by Alan M Wald
DWIGHT MACDONALD: FROM TROTSKYISM TO ANARCHO-PACIFISM
By his own admission, Sidney Hook played a central role in persuading the Partisan Review editors Philip Rahv and William Phillips to revise their revolutionary internationalist position on war, a position that had been intrinsic to the magazine’s outlook since its inception.17 During the fall of 1939 a statement entitled “War Is the Issue!” was prepared by the League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism and endorsed by all the Partisan Review editors and a large number of its regular contributors. The statement insisted that, should the United States enter the war, “every branch of our culture would be set back for decades.” The signers proclaimed that the duty of American intellectuals was to give “conscious and organized expression” to the antiwar sentiments of “the great majority of the American people.” The statement’s political orientation was essentially the same as the “defeatist” view advocated by the Trotskyists before 1940:
We loathe and abominate fascism as the chief enemy of all culture, all real democracy, all social progress. But the last war showed only too clearly that we can have no faith in imperialist crusades to bring freedom to any people. Our entry into the war under the slogan of “Stop Hitler!” would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here. Only the German people can free themselves of the fascist yoke. The American masses can best help them by fighting at home to keep their own liberties.18
Less than two years after this firm pronouncement, two editorials appeared in the Partisan Review, implying the beginning of a process of differentiation among the editors. The first, “Notes on a Strange War,” was signed by Dwight Macdonald, who had just completed a twenty-month sojourn as a member of the SWP and then the WP and who now considered himself to be an independent Trotskyist. His evolution had been rapid, much as it had been between 1935 and 1937 when he quickly passed from liberalism through Communism to Trotskyism.
Macdonald’s organized association with the Trotskyists began after he joined the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky. He had initiated a correspondence with Trotsky during the summer of 1937 on behalf of the then reorganizing Partisan Review.19 James Burnham, whom he had known from his association with the Symposium, encouraged Macdonald to write for the New International.20 He made his debut during the summer of 1938 in characteristic fashion: he contributed the first of what would become a regular column called “They, the People,” blasting the lack of response of the government and liberals to depression problems from a revolutionary point of view. In the same issue, he submitted a letter to the editors sharply criticizing an article by Trotsky defending the Bolshevik suppression of the revolt at Kronstadt naval base in March 1921. Macdonald characterized Trotsky’s article as “disappointing and embarrassing.”21
In the article Trotsky had connected the Kronstadt rebels with the future rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy, insisting that both represented groupings that had given in to the demands of the peasantry against the interests of the proletariat. The peasants had been angered by the Bolshevik’s policy of “war communism” that had been necessitated by the civil war. They were especially upset by the requisitioning of their products, and they wanted to accumulate their own material goods. Examining the situation sociologically, Trotsky argued that the best elements among the original Kronstadters, the devoted proletarian communists, had gone off to fight in the civil war. Those who remained at the base were sailors with peasant ties who believed they were only on temporary assignment. Apart from whether or not it was necessary to use violence to crush the Kronstadt rebellion, Trotsky’s analysis of what they represented politically was based on a class interpretation of their social origin, ties, and outlook.22 Trotsky’s essay was followed by a scholarly work by John G. Wright, who answered the claim that the Bolsheviks had provoked the Kronstadters into revolting against the government. The rebels’ call on 1 March for “free elections” had been a reasonable one, but two days later they demanded “Soviets without Communists,” which was a direct threat to the new Soviet society since the Communists were the stable force leading it. Wright contended that nothing significant had happened between 1 March and 3 March except attempts by the Bolsheviks to appease the Kronstadters. Thus he concluded that their first slogan was merely a tactic designed to garner broader sympathy, while the second expressed the real counterrevolutionary essence of the situation.23
Unfortunately Macdonald’s letter failed to present an alternative analysis of the Kronstadt episode; he mainly objected to Trotsky’s tone and raised hypothetical questions about the relationship between the policies of Lenin and Trotsky and those of Stalin. He missed the real weakness of the essay, which was that Trotsky’s sociological analysis had little to do with what the Bolsheviks ought to have or have not done under the precise circumstances. The editors, Shachtman and Burnham, defended Trotsky’s tone but did little to advance the discussion.24 To a certain extent the discussion of Kronstadt, which during the mid to late 1930s became a hotly debated topic throughout the anti-Stalinist left, was not conducive to advancement.
The real underlying issue was the relationship of Leninism to Stalinism. Chronologically there is no doubt that the act of repression by the Bolsheviks at Kronstadt in 1921 was a forerunner of later acts of repression under Stalin. But was the essence of the repression the same, and did the former necessarily lead to the latter? There are only two ways that one might resolve the meaning of Kronstadt with any certainty. One would be to have knowledge of the “real” motives of the Bolshevik leaders at the time; the other would be to have indisputable knowledge of the “real” motives of the rebels and the exact nature of the events that occurred. Neither seems possible at this late date. But it is certainly arguable that the violent assault on Kronstadt was Trotsky’s greatest blunder (Lenin had little to do with it; Zinoviev gave the orders; Trotsky, while not a participant, accepted political responsibility) and that his persistent defense of the action actually gave credence to those who saw Bolshevism as the parent of Stalinism.
The importance of the debate is captured in the following observation by Princeton political scientist Stephen Cohen: “Tell me your interpretation of the relationship between Bolshevism and Stalinism, and I will tell you how you will interpret almost all of significance that happened in between.”25 In other words, for those who see Bolshevism as the cause of Stalinism, Kronstadt provides an early example of totalitarian rule; for those who see Stalinism as the negation of Bolshevism it was either a “tragic necessity,” as Trotsky put it, or an error in judgment, as Sidney Hook persuasively argued in early 1938:
Lenin and Trotsky were indisputably guilty of harshness and brutality—as were the leaders of civil war and revolution in every country in the world (Cromwell, Sherman, etc.). This is important in evaluating the validity of revolutions and the nature of revolutionary process. But it is a far cry from this to the crimes of which Stalin has been guilty. Lenin and Trotsky justified themselves on the ground that they were only meeting harshness and cruelty on the other side—a greater harshness and cruelty. Sometimes they were clearly mistaken, e.g., at Kronstadt where I believe the differences could have been peacefully negotiated. Each case must be judged on its own merits. But only those who are opposed to any use of violence at any time by any side—like genuine Christians and Tolstoyans—have a right to a blanket condemnation of Lenin and Trotsky.26
In December Macdonald began contributing to the Socialist Appeal as well, with the same mix of praise and criticism.27 By February 1939 he had his own column first called “Off the Record,” which after April became “Sparks in the News.”28 One noticeable feature of these columns was Macdonald’s lack of modesty. For example, in his 13 June 1938 column he devoted considerable space to discussing a letter he had sent to Time magazine and to plugging his New International column.29 In the 11 July issue he explained to his readers that, although he has not yet decided to join, he had attended the recent SWP convention where he was disturbed by
the sessions starting late and by the anti-New York and anti-intellectual attitudes expressed by some of the delegates.30
However, following the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the invasion of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union, Macdonald felt he had a responsibility to join the SWP. He scheduled a meeting with Cannon, who suggested that he might not be a party type and accordingly might play a more valuable role as an independent. Macdonald, suspecting that Cannon was aware of his affinity for the burgeoning Shachtman-Burnham faction, became more determined to join. Once admitted, Macdonald behaved responsibly. He took on the assignment of secretary of the SWP campaign committee, which was running Max Shachtman and Lyman Paine, a former award-winning architect, for New York City Council, and he taught a class at the SWP’s Marxist School on “The War Deal.” In the factional debate itself, Macdonald, who assumed the party name “James Joyce,” mainly read contributions to the discussion and listened. Close to six feet tall, slightly overweight, with a goatee and often sporting a blue workshirt, Macdonald had a distinctive appearance. Despite personal charm, Macdonald was not a good speaker. He spoke only once during the debate and, although he wrote several documents supporting the minority, they decided to publish only one because of his newness to the movement.31
With the launching of the Workers Party, Macdonald threw himself into political activity with even more enthusiasm than before; in fact, he was so bitter against the Cannon faction that he had refused to join with them in singing the “Internationale” at the close of the SWP convention. He edited the first two issues of Labor Action, the paper of the Workers Party, and did all the technical work for the first two issues of New International, of which the minority had retained control after the split. If he was depressed by Burnham’s sudden departure, he may well have been inspired by Shachtman’s pronouncement in the first issue of Labor Action: “We propose to build a party of a new kind in the American revolutionary movement: disciplined yet democratic, thoroughly internationalist yet oriented primarily not toward Russia but toward the struggle in this country, and, above all, steadfast in the fight against both warring imperialist camps and for the world-wide victory of the masses in the Third Camp.”32 Macdonald’s columns and articles, as well as conspicuous advertisements for his contributions to the Partisan Review, appeared prominently in Labor Action. He filled the pages of the WP’s Internal Discussion Bulletin and the New International with his theoretical criticisms of the party’s line.
Those of his criticisms that primarily centered on Germany tended to parallel not only those of Burnham but also those of liberals who denied the capitalist origins of fascism by insisting that it was based upon a “new class.” Ironically, WP leader Albert Glotzer rebutted Macdonald’s argument by claiming that he focused on “indecisive phenomena” to reach this conclusion, which was the same argument made by Trotsky in refuting the theory of a “new class” as it applied to the Soviet Union.33 By November 1940 Macdonald’s political differences were augmented by organizational grievances as well: he charged that C. L. R. James, the West Indian leader of the WP, was using his editorials in the newspaper to attack him. In turn the WP leadership charged that Macdonald was using his Partisan Review articles to attack the WP and demanded that Macdonald discuss his outside literary work with them.34
By the spring of 1941 Macdonald’s charges against the WP leadership had escalated. He claimed that, without a hearing, the WP leadership had banned him from all editorial responsibilities, had denied him a reasonable amount of space to present his views in the party publications, and had been treating him as “a factional opponent; at worst, a sort of fifth-columnist from the camp of the bourgeoisie.” In short, he charged that the WP leadership was now closely approximating the Cannon regime in the SWP, in which those who disagree with the leadership become “second class citizens.” Finally, Macdonald offered an explanation for this development: the desertion of Burnham, combined with the unanticipated Nazi conquest of France, coming right after the split, had thrown a “great scare” into the WP leadership, causing it to retreat into “orthodoxy” and abandon everything that it had learned during the faction fight in the SWP.35
The WP leaders responded in kind, with a litany of charges of their own: that Macdonald had too great a sense of self-importance, conceiving of his individual relationship to the WP as that of one organization to another; that Macdonald was well aware that the WP intended to be a democratic-centralist organization, because he had witnessed a dispute between Shachtman and Burnham on the eve of the split in which it was decided that the “orthodox” positions were to be maintained; and that Macdonald wanted to be recognized as some sort of “privileged aristocrat” in the WP, free to publicly attack the party’s views on the nature of fascism. While the WP leaders were hesitant to interfere with Macdonald’s work on the Partisan Review, because they had no desire to advance a line on cultural and aesthetic matters, they thought that Macdonald’s main orientation should be “to tear the hide off the renegade and backsliding ‘radical intellectuals.’” Instead, Macdonald excluded the WP point of view from a Partisan Review symposium on the nature of fascism, and, after being criticized, announced that he was not going to write or speak for the WP, or let his name be used by the WP, until he could have things his own way.36 Thus ended Macdonald’s association with the Workers Party.
At that time, however, Trotsky’s influence remained strong, as can be seen by Macdonald’s assessment of Trotsky in the Partisan Review a few months after his assassination: “Trotsky was the one man still living whose name and prestige could have become a rallying point for a mass revolution in almost any part of the world, and especially in Russia. And even more important, as long as he lived, there was a center of revolutionary Marxist consciousness in the world, a voice which could not be frightened or corrupted into silence.” Macdonald compared his feelings toward Trotsky to a parent-child relationship: “[H]e was a father to many of us in the sense that he taught us our political alphabet and first defined for us the problems to be solved, so that even when, in the manner of sons, we came to reject the parental ideas, our very rejection was in the terms he taught us.” Trotsky’s most significant flaw, Macdonald maintained, was that “he was a great political thinker in the sense that he took a given body of doctrine, the revolutionary Marxism of the pre-1914 period, and used it to interpret events with the greatest realism and penetration. But he was apparently incapable of examining the instrument itself, of scrutinizing with empirical skepticism the given doctrine.” Specifically, “he never conceived of more than two alternatives in the Soviet Union: either progress to socialism or retrogression to capitalism.”37
Though feeling perhaps orphaned by Trotsky’s death, Macdonald, despite his common political background with Burnham, understood at once the real political direction in which the latter was headed; he sharply disassociated himself from The Managerial Revolution in early 1942 in a critique that predicted the right-wing direction that Burnham would soon take:
Burnham’s thesis seems to me to create at least three highly dangerous illusions: 1) by presenting the “new order” in specifically managerial-productive terms and playing down the role of the dictators, it makes it appear desirable from the standpoint of materialistic progress; 2) it greatly exaggerates the strength, the internal consistency, and the conscious planning of these totalitarian systems; 3) by presenting fascism as historically inevitable . . . and by underestimating the subjective, I venture even to say moral factors working on the other side, Burnham’s theory paralyzes the will to fight for a more desirable alternative.38
When the debate about World War II began in the Partisan Review in mid-1940, Macdonald, despite his lack of party affiliation, acted as if the magazine would simply continue the quasi-Trotskyist positions adopted at its founding in 1937. His first statement on the war included an ungainly preface that presented a number of personal opinions and theories, but his conclusion remained “defeatist” in the sense that he called for “revolutionar
y action against the warmakers.”39
The issue also featured an incisive but ambiguous statement by Rahv, “What Is Living and What Is Dead,” originally intended to be part of a symposium on Marxism that highlighted Trotsky and others.40 A skilled polemicist, Rahv began by differentiating himself from both “revisionists” and “diehards,” then turned to a consideration of the “crisis in Marxism” provoked by the triumph of the “counter-revolution” in the Soviet Union. He concluded that while the predictions of Marxism about the ills of bourgeois society had been validated, its predictions regarding the potential of the working class as a force willing to and capable of acting to reconstruct society should, in the least, be reexamined. So scrutinized, too, should be the forms of party organization revolutionists had advocated to lead and direct the working class. He concluded with an evenhanded discussion of Marxist methodology. On the one hand, he dismissed dialectics as an unscientific but useful “source of metaphors relating to the ideas of change and transformation.” Yet he also criticized the anti-Leninist writings of Max Eastman and Lewis Corey as examples of “ideological determinism” because they attributed the growth of Stalinism to its Bolshevik origins rather than to multiple historic factors. Rahv himself declared his own belief in the need to revise Marxism in order to renew and reinvigorate it; but he saw this need as being qualitatively different from the work of a “panicky fugitive” from radicalism, such as Corey, who used Marx and Lenin as “scapegoats” for the horrors of Stalinism.41
Rahv’s article made no reference at all to World War II, but two months later it became clear that a schism had been developing among the editors. In the November–December issue Macdonald and editorial board member Clement Greenberg published “Ten Propositions on the War.” Greenberg, an aspiring artist and art critic, had been born in 1910 in the Bronx, where his father, a small shopkeeper, had become a successful manufacturer of metal goods.42 Greenberg attended the Art Students League in 1924–25, and, a few years after graduating from Syracuse University in 1930, he obtained a job as a clerk for the Civil Service Commission. He had worked for the United States Customs Service in New York since 1937 and began contributing to the Partisan Review after a letter he wrote to Dwight Macdonald was expanded into his famous essay “Avant-garde and Kitsch”. His thesis was that avant-garde literature drove society forward and evaded exploitation as propaganda, while kitsch (mass culture) was easily manipulated. In 1940 he became an editor. One of his brothers, Sol, was a member of the WP, and the antiwar statement Clement Greenberg coauthored with Macdonald indicated that he, too, was much influenced by the Shachtman group. The basic critique of the prowar position resembled that of the WP. But it overemphasized two erroneous beliefs, namely, that entrance of the United States into the war would bring something close to domestic fascism and that Germany and Italy could only be defeated by workers’ governments. Moreover, a description of how to combine the fight against fascism with the fight against capitalism nowhere appeared.43
