The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  Trotsky’s theory eventually would prove to be lacking in several important respects. For example, he regarded the bureaucratic ruling caste as a temporary, unstable phenomenon and was certain that it would not survive World War II. He also held the view that, because they were under the tutelage of the Soviet party, Communist parties in other countries were no longer capable, except under the most extraordinary circumstances, of abolishing capitalist societies. The problem before Marxists during the late 1930s was not only to recognize such potential weaknesses in Trotsky’s theory but to realize that any alternative theories would have to be substantial theoretical achievements, not simply a reflection of despair over conjunctural events.

  In the weeks prior to the founding convention of the Socialist Workers Party at the end of 1937, several intellectuals in the Trotskyist movement repudiated Trotsky’s view of the Soviet Union, declaring that, if attacked, the Soviet Union merited no support whatsoever. Among them were Harry Roskolenko and Max Geltman, close friends who had combined bohemian, cultural, and political activities since the late 1920s. Roskolenko had been born Harry Roskolenkier in New York in 1907, the thirteenth of fourteen children, eight of whom died before his parents left the Ukraine.24 He went to work in a factory at the age of nine and at thirteen shipped out as a seaman on an oil tanker bound for Mexico. In 1929 he was assigned by the Trotskyists to enter the Communist Party, where he lasted about a year and won ten new members to Trotskyism. Subsequently he devoted himself to literature, contributing poems (sometimes under the name “Ross”) to the Trotskyist youth paper, the Young Spartacus, and even to the Northwest Organizer, when he visited Minneapolis during the 1934 strikes. Geltman, whose party name was “Glee,” was born in 1906. A Communist in the 1920s, he wrote for the Daily Worker and founded a radical theater group, the “Pro Lab.” A younger brother, Emanuel Geltman, also joined the Trotskyists, and an older brother joined and remained a Communist until 1956.25 Others who agreed with Roskolenko and Geltman included Max Eastman’s son, Daniel, and Attilio Salemme. Salemme walked out of the SWP right after the convention, and the rest departed over the next year. Those associated with Roskolenko and Geltman held a few discussions in a small restaurant, then went their separate ways. Roskolenko later published three autobiographies, a few volumes of poetry, a number of other books under various pseudonyms, and several travelogues recounting his adventures in various parts of the world. Geltman worked as a stage manager, and, moving ever further to the right, raised funds for the Irgun and wrote for the National Review. Daniel Eastman was sentenced to a conscientious objectors’ camp during World War II, and Salemme became a respected painter.

  As in 1933, when Sidney Hook became Burnham’s stepping stone to Trotskyism, Burnham required an original theorist to provide him with a perspective that could facilitate his new period of transition. He found one in Joseph Friedman, who was born in 1910 and became a socialist at the age of fourteen. Friedman led the Communist youth movement at City College during the late 1920s and was expelled for Trotskyism in December 1928.26 A founder of the CLA, Friedman, who used the party name “Joseph Carter,” had been a special antagonist of Cannon, particularly on organizational matters, since the early 1930s. A short, thin, energetic man who usually smoked a pipe, Friedman read a few pages of Lenin every day and educated his comrades in a Socratic manner. He supported himself during most of his life by working as a clerk in a radical bookstore. For some time he had been developing a theory that the Soviet Union was neither a workers’ state nor a capitalist state, an idea that he first formulated after reading Rudolph Hilferding, but one that would also come into circulation through a book called The Bureaucratization of the World (1939) by the Italian ex-Communist Bruno Rizzi.27 At the December 1937 SWP convention, Friedman and Burnham differentiated themselves from Geltman and Salemme by submitting a minority proposal that challenged Trotsky’s theory but which agreed with him that the Soviet Union should be defended against external attacks.28 They also joined forces with Hal Draper, a New York City high school teacher, to present a counterresolution on what organizational principles the new party should adopt. Draper, who was born in Brooklyn in 1914, received his B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1934. He had been elected national secretary of the Young Peoples Socialist League, the youth organization of the Socialist Party, when the majority of the organization voted to ally with the Trotskyists in the fall of 1937.

  After some minor concessions, the counterresolution on organizational principles was withdrawn, but Burnham had expressed many concerns about the nature of party discipline in a long letter to Trotsky several weeks earlier. Cannon and Shachtman, he complained, tended to favor a conception of the party that Gregory Zinoviev had tried to impose upon the Third International—a concept that described the party as an organization with “two disciplines,” in which the leaders kept their real views and disagreements hidden from the membership. Burnham further contended that Cannon’s fanatical belief that the majority’s policies represented true Bolshevism meant that even small disagreements became transformed into major factional struggles because of his view that just one deviation would inevitably lead to complete revisionism. Burnham insisted nonetheless that he supported the concept of party discipline; in fact, he had advocated expelling Geltman for disloyal behavior months before the convention. But what he feared was that the current trend would culminate in a situation in which members might be excluded simply for their views, which put them in the situation of either having to recant their opinions or leave the party.29 Less than two years later Burnham and Friedman would join forces with Shachtman and convince almost a majority of the SWP to support their positions on these two issues—the inadequacy of Trotsky’s characterization of the Soviet Union and the nature of the party’s regime—although Burnham himself had come to the verge of repudiating Marxism altogether.

  SCHISM

  The debate between Cannon, on one side, and Shachtman and Burnham, on the other, about what kind of party should be built, should not be downplayed, even if the dispute over the Soviet Union was the dominant issue that divided the two political currents that would become known as the “Cannonites” and the “Shachtmanites.” Charges of bureaucratic abuse permeated the Marxist movement back to the time of Marx himself, when Bakunin accused him of maintaining a dictatorship over the First International. The pioneer American communists charged the right wing of the Socialist Party with using undemocratic methods against the left-wing in 1919, when a minority expelled the pro-Bolshevik majority. The Trotskyists, of course, made similar accusations against the Communist Party when they were expelled in 1928, and Weisbord, Field, and Oehler likewise all claimed that the Cannon-Shachtman leadership of the Trotskyists was undemocratic during the early 1930s. Thus it is not surprising that the Shachtman-Burnham minority, which comprised about 40 percent of the party as well as virtually the entire youth group, should charge the Cannon majority with bureaucratic practices prior to the 1940 split.

  It should be recalled, however, that Burnham had raised similar criticisms against both Cannon and Shachtman in 1937. Even before then, a virulent hatred of “Cannonism,” which occasionally touched Shachtman because of his collaboration with Cannon, had been expressed by many longtime members including Joseph Friedman, Nathan Gould, Martin Abern, and Albert Glotzer, who all joined the Shachtman-Burnham opposition. On the other hand, for many years Cannon had regarded such types as Friedman as “petit-bourgeois” elements disruptive of the functioning of a proletarian party. During the 1939–40 struggle, Trotsky agreed that Cannon’s faction was more proletarian in composition than Shachtman’s, which Trotsky also characterized as “petit-bourgeois.” This was certainly true in the general sense that the thoroughly working-class branch in Minneapolis completely agreed with Cannon while the more middle-class branch in New York supported Shachtman, but it was hardly accurate in every instance. Moreover, determining the value of one’s political analysis according to his or her class background or occupation was as op
en to abuse in interparty struggles as it was in left-wing literary debates over aesthetic value. Even from a Marxist point of view, a group with a proletarian social composition is not guaranteed a political orientation that best expresses the interests of the working class. More convincing was Trotsky’s association of certain of the views held by several leaders of the Shachtman faction with a generalized drift of middle-class intellectuals to the right, a phenomenon that Shachtman and Burnham themselves analyzed in their powerful essay, “Intellectuals in Retreat.”30 Indeed, ideological commerce between Shachtman and intellectuals in the anti-Stalinist left during and after the 1930s was probably more extensive than can be documented by specific texts and testimonies; to some extent Shachtman was the intellectual guru of the non-Communist radical intelligentsia, a good part of which read his New International and Labor Action in the 1940s and who in some cases borrowed and then individually developed his ideas.

  The Cannon faction’s assessment of its differences with the Bumham-Shachtman minority over organizational policy was summarized after the split: “The Socialist Workers Party wants an integrated, homogeneous party, based upon a common program and common methods of thought and work. The Workers Party [the name of the new organization led by Shachtman] wants an organization of diverse tendencies, a federation of factions where any anti-Marxist innovation is assured a friendly hearing.”31 Comparing the organizational practices of the Socialist Workers Party and the Workers Party, Albert Goldman, who defected from the Cannonites to the Shachtmanites in 1945, wrote that the latter “believe that it is best to avoid the creation of factions but we consider that the best method of preventing the creation of factions is to offer such freedom of discussion that serious comrades will think a long time before organizing a faction.”32 As in much of the debate that raged between the two sides against the backdrop of the early months of World War II, both positions had their strengths and weaknesses.

  To some degree Shachtman’s position was more in accordance with the practice of Lenin’s party than Cannon’s. The Bolshevik Party, which was considered a model by both Cannon and Shachtman, was a battleground of different tendencies and factions which issued their own public newspapers, at least before the civil war. Cannon’s view, by his own admission, entailed a special interpretation of Leninist principles as applied to conditions in the United States. His approach to party organization was based on his firsthand experience with the paralyzing factionalism of the Communists during the 1920s and the Trotskyists in the early 1930s. He correctly believed that it was dangerous to give party members the impression that it was healthy or normal to rush to form a faction without recognizing the serious threat to party unity and efficiency such a step might entail. Cannon was deathly afraid of his party’s becoming a “talkshop” rather than an instrument of action. He believed that the construction of factions, while constitutionally permissible, almost always brought a party to the point of a crisis that could lead to a split.

  Shachtman’s open acceptance of factions as an integral part of the internal life of a party was probably based more on a recognition of reality than on a desire for factional strife. The heterogeneity of the working class, in the sense of both life experience and levels of consciousness, as well as the political and intellectual limitations of any single leadership team, made it probable that differences of more than a passing importance would arise in a Marxist party. It followed, for Shachtman, that individuals with important differences would have to develop mechanisms that could facilitate collaboration. But Shachtman quickly found that he, too, had to draw the line somewhere, and when he did so during the first year of his own party’s existence, he was then accused by Dwight Macdonald, Philip Selznick, Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, and other oppositionists, of reinstituting “Cannonite” bureaucratic methods. According to Martin Glaberman, a follower of C. L. R. James, who was twice in the Socialist Workers Party for a total of six years and once in the Workers Party for an equal length of time, the Shachtman group was somewhat more democratic than the Cannon group, but the difference was not qualitative.33

  Concerned that the repressive conditions of impending war would threaten his party’s organizational continuity, Cannon tended to assign the “centralist” component of democratic centralism a higher priority than did Shachtman. But Shachtman’s claim that Cannon intended to construct a “monolithic party” (a slogan of Zinoviev’s “Bolshevization” campaign of the early 1920s, which Cannon had endorsed at the time) was unfounded. Cannon’s objection to Shachtman’s concept was not based on his opposition to allowing a range of views within the party but to the form that the expression of those views might take, especially under the pressures of war. Despite Cannon’s well-deserved reputation for organizational stringency, he did offer several concessions to Shachtman’s faction at the postconvention plenum of the SWP held in the spring of 1940: the Shachtman minority could publish its documents in the party press; an internal written discussion could continue in a bulletin jointly edited by both factions; and the minority faction would be allowed to participate in the party leadership without prejudice, as long as it refrained from publicly presenting the minority views without authorization. Cannon, of course, refused to allow the minority to publish its own organ as the Bolsheviks had done. In a small organization (comprised of approximately one thousand members) with very limited resources, such a practice might have led to the very paralysis that Cannon most feared. If Shachtman and Burnham did have any real justification for leaving the SWP, it must have been their deep-seated conviction that the Cannon faction was simply not trustworthy and would not carry out the spirit of the conciliatory proposals.

  Cannon’s concept of “an integrated, homogeneous party, based upon a common program and common methods of thought and work”—an admirable model for a smoothly humming political machine—was abstract and therefore conducive to different interpretations. Who determines what falls within or without the pale of “common program” and “common methods”? Commonality can be defined broadly or narrowly. It would be very difficult to draw up precise guidelines that would prevent a leadership, either by mistake or malice, from deciding that some particular position was “incompatible” with their definition of the “common program and methods.” If by “common program” Cannon meant agreement on broad political matters such as the Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution or his view of the class nature of the Soviet Union, then there would have been no basis for the original rupture with the Weisbord, Field, or Oehler groups. But if the notion of a “common program” is taken to mean the current interpretation of such broad theories as codified in the most recent party convention resolutions, there is a danger that anyone who opposed the majority’s resolutions might be accused of having a program (or method) insufficiently in “common” with the majority’s positions. Indeed, it is possible that Cannon’s particular attitude toward factions—formally recognizing their legality while predicting that irresolvable conflicts would ensue from them—could create a chilling atmosphere scarcely conducive to internal discussion. The creation of a faction might be perceived as tantamount to announcing a forthcoming split. Members might hesitate to organize even a “current” opposed to the party leadership for fear that such a current might be accused of “inevitably” leading to the formation of a faction that would “inevitably” precipitate a split. Nevertheless, the growth and survival of Cannon’s party, while Shachtman’s declined and collapsed, suggests that Cannon’s powerful leadership qualities overcame whatever the potential problems were endemic in his approach. Shachtman’s organization, despite its relative looseness, was unable to avoid a steady stream of splits and defections, although it should be noted that the majority of these were by individuals and groups who were abandoning a revolutionary perspective.

  It thus appears that no juridical formula in itself can insure intraparty democracy by guaranteeing not only the right of members to freely debate different policies but also the ability of the organiz
ation to implement the decisions approved by its majority. Such factors as the quality of party leaders, the degree of the membership’s political consciousness, and the objective political situation in which the party functions are probably more decisive, even though both constitutional guarantees protecting dissent and mechanisms for implementing policy after a decision has been made are absolutely necessary.

  If Leninist organizational concepts proved to be open to a wide variety of interpretations, one might think that the question of political theory at the heart of the Cannon-Shachtman debate—the social nature of the Soviet Union—might be resolved with greater certainty in light of available empirical evidence. Had a genuinely new bureaucratic class come to power in the Soviet Union, or was it still a postcapitalist society impeded in its transition toward socialism—in Trotsky’s terminology, a “degenerated workers’ state”?

  In the early 1930s Trotskyists such as Yvan Craipeau and Hugo Urbans had raised the issue of whether and if so to what extent the Soviet Union was a progressive new social order. The same debate had erupted in the American Trotskyist movement following the publication of contributions to the internal party discussion by Geltman, Burnham, and Friedman in late 1937 and by the Shachtman-Burnham minority in 1939–40. Partisans of all sides in the dispute tended to dismiss the interpretations of their opponents as ridiculous, anti-Marxist, and religious. However, such characterizations were conventional in intraparty polemic. The actual level of discussion was quite high; many of the contributions to the party bulletin were more cogently written than scholarly essays on the subject by academicians.