The following was the major document of the Cochran faction. It appeared in the SWP Internal Bulletin, April 1953. Signing the document were the following members of the National Committee with their real names and party pseudonyms.
| Name | City | Party Pseudonym |
| Erwin Baur | Detroit | Al Cummings (Adler) |
| Irving Beinin | Chicago | |
| Harry Braverman | New York | Harry Frankel |
| George Clarke | New York | |
| Bert Cochran | New York | |
| E. Drake | Detroit | |
| Sol Dollinger | Flint | Emmett Moore |
| Jules Geller | Chicago | J. Andrews |
| Ernest Mazey | Detroit | E. Kennedy |
| Milton Zaslow | New York | Mike Bartell |
Every responsible party member must view with alarm the new eruption of factional conflict within the leadership and in the party as a whole. It is a grave matter for the party to be plunged into violent internal struggle in the midst of increasing reaction, isolation, and preparations for war, and when the class struggle cannot provide the necessary tests and healthy correctives of differing positions. This is especially serious when the differences, although sharp, have not crystallized along clearly defined programmatic lines that lend themselves easily to an objective judgment by the party membership.
For our part, we take no responsibility for the outbreak of the conflict. We did not seek nor instigate this struggle. On the contrary we have favored every proposal, every compromise, that would postpone its outbreak or allay its intensity. We do not deny that we have vigorously—perhaps sometimes even over vigorously—presented our point of view in the PC and weekly paper staff on current political and organizational questions. How can that constitute a reason for a faction fight to the death, unless the price of peace for an opposition is complete silence?
This fight has been deliberately forced upon us and on the party. That is the real significance of the Dobbs-Stein-Hansen statement (submitted to PC, January 6, 1953).122 In reality, however, this is only the latest of a series of attempts to precipitate a showdown faction struggle that have been made for well over a year. In this time there has been an unceasing and sometimes even frantic hunt for “fundamental” differences, for deviations and motives. The ground for the attack has at least twice been shifted, and it will undoubtedly be shifted again before this struggle is over. Each time the minority point of view mas adopted (and that was the case in most of the political questions under discussion), the search for “fundamental" differences became mare frantic. Compromises have been interpreted by the majority as a license to present a one-sided view, ignoring the essence of the agreement and making a solitary sentence or paragraph the basis of a 1ine.
We intend by a full recitation of the record to demonstrate where the major responsibility for the present struggle in the party rests. Our aim is far more important than merely placing the blame an the guilty side that “fired the first shot” or committed the first act of “bad faith.”For behind the attempt to aggravate incipient differences to the breaking point, to divide the party into irreconcilab1e factions over divergent views that can still be reconciled, we believe there are deeper causes than transient incidents or the conflict of personalities. Behind the present struggle is the shadow of the Third World War which, even more than its two predecessors, is creating the deepest crisis in all social relations, in states, institutions, political movements. Our party, as is now obvious, has not escaped the effects of the crisis. To find the remedy—a matter of life and death—it is first necessary to seek the causes. A description of the conf1ict, which now follows, will lead us unerringly to both cause and solution.
The first differences broke out in the PC and the weekly paper staff in the fall of 1951 soon after Clarke’s return. They concerned our attitude to the Stalinist movement and our approach to it in the press. It had become dear to many of us that our position needed a sharp correction. The Stalinist movement, regardless of its desires, had been thrust into opposition to imperialism; it was persecuted and hounded as the chief target of the witch-hunt. At the same time, it was being shaken internally by the contradiction of a class-collaboration policy that could not be realized in practice, for lack of any important bourgeois allies. Our press, however, was operating as though the war-time collaboration between the Stalinists and the State Department had never ended. Every time we raised problems of this kind - our attitude to the CP trials123 (the emphasis to be placed on them), the ALP, the Monthly Review, and a series of others, our motives were called into question: Were we proposing a “soft” line, a line of “conciliation to Stalinism"? Was Stalinist work “Point One, Two or Three"? It was impossible for us to speak or make a proposal in the PC on some point relating to Stalinism without prefacing it with an earnest of our good intentions. There was clearly a hunt for “Stalinist dangers.” This was in effect admitted by Comrade Cannon himself when he said in the now famous “split” meeting of the PC in March 1952 that “I do not now believe there is a tendency of conciliation to Stalinism in the leadership."
With this statement, the line of attack shifted, although the accusation of “conciliation” was never dropped and still is utilized today. Presumably we were then prepared to write a common document for the plenum and the convention that would follow. A previous plenum on Labor Day 1951 had failed to produce a single word on the changed world situation, on the trend of developments in the interim period before the outbreak of war, and on our tasks. This was particularly incumbent upon us, among other reasons, because the World Congress analysis attributed to the U.S. a key role so far as the war question was concerned: continuing social stability or a radicalization of the workers and great social struggles here being the determining consideration in the war plans of U.S. imperialism. Hence the added importance of the coming plenum: it had to fulfill the task that the previous plenum had left undone, and had not even initiated.
The original resolution drafted by a committee of Cannon and Wright turned out to be thoroughly inadequate. It failed to provide any overall review of America’s role in the developing war, of the social and economic factors that would precipitate the conflict, its analysis of the economic situation was wrong, even the facts were faulty. The labor party was mentioned in a brief sentence, almost as an afterthought. The Stalinists were roundly condemned in a paragraph or two, and that finished that question. The party tasks in the period ahead were very inadequately posed. The document was severely criticized by Comrades Bartell, Clarke, and Frankel, who made proposals for rewriting, changes, and additions.
The very next meeting of the PC (March 1952), called to continue the discussion on the draft resolution, was blown up and the possibility of an objective discussion wrecked by Comrade Cannon’s threat of a split. It took the form of his reading a projected “personal” letter to Pablo which was also to be sent to all members of the NC. The letter concluded with a postscript saying that he (Cannon) was pessimistic about the internal party situation and that he believed we were heading into a split because of the existence of an “unprincipled combination” (meaning Clarke and Cochran) or an “incipient faction.” Taxed with this ominous threat, Cannon innocently declared that he was merely making a prediction. This has been the alibi for the document ever since. The alibi is refuted by the letter itself. The body of the letter contained a pledge of support to Pablo, while making reservations on Eastern Europe and on Pablo’s tactical qualifications.But the last line of the postscript was an admonition to Pablo to keep his hands off the internal situation. Unless words and politics have lost their meaning, how else could this letter be interpreted than as a threat to split? It was a quid pro quo offer to Pablo: support in return for noninterference in the drive for a split.
But if the split were inevitable and were going to occur despite anyone’s desires or intentions—as Comrade Cannon tried to maintain—what were the fundamental differences, we asked, that were driving fatalistically to this disaster? He admitted, as we have already stated, that there was no danger of “Stalinist conciliationism"—although this was the battlecry against us in the committee for at least six months. There would be a split, he said, precisely because there were no fundamental differences, (!) and yet in their absence, the tone of discussion continued to be sharp and the atmosphere tense. Obviously this was reducing a big question to the barren searching for hidden motives. (It did not interest him that the atmosphere might have been charged by the fact that our many practical proposals had been met by him and others by a searching for our motives, by shameful innuendos or charges of “conciliation” to Stalinism.) Before the meeting was over, the letter was so clearly exposed as an irrational act or a willfully malicious project that it was withdrawn. But let this be clear—it was withdrawn at our urging! Although there was obviously factional advantage to be gained from the publication of such a scandalous, unprincipled document—which would have shocked the party and the world movement—we urged its withdrawal to avoid a factional struggle that would be harmful to the party because the differences were admittedly only in their incipient stages. The tactic to precipitate a sudden split situation had failed, but the determination to organize one remained unaltered.
Once again we returned to the plenum resolution. Comrades Clarke and Frankel revised or rewrote at least one-third of the document in the form of amendments. Although these revisions embodied most of the points that had been so vehemently combatted in the previous six months, they were accepted with very little alteration by the PC subcommittee and later by the PC. Naturally complete clarity was not attained, and as was inevitable under the circumstances, the new document took the form of a compromise resolution. Nevertheless it marked a great step forward.
The one important proposal rejected by Comrades Cannon and Stein—and with particular obduracy by Comrade Cannon—was a project for an organized propaganda campaign. In effect it was nothing else than a revival of Comrade Cannon’s own project for an “Ideological Offensive” ("Proposals for a Propaganda Campaign,” submitted by J. P. Cannon, November 1948) which had been adopted in December 1948 hut had never made much headway. We felt that the needs for such a campaign were even more decisive in 1952 than four years previously.
The proposal was bitterly fought at the PC meeting, a countermotion by Comrade Cannon was finally adopted that if funds were available, a new session of the Trotsky School should have priority. The incident is of more than passing significance in view of the present fraudulent claim that the big dividing issue is the “independent party versus the propaganda group.” The Trotsky School—that is, a strictly internal educational activity—was counterposed by those who presumably favor the “independent party” to a propaganda campaign—that is, an external activity primarily directed outside the party—advocated by those who are charged with wanting to liquidate the party into a propaganda group.
With this, once again Comrade Cannon came forward with a declaration of war. Now, he informed us, he knew what the “fundamental differences" were (although he failed to specify their exact nature); he insisted that the “situation in the committee” be placed as a special point on the plenum agenda. We pointed out that in the absence of any written position on his part concerning these so-called differences, such a discussion could only be a brawl. We furthermore pointed out that we had just unanimously adopted the amended resolution, and therefore apparently were proceeding from a common line. Again Cannon withdrew his proposal, but not his determination to convert the plenum into a brawl, and to again lay the basis for the split. On April 25, he dispatched a private letter to a selected group of NC members urging them to come to the plenum without fail because a big fight was expected; he compared the plenum to the one that preceded the split convention in 1940!
This deliberate attempt to repeat the presplit 1939 plenum—despite the unanimity now on fundamental and tactical questions!—quickly became apparent at the May 1952 plenum. Cannon opened with a one-sided and provocative report on the resolution. It was as though the original resolution had not been altered from top to bottom.
The stage was now set for the provocative conclusion of his speech, a thinly veiled attack against us. It dealt with the dangers of degeneration in the leadership, and cited the cases of C. Charles, Manny Mills and... Max Shachtman. The danger of degeneration of individuals in the leadership, according to this theory, came not from the murderous pressure of anticommunist imperialism, from the failure to understand and draw confidence from the new world revolutionary reality, from succumbing to Stalinophobia in one form or another. No, strangely enough, it was attributed to the loss of faith in the independence of the party. This, despite the inescapable lessons of the splits in England and France, where a majority of the leadership, and of the ranks, had marched out of the Trotskyist movement denouncing the International for “liquidating” the independence of the party.
Cannon’s theory was to receive crushing refutation only a few weeks later from one of the participants at the plenum, not from our ranks, however, but from one who had not the slightest doubt about “independence,” not the slightest tendency toward “conciliating Stalinism"—from Grace Carlson’s desertion to Roman Catholicism.
But his speech had its intended effect. It was the signal for a sustained barrage on the part of his supporters against Clarke, who had attempted to present the resolution in its rounded character and to set straight the theory of degeneration so that the leadership could recognize the real dangers and how to combat them. The hysterical tirade was redoubled after Comrade Cochran sharply characterized the irregularity of Comrade Cannon’s launching a factional attack under cover of presenting, as the official PC reporter, a unanimously adopted political resolution.
Weiss’ motion that Cannon’s tendentious and factional report be adopted along with the resolution proved too much for a large part of the committee to stomach, and they demanded, in the absence of clearly revealed differences and because of political agreement on the resolution, that the struggle be suspended. We for our part associated ourselves with this point of view as we had already done on two previous occasions. Once again. Cannon backed down in his attempt to aggravate the struggle and drive it to a crisis. Under pressure of the committee he with9rew the motion for the adoption of his factional report. But again, as in the two previous cases, his retreat was accompanied by the sullen warning that he had no confidence that the agreement would last, meaning of course, that to the best of his ability he would not permit it to last.
The agreement did last, however, through the convention, and with entirely salutary results for the party. There were, it is true, as the Stein-Dobbs-Hansen statement says, “divergent evaluations of the objective situation and of party tasks... (reflected) in reports and speeches.” This was not unnatural in view of the compromise nature of the resolution and above all because Comrade Cannon’s convention report continued to have the same one-sided nature, although not nearly so marked as at the plenum. The section of the membership aware of the previous disputes breathed a sigh of relief at the outcome of the convention. They were satisfied that we had avoided a bitter, frustrating factional struggle.
But not so Cannon. He began at once, no sooner was the convention over, to attempt to organize a personal faction. This attempt was openly made at the camp, and was witnessed by at least a score of comrades. The almost universal reaction was one of revulsion at this irresponsible and unprincipled action. A section of the National Committee, which had supported Comrade Cannon, now decided that something had to be done to halt this degeneration of the party situation. Comrade Dobbs drafted a resolution, an excerpt of which was subsequently sent to the membership, calling for a regularization of the party situation during the campaign and for the opening of an objective political discussion after the campaign. Formally, the resolution was unanimously adopted by the PC. But the reality was quite different. Comrade Cannon absented himself without reason from this PC meeting, but sent word through Dobbs that he would go along with the agreement. At the next meeting of the PC, Comrade Cannon put in a request, again in absentia, to leave New York and go to Los Angeles. The reason was not ill health, or special party work. There were a few vague remarks about a “sabbatical leave,” and that was that. Once again, unity was to be a strictly unilateral matter.
Thus, a new outbreak of the internal struggle was inevitable, the only question being when Cannon would deem it advisable from the point of view of his factional aims.
The promise in the Dobbs proposal to establish collaboration and make possible the reopening of a political discussion free from factionalism has never been carried out, nor has any attempt been made to carry it out. It has remained, from the moment of its adoption a dead letter. Dobbs proved incapable, or unwilling, or both, of making good on his big promise to attempt to ameliorate the internal situation. He simply was responsible for a “holding operation” until Cannon and his supporters felt the time was propitious for reopening their factional offensive.
We repeat: No attempt of any kind was made after the convention and particularly after the election campaign to reestablish collaboration in the leadership. The weekly paper was being run in high-handed fashion by Comrade Hansen. When a controversy arose over some issue or method of handling a problem, he invariably assigned the writing of the article to someone sharing his views, and it was only seen by the others if specifically requested, in departure from the regular staff custom of passing around important articles. When the financial crisis broke on us after the campaign, no attempt was made to permit an inclusive representation of all points of view on the full-time staff.
In truth, how could there he genuine collaboration if two leading comrades, Clarke and Cochran, the representatives of a distinct tendency in the leadership and reflecting the views of a considerable section of the party, were not to have the possibility of fully participating in the propagandist and organizational work of the center? True, a number of other comrades were also removed from the full-time staff, but that begs the question because those that remained were exclusively supporters of Comrade Cannon. Thus, instead of collaboration, we were confronted with the last representative of our point of view being removed from the full-time party staff, and an increasing exclusion from possibilities of political leadership. At the same time, we witnessed the organization of a faction in the New York Local by Stevens and Ring, under the tutelage of the Cannon leaders, against the local organizer, Bartell, on the flimsiest and most artificial lines imaginable.
The New York Local has experienced one of its most successful years of activity since the onset of reaction; it has attracted many new friends to its public affairs and its work is now resulting in the recruitment of new members; the morale of the membership has been excellent and steady, free of the feverish ups and downs of exhilaration and depression that come from disorderly and falsely oriented activities; its finances have never been in better shape. All of this was made possible by a realistic appraisal of the objective situation, by an understanding of the peculiarities of the New York labor and radical movement, by emphasis on propaganda activities and opponents work. Comrade Bartell’s report to the City Convention codified the premises, methods, and practical steps of the year’s work and proposed, in view of the unchanged objective situation, that the New York Local continue on the same road.
Instead of hailing the report as a model effort in adapting a national policy to the peculiarities and needs of a local situation, the majority of the Secretariat124 pounced on it for factional ends as one of the grounds to precipitate an internal struggle nationally. Once again they charged the atmosphere with suspicion, once again we saw the now familiar hunt for hidden motives and secret aims. “Is he (Bartell) not tending to modify our basic evaluation of the party’s character, perspectives and tasks?” With this loaded question, they announced their support of one of the most infantile, miseducated, and sectarian groups that the New York Local has ever known, a group that has been repudiated by the bulk of the experienced, responsible local activists and trade unionists. We will return to this question later. Suffice it to say here that this group is the first fruit of the year of effort by the Cannon-Weiss faction to precipitate a factional struggle to cover up their own confusion, their constant shifting of issues, and their no less constant searching for hidden motives and deviations. It is a warning of what the party will look like nationally if they are not called to order and corrected in time.
We sat for months in the PC meetings and made no attempt to contest or struggle against these factional and warlike moves against us. We did not even fight over Clarke’s removal from the full-time staff as we still hoped that the matter would be straightened out when the financial situation improved. We were waiting for the majority to present to the National Committee, with the conclusion of the election campaign, a practical program of action for 1953, on what practical tasks and projects we would concentrate our efforts. Nothing was ever submitted or proposed. But on December 30, 1952, the Los Angeles leaders proposed to involve the party in a series of new local election campaigns. The issue involved was not the need or merit of participating in election campaigns. The national party and the Los Angeles Local had just concluded a major electoral activity only two months previously. We believed, therefore, that the Los Angeles proposal was made in contemptuous disregard of the fact that we were still in a precarious financial condition, that Clarke had recently been removed from full-time work, that the project for improving the magazine, under consideration by the PC after the convention, was abandoned because of the financial crisis. When we protested against this preposterous proposal, this method, or lack of method, of determining party activity for 1953, and when Comrade Cochran dared suggest that the personnel arrangements were being handled along factional lines, the Cannon leaders decided the moment had arrived to renew battle for the split.
The roots of this irresponsible behavior, this erratic method of dealing with orientation and tasks, this panic in the face of political differences, are primarily political. They grow out of a six-year-old disorientation in the face of unexpected changes in the world and at home, out of disappointment over the collapse of exaggerated hopes, out of an inability to cope soberly and analytically with the new reality created by the deepening reaction and the coming war.
It has taken the form of Stalinophobia and frustration. The nature of this tendency toward Stalinophobia—let us make this unmistakably clear so that there will be no confusion or misunderstanding—is not capitulation to imperialism but a barren sectarianism that makes a doctrinaire panacea of “independence” and attempts to meet all problems of the moment and of perspectives by the mysticism of faith and hope and making a mystique of the party. In frustration at the impotence of such politics, they have turned against those whose approach and policy is more in tune with the reality with a ferocity out of all proportion to the magnitude of the questions involved. Despite its background, tradition, and experience, this tendency bears many of the characteristics of all those groupings in revolutionary leadership who have proved unable to adjust themselves to great historic turns. We say this sadly because we had hoped for better in view of our common heritage. But facts are stubborn things; to ignore them is to court disaster.
Let us preface this documentation of the record by a word of caution. We do not cite the record because some or all of us were right on all questions while others were wrong, nor to demand any breast-beating for errors made. That to us would be a futile game of prestige politics. We cite the record because the same type of errors, and particularly the method of thought responsible for them, are still being repeated without any consciousness of their real cause or any genuine desire to correct them, and because they are the chief cause of the present internal struggle.
The turning point in our party’s recent history was the party’s 1946 convention and its aftermath. The party’s hopes had been greatly buoyed by the postwar rise in the class struggle and its consequent expansion numerically and in influence in the mass movement. We saw a curve of increasing and more rapid party expansion and influence. Our resolution spoke of transforming the party into one of “mass action.” We believed the class struggle would move steadily forward, and with an oncoming depression, which we were predicting, would be transformed into a great social crisis that in turn would lead to the American revolution in which the Trotskyists would play the leading role. In the process of these great events all the complex problems of world politics, of Stalinism and of reformism, would naturally be more or less speedily resolved. Not only had the axis of world power turned to the United States, but also the axis of the class struggle and of world Trotskyism. We had become the children of destiny—at least in our own minds.
Unfortunately, this idyllic picture was to be quickly dispelled. Within four months, the cold war broke out between American imperialism and the Kremlin, and reaction began to mount the offensive against the labor and radical movement at home. Instead of the scene being dominated by pure dass struggle in the United States between the corporations and the labor movement, increasingly led by Trotskyists, we were to be again faced with the complicated problem of the more powerful anticapitalist movement in other parts of the world being led and misled by the Stalinist bureaucracy. In the meanwhile, instead of the American workers engaged in mortal combat with capitalism, the gigantic red-baiting campaign to purge Stalinist influence out of the trade union movement began to occupy the center of the stage.
We were distinctly slow in reacting to these new developments. That in itself is not a fault, or if it was it was also a fault of the whole world movement. The human mind, even the Marxist mind, is slow in grasping a new reality particularly when it changes sharply and suddenly. Our fault, or rather the fault of the majority of the leadership, is that they have not to this day reoriented themselves to the new world situation.
The leadership came to the August 1947 plenum of the NC, the first gathering after the ill-fated 1946 convention, without an analysis of the new situation. But if we could ignore or postpone an examination of the big questions, we could not avoid a discussion of their practical consequences as manifested in our most important field of activity, the trade union movement. A struggle broke out over the policy to be pursued in the auto union, where we had our biggest and most influential fraction.
The leading comrades, and the majority of the fraction, were proposing that we shift our support from Walter Reuther, who was fast becoming the center of reaction in the union and the open agent of the State Department, first to an intermediate position, and possibly later, if developments justified,. to support of the Thomas-Addes group in which the Stalinists were involved. The proposal was violently opposed by Comrades Mills, Swabeck, and Dunne, with Comrade Cannon giving them support until the very end of the discussion when it had become obvious that the majority of the plenum was going to support the position of Comrade Cochran and the auto fraction.
Cannon then announced that he would go along with the decision but was greatly worried lest we cut ourselves off from the “mainstream” and become contaminated by our association with the Stalinists. The self-same fears had in essence been the principal reason for the opposition of the others. The correct decision was taken but not before the committee had been inhibited by this fear of Stalinism which was to be thrust again and again into all serious questions of policy, ranging from tactics to theory.
Thus, if analogies are needed and are correctly applied, the present conflict like the conflict in 1940 began with a dispute over policy to be followed in the auto union and over the self-same issue. At that time, 1939, Burnham and Shachtman bitterly opposed the policy of Cochran, Dunne, and Clarke in Detroit of joining with Reuther and the Stalinists against Homer Martin in the UAW split (We had previously been supporting Homer Martin.) They said the new UAW-CIO, minus Martin, would be nothing but a rubber stamp for the CP. This is more than a coincidence; in both cases a section of the leadership oriented themselves from Stalinophobe considerations against the policy of the auto fraction.
Viewing the events of the 1939 auto crisis and the eruption of more virulent Stalinophobe tendencies that seized the party after the Russo-Finnish war, Trotsky issued his famous cry of alarm. The party, he said, had to be proletarianized or it would succumb to overpowering and alien class pressures. We were to see the first test of his warning in the struggle over auto policy in 1947. It was thanks to the effective and successful proletarianization of the Michigan party, thanks to its flexible tactics over the years which had never made a fetish of alliances with reformist bureaucrats, that our movement was saved from the disgrace of a Shachtmanite trade union policy, from discreditment among the best militants in the UAW and the labor movement as a whole. When, because of old habit patterns or plain disorientation, a section of the party leadership became motivated by phobias of Stalinism rather than by Marxist understanding of class criteria, it was the worker-revolutionists of Michigan who brought them up sharply and kept the party on its true course.
If we insist on this point, it is because of the factional distortion of the real nature of the groups in the present party conflict. It is charged that our tendency, which is in the forefront of the struggle to correct the Stalinophobe tendencies now so manifest in a section of the party leadership, consists of despairing, pessimistic petty-bourgeois types. Were that true, the party’s future would be grim indeed. It would be wrecked on the rocks of Third Campism. Past history and present facts, however, tell an absolutely different story.
It was important sections of rank and file militants in the UAW who were the first to resist the red-baiting witch-hunt instigated in the union by the reformist labor bureaucracy at the behest of the State Department. They knew by class instinct that Reuther’s program was aimed at smashing the traditional democracy and militancy of their union. It was the worker-revolutionists of our party in Michigan who first saw the class lines of this struggle in the auto union. They were determined to link up with and penetrate this movement regardless of Stalinist participation in it. But here they encountered the resistance of a section of the leadership which had become a transmission belt for alien class influences into the party. Fortunately the proletarian section of the party proved strong enough to counteract these pressures and save the Marxist integrity of the party. We are still fighting the same disease today, although it has become more malignant than in 1947.
Now as then, the drive to proletarianize the party goes hand in hand with the struggle against Stalinophobia. Even though countless workers are afflicted with it, Stalinophobia is essentially a petty-bourgeois poison. It destroyed Shachtman because he lacked the antidote of a proletarian base and a Marxist program. We have both—that is why we are confident that the party will overcome the dangerous wavering of a section of its leadership.
The opposition to the auto fraction’s policy was not simply an incidental difference over union tactics. In essence, although generally unrecognized at the time, it was resistance to making an important political turn required by a new world situation. Our trade union policy during the war had been a relatively easy problem to resolve: Stalinist and reformist union leaders were joined in a program of class peace; together with other militants we led the left-wing opposition. Then ensued a very brief interlude which created no end of confusion. Under great pressure from below, the reformist bureaucrats shifted to more militant actions, while the Stalinists still bound by Moscow’s remaining wartime alliances continued to preach class peace. This created a certain opposition between the Stalinists and reformists and threw us into a temporary alliance with the latter, one aspect of which was the bloc with Reuther. It appeared to some that there was a revival of the prewar situation where our main tactic in the unions was that of blocs with more progressive reformist leaders against the Stalinists. This conception went so deep that it was codified politically in Comrade Cannon’s pamphlet American Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism, which appeared a few months before the August 1947 plenum.
But the underlying reality after the war was the emergence of a powerful new labor bureaucracy, in avowed alliance with the State Department, and executors of its war preparations both at home and abroad. The underlying reality was the cold war, which was injected into the union movement by this bureaucracy and resulted in the destruction of Stalinist power in the CIO, and the isolation of all radicals and left-wingers in the process.
The outlived “anti-Stalinist” line of Cannon’s pamphlet—a product of our failure to make the necessary political reorientation—was at the bottom of the resistance to the turn needed in the auto union. It became part of the vulgar “anti-Stalinism” which was to plague us repeatedly in one field after another.
The second big dispute where “fears of Stalinism” were thrust into the debate and became the determining consideration occurred over the new developments in Eastern Europe. Sometime in 1949, Comrade Cochran had come to the conclusion that because of economic, social, and political transformations, the states in the Soviet orbit of Eastern Europe could no longer be considered capitalist but had to be characterized as deformed workers’ states. He was joined in this view on the Political Committee by Comrades Hansen, Bartell, and, later on, by Wood. For a time, the discussion on the question, which was also proceeding abroad, was conducted objectively through an examination and debate as to the’ facts and events and their interpretation.
Suddenly Comrade Cannon entered the debate with the demand that an immediate plenum be called to decide the question because the conception that deformed workers’ states existed in Eastern Europe created the danger of conciliation with Stalinism and loss of faith in the Fourth International. Called to New York on short notice in February 1951, and without time to give sufficient thought to the question, the majority of the NC members voted not on the merits of the dispute but because of the fears Comrade Cannon had induced in them.
The method was a fatal one and was to create endless ideological damage and confusion. For if in fact, and according to Marxist analysis, the Eastern European states had become deformed workers’ states, and if that signified that Trotskyism had lost its reason for existence, then it was beyond our power to reverse that situation. All we could achieve by denying the facts and the Marxist analysis would be to cease being Marxists, or to retreat into an ivory tower, or both. The world congress was to demonstrate later how the events of the countries of Eastern Europe, their transformation into deformed workers’ states, was a vindication of Trotskyism, although not in the form we had predicted before the war.
This great work of Marxist analysis was to be of little aid to Comrade Cannon and a majority of the committee in arriving at a correct position. Motivated by subjective considerations, they shifted helplessly from one position to another, entirely too confused to be committed to paper or explained openly to the membership. They emerged from one of the most significant discussions in the history of world Trotskyism not with a political line but with a mental reservation.
Six months after the decision had been so definitively taken by the plenum, uncertainty and the feeling that an error had been committed began to pervade a section of the leadership which had voted with the majority. To the Yugoslav developments, which had begun to shake our thinking out of traditionalist, routinist ruts, was added the overwhelming demonstration of the facts that a social transformation had occurred in Eastern Europe. In September 1950, Comrade Clarke submitted a memorandum to the Secretariat. It said, in substance, that it was false to continue to characterize the buffer zone as capitalist, but it was also wrong to say that workers’ states had been established because there had been no proletarian revolutions as in Yugoslavia and because the countries had already been absorbed into the USSR, as the Baltic countries had been in 1940.
This hybrid position, although no longer supported by Clarke, was subsequently to become the position of the Political Committee. Unmotivated and unexplained, it was less a political position than a refuge against unanswerable facts and arguments, a safe haven, it seemed, against the encroaching “dangers of Stalinism.” Comrade Cannon, who had angrily insisted in February that a position had to be reached forthwith, now became the very paragon of patience: there was no need in probing the question once again, although he was now ready to accept the hybrid stand; we could expect important developments in the international situation which would throw a new light on the question; and, in any case, comrades were still in the process of thinking through their positions.
The consequence of this erratic behavior on the part of Comrade Cannon, and the lack of political self-confidence on the part of others, was the exclusion of the membership from the privilege of participating in the discussion on the new basis and from finally deciding the question as is their right. For those who were waiting for an answer from the leadership, the whole discussion was to end on a note of confusion and disorientation. No resolution formulating the new position was presented to the 1950 convention for its consideration. Nor was a resolution, which would have reopened the discussion, presented after the convention. For nine months, the majority of the committee maintained an unbroken silence on the question. The International Secretariat resolution, to be submitted to the world congress, characterizing the Eastern European countries as deformed workers’ states (which together with the other theses and resolutions finally resolved the crisis of perspective faced by the Trotskyist movement), elicited no comment from the leadership - until September 1951.
At the very end of the Labor Day 1951 plenum of the NC, without previous warning or discussion, an amendment to the IS resolution was suddenly presented by Comrade Cannon and others, and then adopted by the majority of the committee It was the position of the previous year developed just prior to the 1950 convention: the states of Eastern Europe could no longer be considered capitalist, and therefore they had to be defended from imperialist attack, but neither were they workers’ states because they had already been absorbed into the USSR. No facts or political motivation were given to substantiate this position. What was involved was no simple factual dispute over the degree of Kremlin control in Eastern Europe but continuing fears over the dangers of Stalinist conciliationism and a continuing crisis of perspective. This was revealed by the motley bloc that voted for the resolution—among them Comrades Wright and Stevens (Paul G.), who still opposed the designation of Yugoslavia as a workers’ state. The amendment was never to officially see the light of day in the party.
The motion to accept the world congress decision on Eastern Europe at the 1952 convention was unanimously adopted without any opposition, abstention, or reservation from anyone, although Comrade Cannon and others have repeated again and again that they have not changed their position. A more bankrupt, disoriented method of resolving political questions, which was to reappear again in the discussion of the world congress, and to seriously distort the political thinking of many comrades, had not been known in the whole previous history of the Political Committee.
The Third World Congress was a landmark in the history of world Trotskyism. It was to inaugurate a reorientation in outlook and a change in tactics probably as significant as the turn toward the formation of a new international proposed by Trotsky in 1934 after Hitler had 4aken power in Germany. A crisis of perspective had begun to develop in our movement internationally with the close of the Second World War and particularly with the advent of the cold war. It manifested itself in the struggles and splits in England and France and in the form of the Morrow-Goldman tendency here. But neither the nature of the crhis nor its solution vras immediately apparent.
It remained for the developments in Kastern Europe, the Yugoslav events, and finally for the Third Chinese Revolution to pose the question in all its sharpness and clarity. That what was involved was not some abstract theoretical problem but the fate of our movement itself was demonstrated by the catastrophe that had overtaken our Chinese comrades. Mired by outdated slogans and conceptions, they failed to recognize the ’Ihird Chinese Revolution when it happened, viewing it as another betrayal of the 1925-27 variety, and were left completely on the sidelines in the midst of the greatest upheaval since the Russian October. (In answer to those who speak of the difficulties of participating in a Stalinist-led movement, we can only say with Trotsky that a correct policy does not guarantee victory, but without it defeat is inevitabla) These events precipitated an international discussion which lasted over two years and culmiaated in the Third World Congress.
The Third Congress refined and readjusted our conceptions of the role of Staliaist parties in the light of the Yugoslav and Chinese developments. It analyzed the course of events after the outbreak of the Korean War as being one of rapid drift to World War III between two hostile class camps; it excluded the possibility of any lasting deal between the Kremlin and imperialism; it predicted that the new war—which imperialism would have to unleash without first being able to smash the colonial revolutions and the revolutionary workers’ movements—would quickly take the form of an international civil war. In view of this irreversible trend and the effects it would have on the workers’ movement, the congress called for a reorientation of outlook for the International as a whole and for a reorientation of tactics for an important section of the world movement. Perhaps the chief significance of the congress was that it had ceased to be the prisoner of outlived formulas, of “museum relics,” and had readjusted itself, in true Leninist fashion, to the new world reality.
Unfortunately the congress failed to make any deep impression on an important section of our leadership. A few among them who had a glimmer of its profound meaning drew back in fear at the dangers of “conciliation to Stalinism” they thought might arise as a result. To this day, two years after the discussion on the congress began, important party leaders are still asking: “Why are the resolutions of the Third Congress more important than those of any other congress?” “What is all this nonsense about reorientation and rearmament?” “What have these decisions to do with us in the U. S. anyway?"
The discussion and handling of the world congress resolutions was a pathetic demonstration of political ineptitude and confusion. After two PC sessions in February and March 1951, devoted to the question, which were marked chiefly by doubts, hesitation, disagreement, the committee emerged neither for nor against but with a series of mental reservations. These were catalogued under the title “Contributions to the Discussion on International Perspectives.” Because of strong criticism of it by Clarke and Cochran, demonstrating its untenable position, this document, also, was never to see the light of day, although it was actually mimeographed and had been sent to the members of the NC. (We are appending to this article the sole statement of position to emerge from the majority, entitled “Contributions to the Discussion on International Perspectives,” and Clarke’s reply.) Its authors never proposed its adoption by the PC, nor was it presented to the Labor Day 1951 plenum of the NC which voted without discussion to adopt the general line of the world congress, together with the above-mentioned amendment on Eastern Europe. As in the discussion on Eastern Europe, the membership was again to suffer most from this fumbling, maneuverist method of the PC in handling big political questions. Deprived of the opinions of its leadership, and naturally unclear as to the actual significance of the world congress orientation, there was to be no serious, organized discussion in the ranks as a whole until Comrade Clarke’s tour, that is, one year after the main document for the world congress had been issued in an internal bulletin.
The confusion in the leadership was never to be cleared up in an organized way. The mental reservations, incorporated in “The Contributions, etc.," were never to be confronted directly by the PC or NC as a body, and have persisted to this day and these self-same false concepts are smuggled in repeatedly, even though its authors lacked the courage to defend the position when it was under consideration. Clarke’s report in October 1951 upon his return to the enlarged PC (including those attending the Trotsky School) was met with a round of objections of the same order as those which had been presented at the first discussion eight or nine months before, although in the meantime the NC had formally gone on record approving the general line. There was an outcry in the meeting on the part of Cannon and others when Clarke proposed that the committee should now strongly recommend the congress decisions to the party in its own name as a decisive reorientation of the world movement, and urge the branches to make these decisions the central axis of discussion and education for the entire ensuing period. It was contended that this proposal would gag members of the committee from expressing their differences which they had a right to do until a convention passed a definitive decision. A bare motion was then adopted accepting the report and submitting the world congress documents to membership discussion.
That the clamor for discussion in the committee at this late date was only a means of withholding the authority and wholehearted support of the committee from the world congress decisions, was to be proved by the failure of any member of the committee to come forth with a single word of criticism, orally or in writing, in the ten subsequent months which included the party preconvention discussion. The same silence prevailed when the NC and later the convention were to be presented with a resolution which hailed the congress resolutions and accepted all of them unreservedly and without amendment.
The struggle over the unaltered mental reservations of the leading comrades on the NC was to continue in the form of uninterrupted conflicts and friction in the weekly paper staff and sometimes in the PC over the line and approach to be taken to events in our propaganda. Politics, not psychology, explains the atmosphere and the relationships on the Political Committee. How could it be any different when the party and the press are being directed by that group of comrades who consider it indispensable to present and defend their mental reservations to a line they have formally adopted against those who completely agree with and fully understand this line?
Trotsky long ago pointed out that a deficiency in theory would eventually corrode the entire political organism. Shachtman’s evolution, and later Johnson’s, proved his point to the hilt. What he meant was that without correct theory the basic guarantee for correctly orienting policy in sharp turns and resisting alien pressures would be lost. In that case, even if the leadership succeeded empirically and by instinct in arriving at the correct position, it would constantly face the danger of defections in the ranks and in the leadership among those left politically unprepared, or falsely prepared, and who do not find in these empirical motivations a strong enough shield to resist alien pressure.
It is undoubtedly true that the tradition of the 1940 struggle with the petty-bourgeois opposition acts as a powerful antidote to Stalinophobe degenerations, and has tended to prevent this disease from assuming malignant form. It is because of this tradition also that we are confident that the party will succeed in correcting these dangerous tendencies now manifest in a section of the leadership. But it must not be forgotten that tradition is no permanent guarantee; an important section of the ranks entered the party after the split; and even more important is the fact that while the principles on which the 1940 struggle was waged remain essentially sound, the perspectives upon which it was based have since been altered by the unexpected turn of world events.
Two important instances, which we shall cite, demonstrate how imperfect a shield tradition is in warding off the Stalinophobe mode of thought in formulating party policy on big questions; and how confusion in theory spells disaster in formulating current policies.
l. The Korean War. The first reaction of the weekly paper, operating under the immediate direction of the PC, to the Korean War was a Third Camp position calling down a plague on both houses, the Kremlin and American imperialism. Our position was not dissimilar from that of the POUM and the Yugoslav CP, and not too far from that of the Shachtmanites. Now, the Korean War was the first big postwar crisis, testing all prior conceptions. It proved forthwith the complete fallacy of Cannon’s basic contention that the main danger came from tendencies toward “conciliation with Stalinism.” On the contrary, under the great pressures of the moment, the first inclination of the PC was a position that yielded in the opposite direction, toward Third Campism. It is true that the PC corrected its position in a relatively brief time under pressure of protests from leading comrades. But the fact remains that a semi-Shachtmanite position was taken. That should have been a warning signal, a cause for great concern in a leadership desirous of avoiding such pitfalls in the future. What was needed was not hollow “self-criticism,” but a reevaluation of the false criteria which had dominated the previous debates, and which was the principal source of the present error. That opportunity was to come in the most favorable way in the shape of the world congress resolutions which were presented as a collective product reorienting strategic conceptions without passing judgment on previous positions or errors. But the opportunity was to go unheeded. A majority of the committee reacted to the world congress just as they had to Eastern Europe, as though the mistake on Korea had never occurred, still worried about the main danger of “softness” to Stalinism.
2. The theory of the progressive character of the anti-Stalinism of the American workers. This theory pervades the thinking of a large number of comrades, it provides the Leit-motif for the position and tone of the weekly paper, it is often the determining consideration for tactical conclusions. It is based on two essentially false conceptions: First, that the workers, or an important section of them, are not opposed to the Stalinists as Communists but because of their record of wartime betrayals and bureaucratic rule in the unions. Second, that the opposition of the workers to the Soviet Union is not necessarily an opposition to communism or socialism but to forced labor, concentration camps, purges, frame-up trials, etc. (We discount the opportunist notion as alien to all our conceptions that we should seek through anti-Stalinism to buy legality for ourselves.) From these conceptions, there is derived the conclusion that if we are to maintain contact with the American worker, if we are to gain his ear for our propaganda, we must ever be preoccupied with avoiding being “tarred with the brush of Stalinism,” that we must go out of our way to “differentiate” ourselves from it, that we must even pass up opportunities in Stalinist circles if such a tactic could associate us in any way with Stalinism in the eyes of the so-called average militant worker.
It would take almost as many pages as we have already written to detail the incidents in which this conception of “antiStalinism” has been the deciding factor; in fact, most of the disputes in the PC for the last year or more revolved around this disputed question. We shall limit ourselves here to a few of these incidents. (We shall also publish the views of Comrade Trotsky on this question as he set them forth in his 1940 discussion on the question of granting critical support to Brow6er, then CP candidate for president.)
a. The prosecutions against the Stalinist leaders. The party and the press had taken a magnificent position in the first Foley Square trial, in which defense of the Stalinists was joined with a direct appeal to the CP for a united front. That action, culminating in the Bill of Rights conference in 1949, far from leading to any Stalinist conciliationism, constituted one of the most telling blows we had struck against the Stalinist bureaucrats in years, leading to a split between them and their entire intellectual periphery on the question of the principles of the struggle against the witch-hunt. But by the time the second trial of the Stalinist leaders occurred, a new position, never formally adopted but apparently taken for granted as policy, had edged out the old one. The weekly paper practically buried the news of the arrests and trials, and this was deliberate policy—not an oversight. When Comrade Clarke inquired at a PC meeting in the fall of 1951 for the reasons of this neglect, the reply was given by Comrade Hansen to the effect that the arrests had been deliberately underplayed in order to avoid antagonizing or frightening prospective readers of the weekly paper whom we were then approaching in a sub campaign.
b. The Rosenberg case.125 For almost an entire year, the weekly paper remained completely silent on this case which has since become the cause celebre of the witch-hunt. To our shame, the first recognition of the case appeared in the weekly paper (in the form of an editorial written by Comrade Clarke) after even the prowar Jewish Daily Forward had registered its protest. This position, still to be handled gingerly later on, was taken after months of evasion, first of a proposal by Comrade Breitman to publicize the case, and much later of Comrade Clarke, and then only on a strong demand from the ranks. But before this stand was to be taken, a comrade in the New York Local who had raised the question in his branch was told by Comrade Hansen that the Rosenberg case was a spy case and we didn’t want to get mixed up in it. Others expressing the same point of view in the ranks declared it to be an issue involving GPU agents with whom we had nothing in common. Throughout the country, comrades remarked bitterly that the week the Supreme Court refused to hear the Rosenberg appeal, the weekly paper relegated that news to an editorial while splashing the story of Kutcher’s threatened eviction all over the front page. Without any damage whatever to the Kutcher story, it could well have taken second place to the Rosenberg news that week. If the resistance of the weekly paper editors and a section of the leadership has finally been overcome, it is not because there was any change in their basic attitude, but partly because their position had become untenable (even Labor Action was protesting on the Rosenberg case) and partly because of the exigencies of the internal struggle.
c. Propaganda about Stalinism. Most of the time our propaganda about Stalinism is practically incoherent, lacking in the most elementary pedagogical qualities so necessary in these days of unabated witch-hunt and threatening war when the entire press and all organs of bourgeois public opinion are screaming about Stalinism at the top of their lungs. Our only concern seems to be to attack the Stalinists wherever possible without second thought as to the new circumstances under which this attack has to be made and to the consequent methods to be employed. Our purpose seems to be to distinguish ourselves from the Stalinists—period. The trouble with this method is that very often either the distinction cannot be understood, or the distinction between us and the bourgeois anti- Stalinists gets lost in a flood of invective, epithet, and incomprehensible characterizations.
The tone for this blunderbuss approach was set in Comrade Cannon’s pamphlet The Road to Peace. Nobody can tell—not even Cannon himself—to whom that pamphlet is directed. If its main direction is toward “militant nonpolitical workers,” as he claims, that would require convincing them first of all that America’s aims in the war are counterrevolutionary and imperialist, that U. S. “democracy” can in no sense be considered the “lesser evil" to Stalinist totalitarianism. On the contrary, one would think from the advanced concepts used ("The Road to Peace: According to Lenin and According to Stalin") that it is directed toward the rank and file Stalinists. If that were the case, it completely misses the mark. The attitude is so fierce and unfriendly to people who mistakenly consider their movement to be genuinely fighting imperialism, and being persecuted by it, as to cause them to drop the pamphlet before reading the second paragraph. The only, conclusion one can come to is that it was written for the party membership—another case of excessive preoccupation with mythical Stalinist “dangers” in our ranks.
Because of Stalinophobe considerations, the press fails completely to make itself intelligible precisely to the average nonpolitical militant. Sometimes the weekly paper seems a throwback to the thirties when we were arguing politics in a radical and pro-Marxist movement; other times it returns to the approach of the People’s Front or World War II period of alliance of Stalinism with the State Department. But it is rarely adjusted to the present, i.e., to the cold war between the two class camps.
For some comrades the question boils down to one of a “hard” or “soft" tone on Stalinism. If only life or politics were that simple! Obviously, the intent is hard. It is to destroy Stalinism as a contender for leadership of the radical vanguard of the workers, to disintegrate that movement from within to our own advantage. But the method is determined by objective circumstances, nationally and internationally, by the level of political development of the workers, by the question of whether Stalinism or the proimperialist bureaucracy is the main enemy at the moment. Every season has its vegetable—but for us that vegetable is never Stalinophobia!
Let us return to the concept of the “progressive anti-Stalinism” of the workers, because all of the positions cited above, and many more, would be justified if such a sentiment actually existed among the masses. The entire conception is a myth, a product of wishful thinking all too prevalent in the leadership of the party. The American workers in their vast majority, unfortunately, are anticommunist not anti-Stalinist. Stalinist crimes have simply made it easier for the rulers to inculcate the masses with hysterical antagonism to communism. If any sizable section of the workers in the unions were basically motivated in their opposition to the Stalinists by the wartime betrayals of the CP and its bureaucratic methods primarily, then we or some other progressive anti-Stalinist grouping, would have replaced the Stalinists as the leadership of the left wing. On the contrary, the fact that a reformist bureaucracy, tarred with the brush of the same crimes, could eliminate the Stalinists and rise to unchallenged domination over the unions indicated that this type of progressive anti-Stalinism was not widespread. Moreover, in “left-wing” unions (such as the UE; the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers; the ILWU) or left-wing locals, notably Ford Local 600, the progressives have continued to work with the Stalinists, and primarily because they consider the main danger coming from the side of the State Department lackeys, and not the American agency of the Kremlin—and they are correct!
The existence of “progressive anti-Stalinist” sentiments among broad masses is revealed to be an even greater myth in the realm of decisive class questions. This should be obvious to anyone with even the most general understanding of the political history of the American working class. It is embarrassing to have to repeat elementary truths to those who should know better. The American workers, outside a tiny segment, have no experience whatever with the struggle of working class parties for leadership of the mass movement. They have not yet been confronted with this problem because they have not reached the stage of class consciousness of rejecting capitalist politics, let alone of rejecting capitalism in favor of socialism. Representatives of radical parties have at times been accepted in the leadership of the mass movement, hut always on the basis of a superior minimum program, or because of their special qualities of leadership, but never because of support of their socialist ideology. This was also seen in Minneapolis during the time of the heyday of our influence in the union movement there.
“Progressive anti-Stalinism” does exist in England and is based on the anticapitalist consciousness of the working class as a whole. It is demonstrated by the fact that the workers in their revolt against the right wing of the Labour Party have turned to the left Social Democrat Bevan and not to the Communist Party. It is further demonstrated by the relative absence of any witch-hunting or red-baiting in the British labor movement. This does not mean that the “progressive anti-Stalinism” in England is free of all political backwardness, because the British workers are just beginning to experience the conflict between reformism and revolutionary politics. The British comrades understand this situation perfectly, and for that reason Socialist Outlook is the best product of revolutionary working class journalism in the entire international workers’ movement. The reason is not because they use smaller words or shorter sentences than we do in our paper, but because they understand their own working class, they know its problems and preoccupations and address their propaganda to that movement and not to some mythical conception of the proletariat concocted in an editorial office. We could do worse than to drop some of our false pride and hollow boasting and learn something from the English experience.
“The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” If this progressive anti-Stalinism really existed as a current, it would show up in the growth of the anti-Stalinist parties. The 1952 election returns were a remarkable demonstration of the contrary. The insignificant vote received by all the radical parties combined indicated that the masses, even in their confused opposition to the Korean War, remained anticommunist and made no distinction between treacherous Stalinism, the SP’s State Department socialism, sectarian De Leonism, and the revolutionary Marxism of the SWP. If they had made such distinctions on a mass basis, we would now be faced with the beginnings of great social struggles. The relatively stable social base upon which our ruling class rests, and which is its chief asset in its drive to war, is built upon anticommunism, not progressive anti-Stalinism.
Moreover, none of the pseudosocialist groups, assuming that our revolutionary socialism is still too advanced for the masses, have benefitted from this so-called progressive anti-Stalinism. The SP and the Shachtmanites, who made this conception the focal point of their political orientation, are now recording the results in their own virtual liquidation. Basing themselves upon “progressive anti-Stalinism” signified for these tendencies an adaptation to the most backward prejudices of the masses and to the logical next step, conciliation or capitulation to the imperialist camp in the U. S. which now encompasses virtually all of the anti-Stalinists outside of the radical movement. The evolution of these groups should be a warning signal to us of the terrible consequences of adaptation to the political backwardness of the masses based on wishful thinking about the prevalence of “progressive anti-Stalinism.” We have no magic protection that exempts us, when following a false course, from political degeneration, either in the direction of adaptation to imperialism or sectarian Third Campism. Our only armor is our revolutionary program and strategy based upon a realistic Marxist conception of the world as it is, not as we would like it to be.
Stalinophobia has led the Shachtmanites and others to a conciliatory position toward imperialist public opinion. Our tradition and training against this type of conciliationism is still so powerful that it has effectively barred this path of development and produced instead an opposite tendency - the tendency to petrification in the sphere of Marxist thought and to turning one’s back on the real world and its struggles and lineups, and finding refuge in a revolutionary ivory tower. That is why the question of the independence of the party was artificially pushed to the fore and is discussed in a vacuum, removed from time, place, circumstances, and converted into a mystique—to which all the disoriented, confused, and bewildered can cling.
Whence the big furor about this question today? With the formlessness and lack of precision with which they pose all questions, Cannon and the others first attempted to make the “independence of the party” the main axis of the discussion at the May 1952 plenum, and it remained one of the main themes of his July convention speech. Originally it was the corollary of the slanderous accusation that Clarke and others wanted to orient toward or liquidate into the Stalinist movement. When this charge, made out of the whole cloth, wore itself pretty thin, it was discreetly shoved into the background. Today, Dobbs-Stein-Hansen trot out the second version of the “independent party.” It is the question of the hour, we are informed, not because we are trying to liquidate into the Stalinist movement, but because we have “lost faith” in the party, and we want to convert it into a propaganda group. We propose to leave the vagaries of “faith” to the medicine men, and to get down to politics.
Let us address ourselves to the fundamental problem. At the risk of shocking some, let us restate a few truths that have been generally accepted in our movement until recently. Are we a party? Yes and no. That is, we are not a party as Marxists have understood this term as a relationship to the two fundamental classes in society; neither the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat recognizes us as such; our positions on important political questions are either unknown or considered of little importance to either class; we are unable to mobilize or lead the class or any significant section of it except in accidental or isolated incidents, and then usually as one of the participants in a broader movement. In fact, despite our election campaigns, we still remain unknown to the class as a whole (and election campaigns alone are not the panacea to becoming a party, as fifty years of SLP election campaigning proves).
It is still necessary when introducing the SWP to a new contact to distinguish it, at his request as a rule, from the CP and the SP, indicating that while they have made a certain impression on him as political parties, we have not. We have no nationally known trade union leader with the popularity of Bill Haywood or even Harry Bridges, no well known political figure like a Debs or even a Norman Thomas, with whom the masses can easily identify the party. Like it or not, we are still the “Trotskyists” to that segment of the workers who know us, i.e., a political tendency distinguished from others primarily by our ideas. Through no fault of our own we are a party in the nature of our program, and our intentions and hopes, but not yet in fact.
Are we then a propaganda group? Yes and no. We are a propaganda group in that we must still recruit a sizable section of the vanguard of the class without which we cannot become a party. Above alt, we are still engaged in a struggle with other tendencies for influence over the workers’ vanguard. It is pure self-deception to believe that the struggle has already been won. The chief factor in the decline or disappearance of this or that rival organization has been the impact of reaction-prosperity, not the triumph of our ideas in the workers’ movement. The struggle of tendencies has not been settled in our favor or anyone else’s, but merely postponed to the next onset of social crisis.
We are not a propaganda group because where possible, in accordance with the opportunities provided by the objective situation, and in keeping with a realistic appraisal and proper disposal of our own forces, we attempt and should attempt to act as a party. We are not a propaganda group in that we assert our right and our qualifications from the point of view of record, program, and cadres to fulfilling the role of a party. This contradiction between our political aims and our physical and historical limitations, between our will to be a party and the reality of our present forces, is best demonstrated by the tactic of “caution” we are obliged to follow in the unions.
Were we a full-fledged party, we would today follow a carefully planned course of defensive combat in the unions which would lead undoubtedly to certain victimizations but would at the same time be compensated by the class education of certain sections of the workers’ vanguard, many of whom would be probably won over to the party. But because our numbers are so limited, i.e., because we are essentially a propaganda group, we cannot in the main pursue such a line because, for one, we lack the influence to carry it out, and secondly, any important victimizations can lead to the total elimination of our forces from the unions.
Now, all of this is elementary, and has always been considered ABC in our movement. Even in the flush of our greatest progress, the watchword of the 1946 convention was “From a Propaganda Group to a Party of Mass Action.” We did not make the grade in real life—through no fault of our own. But obviously we did make the grade in some people’s dreams.
Ordinarily, the question of the independence of the party arises when someone proposes to liquidate it as Stalin did in the case of the Chinese Communist Party in 1924 into the Kuomintang, or as Browder did into the Democratic People’s Front coalition during the Second World War. Even the crazy Oehlerites rested on some concrete ground when they set up a howl about the “independence of the party” because Cannon-Shachtman proposed - entirely correctly—an orientation, and later, an entry into the Socialist Party. But no one has made any proposals in our party vaguely relevant to this subject. How is one to deal with this will-o’-the-wisp, unless we decide to completely abandon the ground of Marxism in favor of an unrestrained search for motives, and of psychoanalysis? But Cannon’s making the “independence of the party” one of the main planks of his faction platform has nevertheless a logic of its own. It tends to strengthen the tendencies toward sectarian ossification, especially observable in the changing attitude on the labor party question.
The independence of the party is conditioned and limited by what has presumably been our common perspective of the rise of a labor party. The labor party is not just a good slogan for the day; it is a strategic orientation based upon the most probable course of development of the working class to independent politics through the unions, and not over the unions directly to a revolutionary party. In saying this, we are merely paraphrasing one of our own amendments now in the political resolution. No one can today foretell whether the SWP will have to “liquidate” into the labor party as our comrades were obliged to do in England, whether we will be able to enter the labor party as a recognized party, or whether we will retain formal independence while operating through a left wing from within the labor party. Speculation on this point should be left to armchair philosophers. Yet there has been a great deal of nervousness on this question. From some of the comments made, it almost seems as though the party were doomed unless all shared a crystal ball conception of the future; a perspective isn’t enough, it has to be a blueprint measured out with slide-rule specifications.
Because of the slow maturity of the American workers to political consciousness, the party leadership has not yet been put to the test of a concrete practical application of the labor party strategy. Different approaches to this question have remained mostly in embryonic form. The labor party has been the main emphasis for the trade unionists, for that part of the ranks and leadership most clearly linked to the working class. But for Comrade Cannon and others, the labor party has in recent years been a minor theme, a temporary expedient, perhaps a good slogan for the moment but strictly subordinate to the doctrinaire pronouncement of the SWP as the coming leadership of the masses and of the revolution.
The years of reaction have demonstrated how false and sectarian this approach was, as it would have been equally demonstrated had the period of upsurge in labor struggles continued. The defensive actions of the labor movement against the Taft-Hartley Act put the question of independent labor politics back on the agenda. A split between the unions and the Democratic Party was narrowly averted by Truman turning the helm of his party sharply in the direction of “laborism.” In that situation the PC correctly oriented its strategy and tactics not according to the conception of the coming primacy of the SWP in the workers’ movement, but rather in line with its labor party position and on the slogan of the congress of labor as its vehicle.
As reaction deepened in the country, and domestic conflicts were overshadowed by the cold war, a sectarian approach to the labor party and its corollary of illusions about the SWP became more marked. It remained for Comrade Dobbs, in a letter to the PC from Chicago on November 29, 1951, to elaborate an election campaign strategy based upon a perspective which practically excluded the labor party from our program.
“I believe such wrong thinking arises in part from our one-sided treatment of the labor party question. We confine ourselves too exclusively to agitation for a labor party. We go off balance by failing to give sufficient explanationto the membership that, although one can argue the probability of a labor party development, it is not an indispensable step to the formation of a mass revolutionary party.
“We should explain that we advocate the building of a labor party at this stage because it would help speed mass radicalization. However, the absence of a labor party obviously does not prevent the sharpening of class antagonisms under the impact of the imperialist war program; instead it tends to create a political vacuum of which we should take full advantage.
“Class antagonisms are bound to grow sharper and sharper. The longer the union bureaucrats block the formation of a labor party, the greater the political vacuum will become, and the more opportunity we will have to recruit workers directly into our party.
“We will thus be so much the stronger for the task of entering the labor party, if it comes, and speeding its transition to a mass revolutionary party. And if the rise of a labor party should be long delayed, it is not excluded that the American workers might leap over, very quickly if not entirely, that intermediate stage of their radicalization."
Comrade Cannon immediately seized upon this letter, proposed that the PC (December 11, 1951) adopt its general line and that he be instructed to write a series of articles in the weekly paper based upon them. The proposal was withdrawn, after objections by Clarke, who declared that such letters could not serve as the substitute for a political resolution giving our rounded views on American developments and party strategy in the light of the analysis of the Third World Congress and the new realities of the objective situation in the U. S. Cannon had withdrawn his motion, but not his support of the line in Dobbs’ letter. He was to present it in his first version of the political resolution by the omission of all reference to the labor party. When we protested, he said the point was of small moment and it could be added to the resolution if we insisted.
This omission was not an oversight, as is now explained, but part of a political line Nor was it correct to say, in extenuation for this omission, that the political resolution was to serve merely as a guide for the elections. (Even there it was a vital question as our election campaign would have been reduced to a vacuous SLPism without the labor party conception and the labor party slogan.) Far from it. The document essayed a statement of the fundamental causes for labor’s conservatism and a prognosis of the premises for a future radicalization, an analysis that had no necessary inherent connection with the coming elections. No. The labor party was omitted because it did not easily fit into the author’s sectarian conceptions of the role of the SWP. This was made clear from Cannon’s line in his plenum and later convention report on the political resolution, in which the labor party orientation had now been incorporated as an amendment of Clarke’s. The burden of his remarks on the point was a fear (always phobias!) that we might have to liquidate like the British into a labor party. We were not, he emphasized, “a holding operation for the labor party.” We were to guard against this “danger” by telling ourselves that the SWP would become a party of some tens of thousands of members in the first period of the social crisis and thus be strong enough to dictate terms of participation in the labor party, or to tell its bureaucrats to go to hell.
This is a symptomatic manifestation of sectarianism which, growing essentially out of lack of confidence in program, shuts its eyes to the reality of the workers’ movement and its complicated forms of evolution. In trying to construct another image of the reality more to its own liking, it creates a conception of the party as an end in itself instead of the catalyst within the mass. It discards Lenin’s idea of the party as the fighting instrument which, because of its program, experience, and cadres, can successfully penetrate the mass movement, as it is, provide leadership to those currents among the workers farthest to the left, and thus create the force, integrally tied to the mass, that will become the party and leadership of the American revolution.
Dobbs-Stein-Hansen put the issue falsely when they speak of “independent party versus propaganda group.” Correctly posed, the difference is between their developing conception of the party as an institutionalized sect against ours of a fighting instrument, using propaganda or agitation, as required by the times, for the penetration and leadership of the real workers’ movement.
We, for our part, are not frightened by the prospect of a labor party - yes, even if it fails to assume the “pure” English class forms—nor by the possibility that the Trotskyists may have to go through many complicated stages to establish their alliance with the left wing of the labor party, and ultimately their leadership of it. We believe that the labor party will constitute such a drastic break in the traditional American class pattern that it will become a tremendous revolutionizing force in this country regardless of who leads the labor party or even its left wing in the first stages. That is what is decisive, and that is what will provide us with our greatest opportunity if we know how to recognize the reality and take advantage of it. If Marxism is to serve as a guide to action, not as a sterile dogma, then it must not view history as a succession of optimum perspectives, as a repetition of the Russian “norm” (which was not at all a “norm” at the time), it must not nourish illusions about pure forms of working class evolution. Other- wise, we might as well throw dialectics out the window and write a copybook of perfect formulas and maxims.
At the bottom of this tendency, already sprouting like bad weeds in the much-advertised Los Angeles sunshine, and being transplanted elsewhere, is a terrible pessimism about the future, and a lack of confidence that the Marxist program can sustain the party cadres in a period of reaction. Alongside the fear that the Fourth International will not survive its tactic of entry into Stalinist and Social Democratic movements, is the fear that the SWP will succumb if it takes the labor party perspective too seriously. The movement, according to this conception, has to be kidded, important truths have to be left unsaid or sweetened to make them palatable, illusions have to be encouraged while the analysis of the reality is discouraged or labeled “pessimism” lest the party membership becomes de- moralized or falls by the wayside. We leave aside the fact that Carlson, Charles, Mills, were not saved by this magic formula. We turn instead to Leon Trotsky for an accurate description of the method:
“It is difficult,” he wrote, “to plumb the depths of the theoretical debacle of those who seek in a program not for a scientific basis for their class orientation hut for moral consolation. Consoling theories which contradict facts pertain to the sphere of religion and not science, and religion is opium for the people."
Trotsky was writing in Third International After Lenin about Comintern leaders who considered the theory of socialism in one country “unfounded” but thought “it provides the Russian workers with a perspective in the difficult conditions under which they labor and thus gives them courage.” What would he have thought of leaders who advance a perspective based on wishful thinking to maintain “morale,” not even among the working class as a whole, but among the vanguard of the vanguard which, for almost a quarter of a century, has been undauntedly cultivating the ideas of Marxism in the most inhospitable political soil in the entire world?
Seeing the record, some may say.’ “Dobbs and Cannon made a mistake, but they adopted your proposal and corrected it. Your labor party amendment was incorporated into the resolution and accepted, the labor party slogan was one of the main propaganda themes of the election campaign, and the question as such was treated at length in one of Comrade Cannon’s speeches in Los Angeles. The problem is therefore already resolved.” Unfortunately, this does not exhaust the question. What this thinking fails to note, is that those who attempted to correct the labor party position were first roundly abused as “pessimists” and “liquidators.” And after the correction was made, those who had been wrong have redoubled their attacks against those whose position they accepted. A line is guaranteed not merely by what is written down on paper, but by how the differences over it are resolved and by the relationships established among those who had been in disagreement. As an illustration: The “Troika” (Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev) accepted Trotsky’s line on party democracy in 1924. But then they redoubled the offensive against him for other reasons, i.e., the defense of the “old guard” and “Bolshevism” against Trotsky’s “Menshevism,” etc. In the end there was no party democracy.
The “independence of the party” school has succeeded as its first accomplishment in blurring, if not actually disfiguring, our broad political perspective as it relates to the labor party question. Their sectarian “achievements" in the field of practical day-to-day tactics have been even more immediate According to the Dobbs-Stein-Hansen manifesto, we are guilty of “an exaggerated estimate of the possibilities of opponents work.” Naturally, they disdain to demonstrate their accusation. Behind this charge, however, there appears again the cloven hoof of sectarianism, as we will demonstrate from the record.
As far back as December 1948, the political resolution adopted by the NC plenum predicted that the poor showing made by Wallace in the national elections would create a crisis in the Progressive Party. The NC decided to “organize a planned campaign toward winning over the best elements in this movement.” This campaign was to be “specifically directed to the Stalinist workers and students who had hoped for a return by the CP to an independent class and revolutionary policy after the Browder purge.” Little was done to implement the resolution, partly because of Stalinophobe inhibitions and partly because of plain political lethargy.
By the fall of 1951, it became apparent that we had long been asleep while the crisis of Stalinism, predicted in 1948, had been steadily maturing all the time. The experiences of the 1951 councilmanic elections in New York brought this development into bold relief.
On January 8, 1952, Comrade Bartell proposed to the PC, therefore, that we direct special attention to this movement in New York; that a group of comrades be sent into the ALP to take advantage of the split between Marcantonio and the Stalinists; that our false characterization of the Progressive Party (the ALP in New York) as a capitalist party be changed (particularly now that Wallace and the bourgeois wing had left the party); that under certain circumstances, where ALP candidates ran independently, we grant them critical support; that we propose united-front actions against the war and the witch-hunt.
At the same time it had been noted that the Stalinoid grouping around the Huberman-Sweezy magazine, the Monthly Review, was showing clear signs of conflict with the CP leadership, and a tendency toward independence from them. There had been a public controversy between Bittelman (the CP leader) and the Monthly Review editors over Yugoslavia and over economic problems in this country. They had published a letter (written on their invitation) of Comrade V. R Dunne in memoriam to the writer Matthiessen. At a large open forum, attended by 300-400 persons, Comrade Clarke took the floor to attack the “coexistence” theory and was well received. It was proposed in the PC that more attention be paid this grouping and that we attempt to contribute articles in discussions conducted in their magazine.
All these attempts were met with suspicion, hostility, resistance. Bartell’s proposals were flatly rejected in a subsequent PC meeting. But three months later, virtually all of the proposals made by Bartell were written as amendments by Comrade Clarke to the political resolution and then accepted by Comrades Cannon and Stein! Their acceptance, however, was a mere formality as is revealed by the present Dobbs-Stein-Hansen document which returns now, despite the political resolution, to the suspicion, hostility, and resistance of the fall of 1951. Another example of what happens when the program of critics is adopted but the struggle against the critics is intensified.
Meanwhile, life provided a test of the differing conceptions. The approach of the 1952 elections brought on a new crisis in the Stalinist ranks, this time over the “lesser evil” theory. Marcantonio, far from capitulating to imperialism as Cannon had predicted, led the fight in the ALP against the liberal protagonists of the “lesser evil” theory in the ALP and their secret allies in the CP leadership. We succeeded in participating in this controversy with articles stating our point of view and written by us as representatives of the SWP in the Compass and Monthly Review. Our comrades debated Stalinists and liberals in Compass Clubs, etc. The results of the work were good, already attracting people from that milieu to a prospering forum of the New York Local.
However we have a grand total of two people active in the ALP to utilize this opportunity. Because of the haggling, backbiting, and Stalinophobe accusations, the New York Local cannot take proper advantage today of the split inside of the ALP in the interests of our program and recruitment work. That is the end result of all sectarianism: to declaim majestically about the masses in the abstract, but to put obstacles in the path of the movement in winning masses in practice, even if it be one or two dozen as a starter, in this case.
The aftermath of the 1952 elections, which had practically decimated the Progressive Party’s electoral following, brought with it a deepening of the internal crisis in the Stalinist movement. On the one side, Foster proposed in the Daily 1Vorker that the party be dissolved and its members enter the Democratic Party to lay the basis for a new third party formation. On the other side, Huberman attributed its failure to the lack of a socialist program, saying that without such a program the party had no reason for existence. Marcantonio, on his side, began to rally the ALP against the Stalinist plans for dissolution, and a number of branches in New York and Chicago independently adopted resolutions to that effect. On top of this crisis of electoral policy, serious ferment in the Stalinist ranks was created by the Prague trial and the outbreak of official anti-Semitism in the Soviet orbit
Bartell catalogued these developments in his organizer’s report and proposed that the New York Local continue its attempts to intervene in this Stalinist crisis, for which, moreover, clear provision had been made in the political resolution of the 1952 National Convention. The comrades are now familiar, through reading the New York bulletins, with the infantile and sectarian opposition raised by Stevens-Ring against Bartell’s proposals. Theorized by Stevens with the vulgar Shachtmanesque formula that “Stalinism is counterrevolutionary through and through,” an opposition program was concocted to keep the party “acting like the revolutionary leadership of the masses."
When Stevens ran into trouble with his line in the New York membership, Dobbs-Stein-Hansen stepped into the picture to come to his aid. “Bartell" - they say in their document without proof but with clear intent of arousing suspicion among the innocent—"places such heavy emphasis on opponent’s work that one must ask: Is he not tending to modify our basic evaluation of the party’s character, perspectives, and tasks?” A model of diplomatic protocol, but really sectarian “through and through."
Is it “an exaggerated estimate of opponents work” to view this crisis of Stalinism as the most important in many years? Is there a modification of our basic evaluation of the party’s “character, perspectives, and tasks" to desire to intervene in this crisis and to reap whatever harvest there is for our views and our party, and thus to strike a heavier blow against Stalinism than can be done by literary assaults from afar? No, the “exaggeration" is all the other way—an exaggerated sectarianism. We recall the same type of arguments from Oehler and Abern against our approach to the Musteites and late” the SP. They too railed at “exaggerated estimates,” sneered at the size of these organizations in comparison to the mass movement in general, and predicted that there were no mass gains to be made—and from the point of view of numbers, they proved right. But had we followed their criteria, the Trotskyist movement would have perished, a hopeless sect.
There is a revision of “the evaluation of the party,” but on the side of those who, like the De Leonists, seem now to believe that we need have no further truck with other radical currents and have only to wait until the masses start to move, and naturally come to us as the most undefiled tendency of all. Meantime our swelling corps of “leaders,” for whomCapital classes have become a substitute for an understanding of the real workers’ movement, will have been readied to meet the masses in the millennial moment. Speaking of the organizational fetishism which makes a principle of independence, Comrade Cannon says to the Oehlerites in hisHistory of American Trotskyism, “You set up the principle in such a way as to make it a barrier against the tactical moves necessary to make the creation of a real party possible."
The minds of the sectarians were too rigid to understand the many detours it was necessary to take in order to travel the road of establishing our party as the independent force directly influencing the mass of the American workers. They could not begin to understand that our fusion with the Musteite American Workers Party or our entry into the Socialist Party were not in violation of our main orientation but were necessary tactical moves in order the more effectively to apply it later.
The living reality, as it will be expressed in the coming upsurge of the American workers, will be far richer, more varied, complex and unexpected than our thought can now conceive. In that moment, least of all will it suffice to be guided by the ultimatist expectation that because we alone have the correct program, therefore the masses will naturally come to us. Our “independent” orientation will seemingly be contradicted by the many new formations that will inevitably arise on the arena of the working class mass movement, and by the tactical turns we will have to make to avoid being left on the sidelines as a perfect but isolated sect. In the end, however, these tactical turns will prove to be the means of finding our way and of influencing the broad stream of the mass movement, and thus of effectuating our main orientation.
The aspect of the struggle in the party today over the attitude to be taken to Stalinist formations highlights a vast difference in method and approach. It is not and never could be a conflict between those who want to keep an independent orientation to the workers against those who want to convert the party into a propaganda group oriented toward Stalinist circles. That is either a deliberate fabrication of the issues or a wish-projection on the part of those seeking simplistic formulas to dear up their own confusion. The real issue is between the ultimatism of doctrinaire and sectarian rigidity.