial we had the opportunity, for the first time, to speak to the masses – to the people of the United States.’ 2 But without the SWP speaking for the world movement, the world movement was to have no real voice during the Second Imperialist War. This is pretty much the way it worked out.
Seeing the trial as a forum from which to address American workers, the SWP’s trial presentation was deeply influenced by its own conception of the American working class at that particular time. ‘We,’ Cannon states, ‘dealt with a specific trial and attempted to explain ourselves to the workers as they are in the United States in the year 1941.’ 3 This is how Cannon saw the American working class in 1941:
The forty million American workers, casting an almost solid vote for Roosevelt, remain in the first primitive stages of class political development; they are soaked through and through with bourgeois democratic illusions; they are discontented to a certain extent and partly union conscious but not class conscious; they have a fetishistic respect for the Federal government as the government of all the people and hope to better conditions for themselves by voting for ‘friendly’ bourgeois politicians; they hate and fear fascism which they identify with Hitler; they understand socialism and communism only in the version disseminated by the bourgeois press; and are either hostile or indifferent to it; the real meaning of socialism, the revolutionary Marxist meaning, is unknown to the great majority. 4
Seeing the workers thus as ‘primitive’, ‘fetishistic’ about democracy and ‘hostile to socialism’, the SWP clearly had a rather difficult task of propaganda ahead of it during the trials. This explains the relatively primitive level of the exposition by Cannon during his trial testimony. The question remains as to whether Cannon accurately portrays the American working class in 1941; whether his aim at the trial should have been to reach the class as a whole or its more advanced militant section; further whether his aim should have been to reach the class as it was at that moment or to lay the basis to reach the class as it could and shortly in part did become.
The Mexican Trotskyist Grandizo Munis wrote a very harsh criticism of the SWP’s trial defence policy in 1942. As was to be true of virtually all disputes in the Trotskyist movement after the death of Trotsky there was more than a grain of truth in Munis’s criticisms and in Cannon’s defence of SWP policy, also written in 1942. Munis showed little regard for the very real problem of the defence of the legality of the party and thus of the need for careful defensive formulations during the trial. Cannon correctly defended himself on this with ample quotations from ‘the Marxist masters’.
However at the same time Munis made some very telling criticisms of the SWP which Cannon was unable to really answer. Here is the essential thrust of Munis’s criticism:
It was there (he is referring to Cannon’s testimony), replying to the political accusations – struggle against the war, advocacy of violence, overthrow of the government by force – where it is necessary to have raised the tone and turn the tables, accuse the government and the bourgeoisie of a reactionary conspiracy; of permanent violence against the majority of the population, physical, economic, moral, educative violence; of launching the population into a slaughter also by means of violence in order to defend the Sixty Families. On the contrary, it is on arriving at this part that the trial visibly weakens, our comrades shrink themselves, minimise the revolutionary significance of their ideas, try to make an honourable impression on the jury without taking into consideration that they should talk for the masses. For a moment they border on a renunciation of principles. 5
The basic reason for this defensive political pose of the SWP, as distinguished from legally defensive formulations, is directly related both the SWP’s failure to view its propaganda tasks as international in scope and its assessment of the working class in the United States. The SWP had a political responsibility in 1941 similar to that of Trotsky in his trial following the 1905 Revolution and Karl Liebknecht during World War I. Trotsky, despite the failure of the 1905 Revolution and his own personal jeopardy, defended openly in the Czarist Court the aims of the 1905 Revolution and turned the court proceedings into a trial of Czarism itself. Appropriately his famous speech to the trial was called ‘In Defence of Insurrection’. Liebknecht defended the revolutionary struggle against war and turned prosecutions against him into rallies against the bourgeois government both in his trial before the war and in his action during the war.
The responsibility that fell upon the shoulders of the SWP was to turn this prosecution of the SWP into a political prosecution of capitalism which had imposed the miseries of depression on the people for the past decade and was at that very moment perpetrating the greatest bloodbath history has seen.
The trial was in fact a beautiful platform for putting capitalism on trial in a concrete way for what it was doing at very moment. Even from the point of view of risk to the party it was not such a difficult period, as the United States had not yet actually entered the war and anti-war sentiment was still a real factor in the country. Most important of all, by launching an offensive on this issue the SWP would have reached the very heart of the reason for the prosecution of the party itself – that is, the capitalists’ desire to discipline the working class in preparation for the war. The SWP could have raised as a central propaganda issue the prediction that the war would be run at the expense of the working class and would be used to hold down and discipline the class. Thus it would have prepared the class for the events that were to come.
What the SWP did do was to sidestep this kind of political offensive which would have meant a sharper head-on confrontation with the capitalists. It did this by what was to become a favourite way of evading concrete political tasks – by treating the trials as an opportunity for a general socialist propaganda campaign. Thus Cannon’s testimony was a basic exposition of the ABC of socialism, as was Goldman’s summation. Socialism on Trial 6 and In Defence of Socialism 7 were very appropriate titles. Cannon’s testimony in particular became a basic pamphlet for classes to educate raw recruits for many years to come. While there is nothing wrong with general socialist propaganda – a task which must always be carried out – it cannot be a substitute for the presentation of socialist ideas in a concrete way which counterposes them to the current action of the ruling class. For years the Socialist Labour Party in the United States has carried out general socialist propaganda on a very extensive scale, in fact propaganda of the most uncompromising ‘revolutionary’ sort. But when the time came for the US Attorney General to draw up a list of ‘subversive’ organisations he saw no need for putting such a harmless organisation as the SLP on the list. There was a much more important use to which the Minneapolis Trials could have been put than the publication of a socialist propaganda pamphlet.
Now let us take a short look at the nature of the general socialist propaganda the SWP did produce, viewing it even within the narrow confines of a propaganda attempt to reach the American workers. The weak and defensive nature of this propaganda is closely related to Cannon’s assessment of the American working class and in fact Cannon’s only real defence against this aspect of Munis’s criticism is his assessment of the American working class. The problem is not so much that Cannon is only speaking for the benefit of the jury but that he does not see any great difference between the jury and the working class. Cannon sees a working class dominated by a fetishism of democracy and in fact in large part he gives in to this fetishism. Under such circumstances he seeks to picture the SWP as being respectable to the eyes of a bourgeois democrat.
Thus as Munis correctly points out he sees the ruling class acting in an undemocratic way only at that point when the revolutionary party has the support of the majority of the population. He implies acceptance of the United States of 1941 as a really democratic country. No attempt is made to show how the ruling class subverts democracy with its economic power; how it has bought up both major parties; how it denies even the phoney democracy of the bourgeois ballot to the Negro people in the South; how it resorts to violence every time the working class asserts itself in strike actions; how it forces the working class to work for it on its terms or starve, through its undemocratic control of the means of production; how it perpetrates world war and the slaughter of millions in order to protect its violent domination of society.
Even in his answer to Munis, Cannon sees the bourgeois democratic forms as being very real and meaningful, and even goes so far as to state: ‘Free speech and free press, obliterated or reduced to travesty in other lands, have been virtually unrestricted here.’ 8 But the working class well knows that when it goes on strike this ‘free press’ to a man supports the capitalists, that this ‘free press’ in reality has been bought by the ruling class.
In our opinion the working class in 1941 had a somewhat more realistic conception of the real meaning of bourgeois democracy than Cannon gives them credit for. This is the working class which had just gone through the great strike battles of the 1930s. It still remembered. True it had not developed class-consciousness and it therefore voted for Roosevelt. But it tended to vote for Roosevelt with a good dose of cynicism, a certain feeling of ‘lesser evilism’ – not because it felt that Roosevelt truly represented the American worker. If there is one common characteristic of American workers, throughout the twentieth century at least, it is a deep suspicion of political parties and the whole political apparatus; a certain feeling of alienation rather than identity with government. FDR never fully broke that down.
Even assuming, however, that the American workers in 1941, after the great struggles of the 1930s, were as primitive as Cannon makes them out to be, the question still remains to what extent it is proper for revolutionaries to give in to that primitiveness. If we see that primitiveness as a transitory phenomenon then our propaganda should be aimed at the more advanced elements among the workers and at the workers as they will inevitably emerge as time passes. We would then see our propaganda tasks as preparation for reaching the mass in the period ahead. As it worked out in history this ‘primitive’ and chauvinist working class was to fight against the no-strike pledge and for the continuation of the class struggle despite the war, only two or three years from the time of Cannon’s
Cannon and the SWP did not see their role as that of spokesmen for an international movement which, while persecuted in the present, would grow throughout the world in the future on the basis of the political capital of its principled stand in the present. Rather it sought to reach the mass of American workers at the time by partially giving in to their own illusions, or illusions the SWP imagined them to have, on democracy, by seeking to picture the SWP within the framework of bourgeois democracy. This gave the propaganda in Socialism on Trial a populist tinge. Defensive formulations shifted over into a defensive pose in which the opponent is seen, at least at present, as democratic and peaceful, and we must prove to our opponent – and the working class which is seen as agreeing with our opponent – that we also are democratic and peaceful. While it is clear that the party did not bow to the ruling class during the Second World War there can be no doubt that in the early period it did bend a bit. And above all it acted as simply an American radical party and did not assume the leadership of the international movement thrust upon it by Trotsky’s death.
What was true about the party’s propaganda was even more true so far as concrete trade union work was concerned. Everywhere the watchword was ‘caution’ and the task was to preserve the precious trade union cadres gathered by the work of the 1930s. While a good deal of caution was indeed necessary for revolutionaries during such a period this conservative attitude continued even into the 1944-45 period when the working class was developing important struggles against the no-strike pledge and the wage freeze. The party held back from giving leadership to these struggles.
For instance A. Winters, a working-class comrade from Bayonne, New Jersey who ended up with Goldman and Morrow but who began his struggle in the party largely against the conservatism of its trade union work, raised some very modest proposals in late 1944. Urging participation in concrete struggles of the class and not direct leadership of caucuses he comments: ‘When workers do begin to move on a mass scale, should they follow anyone who did not previously saupply some type of leadership? How would a young comrade ever gain his leadership experience and confidence while sitting it out?’ 9
He further states:
’Everywhere the workers are growing increasingly restless. More and more progressive formations are taking shape as an expression of this fact. We must learn how to inject ourselves in these limited struggles in this period not with the perspective of leading the workers in struggle, but of winning cadre elements to the party.’ 10
In June 1940 Trotsky warned the American Trotskyists of the dangers of adaptation to the backward layers of the working class. But as soon as the Minneapolis Trial started it was clear that the SWP leadership had not heeded Trotsky’s warnings. In its propaganda during the Trial it adapted in part to the backward prejudices of the class. In its concrete work in the trade unions the comrades concerned themselves primarily with protecting themselves rather than assisting the working class in its struggle, which soon came to the fore. Having the responsibility of the whole international thrust upon it by the death of Trotsky, the SWP spoke and acted almost exclusively as leader of an American radical group, not as the leading spokesmen for an international political tendency, the only tendency which could overthrow the capitalist system and bring real peace to the world.
There was another aspect of the life of the Socialist Workers Party during the war. The death of Trotsky left the SWP with a deep void which it had great difficulty in filling. In part, as we have seen, it filled this void by returning to ‘American radicalism’ and to basic socialist propaganda – something which it felt fully confident about. This turn led to its neglect of its international responsibilities and to a blunting of its struggle against American imperialism in the early critical stage of World War II. But there was another part to the life of the SWP, a part which helped to obscure for the rank and file the real political and theoretical weaknesses of the party – orthodoxy.
With Trotsky’s death Cannon could no longer bloc with Trotsky. As a substitute he and the rest of the SWP leadership sought to maintain a bloc with the corpse of Trotsky. That is to say, they became the first and foremost defenders of everything Trotsky ever wrote and did. They upheld all the old positions of the Fourth International. This is, of course, a necessary task. Those who foolishly discard past theoretical achievements can never seriously build anything. But a simple repetition of past positions is no guarantee that one has really assimilated these positions and can now apply the method which produced these positions to new events in the world. Those who rely on orthodoxy alone always end up bowing before revisionism when it comes to an understanding of a changing reality – and reality always changes.
During the war both Trotsky’s and Cannon’s contributions to the 1940 discussion were printed as books and studied throughout the party. In addition Cannon gave a series of lectures on the history of the movement and these were published as the book, History of American Trotskyism. Warde was assigned to the task of educating the party in the dialectic. He also gave a series of lectures on the question which were later issued as a mimeographed study guide. 11 This guide was a very competent summation of the basic ideas of dialectical logic.
There is no doubt but that this educational work strengthened the SWP. However, it is one thing to pedagogically outline the basic elements of the dialectic in classes throughout the party and it is quite a different thing to develop a party capable of applying a dialectical approach to the political tasks which confront it. The SWP during World War II seemed to be trying to solve its deep need for theoretical development in an organisational way. That is, Warde was assigned to lecture the party on dialectics, the local branches were assigned to organise classes around this lecture series, etc. etc. This educational task properly assigned to the proper and competent people, the SWP then proceeded to proceed in its basic party work in the United States in the old way – that is, it stumbled along empirically from task to task on the basis of impressions of the American working class at the moment. Dialectics remained in the classes while empiricism dominated the decisive sections of party work.
Indian SummerThe immediate post-war period was a very decisive one for the SWP. A short, but highly favourable, period of productive work in the class struggle opened for it in 1945 and 1946. Relations were re-established with the Trotskyist movement in Europe. Matters were finally settled definitively with the Shachtmanites. Then the post-war prosperity set in and the cold war and witch-hunt accompanied it.
On the surface it may appear that nothing really fundamental changed in the SWP during this period. In reality it was a highly important formative period for the SWP. It was a period in which the second great crisis in the SWP, the split with the Cochranites internally and the Pabloites internationally, was being prepared. In many ways this interim period of temporary growth and the beginning of long-term retrenchment was more critical than the actual period of struggle with the Cochranites and Pabloites. It was a period in which certain things were done, and more importantly, certain things not done, which made the 1952-1953 struggle inevitable.
We will seek to get to the heart of the political processes going on inside the SWP by dealing with three separate but concurrent political developments: (1) the resurgence of American radicalism in an almost oppositional form to that expressed in the Minneapolis defence; (2) the strange repetition of the 1940 struggle with the Shachtmanites in a weakened form; (3) the new arrangement between the SWP and the international movement and the nature of the SWP’s political participation in the international. It is important for the reader to keep in mind that these developments occurred simultaneously in time and weaved together in a special way to create a fabric of a party soon to go into deep crisis.
As early as 1944 the American working class began to assert its strength on the economic front despite the war. By 1945, when it was clear that the war was to be won by the U.S., economic struggles increased even more. In the wake of the war they received another tremendous boost as workers began demanding that the promises of the war period now be fulfilled. It was a period of considerable radicalisation throughout the working class of the world, including the United States. It was a good healthy period for a revolutionary party.
While the SWP responded only slowly to the new militancy in the class, by 1946 a new mood of confidence in the class dominated the party, and party cadres were deeply involved in all form of mass struggles including trade union struggles, youth demonstrations, anti-fascist demonstrations, Negro actions, etc. The political expression of this new mood was the ‘Theses on the American Revolution’ written by James P. Cannon and passed by the 12th National Convention of the party, November 15-18, 1946. 12 This was the convention which reported the recruitment of over 1,000 new members to the party – almost doubling the party membership in one year.
The ‘Theses’ is in many ways a very important document. Its positive side is its expression of the party’s deep conviction in the revolutionary potential of the American working class. It expresses that positive strain in American Trotskyism, that aspect of Cannon which led to his original break from the American Communist Party. What is especially important is that the picture of the American working class in the ‘Theses’, written by Cannon, stands in sharp contrast with the picture of that same class given only four years earlier by the same Cannon. While the propaganda of the Minneapolis Trial seemed almost in the populist tradition of American radicalism, the ‘Theses’ was definitely in the class struggle traditions of the IWW.
In 1942 Cannon saw the American workers ‘in the first primitive stages of class political development’. In 1946 this class is seen as ‘in many respects the most advanced and progressive in the world’. 13 While it ‘has not yet taken the road of independent political action on a mass scale’ it is stressed that ‘this weakness can be swiftly overcome’. 14 In 1942 this class is seen as being ‘soaked through and through with bourgeois democratic illusions’ but in 1946 it is stated: ‘the American workers have the advantage of being comparatively free, especially among the younger and most militant layers, from reformist prejudices’. 15 In 1942 it is stressed that the workers ‘understand socialism and communism only in the version disseminated by the bourgeois press; and are either hostile or indifferent to it; the real meaning of socialism, the revolutionary Marxist meaning, is unknown to the great majority’. But in 1946 this is seen as no real problem: ‘given an objectively revolutionary situation, a proletarian party – even a small one-equipped with a precisely worked out Marxist programme and firm cadres can expand its forces and come to the head of the revolutionary mass movement in a comparatively brief span of time’. 16
The contrast between the two Cannons is extremely revealing and important for the light it sheds on Cannon’s method and the method of those who shared the leadership with him. In 1942 Cannon could see only that surface conservatism of the American working class, its political backwardness, its illusions. In 1946 Cannon suddenly sees its revolutionary potentialities and correctly expresses confidence in how quickly illusions can be shed as objective conditions change, and how Marxists despised in one period can lead great masses in the next. But Cannon’s assessment of 1946 completely undercuts the whole rationale of the Cannon of 1942. More important, while the Cannon of 1942 became the Cannon of 1946 when the objective situation changed for the better, it was also possible that the Cannon of 1946 could become the Cannon of 1942 once again – and even go further – once the working class struggle receded.
The problem is one of method. Cannon’s confidence in the American working class was empirically derived and lacked the enrichment of a real understanding of Marxist theory and method. Thus while a favourable empirical development could bring out Cannon’s positive qualities he was hopeless in dealing with an unfavourable situation.
There is another aspect of the ‘Theses’ which also is extremely important – its essentially provincial outlook. The Theses were based on a totally false understanding of the objective situation in the world economy at the time as well as of the relationship of American capitalism to the world capitalist system. According to the ‘Theses’ the temporary restabilisation of capitalism, already clearly apparent in 1946, would be only a mere episode of far, far shorter duration than the decade of prosperity that followed World War I. In fact Cannon states: ‘From the point of view of our theses it makes no difference whether the deep-going crisis begins early in the 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.’ 17 Thus a deep-going crisis and pre-revolutionary situation was seen as coming into existence in the United States in two years at the very latest.
Furthermore this crisis was seen as developing despite the stabilisation of capitalism in Europe and the rest of the world following the failure of proletarian revolution – quite apparent by this time – throughout the rest of the world. Come hell or high water the American system was going to collapse shortly and the SWP was to be catapulted into the vanguard of the revolution. With such a perspective Cannon could very well state, as he did, that the main task of the SWP was to come to power shortly and in this way help the Fourth International. In the interim the development of the FI could not be of any great importance to it.
But the world of 1946 was not as Cannon pictured it. Cannon completely underestimated the tremendous significance of the betrayal of the post-war revolutionary wave, by the Stalinists in particular. World capitalism was clearly once again stabilising itself with the help of the Kremlin, and everywhere in the world the revolutionary tide was subsiding. This international stabilisation was essential to the stabilisation of American capitalism, which emerged from the war more dependent than ever on the rest of the world. The failures in Europe could not be brushed aside. These failures had prepared the way for an international situation which would shortly dry up the revolutionary actions of the American workers as well as seal the party off from serious class struggles for the next decade and a half.
No, an American revolutionary orientation cannot be maintained through simply asserting it despite the rest of the world. It must flow from a full understanding of the development of capitalism as a world system. Such an understanding could only have shown the SWP leadership the extreme importance for it to assume its proper share of the leadership of the International movement, for the failures and successes of this movement would have a very direct bearing on its own failures and successes. But the Cannon of 1946 still thought in the narrow provincial terms of the Cannon of 1926. This was to be central to the future problems of the movement.
This perspective of the American Theses was carried over, at least in part, to the party’s concept of its concrete tasks for work in the mass movement. This is to be found in an accompanying resolution passed at the same convention ‘From a Propaganda Group to a Party of Mass Action’. 18 The basic idea of this resolution was that the SWP was to act as a sort of small mass party. It was to play a role in the leadership of the broad masses of workers in concrete struggles. Of course, the party was able to do this to some extent in the 1946-47 period because of the generally more radical objective situation. Such work, in addition to long-term propaganda and work in mass organisations, is always essential to a revolutionary formation, however small.
There was, however, another side to this kind of outlook. There was a tendency to feel that the SWP, as it was at that moment in 1946, was capable of being catapulted into the leadership of the revolution if only it could show the workers its ability to lead them in this or that mass action. Thus the party tended to minimise two important obstacles to its leadership of the masses – the Communist Party and the trade union bureaucracy.
The Communist Party emerged from the war as no small formation, with around 100,000 members as compared to the Socialist Workers Party’s 2,000 or so. It had a periphery of a good half-million and solid bases in a whole number of CIO unions. While a good section of its membership were petty-bourgeois it also had many, many thousands of trade unionists, many of whom were motivated by genuine radical sentiments. The SWP in 1946 had a responsibility to both reach those in the CP it could reach and to deepen the internal crisis in the CP, so as to remove it as an obstacle from its path. The CP was in deep crisis, for this was the period when Foster ousted Browder and then turned around and ousted his own left wing. It was also a period when the developing cold war was forcing the Communist Party to break its relations with its war-time liberal allies and to take more militant stands.
While the above-mentioned resolution noted the crisis in the CP the party did little to intervene in that crisis. Trotsky had urged a special orientation towards the Stalinist workers in 1940 when the turn to the left of the Stalinists was far more unstable and temporary and there was no sign of any deep crisis within the Stalinist ranks. In this period the Progressive Citizens of America, the Stalinist-led liberal coalition, broke up and the Stalinists began their drive which led to the formation of the Progressive Party. This was an extremely opportune time for our movement to intervene directly in that crisis, urging the Stalinist workers to break definitively from popular frontism, and to run a national electoral campaign on a class basis, rather than on the phoney and suicidal ‘progressive’ basis it was run. The SWP should have offered as early as 1947 to give critical support to such a campaign and to withdraw its own candidates if the Stalinists ran on a class line.
The challenge to the party in the trade union movement was even greater than from the CP. This was a period when the ‘progressive’ caucuses, which had fought the Stalinists during the latter part of the war essentially on sound trade union lines, were now settling down to their bureaucratic control of the unions and establishing their relations with the capitalist government and its cold war drive. Faced with this situation the SWP trade unionists were in a very difficult situation. They could not support their allies of the previous period, they were wary of seeking any relationship with the Stalinist workers who were being witch-hunted in the unions, and they did not have the strength to throw up independent third trade union caucuses. Their inability to so function was itself a sign of the unreality of the SWP’s proclaiming itself to be a small mass party to vie with the Stalinists and the reformist bureaucrats for leadership of the American working class.
The real relations of the party in the trade unions are shown clearly in the automobile industry. The auto fraction was the party’s strongest trade union fraction and the UAW was one of the most important unions in the United States. The party auto fraction had supported the Reuther caucus against the Stalinist-backed Thomas-Addes caucus in the closing days of the war when Reuther favoured a more militant trade union policy than did the Stalinists. This relationship with the Reuther group continued into 1946 and early 1947, when it was becoming increasingly apparent that the Reuther formation was becoming more conservative and was engaging in the most virulent forms of red-baiting against the Thomas-Addes caucus. In 1947 there developed serious differences within the party leadership over whether or not to switch support to Thomas-Addes. Swabeck and Dunne (with Cannon’s backing, Cochran insisted later) favoured continuing support for Reuther, while Cochran and the auto fraction pushed for a turn to Thomas-Addes. Neither side considered a third formation realistic. The auto fraction finally supported Thomas-Addes but at a time when the Stalinists were losing control of the caucus. This support did not lead to any significant contact or work with the Stalinist workers, something Cannon was later to see as a virtue. 19
While on the surface it would appear that Cannon’s ‘American Theses’ would lead to a real break of the party’s trade unionists from progressive caucuses of one sort or another and a development of an independent course in the unions, this did not happen, as such a course was clearly unrealistic. In actual fact the evolution of the party’s trade union work had the following pattern to it. In the late ‘30s the party formed an alliance with Rooseveltian progressives in the unions against the Stalinists on the basis of trade union militancy. The early war period brought a deep isolation to the party’s trade unionists, who could not really function with either the Rooseveltians or the Stalinists. These two forces had joined hands to subordinate the trade unions to the capitalist war drive. There was also no real basis for an independent opposition in the unions. Consequently, little caucus work as such was done in the unions. In 1944 and 1945 the party slowly began to form an alliance once again with the Rooseveltian elements and dissident Stalinists who displayed greater independence from the bourgeois state than did the Stalinists. So a partial alliance was once again established with the same kind of progressive elements that Trotsky speaks of in 1940. This alliance soon petered out as the liberals in the unions turned to witch-hunting and the cold war, and turned against all radicals including the SWP. The Stalinists were now in opposition but being Stalinists their opposition was very weak and spineless. However, the party was unable to make a clean break with the progressives and to turn towards these Stalinist workers, urging upon them a more militant opposition. By 1948 trade union work began to take on once more the character of a retrenchment as the party participated in few caucuses and prepared to ‘sit out’ the unfavourable domestic climate for the next decade and a half.
Thuis no sharp political break with progressive liberal trade union circles ever took place. Rather when collaboration was impossible the party’s trade unionists simply pulled into their shells and awaited a time when alliances could once more be formed. The trade unionists who entered the dark period of the 1950s entered in pretty much the same shape they entered the war period. They were not much different from the trade unionists Trotsky criticised in 1940. This was to become crystal clear when the next great crisis shook the party.
One other important aspect of the party work on the American scene in the post-war period deserves mention – the Negro struggle. In the 1944-46 period a number of highly valuable Negro militants came into the party, partly out of trade union work and partly out of the party’s direct participation in Negro struggles. This was an important advance for the party and showed that it attempted to alter the serious situation in relation to the Negro worker that Trotsky pointed out in 1939. In the 1947-48 period, with the receding of the mass movement, the party lost a large part of these valuable cadres. As Johnson reported to the 1948 Convention: ‘Now the fact remains that a great number of Negroes who came into the party left.’ 20 Most of those remaining in the party by 1948 were to leave in the next couple of years. The party had been unable to assimilate the bulk of these militant Negro workers and hold them in a period when mass action was no longer really possible for the party except in isolated cases. This failure is understandable considering the short duration of the party’s direct experience in Negro work and considering that the overwhelming majority of the party came from a more privileged layer of the working class who in their daily lives had little contact with Negroes. Interesting in this regard is the fact that the bulk of the Negroes who stayed with the party at least into 1948 were Negroes integrated into trade union fractions of the party.
An important theoretical gain was made by the party in the 1948-50 period. In this period, J. R. Johnson, a Negro intellectual of West Indian origin, made a substantial contribution to the party’s theoretical understanding of the Negro question in the resolution, ‘Negro Liberation Through Revolutionary Socialism’. 21 Johnson was an extremely erratic intellectual capable of the most inconsistent and oppositional theoretical notions, and highly unstable. However, he did develop a very sound understanding of the American Negro movement under Trotsky’s tutelage in the late 1930s, and he was able to enlarge on this through the party’s experience in the middle forties, It is interesting that this contribution – the only really original contribution to the understanding of an American, not to mention an international question the party was to produce – was to come from a strange individual with no real roots in the party, someone who was to spend only two years in the party.
Along with the Negro militants a greater number of young white workers were recruited to the party in the 1945-46 period. These white workers also found it difficult to stay in the party as the mass movement receded. The great bulk of the 1,000 new recruits reported at the 1945 Convention were no longer in the party by the 1948 Convention. No attempt was made to reach the radicalised students and intellectuals, some whom went to the Shachtmanites but the bulk of whom were recruited Into the CP. The 1940 experience had simply soured the party on any work among students and intellectuals. What intellectuals there were in the party were left from the 1930s, like John G. Wright and William F. Warde. The party which entered the 1950s was very much like the party which entered the war period – except that its leading cadres were older, and more precious time had slipped by without any appreciable qualitative theoretical development of the movement.
By 1948 the unreality of the predictions and perspectives of the ‘Theses on the American Revolution’ were clear to all in the party. The party’s membership was on the decline, its ability to manoeuvre in the trade unions was narrowing, the Negro struggle had lost much of the steam it had had two years earlier, the Stalinists had thrown off the super-Fosterites and were deep in their non-working class ‘progressive’ campaign.
So the SWP turned once again to general socialist propaganda. This time it took the form of the 1948 presidential election campaign. This campaign ignored the Stalinists and other concrete problems facing the party and addressed itself in the most general terms to the broad masses of the population. Once again the party had no real concrete assessment of the situation in the United States and no real strategy for the building of the party under what were to become increasingly difficult conditions.
Once Again with ShachtmanConsidering the depth of the struggle in 1940 it does appear strange that five years later the Shachtman group (Workers Party) and the SWP should engage in unity negotiations. What makes this even stranger was that the political evolution of the Shachtmanites since the 1940 split had been further and further away from Trotskyism. But this is what happened. Even more, groups developed within each formation which ended up joining the other. One could only conclude from this that the 1940 split was not as definitive as it appeared to be at the time Cannon himself admits this when he states that the 1940 split ‘was by no means as definitive and final as is the split today’. 22 He was referring to the split with the Pabloites, which proved to be anything but ‘definitive and final’.
The question we must seek to answer is, why was not the split in 1940 as definitive as it, in our opinion, should have been? We must first look at the evolution of the Shachtman group since 1940. During the 1940 struggle the minority had no clear position on the Russian question. While Burnham’s bureaucratic collectivism set the tone for the group, Shachtman remained non-committal on the question and Abern upheld a degenerated workers’ state theory. Soon after the split Burnham resigned from the WP but Shachtman then picked up Burnham’s thesis and declared in December 1940 that Russia was a bureaucratic collectivist state.
He picked up Burnham’s thesis rather gingerly and saw bureaucratic collectivism as a sort of mutation or aberration in just one country on earth rather than as a whole stage in the development of mankind. The 1941 resolution of the WP on the question stated: ‘Bureaucratic collectivism is a nationally-limited phenomenon, appearing in history in the course of a singular conjuncture of circumstances.’ 23 By 1946, however, the world situation had changed and Stalinism expanded its control over the areas which made up a buffer to the East and West against the capitalists. This defensive expansionism of the Stalinists was seen as evidence of Stalinism as an expanding imperialist force supplanting the role of the working class in replacing capitalism. In 1946 the Shachtmanites stated: ‘It is this fact that gives to the emergence of the new Russian empire a significance much more fundamental than merely a recrudescence of Russian power. Bureaucratic collectivism is the source of the new Russian imperialist power as early capitalism was the source of British imperialist power.’ 24
During the war the WP had done a good deal of trade union work. It accomplished this by sending its young petty-bourgeois youth into the trade unions. But it was unable to root them there, and by 1946 the party was once again predominantly petty-bourgeois in social composition. Ernest Erber, a WP leader, frankly describes the situation thus:
We were a party with a predominantly petty-bourgeois membership. The war gave us the opportunity to place our petty-bourgeois membership in industry. Their presence there had a time limit on it – ‘for the duration’. We had to make use of this time to recruit and hold enough industrial workers to change the character of our party. We failed in this. The end of the war dumped our petty-bourgeois members out of industry. This is the root of the problem. This is the long and short of it. 25
Essentially then the WP in 1946 was an organisation which had developed systematically all its methodological errors of 1940 and further had failed to root itself in the class. Its development was clearly and profoundly to the right.
During the war period there developed a small minority inside the SWP which began to move more and more in the direction of the WP politically. This minority was led by Felix Morrow, and, interestingly enough, Albert Goldman, who had been the lawyer in the Minneapolis Trial. Warde in 1946 describes the background of Morrow and Goldman in the 1940 fight in the following terms:
Both opposed and fought Shachtman’s political positions, including his unprincipled bloc with Burnham. But at the same time they believed with Shachtman that Trotsky had arbitrarily and unjustifiably injected the question of philosophical method into what should have remained a purely political dispute. They shared Shachtman’s view from somewhat different standpoints. Goldman was more or less indifferent toward the philosophic foundations of Marxism; Morrow was at odds with them. 26
The evolution of the Goldman-Morrow group was another warning to the SWP leadership on the critical importance of the understanding of the Marxist method. There is, however, little indication that they took this warning any more to heart than they had taken the last one.
Flowing from their political position of growing sympathy with the views of the WP, growing dissatisfaction with the Cannon ‘regime’, and complete lack of concern as to the critical importance of the Russian question and of the question of method, the Goldman-Morrow group quite naturally began a campaign for reunification with the Shachtmanites. The Shachtmanites naturally enough supported this campaign, seeing it as a way to win over the Goldman-Morrow group. The SWP leadership, also naturally enough, reacted with extreme coolness to these advances seeing in them only manoeuvres to split the party. After considerable manoeuvring and a number of exchanges of letters the SWP finally formulated its position by insisting that a discussion of 11 key points precede any actual reunification. 27 These points began with an evaluation of the 1940 split and included such critical questions as Marxist method, the Russian question, etc. The WP rejected this approach, seeing such a proposal as simply an evasion of unity. Finally the SWP prepared its own answer to the 11 points in a statement, written by Cochran, entitled ‘Revolutionary Marxism or Petty-Bourgeois Revisionism?’ 28 Goldman soon split from the SWP and joined the WP, Morrow was expelled and the first stage of WP-SWP unity negotiations came to an ignominious conclusion.
In our opinion the basic approach of the SWP to the question of unity was correct. Given the character of the WP – that is its nature as a rightward moving centrist formation – it would be incorrect to simply proceed to unification on the basis of some organisational formula. Rather it was essential to first probe the possibilities of a political basis for unity and then proceed to organisational points.
The SWP document ‘Revolutionary Marxism or Petty-Bourgeois Revisionism?’ deserves some attention. Basically it was a very good and solid statement and what it has to state about the Shachtmanites was correct. It had, however, one interesting weakness. It was essentially a statement of the differences the two organisations had on a series of concrete political questions. The titles to the sections of the resolution itself give an indication of this. They refer to divergent ‘positions’, ‘evaluations’, ‘tactics’, ‘concepts’, ‘attitudes’. What is missing is the essential difference – the difference in Marxist method. All these important political and even theoretical divergences were produced by a basic divergence in method. The Shachtmanites proceeded with the method of empiricism, and political views were but an empirical reflection of surface reality around it. The SWP positions were essentially positions they had inherited from Trotsky. Trotsky had produced them by applying the method of Marxism to the reality around him.
The document did, of course, have a small sub-section entitled ‘Marxist Principles and Methodology’. This section was short and in no sense posed the question of method as essential to all the divergences that existed between the two parties. Furthermore, it saw Marxist methodology in a very narrow way. It referred to ‘the Marxist methodology, i.e., the class criterion’. 29 It is true that Shachtman’s approach to the Finnish events can be considered an abandonment of a class analysis. But at the same time this was not true of Burnham. Burnham applied a class criterion to these events but it was the wrong one – he saw Russia’s role as the imperialist intervention of a new bureaucratic collectivist class. The essential methodological point in dispute in 1940 was the importance of the dialectic itself. But this receives only the attention of a passing reference to an abandonment of ‘dialectical materialism’ in another section. 30
In 1940 Trotsky stressed this question to such an extent that he was forced to resort to an elementary exposition of the dialectic in the course of his polemics. In 1941 the party reacted empirically to the negative moods of the class with disorienting effects. In 1946 the party reacted empirically to the positive moods of class. Again the effects were disorienting and the cadre did not really develop qualitatively. In 1946 when faced again with the problem of Shachtmanism the party was to see it essentially in empirical terms as a series of divergent positions on a series of political questions. It missed entirely the central cause of this divergence – a divergence in method. It little realised that its own positions were positions developed by Trotsky with a different method from those who were now defending those positions. Such a contradiction must in time break through.
Hardly had the ink dried on Cochran’s denunciation of the Shachtmanites as petty-bourgeois revisionists than new manoeuvres were to begin. This time the boot was on the other foot – a minority had emerged inside the WP sympathetic to the SWP. This minority, the Johnson-Forrest group, had no common methodological or theoretical basis for its pro-SWP evolution. It upheld a state capitalist theory of the USSR and utilised a method as crassly empirical as was Shachtman’s. It did share with the SWP a similar assessment, empirically arrived at, of the American scene. It also was more proletarian in its composition and was quite restless in the petty-bourgeois atmosphere of the WP.
Largely because of this minority the SWP entered once more into negotiations for unity with the WP. This time it conveniently forgot its insistence on a political discussion to precede unification and proposed an organisational solution whereby the WP would be allowed to enter the SWP as an organised faction without any preceding discussion. Much to everybody’s surprise the Shachtmanites accepted the proposal, and in February of 1947 both the Militant and Labor Action published the joint statement on unification. The difficulty with organisational manoeuvres which lack a firm political basis is that someone might take them seriously. So was the situation both the SWP and WP leadership faced until a slip occurred. Cannon wrote an internal letter referring to the agreement as a ‘capitulation on the Shachtmanites’ part’. It was leaked to Shachtman and Shachtman factionally denounced the Cannonites. The Cannonites in turn denounced the Shachtmanites and unity was off, to everyone’s relief. 31 Soon thereafter Johnson simply announced to change in party affiliation of his faction and went over to the SWP with little fanfare.
The Johnson entry, as much as the proposed WP entry, was not prepared politically by serious discussion nor was it followed by much theoretical effort to win over the group. It was empirically based on a momentary common coming together of the two groups on American perspectives, and the Johnson group was soon to split when the turn in the international situation around Korea brought the defence of the Soviet bloc countries once again strongly to the fore.
There is an important general lesson to be gained from this whole series of almost farcical developments. Unifications empirically arrived at, unless followed by a deepening of methodological agreement, cannot last, and splits empirically arrived at, unless also followed by a deepening of an understanding of the methodological roots of the split, are not permanent. In this respect history was shortly to repeat itself.
International BlocWe have seen that the SWP gave no real leadership to the Fourth International during the war period. Of course, it saw itself as a part of the Fourth International politically, despite the Voorhis Act, but it did not see itself in any sense as the real leadership of the Fourth International. In any event the war period was a difficult one for an international movement and the party was cut off from most of its international co-thinkers. It would thus be in the immediate post-war period that the real challenge to the SWP would arise.
There is no doubt that the SWP emerged from the war as the most solid, most stable Trotskyist formation in the world, with a very considerable proletarian base. In addition the SWP leadership had collaborated extremely closely with Trotsky during the last five years of his life. This collaboration was deepened by a common struggle against revisionism in 1940, the most important internal struggle in the history of the whole world movement. The SWP in 1946 was therefore the natural party to assume an important and direct responsibility for the political leadership of the International.
The need for such leadership was very great, and there was really no other stable formation in the International which could supply it. The British and French sections, the largest in Europe, were led by extremely unstable and politically unreliable petty-bourgeois elements. Neither group had yet really developed into a stable revolutionary communist formation. The Ceylonese LSSP was in Asia and quite distant from the important European political centres. More important, it had always been a quite provincial party, wrapped up in its own affairs in Ceylon, and never did very much to give leadership to the Trotskyist movement even in Asia.
The SWP, however, saw its relationship to the International in a very different light. It was almost totally preoccupied with the American scene, where it hoped it would soon emerge in the leadership of the revolutionary struggle and in this way contribute to the International. Outside of this it saw its role as a supporting one. It would assist materially the International leadership and lend its advice here, or there where needed – especially on practical problems of strategy and tactics in party building. To support and assist – that was the role the SWP cut out for itself.
So in 1946 the SWP turned over the international leadership to a group of talented intellectuals who had never had much experience in practical work in a healthy movement. The most prominent of these were Michel Pablo and Ernest Germain. Having turned things over to these men the SWP sat back and waited for this new group of young leaders to supply it with a political line much as Trotsky once had done.
In this manner the international bloc which was to dominate the Fourth International until 1953 was established. The SWP offered its moral and material support to this new leadership and in return expected the new leadership to ‘handle’ international questions and supply the world movement with a political line. Thus the identical pattern was established with Germain and Pablo that the party had established with Trotsky. The problem however was not simply that Germain and Pablo were not Trotsky, but that the old relationship itself had broken down in the 1940 fight. Precisely because the SWP leadership had not developed theoretically in the 1930s it lost nearly 50 per cent of its membership. Further, those members it retained were largely saved by Trotsky’s intervention in the 1940 fight, during which Trotsky was forced to supplant the Cannon leadership as the real leadership of the SWP. In the six years since these events the SWP had not yet learned the critical importance of its own theoretical development. Once again it looked for a crutch – and this time it found a very weak crutch at that.
No sooner had an international leadership established itself, than it was faced with a theoretical challenge of the most serious nature. The USSR emerged from the war in military control of the whole East European region. In addition, a Stalinist-led movement controlled a huge section of China on its Eastern buffer. As the brief post-war honeymoon between the USSR and the imperialists broke down Stalin began to structurally transform these regions in order to secure a safe buffer between the USSR and the capitalist world. As long as capitalism existed in these regions they could easily become bases for imperialist attacks on the USSR. Thus Stalin began a highly contradictory social transformation of these countries from on top. This process raised the most difficult of theoretical challenges to the Trotskyist movement. If not properly understood this defensive expansionism of Stalinism could be seen either as proof of the Shachtmanite thesis, that Stalinism was a new imperialist ruling class, or lead to pro-Stalinist illusions about the ‘revolutionary’ role of Stalinism in a changed world situation.
Germain began to tackle this theoretical challenge in 1946, and his early work was quite solid. 32 Noting that these areas remained at the time still capitalist countries he also took into consideration a tendency towards their structural assimilation into the USSR. In this latter respect he based himself on Trotsky’s work on Finland and Poland in 1940. This remained the theoretical assessment of East European developments through the Second World Congress in 1948. 33 The SWP, of course, supported this assessment though it contributed nothing to its development.
In 1949 developments had reached a point in Eastern Europe where a serious deepening of the theoretical understanding of the world movement was demanded. Contrary to Germain’s predictions the bulk of the buffer was being transformed into workers’ states, but these states were not being formally incorporated into the USSR. In addition, one of these states, Yugoslavia (which had been the earliest to be socially transformed), broke with the Kremlin and began to move to the left.
At this point a dispute of great importance broke out in the European leadership of the FI. Germain continued to try to apply in a mechanical way the basic analysis which Trotsky had applied to Finland and Poland in 1939-40, and thus insisted that these states were still capitalist states because they had not been formally incorporated in the USSR. 34 Pablo threw all this to the wind and struck out in a new direction, Workers’ states were seen arising everywhere under the leadership of Stalinists. This Stalinist leadership, while capable of bringing the workers to power by establishing a workers’ state, would however deform or distort the resultant state. Thus he foresaw ‘centuries of deformed workers’ states’ created by Stalinist parties under the pressure of the masses. This left no role for the Fourth International; and so, consistently he began to urge the Trotskyist movement to enter the Stalinist parties in the hopes that we too would be swept to power through this means. 35
Having abandoned a Marxist method in analysing the workers’ states, Pablo had ended up with a thesis which meant the very liquidation of our movement. All this was quite clearly expressed by 1950. Germain on the other hand sought to resist Pablo’s liquidationism through a narrow orthodoxy. That is, he sought to apply Trotsky’s early analysis in a mechanical way to these post-war events and thus came right up against events he could not really explain. This weakness of Germain soon led to his capitulation to Pablo. 36
How did the SWP relate to this whole theoretical crisis which dominated the International in 1949 and 1950? Needless to say it was not in a position to offer any independent theoretical solution to the dilemma. Its whole failure in the previous two decades to develop itself theoretically prevented it from so doing. Rather it sat on the sidelines and commented on the discussion as it evolved, supporting this position of Pablo’s and that of Germain’s. Cochran and Hansen emerged on the Political Committee as supporters of Pablo’s whole line, while Cannon, Stein and John G. Wright tended to sympathise with Germain. The result was a completely confusing theoretical situation in the top leadership of the party.
The complete theoretical paralysis which had seized the party was shown clearly in the party’s initial response to the Korean war. The Korean war was the most Important contest between the workers’ states and the imperialists in the whole post-war period. There was an extreme need for revolutionaries to understand it and to defend unconditionally North Korea and China against the imperialists.
This is the way the Cochranites were later to assess the party’s initial reaction to the Korean war: ‘The first reaction of the weekly paper, operating under the immediate direction of the Political Committee, 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.’ 37 Cannon denied that the Militant took a ‘third camp’ position, but he did this by stating that a Third Camp position meant ‘support for the imperialist camp’, and the Militant clearly denounced imperialism. He did not deny that while denouncing imperialism the Militant for several weeks did not clearly defend North Korea. In fact he reports that he himself was so upset about the Militant that he urged an immediate Plenum to settle the question, and ended up flying in from Los Angeles for the sole purpose of discussing this question. 38
Art Preis, who was in New York at the time, furnishes some more information on these events. He claims that ‘six Political Committee members – Stein, Breitman, Wright, Hansen, Bartell, and Clarke – acting hastily and without waiting for adequate information, took a wrong position on North Korea, although sound on American imperialism, South Korea and the Kremlin. 39 He insists that this position, which we can only surmise was a ‘plague on both your houses position’, never actually got expressed in the Militant. However, he documents that a number of Political Committee members were so confused that they insisted that the Militant say nothing which would indicate actual defence of North Korea for a few weeks while they tried to straighten out their thinking.
The picture this whole process gives us is not simply that this or that member of the Political Committee was a ‘Stalinophobe’. Clearly leading Cochranites were found among the confused, and Cannon’s intervention seems wholly on the proper side. Rather what comes out is a picture of a national leadership almost totally confused in its theoretical development, and thus paralysed in coming out with a clear-cut political position when a new event of great importance took place. This theoretical confusion is further documented by the formal position the SWP National Committee took on the theoretical struggle then taking place between Germain and Pablo. The majority of the National Committee came down firmly in support of – both sides. The SWP was able to accomplish this by insisting on a separation of two questions – the nature of the buffer excluding Yugoslavia and the nature of Yugoslavia. It held a special plenum on the former question in February of 1950 in which Morris Stein reported for the majority of the Political Committee. Stein’s presentation was essentially a very good summary of Germain’s views. 40 Another plenum was held in December of 1950 on the Yugoslav question. This time Murry Weiss was the reporter for the Political Committee and the whole position of Pablo on Yugoslavia was endorsed. 41
But the two positions adopted by the SWP were completely antithetical to each other. The Germain position, while incorrect, was at least an attempt to deny to Stalinism a revolutionary role. It was understood in this light by the world movement and it was because of this that the party leadership was attracted to it. The Pablo analysis of Yugoslavia was more than an analysis of Yugoslavia. It was a defence of the thesis that a Stalinist party, under the pressure of the masses, could come to power and establish a workers’ state. This position was the very heart of Pablo’s ‘centuries of deformed workers’ states’ thesis. It undermined completely the whole approach taken at the February plenum on the rest of the Buffer.
The SWP’s participation in this critical discussion shows very clearly the method of the SWP in this period. In the first place it had nothing original to offer to the theoretical discussion. At best all it could do was to pick and choose at a table laid by others. Secondly, it did its picking and choosing empirically. It gave Stalinism one character in Eastern Europe as a whole, but when it crossed the border into Yugoslavia Stalinism suddenly acquired another character. Such a glaring inconsistency is itself an expression of an empirical method which compartmentalises theoretical work. One theory is empirically arrived at for this area, and another for that area, and the connection, the unity of the developments is lost. Here we have another example of the method which could project a revolutionary course for the United States despite the consolidation of capitalism as an international system.
There can be no doubt that the SWP had the best of intentions in all this. It had a deep feeling of the essential need for a revolutionary party. It had the greatest respect for the views of Trotsky and considered itself, above all others, to be an orthodox Trotskyist formation. When a piece of orthodoxy was laid on the table by the international leadership it quickly and hungrily grabbed for it. This explains its warmness towards Germain in this whole struggle.
However, when the party faced a real revisionist trend it was prostrated before it; it was incapable of countering it. Pablo, as much as Burnham and Shachtman, had abandoned the very method of Marxism. Pablo, as much as Burnham and Shachtman, had developed a theoretical position which meant the very liquidation of our movement unless countered. But Pablo’s revisionism was based on an assessment of new events which could not be handled simply by repetition of old Trotskyist orthodoxies. This Germain had attempted to do and failed. What was needed was the application of the basic method of Trotsky to a new process which emerged in the post-war period. This the SWP was incapable of doing. Trotsky was not around to do it for the SWP leadership.
So the game went on as usual. The SWP continued to give Pablo and company material and moral aid. It even endorsed his views (as well as those of his opponent). The leading cadre was uncomfortable, unhappy, but as long as Pablo left the United States to Cannon, Cannon was more than willing to leave the rest of the world to Pablo. So things stood up to the time that George Clarke returned from the Third World Congress in 1951.
The Second Great CrisisThe 1950s was a very difficult period for the American Trotskyist movement. The post-war boom was in full swing and as a result struggles on the part of the working class were at a minimum. In addition a witch-hunt against radicals was in full swing. It was certainly a dark period for building a revolutionary party – a period which brings out every weakness and accentuates every contradiction within a party.
Revolutionaries cannot control the objective situation they must work in. It is their task to further the development of the movement both in times of opportunity and in times of retrenchment. A healthy movement learns from both kinds of periods. A period such as existed in the United States in the 1950s necessarily meant losses to the SWP. The task of the SWP’s leadership was to minimise those losses and to educate the remaining cadre in the process.
There is a tendency to look upon the relationship of a party to objective conditions as a sort of automatic process. Under favourable objective conditions a party bounds ahead and grows. Under unfavourable objective conditions a party begins to shrink and split up. In this way the conscious role and responsibility of the party’s leadership is minimised in both favourable and unfavourable objective situations. In truth a party can grow quantitatively under favourable objective conditions and not really advance qualitatively at all. The result can even be a qualitative loss as opportunist trends grow in the party. Conversely a party can shrink quantitatively under adverse objective conditions but grow qualitatively as it puts its cadre to severe tests and the cadre educates itself and prepares for future advances. Such a party may come out of a reactionary period considerably stronger than it went into it. Objective conditions may be blamed for creating an environment which encourages internal crisis but it cannot be blamed for the way a leadership handles itself during such a crisis.
The 1952-53 Cochranite struggle has many similarities to the 1939-40 struggle. It was without a doubt the most profound internal struggle the SWP experienced since the death of Trotsky. As in 1940 the constituent elements which made up the bloc that was the SWP came apart at the seams and turned on each other. This time, however, the elements combined in a very different manner and not one of these elements was capable of bringing real clarity to the dispute.
We have previously described the political position which had been evolved by the International leadership. The International had broken completely from the Marxist method and had come to deeply Iiquidationist political conclusions. This method and these conclusions were codified at the Third World Congress held in 1951. George Clarke returned from this Congress determined that the SWP should actually carry out this new line. In this effort he had the factional backing of Pablo. Clarke’s mission threatened to break down the basis for the Iong-standing bloc between the Cannon leadership and the Pablo international leadership. Now Pablo was insistent that the United States was also part of the world and was seeking to get the SWP to implement the liquidationist international line. Clarke’s return from Europe can be seen as the catalyst which started into motion the various forces that came into bitter conflict in a very short time.
The orientation of Clarke, and his lieutenant in New York, Bartell, towards the Stalinists was in part based on the very real crisis then going on in Stalinist ranks. This was the period of the CP decision to dissolve the American Labour Party and the Progressive Party and to return to open support of the Democratic Party. It was certainly a situation in which the party should have properly intervened.
However, the crisis in the decimated Stalinist ranks of 1953 was nowhere near as important as that of the immediate post-war period when the organisation was much bigger and more proletarian elements were involved. The 1953 crisis largely affected the petty-bourgeois Stalinist periphery. Of course the Clarke-Bartell orientation was a liquidationist one, and the section they were most interested in consisted precisely of such petty-bourgeois dilettantes as Huberman and Sweezy.
A second factor in the situation was Cochran and the forces which he stood for. Cochran’s base in the party was the party’s strong auto fractions in Detroit and Flint, Michigan. In addition old-time trade unionists in almost every branch throughout the party supported Cochran. Cochran’s base was thus a working-class base. It was, however, a working-class base of a very special kind – an aristocratic stratum in the working class which Trotsky had warned about so clearly in 1940 and earlier. This is the way Cannon was to describe the Cochran formation:
The old union militants who are still in the plant, after 13 years of war and post-war prosperity, are now 13 years older, and many of them are 13 times softer and more conservative. They have many years seniority, and that has become a sort of vested interest, a special privilege in steady employment, as against the younger, newly-recruited slaves of the assembly line who have no privileges whatever. . . . And some of them – some of our own trade unionists – have become infected with this conservatism themselves.
We have that infection right in our own party! We have that reflection of the combined pressures of 13 years of prosperity, and six years of witch-hunt, expressed in the conservatisation of a section of our own trade unionists! That is the bitter truth. And these conservatised trade unionists are the real social basis of Cochranism in our party. They are the conservative right wing of the party. 42
Thus we can begin to see the elements which came together as the Clarke-Cochran minority inside the SWP in late 1951. There was a small group of petty-bourgeois and worker elements who were seeking to jump over the extremely difficulty objective circumstances facing the party through a special capitulatory orientation towards the Stalinists who, according to the Pablo thesis, would be propelled along the revolutionary road everywhere. This was the Clarke formation. Behind Clarke stood Pablo and the International leadership. Combined with Clarke-Pablo was a large section of the party’s trade unionists who were not that much concerned with the Stalinists. In fact Cochran himself denied the very existence of the ‘Stalinist milieu’ towards which Clarkeites wished to orientate the Party. This section of the party had been as Stalinophobe as any section of the party in the past. This was no small section of the party. It had support of the most important trade union fraction left in the party and many, many other important trade unionists throughout the country. Most of these Cochranites had been in the party since the late 1930s. These were the same people Trotsky had in mind in his 1940 discussion.
What was the real programme of the Cochran section of this minority? Cannon describes it this way:
Their conservativism, which clashes head-on with the revolutionary line of the party, expresses itself in a revolt against the party. Under the inspiration of Cochran, this revolt sometimes even takes the character of hatred of the party; denigration of the party; and denial of its historic mission. They exaggerate and whimper about petty ‘grievances’ which are mostly imaginary, and not worth two cents anyway. They want to withdraw from the political struggle in the open arena. They want to retreat into a propaganda circle. They oppose any programme of rounded activities proper for a revolutionary party, which is not the same thing as a mere group of progressive trade unionists. 43
The cement which held together the Pablo-Clarke pro-Stalinists with this section of the party’s trade unionists was obviously a common desire to liquidate the party.
On the other side of the struggle was an equally heterogeneous combination. The first grouping in the party to tackle the Cochranites was the group around Murry Weiss. Weiss’s base in the party was an essentially petty-bourgeois one. Though this group included a number of older comrades, its vitality and dynamism came from petty-bourgeois youth who had joined the party in the late forties and who had grown impatient and disturbed by the party’s growing conservatism in this period. They wanted a more dynamic party. Little concerned with trade union work, their loyalty was to the party as a propagandistic instrument and apparatus. Weiss was rather ill-equipped for a struggle against a Pablo-inspired pro-Stalinist tendency, for he and his brother Dave has been among the most enthusiastic early supporters of Pablo, especially on Yugoslavia. The Weiss tendency wanted a party of propagandistic activity but not necessarily one of proletarian intervention. The ideal of a young Weiss supporter was full-time party work quite removed from the American working class.
Combined with Weiss from the beginning was Cannon. Cannon, almost alone of the old cadre party cadre, responded strongly to the Cochranite threat because Cannon, above all else, felt deeply about the necessity of a party. It was this deep conviction of the need for a party more than anything else which led him into a head-on struggle with a section of the party’s old trade union cadre.
The role of Dobbs and the whole older cadre of the party which did not go along with the Cochranites was, at the beginning, quite ambiguous. The Dobbs section of the party – the great majority of the party – feared a break with the Cochranites and did everything they could to compromise the struggle and to avoid a showdown with Cochran. They viewed Cochran and his supporters as one of their own, as part of the same stratum of the party, and having pretty much the same outlook. In the early stages of the dispute Cannon accused Dobbs of actually maintaining neutrality in the struggle and there is no doubt but that for a while he actually did do this.
Cannon describes his relation to Dobbs this way in a letter written to V. R. Dunne following Dobbs’ decision to go along with Cannon in the struggle:
He thought, it seems, we were hellbent on organising a factional fight in the party without consulting him and before the party members, or even a considerable section of the leading cadre, were convinced of the depth and seriousness of the conflict. He said he had not intended his memorandum to the PC as a declaration of political neutrality – as we told him frankly we had interpreted it – but only as a means of slowing down the organisational side of the internal conflict. 44
As late as May 1953, just a few months before the final split, Cannon continued to express worry about ‘neutralist’ sentiments in his ranks:
. . . Revolutionary elements in the party – and those who want to be revolutionists – have got to quit fooling around with the irresponsible game of ‘neutrality’, and take sides in the fight to protect the party against this Cochranite attack on its right to live. 45
The Dobbs section of the party had been affected by much the same pressures as the Cochran section. It, too, was demoralised by the prosperity. It, too, lacked any real theoretical development. It, too, was a bit tired and would prefer to ‘sit things out for a while’. But there was one main difference between the Dobbs and Cochran groups. Over the years the Dobbs people had either left industry in order to do party apparatus work; or had been screened out by the witch-hunt; or, while remaining in industry, remained there largely to earn a living while their real life was in the party branch. The Dobbs section of the party was that section of the proletarian kernel of the movement which had retreated into the party, while the Cochran section was that section of the proletarian kernel which had retreated into the trade unions and the trade union apparatus. Thus while conservatism compelled the Cochranites to break from the party it compelled the Dobbsites to defend the party which had become their home. From the beginning they both felt quite unhappy about the whole squabble but were powerless to change it.
There were three small groupings which lined up also with the Cannon-Weiss-Dobbs majority in the final break. These groupings had no theoretical agreement with the majority but they did agree on the need to preserve the party. Two of them – the Marcyites and the Vernites – were localised personal groups with pro-Stalinist views. The third was the remnants of the Johnsonites which maintained a ‘state capitalist’ position. These comrades continued to bloc with Cannon for the same empirical reasons which had led Johnson to enter the SWP in 1948.
The actual written programme of the Clarke-Cochran faction was really unbelievably bad, confusing, unpolitical, and totally inadequate for the kind of factional heat that lay behind it. Only Clarke wrote clearly and he clearly presented the liquidationist views of Pablo. Pablo stood in much the same position to the 1952-53 minority as did Burnham to the 1940 minority. It was Pablo who was able to give some kind of theoretical justification to the flight from the party of the minority. It was his liquidationist theories which had done so much to encourage this flight from the movement not only in the United States but in other Trotskyist groups throughout the world. As in 1940 a good section of the minority was not particularly interested in these theories – it was only interested in flight. But despite this, Trotsky tackled Burnham head-on, knowing that in this way he was getting at the methodological roots of the disease which infected even those who showed no interest in theory (especially those).
In 1952 Cannon and his collaborators could not do this. In fact they proceeded in an exactly opposite way. They solidarised themselves with Pablo and the Third World Congress decisions over and over again. Cannon urged Pablo to support him over Cochrane-Clarke, making it perfectly clear that if he would support him, Cannon would continue his loyal support of Pablo internationally. 46 As if in order to prove this point in 1952 Cannon fully solidarised himself with Pablo’s expulsion of the majority of the French section and supported Pablo against the political attacks of the French comrades. 47
This approach of Cannon’s – for which he is solely responsible – completely castrated the majority politically. Unable to attack the source of the revisionism it could only attack Clarke and company for misapplying an international line they admitted to be correct. Once again they took refuge in ‘American exceptionalism’. It was all right to liquidate the movement into the Stalinist parties in Europe but not here. Stalinists in the United States are different, etc., etc. As long as the argument remained on this level no one learned much and Clarke was on the offensive.
As time passed in the struggle Cannon shifted his fire to the Cochran section of the opposition. Here he felt on stronger ground. He defended the need for a party and the party’s whole past against someone who wished to escape from the party. But he was unable to go much beyond a mere repetition of orthodoxy. The party has been created by 25 years of struggle. The party is needed. The party should act like a party. But exactly what the party concretely should do either in this country or internationally Cannon did not seem to know. Time would tell whether or not the simple assertion of the necessity of the party as an orthodox principle would be enough to maintain the party as a revolutionary instrument.
Cannon’s struggle against the Cochran section of the minority was hampered in another way. He was incapable of looking back at the history of the party and explaining how a central section of the party’s cadre degenerated to the point where they could reject the revolutionary party as such, wanting only ‘a mere group of progressive trade unionists’. It was Clarke and not Cannon who republished the 1940 discussion with Trotsky, and Cannon’s comments on this discussion during the dispute completely evaded seeing in Trotsky’s scorching assessment of the party’s trade union cadre the origins of Cochranism. The reason for this failure is clearly that such an approach would soon make clear Cannon’s own responsibility for the failure of the SWP leadership to develop its trade union cadre as Bolsheviks. In 1940 Cannon fought a section of the party to which he had never been very close, and for which he could claim to have no real responsibility. In 1952 Cannon was fighting his own creation – it was Cannon’s battle against a section of Cannonites. He was forced to muster what strengths he had to battle against the creature of his own weaknesses.
At a Plenum held in May 1953 a truce was called in the factional struggle. No sooner was the truce called than the factional struggle erupted with renewed violence. In fact it was the post-plenum reports to the branches which touched things off again. So in the autumn of 1953 the entire Cochran faction, comprising perhaps a quarter of the party membership, was unceremoniously expelled from the party because the New York section of the minority had boycotted the 25th Anniversary Banquet of the party. The split in the party was of such importance and the discussion was so confused that the majority was forced to re-register the entire party membership to be sure the split was completed.
Soon thereafter the party held an emergency Plenum denouncing Pabloism as revisionism and issuing and ‘Open Letter’ 48 which split the Fourth International in two. The political break with Pablo was not at all prepared during the previous Clarke-Cochrane struggle, though a certain behind-the-scenes organisational struggle with Pablo had taken place. Furthermore it came as a thunderbolt to the world movement, which also was not prepared for it. The international discussion had just opened in preparation for the Fourth World Congress. Cannon in effect split the world movement before he even attempted to politically clarify its ranks in this opening international struggle. Clearly the SWP had split the world movement down the middle because of Pablo’s support for the American minority – that is, for purely national reasons. The political motivation for the split was simply added later – almost as an afterthought.
Following the split the SWP began what was to be a short-lived political offensive against Pabloism. The emergency plenum in the autumn of 1953 issued a resolution entitled ‘Against Pabloite Revisionism’ 49 as well as the ‘Open Letter’. Cannon wrote a searching article ‘Trotsky or Deutscher’ which was an attack on Deutscher as the theoretical inspirer of Pablo. 50 Breitman and Hansen wrote some material in the Militant and then the struggle petered out around the middle of 1954.
It is important for us to understand the nature of this all-too-brief political polemic with the Pabloites. Faced with a revisionist threat Cannon and his supporters could rely on only one thing to combat it – orthodoxy. Unable to really come to grips with the new problems which Pablo used as touching-off points for his revisionism, Cannon had to simply counterpose the old Trotsky to the new revisionism. Thus in a sense Cannon was continuing his old bloc with Trotsky – this time with Trotsky’s corpse and what he had produced in his lifetime. Thus was born ‘orthodox Trotskyism’.
Cannon explains this ‘orthodox’ outlook in a letter to Leslie Goonewardene of the LSSP (Ceylon) in January 1954:
This extraordinary situation consists in the fact – and there is no getting away from it, for it strikes everyone in the eye – that the personally monopolised International Secretariat of Pablo has attempted, and is attempting, to impose upon the Fourth International a line of policy and political action not sanctioned by our programme or by any congress, and against the will of the great majority of the strongest Trotskyist cadres. The attempt of Pablo and his personal circles to impose unauthorised policy, and to choke off a free discussion, by means of threats, expulsions, excommunications and other measures of Stalinist discipline, confronted the orthodox ‘old Trotskyists’ with the inescapable alternatives: to capitulate or to fight.
But precisely because they are ‘old Trotskyists’, precisely because they learned in Trotsky’s school how to stand up for their ‘old programme’ under any and all circumstances, and to grant no one the right to proscribe it, they have decided to fight.
The first concern of Trotskyists always has been, and should be now the defence of our doctrine. That is the first principle. The second principle, giving life to the first, is the protection of the historically created cadres against any attempt to disrupt or disperse them. 51
We need add only one slight change to this exposition by Cannon of what he was fighting for. In the actual struggle it was the second principle, the ‘protection of the historically created cadres’, which came first with Cannon. Only when Pablo was clearly involved in disrupting the SWP did Cannon turn to the first principle – the orthodox defence of doctrine.
The brief international struggle of 1953-54 with Pablo was carried out in dead earnest and as far as the SWP leadership was concerned at the time it was a definitive battle. Cannon stated:
. . . The split of 1940 was by no means as definitive and final as is the split today. We are finished and done with Pablo and Pabloism forever, not only here but on the international field. And nobody is going to take up any of our time with any negotiations about compromise or any nonsense of that sort. We are at war with this new revisionism, which came to full flower in the reaction to the events after the death of Stalin in the Soviet Union, in East Germany, and in the French general strike. 52
But the break in 1953 did not lead to a break with the method of Pabloism, and so the split could not be permanent. Orthodoxy is not enough. New events always disorient those who rely on orthodoxy alone. That was Germain’s great weakness. Only the ability to apply the Marxist method to a changing reality can ensure the permanence of a split with revisionism in all its forms.
Before we leave this period it is important to note that the expulsion of the Cochranites did not immediately bring internal peace to the SWP. Quite the contrary; it led almost immediately to a new internal factional situation which almost produced a second split and which showed how unstable the majority forces were.
Soon after the Cochranite split the Weiss grouping rushed into action. Emboldened by the special role they had played in the forefront of the struggle against Cochran, they expected to receive a greater share in the party’s leadership. In addition they hoped to galvanise the party with the youthful energy of the young supporters of Weiss who were sent throughout the party to build up the weaker branches.
Dobbs’ reaction was immediate. He felt that he was being pushed out of party leadership. Further the tired section of the cadre which he rested upon were highly suspicious of those who expected that after the Cochranite split the party would really do something. In addition many of these older workers felt correctly that these Weissite youth had no solid working-class outlook – that they had all the characteristics of footloose adventurers. Everyone in the party was extremely tense and it was expected that a new factional struggle was soon to break out.
This time Cannon intervened – to preserve the peace. While he could have made a good case against either side in the struggle he did not do so. As long as both sides favoured the continued existence of the party he was willing to let things be. Weiss was requested to formally dissolve a faction he claimed he never had and Dobbs was requested to give Weiss a real role in the central apparatus of the party. So unity was preserved on the surface while a subterranean war continued intermittently in the party up to the present moment.
The SWP Turns against TrotskyistsA very sick party emerged from the Cochranite fight. The party had been saved from organisational liquidation but what little remained of it politically would soon become clear. The basic cadre of the party was tired, demoralised, devoted to leading only a routine organisational existence in the branches. The majority had fought for an orientation towards the mass movement against the Cochranites, but little if anything was really done to implement such an orientation after the Cochranites left. Routinist, internalised existence was the rule everywhere.
In 1954 and 1955 the SWP paid a good deal of attention to the American scene and most particularly to the rise of McCarthyism. Its assessment of McCarthyism was another sign of the theoretical decay and disorientation of the SWP. This decay reflected itself not simply in the SWP’s misunderstanding of international matters. It also found expression whenever the SWP sought to come to grips with the reality of its own country – that field it felt it knew the best.
This is the way the SWP assessed McCarthyism in September of 1954:
As a product of the witch-hunt, McCarthyism continues to set the pace for the hysteria, but it is more than a witch-hunting excrescence of the capitalist state apparatus. It is a native American fascist movement in the early stage of formation. Having stepped out on the political arena as the murderous foe of the working class, it will not be subdued or contained by the old capitalist parties, even though they take fright, or by the well-meaning liberals or by any other force except the working class itself. 53
This assessment of McCarthyism as a fascist movement which could not be contained by the capitalists was made after the famous Army-McCarthy Hearings which in actual fact were precisely the containing of McCarthy by the capitalists. But this is the way the SWP assessed those hearings:
All attempts of the Democrats and Republicans to curb, crush, outflank or brush aside McCarthy have ended in fiasco. The Army-McCarthy hearings, for instance, which resulted from the need of the Eisenhower administration to draw a line on the encroachments of McCarthy’s independent power, cost nothing to the fascist demagogue than the sacrifice of his Jewish Democratic attorney as a scapegoat. 54
Of course, if McCarthy really represented a fascist formation then considering the strength he had mustered, it would be understandable for the SWP to not expect the capitalist politicians to be able to contain him. It could look only to the working class. But the working class was in a far from militant, let alone revolutionary mood in 1954. Thus such an assessment of McCarthyism could not but have a deeply pessimistic impact on the SWP. This is exactly how the similar theory of the CP affected its ranks. It led to a deep inward turning of the CP combined with the increasing flight of cadres from the party.
However, McCarthy was very far from being a fascist, even a ‘nascent’ one. Fascist movements develop in a different kind of period, when there is a deep social crisis in a country and a massive working-class movement in motion. Only after the capitalists exhaust their reformist resources in trying to placate the masses do they resort to fascism to break up and smash workers’ organisations. Fascism thus must have a social programme of its own in order to win enough petty-bourgeois and lumpen support to counter the working-class movement.
McCarthy had no social programme whatsoever. McCarthy rose during a period of considerable prosperity and during which the masses were relatively quiescent and reformist solutions had been far from exhausted. McCarthy was in fact a ‘witch-hunting excrescence’ of a very particular kind. He reflected the deep international crisis facing American imperialism and the anti-bourgeois-democratic turn he did take was a sign of the underlying instability of American ‘democracy’ in the present world situation. Yes, McCarthyism was an extremely virulent and reactionary development, but it was far from a fascism of a Hitler, a Mussolini, or even a Father Coughlin (properly designated a ‘nascent fascist’ by our movement in the 30s).
Another sign of the deep sickness that had infected the SWP was the infamous ‘Cosmetics Controversy’, In 1954 the party was suddenly seized by a large scale controversy as to whether or not one of the side effects of the proletarian revolution would be to liberate women from the use of cosmetics so as to let their ‘natural beauty’ flower. This not particularly burning issue of the day was taken in dead earnest by many in the party and filled a whole 67 page mimeographed internal discussion bulletin. 55 Who should be in the centre of this controversy but one ‘Jack Bustelo’, a nom de plume for Joseph Hansen, the most prominent theoretical spokesman for the party majority during the Cochran fight.
The years 1954 and 1955 were also the period when the SWP finally came to a decision as to the class nature of the Chinese state. There continued to be considerable theoretical confusion on this question even after the Cochran split. One prominent party leader, Joseph Hansen again, in fact circulated a memorandum to the National Committee suggesting a state capitalist theory of China. Because of interest in this theory the party opened the pages of its theoretical magazine to Dave Miller, a former Johnson supporter, to present the state capitalist theory of China.
By 1955 the SWP had settled on an analysis of China as a deformed workers’ state. This is to be found in the resolution ‘The Third Chinese Revolution and Its Aftermath’ passed by the 1955 SWP Convention. 56 This resolution represented a very fine and orthodox descriptive statement as to the nature of the state in China, the existence of a bureaucratic caste, and the need for a political revolution. However, the resolution made no attempt to offer a theoretical explanation of the real challenge in the Chinese events – by what process was a workers’ ‘state established? As an empirical description of China and as a political stand in relation to that empirical picture, the 1955 resolution is excellent and represents the last attempt of the party to put forward orthodox theory in resolution form. But as the SWP did not really come to grips with the question of the process which created this deformed workers’ state, it was to have more and more difficulty as the years passed in upholding its orthodox conclusions about China. To understand this process the SWP needed an understanding of the Marxist method. This it lacked.
In the latter part of this period one of the minor constituents which made up the majority bloc against Cochran left the SWP – the Vernites. This small personal group in Los Angeles had maintained that wherever the Red Army went workers’ states automatically sprang up. Upon leaving the party it immediately entered the Shachtmanite movement! Such was the peculiar logic of the times!
RegroupmentThe Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was the beginning of a process which was to shatter the isolation of the SWP, thrust it into the middle of important developments both internationally and within the country, and subject it to tests which simple orthodoxy would prove inadequate to cope with. As long as one remains in isolation the repetition of past positions may suffice, but when one breaks out of isolation all kinds of new developments and new pressures are brought to bear on an organisation. Then one must be able to master the Marxist method or be destroyed.
The party which entered this new period was far from healthy. The break with the Cochranites combined with the generally unfavourable objective situation largely destroyed whatever trade union fractions the party had been able to maintain up to 1953. By 1956 there were no more than one or two small fractions left in the party which functioned on any kind of regular basis. Many individual trade union cadres remained in the party, but most of these comrades did little or nothing in the unions. Their real life was in the local branch. To the extent that they functioned at all in the unions this work was seen as quite separate from branch life and very infrequently was it even reported into the branch. Above all the party had no contact on any level with young workers, Negro or white.
Some Negro work had been done in the past period but it tended to be of a sporadic campaign-type character, and in the period following 1956 – during a period of increasing militancy of the Negroes – the trend was to pull more and more out of this work rather than to enter more deeply into it. A few youth recruited primarily by the Weissites were in the party, but by and large youth work as such had been neglected by the party since 1940.
The first phase of the party’s reaction to the Hungarian and Polish events and the crisis these events produced in all sections of the radical movement was generally a positive one. Politically the Hungarian uprising was seen as a reaffirmation of the historic position of the Trotskyist movement on political revolution. These events gave the tired cadres of the SWP new hope, new faith in the ability of the working class to struggle against oppression and to exert its own independent will. 57
Domestically the party turned its attention to the Communist Party and sought to intervene there around the slogan ‘Back to Lenin’. Some very fruitful work was done with dissident CP formations in both Los Angeles and Seattle which had formed around this battle cry. These groups finally were expelled from the CP and joined the SWP, providing the SWP with its most sizeable recruitment from its work in and around the Stalinist movement.
This period also brought forward a crisis within the Shachtmanite organisation. The Shachtmanites had been moving steadily to the right over the past decade. The only fruitful work they were able to do was to build up a small student youth formation. They were able to accomplish this because the SWP completely neglected any kind of work in this field. By 1957 Shachtman had come to the conclusion that independent existence was no longer meaningful and he proposed that his organisation enter the Socialist Party in essentially a capitulatory way. In fact his aim was not so much to enter the Socialist Party as to commit political suicide – to lose completely one’s individual political identity. The Socialist Party was ideally suited for such a purpose.
About a quarter of the youth organisation of the Shachtmanites rebelled against this capitulation and conducted a struggle against Shachtman which ended up in a split and then fusion with the youth of the SWP. This fusion of the former Shachtmanite youth with the SWP youth, largely Weissite, created the basic cadres for a new youth organisation for the SWP, its first such national formation since 1940. Whatever growth the SWP was to experience in the next seven years, outside of the initial recruitment from the CP mentioned earlier, was to come from this youth work.
This first stage of positive ‘regroupment’ work did not last long. Soon the party was to become deeply disoriented and to adapt to centrist trends within the general Stalinist movement. This first stage was expressed in an extremely soft adaptationist approach to one of the two factions which struggled against each other inside the CP in 1957-58. On the one side was Foster, who maintained Stalinist orthodoxy but who also had the support of the bulk of the workers in the party and many militant youth. On the other side was Gates, who expressed various ‘democratic’ criticisms of Stalinism, but who had an extreme right-wing orientation on the American scene. Gates was obviously seeking to break out of the CP in order to get with the ‘mainstream’ of American petty-bourgeois liberalism. The party sided almost uncritically with Gates, hoping that the Gates group would move to the left. 58 The Gates group soon left the CP and left radical politics, entirely dissolving into their personal lives and / or the Democratic Party. Several left groups were to later break .from the Fosterites, the most recent being the Progressive Labor group, showing that militant forces did exist in the CP but that the SWP was unable to find a road to these forces.
The flirtation with Gates prepared the party for its next operation – an orientation towards the ‘progressive’ periphery of the CP whose spokesman was the publication National Guardian. This Guardianite milieu was essentially petty-bourgeois – in fact it was the identical milieu Cannon had rejected as ‘second-rate’ in 1952. Essentially they were the same kind of people as the Gatesites except that entry into the Democratic Party was a bit too much for them – at least at the time. They wanted to maintain a certain independent existence.
The SWP organised for them the Independent Socialist Party, which ran a slate of candidates in New York State in 1958, and similar formations elsewhere. The ISP’s programme was essentially a modified Stalinist one and its major candidate was none other than Corliss Lamont, a millionaire dabbler in ‘left’ causes who liked to see his name appear in the paper. His major contribution to the campaign was to urge Harold Stassen, a Republican, to run as a ‘peace candidate’ in the next election.
This regroupment work with the ‘Progressives’ became a total preoccupation for the party. The 1958 election campaign was organised from beginning to end by party members, with the ‘Progressives’ making barely a token participation. In the end the relationship between the SWP and the ‘Progressives’ blew up and most of the ‘Progressives’ found their way back to the Democratic Party. No more than a handful of them entered the party and most of these were far from revolutionaries. Never in its history had the SWP exerted so much effort to woo a group of people with so little concrete result.
This regroupment process had very serious effects on the political and theoretical development of the SWP. It was in this period that the old orthodoxy of the SWP broke down and a new revisionism came to the fore. For weeks on end the Militant took on the colouration of the ‘Progressives’ it was working with. The Trotskyist critique of Stalinism – that great weapon which could have won the best of the Stalinists over to Trotskyism – was blunted, and every effort was made to make the SWP seem to be nothing but a slightly more radical version of the Progressive Party.
The clearest theoretical expression of this trend can be found in an article by Joseph Hansen written in 1958, ‘Proposed Roads to Soviet Democracy’. This article dealt with the critical question of political revolution. In 1953 and 1954 this question had been central in the dispute with Pablo. In 1956 the SWP had been in the forefront in seeing the Hungarian Revolution as a vindication of its orthodox position on political revolution. Now four years after the Pablo fight and only two years after Hungary, Hansen was to put forward an essentially reformist conception of political revolution almost identical with that held by Clarke in 1953:
It is much closer to reality to view the programme of political revolution as the total series of reforms, gained through militant struggle, culminating in the transfer of power to the workers.
No revolution comes in a single oversize dose like a horse pill. It develops in interlinked stages affecting interlinked fields. If any of the stages be viewed in isolation, or fixed as an end in itself rather than a means to a higher goal, it appears as a reform. If its connections to the demands of other stages be kept in mind, it appears as a transitional step. It is only when the process is viewed as a whole – in its origins, its fundamental aims and final results – that it appears for what it really is, a revolution: an organic qualitative change in whatever structure is involved. 59
All this sounds very dialectical. But far from being the revolutionary position of Marxism, it is in actuality the evolutionary position of Menshevism. It is important that Hansen here generalises his concept that revolution is nothing but a series of reforms to apply to all revolutions. To Hansen the October Insurrection must have been but one of a number of reforms the cumulative effect of which was a revolutionary change. In our book the destruction of the capitalist state and the transfer of power to the working class organised in Soviets was quite a reform, quite a reform! Needless to say the concept of the political revolution as a series of reforms completely obliterates the division between the Trotskyist position and that of Deutscher and other revisionists who urge a reformist road in the Soviet countries. This, of course, was its purpose.
Hansen’s theoretical role in the post-war history of the SWP was not a personal matter. He reflected – perhaps a bit more grotesquely than others – the empiricist method of the SWP. His theories were developed as impressionistic reactions to current development or to serve political and factional purposes. A theory once developed would be lightly discarded when either the objective situation or the factional need changed. Thus in 1949 and 1950 Hansen, together with Cochran, reacted in the same impressionistic way as did Pablo to the expansion of Stalinism. Their views were if anything cruder, more vulgar than Pablo’s. In 1952 and 1953 Hansen responded to the internal factional needs of the Cannon group in the SWP and became the foremost advocate of the view that Stalinism was ‘counter-revolutionary through and through’. In 1954 and 1955, in the climate of McCarthyism and reaction, Hansen experimented with state capitalism, a position about as far removed politically – if not methodologically – from his 1949 position as one could get. By 1958, when the party’s tactical needs required an adaptation to the Stalinists, Hansen was to return to his earlier Pabloite views. This was to prepare him for his future role as the foremost battler against orthodoxy and for a return to the Pabloites. Only a party deeply sick with the disease of empiricism would let such a person occupy a leading position in its central leadership.
There was, as would be expected, a minor orthodox resistance to the return to revisionist views fought against earlier and to the almost total absorption of the party in a ‘radical’ petty-bourgeois milieu. This resistance found expression in the Cowley tendency, which opposed the extremes of regroupment and which urged a continuation of an orientation towards the mass movement. 60 It was, however, a very weak echo of orthodoxy and its base was in the same tired section of the party which was responsible for the disorientation of the party in the first place. Quite naturally a good section of these Cowley supporters, including Cowley herself, were to simply drift out of the party and out of politics in the next period. They were simply too tired to do much else than register their protest before they left.
The Marcyites also strongly opposed regroupment. However, it would be difficult to characterise their opposition as really ‘orthodox’ as they combined their criticisms of regroupment with a position that the Hungarian Revolution was a fascist counter-revolution. This section was to split from the party before the 1959 convention and to drift more and more away from Trotskyism.
In the meantime, the evolution of the Cochranites fully confirmed the deeply liquidationist nature of this formation. First of all in the early stages of the regroupment process the Bartell-Clarke wing of the formation split away and played a certain role for a while as ‘unity brokers’. The Cochranites proper were too involved in publishing their magazine, American Socialist, to bother with regroupment. Soon after regroupment came to an end, the Cochranites simply ceased publication of their magazine and announced to all and sundry that they were going out of business for good. The Bartell-Clarke formation had disintegrated a little earlier once the ‘unity brokerage’ business had dried up.
For the Weiss formation regroupment was a heaven-sent proposition. Murry Weiss came to the fore as the party’s leading negotiator and expert on adaptation to pro-Stalinist currents. All over the country these people were in the forefront of regroupment, its ceaseless advocates, its most dedicated exponents. Regroupment was more than a tactical manoeuvre to the Weissites – it was a whole approach to the building of the party. They saw the party being built through a process of ever broader fusions with petty-bourgeois radical forces on an ever more amorphous political programme. They developed a deeply liquidationist approach towards regroupment. More and more they began to espouse the formulations and outlook of the Cochranites – their enemies of only a few short years back. At the same time that the Cochranites outside the party were dissolving, the Weissites were to evolve inside the party into essentially a Cochranite formation.
As long as regroupment was the main orientation of the party as a whole the Weiss and Dobbs forces in the party worked reasonably well together with only occasional subterranean conflicts. Weiss also put forward no line independent of the majority line. In fact, as far as regroupment was concerned, he was the main formulator of the party line. 61
At the 1959 party convention the SWP was to make a decisive turn away from this work in the Stalinist milieu. The impetus for the turn came from Cannon. Throughout the 1957 and 1958 period Cannon had been a firm defender of regroupment. He not only defended some of its excesses – he committed some himself. But by 1959 it became clear to Cannon that the Stalinist milieu was moving away from the party and for the party to chase after the Stalinists could lead to liquidationism. So he suddenly discovered that some comrades were mistaking regroupment for ‘political togetherness’. On the eve of the 1959 Convention he sent a letter to Farrell Dobbs proposing that the political resolution already drafted for the Convention by Dobbs be redrafted to eliminate regroupment. 62 Dobbs hurried to Los Angeles for consultation and out went regroupment. No real assessment was ever made of the party’s failings in this period. The party simply turned to other work.
But regroupment was not over for Murry Weiss. On October 7, 1959, several months after the convention, Weiss issued to the National Committee a ‘Memorandum on Policy Towards the Rubinstein Group’ which in effect urged a continuation of the regroupment approach towards the very small remnants of petty-bourgeois ‘Progressives’ still willing to talk to the SWP. This was unceremoniously rejected. As late as April 26, 1961, Weiss once again urged a regroupment approach – this time towards the CP itself in the local New York elections – claiming that the Cuban Revolution was opening them up for this kind of proposal. This was also rejected. By this time Weiss liquidationism began to spread to the international question, and we will take it up in more detail later.
Back to PabloAs we have noted earlier, splits which do not lead to an understanding of the methodological causes of the split, cannot be permanent. No matter how much one may wish to turn one’s back on the split and get on with other business, the split keeps hitting at you until you are forced to face up to it again one way or another. So it was with the Pabloite split. This split had been brought about by a precipitous reaction to Pablo’s factional manoeuvres in various national sections – especially the SWP. Only a rudimentary opposition of orthodoxy was thrown up to counter Pablo’s revisionism. No one had come anywhere near to an investigation of the underlying methodological causes of the split.
Thus it was understandable that no sooner had this ‘definitive’ split taken place than unity negotiations got under way. In 1954 the International Committee, in a move hoping to win over the LSSP, initiated a unity move with a parity proposal. There was no response from the Pabloites. The whole matter was dropped at the time, in part at the urging of the SWP. 63 Then in 1957 the SWP itself proposed that unity with the Pabloites take place on the basis of parity between the International Committee and the international Secretariat. This time also the International Secretariat rejected the overture. 64
In neither 1954 nor in 1957 were the unity proposals seen as initiating a political discussion. Rather this stage was dispensed with and the negotiations dealt strictly with organisational proposals. More important, the SWP, which was the only party in a real position to do so, did not carry on a theoretical and political struggle after its brief flurry in early 1954. It simply dumped the new International Committee in the laps of the British and French and proceeded once again to devote its energies to its beloved American scene. It hoped that this time the International would just leave it alone. It got its wish for a while – but not for long. Neither the French nor the British had the strength at the time to give much leadership to the International Committee, so without the SWP’s active role the International Committee fell into relative quiescence from 1954 until 1961.
The period from 1957 to 1961 in the SWP was to be a period of political preparation for organisational fusion with the Pabloites. We have seen how the SWP began to develop a revisionist outlook very close to that of the Pabloites in the period 1957-59. After the 1959 convention the party was supposed to turn once again to the party’s traditional major arena of work – the working class. But the SWP was unable to make such a turn – the SWP of 1959 was organically incapable of making such a turn. It was a tired party, a party which had long since withdrawn from the working class. Such a formation could not simply re-enter that from which it had slowly withdrawn over the past decade. The SWP cadres could keep an organisation going, raise finances for the national office, modestly circulate the press, hold forums in the local areas and carry on other routine organisational and propaganda activities. It could keep an organisation as an organisation but by 1959 it no longer had an organisation which could be used as a revolutionary instrument. To turn the party towards effective intervention in the class would have required a complete shake-up of the party from top to bottom. Such a shake-up would have meant the loss of much of the tired cadre. This no one in the leadership for a moment considered.
The organisational turn away from regroupment work did not signify a sharp break from the kind of revisionist political formulations which were being evolved in the 1957-1959 period. In fact two months after the 1959 convention the Militant ran an editorial on the then current international manoeuvres between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. entitled ‘A Welcome Thaw’. The opening sentence of the editorial referred to this current ‘thaw’ as ‘. . . a victory for the forces of peace over the warmongers’ in the true non-class, pacifist spirit of the National Guardian. 65 In the Autumn, 1960, International Socialist Review, dedicated to the twentieth anniversary of Trotsky’s death, Murry Weiss wrote an article called ‘Trotskyism Today’. This article expressed a completely Pabloite outlook in which Trotskyism was seen flowering all over the place in the triumph of the Yugoslavs, the triumph of Mao, etc. However, the development of Trotskyism as a movement in its own right was completely ignored. Weiss stated: ‘Trotskyists have never claimed a franchise on revolutionary theory and practice. On the contrary, all of our work is directed towards convincing the working class and its parties to take the revolutionary road.’ 66 The Trotskyist movement is clearly seen as outside ‘the working class and its parties’ seeking to convince others to do what Weiss feels it is incapable of doing itself.
Thus the 1959-1960 period was essentially a period of busy work and a propagandistic election campaign. The party turned away from the Stalinist milieu only because the Stalinist milieu turned away from it. But it turned in no other direction. It just waited for something to happen. Only in the youth movement did anything really happen. There the youth organisation experienced a period of relatively peaceful growth and development, concentrating its work among the students where new radical trends were emerging.
By the middle of 1960 something new did happen which finally gave the party something to do – the development of the Cuban Revolution. As American imperialism pushed the Cuban Revolution to the left the SWP began to pay more and more attention to Cuba. Finally the SWP declared that Cuba had become a workers’ state, and the Cuban leadership was seen as offering the way out for the Trotskyist movement. Objective pressures had forced Castro to the left. Now if only the little SWP could connect up with the Cuban leadership, much as Pablo a decade earlier sought to connect up with the Stalinists, it could become once again part of the revolutionary process. Cuba was seen as a substitute, a short-cut for the long, hard struggle to build a party in the United States – a struggle which the tired old SWP cadres could make only a half-hearted effort to carry out.
The pro-Cuba forces in the United States (the Fair Play for Cuba Committee) were to become the new regroupment arena and the major area for party work. These pro-Cuban forces were essentially the same petty-bourgeois radicals the SWP had sought to reach during regroupment. Once again the Militant took on the coloration of the Castroites and devoted much of its space to publishing Castro’s speeches. This chameleon-like ability of the Militant to absorb the coloration of others was an indication of its own lack of indigenous colour – that the SWP had no conscious direction in and of itself.
As time passed the pro-Cuban forces began to drift away and those remaining grew increasingly hostile to the SWP and Cuba worked closer with the USSR. Finally the Fair Play group formally dissolved itself in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. But long before this it had lost its steam. Out of all this effort the SWP did not gain more than a handful of recruits.
However, this new adaptation to Castro reinforced the old adaptation to the ‘progressives’ and helped to prepare the SWP for a return internationally to Pablo’s camp. Modest moves were made in this direction in late 1960 as the SWP leadership took note of the concurrence of agreement on important political questions such as the Cuban Revolution. The whole question, however, was brought to a head by the January 1961 letter of the SLL to the SWP stating that:
It is time to draw to a close the period in which Pabloite revisionism was regarded as a trend within Trotskyism. Unless this is done we cannot prepare for the revolutionary struggle now beginning. We want the SWP to go forward with us in this spirit. 67
The ability of the SLL to take the political initiative inside the ranks of the International Committee was a tribute to its development since the days of the original split with Pablo. The period since 1953 brought about not only a quantitative development of the British Trotskyist movement but also a qualitative development. Despite the surface changes in the line of the Pabloites it insisted that the Pabloites had not changed in their method. It took this stand in 1957 with Sinclair’s letter to Germain and again in an editorial in Labour Review in August of 1959. But it was not until 1961 that the SLL had developed to the point where it could struggle for this view despite the resistance of the SWP.
There is another aspect to the SLL’s views as they unfolded in the Spring of 1961. The SLL, almost from the beginning, sought to turn the international discussion around the question of methodology. In this way the SLL began to raise the level of the discussion with the Pabloites beyond the level of the 1953 split to go beyond orthodoxy. In this sense the SLL sought to raise the level of the international movement to the point Trotsky himself sought to bring it during his intervention in the 1940 struggle. In the 21 years since that struggle the Fourth International had slipped further and further back from the point Trotsky had developed it to in 1940. In 1961 the vast majority of Trotskyists were far below the theoretical level of the 1940 struggle. This is the fundamental meaning of the reaction on the part of the SWP and many others to the SLL’s efforts.
Starting a little cautiously in early 1961, the SWP began a political process which was soon to bring it back into the Pabloite camp. Relations became tense between the SWP and the SLL. The SLL’s constant insistence on discussion rather than organisational manoeuvres was too much for the SWP. To the SWP leaders this meant the SLL was becoming its enemy. They feared discussion would destroy the internal regime of the SWP – would break the party up into its constituent parts, would lead to the wholesale flight of those in the party who were already dead politically. The SWP, and Cannon above all, sought to preserve the unity of the ‘cadre’ first even if it meant breaking with its closest international collaborators for a decade and abandoning principled politics altogether. By so acting the SWP showed how superficial its internationalism had been for the whole previous decade. Just as quickly as Pablo had been transformed from friend to enemy in 1953 when Cannon felt his cadre threatened, so in 1961 with the SLL and the French. The real factional fever of the SWP leadership and Jim Cannon in particular can be seen in Cannon’s ‘Letters to the Party Center’ published on the very eve of the 1961 Convention. 68 These letters expressed a feeling of deep factional hostility towards those international sections which were the SWP’s closest collaborators only six months earlier.
Politically the 1961 SWP discussion revealed that the party’s leadership had gone over completely to the very views it had struggled against in 1953. For instance, at the January 1961 Plenum, Comrade Morris Stein was to state the following about Stalinism, which was ‘counter-revolutionary through and through’ in 1953: ‘. . . The Soviet Union is compelled today, instead of playing a counter-revolutionary role – to place itself on the side of revolution.’ 69 Most significant is the fact that this statement was made by Stein, one of the most solid elements in the old Dobbs section of the party’s cadre – the man who held together the party during the war when the 18 were in jail; the man chosen to report for Germain’s position on Eastern Europe in February 1950; the man who played an important role in formulating the orthodox answer to Pablo in 1953; the man who was Dobbs’ spokesman in the showdown with Weiss. Stein’s degeneration was a sign of how deeply revisionist thinking had sunk into the most solid, orthodox sections of the party’s leading cadre and rank and file.
The SWP’s international resolution passed at the 1961 convention represented a retreat to Pabloite positions on all major international questions. It stands in stark contrast to the position the SWP had drawn up in late 1953 in the resolution ‘Against Pabloite Revisionism’. For instance the 1961 resolution claimed that the victory of the Chinese Revolution ‘definitively altered relation of forces in favour of socialism’. 70 However, the 1953 resolution denied that such a qualitative alteration in the world relationship of class forces had taken place and this denial was central to its critique of the Pabloites. It declared:
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 the class enemy, and facilitated the mobilisation 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 works to the advantage of the Kremlin. 71
This was a central difference, for the Pabloite position has always been that, since the objective weight of world events is on the side of revolution, the subjective factor, the building of the party, tends to matter less. Almost any centrist formation can be thrust forward by the objectively revolutionary conditions and bring the working class to power. This was the conclusion the SWP also had drawn from the Cuban experience.
The SWP’s organisational proposals for unity with the Pabloites were obviously predicated on a political movement in the direction of the Pabloite outlook. In this sense they were of the same character as the Goldman-Morrow proposals for unity with the Shachtmanites. The SLL’s insistence on a political discussion prior to unification was similar to the position the SWP took in 1946. However, as we have noted, the SLL went beyond the SWP of 1946 in probing the causes for the split.
The Pabloites themselves clearly admitted that the reunification moves of the SWP were based on the SWP’s reversal of political position and not on any real change in the political outlook of the Pabloites. They state in their own resolution on reunification:
The political basis for the 1953-54 split, as we saw it, was a lack of full understanding of the correctness of the International’s turn in the estimate of the world situation, made in 1950-51. . . . Starting from the 20th Congress of the CPSU, some organisations affiliated with the International Committee or in sympathy with its political views as in the case of the SWP, corrected their evaluation of the world situation and of the evolution within the Soviet Union, and arrived at an estimation of events very close to that of the Fourth International. From that time on, reunification became not only desirable but also possible. 72
The SWP quite naturally rejected every proposal of the SLL to discuss prior to unification and to discuss the origins of the split in 1953. Neither the SWP of 1961 nor the Shachtmanites of 1946 could afford to look back at their history and grapple with the causes of the original split. Any group incapable of studying its own history and of explaining its own evolution, has broken totally with the method of Marxism. All groups make mistakes – those groups which are incapable of learning from mistakes or even acknowledging that they took place are making the biggest mistake of all, an irreparable mistake.
After 1961 the evolution of the SWP back to Pablo was only a matter of time. Its decision to break from the International Committee and announce its political solidarity with the Pabloite International Secretariat came as no surprise to anyone. It had been prepared politically ever since the regroupment period. In fact it had been prepared earlier than that, in 1953, by the inability of the SWP to carry forward the struggle against Pabloism from the level of orthodoxy to a defence of the Marxist method and the application of that method to new events in the world. This failure in turn was prepared by the failure of the SWP after 1940 to really learn the lessons of the 1940 struggle and to definitively break with the method of empiricism.
The SWP’s return to the Pabloite camp in no sense meant a revival of an international outlook on the part of the SWP. It was motivated solely by domestic needs, the need for protection against the political attack of the SLL, for protection of the cadre from politics. It was based on an understanding that once again the SWP would offer the international a little material assistance and support if only the international would leave the SWP alone. The international this time was in no position to do anything but leave the SWP alone. A decade of Pabloism had decimated its ranks.
The move of the SWP back into the camp of Pabloism did not protect the party from disintegration. Rather it created conditions which were to hasten the disintegrative process and to hinder any attempt to progressively resolve the party’s problems. The evolution of the Weiss group is particularly instructive in this respect. Murry Weiss emerged as the most extreme advocate of reunification of the Fourth International, seeing this as but a small step in a much broader ‘revolutionary regroupment’ with Castro, Mao, etc. In fact, he announced on the Political Committee in 1961 that the SWP’s international resolution did not go far enough in its liquidationism: ‘Murry said that this draft as it stands is inadequate and therefore erroneous on a couple of points. Although it made a flying start, it stopped on the subject of what he would term revolutionary regroupment in the revolutionary world process.’ 73.
Weiss’s closest political collaborators saw workers’ states popping up all over the place. Bert Deck emerged with a ‘special position’ on Cuba, seeing it transformed into a workers’ state some six months earlier than the rest of the majority because of the presence of an armed militia. 74 Frances James, another Weiss supporter, supported the Deck line and further suggested that Guinea also was fast becoming a workers’ state. 75 Weiss’s youth supporters suddenly saw thousands of young people radicalised by Cuba with whom we could fuse if only we would get out of our own way.
In the 1961-1963 period the Weiss supporters deepened their liquidationist methods though they conducted no open struggle for their views. One by one the leading figures of the Weiss formation in the SWP left the party. Bert Deck with his ‘special position’, Nora Roberts and James Lambrecht with their feverish images of thousands of revolutionary youth, more recently Frances James with her workers’ state in Guinea. Murry Weiss himself left the party in spirit if not formally. He simply pulled out of all party work and informed anyone who bothered to ask that he now had come to the conclusion that the Cochranites in 1953 had been basically right and that the SWP would play no special role in the great regroupment that was to come. Some of the Weiss supporters remained in the party to fight the ‘Dobbs regime’ and to urge that the party intervene in petty-bourgeois movements rather than the working class.
The 1961-1963 period was the period of the serious growth of an openly Maoist group in the SWP. The Swabeck tendency had evolved to a point where they repudiated the whole history of the Trotskyist movement in China and sided with Mao from 1927 on. They, of course, completely abandoned the political revolution in China and didn’t even seem much interested in reform. They became an almost crystal-pure Stalinist formation within the SWP with support of perhaps as much as 15 per cent of the party.
A minority opposition in support of the SLL position also rose up in the party. This opposition’s main base was among the younger comrades relatively new to the movement. Significantly the few older Dobbs cadres who joined this opposition on the same general that they fought Cochran and Pablo soon deserted it and the party. They were too tired to do more than register a protest before they retired from active political struggle.
The Dobbs section of the party has always prided itself on its proletarian composition and its concrete orientation towards the American working class. Whatever theoretical weaknesses it had, it felt its concrete working-class work helped to compensate for these weaknesses. In this period the Dobbs section of the party emerged as the central element in the resistance to a turn by the party towards work in the mass movement. Its approach to the developing Negro struggle and the beginning of restiveness in the class as a whole has been one of abstentionism.
At the 1963 Convention Dobbs took the lead in rejecting minority proposals to turn the party towards the working class and the Negro movement. As a cover for their very real abstentionism in the class the SWP majority leadership as a whole projected a deeply adaptationist line toward the petty-bourgeois leadership of the black nationalist section of the Negro movement. The chameleon-like Militant took on the coloration of the Black Muslims and Malcolm X’s speeches replaced those of Castro. But concrete work in the Negro movement on the basis of a class line was rejected.
The one great virtue of the Dobbs group it no longer possessed. The evolution of the Dobbs forces in the SWP shows concretely that a perspective of struggle in the mass movement cannot be maintained for long without a theoretical understanding. In 1961-63 the Dobbs forces completely capitulated to the Pabloites on every theoretical issue and at the same time turned their backs on the concrete struggle of the working people in the United States. The Dobbs group, like the Cochran group, always was a more aristocratic section of the working class and never did reach the young workers and Negroes. Now this aristocratic section had receded into the party itself, thus isolating itself further from the class.
The role of Cannon in this whole process must be mentioned. In 1953 it was Cannon who threw himself into the struggle against a liquidationist trend in the organisation. Later, though reluctantly, he tackled the Pabloite revisionists. Today Cannon’s role was very, very different. Right through this whole period Cannon, above all, pursued a policy of compromise with the liquidationist Weiss section of the party – the current Cochranites. As late as the 1963 Convention Cannon intervened strongly in defence of the Weiss group. Thus the Cannon of 1961-63 played the role of the Dobbs of 1952-53. Cannon played the same role on the international arena. This great ‘protector of the historically constituted cadres’ did not blink an eye in writing off the entire British and French sections early in 1961 and throwing his weight on the side of the Pabloite destroyers and liquidators of the cadres.
Cannon’s political role was of the same character. In December 1962 it was Cannon who jumped to the defence of the Kremlin in the Cuban Missiles Crisis and criticised the Militant for being a bit too critical of Khrushchev. After all, what else could Khrushchev do in the interests of ‘world peace’? He actually commended the positions of Bertrand Russell and Nehru on the question. 76 In this respect he did not differ from Dobbs, who a year later was to send his condolences to Mrs. Kennedy after the Kennedy assassination and to lecture the American workers on the importance of ‘orderly processes’.
Forty Years of American MarxismIn the late 1950s Jim Cannon was to devote a good deal of his time to compiling his recollections of his past history as a participant in the American radical movement since the days of Debs and the IWW. Summarising his whole history as an American revolutionist Cannon had this to say:
My decision to support Trotsky and the Left Opposition in 1928, and to break with all the factions in the Communist Party over that issue, was not a sudden ‘conversion’ on my part; and neither was my earlier decision in 1917 to support the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks and to leave the IWW behind.
Each time I remained what I had started out to be in my youth – a revolutionist against capitalism. The Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks in the first instance, and the heroic struggle of the Left Opposition in the second, taught me some things I hadn’t known before and hadn’t been able to figure out for myself. They made me a better and more effective fighter for my own cause. But they did not basically change me into something I hadn’t been before. They did not ‘convert’ me to the revolution; I was a revolutionist to start with. 77
Precisely because neither the Communist International nor Trotsky and the Fourth International changed Cannon ‘into something I hadn’t been before’, Jim Cannon, the American revolutionist personified, was by 1963 no longer a ‘revolutionist against capitalism’. This was not a matter of the evolution of an individual – Cannon’s evolution was the evolution of a whole trend of American Marxism, the only Marxist trend to emerge from the American Communist Party.
American radicalism did not really survive World War I. The elementary syndicalism of the IWW was totally inadequate in the United States which emerged from World War I. The United States was not only a part of the world; it emerged in the pre-eminent position in the ranks of world imperialism. An American radical trend which could not even try to cope with this new world situation could not survive in the United States. So following the war the IWW disappeared from the scene as an effective radical force.
Populism failed to survive the war as a serious national movement. The petty-bourgeoisie of the countryside and small towns – the real base of populist strength – were by the 1920s a relatively minor factor in American society. The new outbursts of populism during the thirties were restricted to such backwater areas as the Dakotas. The real questions facing the United States were not to be solved on the wheat farms of the Dakotas.
The Socialist Party never recovered its pre-war strength. This cannot be blamed simply on the split of the left wing and the formation of the CP, for the CP took only a small fraction of the English-speaking membership of the SP. The predominantly English-speaking American-through-and-through Socialist Party of the 1920s was reduced to only a minor role in American radical politics while the ‘Russian’ CP remained the major factor in American radicalism until the post-World War II period.
In order for any kind of socialist working-class movement to survive in the United States it was forced to go to the Russians for a programme – for a programme which would enable it to deal with the United States, which was now playing a central role in the whole world situation. Thus the very growth of the Communist Party itself showed the deep need for American workers to go beyond their own narrow provincial experience and their own narrow empirical method. The basic programme of the early American Communist Party was not ‘made in America’, nor was it the product of the American empirical method. It had been developed on an international scale through the use of the dialectical method. The early American Communist Party sought to empirically apply a programme that was developed dialectically.
Jim Cannon in particular personified this process. His mind was compartmentalised. One part of his mind held a programme developed elsewhere by a method which remained a mystery to Cannon, the dialectical method. In another part of his mind Cannon had his impressions of the United States, his famous ‘feel’ for American workers in their revolutionary potential. This ‘feel’ was arrived at empirically and thus vulnerable to change depending on changing conditions in the United States.
The Jim Cannon of the 1930s approached politics in the same way as the Jim Cannon of the 1920s. The American Trotskyists had a programme deeply relevant to world-wide developments of capitalism, the degeneration of the workers’ state, and the deep ramifications of these related processes for the American scene. But this programme also was not made in America by the American method. It was developed by Trotsky, the continuator of the Marxist traditions of the Russian Revolution. It was produced by the dialectical method, a method deeply alien to American empiricism. Cannon carried with him from the CP his neatly compartmentalised mind, deftly filed the new programme in the place where the old programme had been, and devoted himself once again to his ‘feel’ of the American scene and to building an organisation.
The net result was a deep crisis in the movement which almost destroyed it. Trotsky was forced to come to the rescue, for only someone who understood the Marxist method was capable of combating the revisionist threat of Burnham-Shachtman-Abern. During his last days Trotsky sought to bring about a further development of the Cannon section of the movement. He warned them of the deep danger of adapting to their situation in the American trade union movement unless they began to function as Bolsheviks first and American syndicalists second.
With Trotsky dead, Cannon was suddenly left with a void in that compartment of his mind reserved for programme. He filled it as best he could with the programme Trotsky had produced in the past period and turned his attention once again to the American scene. This time his ‘feel’ for the American workers weakened – he saw largely their conservative surface appearance rather than their deeper revolutionary potential. Left to his own resources and with an American working class of which he was somewhat sceptical, he retreated into the refuge of broad socialist propaganda rather than asserting his rightful position as the leading spokesman of the international movement which represented the working class as it would become rather than simply as it was at the moment.
Past positions, only empirically understood, are not enough to fill the programme section of even a compartmentalised mind. A new programme, developed this time with an empirical method, was furnished to Cannon by his international collaborators. There is no doubt Cannon did not feel overly comfortable with this new programme. He could empirically feel it was different from the old one. But into his mind it went, for without a development on his part theoretically he could put nothing else there to cope with new international developments. More and more Cannon had difficulties keeping the compartments of his mind separated. Comrades in the party with greater concern for theoretical consistency began insisting that the new programme actually be applied to the American scene.
Faced with the very liquidation of the movement he had devoted such effort to constructing, Cannon broke empirically with the new programme, countering it only with the old orthodoxy. But this did not work. Events kept banging and banging away at Cannon and his supporters. Finally, the new revisionist programme began creeping back into the cosy compartment, this time to settle down to stay. By this time the other compartment was not faring so well either. Despite all the rhetoric about the American Revolution, the Cannon of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s began to see the American working class like the Cannon of 1941, but now multiplied many times over. This Cannon began to look elsewhere for a revolutionary force. First it was adaptationist, get-rich-quick schemes with petty-bourgeois Stalinists. Then it was Cuba – Castro’s empiricism seemed heaven-sent to the empirical SWP. Someone with their method had come to power. Never mind that the Castro formation was not a working-class formation. Never mind its lack of theory – this was seen in fact as its appeal. So what if the workers had no say in anything and Trotskyists were suppressed. Castro had power and he got it empirically – that was enough.
Cannon’s whole history is the story of American Marxists facing a new situation which made it impossible for them to simply maintain a revolutionary perspective on American soil. They were forced to turn elsewhere for their programme. But they took over this programme without understanding the method which produced it and sought to survive by simply applying it to the American scene empirically – with a method hostile to the method which produced the programme. Trotsky’s role and Trotsky’s intervention made it possible for the SWP to survive as long as it did. All other tendencies had long since broken from the revolu¬tionary road. But in the end the SWP turned on Trotskyism itself and repudiated a revolutionary perspective in the United States.
The American Marxists of the future must begin their work with an understanding of the history of this 40-year struggle for Marxism in the United States. The main lesson of this history is the need for American Marxists, no matter how few in number, to begin their qualitative theoretical development through an understanding of the Marxist method. Only such a qualitative develop¬ment will prepare them to reach the new gene¬ration of working-class militants now clearly coming on the scene in the United States. Any formation which continues to neglect this task will simply be by-passed by revolutionary developments in the United States, regardless of size or the amount of ‘busy work’ they do.
1. Cannon, James P. ‘Political Principles and Propaganda Methods’, Defense Policy in the Minneapolis Trial (Pioneer Publishers, New York, 1942), page 5.
2. Ibid., page 16.
3. Ibid., page 19.
4. Ibid., page 20.
5. Munis, Grandizo. ‘A Criticism of the Minneapolis Trial’, Defense Policy ..., op. cit., page 5.
6. Cannon, James P. Socialism on Trial (Pioneer Publishers, New York, Third Edition, 1949).
7. Goldman, Albert. In Defense of Socialism (Pioneer Publishers, New York. 1942).
8. Cannon, James P. ‘Political Principles . . .’, op. cit., page 19.
9. Winters, A. ‘Review of Our Trade Union Policy’, Internal Bulletin, Vol. VI, No. 9 (Socialist Workers Party), page 33.
10. Ibid., page 35.
11. Warde, William F. An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism (Pioneer Publishers, New York, Revised Edition, 1953).
12. Cannon, James P. ‘Theses on the American Revolution’, The Coming American Revolution (Pioneer Publishers, New York, 1947), page 8 ff.
13. Ibid., page 14.
14. Ibid., page 14.
15. Ibid., page 15.
16. Ibid., page 15.
17. Cannon James P. ’The Coming American Revolution’, op. cit., page 26.
18. ‘From a Propaganda Group to a Party of Mass Action’, Fourth International (New York, January, 1947).
19. Cannon, James P. ‘Some Facts About Party History – and the Reasons for its Falsification’, Internal Bulletin, Vol. 15, No. 19 (Socialist Workers Party, 1953), page 11 ff.
20. Meyer, J. (J.R. Johnson) ‘The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States’, Bulletin of Marxist Studies No.4, op. cit., page 32.
21. Ibid., pp. 35 ff.
22. Cannon, James P. ‘Factional Struggle and Party Leadership’, Fourth International (New York, Nov.-Dec. 1953), page 116.
23. ‘The Russian Question’, New International (New York, October 1941).
24. New International (New York, April 1946),
25. Erber, Ernest. City Committee Bulletin (Workers Party, New York, 1945).
26. Warde, Wm. F. ‘A Note on the Ideological Degeneration of Goldman, Morrow and Logan’, Internal Bulletin, Vol. VIII, No. 11 (Socialist Workers Party, 1946), page 12.
27. Goldman, Albert. The Question of Unity (Workers Party, New York, 1947) Appendix D, E, F, G.
28. ‘Revolutionary Marxism or Petty-Bourgeois Revisionism?’, Internal Bulletin, Vol. VIII, No. 10 (Socialist Workers Party, August 1946).
29. Ibid., page 3.
30. Ibid. , page 4.
31. See: ‘Speeches on Unity Question by Two SWP Leaders’, Bulletin, Vol. II, No.4 (Workers Party, May 27, 1947), page 24 ff.
32. See: Ernest Germain. ‘The Soviet Union After the War’, International Information Bulletin, Vol. I, No.2 (Socialist Workers Party, 1947).
33. ‘USSR and Stalinism – Theses adopted by the Second World Congress’, Fourth International (New York, June 1948).
34. Germain, Ernest. ‘The Yugoslav Question, The Question of the Soviet Buffer Zone, and Their Implication for Marxist Theory’, International Information Bulletin (Socialist Workers Party, May 1950).
35. Pablo, Michel. ‘Yugoslavia and the Rest of the Buffer Zone’, International Information Bulletin (Socialist Workers Party, 1950).
36. This occurred at the Third World Congress.
37. Andrews, J. et. al. ‘The Roots of the Party Crisis – Its Causes and Solution’, Internal Bulletin, Vol. 15, No. 8 (Socialist Workers Party, April 1953), page 16.
38. Cannon, James P. ‘Some Facts . . .’, op. cit., page 14.
39. Preis, Art. ‘The "Proof" of Our "Stalinophobia"’ Internal Bulletin, Vol. 15, No. 9 (Socialist Workers Party, April 1953), page 13.
40. Stein, M. ‘The Class Nature of the Buffer Countries in Eastern Europe’, Discussion Bulletin No. 3 (Socialist Workers Party, June 1950).
41. Weiss, Murry. ‘Report on Yugoslavia’, Discussion Bulletin No.6 (Socialist Workers Party, January 1951).
42. Cannon, James P. ‘Some Facts ...’, op. cit., p. 21.
43. Ibid., p. 21.
44. Cannon, James P. ‘Background and Issues of the Party Crisis (Letters to Comrades)’, Internal Bulletin, Vol. 15, No. 12 (Socialist Workers Party, May 1953). The letter was originally written on October 7, 1952.
45. Cannon, James P. ‘Some Facts . . .’, op. cit., p.22.
46. The Cochranites reported a letter of Cannon’s in March of 1952 which ‘was a quid pro quo offer to Pablo: support in return for non-interference in the drive for a split’. See: Andrew, J. et. al., op. cit. , p.3.
47. ‘Letter from Cannon to Daniel Renard’, International Information Bulletin (Socialist Workers Party, November 1952).
48. Militant (New York, November 16, 1953).
49. Fourth International (New York, Sept.-Oct. 1953).
50. Fourth International (New York, Winter, 1954), p. 9 ff.
51. ‘Letter by James P. Cannon, Feb. 23, 1954’, Discussion Bulletin A-16 (Socialist Workers Party, March 1954), pp. 6, 7, 16.
52. Cannon, James P. ‘Factional Struggle . . .’, op. cit., p. 116.
53. ‘Draft Resolution on the Political Situation in America’, Discussion Bulletin A-20 (Socialist Workers Party. September 1954), p. 9.
54. Ibid., p. 10.
55. Discussion Bulletin A-23 (Socialist Workers Party, October 1954).
56. Discussion Bulletin A-31 (Socialist Workers Party, October 1955).
57. See: The 20th Congress (C.P.S.U.) and World Trotskyism (New Park Publications, London, 1957).
58. See: Harry Ring. ‘The Struggle in the Communist Party’, International Socialist Review (New York, Spring, 1958), p. 52 ff.
59. Hansen, Joseph. ‘Proposed Roads to Soviet Democracy’, International Socialist Review (New York, Spring, 1958), p. 50.
60. Cowley, Joyce. ‘Resolutions’, ‘Regroupment Policy’, Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Socialist Workers Party, January 1959), pp. 22 ff.
61. See: Murry Weiss. ‘Regroupment and United Socialist Political Action (Majority Report to Plenum)’, Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 20, No.1 (Socialist Workers Party, January 1959). p. 1 ff.
62. ‘Letter to Farrell Dobbs’, June 11, 1959.
63. See: ‘A Reply to Comrade Peng from the Socialist Labour League’, International Bulletin No. 5 (International Committee, London, 1961), pp. 4, 5.
64. Ibid., p. 6.
65. Militant (New York, August 10, 1959).
66. Weiss, Murry. ‘Trotskyism Today’, International Socialist Review (New York, Fall, 1960), p. 110.
67. ‘Letter of January 2, 1961 from the NC of the Socialist Labour League to the NC of the Socialist Workers Party, February 1961), p. 21.
68. Cannon, James P. ‘Letters to the Party Center’, Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 22, No. 17 (Socialist Workers Party, New York, June 1961).
69. Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Socialist Workers Party, February 1961), p. 21.
70. ‘The Struggle for World Socialism’, International Socialist Review (New York, Summer, 1961), p. 90.
71. ‘Against Pabloite Revisionism’, op. cit., p. 100.
72. ‘Declaration of Reunification of the World Trotskyist Movement’ passed by the 23rd Plenum of the IEC, June 23-24, 1962.
73. Minutes of Political Committee, No. 12, May 10, 1961 (Socialist Workers Party), p. 4.
74. Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Socialist Workers Party; February 1961), pp. 4-6. P. 1.
75. James, Frances. ‘The Question of Criteria and the Cuban Revolution’, Discussion Bulletin (Socialist Workers Party, May 1961), pp. 4-6.
76. ‘Letter from J. Cannon to New York, October 1962’, International Information Bulletin (Socialist Workers Party, July 1963).
77. Cannon, James P. ‘First Ten Years . . .’, op. cit., p.28.
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