WRP sleuth: wrong again
Socialist Press1980 1980-10-15Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 9 →
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Thank you for your courtesy in publishing my review of The Young Trotsky'. I would like, if I may, to use your columns again to reply to some of the hysterical reaction to my review as expressed by WRP leader Alex "Mitchell in Saturday's Newsline.
Mitchell takes a full page to reply to me: yet he concentrates on a mere three paragraphs which mention the WRP.
Applying all the skills and training he accumulated as a Fleet Street hack, Mitchell endeavours to denigrate and misrepresent every word in my three paragraphs.
It would take a large pamphiet to reply to every one of Mitchell's falsehoods: I will deal only with the most important.
First, he wrongly identifies me with the Editor of Socialist Press-quite a blunder for the ace "investigator"!
Second, Mitchell asks why if the Eastman pamphlet has "attracted deservedly little critical attention" I have renewed it at all.
It seems he has not read even to the end of the first column of part one, where I explained the educational value of such a study.
This brings me to the third point. Mitchell defends Eastman's pamphlet as "essential for the education of the youth of today". . Let us ask, if Newsline and the WRP are so concerned to educate the youth, why they have failed to review the Eastman pamphlet themselves? And why have they also failed to review a number of other recent WRP publications-such as Trotsky's Report of the Siberian Delegation' "Our Political Tasks' and Volume 2 of the 'Military Writings', as well as Sedov's 'Red Book' (the last of which they have not even advertised).
This inability to review even his own party's material presumably accounts for Mitchell's inability to understand my At no point do I seek to link the right wing anti-communism of Eastman with the WRP's capitulation to petty bourgeois nationalism, even though, as in Iraq and Iran, the result is often the same.
Finally, Mitchell's assessment of Eastman as "never a Marxist" contrasts with Cannon's statement "The first American Trotskyist was undoubtedly Max Eastman".
Yours fraternally, Ernie Stubbins