by Alan M Wald
For example, fifteen years after he published Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx during the height of the Great Depression, Hook wrote a second introduction to Marx’s thought that was much more appropriate to the changed political climate. Moreover, the new book itself, appearing under the title Marx and the Marxists (1955), contains dramatic alterations of Hook’s earlier point of view that are never acknowledged. This time Marx, instead of being presented as unorthodox, is depicted as the fount of all orthodoxy, although the term still lacked the positive connotation that it had for Georg Lukács. To the “born again” Hook, Marx’s writings are orthodox because he believes that socialism is a logical stage that must and can only follow advanced capitalism—a position shared by the reformists, who now replace Lenin (described here, with other Bolsheviks, as a deviant) in the line of direct descent. This leads Hook to such inaccuracies as claiming that Trotsky concocted the theory of “uneven and combined development” to justify the Bolsheviks’ allegedly premature seizure of power in 1917, even though the concept of “uneven and combined development” is implicit in Marx’s writings and was clearly a component of Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution as it was first articulated in 1905.
Hook conveniently omitted a central argument that had originally appeared in Toward an Understanding of Karl Marx, an argument that held that the primary test of an authentic Marxist is an understanding that the state must be abolished because it is an instrument of the oppressing class. Also present is Hook’s assertion that in 1917 Lenin had led a coup, even though this view contradicts his contention in Toward an Understanding of Karl Marx that revolutions cannot be made by groups but are the results of a historical process. Thus it seems that by 1955 Hook either held the view that no revolution had been made in the Soviet Union, or that a coup is synonymous with a revolution. According to Hook, authentic socialism should now be understood as being simply a current of liberalism, a notion that ironically paralleled the Popular Front thesis, once ridiculed by Hook, that communism was but a more militant current of liberalism.57
The psychology of apostasy is nicely illustrated by Hook’s utter reversal of his previous assessment of Leninism which led him to misconstrue the record of Lenin’s views. In a carefully documented critique of Hook’s view of civil liberties during the 1950s, two young members of the Independent Socialist League (the new name for the Workers Party after 1949), Gordon Haskell and Julius Jacobson, examined the quotations from Lenin that Hook had used to prove the case he presented in Heresy, Yes—Conspiracy, No. Hook had asserted that Lenin’s doctrines provided the basis for an international communist conspiracy. In each instance Hook simply deleted, sometimes even without ellipses, the specific context of the quotation, which enabled him to attribute a very different meaning to the respective passage. For example, Lenin wrote that revolutionists must use subterfuge in the trade unions if their democratic rights are proscribed. Hook simply deleted the part of the quotation that referred to the proscription of rights, thus bolstering his theme that, for Lenin, conspiracy was a way of life. Or when Lenin wrote that revolutionaries should operate in larger organizations in secret groups if they faced the threat of arrest or deportation, Hook again deleted the qualifying clause. It is especially ironic that such methods were used by Hook, who was totally dedicated to exposing the “Big Lie” of the Communists.58
During the early 1930s, when Hook ardently believed that “no tinkering with capitalism will enable us to avoid the evils of war, cyclical depression, and cultural perversion inherent in the existing social relations of production,” he had interpreted Lenin very differently, considering him to be the greatest defender of the democratic process.59 As a young faculty member at New York University in 1932, Hook had reviewed Lenin’s manifesto of organizational principles, What Is to Be Done?, in the American Journal of Sociology, calling it “one of the landmarks in the social and intellectual history of Russia in recent times.” In a tone just as cocksure and self-confident as the one that marked his New York Times Magazine articles twenty years later that “exposed” pro-Communist professors as conspirators, Hook insisted that Lenin’s strategy of revolution was based not on deception but on “the causal efficacy of classconsciousness in accelerating social change.”60 In a review of the first volume of The History of the Russian Revolution that same year, he had even criticized Trotsky for not describing the full democratic nature of the Leninist party: “the . . . independent initiative of its rank and file, the freedom of criticism which prevailed even at crucial moments.”61
How is it possible, then, that in 1955, Hook could say of Lenin that “as a Marxist theoretician he was comparatively undistinguished,” or that he ruthlessly ran a “small group . . . poised to strike against the democratic regime which followed the collapse of absolutism,” or that when “Lenin sometimes characterized the structure of the party as one of ‘democratic centralism,’ it actually meant that the exercise, degree, and occasion of democratic activity on the part of the membership was determined by the central source—the bureaucratic and self-perpetuating directors of a military machine”?62 Since there is no reason to believe that Hook is intentionally dishonest, one must attribute such extraordinary lapses to the Stalinophobic fanaticism that overtook his generation, causing genuine memory lapses in those instances when historic facts conflicted with the ideological needs of the Cold War. As Hook himself observed in another context, “It is an elementary truth of the psychology of perception that what a man sees depends upon his beliefs and expectations.”63 In looking back at the communist movement that he had once known so well, virtually as an insider, Hook failed to realize how his new opinions had shaped his new conclusions. He became a victim of the familiar phenomenon of perceiving all information as independent confirmations of his viewpoint, while not realizing that his highly emotional bias against communism had preselected the information about Lenin and other radical matters that he now used to buttress his new theorizations.
Another clue to the process of Hook’s apostasy was his insistence that his switch from revolutionary to reformist socialism (referred to as “democratic socialism” to avoid the stigma of “social democracy,” against which Hook had railed so often), was based on changes that had occurred in the world and not in him personally. In his contribution to the 1952 symposium, “Our Country and Our Culture,” he presented the most persuasive case for the new politics of his generation. History, he argued, had simply limited its choice to only two possibilities, that is, “between endorsing a system of total terror [the Soviet Union] and critically supporting our own imperfect democratic culture with all its promises and dangers.”64 Once he advanced beyond this rhetoric, however, it became clear that his talk of “imperfect democratic culture” was an ideological mystification: without evidence, he declared that the economy of the United States should be recognized as “mixed.” He also claimed that the U.S. working class enjoys “more bread and freedom than anywhere else in the world”—as if this generalization might give comfort to large segments of the American working class who were excluded from the fruits of postwar prosperity, or the workers of dependent nations whose economic stagnation was part of the price of the U.S. domestic achievement.
Although Hook insisted that criticisms of American life were still appropriate, he warned that such criticisms ought be made “without forgetting for a moment the total threat which Communism poses to the life of the free mind.”65 This implied that “free minds” existed in American culture but might be suddenly lost if one gave aid and comfort to the enemy; the logic of this position is to eschew far-reaching criticisms of the United States on the grounds that one is objectively aiding the enemy. Hook simply had no use for the more plausible argument that a rapacious American capitalism not only brings a relative prosperity and freedom to some sectors at the expense of others, but that it aids the stability and expansion of Stalinist regimes by failing to offer an attractive alternative to movements for social change throughout the world.
/> Above all, Hook would never acknowledge that the change in his views could be explained by social pressures brought on him and his generation in addition to the postwar prosperity that resulted in a loss of ability to view the world from the class perspective of the oppressed. To the contrary, his method of analysis, and those of the other neoconservatives for whom he would become a guiding spirit in the 1970s, was to perceive a reversal in the pressure, to insist that he was always going against the stream and taking great risks, as he had genuinely done in the early 1930s when he first came out in support of Marxism and then broke with the Communists from the left.
At the onset of World War II, for example, Hook claimed that he was virtually alone in standing up for reason, resisting combined pressures from the left and from the new irrationalists, both of which were retreating into utopian fantasies. During the postwar witch-hunt he fantasized that he and a few stalwart colleagues were standing almost alone defending the right of liberal “heresy” against Communist conspirators on the left and irresponsible McCarthyites (irresponsible because they were bungling the job of fighting Communism with their excesses) on the right. In each case Hook was actually finding social democratic reasons for adapting to the tide of opinion while depicting himself as “out of step.” In the same manner, the leader of the younger generation of deradicalized intellectuals, Norman Podhoretz, would claim to be “breaking ranks” when he joined the Reagan parade in the 1980s.
Social democracy, the variant of socialism that functions within the framework of capitalist institutions rather than counterposing a program of workers’ self-management to capitalism, was sufficiently flexible to be invoked by Hook in his revolutionary antiimperialist phase of the late 1930s as well as in his pro-Reagan phase of the 1980s. His claim of adherence to social democracy, manifested in recent years in his membership in Social Democrats U.S.A., the only socialist organization he ever joined after his sojourn in the American Workers Party, allows him to reassure the residue of his younger self: “I never went over to the class enemy; I remained a socialist to the end.” It constitutes the ideological shield that he has erected around himself, perhaps in order to appease his conscience and justify his political transmogrification since the late 1930s. Nevertheless, it is hard to consider Social Democrats U.S.A. an authentic part even of the social democratic movement today. The organization does have ties to labor officials and supports a welfare state up to a point, but in its ideology and politics it is indistinguishable from the neoconservatives with whom it seeks a dialogue.
As late as the summer of 1985, Hook coauthored an ostensibly Marxist essay, “‘Bashing’ the Raj: Truth or Propaganda,” in response to recent films and books critical of British rule in India.66 Basing himself on some of Marx’s 1853 writings, Hook not only repudiated the “common cause” he had felt with the Indian fighters for national independence in the 1930s, but he insisted that colonial rule was less harmful than the independence movement. His conclusion was that this continues to be the case in Africa and Asia and that anticolonial sentiments actually aid Soviet expansion by weakening U.S. hegemony over the Third World. Thus forty-five years after he lost all plausible claim to being a Marxist, he still maintains that he is the only authentic interpreter of Marx’s “complexity” and Marx’s awareness of the “tragic dimension in history.”
THE IRON CAGE OF ORTHODOXY
The decline of the American left after World War II took its toll in all progressive quarters, causing a narrowing of outlook and a retreat to rigid, sometimes paranoid, thinking. The handful of intellectuals who survived the difficult postwar years, who remained generally independent of and militantly opposed to both Stalinism and Cold War imperialism, were scarred in ways that were different from the apostates but were scarred nonetheless. In a certain sense the evolution of Shachtman’s group is easiest to understand. Some time after it split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940, the Workers Party began a process of social democratization. This was heatedly denied by its leaders and members for nearly twenty years, but it is hardly questionable today.67
At what point the WP actually became social democratic is quite another question. The Socialist Workers Party’s 1940 predictions about the social patriotic course on which the Workers Party was embarked were premature. As late as 1947 the orthodox Trotskyists of the SWP were willing to consider a merger with the WP, and the WP came close to gaining admission to the Fourth International as fraternal members. Shachtman, however, was trailing down the path trod by the deradicalizing intellectuals, albeit reluctantly. By the late 1960s, at the latest, his path had conjoined with Sidney Hook’s, although he apparently failed to confront the profound nature of his change and made almost no references in writing to the contrast between his previous and his new views. Those former WP members who had accepted the turn to social democracy, but not the right-wing variant embraced by Shachtman, formed the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (later, the Democratic Socialists of America) led by Michael Harrington and Irving Howe. Those who still adhered to the revolutionary convictions that Shachtman had once held broke with him in 1960. Several formed the Independent Socialist Clubs (later, the International Socialists) while others began the journal New Politics.
The evolution of the orthodox Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers Party is somewhat more difficult to grasp. Emerging from World War II, the Trotskyists faced an inevitable crisis because their prewar short-term predictions failed to materialize. Contrary to expectations, no wave of successful revolutions occurred in the major European capitalist countries, and Stalinism had become stronger than ever. Moreover, U.S. capitalism thrived in its new role as a major world power. Goldman and Morrow fixated on these developments, thereby missing a larger picture which arguably confirmed several of Trotsky’s longer-term predictions, namely, that there was a rise in revolutionary working-class struggles in western Europe; that there were overturns of the social systems in eastern Europe and China (to be followed by social overturns in North Korea, North Vietnam, and Cuba during the next decade); and that the continued success of U.S. capitalism would have to be contingent on its efficacy in dominating economically underdeveloped countries. Short-term predictions were never meant to be taken as certain but were intended rather as successive approximations necessary to guide political action; thus there were no objective factors in the postwar period that mandated an abandonment of the basic Marxist perspective, although subjective factors abounded. What was needed was a readjustment of Marxism in light of a new world reality, especially a means of analyzing the phenomenon of Stalinism, the major system for which Trotsky’s predictions were most amiss.
The persistence of Stalinist rule in the Soviet Union was in itself not the main problem. After all, a transitional society is not obliged to appear or disappear according to any rigid chronological formulas. Plausible reasons for the survival of the bureaucratic Stalinist regime were legion, including the failure of new revolutionary leaderships to provide positive alternatives in western Europe. Whether Stalinist systems were aberrations, as Trotsky theorized, or inevitable (which would demand a new conceptual framework) might not be definitively answered until an anticapitalist revolution occurred in an industrialized country with a sizable working class. What was more threatening to the traditional Trotskyist worldview was the apparent social transformations that had occurred in China, Yugoslavia, and other states of eastern Europe for which Communist parties and the Soviet Union claimed credit. In none of these cases did the social transformations follow the classical model of the Russian Revolution. Moreover, those who had led the transformations were decidedly non-Trotskyist.
Thus the orthodox Trotskyists of the SWP and the Fourth International (with which the SWP had only a fraternal relationship because of U.S. legislation prohibiting international political affiliations) were faced with a fundamental problem. Trotsky had theorized that only an authentic Fourth Internationalist party, consciously based on the International’s Transitional Program (the fou
nding programmatic document, written in 1938), could lead a social transformation, except under a rare set of circumstances in which a non-Trotskyist leadership might be forced to carry out a revolution against its will.68 Faced with this contradiction between theory and reality, the Trotskyists were posed with four alternatives: they could abandon building the Fourth International and organizations such as the SWP; they could correct, update, and adjust Marxism and Trotskyism in light of the unexpected phenomena; they could attempt to demonstrate how all the post-World War II social transformations actually did occur according to Trotsky’s pre-1940 perspectives; or they could deny that authentic revolutions had occurred in the aforementioned countries.
The majority of the orthodox Trotskyists in the SWP began in the late 1940s with the fourth position, that is, they denied that what had occurred in China and eastern Europe were authentic social transformations. By the early 1950s, they had moved painfully to the third position, that is, they admitted that social transformations had indeed occurred but asserted that they had occurred against the conscious intentions of the Stalinists who led them. The fact that the SWP began with the fourth alternative and moved slowly toward the third shows an admirable caution that was far superior to impressionistic theorizing. Such caution may have been partly responsible for their survival during the difficult World War II and Cold War years. But the fact that they stopped at the third alternative without progressing to the second suggests that they feared to stray too far from formulas of Trotsky even when, as in this instance, material reality called for a more rigorous analysis. Thus the SWP developed, and for twenty-five years would continue to defend, the view that Communist parties with origins in the Stalinist movement were incapable of consciously leading anticapitalist revolts. Like the parent Soviet regime, which was, in fact, opposed to social transformations that might upset the world balance of power or pose an attractive alternative model to the totalitarian system that prevailed within the Soviet Union, such parties were characterized by the SWP as “counter-revolutionary.” What had really happened, in their view, was that in China, eastern Europe, North Korea, and, later, in North Vietnam, mass upheavals of one sort or another had pushed these Communist leaderships much further than they had wanted to go; what Trotsky had theorized as a rare exception became the norm. But the orthodox Trotskyists of the SWP failed to comprehend the dynamic of these mass upheavals because the realities challenged orthodox Trotskyist doctrine.
