[1978 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the emergence…]

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1978 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the emergence of the Trotskyist movement in the United States. The Socialist Workers Party which today claims to represent that tradition offers no more than a hollow mockery of the fighting spirit of that early movement. This article is the last in a series of seven being published by Socialist Press which examine the rly history of the SWP, the party so central in the 1930s to the launching of the Fourth The BurnhamSchachtman split from the American Socialist Workers Party in 193940 revolyes around three major questionsnone of which can be separated from the others.

These are: the question of Russia; the question of the party; and the question of philosophy.

Whilst none of these facets can ultimately be separated from one another, neither can they be understood except by initially examining them in turn.

Background

First it is necessary to give a little background information participants.

James Burnham, a professor of philosophy, had come into the Trotskyist movement in 1934 when the Communist League fused with the American Workers Party to form the Workers Party of the USA.

Burnham had been a leading advocate of the fusion on the National Committee of the AWP.

Together with • fellow professor Hook, he collaborated with Cannon in efforts to speed the unification of forces. Cannon in his History of American Trotskyism points out that «Burnham, later events showed, wanted unification with the Trotskyists because he was then taking a step forward, getting a little bit more radical; he wanted to put his toe a little deeper into the icy water of proletarian politics while firmly bracing himself with his other foot, on the bourgeois shore."

Max Schachtman and Martin Abern on the other hand had been co-founders of the American Trotskyist movement with Cannon in the 1920s. Schachtman in particular had made an important and valued contribution to that movement in the early period.

Pressures

The attitude they take to the Soviet state is one of the most rigorous tests of revolutionaries.

In analysing the contradictory reality of the Soviet Union, two conflicting pressures make themselves felt.

The first is the tendency to view the continued existence of nationalised property relations in the Soviet Union, and the postwar extension of those property relations into Eastern Europe, as proof that there is no need to fight for the construction of independent revolutionary parties to accomplish a political revolution.

Compromise

Such a view often extends to imagining that in some sense or other the Stalinist bureaucracy or a "left" section of it in the Soviet Union will reform itself.

As a result such a view drives those that defend it into a compromise and even collaboration with Its basic starting point is that in a two-colour world of 'blacks' and 'whites'. , the Soviet Union is-by and large -'white'.

Failing to grasp its contradictory nature, it is incapable of understanding the USSR or its bureaucracy. Leading advocate of this anti-Marxist, revisionist, position in the post war Fourth International was Michel Pablo. • Public opinion But the opposite pressure on the revolutionary movement on the Russian question is that from imperialism and bourgeois "public opinion"; ; particularly as reflected within middle class elements in or around the revolutionary movement.

Noting correctly one aspect of the Soviet Unionits repressive, dictatorial regime in which the working class has no real political power-this current finds itself in accord with the view of imperialism, that the USSR is a dictatorship which cannot be defended.

Searching around for some argument on which to shore up this position, certain petty bourgeois forces have historically taken refuge in branding the USSR as no longer a denerated workers' state, but one in which the gains of the 1917 revolution have been reversed, and a state capitalist regime instituted. The signing of the Stalin-Hitler Pact The Stalinist bureaucracy from this standpoint, is seen not as a parasitic ruling caste resting on nationalised property relations, but as a special form of ruling class.

Here, too, the attempt to view the world in terms of only two distinct colours, "black' and white' , leads to an opposite, but equally false, view that the USSR Is totally "black'.

In the period of the Cold War, when capitalist antipropaganda reached its high point, this "state capitalist' analysis provided the cover under which a group of renegade Trotskyists under Tony Cliff broke from Marxism and refused to support North Korea against imperialist attack.

Workers' state

That group today lives on as the British Socialist Workers Party. It is this group which now most resembles the positions of Burnham and Schachtman, and their refusal to defend the, USSR against imperialism.

The Left Opposition in the Russian Communist Cannon in 1938 Party and later the Fourth International had stood by a position that the October Revolution created workers' state in Russia.

And despite the deformations, distortions and crimes wrought by Stalinism it remained-albeit degenerated-a workers' state to be defended against imperialist assault.

The working class having seized power in November 1917, took ownership of the means of production from the bourgeoisie, establishing nationalised property relations.

A new social order began to be created where production was no longer for profit.

It is not the place of this article to examine the reasons for the growth of a parasitic bureaucracy upon that new social order.

Among the key factors were the decimation of the working class, continued scarcity and the isolation of the revolution.

Trotsky's book Revolution Betrayed gives the clearest account. But a ruling caste, a bureaucratic clique did emerge. And it distorted and bent the form and content of the workers' state, so it became at first sight unrecognisable as a workers' state.

For the working class does not control or benefit from the social organisation of those states, indeed is oppressed by them.

Alignments

Yet nonetheless there are gains contained within it which must be defended.

There were other pressures on Burnham and Schachtman. They were caught in the play of class forces which found its expression in new international manoeuvres and alignments.

Stalin, in August 1939, sought a bureaucratic means of "defending" the Soviet Union without mobilising the working class, and signed the notorious "Stalin-Hitler Pact"

This unleashed a great wave of anti-Soviet hysteria throughout the western capitalist countries.

Burnham declared:

"It is impossible to regard the Soviet Union as a workers' in any sens state whatever ... Soviet inte vention (in World War I] will be wholly subordinate to the general imperiali: character of the conflict as whole, and will be in n sense a defence of th remains of the sociali:

Trotsky in 'Again an once more again on th nature of the USSR' replie to this criticism b Burnham and Schachtman:

"When an emotion: mechanic considers an aut‹ mobile in which let us sa! gangsters have escaped fro1 police pursuit over a ba road, and finds the fram bent, the wheels out of lini and the motor partiall damaged, he migh justifiably say: "It is not a automobile-devil-knows what it is." Such a estimate would lack an technical and scientifi value, but it-would expres the legitimate reaction c the mechanic at the work o the gangsters. Let u suppose, however, that thi same mechanic must recor dition the object which h named "devil-knows what i . In this case he will star with the recognition that i is a damaged .. automobil before him."

Different

So the Soviet Unior Trotsky argues, is a worker: state in the sense that damaged car remains a car.

For Burnham an Schachtman, however, th approach was different:

As the Stalinist gangster perpetrated yet more abuse as the mangled machin became more and mor unrecognisable-they finall threw up their hands i horror and said "It's not car anymore.

The whole time they ha been looking not at th contradictions beneath th surface but at how i appeared to them and not it appeared different.

Cannon analysed thei position thus in Th Struggle for a Proletaria:

"The crisis signifies th reaction in our ranks ti external social pressure.. More specifically, we sa! the crisis is the result of thi pressure of bourgeois-demo cratic opinion upon . 1 section of the party leader ship.

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Trotsky-fought "radical dandies"

That is our class analysis of the unrestrained struggle between the proletarian and the petty bourgeois tendencies in our party"

The Second World War, like the First, struck the world labour movement like a cataclysm. As Cannon put it:

"Weaknesses which remained undisclosed in time of peace are rapidly laid bare with the approach of war."

The weaknesses in this opposition group within the SWP emerged in their superficial failure to look below the surface of events. Instead they insisted upon a formal black and white' analysis in their failure to understand the contradictory nature of reality.

They were unable to comprehend that because the Soviet Union entered into a clearly 'counter-revolutionary alliance with Hitler that did not mean that it was the same thing as Hitler.

Method

The weakness of the group was essentially in their philosophical method which Burnham explicitly expressed in his rejection of the Marxist method of Dialectical Materialism. • In insisting that the Soviet Union was either a perfect workers' state worth defending or had turned into something else. no longer worth defending, Burnham was turning away from understanding the contradictory nature of the Soviet Union.

Trotsky uses the analogy with a trade union.

"The trade unions of France, Great Britain, the United States and other countries support completely the counterrevolutionary politics of their bourgeoisie.

This does not prevent us from labelling them trade unions, from supporting their progressive steps and from defending them against the bourgeoisie."

Thus we understand the dual nature of trade unions. On the one hand they are the form of organisațion of the working class.

Distorted

the other hand they are simultaneously hampered, warped and distorted by their current pro-imperialist, reactionary These two aspects exist side by side. We support the trade union movement against the employers-we support even Scanlon, Chapple, Jones etc., against attack by the state-yet.we recognise that such leaders ally with the bosses and the state against us, and we fight within the trade unions against those leaders and to overthrow them, Not to do both things is to abstain from the battle to change the world.

The view that the trade unions really are only what the bureaucracy makes them is held by certain anarchists today, who for instance argued that the Grunwicks workers should have nothing to do with unions because the APEX leadership would sell them out!

Precisely and for this reason we do battle in unions.

For this reason, also, understanding the contradiction, we defend the Soviet Union and battle for the political overthrow of its bureaucratic leaders.

Not to do so is to refrain from participating in the real world.

Trotsky puts it thus: "Idealistic, ultimatistic, "purely" normative thinking wishes to construct the world in its own image, and simply turns away from phenomena which are not to its liking.

Sectarians, ie. people who are revolutionary only in their own imagination, guide themselves by empty idealistic norms.

They say: "These unions are not to our liking, we will not join them;this workers' state is not to our liking we will not defend it" • Each time they promise to begin history anew. They will construct, don't you see, an ideal workers' state, when god places in their hands an ideal party and ideal unions.

But until this happy moment arrives, they will, as much as possible, pout their lips at reality"

Trotsky argues that in fact were the bureaucracy to be driven out, the Russian proletariat would still find:

the nationalised means of production and the basic elements of planned economy after its victory.

This means that it will not have to begin from the beginning. That is a tremendous advantage!

Only radical dandies, who are used to hopping carelessly from twig to twig can lightmindedly dismiss such a possibility.

The socialist revolution is too tremendous and difficult a problem for one to lightmindedly wave his hand on its inestimable material achievement and begin from the beginning. 99 dandies' The philosophical method of these "radical dandies" was a method which rejected the scientific basis of Marxism, rejected historical materialism.

The Battle Burnham argued that:

46 .. so far as politiçs goes, it is the programme and the empirical consequences that follow from it which are fundamental in relation to the theory of the state, rather than the theory fundamental in relation to the programme"

"But there is no sense at all in which dialectics (even if dialectics were not, as it is, scientifically meaningless) is fundamental in politics, none at all.

"An opinion on dialectics is no more fundamental for politics than an opinion on non Euclidean geometry or relativity physics."

Process

Burnham rejects therefore any analysis of social reality which understands it to be always in a process of movement and change.

For Burnham it is enough to say that things are like they are until suddenly, they are like something else.

He ignores the whole process of movement and development by which-to return to the earlier example-the motor car broke down.

He comes upon things without understanding their historical development-the processes and contradictions at work within them.

Trotsky says that these American radical' intellectuals:

"accept Marxism without the dialectic (a clock without a spring)."

This, he says, is because they are influenced by the dominating philosophical outlook of American thought-America the land of unlimited opportunity' that. denies the class struggle and social contradictions as the moving force of development.

Trotsky points to the contrast between Burnham's wooden, formal impressions and Marxism:

"Dialectical thinking is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is 'related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion.

Burnham, however, was so aggressively attached to his collection of static, black and white, snapshots that he threw the motion picture out of the window.

Interconnected

So attitudes to Russia and attitudes to philosophy were interconnected-the one an expression of the other.

But why did Burnham in particular take this position?

And why did Schachtman, though not agreeing if Leningrad-defence of the USSR with his philosophical starting point, concede that philosophy was "unimportant"?

Burnham-a university professor, a professor of philosophy, lived and breathed in the sterile anti-Marxist atmosphere of the university-a totally, petty-bourgeois milieu. -. -Burnham and Schachtman were content to debate in a propagandistic way within this arena.

Cannon's concern and that of the SWP majority "ng the huildina of a nial. was me vuuung ur a pruietarian party. Trotsky had written in 1937:

«Predominance in the organisation of intellectuals is inevitable in the first period of development of the organisation.

"It is at the same time a big handicap to the political education of the more gifted workers"

Burnham and Schachtman did not accept this view. Nor did they accept the necessity of following party discipline.

They insisted that they be allowed to air their differences in public outside the party.

As "radical dandies" they rejected the discipline of democratic centralisma discipline Cannon explained thus:

"With the public press of the party, however, the situation stands differently. If democracy holds sway in the internal discussion, then centralism predominates in the public expressions and actions of the party.

"The public party press is not and cannot be an instrument of discussion under the control of •a parity • committee. It is, rather, an instrument of the party and its National Committee for the presentation and defense of the official position of the party.

"In the discussion bulletin the opposition can ask for equal rights with the majority, but the official party publications have the duty to defend the point of view of the party and the they are changed •until Fourth International convention or congress.

"A discussion in the pages of the official party publications-as provided in the forthcoming issue of the New International, for example-can be conducted only within the limits established by the majority of the National Committee. Whoever disputes this rejects the whole conception of a centralised revolutionary party.

"At the same time he negates party democracy by subjecting the decisions of a majority to the public attack of a minority at whim."

Thus in all three arenas the opposition were influenced by bourgeois was an immediate question thought capitulating to anti-Soviet hysteria, capitulating to an anti-Marxist rejection of dialectical materialism and capitulation to Menshevik ideas of 'freedom of discussion' rather than democratic centralism.

The majority behaved according to Bolshevik principles of democratic centralism-only demanding that the minority abide loyally by majority decisions and to confine its opposition to within the Rut as leading SWP MUL member George Novack put it:

"The minority bloc could not comply with the decisions democratically arrived at by the party.

"After refusing to vote for a polițical committee motion to accept the convention decisions in 1940 it set up a separate organisation named the Workers Party, stole the Socialist Workers Party theoretical organ The New International, and embarked on an independent career along non-Trotskyist lines"

Burnham's defection from this new party a mere month later is a fitting epitaph.

"Of the most important beliefs which have been associated with the Marxist movement, there is virtually none which I accept in its traditional form."

He goes on to say:

"Experience and further study and reflection have convinced me that I have been wrong and Trotsky right on this score; that dialectical materialism though scientifically meaningless, is psychologically and historically an integral part of Marxism."

Burnham stood all on its head.

Yet from this major political fight in the early years of World War 2, we can reaffirm the significance and fundamental importance' of dialectical materialism as a philosophical method, upon which we continue to stand..

Schachtman Only the method of dialectical materialism allows us to see the contradiction and process within all things.

And the BurnhamSchachtman split confirms the need to fight within the discipline of a democratic centralist party against the pressures from the ruling class which BurnhamSchachtman and their present day co-thinkers reveal.

This faction fight therefore drew out a series of questions which remain fundamental to the fight in today's class struggle to reconstruct the Fourth International on the basis of a practical and theoretical reaffirmation of its founding principles and Trotsky's polemics against Burnham and Schachtman published in In Defence of Marxism provide some of the most concise and accessible statements on the Marxist method of analysis-a method sadly thrown aside in the post-war period by the FI leadership headed by Michel Pablo.

The resultant crisis and split in the movement has never been resolved, and Pablo's methods have been continued by the leadership of the present day United' Secretariat.

Adequate

Our task as Marxists is not simply to assemble around us numerical forces, but to ensure that the revolutionary party that we build is adequate to the demands that will be placed upon it in the struggle for power.

The lessons of the formative years of the SWP offer us important assistance in fighting the present-day degeneration of that party and of the USFI leadership which .it politically supports, and struggling for the reconstruction of the Trotskyist Fourth International.

Concluded