by Alan M Wald
Even when he includes excerpts from Partisan Review’s first editorial—after its post-Stalinist reorganization in 1937—to demonstrate the magazine’s “combination of social concerns and literary standards,” Phillips omits all reference to the magazine’s anticapitalist political thrust.33 He might have included the following statement of the journal’s early editorial policy: “Our program is the program of Marxism, which in general terms means being for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist society, for a workers’ government, and for international socialism. In contemporary terms it implies the struggle against capitalism in all its modern guises and disguises, including bourgeois democracy, fascism, and reformism (social democracy, Stalinism).”34
When confronted with such omissions, the memoirist may insist that he or she was not covering up but simply that such omitted facts or episodes “weren’t very important” in the larger scheme of things. In some instances this may be so, but when there is a pattern of omissions that results in a certain impression that seems to serve an ideological necessity of the present moment, then the historian has good reason to suspect that the politics of memory has played a part in reassembling past experience.
The politics of memory also plays certain tricks on memoirists who are driven to recast the past, in part, according to current political exigencies. For example, some present-day neoconservatives choose to present themselves as having a special “expertise” about the politics of the radical movement, a spurious claim that can backfire when original experiences have been overlayed by decades of anti-Marxist thinking. Such is the case with William Barrett, a Partisan Review editor in the late 1940s and author of The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (1982), who was more distant from the radical movement than the other Partisan Review editors but who nonetheless wishes to present himself as an authoritative interpreter of their tradition. For example, at one point Barrett explains why he had “mixed feelings” about Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution even when he was a self-proclaimed Marxist: “If the revolution is permanent and unceasing, then next week you reverse what you have revolutionized last week.”35 To anyone who has the slightest familiarity with Trotsky’s most famous theoretical contribution, this statement will be astonishing. Trotsky, like all Marxists, believed that social relations and institutions would continue to evolve after the working class took power, but the essence of the Theory of Permanent Revolution, derived in part from Marx, involved an analysis of the dynamic of social change in economically underdeveloped countries. Trotsky theorized that in such countries during the age of imperialism the proletariat was the only class capable of carrying out political and social tasks (such as land reform and national unification) earlier associated with the radical bourgeoisie.36 What Barrett is describing in this passage is something more akin to Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” in the 1960s, or, worse, to Stalin’s slanders against Trotsky’s internationalist policies in the 1920s.
It is also doubtful that Barrett understands, or ever understood, the basic Trotskyist critique of Stalinism, since Barrett writes that socialism is no longer an option for him because, having repudiated Trotskyism, he now realizes that “the dictatorial course of socialist revolution can no longer be dismissed as an aberration due to the personality of Stalin.”37 Trotsky, of course, took into account Stalin’s role as an individual but never claimed that Stalin’s personality was what transformed the political character of the Russian Revolution. In The Revolution Betrayed (1937), he clearly describes the encircling conditions and economic class forces that precipitated the crystallization of a bureaucratic caste in the Soviet Union, for which Stalin served as chief spokesman.
These blunders occur despite Barrett’s repeated references to himself as having been a Marxist since the early 1930s—indeed, as one who was “passionately arguing Marxist theory” even in the 1940s.38 In a 1982 New York Times interview, Barrett even refers to himself as having been in his Partisan Review days “a Marxist with a Trotskyist orientation.”39 Apparently this fanfare about his Marxist expertise is necessary to give credibility to the familiar premise stated early in the book that only former Marxists can understand the truly pernicious nature of Marxism and the Soviet Union. But it is difficult to find much that Barrett gets right in his book in regard to either Marxist political or cultural matters. For example, 1937 is cited as the year of “the last of Stalin’s purges,” when in fact the sensational Bukharin trial did not begin until 1938.40 Barrett states that when Partisan Review was relaunched in 1937, the Communist Party advocated “a cultural doctrine of social realism and proletarian culture,” although this line had actually been discarded two years earlier in favor of the People’s Front, with its Hollywood and Broadway stars, which was one of the reasons why Phillips and Rahv became disenchanted with the party.41 Barrett describes the Communists’ and fellow-travelers’ view of the Soviet Union in the late 1940s as a “Worker’s State,” even though their official doctrine was that such a stage had been superseded by “socialism” a decade earlier.42
Like Phillips, Barrett’s description of the deradicalization of James Burnham is also somewhat skewed. He tells us that in the late 1930s Burnham reached the conclusion that socialism should not be theorized as “inevitable” but only as a “moral idea.” According to Barrett, Burnham published these views in the “Trotskyist organ” and Trotsky “thundered furiously” from Mexico that people who worried about “moral ideas” had succumbed to “petty-bourgeois revisionism.” At this point “Burnham was promptly read out of the party” and responded with an essay called “Lenin’s Heir” that “appeared in Partisan Review in 1939.”43
Barrett has the facts so jumbled here that it would take several pages to set all of them straight. Burnham acknowledged that he had never agreed with dialectical and historical materialism but had considered the matter unimportant until a dispute broke out in the Trotskyist movement over what policy socialists should take toward the Soviet Union in the early days of World War II. Burnham was never “read out” of any party but joined a faction in the Trotskyist movement that split in 1940 to form the Workers Party, from which he speedily resigned of his own volition. “Lenin’s Heir” was published in 1945, so it hardly could have been part of a factional polemic with Trotsky who was assassinated in 1940.44
Many of the above sorts of errors can be corrected simply by checking the records; inaccurate dates, misleading summaries of theoretical positions, the claim that someone was expelled from an organization when he or she resigned, and so on, can be caught by a careful researcher. But other judgments about the past and about different stances are more directly bound up in an individual’s political orientation both at the time of the event and at the time the recollection is offered. Moreover, there is the problem of gauging an individual’s frame of reference; Midge Decter’s 1982 Commentary magazine attack on Irving Howe’s autobiography as the work of an irresponsible utopian reminds us that one person’s moderate is another person’s extremist.45
Some comments on the method of research and analysis used in this book may help to explain how it comes to grips with the politics of memory. This study began with an interest in writers and politics on the left. It soon became apparent that accomplished writers and artists, as well as full-time scholars, had little time for political activism. They tended to be linked to political movements and activities through more activist but lesser-known political friends. Possibly these friends remained lesser-known because so much of their energy went into political organizing, although in some cases problems in their own intellectual work compelled them to find fulfillment in political activity. Behind the friends were committees, and behind the committees were various leftwing parties. Behind these parties came the press of social forces and historical events.
Thus I came to recognize that no simple claims could be made about the degree and nature of my subjects’ political commitments based on their public political statements and memoirs alone; a fairly detailed reconstruct
ion of personal relationships and the background of political activity would be required for the disclosure of at least some of the subtleties. In the case of the left-wing anti-Stalinist intellectuals of the 1930s, the influence of Trotsky was central and this influence was mediated through various political groups. Despite their small size, such groups were often the aquifer of currents of political thought among the intellectuals; like the small magazines of that time and after, they were sometimes the source of ideas and analyses that trickled upward to nourish the political thinking of unaffiliated radicals. This is one of the reasons why I have devoted serious attention to Trotskyist political figures such as James P. Cannon and Max Shachtman, normally slighted or caricatured in previous studies, as well as to a number of party intellectuals who have never been, and who would never want to be, associated with the New York intellectuals.
In this book I have emphasized networks and associations as one aspect of the way in which intellectuals become drawn to certain political ideas, but I also believe that ideas and theories matter and that some ideas and theories matter more than others because they more adequately interpret complex reality. This does not, however, by any means eliminate all the mediating factors that come into play in shaping one’s perspective, such as family background, personal loyalties, sexual attraction, psychology (especially the desire for attention and for security), and accident. The Marxism that in forms this study aspires to probe a multiplicity of such causes without indulging in the fallacy of psychoanalysis at long distance.
Such an approach is crucial if the story of the deradicalization of the New York intellectuals is to be presented in its full complexity and not as a tale of good and bad cowboys, with black-hatted opportunists battling white-hatted saints. From the point of view of developing a socialist movement in the United States, their story is a tragedy (with some comic relief), not a morality play. Even the most notorious apologists for the status quo among the New York intellectuals today are at least partially under the delusion that in some way the defense of the inegalitarian social order from which they have so benefited is consistent with the best interests of humankind. To characterize their transformation from left to right as an “economic sell-out” would be a vulgar caricature, though not without some element of truth. More central to the lives of intellectuals, however, is the need for a vision to sustain their work. Thus the failures of this group are more aptly characterized as stemming from a blindness to the social functions served by the post-1940s ideologies they promoted—ideologies most often touted as some sort of nonideological breakthrough. On the other hand, I do not intend to make a brief for the absolute purity of all Marxist commitment; intransigent loyalists of left-wing parties and factions, especially leaders and full-time functionaries, can receive their own kinds of benefits—in terms of a modest power, a sense of moral righteousness, and satisfying work—from defending their political organization and its ideology.
Still, it should be unambiguous that my political sympathies are with Marxist commitment. While this book does not claim to have overcome the partisanship that other scholars pretend to transcend, I have made every effort to examine the central controversies even-handedly and to interrogate all sources with equal care. At various times I have tried to imagine myself in the same position as the figures in this study, and within the areas of my intellectual competence I have tried to indicate what I think the preferable course of action might have been. To a certain extent, writing a book such as this is an imaginative act, involving skills such as one might use when writing a historical novel.
In this book the term “intellectual” is used rather specifically. An intellectual is defined not by personal attributes but by social function; an intellectual is one who is occupationally involved in the production and dissemination of ideas. As Karl Mannheim, Joseph Schumpeter, and others have emphasized, intellectuals are not a class; they are bonded together by their education and have some group attributes but tend to ally with more powerful social forces.46 While there are many intellectual workers (in distinction to manual workers) in our society, authentic intellectuals are the creative sector among those intellectual workers who produce intellectual products.47 Most often an intellectual will be an interdisciplinary generalist as opposed to a narrow specialist or technician. In this study I will almost always be referring to people in the professions of teaching, journalism, and editing intellectual magazines, or, in a few instances, “political intellectuals,” that is, fulltime party members whose task is to disseminate ideas. Everyone, of course, uses his or her brain to indulge ideas, so everyone is intellectual to one degree or another. However, it is not true that everyone who is intellectual performs the social function of an intellectual. Antonio Gramsci, one of the leading theoriticians of intellectuals, provided a useful analogy in the section of his Prison Notebooks on intellectuals: all of us cook or sew to one degree or another in our daily lives, but few of us have the social function of being cooks or tailors.48
Finally, this book rejects a position fashionable on the left at the moment, popularized by James Weinstein and others, that American radicals must abandon their traditional preoccupation with the significance and legacy of the Russian Revolution. James Gilbert, in reviewing Irving Howe’s intellectual autobiography, A Margin of Hope (1982), in the socialist paper In These Times, complained of the Old Left that “many American intellectuals . . . were more concerned with the Soviet Union than with their own country.”49 This is an exaggeration, but it is true that slavish imitation of “foreign models” and ignorance about peculiar features of the United States have vitiated our indigenous American socialist movements. On the other hand, so have various forms, sometimes unconscious, of national chauvinism and the abandonment of an internationalist perspective. The point is that it is futile to evade the knotty problems of theory and practice that have ensnared our political ancestors rather than learn from them and try to do a bit better. We can ignore the “Russian Question,” but it will not ignore us. A failure to understand the nature of the Soviet Union (is it imperialist? belligerent? wholly reactionary? an acceptable ally for victims of U.S. aggression?) has led to catastrophes on the radical left—disorientation and deradicalization. Meanwhile, the same basic type of revolution, with a majority of peasants in an economically underdeveloped country and a leadership professing Leninism, keeps recurring to this day.
My own study of the left in the United States from the 1930s to the present convinces me more than ever that an understanding of these worker-peasant revolutions, especially the 1917 one, is crucial for the survival of a healthy socialist movement in the United States. Did not a misunderstanding of Stalinism—first excessively “pro” and then excessively “anti”—destroy a generation of socialists? Later, in a repeat performance of the late 1930s, those New Leftists who uncritically cheered the accomplishments of China and Vietnam crumbled into apathy and worse because they did not anticipate the ways in which these worker-peasant revolutions might evolve. In Chapters 5, 6, and 9, I give further consideration to this problem.
In summary, the purpose of this book is to combat the political amnesia of a predecessor generation in the hope of reasserting the possibility and the potential of a tradition of radical political and cultural activity that is both Marxist and anti-Stalinist. The approach is to reconstruct and interpret more than fifty years of political and cultural activity by the founders and continuators of an intellectual tradition that initiated and subsequently abandoned this project. Such an effort starts with the delineation of the core groups and the process of evolution that led to the formation of the culturally significant intellectual circle that established the tradition of anti-Stalinist Marxism. Thus we begin by examining the activities of a coterie of young intellectuals who coalesced in the 1920s around a cultural enterprise devoted to the exploration of Jewish identity in the modern age.
Part I. Origins of the Anti-Stalinist Left
Chapter 1. Jewish Internationalists
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p; Like Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky strove, together with their non-Jewish comrades, for the universal, as against the particularist, and for the internationalist, as against the nationalist, solutions to the problems of their time.
—Isaac Deutscher, “The Non-Jewish Jew”1
THE NON-JEWISH JEWS
A substantial number of studies have been devoted to probing the social and historical roots of modern Jewish radicalism. Despite the variety of conclusions such studies have yielded, most analyses usually begin by noting the dilemma of young Jewish intellectuals who have attempted to escape the confines of the religio-cultural ghetto, only to confront an alien society toward which they feel ambivalent if not hostile.2 Political radicalism with its internationalist élan has often served as a magnetic pole of attraction to such intellectuals, especially in a period of social upheaval. One of the most important yet least documented developments in the evolution of modern American culture concerns just such a group of Jewish intellectuals. Seeking to forge a liberal Jewish cultural movement under the aegis of “cultural pluralism” in the 1920s, they found themselves propelled first toward Communism and then toward Trotskyism during the 1930s. Their experience produced several of the earliest pioneers of the anti-Stalinist left who later achieved national prominence as New York intellectuals.
