by Alan M Wald
Max Eastman. A poet and journalist, Eastman was an early proponent of Trotskyism in the United States. (Sylvia Salmi Collection)
John Dewey. The most eminent philosopher in the United States, seventy-eight-year-old Dewey traveled to Mexico in 1937 to investigate the charges against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow trials. (Sylvia Salmi Collection)
Eleanor Clark. As a young writer in New York, the novelist met Herbert Solow in 1934 and in 1937 married Jan Frankel, Trotsky’s secretary. (Sylvia Salmi Collection)
Philip Rahv. Rahv was the dynamic force behind Partisan Review, which in the late 1930s promoted quasi-Trotskyist politics and a sympathy for literary modernism. (Betty Rahv Collection)
Philip Rahv. (Photograph by Peter Diamadopolis, Betty Rahv Collection)
Mary McCarthy. McCarthy satirized members of the anti-Stalinist left in some of her novels and stories. (Sylvia Salmi Collection)
Charles Rumford Walker. From a patrician background, Walker was a journalist, novelist, and playwright who worked closely with the Communists and then the Trotskyists in the 1930s. (Sylvia Salmi Collection)
John Dos Passos. The novelist had many friends and associates in the anti-Stalinist left. (Sylvia Salmi Collection)
Edmund Wilson. The literary critic was a strong admirer of Trotsky in the 1930s but developed his own eclectic brand of radical politics. (Sylvia Salmi Collection)
Dwight Macdonald. An enormously gifted editor and journalist, Macdonald made the transition from Trotskyism to anarcho-pacifism in the 1940s. (Sylvia Salmi Collection)
James T. Farrell. The novelist supported the Communist Party until 1936 and then became an independent Trotskyist until the late 1940s. (Vanguard Press)
James T. Farrell. (Photograph by Charles Gekler, Vanguard Press)
Harvey Swados. The novelist was a Trotskyist in his youth and remained an independent radical until his death in 1972. (Photograph by James Salter, University of Massachusetts Library)
Chapter 7. The Second Imperialist War
The point is that Western imperialism as a whole, whether in its totalitarian or its “democratic” manifestations, is no longer able to serve the cause of human progress.
—A. J. Muste, 19411
THE ENIGMA OF WORLD WAR II
During and after World War II most of the New York intellectuals abandoned the revolutionary pro-working-class perspective they had earlier defended. For many, signs of their later transformation first appeared in a startling reversal of one of the most fundamental political positions they previously had held, namely, that capitalist America’s entrance into World War II would not be to defend democracy or to fight fascism on principle but to attain domination of the world’s economy. Until 1939 many of the New York intellectuals argued that, when the inevitable world war broke out, it would have to be politically opposed as an imperialist war. The international working class, oppressed minorities, and colonial nations all should be urged to continue their struggles for a socialist world, regardless of the war, and to eradicate fascism, permanently, by eliminating its capitalist roots.
In April 1936, for example, Sidney Hook had debated Popular Front supporter Ludwig Lore in the pages of the Modern Monthly on the issue of whether to support the League of Nations’s sanctions against Italy for its invasion of Ethiopia. Hook argued that these sanctions would simply serve as an instrument in the hands of the great capitalist powers, England and France, to strengthen their imperialist grip over their newer rivals. Hook adamantly argued that the United States, France, and England should not be portrayed as good or progressive in contrast with such rival capitalist powers as Italy and Germany because such a comparison would obscure the imperialist economic foundation that they had in common. “Notice that bourgeois democratic France is doing in Indo-China, bourgeois democratic Belgium is doing in the Congo, bourgeois democratic England is doing in Egypt precisely the same thing which Italy wants to do in Ethiopia,” admonished Hook.
Hook also insisted that it was false to depict the coming war as a “choice between fascism and bourgeois democracy.” He argued that “politically, economically and culturally the real choice is between socialism and fascism. Those who look for a lesser evil to escape the struggle for socialism will always find one at hand, relegating socialism . . . to the land of pipe dreams.” Hook maintained that the primary enemy of any oppressed class is its own ruling class: “From the point of view of the working class any measure which strengthens the military arm of the state power weakens the workers in their struggle for socialism. Was this not the lesson of the social democratic debacle in Germany [in 1914] where the socialists voted military appropriations as ‘defense’ against the enemies of Kultur . . . only to discover that the military machine would countenance no socialist agitation, and was used most ruthlessly against the working-class?” Hook concluded his polemic with a memorable prophecy: “Those who are diverting the labor movement from the struggle for socialism to a support for nationalist sanctions and imperialist war may live to see the suicidal consequences of their policy, i.e., the destruction of the militant working class movement.”2
Just four years later many of the New York intellectuals carried out precisely what Hook had explicitly characterized as a “suicidal” policy. Under the pressure of popular support for the war they lost sight of its overriding class character as an interimperialist conflict, thereby ironically emulating the Communist party’s Popular Front politics. To them the war was reducible to but one of its facets—a war against fascism. The monster of British imperialism —once described as the brutal master of India, much of Africa and the Mideast, and as “perfidious Albion,” betrayer of the Spanish Republic—had been entirely supplanted by the image of the heroic England of the Battle of Britain.
But the reasons for the prowar positions taken by many of the New York intellectuals (among the exceptions for various reasons were Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy, Clement Greenberg, Meyer Schapiro, Dwight Macdonald, and James T. Farrell) have to be located to some extent in the material reality of the times, which was marked by mass pressure to conform to the government’s propaganda campaign in support of the war. Much has been written about the pressure on intellectuals to conform during the postwar McCarthy period, but less often discussed is the similar kind of pressure Washington exerted during World War II.
World War II was an immensely popular war. The entire American left, with the exception of minuscule groups of pacifists and Trotskyists, enthusiastically supported it.3 After all, the revelations of fascist atrocities were hideous beyond belief; the Jewish people were being exterminated. After Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, the issue of the very survival of the Soviet Union loomed large for those who felt that it still retained some progressive features. Radicals, above all, understood that in conflicts in the real world there is no room for fence-sitters; either one fought fascism in the concrete—that is, militarily—or one did not. These were all very powerful arguments for not simply or routinely viewing World War II, from a Leninist or Luxemburgian point of view, as a rerun of World War I.
Yet to change one’s characterization of the essence of the war from that of a fundamentally interimperialist conflict to a fundamentally antifascist struggle had a logic of its own. In retrospect, there is evidence that even those who decided to give the war no more than “critical” support were unable to act in any meaningful way to sustain working-class militancy and antiracist struggles at home, or to support (even if only through propaganda and education) movements for national liberation in such colonies as India. In practice, political support for the war meant that one must subordinate the interests of the working class to those of business and government. Advocates of this position thus succumbed to the same myth of a “sacred union” based on a supraclass “national unity” that had discredited and virtually destroyed the Second International at the advent of World War I.
The clearest evidence that declaring one’s political support for the American government’s war ef
fort meant calling off the struggle for socialism and placing the campaign for the liberation of oppressed minorities on the back burner can be seen in the actions of the Communist Party. After briefly opposing the war during the one-year Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Communists dubbed all wartime strikes as “treacherous.” They applauded the government’s imprisonment of the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party under the Smith (“Gag”) Act. They denounced the “Double V” campaign of Afro-Americans for civil rights at home as well as victory abroad as disruptive. They called Norman Thomas an “accomplice of fascism” because of his concern with civil liberties on the home front, as in the case of his criticism of the internment of the 110,000 Japanese-American citizens. And they opposed the movement for national independence of people in the colonies of the Allies.4
That World War II posed enormous complications for traditional Marxist analyses must be acknowledged at the outset. Trotsky’s own writings on the subject show considerable evolution and development through the late 1930s, especially during the last few months before his death.5 In an 1938 article, “Lenin and Imperialist War,” written in 1938, Trotsky advocated in the event of war the traditional internationalist position of “defeatism,” which he defined as “a parallel struggle by the workers of each country against their own imperialism, as their primary and most immediate enemy.” However, he also pointed out that fascism, the “most consistent expression” of imperialism, had taken on “a far sharper and more graphic character.”6 A few months later, responding to Palestinian Trotskyists who held that such a “defeatist” policy was inapplicable to bourgeois democratic countries at war with fascist regimes, Trotsky again defended the traditional position: “Defeatism is . . . conducting an irreconcilable revolutionary struggle against one’s own bourgeoisie as the main enemy, without being deterred by the fact that this struggle may result in the defeat of one’s own government; given a revolutionary movement the defeat of one’s own government is a lesser evil.”7 Trotsky of course knew that the horrendous conditions for millions within Nazi Germany differed qualitatively from the situation in the Western bourgeois democracies, but he always evaluated societies from the viewpoint of the most oppressed sectors of the population, which included colonial peoples: “In the long run the imperialists are distinguished from one another in form—not in essence. German imperialism, deprived of colonies, puts on the fearful mask of fascism with its saberteeth protruding. British imperialism, gorged, because it possesses immense colonies, hides its saberteeth behind a mask of democracy. But this democracy exists only for the metropolitan center.”8
A few weeks after the start of World War II, Trotsky wrote an unpublished article that tried to come to grips with the reality that revolutionary movements did not exist, at least as a viable alternative, in any of the bourgeois democracies. He proposed a two-stage program for the struggle against fascism: “We Bolsheviks also want to defend democracy, but not the kind that is run by sixty uncrowned kings [a reference to Ferdinand Lundberg’s popular 1937 study of the American ruling class, America’s Sixty Families]. First, let’s sweep our democracy clean of capitalist magnates, then we will defend it to the last drop of blood.” But a few paragraphs later he affirmed that, as long as revolutionaries were not strong enough to reorganize society on their own, they should participate militarily in the war against fascism: “This war is not our war. The responsibility for it lies squarely on the capitalists. But so long as we are still not strong enough to overthrow them and must fight in the ranks of their army, we are obliged to learn to use arms as well as possible.”9 In June 1940, at the time of the German invasion of France, he again modified his position for revolutionaries: “I will not sabotage the war. I will be the best soldier just as I was the best and most skilled worker in the factory. At the same time I will try to convince you [nonrevolutionary soldiers] that we should change our society. In court my fellow-worker would say, ‘He said that he would be a disciplined soldier, that he wouldn’t provoke rebellions. All he asked for was the right to give his opinion.’“10 Finally, in an unfinished essay on which he was working at the time of his assassination two months later, he elevated such insights to a clear theoretical statement:
The present war, as we have stated on more than one occasion, is a continuation of the last war. But a continuation does not signify a repetition. As a general rule, a continuation signifies a development, a deepening, a sharpening. Our policy, the policy of the revolutionary proletariat toward the second imperialist war, is a continuation of the policy during the last imperialist war, primarily under Lenin’s leadership. . . . In this case, too, a continuation signifies a development, a deepening and a sharpening.11
James P. Cannon is generally regarded, by admirers and detractors alike, as a party-builder, rather than an original Marxist theoretician. Nevertheless, he responded to Trotsky’s last recommendations with considerable creativity by applying classical Leninist positions to the specific conditions in the United States. In doing so he formulated what may have been the most reasonable position that revolutionary internationalists in the United States could take, given the complex realities of World War II. In a speech delivered in September 1940, Cannon acknowledged that the policies that the Socialist Workers Party had pursued before the outbreak of war in Europe were now inadequate: “We didn’t visualize, nobody visualized, a world situation in which whole countries would be conquered by fascist armies. The workers don’t want to be conquered by foreign invaders, above all by the fascists. They require a program of military struggle against foreign invaders which assures their class independence. That is the gist of the problem.” More specifically, he rejected the two-stage theory that Trotsky had previously advocated (“the workers will first overthrow the bourgeoisie at home and then they will take care of the invaders”), because “the workers did not make the revolution in time.” Instead, Cannon argued that it was now imperative that “the two tasks must be telescoped and carried out simultaneously.”12
In a series of articles that appeared in the Socialist Workers Party newspaper, the Militant, Albert Goldman tried to popularize this approach. For example, in early 1941 he explained that it was untrue that the SWP did not care whether Hitler or Great Britain won the war and that the SWP certainly did not advocate the defeat of the United States. Hitler should be regarded as “the greatest enemy of the working class,” he wrote, therefore it was the SWP’s policy that “all those we influence must go to war and do what they are told by the capitalists.” Furthermore, “we would not prevent war materials being shipped to fight Germany and Japan.” Nevertheless, the SWP was fundamentally opposed to the policy of the U.S. government: “They want to protect interests; we want to transform the war into a real war for democracy.” In this context “revolutionary defeatism” meant that the SWP would publish anti-imperialist propaganda and continue to wage the class struggle in the United States on behalf of the rights of workers and minorities. If a strike or antiracist struggle began to negatively affect the war effort, the blame should not be placed on the workers but rather on the capitalists, who had the resources to meet just demands. The SWP ultimately preferred that the working class should take over conduct of the war on a socialist basis, which would greatly increase the chances of victory. The rapid defeat of France clearly illustrated the inability of the bourgeoisie to lead the fight effectively.13
Whatever its limitations, such a policy had the virtue of neither remaining aloof from the real struggle against fascism nor abandoning revolutionary internationalist ideology and its tradition of working-class independence, as the Communist and Socialist parties had done. Goldman’s statement that Hitler was the main enemy was meant to be taken seriously because American Trotskyists actually participated in the war. They understood the immediate urgency to fight against fascism, despite the refusal to give their political support to the war. The most obvious flaws in the SWP’s argument were its frequent subsidiary predictions that the United States, after entering the war, would itself
become totalitarian, and that liberal capitalism was simply incapable of defeating the fascist powers, even in the short run.14
In comparison, Shachtman’s Workers Party, which had different assessments of the roles that China and the Soviet Union would play in the war, seemed considerably disoriented at the outbreak of hostilities in Europe. At first it advocated draft resistance, then, in practice, its posture toward military service was similar to the course proposed by Cannon and Albert Goldman of the SWP, even to the point of expelling draft dodgers. Shachtman’s argument, however, was that a worker must go to war along with the rest of his or her class to share its experiences. In the New International Shachtman ridiculed Cannon’s statement (while mocking Cannon personally for his lacking “the elementary equipment” to discuss fundamental theoretical questions) about “telescoping” the anticapitalist and antifascist struggles. In consonance with the Workers Party view that the SWP was moving to the right, Shachtman called Cannon’s policy “a concession to social patriotism.”15 In mid-1942, Irving Howe, one of the Workers Party’s most prolific journalists, defended the two-stage defeatist approach: “We are in favor of the defeat of fascism. We believe, however, that an indispensable prerequisite for that defeat is the establishment of workers’ and farmers’ governments in the Allied countries, which, by freeing the colonial people now enslaved by the Allied imperialist powers and extending the hand of socialist brotherhood to the German workers oppressed by Hitler, can alone effectively fight a revolutionary war to smash all forms of fascism.”16 Among the New York intellectuals, discussion over what approach socialists should take toward the war was much less substantial because only a handful still considered themselves as revolutionary internationalists. Nonetheless, the question was discussed in the pages of the Partisan Review.
