Max Eastman-from fellow ch-h -traveller to witch-hunter

Scan page 9

Ernie Stubbins has been using the occasion of the republication by the WRP of Max Eastman's book The Young Trotsky' to examine Eastman's political itinerary as an intellectual Marxist turned anti-communist.

Trotsky's political opposition to Eastman was hardened by the reports of the sharpening discussions within the Communist League of America (as the US section of the Left Opposition was then called).

Shachtman was already leading an opposition against Cannon, early in 1933. Eastman was operating around the fringes of this opposition and a sharp clash occured within the CLA leadership over Shachtman's attempts to present Eastman as a speaker in a public meeting.

There are no further references to Eastman in Trotsky's published works until November 1935, when in conversation with Earle Birney, he returns to his attacks on Eastman's 'engineering philosophy:

"Eastman talks about the revolutionary who sets about to create a revolution as an engineer conceives a plan and builds bridge according to it. Engineers! Bridges! Revolution! Eastman knows nothing about them.

¿ He knows nothing about bridge building. Does an engineer build a bridge out of his head or does he receive a command from the capitalists whose economic needs require the bridge? Does he form a plan out of his head or is it the product of the accumulated knowledge of years of bridge building, incorporated in textbooks? * Is the engineer of value as an individual or because of his creative power when, in accepting that command he coordinates in the best interests of those who command him the elements of nature and science, which exist independently of him?

if Eastman meant "engineer" in this sense, we could accept his definition.

But he thinks of the revolutionary genius as a man who conceives a priori and then gives orders. No, there are many engineers and many plans. The mass, does its own selecting among them and chooses the engineer and the plan that answers its historic needs. It was this that Marx explained and that Eastman never understood"

A letter from Trotsky to Sara Weber in September 1936 shows that the business relationship with Eastman was suffering as a consequence of the deep philosophical differences.

Intensity

Trotsky complains that Eastman had demanded 10% of Trotsky's earnings in addition to his translator's fees, in connection with the publication of the 'History of the Russian Something of the intensity of the past connections between the two men can be learned from Trotsky's words in this letter:

"In this way his work would be paid from two to three times better than mine (I. worked almost three years). But I did not find the courage to say NO (in such matters it is always very hard for me to get up the courage). Thus, up to date I have paid Eastman voluntarily about $4,000; in addition he received a very high fee as a translator"

He goes on to criticise the quality of Eastman's translation of Volumes 2 and 3 of the 'History', and his demands for 4% of the earnings from 'Lenin' (which was never completed, and sections of which were published as Young Lenin' many years later).

Intolerable

During this period Eastman had advised the publishers, Doubleday Doran, to give up hope of the Lenin book ever appearing. This was in an episode of considerable strain and ill health for Trotsky, during which at Eastman's suggestion he was working on a new introduction to the 'History' which was eventually to become The Revolution Betrayed'.

Under any circumstances this would be intolerable behaviour in a literary agent. In an alleged political sympathiser, in a position to control a major proportion of Trotsky's income, it is something much worse.

During 1937 things continued to deteriorate. In February Trotsky made a statement rejecting Eastman's interpretation of 'The Revolution Betrayed' as equating the Soviet regime as "I carry no responsibility for Max Eastman. I hope that my readers will understand my ideas better than my translator".

It is illustrative of Trotsky's political approach during this period that he was not prepared to allow the Left Opposition to cut itself off from the layer of intellectuals within which Eastman operated.

In June 1937 he argued for the participation of Trotskyists in a proposed weekly journal involving Eastman and other anti-Stalinist revolutionary intellectuals:

In July, replying to the Herring Committee on cultural relations with Latin America, he disagrees again with Eastman's by now much publicised view that the Stalin regime had ended socialism in Russia, but still referred to Eastman as 'my friend'.

Again in January 1938 he makes the same points in an article in the Soottish journal 'Forward' . In February he complains again of Eastman's delays in translating The Revolution Betrayed' and 'Young Lenin', which were preventing serialisation. In a letter to Frankel he concludes:

"I see that getting free Eastman is the only way succeed"

And he asks the SWP to approach Eastman explaining the impossibility of Trotsky's position as an author subordinated to the convenience of the translator.

A second letter to Frankel a few days later makes the same points:

"Somebody should visit Eastman and explain to him that his elementary duty is to let me free"

And he accuses Eastman of siding with the publishers in every disagreement.

This political difference went further in March 1938, when in a discussion with SWP leaders Trotsky argued that it was necessary for the party to maintain elastic and liberal relations with intellectual sympathisers outside the party, while of course maintaining strictest conditions for membership. However, he went on:

"At the same time we must mercilessly attack types like Max Eastman and Eugene Lyons. We must show them that we take things like Marxist theory very seriously, and we must not permit the impression that Max Eastman can be our friend and at the same time, incidentally, an enemy of socialism"

In a letter to Cannon in April he criticises the prominence given to a letter from Eastman in The International':

"Many people will interpret this fact as our willingness to close our eyes on principles when friendship is concerned.".

Again in a letter to Dunayerskaya in June he argues for an open polemic against Dewey and particularly Eastman:

"The very confused and equivocal character of his friendship to us is extremely prejudicial to our movement".

The argument continued to rage through 1939 and in April Trotsky wrote in the International Bulletin' of the SWP:

"Max Eastman wrote that Trotsky places too much value on doctrine and if he had more common sense he would not have lost power"

By the end of 1939 it was becoming clear that the Burnham-Shachtman opposition was rapidly approaching Eastman's position on dialectics. Thus in his December document 'A petty-bourgeois opposition in the SWP' he praises the earlier attacks by Burnham and Shachtman on Eastman and Sidney Hook, whom they had called The League of Abandoned Hopes He traced the material basis of American Pragmatism in the following paragraph:

became the national philosophy of the USA. The theoretical methodology of Henry Fordboth regard living society from the point of view of an 'engineer (Eastman platonically). Historically the disdainful attitude toward the dialectic is explained by the fact that the Trotsky grandfathers and grandmothers of Max Eastman and others did not need the dialectic in order to conquer territory and enrich themselves. But times have changed and the philosophy of pragmatism has entered a period of bankruptcy just as has American capitalism"

On a number of occasions in the fight against the Burnham-Shachtman opposition Trotsky traces its origins to Eastman, both as the original propagator of the attacks on dialectics, and in his continuous • agitation around the fringes of the SWP.

In the Open Letter to Burnham' of January 1940 he ascribes Burnham's refusal to discuss dialectics I stopped arguing about religion long ago' directly to Eastman, and warns of where such a position always leads:

"In the USA Eastman, Sidney Hook and their friends utilised opposition to the dialectic as cover for their transformation from fellow travellers of the proletariat to fellow travellers of the bourgeoisie"

He criticises Burnham's attention to the developments in the Eastman-Hook circles when the focus should have been the problems of the Stalinist party in the USA. He argues that Eastman should no longer be allowed access to the "New International'.

In February, in the letter to Hansen of the 29th, he has to reply to attacks from the opposition about his 1929 statement repudiating Eastman:

"The new moralists quote, I heard, my terrible crime concerning Eastman and Lenin's Testament. What despicable hypocrites, Eastman published the document on his initiative in a moment when our faction decided to interrupt all public activity in order to avoid a public split. Don't forget it was before the famous . Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee and the Chinese Revolution even before the emergence of the Zinoviev Opposition."

During 1929 the Troika was prepared to employ Eastman's book to destroy the Opposition. Trotsky was faced with the choice between a fight for which the Opposition was not prepared, and signing the repudiation.

It was wrong to transform this into an abstract moral question, as the petty bourgeois opposition in the SWP was attempting to do. Trotsky writes of them:

"Our old Mensheviks were real heroes in comparison with them"

Trotsky's final reference to Eastman comes in the unfinished 1940 document 'Bonapartism, Fascism and War'. Denouncing Eastman's individualism he writes:

"This anecdote deserves to be included in the text of a history of ideology";

After the defeat of the opposition both Burnham and Eastman moved quite rapidly into • the camp of the bourgeoisie. Burnham made a career for himself out of anti-communism, lecturing at the Us War College and editing the far right National Review' which denounced Nixon for his soft line against Moscow and Peking. He even gave evidence against Shachtman as a subversive.

Eastman's anti-communism was slightly less rabid than Burnham's but equally dedicated.

For many years he edited the 'Readers Digest', , one of the most widely circulated right wing journals of the 1950s.

Shortly before his death in 1969 he was an active Nixon supporter.

However there was to be one further twist of the knife to end the sorry tale of Eastman's literary collaboration with Trotsky. The completed sections of "Lenin' were prepared for publication in 1943 as a first volume towards the completed work.

Before they could be published they vanished from Eastman's home, stolen presumably by Stalinist agents.

Mysteriously, the stolen sections appeared many years later in a library at Harvard University. It was not until then that Eastman 'chanced to find' in his own files the three remaining untranslated chapters.

Thus with bitter irony all of Trotsky's complaints about Eastman's delays in translation were borne out in full.

.Finally a few words on the value of Eastman's pamphlet. Eastman originally set out to write a complete biography, but by his own admission (in the introduction to 'Young Lenin') his patience gave out when the book was half done. 'Young Trotsky' is the result.

The pamphlet cannot be recommended to readers coming new to Trotskyism. As biographical material it is poor, containing no more than sketchy accounts of events recounted more Like in Tich we interested reader should turn first. The advanced students will find that Eastman's document adds only a few incidents to what we know of Trotsky's youth, and nothing at all to what we understand of it.

Scan page 10

DON'T GO INTO THETIGHT BLANDROUD! ISERUILNERD

MERSEYSIDE

FACTORY CLOSURES i Fisher Bendix Leyland Dunlop eccano Why eampaigns nore lost de «how they can be WOn Wednesday MY CATAL

----- pull-quotes -----

"Pragmatism, a mixture of rationalism and empiricism,