US Trotskyism 1928–1965 Part II: Endurance: The Coming American Revolution

844 Pages·2019·17.34 MB·English

by  Paul Le Blanc (editor), Bryan D. Palmer (editor), Thomas Bias (editor)

US Trotskyism 1928-1965
Part II: Endurance
The Coming American Revolution
Dissident Marxism in the United States, Volume 3
Edited by
Paul Le Blanc
Bryan Palmer
Thomas Bias
Haymarket Books
Chicago, IL
First published in 2018 by Brill Academic Publishers, The Netherlands
© 2018 Koninklijke Brill NY, Leiden, The Netherlands
Published in paperback in 2019 by
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
Contents
1 Introduction: the Coming American Revolution 1
Paul Le Blanc
2 Dawn of the American Century 21
Paul Le Blanc
1 Joseph Hansen, 'March of Military Events' 27
2 Terence Phelan (Sherry Mangan), 'How Paris Fell' 43
3 John G. Wright (Joseph Vanzler), 'Class Relations in the Soviet
Union' 54
4 Marc Loris (Jean van Heijenoort), 'Europe Under the Iron Heel' 65
5 Joseph Hansen, 'On the War Fronts' 78
6 Art Preis, 'America's Sixty Families and the Nazis' 89
7 George Breitman, 'Wartime Crimes of Big Business' 102
8 James P. Cannon, 'The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki' 115
9 William F. Warde (George Novack), 'The Big Five at London' 122
1 o E.R. Frank (Bert Cochran), 'The Great Strike Wave and Its
Significance' 131
11 James P. Cannon, 'The Coming American Revolution' 144
3 Challenging Racism 159
Paul Le Blanc and Tom Bias
1 Albert Parker (George Breitman), 'The Negro March on
Washington' 162
2 Albert Parker and John Sanders (George Breitman and Arthur Burch),
'The Struggle for Negro Equality' 169
3 Carl Jackson (Edgar Keemer)-, 'The Case of Milton Henry' 209
4 Carl Jackson (Edgar Keemer), 'Government Policy on Race
Equality' 212
5 Carl Jackson (Edgar Keemer), 'How to Win the Struggle for Negro
Equality' 214
6 Robert Birchman, 'The Case of James Hickman' 224
7 Freddie Forest (Raya Dunayevskaya), 'Industrialization of the
Negro' 227
8 J. Meyer (C.L.R.James), 'Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem
in the United States' 236
9 George Breitman, 'The Bomb Murder of Harry T. Moore' 256
10 George Breitman, 'When Anti-Negro Prejudice Began' 275
VI CONTENTS
4 Dissensions 283
Paul Le Blanc
1 Felix Morrow, 'The Political Position of the Minority in the swp' 288
2 Albert Goldman, 'Minority Statement on Joining the Workers
Party' 298
3 Johnson-Forest (C.L.R.James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Grace Lee),
'State-Capitalism and the World Revolution' 303
4 [C.L.R.James ], 'The Balance Sheet Completed: Ten Years of American
Trotskyism' 327
5 Coping with the Cold War, Global and Domestic 340
Paul Le Blanc
1 James P. Cannon, 'American Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism' 343
2 James P. Cannon, 'The Treason of the Intellectuals' 383
3 E.R. Frank (Bert Cochran), 'The Kremlin's Satellite States in Eastern
Europe, Yugoslavia, Marxist Theory, and Our Perspectives' 388
4 Joseph Hansen, 'The Problem of Eastern Europe' 414
5 Li Fu-jen (Frank Glass), 'China: A World Power' 453
6 Tom Kerry, 'The Political Meaning of the CIO-AFL Merger' 464
7 James P. Cannon, 'Socialism and Democracy' 476
6 Confrontations Internal and International 488
Bryan Palmer
1 Michel Pablo, 'Where Are We Going?' 506
2 E.R. Frank (Bert Cochran), 'Notes on Our Discussion' 522
3 Michel Pablo, 'On the Duration and the Nature of the Period of
Transition from Capitalism to Socialism' 530
4 George F. Clarke, 'A Milestone in Internationalism' 538
5 Mike Bartell (Milton Zaslow), 'The New York Local - Report and
Tasks' 543
6 D. Stevens (David Weiss) and Harry Ring, 'Perspectives for the Period
Ahead' 555
7 Farrell Dobbs, 'For an Independent Party Based on a Proletarian
Orientation' 570
8 Bert Cochran and George Clarke et al., 'The Roots of the Party Crisis -
Its Causes and Solution' 596
9 Michel Pablo, 'The Post-Stalin 'New Course" 630
10 James P. Cannon, 'The Six Points of Cochranism' (Letters to Farrell
Dobbs) 640
11 Bert Cochran, 'American Tasks' 644
CONTENTS VII
12 Genora Dollinger, 'Where I Stand' 665
13 James P. Cannon, 'Internationalism and the SWP' 674
14 Socialist Workers Party National Committee, 'Against Pabloist
Revisionism' 687
15 James P. Cannon, 'The 25th Anniversary Plenum of the SWP' 720
16 George Breitman and Ernest Germain (Ernest Mandel), 'Trotskyism
vs. Pabloism': Correspondence 739
17 Sam Ryan, 'The Bolivian Revolution and the Fight Against
Revisionism' 781
Bibliography 805
Index 815
Dissident Marxism in the United States 836

CHAPTER I
Introduction: the Coming American Revolution
Paul Le Blanc
This is the second of three volumes gathering together documentary mater
ials on the us Trotskyist movement, a small but sometimes influential polit
ical current, arising out of the earlier Socialist and Communist movements. It
was a political current powerfully influenced by such global revolutionaries as
Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and especially Leon Trotsky, whose ideas the
authors of the writings presented here did their best to utilize for the purpose
of understanding and changing the world around them.1
To understand the nature of a revolutionary organization, Italian Marxist
Antonio Gramsci once speculated on how the history of such an organization
might be written. 'A simple narrative of the internal life of a political organiz
ation' - focusing on the first groups that bring it into being, 'the ideological
controversies through which its program and conception of the world' are
formed - will provide only an account of 'certain intellectual groups' or even
'the political biography of a single personality', but will not provide an adequate
understanding of the political party. To develop such an understanding, much
more is required:
The history will have to be written of a particular mass of men who have
followed the founders of the party, sustained them with their trust, loyalty
and discipline, or criticized them 'realistically' by dispersing or remain
ing passive before certain initiative&. But will this mass be made up solely
of members of the party? Will it be sufficient to follow the congresses,
the votes, etc., that is to say the whole nexus of activities and' modes of
existence through which the mass following of the party manifests its
will? Clearly it will be necessary to take some account of the social group
of which the party in question is the expression and the most advanced
element. The history of a party, in other words, can only be the history
of a particular social group. But this group is not isolated; it has friends,
kindred groups, opponents, enemies. The history of any given party can
only emerge from the complex portrayal of the totality of society and
1 See Le Blanc 2016a, and Le Blanc 2015.
2 CHAPTER 1
State (o ften with international ramifications too). Hence it may be said
that to write the history of a party means nothing less than to write the
general history of a country from a monographic viewpoint, in order to
highlight a particular aspect of it. A party will have had greater or less sig
nificance and weight precisely to the extent to which its particular activity
has been more or less decisive in determining a country's history.2
This volume provides some of the raw materials for such an account, and his
torians of the us Left may want to make use of it as they seek to develop such
historical monographs. At the same time, it could be argued that much of the
writing reproduced here can - simply taken by itself - shed some light on the
history of the United States, as well as the history of the world, with insights that
might be useful in understanding aspects of our own times, and perhaps even
future possibilities. In the first half of the period reflected here, many of the
American Trotskyists are convinced (though a growing number are beginning
to doubt) that 'the coming American revolution' is actually about to unfold, if
not already in the process of unfolding. The second half of the period covered
in this volume reflects the consequences of that failed perspective.
Many have scoffed at the very notion of a 'coming American revolution' as
a utopian delusion. At the end of his life, in 1974, James P. Cannon was inter
viewed by Sidney Lens, an independent left-wing writer and activist (a nd him
self a one-time Trotskyist ). Lens challenged: 'Do you anticipate a revolution
in America in the near future?' Cannon responded, 'It depends on what you
mean by near', and then added: 'I say anything is possible in this century in the
years that are left of it. That's 26 years'. When Lens commented that this did not
sound very optimistic, Cannon said: 'I don't want to make any categorical state
ments, but I say we're living in a time when capitalism is plunging toward its
climactic end'. To which Lens asked: 'Didn't you say that in the thirties?' Cannon
responded: 'I did, yes'. Lens: 'And in the forties?' Cannon: 'And in the forties'. At
which point Lens commented: 'I mean, that must sound like something pecu
liar when you say it every decade'. To which Cannon countered: 'But when you
stop to think, the history of humanity is a very long one, isn't it? And a quarter
of a century is only an instant in the history of the human race .... I see one
crisis piling upon another. I don't think the capitalists have ever been in such
a jam in this country as they are right now, both politically and economic
ally'. 3
2 Gramsci 1971, pp. 150-1.
3 Cannon 1974, p. 42.
INTRODUCTION: THE COMING AMERICAN REVOLUTION 3
The certainty of the coming revolution, however, seemed far more vibrant
to many in the early-to-mid-194os. The freshness of 1930s radicalism had not
yet faded, and Trotsky's prediction of militant upsurges that the Second World
War would bring still echoed, with genuine urgency, in comrades' ears. And
to those who lost heart and could no longer believe in 'the coming American
revolution', the stubborn adherents could respond that one must be guided by
'the long view of history'.
The attentive reader will note that Chapter 6 in this volume is not like the
others - it is much, much longer and includes more excerpted and abridged
material than usual. The chapter deals with a relatively momentous split in the
SWP and the Fourth International in the early 1950s - a development which
sheds much light on the nature and development of the Trotskyist move
ment, and one about which conflicting interpretations and bitter polemics
have swirled for years. Rather than devoting an entire volume to it, or offer
ing an overly truncated account, we are seeking a middle path. This is thanks
to the immense labors of Bryan Palmer, who has sought to provide a repres
entative sampling of these highly revealing documents ( of those excerpted or
abridged, most can be found in their entirety online ). Given the complexity and
centrality of this rupture, it makes sense that Bryan also presents this mater
ial with a more substantial interpretive introduction than is the case with the
other chapters. Naturally, more than one interpretation can be gleaned from
the material he presents (which is always the case with a serious historian).
Readers should bear in mind the concluding comment from the first volume of
this documentary trilogy: 'Naturally, although all of the editors share a common
sympathy for the us Trotskyist movement, there are different "takes" one or
another of us may have on both minor and major questions, and in our signed
introductions none of us presumes to speak for all of us'. That holds for all three
volumes - including the present introductory essay.
The Long View of History4
The development of American capitalism has always been intimately bound
up with international developments: from the first European explorers repres
enting the tentative probe of a rising merchant-capitalism, to the establish
ment in the Americas of the European great powers' rival colonial mercantile
4 This ,section and the next draw substantially from my essay 'Leninism in the United States
and the Decline of the Socialist Workers Party', in Breitman, Le Blanc and Wald 2016.