councilor.org
| Source | News for Social Justice Action |
| Date | 05/01/29/02:45 |
| "David Mcreynolds" These notes relate only indirectly to the two posts below, though the one by Tom Smith is a good example of the problem. I'm sending this to some of you who share with me a long history in the movement. Younger radicals can give it thought if they want. The Socialist Party currently has somehow inherited a small group of neo-Trotskyists and this discussion may have some current value. The other night I realized that, given a choice between Trotskyists and Stalinists, I much prefer the latter. Of course I'm an old radical, and when I say Stalinists I am not referring to the Communist Parties of today but to that period when there was a wonderfully monolithic Communist movement, close in its ideological and spiritual power over its adherents to the Catholic Church in the days of Pope Pius. The Communist Party was marked by two things. One was the willingness to suspend belief. No facts, no evidence, could shake their faith in the Soviet Union. Arguments were deflected by attacking the critics as Trotskyists or Fascists. (One runs into much the same thing with contemporary Zionists in the US, who, safely distant from the realities of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, are more likely to attack you as an anti-Semite than to listen to a reasoned critique of Israel). The second thing the Communist Party did was mass work. They did terrific work in trade unions, the civil rights movement, in anything they touched. If they were let down it was because the Party line caused them trouble (as with the US trade unions, when, during World War II, in deference tothe CP's support for the Soviet Union, they too swiftly signed no-strike pledges, which left a bad taste in the minds of many unionists). The "old Socialist Party" was also very good at mass work, and need make no apologies for its record in the civil rights and labor movement. The first Trotskyists were remarkable people. I knew some of them, and, of course, was deeply influenced by A. J. Muste who was, for a brief period, more or less a Trotskyist and most certainly a Marxist before returning to his Christian and pacifist roots. The first Trotskyists were genuine Communists, absolutely committed revolutionists - the only thing that separated them from the Communist Party was the fact they had been expelled. I knew Max Shachtman very well but he was, by the time I met him, already on his way out of the radical movement (though I don't think any of us - either his co-workers or those, such as myself who were pacifists, realized this). There was an historic problem with the Trotskyists (not my central point tonight but worth touching on). It was an intensely psychological problem. They had been expelled, on October 25, 1928, but had not left willingly. They still fully supported the Soviet Union. To be "thrown out of the church" was bad enough, but to be labeled as "enemies" of the Soviet Revolution was intolerable. The first (and logical) move by the early Trotskyists was . . . . . to apply for readmission to the CP, to denounce their denouncers. Far from saying "Fine, we were fed up anyway, we are happy to be outside", they said "We are good Communists, we want back in". They talked to family members (families were often split by this). They talked, or tried to talk, to former friends still in the Party. They did not accept their expulsion. They did not set up formal "Trotskyist" organizations for some time after their expulsion. And when they did set up their group - the Communist League of America, which changed its name to the Socialist Workers Party in 1938 - their immediate concern was to prove they had more right to be considered the true inheritors of the Russian Revolution than the Communist Party. I remember when, as a student at UCLA in the 1950's, I would read the Trotskyist press, it was almost as filled with attacks on the Communist Party as it was with attacks on capitalism. This particular problem of the Trotskyist movement led to an extreme anti-Communism, so great that even when the late American socialist, Michael Harrington, broke with orthodox Trotskyist thinking, he was still so bitterly anti-Communist that he gave critical support to the US war in Vietnam until as late as 1972 (more than seven years after the war had started), and of course this anti-Communism was pathological in the case of Max Shachtman, who moved eventually to find his home in the CIA wing of US politics. In talking with Trotskyists, you were always subjected to two quite different discussions. First, why you should become a Marxist/Leninist and oppose capitalism, and second, why you had to be just about as bitterly opposed to the Communist Party as to US capitalism. The Stalinists had it much simpler - it may be very hard to believe, but when I was at UCLA in the early 1950's, the Communist Party would not share a public platform with a Trotskyist, nor work in any "front" group with Trotskyists. They not only didn't talk to Trotskyists, they didn't talk about them. So at least the Stalinists were focused on what I would consider the main problem - US capitalism. (This was also the period when the Communist Party at UCLA told other students that I worked for the FBI - I think, in fairness to them, they may have believed this - it was impossible for them to believe there were people to the "left" of the Communists who weren't in some way either Trotskyist or "agents of the State"). However the main thrust of the short essay tonight is that for Trotskyists, the battle is never over. There is still the belief that if only the vote had gone a different way at some meeting in Moscow, if only Trotsky had attended Lenin's funeral, if only Lenin's last will and testament had reached the Soviet party members, if only, if only, if only . . . . then all history would be different. There is never a re-examination of anything fundamental. I read some of the material put out by those in the "left" of the Socialist Party today and I could have read it (and did read it) forty years ago. There are times when I know how out of touch I am with the contemporary world, and worry about it, but I'm an old radical and people expect us to be out of touch. It is very sad when young radicals are still constrained by such ancient debates. The whole "Stalinist / Trotskyist" debate was effectively ended with the death of Stalin. To a much greater extent than Trotskyists ever realized, the debate was a personal one between the two men, and the 20th Congress of the Soviet Party effectively put stop to that long history. (The issues between them were real enough - the irony was that in many ways both men were quite right. Stalin was right that a world revolution wasn't about to occur. Trotsky was right that without it, the Soviet state would become "deformed"). Shortly after Stalin's death and the word about Khrushchev's secret speech on Stalin to the 20th Congress I went to hear James Cannon at a meeting in Los Angeles. I had expected he would have some profound analysis to make about where his movement would go next. Instead he said "Where do we Trotskyists stand today? We stand where we have stood for the last thirty years, on the words of Leon Trotsky" and I thought what a pity - his whole world has changed, Lenin's famous last will and testament has been made public, and he still stands where he stood for thirty years! And I thought how different a thinker Cannon was from A. J. Muste. When the Soviet Union disintegrated - and, in fact, before that, when Gorbachev was deposed by the coup (which was illegal under the Soviet Constitution) - the American Communists I knew had to grapple with very deep questions. It wasn't a matter of whether Trotsky or Stalin was right - it was that something had been wrong from the beginning, and that wasn't the deadly political and personal conflict between Stalin and Trotsky, it was the origins of the Bolshevik Revolution, the theories of Lenin, the issues of democracy, the matters of ends and means. When the late Sam Coleman left the CP at the time of the Hungarian events, he didn't leave it for the Trotskyists - he joined the War Resisters League and became vice-Chair. (And had he not died of a heart attack he almost certainly would have become the Chair). When my friend, the late Gil Green, left the Communist Party at the time of internal struggle that resulted in setting up the Committees of Correspondence, he didn't join the Trotskyists - he came to the conclusion that democracy was the central issue and was urging his co-workers to read Michael Harrington. (And when my other old friend from the CP, Dorothy Healey, was expelled - I think about the time of the Hungarian events, she also didn't join the Trotskyists but eventually joined DSA). In short, the Stalinists, when faced with "ultimate questions" (whether those questions were posed to them by the East Berlin uprising in June of 1953, by the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, by the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, or by the coup against Gorbachev), they did not join the Trotskyist movement. No, they had more important fish to fry. They needed to rethink basic assumptions. To their enormous credit, with few exceptions they did not join the right wing. They have remained active in the "broad left". But what they shared in common - and what set them apart from the Trotskyists - was a willingness to engage in a profound probing of basic issues, including rethinking Lenin. I remember that at the time when Glasnost hit the USSR I was reading the monthly magazine of the Soviet Peace Committee which was suddenly pushing back the date of "when things went wrong" to the concepts of Leninism itself. The concern - the dangerous concern - with means and ends, with what Gorbachev dared to call the "spiritual issues" that socialism should not evade. We have a couple of former Communists in the SP today - and unlike those who have drifted in from the Trotskyists, they are engaged, or try to engage, in mass work. Ironically the Trotskyists who, in their early days represented some of the best minds in the United States intellectual community (think, for example, of Dwight MacDonald), have become trapped in a "Ground Hog Day" of the political world, each day starting once more the debate about the Russian Revolution, what went wrong and when. They are now an absolutely irrelevent force in the real political world. I don't think any of us really know where to go or what to do today. I know that I don't. I believe capitalism is a monstrous system on ethical, ecological, and economic grounds, that it will chew up the world and spit it out, that it is the cause of monstrous human misery. It is such an apalling system that I even understand why people wind up in groups like Workers World Party. But I don't see a serious Left in the US - I don't see one, for that matter, in Europe. And the former Soviet Union - God help those who thought Gorbachev wasn't good enough, that the whole system had to come down at once - the result is that Russia today is increasingly a third world country, a peripheral power in Europe, where the average male has a life expectancy no greater than in Bangladesh. This is the freedom and democracy the neo-conservatives wanted? An internal desolation that makes the old system look good - run by Bush's dear friend, Putin. None of what I've written is meant to discourage joint work with anyone, including Trotskyists. I do understand and respect the committment to the broader movement of those active in Trotskyist or "neo-Trotskyist" movements. But I think the issue of Trotsky, of "the transitional program", etc., really reflects the historic failure of Trotskyists to risk the deeper kind of thinking which - to the surpise of many of us - came from what we once wrote off as "Stalinists". |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho