tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20625098337116000702010-04-30T13:17:03.528-07:00Permanent RevolutionCommentary on issues of Marxist theory and practice.Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.comBlogger25125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-26086715705365475832010-04-30T13:17:00.001-07:002010-04-30T13:17:03.543-07:00This blog has moved<br /> This blog is now located at http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/.<br /> You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click <a href='http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/'>here</a>.<br /><br /> For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to<br /> http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/feeds/posts/default.<br /> <div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-2608671570536547583?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-18395653180431567452009-11-25T21:29:00.000-08:002010-02-22T22:56:33.307-08:00The Downward Spiral of the International Committee of the Fourth InternationalThis space is devoted to a discussion and commentary on the series, The Downward Spiral of the International Committee of the Fourth International.<br /><br /><a href="http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/downward_spiral_ch01.pdf">Link to Chapter 1: Concocting a smear campaign: A dash of political blackmail and a serving of pseudo-history.</a><br /><br /><a href="http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/downward_spiral_ch02.pdf">Link to Chapter 2: Concocting a smear campaign: Falsifying my history</a><br /><br /><a href="http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/downward_spiral_ch03.pdf">Link to Chapter 3: Concocting a smear campaign: North distorts the history of the Workers League/SEP</a><br /><br /><a href="http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/downward_spiral_ch04.pdf">Link to Chapter 4: The Talbots weigh in: An olive branch to liberalism and misrepresentations on science</a><br /><br /><a href="http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/downward_spiral_ch05.pdf">Link to Chapter 5: Dialectics vs. positivism in the philosophy of science</a><br /><br /><a href="http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/downward_spiral_ch06.pdf">Link to Chapter 6: Notes on philosophy and science</a><br /><br /><a href="http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/downward_spiral_ch07.pdf">Link to Chapter 7: A defense of positivism in the guise of a defense of science</a><br /><br /><a href="http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/downward_spiral_ch08.pdf">Link to Conclusion: A new stage in the degeneration of the International Committee</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-1839565318043156745?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-9497364171413552542009-10-20T18:38:00.000-07:002009-11-02T18:48:59.785-08:00The deadweight of sectarianism<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-CA">By Frank Brenner</span><br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-CA">Oct. 21, 2009</span><br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-CA">I want to follow up a previous blog of mine (“The PSG and the EU elections”<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">[1]</span>) by commenting on a recent article by PSG leader Peter Schwarz called “The PSG and the German Left Party”.<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">[2]</span> While Schwarz’s article is an exchange of letters with a reader, it isn’t hard to see that he is also addressing my earlier posting (though without bothering to mention the latter, a practice all too common in the polemical style of the ICFI leadership).<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">[3]</span></span><br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-CA">Without repeating material from the previous blog, it needs to be said that the trends analyzed there became more evident in the Sept. 27 German federal election. The Social Democrats (SPD) had their worst result since the end of the Second World War, losing over 11 percent of their vote. The other ‘natural’ governing party, the Christian Democrats (CDU), also had one of its poorest showings ever. Lesser parties – the Free Democrats, the Greens and the Left Party – all made substantial gains. The German political landscape is being altered by the seismic shifts within global capitalism. </span><br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-CA">From the standpoint of the working class, the key development is the decline of the SPD and the growth of the Left Party. It is clear that many workers and youth, facing increasingly bleak economic prospects, no longer see the SPD as a party of social reform. They identify it – rightly of course – as a pro-business, establishment party. This represents an important shift in the political consciousness of a significant section of the German working class, and that shift has manifested itself in a turn towards the Left Party.</span><br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-CA">It is this last point, evident to anyone who has followed the German political scene, which Schwarz and the PSG vehemently deny. They are happy to discuss the political decline of the SPD but see no significance, so far as the development of working class consciousness is concerned, in the growing support for the Left Party. To this end, Schwarz marshals a number of arguments, all of which repeat earlier PSG statements and none of which stand up to critical analysis.</span><br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/deadweight_sectarianism.pdf"><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Read entire essay here ->></span></b></a><br /><br /><a href="http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/deadweight_sectarianism_de.pdf"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><strong>Auf Deutsch ->></strong></span></a><br /></div><div style="mso-element: footnote-list;"><br /><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 10pt;">[1]</span> <a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/PSG_elections.pdf">http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/PSG_elections.pdf</a>. In German: <a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/PSG_Europawahl.pdf">http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/PSG_Europawahl.pdf</a> <br /></div></div><div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 10pt;">[2]</span> “The PSG and the German Left Party: An exchange of letters,” WSWS, Sept. 28, 2009: <a href="http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/sep2009/left-s28.shtml">http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/sep2009/left-s28.shtml</a>. The article was originally posted in German: “Die PSG und die Linkspartei”, WSWS, Sept. 26, 2009: <a href="http://www.wsws.org/de/2009/sep2009/link-s26.shtml">http://www.wsws.org/de/2009/sep2009/link-s26.shtml</a>.<br /></div></div><div id="ftn3" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 10pt;">[3]</span> It is worth noting that the letter Schwarz is responding to makes no mention of the Left Party. Schwarz, however, spends six-and-a-half pages discussing little else but the PSG’s attitude to the Left Party, which also happens to be one of the main themes of my article. Moreover, while the letter-writer, F.S., demonstrates political confusion when he calls on the PSG to collaborate with various revisionist outfits, he also criticizes the PSG’s EU election campaign very much along the lines of what I had written, a point I’ll come back to later.<br /></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-949736417141355254?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-54935972913437924932009-08-31T08:04:00.000-07:002009-09-02T21:21:47.358-07:00History turned into a dead letter<strong>By Frank Brenner<br /><br /></strong>The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) just finished running a four-part series on the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, whose 75th anniversary has just passed.[1] Alas, while this is important history and while the series does a competent job in recounting it, this is a case of a tradition being honored more in the breach than in the observance. To anyone familiar with the work of the SEP today, there could hardly be a starker contrast between its abstentionist practice and the inspiring record of James Cannon’s party in providing revolutionary leadership in these strikes.<br /><br />For this reason, a notable feature of this series is its inability to draw any lessons from this history for today. This is evident at the end, when after four long instalments, the series is concluded in an abrupt and perfunctory way, with two brief paragraphs which do nothing but repeat obvious truths about the need for revolutionary leadership.<br /><br />The series ends with the following line:<br /><br />“The lessons of 1934 and those of the entire history of the Trotskyist movement internationally must be assimilated to prepare the leadership of the struggles to come.”<br /><br />We agree that the lessons of 1934 “must be assimilated”, but the real meaning of that injunction is that this rich history should be more than an occasion for a retrospective essay. It should inform our practice. Yet nothing could be further from the current practice of the SEP than the lessons of 1934. The trouble for the WSWS editorial board is that any attempt to draw concrete lessons from this history becomes implicitly an indictment of the SEP’s abstentionism.<br /><br />For example, at one point Cannon is quoted as saying that <em>The Organizer</em>, the local strike paper which was edited by Max Shachtman and which Cannon wrote for, was "the crowning achievement" of the party's work in the strike – and yet this is precisely the kind of work that SEP leader David North disparaged in his polemic with us over the NYC transit strike. When we criticized the SEP for the unserious manner in which it intervened in the New York transit strike of 2005, North replied with a sneer that organizing strike committees is not the work of Trotskyists. He wrote,<br /><br />“No, we did not attempt to write a manual on how to form strike committees. To the extent that workers understood the need for an alternative to the TWU Local 100 leadership and its policies, they would be more than capable of working out the details of creating and running rank-and-file strike committees. But we most certainly did explain what such committees should fight for: the statement outlined the political strategy upon which the fate of the strike depended.” [2]<br /><br />But listen to the following assessment of the work of the Trotskyists in the 1934 strike by James Cannon:<br /><br />“Trotskyism made a number of specific contributions to this strike which made all the difference between the Minneapolis strike and a hundred others of the period, some of which involved more workers in more socially important localities and industries. <strong><em>Trotskyism made the contribution of organization and preparations down to the last detail. That is something new, that is something specifically Trotskyist</em>.</strong>” [emphasis added] [3]<br /><br />The gulf between Cannon in 1934 and North in 2005 could not be wider. Thus it isn’t surprising that the WSWS series on the Minneapolis strikes, while providing an overview of these events, can say nothing about the fact that the lessons of this history, to which the series alludes on several occasions, have absolutely no impact on the current practice of the SEP.<br /><br />Another example of the forgotten lessons of the Minneapolis strikes is this analysis of the role of the Stalinists in 1934:<br /><br />“During the May strike, the CP revealed its inability to advance correct Marxist tactics in relation to the Farmer-Labor Party and Governor Olson. It demanded that Local 574 call a general strike directly against Olson. This was at a time when Olson was verbally—not to mention financially, having personally contributed $500 to Local 574—supporting the strike. The overwhelming majority of workers harbored illusions that he would aid the struggle of Local 574. The Trotskyist leaders judged correctly that his ‘support’ would have to be tested and exposed in the course of the struggle before workers could shed their illusions in the FLP governor.”<br /><br />Again this is implicitly an indictment of contemporary political practice: Today it is the PSG in Germany that has “revealed its inability to advance correct Marxist tactics” in relation to the Left Party, to say nothing of the wholesale abstentionism of all the SEPs with regard to the unions.[4]<br /><br />In the history of the Marxist movement, there have often been cases of parties that maintain a formal, ‘orthodox’, adherence to a revolutionary tradition, while deviating from the lessons of that tradition in practice. That is increasingly what characterizes the WSWS and SEP.<br /><br /><br /><br />--------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><br />[1] “75th anniversary of the Minneapolis truck drivers’ strike”, WSWS, Aug. 26-29, 2009: <a href="http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/mpls-a26.shtml">http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/mpls-a26.shtml</a><br /><br />[2] North’s statement is from his <em>Marxism, History and Socialist Consciousness</em>, (Mehring Books, 2007), pp. 44-45.<br />An online version can be found at <a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mhsc.pdf">http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mhsc.pdf</a><br />For our reply, see <em>Marxism Without its Head or its Heart</em>, chapt. 5: <a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch05.pdf">http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch05.pdf</a>, pp. 120-3. This chapter also contains a discussion of the relevance of the 1934 strikes to a critique of the SEP’s abstentionism, cf. pp. 124-6.<br /><br />[3] James P. Cannon, “The History of American Trotskyism”, p. 156. <a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1944/ht03.htm">http://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1944/ht03.htm</a><br /><br />[4] See “The PSG and the EU elections”, permanent-revolution.org: <a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/2009/06/psg-and-eu-elections.html">http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/2009/06/psg-and-eu-elections.html</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-5493597291343792493?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-7340782686063593392009-08-21T16:17:00.000-07:002009-10-22T07:45:51.481-07:0069th Anniversary of the Assassination of Leon Trotsky<a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/uploaded_images/trotsky_anniversary-trotsky_portrait-740476.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/uploaded_images/trotsky_anniversary-trotsky_portrait-740470.jpg" style="cursor: hand; display: block; height: 275px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 220px;" /></a><br /><a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/uploaded_images/trotsky_anniversary-trotsky_portrait-762712.jpg"></a><br /><div><br /><br /></div><a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/uploaded_images/trotsky_anniversary-trotsky_portrait-762569.jpg"></a><br /><div><br /><br /><br />[On this, the 69th anniversary of the assassination of Leon Trotsky, we are republishing the obituary delivered by James P. Cannon to the memorial meeting of the Socialist Workers Party held a week following the assassination. The text is courtesy of the Marxist Internet Archives:<br /><a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1940mom.htm">http://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1940mom.htm</a>] <br /></div><div><br /></div><div></div><div><strong><span style="font-size: 130%;">James P. Cannon</span></strong><br /></div><div></div><div></div><div><strong><span style="font-size: 180%;">To the memory of the Old Man (Trotsky Obituary)<br /><br /></span></strong><br />This speech was delivered to the Leon Trotsky Memorial meeting held at the Diplomat Hotel in New York City on August 28, 1940.<br /><br />It was first published in Socialist Appeal, September 7, 1940.<br /><br /><br />Comrade Trotsky's entire conscious life, from the time he entered the workers' movement in the provincial Russian town of Nikolayev at the age of eighteen up till the moment of his death in Mexico City forty-two years later, was completely dedicated to work and struggle for one central idea. He stood for the emancipation of the workers and all the oppressed people of the world, and the transformation of society from capitalism to socialism by means of a social revolution. In his conception, this liberating social revolution requires for success the leadership of a revolutionary political party of the workers' vanguard.<br /><br />In his entire conscious life Comrade Trotsky never once diverged from that idea. He never doubted it, and never ceased to struggle for its realization. On his deathbed, in his last message to us, his disciples-his last testament-he proclaimed his confidence in his life-idea: "Tell our friends I am sure of the victory of the Fourth International - go forward!"<br /><br />The whole world knows about his work and his testament. The cables of the press of the world have carried his last testament and made it known to the world's millions. And in the minds and hearts of all those throughout the world who grieve with us tonight one thought-one question-is uppermost: Will the movement which he created and inspired survive his death? Will his disciples be able to hold their ranks together, will they be able to carry out his testament and realize the emancipation of the oppressed through the victory of the Fourth International?<br /></div><div align="left"><br />Without the slightest hesitation we give an affirmative answer to this question. Those enemies who predict a collapse of Trotsky's movement without Trotsky, and those weak-willed friends who fear it, only show that they do not understand Trotsky, what he was, what he signified, and what he left behind. Never has a bereaved family been left such a rich heritage as that which Comrade Trotsky, like a provident father, has left to the family of the Fourth International as trustees for all progressive humanity. A great heritage of ideas he has left to us; ideas which shall chart the struggle toward the great free future of all mankind. The mighty ideas of Trotsky are our program and our banner. They are a clear guide to action in all the complexities of our epoch, and a constant reassurance that we are right and that our victory is inevitable.<br /><br />Trotsky himself believed that ideas are the greatest power in the world. Their authors may be killed, but ideas, once promulgated, live their own life. If they are correct ideas, they make their way through all obstacles. This was the central, dominating concept of Comrade Trotsky's philosophy. He explained it to us many, many times. He once wrote: "It is not the party that makes the program [the idea]; it is the program that makes the party." In a personal letter to me, he once wrote: "We work with the most correct and powerful ideas in the world, with inadequate numerical forces and material means. But correct ideas, in the long run, always conquer and make available for themselves the necessary material means and forces." <br /></div><div><br />Trotsky, a disciple of Marx, believed with Marx that "an idea, when it permeates the mass, becomes a material force." Believing that, Comrade Trotsky never doubted that his work would live after him. Believing that, he could proclaim on his deathbed his confidence in the future victory of the Fourth International which embodies his ideas. Those who doubt it do not know Trotsky.<br /><br />Trotsky himself believed that his greatest significance, his greatest value, consisted not in his physical life, not in his epic deeds, which overshadow those of all heroic figures in history in their sweep and their grandeur-but in what he would leave behind him after the assassins had done their work. He knew that his doom was sealed, and he worked against time in order to leave everything possible to us, and through us to mankind. Throughout the eleven years of his last exile he chained himself to his desk like a galley slave and labored, as none of us knows how to labor, with such energy, such persistence and self-discipline, as only men of genius can labor. He worked against time to pour out through his pen the whole rich content of his mighty brain and preserve it in permanent written form for us, and for those who will come after us.<br /><br />The whole Trotsky, like the whole Marx, is preserved in his books, his articles, and his letters. His voluminous correspondence, which contains some of his brightest thoughts and his most intimate personal feelings and sentiments, must now be collected and published. When that is done, when his letters are published alongside his books, his pamphlets, and his articles, we, and all those who join us in the liberation struggle of humanity, will still have our Old Man to help us.<br />He knew that the super-Borgia in the Kremlin, Cain-Stalin, who has destroyed the whole generation of the October Revolution, had marked him for assassination and would succeed sooner or later. That is why he worked so urgently. That is why he hastened to write out everything that was in his mind and get it down on paper in permanent form where nobody could destroy it.<br /><br />Just the other night, I talked at the dinner table with one of the Old Man's faithful secretaries - a young comrade who had served him a long time and knew his personal life, as he lived it in his last years of exile, most intimately. I urged him to write his reminiscences without delay. I said: "We must all write everything we know about Trotsky. Everyone must record his recollections and his impressions. We must not forget that we moved in the orbit of the greatest figure of our time. Millions of people, generations yet to come, will be hungry for every scrap of information, every word, every impression that throws light on him, his ideas, his aims, and his personal life."<br /><br />He answered: "I can write only about his personal qualities as I observed them; his methods of work, his humaneness, his generosity. But I can't write anything new about his ideas. They are already written. Everything he had to say, everything he had in his brain, is down on paper. He seemed to be determined to scoop down to the bottom of his mind, and take out everything and give it to the world in his writings. Very often, I remember, casual conversation on some subject would come up at the dinner table; an informal discussion would take place, and the Old Man would express some opinions new and fresh. Almost invariably the contributions of the dinner-table conversation would find expression a little later in a book, an article, or a letter."<br /><br />They killed Trotsky not by one blow; not when this murderer, the agent of Stalin, drove the pickax through the back of his skull. That was only the final blow. They killed him by inches. They killed him many times. They killed him seven times when they killed his seven secretaries. They killed him four times when they killed his four children. They killed him when his old coworkers of the Russian Revolution were killed.<br /><br />Yet he stood up to his tasks in spite of all that. Growing old and sick, he staggered through all these moral, emotional, and physical blows to complete his testament to humanity while he still had time. He gathered it all together-every thought, every idea, every lesson from his past experience-to lay up a literary treasure for us, a treasure that the moths and the rust cannot eat.<br /><br />There was a profound difference between Trotsky and other great men of action and transitory political leaders who influenced great masses in their lifetime. The power of such people, almost all of them, was something personal, something incommunicable to others. Their influence did not survive their deaths. Just recall for a moment the great men of our generation or the generation just passed: Clemenceau, Hindenburg, Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Bryan. They had great masses following them and leaning upon them. But now they are dead; and all their influence died with them. Nothing remains but monuments and funeral eulogies. Nothing was distinctive about them but their personalities. They were opportunists, leaders for a day. They left no ideas to guide and inspire men when their bodies became dust, and their personalities became a memory.<br /><br />Not so with Trotsky. Not so with him. He was different. He was also a great man of action, to be sure. His deeds are incorporated in the greatest revolution in the history of mankind. But, unlike the opportunists and leaders of a day, his deeds were inspired by great ideas, and these ideas still live. He not only made a revolution; he wrote its history and explained the basic laws which govern all revolutions. In his History of the Russian Revolution, which he considered his masterpiece, he gave us a guide for the making of new revolutions, or rather, for extending throughout the world the revolution that began in October 1917.<br /><br />Trotsky, the great man of ideas, was himself the disciple of a still greater one-Marx. Trotsky did not originate or claim to originate the most fundamental ideas which he expounded. He built on the foundations laid by the great masons of the nineteenth century-Marx and Engels. In addition, he went through the great school of Lenin and learned from him. Trotsky's genius consisted in his complete assimilation of the ideas bequeathed by Marx, Engels, and Lenin. He mastered their method. He developed their ideas in modern conditions, and applied them in masterful fashion in the contemporary struggle of the proletariat. If you would understand Trotsky, you must know that he was a disciple of Marx, an orthodox Marxist. He fought under the banner of Marxism for forty-two years! During the last year of his life he laid everything else aside to fight a great political and theoretical battle in defence of Marxism in the ranks of the Fourth International! His very last article, which was left on his desk in unpolished form, the last article with which he occupied himself, was a defence of Marxism against contemporary revisionists and sceptics. The power of Trotsky, first of all and above all, was the power of Marxism.<br /><br />Do you want a concrete illustration of the power of Marxist ideas? Just consider this: when Marx died in 1883, Trotsky was but four years old. Lenin was only fourteen. Neither could have known Marx, or anything about him. Yet both became great historical figures because of Marx, because Marx had circulated ideas in the world before they were born. Those ideas were living their own life. They shaped the lives of Lenin and Trotsky. Marx's ideas were with them and guided their every step when they made the greatest revolution in history.<br /><br />So will the ideas of Trotsky, which are a development of the ideas of Marx, influence us, his disciples, who survive him today. They will shape the lives of far greater disciples who are yet to come, who do not yet know Trotsky's name. Some who are destined to be the greatest Trotskyists are playing in the schoolyards today. They will be nourished on Trotsky's ideas, as he and Lenin were nourished on the ideas of Marx and Engels.<br /><br />Indeed, our movement in the United States took shape and grew up on his ideas without his physical presence, without even any communication in the first period. Trotsky was exiled and isolated in Alma Ata when we began our struggle for Trotskyism in this country in 1928. We had no contact with him, and for a long time did not know whether he was dead or alive. We didn't even have a collection of his writings. All we had was one single current document - his "Criticism of the Draft Program of the Comintern." That was enough. By the light of that single document we saw our way, began our struggle with supreme confidence, went through the split without faltering, built the framework of a national organization and established our weekly Trotskyist press. Our movement was built firmly from the very beginning and has remained firm because it was built on Trotsky's ideas. It was nearly a year before we were able to establish direct communication with the Old Man.<br /><br />So with the sections of the Fourth International throughout the world. Only a very few individual comrades have ever met Trotsky face to face. Yet everywhere they knew him. In China, and across the broad oceans to Chile, Argentina, Brazil. In Australia, in practically every country of Europe. In the United States, Canada, Indochina, South Africa. They never saw him, but the ideas of Trotsky welded them all together in one uniform and firm world movement. So it will continue after his physical death. There is no room for doubt.<br /><br />Trotsky's place in history is already established. He will stand forever on a historical eminence beside the other three great giants of the proletariat: Marx, Engels, and Lenin. It is possible, indeed it is quite probable, that in the historic memory of mankind, his name will evoke the warmest affection, the most heartfelt gratitude of all. Because he fought so long, against such a world of enemies, so honestly, so heroically, and with such selfless devotion!<br /><br />Future generations of free humanity will look back with insatiable interest on this mad epoch of reaction and bloody violence and social change-this epoch of the death agony of one social system and the birth pangs of another. When they see through the historian's lens how the oppressed masses of the people everywhere were groping, blinded and confused, they will mention with unbounded love the name of the genius who gave us light, the great heart that gave us courage.<br /><br />Of all the great men of our time, of all the public figures to whom the masses turned for guidance in these troubled terrible times, Trotsky alone explained things to us, he alone gave us light in the darkness. His brain alone unravelled the mysteries and complexities of our epoch. The great brain of Trotsky was what was feared by all his enemies. They couldn't cope with it. They couldn't answer it. In the incredibly horrible method by which they destroyed him there was hidden a deep symbol. They struck at his brain! But the richest products of that brain are still alive. They had already escaped and can never be recaptured and destroyed.<br /><br />We do not minimize the blow that has been dealt to us, to our movement, and to the world. It is the worst calamity. We have lost something of immeasurable value that can never be regained. We have lost the inspiration of his physical presence, his wise counsel. All that is lost forever. The Russian people have suffered the most terrible blow of all. But by the very fact that the Stalinist camarilla had to kill Trotsky after eleven years, that they had to reach out from Moscow, exert all their energies and plans to destroy the life of Trotsky-that is the greatest testimony that Trotsky still lived in the hearts of the Russian people. They didn't believe the lies. They waited and hoped for his return. His words are still there. His memory is alive in their hearts.<br /><br />Just a few days before the death of Comrade Trotsky the editors of the Russian Bulletin received a letter from Riga. It had been mailed before the incorporation of Latvia into the Soviet Union. It stated in simple words that Trotsky's "Open Letter to the Workers of the USSR"14 had reached them, and had lifted up their hearts with courage and shown them the way. The letter stated that the message of Trotsky had been memorized, word by word, and would be passed along by word of mouth no matter what might happen. We verily believe that the words of Trotsky will live longer in the Soviet Union than the bloody regime of Stalin. In the coming great day of liberation the message of Trotsky will be the banner of the Russian people.<br /><br />The whole world knows who killed Comrade Trotsky. The world knows that on his deathbed he accused Stalin and his GPU of the murder. The assassin's statement, prepared in advance of the crime, is the final proof, if more proof is needed, that the murder was a GPU job. It is a mere reiteration of the lies of the Moscow trials; a stupid police-minded attempt, at this late day, to rehabilitate the frame-ups which have been discredited in the eyes of the whole world. The motives for the assassination arose from the world reaction, the fear of revolution, and the traitors' sentiments of hatred and revenge. The English historian Macaulay remarked that apostates in all ages have manifested an exceptional malignity toward those whom they have betrayed. Stalin and his traitor gang were consumed by a mad hatred of the man who reminded them of their yesterday. Trotsky, the symbol of the great revolution, reminded them constantly of the cause they had deserted and betrayed, and they hated him for that. They hated him for all the great and good human qualities which he personified and to which they were completely alien. They were determined, at all cost, to do away with him.<br /><br />Now I come to a part that is very painful, a thought which, I am sure, is in the minds of all of us. The moment we read of the success of the attack I am sure everyone among us asked: couldn't we have saved him a while longer? If we had tried harder, if we had done more for him - couldn't we have saved him? Dear comrades, let us not reproach ourselves. Comrade Trotsky was doomed and sentenced to death years ago. The betrayers of the revolution knew that the revolution lived in him, the tradition, the hope. All the resources of a powerful state, set in motion by the hatred and revenge of Stalin, were directed to the assassination of a single man without resources and with only a handful of close followers. All of his coworkers were killed; seven of his faithful secretaries; his four children. Yet, in spite of the fact that they marked him for death after his exile from Russia, we saved him for eleven years! Those were the most fruitful years of his whole life. Those were the years when he sat down in full maturity to devote himself to the task of summing up and casting in permanent literary form the results of his experiences and his thoughts.<br /><br />Their dull police minds cannot know that Trotsky left the best of himself behind. Even in death he frustrated them. Because the thing they wanted most of all to kill-the memory and the hope of revolution-that Trotsky left behind him.<br /><br />If you reproach yourself or us because this murder machine finally reached Trotsky and struck him down, you must remember that it is very hard to protect anyone from assassins. The assassin who stalks his victim night and day very often breaks through the greatest protections. Even Russian tsars and other rulers, surrounded by all the police powers of great states, could not always escape assassination by small bands of determined terrorists equipped with the most meager resources. This was the case more than once in Russia in the prerevolutionary days. And here, in the case of Trotsky, you had all that in reverse. All the resources were on the side of the assassins. A great state apparatus, converted into a murder machine, against one man and a few devoted disciples. So if they finally broke through, we have only to ask ourselves, did we do all we could to prevent it or postpone it? Yes, we did our best. In all conscience, we must say we did our best.<br /><br />In the last weeks after the assault of May 24, we once again put on the agenda of our leading committee the question of the protection of Comrade Trotsky. Every comrade agreed that this is our most important task, most important for the masses of the whole world and for the future generations, that above all we do everything in our power to protect the life of our genius, our comrade, who helped and guided us so well. A delegation of party leaders made a visit to Mexico. It turned out to be our last visit. There, on that occasion, in consultation with him, we agreed upon a new campaign to strengthen the guard. We collected money in this country to fortify the house at the cost of thousands of dollars; all our members and sympathizers responded with great sacrifices and generosity.<br /><br />And still the murder machine broke through. But those who helped even in the smallest degree, either financially or with their physical efforts, like our brave young comrades of the guard, will never be sorry for what they did to protect and help the Old Man.<br /><br />At the hour Comrade Trotsky was finally struck down, I was returning by train from a special journey to Minneapolis. I had gone there for the purpose of arranging for new and especially qualified comrades to go down and strengthen the guard in Coyoacan. On the way home I sat in the railroad train with a feeling of satisfaction that the task of the trip had been accomplished, reinforcements of the guard had been provided for.<br /><br />Then, as the train passed through Pennsylvania, about four o'clock in the morning, they brought the early papers with the news that the assassin had broken through the defences and driven a pickax into the brain of Comrade Trotsky. That was the beginning of a terrible day, the saddest day of our lives, when we waited, hour by hour, while the Old Man fought his last fight and struggled vainly with death. But even then, in that hour of terrible grief, when we received the fatal message over the long-distance telephone: "The Old Man is dead"-even then, we didn't permit ourselves to stop for weeping. We plunged immediately into the work to defend his memory and carry out his testament. And we worked harder than ever before, because for the first time we realized with full consciousness that we have to do it all now. We can't lean on the Old Man anymore. What is done now, we must do. That is the spirit in which we have got to work from now on.<br /><br />The capitalist masters of the world instinctively understood the meaning of the name of Trotsky. The friend of the oppressed, the maker of revolutions, was the incarnation of all that they hated and feared! Even in death they revile him. Their newspapers splash their filth over his name. He was the world's exile in the time of reaction. No door was open to him anywhere except that of the Republic of Mexico. The fact that Trotsky was barred from all capitalist countries is in itself the clearest refutation of all the slanders of the Stalinists, of all their foul accusations that he betrayed the revolution, that he had turned against the workers. They never convinced the capitalist world of that. Not for a moment.<br /><br />The capitalists - all kinds - fear and hate even his dead body! The doors of our great democracy are open to many political refugees, of course. All sorts of reactionaries; democratic scoundrels who betrayed and deserted their people; monarchists, and even fascists - they have all been welcomed in New York harbor. But not even the dead body of the friend of the oppressed could find asylum here! We shall not forget that! We shall nourish that grievance close to our hearts and in good time we shall take our revenge.<br /><br />The great and powerful democracy of Roosevelt and Hull wouldn't let us bring his body here for the funeral. But he is here just the same. All of us feel that he is here in this hall tonight - not only in his great ideas, but also, especially tonight, in our memory of him as a man. We have a right to be proud that the best man of our time belonged to us, the greatest brain and strongest and most loyal heart. The class society we live in exalts the rascals, cheats, self-seekers, liars, and oppressors of the people. You can hardly name an intellectual representative of the decaying class society, of high or low degree, who is not a miserable hypocrite and contemptible coward, concerned first of all with his own inconsequential personal affairs and saving his own worthless skin. What a wretched tribe they are. There is no honesty, no inspiration, nothing in the whole of them. They have not a single man that can strike a spark in the heart of youth. Our Old Man was made of better stuff. Our Old Man was made of entirely different stuff. He towered above these pygmies in his moral grandeur.<br /><br />Comrade Trotsky not only struggled for a new social order based on human solidarity as a future goal; he lived every day of his life according to its higher and nobler standards. They wouldn't let him be a citizen of any country. But, in truth, he was much more than that. He was already, in his mind and in his conduct, a citizen of the communist future of humanity. That memory of him as a man, as a comrade, is more precious than gold and rubies. We can hardly understand a man of that type living among us. We are all caught in the steel net of the class society with its inequalities, its contradictions, its conventionalities, its false values, its lies. The class society poisons and corrupts everything. We are all dwarfed and twisted and blinded by it. We can hardly visualize what human relations will be, we can hardly comprehend what the personality of man will be, in a free society.<br /><br />Comrade Trotsky gave us an anticipatory picture. In him, in his personality as a man, as a human being, we caught a glimpse of the communist man that is to be. This memory of him as a man, as a comrade, is our greatest assurance that the spirit of man, striving for human solidarity, is unconquerable. In our terrible epoch many things will pass away. Capitalism and all its heroes will pass away. Stalin and Hitler and Roosevelt and Churchill, and all the lies and injustices and hypocrisy they signify, will pass away in blood and fire. But the spirit of the communist man which Comrade Trotsky represented will not pass away.<br /><br />Destiny has made us, men of common clay, the most immediate disciples of Comrade Trotsky. We now become his heirs, and we are charged with the mission to carry out his testament. He had confidence in us. He assured us with his last words that we are right and that we will prevail. We need only have confidence in ourselves and in the ideas, the tradition, and the memory which he left us as our heritage.<br /><br />We owe everything to him. We owe to him our political existence, our understanding, our faith in the future. We are not alone. There are others like us in all parts of the world. Always remember that. We are not alone. Trotsky has educated cadres of disciples in more than thirty countries. They are convinced to the marrow of their bones of their right to victory. They will not falter. Neither shall we falter. "I am sure of the victory of the Fourth International!" So said Comrade Trotsky in the last moment of his life. So are we sure.<br /><br />Trotsky never doubted and we shall never doubt that, armed with his weapons, with his ideas, we shall lead the oppressed masses of the world out of the bloody welter of the war into a new socialist society. That is our testimony here tonight at the grave of Comrade Trotsky.<br />And here at his grave we testify also that we shall never forget his parting injunction - that we shield and cherish his warrior-wife, the faithful companion of all his struggles and wanderings. "Take care of her," he said, "she has been with me many years. Yes, we shall take care of her. Before everything else, we shall take care of Natalia.<br /><br />We come now to the last word of farewell to our greatest comrade and teacher, who has now become our most glorious martyr. We do not deny the grief that constricts all our hearts. But ours is not the grief of prostration, the grief that saps the will. It is tempered by rage and hatred and determination. We shall transmute it into fighting energy to carry on the Old Man's fight. Let us say farewell to him in a manner worthy of his disciples, like good soldiers of Trotsky's army. Not crouching in weakness and despair, but standing upright with dry eyes and clenched fists. With the song of struggle and victory on our lips. With the song of confidence in Trotsky's Fourth International, the International Party that shall be the human race!<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-734078268606359339?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-59867386381506523782009-06-23T23:47:00.000-07:002009-07-10T20:56:33.285-07:00The PSG and the EU electionsBy Frank Brenner<br /><br /><a href="http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/PSG_Europawahl.html"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><strong>Deutsch: Die PSG und die Europawahl</strong></span> </a><br /><br />After the recent European Union elections, the WSWS ran a number of articles assessing the results of these elections, including the performance of the German section of the International Committee, the PSG (Partei fur Soziale Gleichheit). These articles bear some comment.<br /><br />First, some facts. The PSG received 9,673 votes in the election. This compares to the previous election, in 2004, where the PSG received 25,800 votes. Which is to say that the party’s vote fell by a whopping 62.5 percent. To call this a steep decline is an understatement. Moreover, the PSG scored dead last of the 31 German parties contesting the EU election, including some very obscure and makeshift groups peddling everything from spiritual politics to the merits of internet file-sharing. This result is all the more noteworthy given that these elections were held in the midst of the global financial crisis, which is hitting the German working class hard.<br /><br />So what accounts for this? Surely that should be a pressing concern for the party. But you won’t find a coherent explanation in the WSWS commentary. Here is how PSG leader Ulrich Rippert handles the issue in his assessment of his party’s campaign:<br /><br />"The PSG received 9,673 votes. While this total is significantly less than the vote won by the party in the European election five years ago, it would be a mistake to assess the significance of the elections from the narrow viewpoint of how many votes were won."<br /><br />Now, it is true that Trotskyist parties are not electoralist machines and that votes are not the primary consideration determining our politics. But clearly votes have some significance. Imagine if the PSG vote had increased by 62.5 percent: of course the party would have trumpeted such as a result as indicative of a growing influence in the working class. Indeed this is just what happened in 2004. Then the WSWS was so proud of the PSG vote that it put the vote numbers in the headline: “Socialist Equality Party of Germany receives nearly 26,000 votes”. The article went on to declare: “This increase in votes is of considerable political significance. It shows that a section of workers, intellectuals and youth are beginning to seriously take up political issues and support an international socialist perspective.”<br /><br />But you can’t have it both ways – you can’t take credit for a good result but dismiss the significance of a bad one. There is – or should be – no question that such a dramatic fall in the party’s vote calls for a critical reappraisal of what the PSG has been doing to reach the working class.<br /><br /><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">Read entire essay </span></strong><a href="http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/PSG_elections.pdf"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">HERE</span></strong></a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-5986738638150652378?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-73324674934328221652009-05-31T15:59:00.000-07:002009-06-01T23:32:28.773-07:00Sectarianism, Centrism and the Fourth International<a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/uploaded_images/leon_trotsky-745707.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 234px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/uploaded_images/leon_trotsky-745705.jpg" border="0" /></a><strong>SECTARIANISM, CENTRISM AND THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL</strong><br /><br /><strong>By Leon Trotsky</strong><br /><br /><em>[We are posting here an important article by Trotsky, from October 22, 1935. There is something especially timely about this article now. We are living through an unprecedented global economic crisis, while at the same time the traditional labor movement is disintegrating, with little credibility left. Under these conditions, it is inevitable that makeshift formations will emerge in the working class to fill the political vacuum. In many ways, how revolutionary Marxists respond to these developments will determine whether we can find a road to the masses or not. Trotsky’s article is a timely reminder of two grave dangers facing Marxists under such circumstances – the danger of sectarianism and the danger of centrism. As Trotsky notes in his article, these two apparent opposites are in fact closely related: they are both diversions from the essential struggle of Marxists to intervene in the living movement of the working class, and through that intervention, build bridges to socialist consciousness. A further point needs to be made, specifically with regard to centrism: “We draw a distinction,” Trotsky wrote elsewhere, “between the centrism of the workers, which is only a transition stage for them, and the professional centrism of many leaders among whom there are also incurables” (“Two Articles on Centrism”: </em><a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1934/02/centrism.htm"><em>http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1934/02/centrism.htm</em></a><em>). This is a distinction that sectarians routinely ignore.]</em><br /><br /><br /><em><br /></em><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">IT </span></strong>would be absurd to deny the presence of sectarian tendencies in our midst. They have been laid bare by an entire series of discussions and splits. Indeed, how could an element of sectarianism have failed to manifest itself in an ideological movement which stands irreconcilably opposed to all the dominant organizations in the working class, and which is subjected to monstrous, absolutely unprecedented persecution all over the world?<br /><br />Reformists and centrists readily seize upon every occasion to point a finger at our “sectarianism’’. Most of the time, they have in mind not our weak but our strong side: our serious attitude towards theory; our effort to plumb every political situation to the bottom, and to advance clear-cut slogans; our hostility to “easy” and “comfortable” decisions which deliver from cares today, but prepare a catastrophe on the morrow. Coming from opportunists, the accusation of sectarianism is most often a compliment.<br /><br />Curiously enough, however, we are often accused of sectarianism not only by reformists and centrists but by opponents from the “left” — the notorious sectarians, who might well be placed as exhibits in any museum. The basis for their dissatisfaction with us lies in our irreconcilability to themselves, in our striving to purge ourselves of the infantile sectarian diseases, and to rise to a higher level.<br /><br />To a superficial mind it may seem that such words as sectarian, centrist, and so on, are merely polemical expressions exchanged by opponents for lack of other and more appropriate epithets. Yet the concept of sectarianism as well as the concept of centrism has a precise meaning in a Marxian dictionary. Marxism has built a scientific program upon the laws that govern the movement of capitalist society, which were discovered by it. This is a colossal conquest!<br /><br />However, it is not enough to create a correct program. It is necessary that the working class accept it. But the sectarian, in the nature of things, comes to a full stop upon the first half of the task. Active intervention in the actual struggle of the working masses is supplanted, for him, by an abstract propaganda for a Marxist program.<br /><br />Every working-class party, every faction, passes during its initial stages through a period of pure propaganda — that is, the training of its cadres. The period of existence as a Marxist circle invariably grafts habits of an abstract approach to the problems of the workers’ movement. He who is unable to step in time over the confines of this circumscribed existence becomes transformed into a conservative sectarian. The sectarian looks upon the life of society as a great school, with himself as a teacher there. In his opinion, the working class should put aside its less important matters, and assemble in solid rank around his rostrum. Then the task would be solved.<br /><br />Though he may swear by Marxism in every sentence, the sectarian is the direct negation of dialectical materialism, which takes experience as its point of departure and always returns to it. A sectarian does not understand the dialectical interaction between a finished program and a living (that is to say, imperfect and unfinished) mass struggle. The sectarian’s method of thinking is that of a rationalist, a formalist and an enlightener. During a certain stage of development rationalism is progressive, being directed critically against blind beliefs and superstitions (the eighteenth century!) The progressive stage of rationalism is repeated in every great emancipatory movement. But rationalism (abstract propagandism) becomes a reactionary factor the moment it is directed against the dialectic. Sectarianism is hostile to dialectics (not in words but in action) in the sense that it turns its back upon the actual development of the working class.<br /><br />The sectarian lives in a sphere of ready-made formulas. As a rule, life passes him by without noticing him; but now and then he receives in passing such a fillip as makes him turn 180 degrees around his axis, and often makes him continue on his straight path, only ... in the opposite direction. Discord with reality engenders in the sectarian the need to constantly render his formulas more precise. This goes under the name of “discussion”. To a Marxist, discussion is an important but functional instrument in the class struggle. To the sectarian discussion is a goal in itself. However, the more he discusses, the more actual tasks escape him. He is like a man who satisfies his thirst with salt water: the more he drinks, the thirstier he becomes. Hence the constant irritability of the sectarian. Who slipped him the salt? Surely, the “capitulators” of the International Secretariat. The sectarian sees an enemy in everyone who attempts to explain to him that an active participation in the workers’ movement demands a constant study of objective conditions, and not haughty bulldozing from the sectarian rostrum. For analysis of reality the sectarian substitutes intrigue, gossip and hysteria.<br /><br />Centrism is in a certain sense the polar opposite of sectarianism; it abhors precise formulas, seeks routes to reality outside of theory. But despite Stalin’s famous formula, “antipodes” often turn out to be “twins”.[1] A formula detached from life is hollow. Living reality cannot be grasped without theory Thus, both of them, the sectarian and the centrist, depart in the end with empty hands and join together ... in their feelings of animosity towards the genuine Marxist.<br /><br />How many times have we met a smug centrist who reckons himself a “realist” merely because he sets out to swim without any ideological baggage whatever, and is tossed by every vagrant current. He is unable to understand that principles are not dead ballast but a lifeline for a revolutionary swimmer. The sectarian, on the other hand, generally does not want to go swimming at all, in order not to wet his principles. He sits on the shore and reads lectures on morality to the flood of the class struggle. But sometimes a desperate sectarian leaps headlong into the water, seizes hold of the centrist and helps him drown. So it was; so it will be.<br /><br />In our epoch of disintegration and dispersal there are to be found a good many circles in various countries who have acquired a Marxist program, most often by borrowing it from the Bolsheviks, and who have then turned their ideological baggage into a greater or lesser degree of ossification.<br /><br />Let us take, for example, the best specimen of this type, namely the Belgian group led by Comrade Vereecken.[2] On August 10 Spartacus, the organ of this group, announced its adherence to the Fourth International. This announcement was to be welcomed. But at the same time it is necessary to state beforehand that the Fourth International would be doomed if it made concessions to sectarian tendencies.<br /><br />Vereecken was in his own time an irreconcilable opponent of the entry of the Communist League of France into the Socialist Party. There is no crime in this. The question was a new one, differences were entirely permissible. In a certain sense, equally permissible, or at any rate unavoidable, were exaggerations in the ideological struggle. Thus, Vereecken predicted the inevitable ruin of the international organization of the Bolshevik-Leninists as a result of its “dissolution” into the Second International. We would advise Vereecken to reprint today in Spartacus his prophetic documents of yesteryear. But this is not the chief evil. Worse yet is the fact that in its present declaration Spartacus confines itself to pointing out evasively that the French Section remained true to its principles “in a considerable, we may even say a large, measure”. If Vereecken behaved as a Marxist politician should, he would have stated clearly and definitely wherein our French section departed from its principles, and he would have given a direct and an open answer to the question of who proved to be right: the advocates or the opponents of entry?<br /><br />Vereecken is even more incorrect in his attitude towards our Belgian section that entered the reformist Labor Party [POB]. Instead of studying the experiences relating to and resulting from the work carried on under new conditions, and criticizing the actual steps taken, if they merit criticism, Vereecken keeps on complaining about the conditions of the discussion in which he suffered defeat. The discussion, you see, was incomplete, inadequate and disloyal: Vereecken failed to satisfy his thirst with salt water. There is no “real” democratic centralism in the International Communist League! In relation to the opponents of entry the League evinced ... “sectarianism”.<br /><br />It is clear that Comrade Vereecken has a liberal and not a Marxian conception of sectarianism: in this he obviously draws close to the centrists. It is not true that the discussion was inadequate: it was carried on for several months, orally and in the press, and on an international scale besides. After Vereecken had failed to convince others that marking time in one place is the best revolutionary policy, he refused to abide by the decisions of the national and international organizations. The representatives of the majority told Vereecken on more than one occasion that if experience proved that the step taken was incorrect, we would rectify the mistake jointly. Is it really possible that after the 12-year struggle of the Bolshevik-Leninists, you lack sufficient confidence in your own organizations to preserve discipline of action even in case of tactical disagreements? Vereecken paid no heed to comradely and conciliating arguments. After the entry of the majority of the Belgian section into the Labor Party, the Vereecken group naturally found itself outside our ranks. The blame for this falls entirely upon its own shoulders.<br /><br />If we return to the gist of the question, then Comrade Vereecken’s sectarianism stands out in all its dogmatic uncouthness. What’s this! cried Vereecken in indignation: Lenin spoke of breaking with reformists, but the Belgian Bolshevik-Leninists enter a reformist party! But Lenin had in mind a break with the reformists as the inevitable consequence of a struggle against them, and not as an act of salvation regardless of time and place. He required a split with the social-patriots not in order to save his own soul but in order to tear the masses away from social patriotism. In Belgium the trade unionists are fused with the Belgian Labor Party; the Belgian party is essentially the organized working class.<br /><br />To be sure, the entry of revolutionists into the Belgian Labor Party not only opened up possibilities but also imposed restrictions. In propagandizing Marxian ideas it is necessary to take into account not only the legalities of the bourgeois state but also the legalities of a reformist party (both these legalities, it may be added, coincide in a large measure). Generally speaking, adaptation to an alien “legality” carries with it an indubitable danger. But this did not prevent the Bolsheviks from utilizing even czarist legality: for many years the Bolsheviks were compelled to call themselves, at trade union meetings and in the legal press, not Social Democrats but “consistent Democrats”. True, this did not pass scot-free; a considerable number of elements adhered to Bolshevism who were more or less consistent democrats, but not at all international socialists; however, by supplementing legal with illegal activity, Bolshevism overcame the difficulties.<br /><br />Of course, the “legality” of Vandervelde, de Man, Spaak and other flunkeys of the Belgian plutocracy imposes very onerous restrictions on the Marxists, and thus engenders dangers. But Marxists who are not as yet sufficiently strong to create their own party, have their own methods for the struggle against the dangers of reformist captivity; a clear-cut program, constant factional ties, international criticism, etc. The activity of a revolutionary wing in a reformist party can be judged correctly only by evaluating the dynamics of development. Vereecken does not do this, either in regard to the faction ASR faction or the Verite group. Had he done so, he would have been compelled to admit that the ASR has made serious advances in the recent period. What the final balance will be is impossible to forecast as yet. But the entry into the Belgian Labor Party is already justified by experience.<br /><br />Extending and generalizing his mistake, Vereecken asserts that the existence of isolated small groups, which split away at different stages from our international organisation, is proof of our sectarian methods. Thus, the actual relationships are stood on their head. As a matter of fact, into the ranks of the Bolshevik-Leninists during the initial stages came a considerable number of anarchistic and individualistic elements generally incapable of organizational discipline, and occasionally an incompetent, who could not make his career in the Comintern. These elements viewed the struggle against “bureaucratism” in approximately the following manner: no decisions must ever be arrived at; instead, “discussion” is to be installed as a permanent occupation. We can say with complete justification that the Bolshevik-Leninists showed a good deal of patience – perhaps even a good deal too much – towards such types of individuals and grouplets. Only since an international core has been consolidated, and has begun to assist the national sections in purging their ranks of internal sabotage, has actual and systematic growth of our organization begun.<br /><br />Let us take a few examples of groups that split from our international organisation at various stages of its development.<br /><br />The French periodical <em>Que Faire?</em> [What Is To Be Done?] is an instructive specimen of a combination of sectarianism with eclecticism. On the most important questions this periodical expounds the views of the Bolshevik-Leninists, changing a few commas, and directing severe critical remarks at us. At the same time, this periodical permits a defence of social-patriotic garbage, under the guise of discussion, and under cover of “defending the USSR”, to go on with impunity. The internationalists of <em>Que Faire?</em> are themselves unable to explain how and why they happen to cohabit peacefully with social patriots after breaking with the Bolsheviks. It is clear, however, that with such eclecticism Que Faire? is least capable of replying to the question what to do (<em>que faire</em>).<br /><br />The “Internationalists” and the social patriots are agreed on only one thing: never the Fourth International! Why? One must not “break away” from the Communist workers. We have heard the self-same argument from the SAP: we must not break away from the Social Democratic workers. In this instance, too, antipodes turn out to be twins. The peculiar thing, however, is that <em>Que Faire?</em> is not connected, and, by its very nature, cannot be connected with any workers.<br /><br />There is even less to be said about such groups as <em>Internationale</em> or <em>Proletaire.</em> They also abstract their views from the latest issues of <em>La Verite</em>, with an admixture of critical improvisations. They have no perspectives at all of revolutionary growth; but they manage to get along without perspectives. Instead of trying to learn within the framework of a more serious organization (to learn is difficult), these haters of discipline, very pretentious “leaders,” desire to teach the working class (this appears to them to be easier). In moments of sober reflection they must themselves realize that their very existence as “independent” organizations is a sheer misunderstanding.<br /><br />In the United States we might mention the Field and Weisbord groups.[3] Field – in his entire political make-up – is a bourgeois radical who has acquired the economic views of Marxism. To become a revolutionist Field would have had to work for a number of years as a disciplined soldier in a revolutionary proletarian organization; but he began by deciding to create a workers’ movement “of his own”. Assuming a position to our “left” (where else?), Field shortly entered into fraternal relations with the SAP. As we see, the incident that befell Bauer was not at all accidental. The urge to stand to the left of Marxism leads fatally to the centrist swamp.<br /><br />Weisbord is indubitably closer to a revolutionary type than Field. But at the same time he represents the purest example of a sectarian. He is utterly incapable of preserving proportions, either in ideas or in actions. Every principle he turns into a sectarian caricature. That is why even correct ideas in his hands become instruments for disorganizing his own ranks.<br /><br />There is no need to dwell upon similar groups in other countries. They split from us not because we are intolerant or intolerable but because they themselves did not and could not go forward. Since the time of the split they have succeeded only in exposing their incapacity. Their attempts to unite with each other, on a national or an international scale, produced no results in any single case: peculiar to sectarianism is only the power of mutual repulsion and not the power of attraction.<br /><br />Some crank has computed the number of “splits” we have had and arrived at the sum of about a score. He saw in this devastating evidence of our bad regime. The peculiar thing is that in the SAP itself, which had triumphantly published these computations, there occurred, during the few years of its existence, more rifts and splits than in all our sections taken together. Taken by itself, however, this fact is meaningless. It is necessary to take not the bald statistics of splits but the dialectics of development. After all its splits, the SAP remained an extremely heterogeneous organization which will be unable to withstand the first onset of great events. This applies even to a larger measure to the “London Bureau of Revolutionary Socialist Unity”, which is being torn asunder by irreconcilable contradictions; its “tomorrow” will consist not of “unity” but only of splits. In the meantime, the organization of the Bolshevik-Leninists, after purging itself of sectarian and centrist tendencies, not only grew numerically, not only strengthened its international ties, but also found the road to fusion with organisations akin to it in spirit (Holland, United States). The attempts to blow up the Dutch Party (from the right, through Molenar!) and the American Party (from the left, through Bauer!) have only led to the internal consolidation of both these parties. We can predict with assurance that parallel to the disintegration of the London Bureau will proceed an ever more rapid growth of the organizations of the Fourth International.<br /><br />How the new International will take form, through what stages it will pass, what final shape it will assume – this no one can foretell today. And, indeed, there is no need to do so: historical events will show us. But it is necessary to begin by proclaiming a program that meets the tasks of our epoch. On the basis of this program it is necessary to mobilize co-thinkers, the pioneers of the new International. No other road is possible.<br /><br />The <em>Communist Manifesto</em> of Marx and Engels, directly aimed against all types of utopian-sectarian socialism, forcefully points out that Communists do not oppose themselves to the actual workers’ movements but participate in them as a vanguard. At the same time the <em>Manifesto</em> was the program of a new party, national and international. The sectarian is content with a program as a recipe for salvation. The centrist guides himself by the famous (essentially meaningless) formula of Eduard Bernstein: “the movement is everything, the final goal – nothing”. The Marxist draws his scientific program from the movement taken as a whole, in order to apply this program to every concrete stage of the movement.<br /><br />On the one side, the initial steps of the new International are made more difficult by the old organizations and splinters from them: on the other side, they are facilitated by the colossal experience from the past. The process of crystallization, which is very difficult and full of torments during the first stages, will assume in the future an impetuous and rapid character. Recent international events are of incommensurate significance for the formation of the revolutionary vanguard. In his own fashion, Mussolini — and this should be recognised — has “aided” the cause of the Fourth International. Great conflicts sweep away all that is half-way and artificial and, on the other hand, give strength to all that is viable. War leaves room only for two tendencies in the ranks of the working class movement: social patriotism, which does not stop at any betrayal, and revolutionary internationalism, which is bold and capable of going to the end. It is precisely for this reason that centrists, fearful of impending events, are waging a rabid struggle against the Fourth International. They are correct, in their own fashion: in the wake of great convulsions, the only organizations that will be able to survive and develop are those that have not only cleansed their ranks of sectarianism but have also systematically trained them in the spirit of despising all ideological vacillation and cowardice.<br /><br /><br />[1] “Stalin’s famous formula” during the “third period” had that Social Democracy and fascism were not antipodes (i.e. opposites) but twins.<br />[2] Georges Vereecken was a leader of a group that split away from the Trotskyist movement’s Belgian section early in 1935, when that section voted to enter the Belgian Labor Party. After rejoining in 1936, Vereecken split again in 1938 in protest against the founding of the Fourth International.<br />[3] B. J. Field was expelled from the American Trotskyist movement after violating party discipline in 1934. He organized the League for a Revolutionary Workers Party, which soon disappeared. Albert Weisbord, who was expelled from the American Communist Party in 1929, organized a small group, the Communist League of Struggle, which proclaimed its adherence to the Trotskyist movement in the early thirties, although its politics vacillated between those of the Right and Left Oppositions. He later broke with Marxism and became an AFL organizer.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-7332467493432822165?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-66864608384678713202009-05-01T04:48:00.000-07:002009-05-01T08:07:52.303-07:00The Martyred Apostles of Labor<a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/uploaded_images/debs-717867.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 237px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/uploaded_images/debs-717865.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><br />Eugene V. Debs<br /><br />Written: February, 1898<br /><br />First Published: The New Time, February, 1898<br /><br /></div><br /><div></div><br /><div><br /><br />The century now closing is luminous with great achievements. In every department of human endeavor marvelous progress has been made. By the magic of the machine which sprang from the inventive genius of man, wealth has been created in fabulous abundance. But, alas, this wealth has been created in fabulous abundance. But, alas, this wealth, instead of blessing the race, has been the means of enslaving it. The few have come in possession of all, and the many have been reduced to the extremity of living by permission.<br /><br />A few have had the courage to protest. To silence these so that the dead-level of slavery could be maintained has been the demand and command of capital-brown power. Press and pulpit responded with alacrity. All the forces of society were directed against these pioneers of industrial liberty, these brave defenders of oppressed humanity—and against them the crime of the century has been committed.<br /><br />Albert R. Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, Adolph Fischer, Louis Lingg, Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab and Oscar Neebe paid the cruel penalty in prison cell and on the gallows.<br />They were the first martyrs in the cause of industrial freedom, and one of the supreme duties of our civilization, if indeed we may boast of having been redeemed from savagery, is to rescue their names from calumny and do justice to their memory.<br /><br />The crime with which these men were charged was never proven against them. The trial which resulted in their conviction was not only a disgrace to all judicial procedure but a foul, black, indelible and damning stigma upon the nation.<br /><br />It was a trial organized and conducted to convict—a conspiracy to murder innocent men, and hence had not one redeeming feature.<br /><br />It was a plot, satanic in all its conception, to wreak vengeance upon defenseless men, who, not being found guilty of the crime charged in the indictment, were found guilty of exercising the inalienable right of free speech in the interest of the toiling and groaning masses, and thus they became the first martyrs to a cause which, fertilized by their blood, has grown in strength and sweep and influence from the day they yielded up their lives and liberty in its defense.<br />As the years go by and the history of that infamous trial is read and considered by men of thought, who are capable of wrenching themselves from the grasp of prejudice and giving reason its rightful supremacy, the stronger the conviction becomes that the present generation of workingmen should erect an enduring memorial to the men who had the courage to denounce and oppose wage-slavery and seek for methods of emancipation.<br /><br />The vision of the judicially murdered men was prescient. They saw the dark and hideous shadow of coming events. They spoke words of warning, not too soon, not too emphatic, not too trumpettoned—for even in 1886, when the Haymarket meetings were held, the capitalist grasp was upon the throats of workingmen and its fetters were upon their limbs.<br />There was even then idleness, poverty, squalor, the rattling of skeleton bones, the sunken eye, the pallor, the living death of famine, the crushing and the grinding of the relentless mills of the plutocracy, which more rapidly than the mills of the gods grind their victims to dust.<br />The men who went to their death upon the verdict of a jury, I have said, were judicially murdered—not only because the jury was packed for the express purpose of finding them guilty, not only because the crime for which they suffered was never proven against them, not only because the judge before whom they were arraigned was unjust and bloodthirsty, but because they had declared in the exercise of free speech that men who subjected their fellowmen to conditions often worse than death were unfit to live.<br /><br />In all lands and in all ages where the victims of injustice have bowed their bodies to the earth, bearing grievous burdens laid upon them by cruel taskmasters, and have lifted their eyes starward in the hope of finding some orb whose light inspired hope, ten million times the anathema has been uttered and will be uttered until a day shall dawn upon the world when the emancipation of those who toil is achieved by the brave, self-sacrificing few who, like the Chicago martyrs, have the courage of crusaders and the spirit of iconoclasts and dare champion the cause of the oppressed and demand in the name of an avenging God and of an outraged Humanity that infernalism shall be eliminated from our civilization.<br /><br />And as the struggle for justice proceeds and the battlefields are covered with the slain, as Mother Earth drinks their blood, the stones are given tongues with which to denounce man’s inhumanity to man—aye, to women and cellar, arraign our civilization, our religion and our judiciary—whose wailings and lamentations, hushing to silence every sound the Creator designed to make the world a paradise of harmonies, transform it into an inferno where the demons of greed plot and scheme to consign their victims to lower depths of degradation and despair.<br /><br />The men who were judicially murdered in Chicago in 1887, in the name of the great State of Illinois, were the avant couriers of a better day. They were called anarchists, but at their trial it was not proven that they had committed any crime or violated any law. They had protested against unjust laws and their brutal administration. They stood between oppressor and oppressed, and they dared, in a free (?) country, to exercise the divine right of free speech; and the records of their trial, as if written with an “iron pen and lead in the rock forever,” proclaim the truth of the declaration.<br /><br />I would rescue their names from slander. The slanderers of the dead are the oppressors of the living. I would, if I could, restore them to their rightful positions as evangelists, the proclaimers of good news to their fellowmen—crusaders, to rescue the sacred shrines of justice from the profanations of the capitalistic defilers who have made them more repulsive than Augean stables. Aye, I would take them, if I could, from peaceful slumber in their martyr graves—I would place joint to joint in their dislocated necks—I would make the halter the symbol of redemption—I would restore the flesh to their skeleton bones—their eyes should again flash defiance to the enemies of humanity, and their tongues, again, more eloquent than all the heroes of oratory, should speak the truth to a gainsaying world. Alas, this cannot be done—but something can be done. The stigma fixed upon their names by an outrageous trial can be forever obliterated and their fame be made to shine with resplendent glory on the pages of history.<br />Until the time shall come, as come it will, when the parks of Chicago shall be adorned with their statues, and with holy acclaim, men, women and children, pointing to these monuments as testimonial of gratitude, shall honor the men who dared to be true to humanity and paid the penalty of their heroism with their lives, the preliminary work of setting forth their virtues devolves upon those who are capable of gratitude to men who suffered death that they might live.<br /><br />They were the men who, like Al-Hassen, the minstrel of the king, went forth to find themes of mirth and joy with which to gladden the ears of his master, but returned disappointed, and, instead of themes to awaken the gladness and joyous echoes, found scenes which dried all the fountains of joy. Touching his golden harp, Al-Hassen sang to the king as Parsons, Spies, Engels, Fielden, Fischer, Lingg, Schwab and Neebe proclaimed to the people:<br /><br />“O king, at thyCommand I went into the world of men;</div><div>I sought full earnestly the thing which I</div><div>Might weave into the gay and lightsome song.</div><div>I found it, king; ’twas there. Had I the art</div><div>To look but on the fair outside, I nothing</div><div>Else had found. That art not mine, I saw what</div><div>Lay beneath. And seeing thus I could not sing;</div><div>For there, in dens more vile than wolf or jackal</div><div>Ever sought, were herded, stifling, foul, the</div><div>Writhing, crawling masses of mankind. </div><div>Man!Ground down beneath oppression’s iron heel,</div><div>Till God in him was crushed and driven back,</div><div>And only that which with the brute he shares</div><div>Finds room to upward grow.”<br /><br />Such pictures of horror our martyrs saw in Chicago, as others have seen them in all the great centers of population in the country. But, like the noble minstrel, they proceeded to recite their discoveries and with him moaned:<br /><br />“And in this worldI saw how womanhood’s fair flower had</div><div>Never space its petals to unfold. </div><div>HowChildhood’s tender bud was crushed and trampled</div><div>Down in mire and filth too evil, foul, for beasts</div><div>To be partaken in. For gold I saw</div><div>The virgin sold, and motherhood was made</div><div>A mock and score.<br />I saw the fruit of labor</div><div>Torn away from him who toiled, to further</div><div>Swell the bursting coffers of the rich, while</div><div>Babes and mothers pined and died of want.</div><div>I saw dishonor and injustice thrive. I saw</div><div>The wicked, ignorant, greedy, and unclean,</div><div>By means of bribes and baseness, raised to seats</div><div>Of power, from whence with lashes pitiless</div><div>And keen, they scourged the hungry, naked throng</div><div>Whom first they robbed and then enslaved.”<br /><br />Such were the scenes that the Chicago martyrs had witnessed and which may still be seen, and for reciting them and protesting against them they were judicially murdered. </div><div><br />It was not strange that the hearts of the martyrs “grew into one with the great moaning, throbbing heart” of the oppressed; not strange that the nerves of the martyrs grew “tense and quivering with the throes of mortal pain”; not strange that they should pity and plead and protest. The strange part of it is that in our high-noon of civilization a damnable judicial conspiracy should have been concocted to murder them under the forms of law. </div><div><br />That such is the truth of history, no honest man will attempt to deny; hence the demand, growing more pronounced every day, to snatch the names of these martyred evangelists of labor emanicapation from dishonor and add them to the roll of the most illustrious dead of the nation.</div><div><br /></div><div>Courtesy of Marxist Internet Archives </div><div></div><div><a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1898/martyred.htm">http://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1898/martyred.htm</a> </div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-6686460838467871320?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-66468478483085105932009-04-02T21:18:00.000-07:002009-04-02T21:26:52.231-07:00Un intercambio con un apologista del liderazgo del Socialist Equality Party (SEP) (Partido Socialista por la Igualdad):<span style="font-size:130%;"><strong>Sobre la " curiosa torpeza " del WSWS en Iraq y otros asuntos </strong><br /><br /><strong></strong><br /></span><br />Estoy poniendo algunos comentarios de un lector, Mdv, y mi respuesta .Al juzgar porlas observaciones de Mdv, es justo caracterizarlo como un apologista del liderazgo del SEP. Pero lo interesante es que, a diferencia de David North (o los Talbots), Mdv trata de dirigirse a la parte de las críticas sustantivas que hicimos de la línea política y práctica del SEP. Sus esfuerzos por defender al liderazgo de SEP en estos asuntos lo dirigen a hacer, aunque por inadvertencia, algunas declaraciones reveladoras que merecen ser notificadas a nuestros lectores. Otra razón para responder a Mdv es que los puntos de vista que él expresa probablemente son compartidos por otros en y alrededor del SEP.<br /><br />Estos comentarios por Mdv son la última parte de un intercambio que él estaba teniendo con Andrew Rivers con respecto a un discurso de North en una conferencia de Estudios Eslavos sobre el cual River escribió para el blog de revolución permanente.org<br />Hasta donde este intercambio se dio yo no tengo nada que añadir a lo que River ha dicho, y las últimas observaciones de Mdv no sustentan nada nuevo. Desde el segundo párrafo en adelante, sin embargo, Mdv se mueve a una basada y más amplia defensa del liderazgo del SEP, y son estas observaciones las que me conciernen aquí.<br /><br />Frank Brenner<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/curious_fumble_es.pdf">http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/curious_fumble_es.pdf</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-6646847848308510593?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-9731637214040366582009-03-30T23:41:00.000-07:002009-03-30T23:52:53.973-07:00Briefwechsel mit einem Apologeten der SEP-Führung:<strong>Die „merkwürdige Verirrung“ der WSWS beim Irak-Krieg und anderen Angelegenheiten</strong><br /><br />Ich gebe hier die Kommentare eines Lesers, mdv, und meine Antwort darauf wieder. Ausgehend von seinen Bemerkungen ist es angemessen, ihn als einen Apologeten der SEP-Führung zu bezeichnen. Es ist jedoch bemerkenswert, dass er im Gegensatz zu David North (oder den Talbots) versucht Teile der grundlegenden Kritik zu erwidern, welche wir an der politischen Linie und der Praxis der SEP geübt haben. Beim Versuch die SEP Führung zu verteidigen macht er unbeabsichtigt einige aufschlussreiche Bemerkungen, welche für unsere Leser hervorgehoben werden sollten. Ein weiterer Grund für die Antwort an mdv ist, dass er Ansichten äußert, die wahrscheinlich von anderen SEP Mitgliedern und Unterstützern geteilt werden.<br /><br />Mdvs Kommentare sind der jüngste Teil eines Briefwechsels der sich zwischen ihm und Andrew River entwickelt hatte. Dieser begann mit Rivers Blog-Eintrag auf permanent-revolution.org über David Norths Rede bei einer Slawistik-Konferenz. Was diesen Briefwechsel angeht, habe ich nichts zu Rivers Bemerkungen hinzuzufügen, und mdvs jüngster Beitrag trägt nichts neues zum Thema bei. Doch vom zweiten Absatz an geht mdv zu einer breiter angelegten Verteidigung der SEP-Führung über, und mit diesen Bemerkungen setze ich mich hier auseinander.<br /><br />Frank Brenner<br /><br /><a href="http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/curious_fumble_de.pdf">http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/curious_fumble_de.pdf</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-973163721404036658?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-26365321633682896092009-03-08T22:00:00.000-07:002009-03-08T22:10:21.292-07:00On the WSWS's "curious fumble" on Iraq and other mattersI’m posting here some comments by a reader, mdv, and my response. Judging from mdv’s remarks, it is fair to characterize him as an apologist for the SEP leadership. But what is interesting is that unlike David North (or the Talbots), mdv tries to address some of the substantive criticisms we made of the SEP’s political line and practice. His efforts to defend the SEP leadership on these issues lead him to make, albeit inadvertently, some revealing statements which deserve to be brought to the attention of our readers. Another reason for responding to mdv is that the views he expresses are probably shared by others in and around the SEP.<br /><br />These comments by mdv are the latest installment of an exchange he was having with Andrew River over a blog River wrote for permanent-revolution.org concerning a speech by North to a Slavic studies conference. As far as this exchange goes, I have nothing to add to what River has said, and mdv’s latest remarks raise nothing new on this score. From the second paragraph on, however, mdv moves to a more broad-based defense of the SEP leadership, and it is these remarks that concern me here.<br /><br />Frank Brenner<br /><br /><a href="http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/curious_fumble.pdf"><strong>Click here for the exchange with an apologist for the SEP leadership</strong></a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-2636532163368289609?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-17068775962735347412009-03-03T23:30:00.000-08:002009-03-04T00:30:49.151-08:00If Charles Darwin had never been born<a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/uploaded_images/stephenjaygould-726719.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 304px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 309px" alt="Stephen Jay Gould" src="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/uploaded_images/stephenjaygould-726717.jpg" border="0" /> <p>Stephen Jay Gould</p></a><br /><br /><div>I will grant one point to my scientific colleagues and freely allow that if Charles Darwin had never been born, a well-prepared and waiting scientific world, abetted by a cultural context more than ready for such a reconstruction of nature, would still have promulgated and won general acceptance for evolution in the mid 19th century. At some point, the mechanism of natural selection would also have been formulated and eventually validated, perhaps by Wallace himself who might then have expanded his few pages of speculation, written during a malarial fit on Ternate, into the same kind of factual compendium that Darwin composed, and that guaranteed the triumph of this view of life. </div><div><br />So why fret and care that the actual version of the destined deed was done by an upper class English gentleman who had circumnavigated the globe as a vigorous youth, lost his dearest daughter and his waning faith at the same time, wrote the greatest treatise ever composed on the taxonomy of barnacles, and eventually grew a white beard, lived as a country squire just south of London, and never again traveled far enough even to cross the English Channel? We care for the same reason that we love okapis, delight in the fossil evidence of trilobites, and mourn the passage of the dodo. We care because the broad events that had to happen, happened to happen in a certain particular way. And something almost unspeakably holy-I don’t know how else to say this-underlies our discovery and confirmation of the actual details that made our world and also, in realms of contingency, assured the minutiae of its construction in the manner we know, and not in anyone of a trillion other ways, nearly all of which would not have included the evolution of a scribe to record the beauty, the cruelty, the fascination, and the mystery. </div><div><br />Yes, the Renaissance would have unfolded-indeed, Europe already bathed in its midst-if Michelangelo had never been born. But how much poorer would our world have been without the magnificent statue of Moses, furious and disconsolate as he holds the tablets of the law while his people dance about the golden calf, still presiding in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli; and without the gigantic fresco of the Last Judgment, revealing all our blessed humanity in all our earthly sins, and still covering, in brilliant restoration, a full wall of the Sistine Chapel? </div><div><br />No difference truly separates science and art in this crucial respect. We only perceive a division because our disparate traditions lead us to focus upon different scales of the identity. The art historian looks right at Moses and knows the importance of its individuality. The scientist tends to gaze upon a world ready for evolution, and then discounts the centrality of a single, admittedly fascinating, individual named Charles Darwin. But if Darwin had never been born, we would have suffered the equivalent of a Renaissance without Moses or the Last Judgment-a biological revolution without the Origin of Species; without the invocation of Julia Pastrana, the bearded circus lady with two sets of teeth, to illustrate correlation of growth; without the Galapagos fauna to embody the principle of imperfection to prove the pathways of history; without pigeons to illustrate artificial selection; without barnacles to puncture half our pride with their dwarfed males upon the hermaphrodites.</div><div> </div><div>Most of all, we would have experienced the same biological revolution without the stunning clarity, illustrated by wonderfully apposite metaphors, of a complex central logic so brilliantly formulated, and so bristling with implications extending nearly forever outward, at least well past our current reckoning. In this alternate world, we would probably be honoring a different and far less compelling founder by occasional visits to a statue in a musty pantheon, and not by constant dialogue with a man whose ideas live, breathe, challenge, taunt, and inspire us every day of our lives, more than a century after his bones came to rest on a cathedral floor at the foot of whatever persists in the material being of Isaac Newton.</div><br /><a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/uploaded_images/darwin_beard-708892.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 257px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="Charles Darwin" src="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/uploaded_images/darwin_beard-708888.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div><a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/uploaded_images/darwin_beard-783402.jpg"><p>Charles Darwin with beard</p></a><br /><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div><br />We would be enjoying an evolutionary view of life, but not the specific grandeur of “this view of life.” What can be more ennobling than a factual reality-the uniquely actualized result among innumerable potentials that did not obtain the most precious privilege of emergence into concrete existence? And what a stunning piece of good fortune, that this actuality came to us with all the grace, the moral weight, and the intellectual power of Darwin’s particular struggles and insights, clothing the structure of his thought in that apotheosis of human achievement-wisdom, which the Book of Proverbs, citing the same icon that Darwin would borrow more than two millennia later, called Etz Chayim, the tree of life. “Length of days is in her right hand,” for “she is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her; and happy is everyone that retaineth her.” </div></div><br /><br />From Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, (Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 1294-1295<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-1706877596273534741?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-57312870702296346542009-02-11T22:17:00.000-08:002009-02-11T22:28:25.953-08:00Lincoln at 200: Until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword<a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/uploaded_images/AbrahamLincoln-710749.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 214px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/uploaded_images/AbrahamLincoln-710746.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div>Fellow-Countrymen: </div><br /><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><br /><div>AT this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.</div><br /><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><br /><div>On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.</div><br /><br /><br /><div><br />One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."</div><br /><br /><br /><div><br />With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.</div><div></div><div><br /></div><div>Abraham Lincoln</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>Second Inaugural Address</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>Saturday, March 4, 1865 </div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-5731287070229634654?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-65318278624034921932009-02-11T12:45:00.000-08:002009-02-11T13:20:27.655-08:00Darwin at 200: Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful<a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/uploaded_images/Darwin_by_G.Richmond-790329.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 212px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/uploaded_images/Darwin_by_G.Richmond-790262.jpg" border="0" /></a><strong>It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.<br /><br /></strong>From the conclusion of <em>The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection</em><br /><br />Charles Darwin, born February 12, 1809<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-6531827862403492193?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-37997198687614437602009-01-26T22:55:00.000-08:002009-01-26T23:34:35.128-08:00Did the SEP abandon permanent revolution in Iraq?The following letter was posted by an Anonymous reader on the blog “<a title="external link" href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/2009/01/brief-note-on-publication-of-steiner.html">A brief note on the publication of "Steiner, Brenner and Neo-Marxism: The Marcusean Component" </a>as a response to my reply. I am posting the response Anonymous sent and a further reply. Since it is reasonable to assume that other SEP members and supporters share the views presented by Anonymous, I am posting his comments and my reply as a new blog entry.<br /><br /><b>Dear A. River,</b><br /><br />Your observation about my previous comment makes some good points. I did make the statement from the point of view of someone who had already decided what position I favored and consider the theoretical points to be clear. Practice then becomes the issue.<br /><br />anyway, you asked:<br /><br />"The concluding chapter of Marxism Without its Head or its Heart proposes a few simple steps that the SEP can undertake to begin to reorient their practice. The IC leadership has not responded to any of these proposals. Perhaps you can tell us what you think of them?"<br /><br />to begin:<br /><br />You mentioned Iraq in the chapter, saying the WSWS supports "bourgeois nationalism." The WSWS calls for an end to the occupation, but apparently this is equivalent to supporting bourgeois nationalism for you. The WSWS has not supported any bourgeois faction in Iraq. I'm not sure about your view here, but you must be insisting on some alternative to this demand for withdrawal. I presume either it is a controversy drawn up that insists this demand is a repudiation of a demand for socialism in the country, thus keeping the country bourgeois. It is what we call a transitional demand. Otherwise you may advocate some sort of occupation uprising or occupation aided-revolution, but you'll have to enlighten us.<br /><br />With your demands, though they sound on their face to be interesting, most of them are, in my view (such cultural and historical articles, events), done extremely well by the ICFI and WSWS. A good sounding argument is the youth league argument, but you'll have to prove colleges are poor arenas for movement building. I am a working class youth who is working my way (hopefully) through colleges. I hope to go to a state college after getting my associate's degree. The comrades I have met who are students at colleges are, as far as I can tell, excellent socialists. As for the calls for democracy, freedom of criticism and the emphasis on learning to a greater extent than of that of the WSWS, these can only be seen in the light of your psychosexual and utopian views which you want to introduce and the ICFI doesn't want to introduce (and in my opinion rightly so). It isn't a question of democracy, its a question of citizenship, so to speak, and in an ideological sense.<br /><br />Now, perhaps or perhaps ultimately you merely try to win over the socialists of the ICFI because you like their character and you've had a long association with them. Now this you can't blame the ICFI for opposing. I am tired of their opposition because I'm not sure if it is strictly necessary in its current form, but I understand it, for any organization would be forced to do the same. Your whole site is a back-and-forth with the ICFI, they just have an article every month.<br /><br />Anonymous<br /><br /><b>Dear Anonymous,</b><br /><br />Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately I do not share your confidence that the theoretical issues are already solved and can be shelved accordingly. I hope you will consider the theoretical with the practical critiques Steiner and Brenner offer. You really haven’t told us—beyond mere assertion--why you consider these theoretical issues a shut case, nor have you expressed an anti-critique of Steiner and Brenner’s criticisms of the ICFI leadership’s descent into objectivism. Again, I urge you to make a thorough examination of what Steiner and Brenner actually wrote.<br /><br />As to your substantive criticisms:<br /><br />1. Chapter 2 of MWHH argued that the WSWS coverage of Iraq constituted “the abandonment of the permanent revolution and the embrace of bourgeois nationalism in the form of a Shiite cleric and his militia.” [1] Your invocation of the ICFI’s call for an end to the occupation is missing the point of Steiner and Brenner’s criticisms. Everyone on the Left wants to end the occupation. Even Obama in his mealy-mouthed speeches expressed such sentiments. Revolutionary Marxists have a much higher standard to meet. Our perspective has to be based on Trotsky's permanent revolution, which fights for the independent mobilization of the Iraqi working class. If we abandon that perspective, then there is nothing that distinguishes Marxism from liberalism when it comes to the struggle against imperialist war. But if you actually read through the analysis presented in MWHH, it is absolutely undeniable that the WSWS did abandon the perspective of the permanent revolution in Iraq. They adopted a very different kind of perspective, one which boosted so-called "national resistance" against the occupation. Trodding a well-worn path taken by many middle class radicals (and before them, by Stalinists) this perspective led the WSWS to become a cheerleader for bourgeois nationalists in Iraq, specifically the Shiite cleric al-Sadr.<br /><br />The language the WSWS used in its coverage of the war was not Marxist, but rather colored by a non-class perspective of “national resistance”. The working class disappeared from their coverage in 2004 (and beyond) once the Sadrist uprising gained attention in the mainstream and caught the eye of the radical middle class (i.e. Naomi Klein). The WSWS lavished praise upon Sadr and characterized his politics in pseudo-Marxist phraseology, claiming his banal anti imperialism represented a “leap” in consciousness [2]. Hyperbolic rhetoric saturated the coverage, as the Sadrist uprising resurrected in the minds of WSWS journalists the respective ghosts of the French Resistance and the founding fathers [3]. Steiner and Brenner warned,<br /><br />“Once you are freed of the nagging problem of class, then all kinds of glorious parallels suggest themselves, as we saw earlier with the French resistance etc. {Patrick} Martin now enlists the shades of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and one can almost see the fife and drum marching through the dusty streets of Najaf and Fallujah. But alas the shade of Leon Trotsky, author of the theory of permanent revolution, is nowhere to be seen in this heroic scenario.” [4]<br /><br />Only much later, when the Sadrists failed to advocate a “no” vote on the Iraqi constitution the Quisling installed government drafted in 2005, did the WSWS suddenly figure out Sadr was a typical bourgeois nationalist after all. It took the WSWS an astonishing 18 months to figure out the ABCs of Marxism. But nevertheless the adaptation to bourgeois nationalism continued. WSWS writers expected and supported anti imperialist responses from the Iraqi masses, but did so without any perspective for building an independent Marxist movement. Such statements from James Cogan and others on the WSWS staff amounted to objectivist daydreams, with the job of liberation outsourced to the “Iraqi masses” (defined without an analytical class criterion), and with a blind eye to the working class struggles in Iraq. Without a class analysis and program as a guiding thread, the WSWS abandoned the Iraqi working class to the machinations of the bourgeoisie. To conclude:<br /><br />“The WSWS paid no attention to the struggles of the Iraqi workers because it became a proponent of so-called “national resistance.” But to ignore the working class means to abandon any effort to build a revolutionary party. And so there has never been a single article on the WSWS devoted to the call for the building of a Trotskyist party in Iraq or the spelling out of what such a party would stand for. Nothing expresses the WSWS’s abandonment of the permanent revolution more clearly than this. Capitulating to bourgeois nationalism is a black hole that blots out both the working class and Marxism.” [5]<br /><br />All of this has been painfully documented in Chapter 2 of Steiner and Brenner’s polemic. My summary cannot do justice to what--in my opinion--is the most damning section of MWHH. I encourage you to study it carefully. These criticisms have been totally ignored in the most dishonest fashion by the IC leadership. Those readers who are nurtured only on what WSWS tells them are shamefully left in the dark as to the real content of Steiner and Brenner’s critique.<br /><br />2. Steiner and Brenner are not against recruiting students in colleges and universities for Trotskyism. But it was a conscious decision on the SEP’s part to limit their youth movement, the ISSE, solely to students. Steiner and Brenner cited an article from Znet which contained some damning statistics that demonstrate higher levels of education are out of reach for many. To quote from that same article:<br /><br />“Commonly held definitions need not apply any more. "Public" no longer means public if the majority of people can't afford or have access to institutions of higher education. Community colleges also increased tuition by 14%, the second largest increase since 1976. What "community" will attend these schools? Certainly not the 12.4% of the U.S. population who live on less than $18,400 yearly - a community of 34.6 million in the U.S. who see a college education well out of their reach.” [6]<br /><br />Your anecdotes aside, it was argued in the concluding chapter of MWHH that “the astronomical costs of higher education now put it out of reach for most working class youth and even many middle class youth…a smaller percentage of working class youth are now able to attend college than in previous generations…” [7] No matter how you state it, the SEP is losing (what James Cannon called [8]) its proletarian orientation by limiting its recruitment to the campuses. This opens the party up to middle class forces. Such a strategy spawns an internal dialectic in the party’s increasing adaptation to the mentalities of middle class politics, namely the mindsets of pragmatism and liberalism. Such adaptation is unavoidable in the absence of a proletarian counterweight and scrupulous ideological training in dialectics and Marxism for new recruits.<br /><br />Again, our objection is not to recruiting college students but rather to limiting recruitment almost exclusively to such students. This is in stark contrast not only to the Trotskyist movement under Cannon but also to the earlier history of the SEP's predecessor, the Workers League. There used to be demands formulated by the WL that addressed the oppressed sections of working class youth, from the unemployed to minorities. Compared with its predecessor the SEP doesn’t come close to engaging these forces. There simply is no attention paid to unemployed and minority youth in the current activities of the SEP. [9].<br /><br />3. Your conception of party democracy is alien to the traditions of Bolshevism. This was a tradition that countenanced intense debate even as foreign imperialism and civil war were threatening the very existence of the young workers state. At the time it seemed as if Moscow and Leningrad might very quickly be overrun by German troops who would only face a weak Soviet army that was in the process of disintegration. But in Alexander Rabinowitch’s penetrating study, The Bolsheviks in Power, the author provides a plethora of examples of how intense the debate was within the Bolshevik Party during even this stage of what was perceived as an imminent collapse of the new Soviet Government. [10].<br /><br />Your distinction between “citizenship” in the party and democracy is a confused one. It has nothing to do with the Leninist principle of democratic centralism. Trotsky, a supporter of psychoanalysis, would have been kicked out of the Bolshevik party by your standard for being “obsessed” with “psychosexual” politics.<br /><br />I will end this reply with a quote from Lenin, who was an advocate of democratically conducted debate within socialist parties:<br /><br />“It is necessary that every member of the Party should study calmly and with the greatest objectivity, first the substance of the differences of opinion, and then the development of the struggles within the Party. Neither the one nor the other can be done unless the documents of both sides are published. He who takes somebody’s word for it is a hopeless idiot, who can be disposed of with a simple gesture of the hand." [11]<br /><br />Anyone who has actually read the material presented by Steiner and Brenner, concomitant with North’s, the Talbots’, and Haig’s polemics know who has followed the spirit of objectivity Lenin outlined here and who has not. [12]<br /><br />Fraternally,<br /><br />Andrew River<br /><br /><br />1. See Chapter 2 of Marxism Without its Head or Heart: The WSWS as a Left Apologist for Bourgeois Nationalism in Iraq:<br /><a href="http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch02.pdf">http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch02.pdf</a><br /><br />2. From David North,<br />“We have taken serious note of the appeal issued by al-Sadr to the people of the United States. This appeal must reflect a new awareness among the Iraqi masses that American imperialism is not a monolithic force, and that the United States is torn by internal social divisions. It also expresses a realization that the Iraqi people must seek support beyond the borders of their own country. This development in consciousness was already anticipated in the mass international anti-war demonstrations of February 2003, and provides fresh substantiation of the emergence of new and more favorable conditions for the building of the World Party of Socialist Revolution.” Quoted from Greetings from David North to Australian SEP: “A devastating blow to the myth of American invincibility”, WSWS, Apr. 12, 2004:<br /><a href="http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/apr2004/dn-a12.shtml">http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/apr2004/dn-a12.shtml</a><br /><br />3. See “An exchange on Nader, Kerry and the US war in Iraq”, WSWS, June 1, 2004: <a href="http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/apr2004/dn-a12.shtml">http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/apr2004/dn-a12.shtml</a><br /><br />4. Marxism Without Its Head or Heart chapter 2, ibid<br /><br />5. ibid<br /><br />6. Quoted in the Conclusion to Marxism Without its Head or Heart:<br /><a href="http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch11.pdf">http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch11.pdf</a><br /><br />Read the Znet article here:<br /><a href="http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2003-11/09pandya.cfm">http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2003-11/09pandya.cfm</a><br /><br />7. Conclusion to Marxism Without its Head or Heart, ibid<br /><br />8. The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, James Cannon: <span style="TEXT-DECORATION: underline"><br /></span><a href="http://marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1940/party/index.htm">http://marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1940/party/index.htm</a><br /><br />9. From the Conclusion to Marxism Without its Head or Heart: “Something also needs to be said about the launching of the youth movement, The International Students for Social Equality, (ISSE) which is oriented to students on college campuses. We find it troubling that this youth movement is limited to the college campus milieu. In the context of the recent political evolution of the IC, it is another sign of the crystallization of the dominance of middle class forces within the party. There is a notable contrast here with the work the party did among working class youth in the past. An important achievement of the Workers League in the early 1970s was the building of a youth movement, the Young Socialists, that gained a substantial following among working class and minority youth. The Young Socialists actively fought against the pernicious influence of Black Nationalism and other reactionary ideologies on the home base of its adherents and more than held its own. It organized rallies and demonstrations against unemployment, imperialist war, and fought to unite the struggles of the youth with those of the working class as a whole. It also educated a layer of youth in the principles of Marxism. Yet today the successor organization of the Workers League, the Socialist Equality Party, proposes nothing for the most oppressed sections of the working class, the unemployed youth, African American and Hispanic youth. This is another unmistakable sign of the party’s growing estrangement from the working class.”<br /><br />10. See Alexander Rabinowitch’s discussion of this period in the internal life of the Bolshevik party in his comprehensive The Bolsheviks in Power. See particularly Part 2 “War or Peace” chapter 6 “The Socialist Fatherland Is in Danger”, pp 173-174.<br /><br />11. Quote from Lenin as printed over the masthead of the first issue of The Militant, 15 November 1928. Also quoted in the Conclusion to Marxism Without its Head or Heart ibid<br /><br />12. The removal of the hyperlinks to Steiner and Brenner’s documents in Adam Haig’s polemic “Steiner, Brenner, and Neo-Marxism: the Marcusean Component” is just the icing on the cake of a campaign to disorientate readers of the WSWS and members of the SEP. This was a conscious decision made by the editorial board in order to avoid their readers having direct access to the documents Haig cites from permanent-revolution.org. See “Of sterile flowers, poisonous weeds, and a political smokescreen” by Alex Steiner and Frank Brenner:<br /><a href="http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/haig_smokescreen.pdf">http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/haig_smokescreen.pdf</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-3799719868761443760?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Andrew Riverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10238260479078673628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-14738407003266004162009-01-20T16:08:00.000-08:002009-01-22T09:26:23.886-08:00History in the making and the making of historyBy Frank Brenner<br /><br />We are being constantly told by the mass media that today is a day of 'history in the making'. And there are millions of people, including many workers and many on the left, who believe this, at least to some degree: the massive crowds that have come to Washington to watch the inauguration of Obama are evidence of that. In cities throughout the US and around the world, people stopped work to watch the event on tv. <br /><br />It hardly needs to be said that as Marxists we understand that this is a huge case of political demagogy. But I want to consider something different - I want to ponder the notion of 'history in the making'. This is a telling example of the counterfeits of freedom that characterize bourgeois society and particularly bourgeois democracy. By this I mean that bourgeois society continuously offers the illusion of freedom while denying its substance. Thus today the masses are being invited to watch 'history in the making', which is to say that they get to be passive spectators while the powerful (and of course the wealthy) get to make history. <br /><br />In feudal times the coronation of a new king served similar purposes, and the more astute and 'progressive' monarchs very much encouraged the participation of the 'rabble': the king was meant to be seen as the 'people's king' and much effort was spent to encourage a symbolic identification with him. <br /><br />Bourgeois politics has taken this a good deal further: this symbolic identification is now bound up with the ideology of nationalism. This is by no means limited to democratic forms of bourgeois rule; on the contrary, fascism in particular took this kind of identification furthest of all. <br /><br />Walter Benjamin talked about how fascism aestheticizes politics, by which he meant that it transforms politics into a grand spectacle or better still a kind of national psychodrama. The giant Nazi rallies, such as the one at Nuremberg recorded in the Leni Riefenstahl movie, “Triumph of the Will,” is a perfect example of that. No doubt many of those who attended such rallies were convinced that they too were witnessing ‘history in the making’. <br /><br />To be sure, bourgeois democracy approaches these matters somewhat differently. But for a long time now, as the socioeconomic divisions have widened at the base of society, there has been a major effort to divert attention away from these divisions by an ever greater aestheticizing of politics. This has been most noticeable in the US, though American techniques in this regard have increasingly been copied by ruling parties around the world. From the Reagan years on, the principal narrative of this psychodrama was the so-called ‘culture wars’ whereby ‘honest’, ‘authentic’ conservatives were fighting to defend the family and American ‘values’ against liberal elites. <br /><br />With Obama’s election, the narrative has changed – it is now about ‘the audacity of hope’, about social ‘cooperation’, ‘compassion’, ‘duty’ and ‘responsibility’. Just as American capitalism survives on borrowed money, so the American political elite is now borrowing on the political capital of the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, to say nothing of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. These are potent symbols and Obama and his circle are doing their best to capitalize on them. Under these conditions, it has never been more important for Marxists to draw the clearest possible distinction between liberalism and socialism. <br /><br />One such distinction is over history and how it is made. The millions who come to Washington or watch on tv to witness ‘history in the making’ are actually being treated to a political ‘reality television’ show. What we need is not to watch ‘history in the making’ - by others! - but to make history ourselves. That is the dividing line between bourgeois and socialist democracy. The ‘beautiful’ illusions of freedom have to give way to a freedom from illusions.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-1473840700326600416?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-82622965413799139392009-01-11T16:25:00.000-08:002009-01-27T06:27:28.391-08:00Of sterile flowers, poisonous weeds and a political smokescreenOn Jan. 6, the WSWS carried yet another polemic against us, the second one in a week. This one came with a purple prose title, “Adam Haig responds to Alex Steiner’s burst of outrage”.<br />Burst of outrage? This same Haig had four days earlier posted a 17-page attack on us in which he baldly declared that we “cannot be regarded as Marxist-Trotskyists”, claimed that we reject the materialist conception of history, are skeptical about the revolutionary role of the working class and much else.<br /><br />We posted a brief response (a little over a page in length) on our website blog in which we pointed out that most of the essay was devoted to using Herbert Marcuse as a straw man and that much of the rest of it brought in irrelevant material regarding Erich Fromm and Slavoj Žižek.<br /><br />There was no “burst of outrage” in what we wrote. It is true that we called the title of Haig’s piece pretentious and we characterized his ruminations on Fromm and Žižek as the kind of padding a clever graduate student would engage in, but this is pretty routine stuff in the cut-and-thrust of polemical debate, and given what we were dealing with, it was eminently fair comment. By any objective measure, our criticisms of Haig were a good deal more restrained than his accusations against us.<br /><br />But that isn’t how Haig saw it. Our brief note enraged him and he vented his anger in a new posting which the WSWS editors were only too happy to run (a point we will come back to). In this latest posting we are accused of writing an “angry response”, of making “several outrageous charges” in our brief note, and that we are supposedly “intent on discrediting the ICFI.” Steiner, “in his hysteria,” apparently “employs a deceitful use of quotation marks”. Later we are told that Steiner “exploded” and later still that Steiner “has no capacity for logical argumentation.” The piece winds up by consigning us to the garbage heap of history (having “embraced Herbert Marcuse, Freudo-Marxism, and Utopia … it is fairly clear where they [i.e. Steiner and Brenner] will end up”).<br /><br />“Hysteria”, “exploded”, “burst of outrage” – the violence of this language is striking. Clearly, the “hysteria” here is Haig’s, not ours. In psychology this is known as projection; in a more familiar idiom it is a case of the pot calling the kettle black...<a title="http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/haig_smokescreen.pdf" href="http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/haig_smokescreen.pdf">Click here to read entire essay </a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-8262296541379913939?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-49864553630304717932009-01-02T07:48:00.000-08:002009-01-02T14:12:59.702-08:00A brief note on the publication of "Steiner, Brenner and Neo-Marxism: The Marcusean Component"On January 2, the World Socialist Web Site greeted the New Year by offering its readers yet another polemic that attempts to discredit us, this one with the pretentious title, "Steiner, Brenner and Neo-Marxism: The Marcusean Component". [1] This isn’t the place for a substantive reply, but a few quick points are in order:<br /><br />First, the basic premise of this essay is a misrepresentation of our attitude to the Frankfurt School and Marcuse. The author, one Adam Haig, states:<br /><br />“One of the arguments Steiner and Brenner make is that despite the incompatibilities of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory with orthodox Marxism, not everything by the critical theorists is worthless. That is beside the point. The question is whether or not Frankfurt School critical theory is Marxism.”<br /><br />Why is it “beside the point” to claim that “not everything by the critical theorists is worthless”? Haig is simply dodging the substance of our position and replacing it with a different view, i.e. “that Frankfurt School critical theory is Marxism.” This is what is called setting up a straw man, and Haig then spends 17 pages knocking him down, arguing against something that we never claimed. In this respect as in many others, Haig merely echoes the misrepresentations advanced by ICFI leader David North in his various polemics against us, particularly the series “The Frankfurt School vs. Marxism: The Political and Intellectual Odyssey of Alex Steiner”. [2]<br /><br />Second, in the manner of a clever graduate student, Haig pads his essay with several pages of completely extraneous material on Erich Fromm and Slavoj Žižek. We have never cited the latter’s views in any of our polemical material and our few references to Fromm are confined to his writings from the early 1930s, long before his politics (and psychology) lost their revolutionary edge. Haig has clearly been trained by North in the ‘art’ of cooking up amalgams: Marcuse leads him to Fromm (even though their differences on psychoanalytic theory were of a fundamental nature) and Fromm then allows Haig to throw in ‘socialistic humanism’, left-liberalism, Eugene McCarthy and the proverbial kitchen sink.<br /><br />(One has to say in passing that while this essay offers very little of intellectual or political merit, it is a striking – and frankly depressing – indication of how newer party members and supporters are being trained. They are being taught that one ‘defends’ Marxism through setting up straw men, cooked-up amalgams and smear campaigns. It would be hard to think of a worse indictment of the present leadership of the ICFI than this kind of miseducation of young comrades.)<br /><br />Finally, a small but telling point. From the time it first appeared a little past midnight on Jan 2 to some hours later that morning, this essay went through a slight ‘change’. The first edition of this essay had some footnotes citing our essays. The footnotes included hyperlinks to the essays that were referenced on our web site, <a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/">http://www.permanent-revolution.org/</a>. Several hours later, the hyperlinks were removed. Right now, there is no way for anyone reading this essay online to link directly to any of our material. The footnotes refer to something called “Permanent Revolution” (without the hyphen). For instance, here is footnote 1:<br /><br />1. Alex Steiner, “Unable to Answer Our Political Criticisms: The WSWS Resorts to a Smear Campaign,” Permanent Revolution, 9 November 2008.<br /><br />It is not even clear whether “Permanent Revolution” is a web site or the name of a periodical or a book. It is true that the enterprising reader who is determined to find our material can do a Google Search and eventually they will be led to the URL,<br /><a title="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/smear_campaign.htm" href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/smear_campaign.htm">http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/smear_campaign.htm</a>,<br />but of course the editors of the WSWS who removed the original hyperlink to this document are banking on the fact that the great majority of their readers will not be so enterprising.<br /><br />Now it is one thing not to insert hyperlinks in the first place but it is something yet again to remove hyperlinks that were already there. This was obviously a deliberate decision made by the editors of the World Socialist Web Site to prevent people from actually reading the views of a polemical opponent.<br /><br />This little ‘edit’ is particularly ironic given the following statement in the essay itself:<br /><br />“Ironically, Steiner claims that ‘feelings of “party-patriotism” will blind many members and supporters’ from seeing ‘the [Socialist Equality] party's abstentionism and estrangement from the working class,’ and that ‘the SEP's theoretical degeneration’ has been laid bare in Marxism without Its Head or Its Heart. Steiner has a very low opinion of the ability of SEP members and supporters to seriously think through theoretical, political, and historical questions.”<br /><br />Actually, it seems that it is the WSWS editorial board that “has a very low opinion” of the abilities of its readers and of party members; otherwise, they would have left the links in and allowed readers to judge for themselves the validity of our criticisms.<br /><br />Alex Steiner<br />Frank Brenner<br />Jan. 2, 2009.<br /><br /><br />[1] Adam Haig, “Steiner, Brenner and Neo-Marxism: The Marcusean Component,” WSWS, Jan. 2, 2009:<br /><a href="http://wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/bren-j02.shtml">http://wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/bren-j02.shtml</a><br />[2] <a href="http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/oct2008/fran-o22.shtml">http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/oct2008/fran-o22.shtml</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-4986455363030471793?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-17533184554441639892008-12-21T11:19:00.000-08:002008-12-21T11:24:46.077-08:00One Year Anniversary of Marxism Without its Head or its HeartDecember 16, 2008 marked a year since we completed posting Marxism Without its Head or its Heart (MWHH).<br /><br />Before we started posting it (in ten instalments beginning in September 2007), David North had claimed that the passage of a year without a response to a polemic (he was speaking of his own Marxism, History and Socialist Consciousness) constituted the passing of “something akin to a statute of limitations.” This was a hypocritical claim for North to be making, since (as we pointed out at the time) he himself had ignored our earlier polemics for three years.<br /><br />In any case, if we look back on the last year, it is true that we received a response to MWHH, but only in a formal sense. This ‘response’ – by North, assisted by Ann and Chris Talbot – turned out to be a smear campaign against Alex Steiner. When it came to the substance of our criticisms of the International Committee’s political line, neither North nor the Talbots had anything to say. When it came to the philosophical issues, their ‘response’ was equally telling: while the Talbots mounted a blatant defence of empiricism and positivism, North’s only reference to dialectics was a contemptuous sneer. Dialectics remains a dead letter in the IC, as does any theoretical struggle against pragmatism.<br /><br />It is a fair assumption that we won’t see a further response that actually addresses those issues. In that sense, the passage of a year is significant because if the IC leadership had been able to answer our criticisms, they would have done so already instead of resorting to an ad hominem attack on Steiner. Our analysis has withstood an important test.<br /><br />The global financial meltdown guarantees that the coming period will be one of great political upheaval. As the old mainstream political consensus collapses, there will be a resurgence of interest in revolutionary Marxism among militant workers, youth and intellectuals. We are confident that Marxism Without its Head or its Heart will come to be seen as having made a positive contribution to that resurgence.<br /><br />Frank Brenner<br />Alex Steiner<br />Dec. 21, 2008<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-1753318455444163989?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-7489171819737058142008-12-08T02:27:00.000-08:002009-01-22T09:28:40.427-08:00Comments on “Leon Trotsky, Soviet Historiography, and the Fate of Classical Marxism”By Andrew River<br /><br />It has long been the case that David North is engaged in a systematic campaign to blur the distinction between Marxism and objectivism. North’s latest foray in this endeavor was a speech he recently presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) at its 2008 National Convention in Philadelphia on November 20-23. The speech, with the title “Leon Trotsky, Soviet Historiography, and the Fate of Classical Marxism” was subsequently published on the World Socialist Web Site. [1]<br /><br />Before examining what North said, we must note that the venue itself is of some interest. The AAASS is a typical academic association that includes representatives from various political and theoretical orientations, undoubtedly including some very right wing individuals. Founded in 1938, the AAASS’ website reveals that “its representatives serve on such bodies as the U.S. State Department's Advisory Committee for Studies of Eastern Europe and the Independent States of the former Soviet Union, and the International Council for Central and East European Studies.” [2] Such organizations during the Cold War years were heavily infiltrated and financed by the CIA. (Indeed, when the past president of the AAASS, James R. Millar, died recently, it was noted in his obituary in the Washington Post that he had been a resident academic scholar employed by the CIA. [3])<br /><br />That being said, there is nothing wrong with North addressing this conference. Indeed, he has a responsibility to defend the perspective of Trotskyism, even in such venues, when the opportunity presents itself. However, it is somewhat curious that whereas North has no problem attending forums sponsored by mainstream bourgeois academic organizations, he has never bothered to defend Trotskyism at any self-professed left wing forum. North has never presented the views of the Socialist Equality Party at any of the annual Left Forums held in New York or its predecessor, the Socialist Scholars Conference. Nor did North or any representative from the SEP make a presentation at a well publicized conference devoted to the topic of the Legacy of Leon Trotsky held at Fordham University this past summer.<br /><br />Furthermore, it is rather incredible that North has no problem participating in conferences sponsored by an organization that has ties to the U.S. government, but in the WSWS smear campaign against Alex Steiner, North attacked Steiner for his educational activities with a left-wing alternative educational institution that has no government ties whatsoever, claiming this as proof of Steiner’s supposed “political associations” with middle class radicalism and the Frankfurt School [4]. By this same standard, one could accuse North himself of “political associations” with the AAASS and consequently with the US government. No doubt North would be outraged at such a flagrant use of guilt-by-association, but he has no trouble in resorting to the very same method when it comes to smearing Steiner.<br /><br />In his presentation North bemoans the fate of Trotsky scholarship, which he sees as “drying up” after the publication of Baruch Knei-Paz's study of Trotsky’s thought, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky, first published in 1978. He contrasts the period since the publication of that book with the 1950s and 1960s when Deutscher’s classic biography of Trotsky appeared amidst a renewed interest in the life and work of Trotsky and of the Russian Revolution coinciding with the revelations of Khrushchev and the beginning of the decades long unraveling of Stalinism.<br /><br />“This drying up of Trotsky scholarship after 1978 is a curious phenomenon. After all, the deepening crisis of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe throughout the 1980s certainly justified a more intensive review of the work of Trotsky…”<br /><br />North has a tale to tell and he is not one to let facts get in his way. He states that,<br /><br />“The only notable and original contribution to Trotsky studies that appeared in the 1980s—such a tumultuous decade in Soviet history—was a small monograph, entitled Leon Trotsky and the Art of Insurrection, that focused on Trotsky’s achievements as a military strategist.”<br /><br />While I can wholeheartedly agree that there has been a neglect of Trotsky scholarship in the past 30 years, North’s narrative overlooks an exception to this assessment, namely, that the most important contribution to Trotsky scholarship in the 1980s was not the minor work on military affairs cited by North, but the publication in 1986 of Trotsky’s Philosophical Notebooks. The discovery of the Notebooks by Philip Pomper in the Harvard Archives and their subsequent publication under the title Trotsky's Notebooks, 1933-1935: Writings on Lenin, Dialectics, and Evolutionism, dwarfs anything else in the field of Trotsky scholarship for the past 40 years, Knei-Paz’s book included [5].<br /><br />That North does not even mention the Trotsky Notebooks in a forum devoted to Trotsky scholarship is noteworthy but not surprising. For as was noted in an appreciation published earlier this year devoted to the Trotsky Notebooks,<br /><br />“One would have thought that the publication of Trotsky’s Notebooks more than twenty years ago would have elicited renewed interest in the theoretical side of Trotsky’s work. However such has not been the case. While Trotsky is justifiably remembered as a supreme man of action, the co-leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution and the architect of the Red Army, there is little recognition of his importance as a Marxist theoretician. Unfortunately, the publication of the Notebooks has done little to dispel that viewpoint. In sharp contrast to the excitement caused by the publication of Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks (Volume 38 of his Collected Works) in English in the early 1960’s, there has been virtually no commentary on Trotsky’s Notebooks. This silence facilitates the prejudices of contemporary left wing intellectuals who continue to minimize Trotsky’s theoretical contributions.” [6]<br /><br />One may add that notable among those authors who have been conspicuous by their silence about Trotsky’s Notebooks has been David North himself. Up till now the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has not devoted a single article or even a reference to this most seminal event in Trotsky scholarship since the Harvard Archives were opened. What accounts for the silence about this work that provides a glimpse into Trotsky’s views on Hegel, Lenin, Dialectics, Evolution and Freud, topics that Trotsky normally kept behind the scenes in his published writings? In North’s case, the Trotsky Notebooks must be made to disappear because the topics they cover do not conform to his version of Marxism, one that closes the door to a serious exploration of these issues.<br /><br />Were one to ask why North’s version of Marxism finds such topics anathema, we would find a clue in examining North’s explanation of the causes for the lacunae in Trotsky scholarship. Let us then turn to that topic.<br /><br />According to North, a major cause of the neglect of Trotsky scholarship has been the conservative political climate of the past two decades, particularly the period after the fall of the Soviet Union, when it seemed to many that Marxism was a failed 19th century doctrine that had little relevance to the contemporary world. And there is certainly a great deal of truth to this. But North doesn’t stop there. He provides a supplementary explanation for the neglect of Trotsky scholarship – one that is the real focus of his talk. He claims that the type of Marxism espoused by Trotsky has gone out of fashion among left intellectuals. According to North, Trotsky was the last great representative of what he calls “classical Marxism”, which he identifies as follows,<br /><br />“It is not possible at this time to offer an exposition of Trotsky’s philosophical worldview and his conception of politics and human culture. But it must be said, for the sake of the argument being presented here, that crucial elements of this world view included an irreconcilable commitment to philosophical materialism, belief in the law-governed character of the historical process, confidence in the power of human reason (to the extent that this faculty is understood materialistically) and its ability to discover objective truth, and, associated with this, belief in the progressive role of science. Trotsky was a determinist, an optimist, and an internationalist, convinced that the socialist revolution arose necessarily out of the insoluble contradictions of the world capitalist system. Above all, he insisted that there existed a revolutionary force within society, the working class, that would overthrow the capitalist system and lay the foundations for world socialism.”<br /><br />Now one can agree that Trotsky was indeed the last great representative of “classical Marxism”. But what North means by this term is very different than how this term has been understood traditionally in the Trotskyist movement. “Classical Marxism” is the Marxism of Marx and Engels and later of Luxemburg and Lenin, whereas for North it really means the Marxism of Second International orthodoxy, i.e. the Marxism of Kautsky and Plekhanov. Second International orthodoxy however was not a form of classical Marxism but in many ways its opposite. Second International orthodoxy conceived of Marxism as a form of economic determinism that upheld a “stages” view of history and considered socialism to be inevitable. The belief in the inevitability of socialism naturally took the teeth out of revolutionary struggle and in fact peacefully coexisted with a reformist day to day practice. Trotsky, like Lenin, resurrected the traditions of classical Marxism by breaking from Second International orthodoxy and stressing the decisive role of conscious leadership in forging the transition from capitalism to the socialist future of mankind. Trotsky also decisively broke from the “stages” theory of history in developing his ground-breaking theory of permanent revolution.<br /><br />What North consistently does, in this speech as elsewhere, is to blur the distinction between the reductive economic determinism of the Second International and the standpoint of classical Marxism, as embodied in Bolshevism and Trotskyism. Thus North describes Trotsky here as a “determinist” who was “convinced that the socialist revolution arose necessarily out of the insoluble contradictions of the world capitalist system” – a description that applies just as well to a Kautsky or a Plekhanov. To describe Trotsky as this kind of a “determinist”, without any qualification, is to conflate classical Marxism with vulgar materialism. Trotsky’s entire career as a revolutionary was built on a break with this kind of determinism, as the following characteristic quote (from one of his speeches to the Communist International) makes clear:<br /><br />“History has provided the basic premise for the success of the revolution – in the sense that society cannot any longer develop its productive forces on bourgeois foundations. But history does not at all assume upon itself – in place of the working class, in place of the politicians of the working class, in place of the Communists, the solution of this entire task. No, History seems to say to the proletarian vanguard (let us imagine for a moment that history is a figure looming above us), History says to the working class, ‘You must know that unless you cast down the bourgeoisie, you will perish beneath the ruins of civilization. Try, solve this task!’ Such is the state of affairs today.” [7]<br /><br />What Trotsky is saying is that while the conditions for socialism are indeed “determined” through the internal dynamic of capitalism and its crisis, the resolution of that crisis is entirely contingent on the theoretical and political maturity of the working class and especially its revolutionary leadership. This is a fundamentally different conception of determinism than the inevitabilism of Second International orthodoxy as expressed by Kautsky and Plekhanov.<br /><br />Indeed, if one were to accept North’s exposition of Trotsky’s thought, one would be hard-pressed to understand what the philosophical differences are between Trotsky and the old mechanistic materialism Marx attacked, or between Trotsky and the leading theoreticians of the Second International. There is no room for revolutionary dialectics in North’s treatment. Trotsky’s philosophy is presented as a clock that runs without a spring, a blind inevitabilism that cuts out all mediating factors (including the subjective dialectic of human consciousness) from history.<br /><br />Yet according to North, this brand of Second International orthodoxy that he falsely portrays as the legacy of Trotsky has fallen into disfavor among academics. The chief culprit for this state of affairs in North’s indictment will come as a surprise to some readers. After taking on right wing opponents of Marxism such as Richard Pipes and Robert Conquest, and pro-Stalinist academics such as Robert Thurston, North comes to the real target of his ire, the Frankfurt School. North has been using the Frankfurt School for some time as a kind of ideological bogeyman to explain everything from the rise of postmodernism to the celebration of the irrational by fascists. And now according to North, it is the pervasive influence of the Frankfurt School in academia that is responsible for the demise of Trotsky scholarship in the last three decades.<br /><br />North’s blanket indictment of the Frankfurt School as being responsible for all the ills of contemporary culture has already been refuted and will be explored in more detail on another occasion. [8] Aside from the fact that North’s explanation conveniently sidesteps his own share of responsibility for the neglect of Trotsky scholarship, North’s invectives against the Frankfurt School are so historically inaccurate that virtually no one who knows anything about this piece of intellectual history could take them seriously.<br /><br />It is worth noting that for all that invective, North has no compunction about citing Walter Benjamin’s high opinion of Trotsky as a writer, even though Benjamin was himself associated with the Frankfurt School. [9] North also conflates the work of Adorno and Horkheimer with Hendrick de Man. North’s bogus attempt to link de Man with the Frankfurt School was exposed in Chapter 9 of Marxism Without Its Head or Heart. [10] The Frankfurters opposed de Man politically and philosophically. For instance, in 1932 Erich Fromm attacked de Man and accused him of reifying character traits of bourgeois society into human nature. [11] Again, the point here isn’t to defend the Frankfurt School against Marxist criticism, but to “treat history with a basic degree of honesty”. It is apparent that North only cites de Man as part of his ideological police action, to smear those who critique his version of Marxism as “irrationalist” and “anti-materialist”. Knowing this North could not have countenanced Trotsky’s Notebooks, which deal with the “subjective dialectic” of human consciousness, something that cannot be reduced to the crude formulas North advances.<br /><br />It is significant to note that Lars Lih headed the panel where North gave his presentation at the AAASS conference. Lih, in his scholarly output on the relationship between Lenin and social democracy, denies that Lenin ever broke from the Second International orthodoxy of Plekhanov and Kautsky, and tries to depict Lenin as an unadulterated defender of their philosophical and political legacy. For Lih, Lenin defended the legacy of the Second International while Kautsky and the rest betrayed it. [12] Lih like North totally ignores Lenin’s theoretical development amidst the background of the betrayal of the Second International in 1914, an event that impelled him to break from Second International orthodoxy via a turn to a study of dialectics in his 1914-15 Conspectus on Hegel’s Logic. North and Lih all have an interest in collapsing the purportedly “good” days of the Second International with Lenin and Trotsky’s Third. They simply ignore the fact that the construction of the Third (Communist) International had to be laid on new theoretical foundations. In the words of Lenin, writing in anticipation of the New International during the dark days of World War I,<br /><br />“It would be a very deplorable thing, of course, if the “Lefts” began to be careless in their treatment of Marxian theory, considering that the Third International can be established only on the basis of Marxism, unvulgarised Marxism.” [13]<br /><br /><br />[1] <a href="http://wsws.org/articles/2008/dec2008/aaas-d01.shtml" target="_blank">http://wsws.org/articles/2008/dec2008/aaas-d01.shtml</a><br />[2] Quoted from the AAASS about us: <a href="http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~aaass/about.html">http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~aaass/about.html</a><br /><br />[3] <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/03/AR2008120303714.html?wprss=rss_metro%2Fobituaries">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/03/AR2008120303714.html?wprss=rss_metro%2Fobituaries</a><br />[4] See The Intellectual and Political Odyssey of Alex Steiner, Part-3, <a href="http://wsws.org/articles/2008/oct2008/fran-o24.shtml">http://wsws.org/articles/2008/oct2008/fran-o24.shtml</a> . The following is the relevant section of North’s document:<br />“At about the same time, Steiner was entering into new political relations of which he has made no mention in any of his attacks on the ICFI. It obviously has been his intention to conceal his present political associations from those who are reading his documents. Steiner became a lecturer on philosophy at The New School for Pluralistic Anti-Capitalist Education, also known as The New SPACE. In its literature, the New SPACE describes itself as "Resolutely anti-authoritarian and non-sectarian," bringing together "anarchists, humanist Marxists, and others." It is, to be more precise, a conglomeration of middle-class radical tendencies that are hostile to Trotskyism. Among its "Teachers, Speakers and Organizers" are individuals closely associated with the Frankfurt School, such as Kevin Anderson (whose writing is highly praised by Steiner), Stanley Aronowitz, Eric Bronner and Bertell Ollman. The faculty also includes individuals active in the Green Party and other brands of petty-bourgeois protest politics.”<br /><br />[5] It should also be noted that North completely fails to mention that Knei-Paz’s study has been challenged and in large part superseded by a very recent work, The Marxism of Leon Trotsky, by Kunal Chattopadhyay, Progress Publishers, Kolkata, India, October, 2006.<br />[6] <a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/archives/trotsky_notebooks.pdf">http://www.permanent-revolution.org/archives/trotsky_notebooks.pdf</a><br /><br />[7] The First Five Years of the Communist International , Volume 2, New Park Publications, p. 6<br />[8] A critique of North’s analysis of the Frankfurt School can be found in Chapter 6 of Marxism Without its Head or its Heart: The Real Dialectic of the Enlightenment, <a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch06.pdf">http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch06.pdf</a> , as well as in the essay, The Vulgar Critique of Vulgar Materialism, <a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/vulgar_critique.pdf">http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/vulgar_critique.pdf</a><br />[9] From North’s essay: “Trotsky, quite clearly, played a decisive role in the Russian Revolution, one of the key events of the 20th century. He was also, as it so happens, one of this century’s most brilliant literary figures. Walter Benjamin noted in his diary that Bertolt Brecht in 1931 “maintained that there were good reasons for thinking that Trotsky was the greatest living European writer.””<br />[10] See Chapter 9 of Marxism Without its Head or Heart “Remarks on Bernstein, ‘Neo-Utopianism’ and Political Amalgams” <a href="http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch09.pdf">http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch09.pdf</a> pages 242-243.<br /><br />[11] See Fromm’s “The Method and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology” Reprinted in The Crisis of Psychoanalysis<br />[12] See Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered: What is to be Done? in Context. (Brill Academic Publishers, 2005)<br />[13] The Junius Pamphlet , Collected Works, Volume 22 . This is available online at <a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jul/junius-pamphlet.htm">http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jul/junius-pamphlet.htm</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-748917181973705814?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Andrew Riverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10238260479078673628noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-472518708397837342008-11-18T22:09:00.000-08:002009-01-22T09:32:36.294-08:00A footnote to the SEP’s 2008 election campaign:<strong><span style="font-size:180%;">My less than brilliant career as a write-in voter</span></strong><br /><br />By Alex Steiner<br /><br />I have previously commented on the anemic quality of the SEP’s 2008 election campaign.[1] The SEP claimed to be running a write-in campaign, (having waited to launch their campaign until it was too late to get on the ballot anywhere). But it was obvious that even as a write-in campaign, the party was just going through the motions. A small but telling indication of this is that the SEP did nothing to warn its supporters of the problems they might face in actually placing a write-in vote. As I discovered when I went to vote myself, those problems could be formidable.<br /><br />I arrived at the grammar school gymnasium where the voting takes place in my Brooklyn, New York neighborhood in the latter part of the evening, when I knew the lines would be shorter, but also well ahead of the 9 PM closing time for the polls. I was determined to vote SEP, which I thought would be a relatively straightforward matter. However, once I entered the voting booth, I realized that I did not recall the exact mechanics of submitting a write-in vote and there was nothing in the voting booth in the way of instructions that would assist me. I therefore signaled to one of the poll workers that I wished some assistance.<br /><br />Once I got the attention of the volunteer I explained to him what I wanted to do and he simply did not understand the concept of a write-in vote at all. I then asked him to consult with his supervisor where I hoped to have better luck. It turned out that the supervisor, a middle-aged woman with a very business-like attitude only had a little bit more knowledge than the volunteer. She understood the concept of a write-in vote but had no idea how to do it with Brooklyn’s antiquated manual voting machines. Finally, she located an instruction booklet that actually had a section explaining how to cast a write-in ballot. It seems there was a button on the upper left that you have to press down and at the same time slide over a metal fastener over a rectangular space to the left of the position for which you want to cast your ballot. The metal fastener is supposed to unlock a paper ballot where you can write in your preference.<br /><br />This sounded simple enough and armed with a new degree of confidence I thanked the supervisor for showing me the directions and told her that I wanted to complete my vote. However, during the interval while I was attempting to obtain these directions, other people were waved through and allowed to vote. This created a logistical problem for the volunteers as my return to the voting booth required that they fill out a new form for me. They seemed reluctant to do this, claiming that this would “disrupt” their orderly procedures. When I pointed out that it was not my fault that asking for assistance for a simple problem should not have been the cause of any disruption, the supervisor with whom I was speaking asked me why I couldn’t just vote the “normal” way, i.e. for one of the candidates whose names were on the ballot, instead of causing trouble with my unorthodox request. I replied that I had a right to vote in whatever manner was allowed in the State of New York and casting a write-in ballot was one of the options that voters had before them.<br /><br />As soon as I mentioned my rights, the supervisor’s attitude changed from one of mild annoyance to overt hostility. She then informed me that I could not go back into the voting booth to cast my ballot unless I was accompanied by two election officials. When I asked her why I should have this kind of supervision imposed on me, she claimed that the instruction booklet stated that anyone casting a write-in ballot can only do so if there are two elections officials standing by with that person in the voting booth. I could not believe the instruction booklet said any such thing and I asked her to show me where it said that. She pointed to a line where the instruction booklet stated that “If the voter requests assistance, two elections officials must enter the booth with that voter.” I explained that this sentence in the instruction manual applied to a situation where the voter was requesting assistance and I was not requesting any assistance. Now that I understood the procedure for casting a write-in ballot, I wished to avail myself of this option and cast my ballot in private as is my right.<br /><br />My insistence upon my right to cast my write-in ballot in private further alienated this woman and she claimed that I could not vote until she obtained “clearance” from higher election authorities. She then got on her cell phone to make some calls. This went on for several minutes. After a while I once again insisted on my right to vote and went up to the police officer guarding the place and complained that I was in effect being denied my right to vote. At that point, the elections supervisor with whom I had been squabbling brought in reinforcements in the form of a higher election official, another middle-aged woman who sported a button on her lapel indicating that she had some kind of authority over the entire voting place. After explaining the problem to this woman she promptly echoed what the supervisor had said, that I can only vote under supervision, even though the booklet was very clear that this was required only in the case where the voter asks for assistance.<br /><br />I once again insisted on my right to vote in privacy. When confronted by this unexpected rejection of her authority to dictate the terms of my voting, the elections official finally relented and said that I may vote without supervision, but I would only be given three minutes in the booth. She also threatened to find out my name and retaliate against me in some unspoken manner if my insistence on voting for a write-in candidate wound up”destroying” her statistics. Although her conditions were obviously capricious and unfair, I felt that I had at least won a partial victory and it was not fruitful to continue the argument with her. I agreed to her conditions and finally, after receiving a duplicate voting card, went in for the second time to cast my write-in vote. (I exited the first time without actually voting for anyone when I tried to obtain assistance initially.)<br /><br />It was only then that I discovered that all my efforts and good intentions had been in vain. Although I followed the instructions in the booklet religiously, the slot where the paper ballot is supposed to reveal itself refused to open. I was the victim of a faulty voting machine. I left in disgust, unable to cast my ballot for the SEP.<br /><br />I can only wonder how many other supporters of the party had similar experiences. Interestingly, there has been no article posted on the WSWS reporting on how many votes the party received, something that was standard practice in other party campaigns. [2] What is ironic about my little comedy of errors in the voting booth is that I was taking this write-in campaign more seriously than the SEP was.<br /><br />A last point that’s worth reflecting on: what accounts for this virtual non-campaign on the SEP’s part? If ever there were an election that cried out for a socialist voice to be heard, this was it. And yet none of the movements to the left of the Democratic Party made themselves heard in this campaign, from Ralph Nader and the Greens to the various middle class radical groups. Of course the mass media adulation for Obama did much to drown out such voices, but it is also the case that these tendencies adapted themselves to the Obama campaign, either by toning down their own campaigns or abandoning them altogether.<br /><br />If we consider the SEP’s behavior in this broader context, then its failure to fight for ballot status or mount a serious write-in campaign was also an adaptation to these bourgeois class pressures. Those pressures express themselves through the political base of the SEP, which is increasingly middle class college and university students, the layer of the population who most fervently supported Obama. A serious election campaign would have forced these students to swim against the stream of Obama’s popularity, and clearly this was something the party leadership wanted to avoid.<br /><br /><br /><br />[1] <a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/labels/election_2008.html">http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/labels/election_2008.html</a><br /><br />[2] One example can be found in this report written in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 election –<br />Socialist Equality Party gains significant support in US elections,<br />by Joseph Kay, 4 November, 2004<br /><a href="http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/nov2004/sep-n04.shtml">http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/nov2004/sep-n04.shtml</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-47251870839783734?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-46357774396042040892008-11-09T12:07:00.000-08:002008-11-09T12:23:39.031-08:00Unable to answer our political criticisms the WSWS resorts to a smear campaignIn politics a sure sign that you can’t answer criticism is that you try to change the subject. And one of the most tried and true methods for doing that is to smear the reputation of your opponent: discredit the critic so as to ignore the criticism. That is precisely what the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has done with its series, “The Frankfurt School vs. Marxism: The Political and Intellectual Odyssey of Alex Steiner.”... <a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/smear_campaign.htm">More >></a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-4635777439604204089?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-55583521553155350662008-10-22T20:29:00.000-07:002009-01-22T09:34:17.887-08:00The SEP’s 2008 election campaignThe announcement by the US Socialist Equality Party on Sept 13, 2008 that they were launching a national election campaign for President and Vice-President is yet another indication of the abstentionist torpor that now grips the International Committee.[1]<br /><br />This campaign is a decidedly half-hearted effort. By waiting until mid-September, the SEP forfeited any chance of getting its candidates on the ballot in any state. Even as a write-in campaign, it seems very much a pro forma exercise.<br /><br />(In Canada, the party’s abstentionism was even more marked: in the federal election held on Oct. 14, the SEP ran no candidates, held no meetings and did not even bother issuing a programmatic statement.)<br /><br />A revolutionary Marxist party is not an electoral machine. Whether and how to participate in elections are always tactical considerations. But that being said, an election can often be an important – and rare – opportunity to reach a broad audience. And what an extraordinary situation coincides with this election! The world financial system is disintegrating, threatening to engulf the global economy in a tidal wave of capitalist chaos. Under these conditions, it should be a matter of the utmost urgency for Marxists to get the widest possible hearing for socialist policies in the working class. But no sense of urgency animates the SEP campaign.<br /><br />It is well known that the American electoral system places enormous obstacles in the way of minor party candidates getting access to the voters. The onerous and needlessly complex requirements for petitions are the chief method by which the near monopoly of political life by the two capitalist parties is maintained.<br /><br />Nevertheless, the socialist movement in the United States has a long and proud tradition, going back to the days of Daniel De Leon and Eugene V. Debs, of overcoming these obstacles and gaining ballot status. Even in the recent past, the Socialist Equality Party and its predecessor, the Workers League, conducted energetic petition campaigns.<br /><br />In one notable petition campaign for a Congressional race in Ohio in 2004 the SEP went so far as to file a lawsuit in Federal Court against the unfair rejection of its petitions.[2] In another campaign, a race for a statewide office in Illinois in 2006, the Socialist Equality Party once more had to avail itself of legal remedies in order to get on the ballot in the face of a conspiracy to silence them orchestrated by local Democratic Party operatives.<br /><br />In that campaign SEP candidate Joe Parnarauskis rightly stressed that gaining ballot status for a third party candidate is a significant victory in the struggle against the erosion of democratic rights. He said:<br /><br />"[The court]… decision has once again vindicated the position of the SEP, which has met every legal requirement to be placed on the ballot. We hope this will end the long saga of obstructing democratic rights, but at the same time, we fully expect the Democrats will continue their bad-faith efforts against us. We call on voters in the district to demand the right to vote for a candidate of their choice. If they want a candidate that fights for the working class against the two parties of war and big business, they should support my campaign and vote for me in November."[3]<br /><br />After the Illinois State Board of Elections, under immense legal and political pressure finally relented and allowed the SEP candidate’s name to appear on the ballot, Parnarauskis again issued a statement that underlined the importance of ballot access for the defense of democratic rights:<br /><br />"This is not only a victory for the Socialist Equality Party, but it is a victory for citizens in the 52nd District and nationwide. It is a repudiation of the undemocratic efforts by the Democratic Party to deny the voters in my district the right to vote for a candidate of their choice."[4]<br /><br />Thus in 2006 the SEP was prepared to put in a good deal of political work (to say nothing of legal claims and expenses) to get on the ballot in a state race during a mid-term election. In the Presidential election campaign of 2004, the SEP successfully obtained ballot status in five states, namely, New Jersey, Iowa, Washington, Minnesota and Colorado. An article summarizing the achievements of the 2004 election campaign clearly underlined the importance that the SEP attributed to the campaign waged by its supporters to obtain ballot status and exposure in the media:<br /><br />"The impact of the SEP’s intervention in the elections extended well beyond the number of votes it received. In the course of fighting for ballot access, the party gathered thousands of signatures from individuals opposed to the war and looking for an alternative to the two-party system. This included over 8,000 signatures gathered in the state of Ohio, where Van Auken and Lawrence were ultimately denied ballot access after thousands of registered voters were arbitrarily disqualified from the petitions."<br /><br />"During the course of the campaign, Carl Cooley and Tom Mackaman were able to debate their Democratic and Republican opponents on several occasions, and explain the SEP’s opposition to the war in Iraq, as well as many aspects of the party’s internationalist and socialist program. Thousands of copies of the SEP election platform were distributed by supporters on college campuses, at work locations and in working class neighborhoods."[5]<br /><br /><br />Yet when it comes to the far more important 2008 Presidential campaign – which was already destined to be an historic election due to the debacle of US imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan, and whose significance was greatly compounded by the Wall Street financial meltdown – the SEP abstained from any effort to appear on the ballot without so much as a word of explanation.<br /><br />One might add here that given that the SEP conducts no sustained work in unions or any other venue in which there is a regular dialogue with workers, a petition campaign in 2008 would have been doubly important in that it offered one of the few possibilities for party members to have face to face contact with workers. (The WSWS has posted a couple of video clips of presidential candidate Jerome White talking to workers, including one at the factory gates of American Axle, a Detroit plant that was the sight of a bitter strike earlier this year. But these video clips have the character of a ‘photo op’: they are more about image than substance. Which is consistent with the party’s abstentionism, where all involvement with the working class is reduced to journalism, albeit this time with digital cameras. When it comes to holding meetings in working class neighborhoods or rallying support among workers or working class youth, this ‘campaign’ is non-existent.<br /><br />An examination of the programmatic content of the campaign reinforces the impression that this is little more than an exercise in going through the motions. The initial statement introducing the SEP’s 2008 election campaign contains just the bare skeleton of a program. It is a threadbare affair of just a few paragraphs. It is true that two weeks later (on Sept. 25) the SEP did publish a more extensive programmatic statement, but it is evident even from the title of this document, The Socialist Equality Party Statement of Principles,[6] that this isn’t intended as an election platform but a broader “statement of principles” connected to the ‘founding’ of the SEP in August. No effort has been made to adapt this statement to the agitational needs of an election campaign, and the campaign itself is making no effort to fight for the demands in this statement or win support for them in the working class. This ‘program’ thus becomes little more than a ritualized affirmation of orthodoxy which is issued and then promptly ignored for the rest of the ‘campaign’.<br /><br />Perhaps the most telling thing about the SEP election campaign is the schedule of speaking engagements of candidates Jerome White and Bill Van Auken. Of the dozen or so locations listed by the WSWS, almost all of them are on college campuses. There doesn’t seem to be any meetings aimed specifically at a working class audience. Nor does there appear to be much effort to gain publicity for the campaign through radio and television appearances. Indeed, by abstaining from any effort to get on the ballot, the SEP has also forfeited any opportunity to get access to the mass media. TV and radio stations are often legally obliged to provide minor party candidates with some free air time during the election campaign, but this applies only to those candidates with ballot status.<br /><br />So here we are in the midst of the most profound economic crisis in the history of capitalism since 1929, a remarkable opportunity to educate thousands of workers about the socialist alternative, and all the SEP can come up with is a tepid write-in campaign, engaging no one but a tiny handful of students at various campus-oriented meetings.<br /><br />The SEP’s record in this crucial election is yet further confirmation of the party’s abstentionism and estrangement from the working class that we analyzed in Marxism Without its Head or its Heart. Doubtless feelings of “party-patriotism” will blind many members and supporters to the significance of this record. And doubtless lots of excuses are being circulated internally to account for this failure. “The comrades were too busy preparing for the SEP’s Founding Congress”, or “investing the resources involved to get on the ballot is not worth the effort.” But all such excuses - like any analysis that fails to examine the theoretical roots of the SEP’s practice over the past dozen years – will completely miss their mark. To those seeking to break through the logjam of abstentionism, we urge a careful consideration of our extensive analysis of the SEP’s theoretical degeneration in our polemic, Marxism Without its Head or its Heart.<br /><br />Alex Steiner<br /><br />Oct. 22, 2008<br /><br />[1] “Reject Obama and McCain! Support the socialist alternative in 2008! Build the Socialist Equality Party!<br />Statement of the Socialist Equality Party,” September13, 2008.<br /><a href="http://www.socialequality.com/electionstatement.html">http://www.socialequality.com/electionstatement.html</a><br />[2] “Party to challenge early filing deadline: Petition drive completed for SEP Congressional candidate in Ohio”, June 8, 2004 <a href="http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jun2004/cinc-j08.shtml">http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jun2004/cinc-j08.shtml</a><br />[3] “Judge orders election board to certify Illinois SEP candidate,” September, 20, 2006.<br /><a href="http://wsws.org/articles/2006/sep2006/illi-s20.shtml">http://wsws.org/articles/2006/sep2006/illi-s20.shtml</a><br />[4] “Parnarauskis to appear on Illinois ballot: Unanimous decision ends lengthy battle for candidate,” Sep. 22, 2006:<a href="http://media.www.dailyillini.com/media/storage/paper736/news/2006/09/22/News/Parnarauskis.To.Appear.On.Illinois.Ballot-2302227.shtml">http://media.www.dailyillini.com/media/storage/paper736/news/2006/09/22/News/Parnarauskis.To.Appear.On.Illinois.Ballot-2302227.shtml</a><br />[5] “Socialist Equality Party gains significant support in U.S. elections”, by Joseph Kay, November 4, 2004.<br /><a href="http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/nov2004/sep-n04.shtml">http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/nov2004/sep-n04.shtml</a><br />[6] The Socialist Equality Party Statement of Principles, September 25, 2008.<br /><a href="http://www.socialequality.com/principles.html">http://www.socialequality.com/principles.html</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-5558352155315535066?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-34080069106222943822008-09-28T20:54:00.000-07:002009-02-02T13:27:35.856-08:00A Comment on the Founding Congress of the SEP<div align="left"><br />On Sept. 19, 2008 the World Socialist Web Site announced that the Socialist Equality Party had held a Founding Congress on Aug 3-9 in Ann Arbor Michigan. [1] This statement came as a surprise to many readers as we were under the impression that the Socialist Equality Party had already been founded years ago. In fact if you go back into the archives of the WSWS you can find a document from 1995 with the title, The Workers League and the founding of the Socialist Equality Party. [2] The basis for that earlier Founding was spelled out by David North in his remarks to the 1995 Congress,<br /><br />"Because the transition from the Workers League to the Socialist Equality Party involves not merely a reorganization of our present forces but a change in our relationship to the broad masses, I believe that this transformation requires patient preparation. It is not enough for us to change our name and proclaim ourselves a new party. We must work to encourage and develop a real social movement of the working class upon which this new party can establish a firm foundation."<br /><br /><br />Therefore the founding of the SEP in 1995 was based on the prospect of a fundamental change in the relationship between the party and the working class. Yet we are now told that in fact the 1995 Congress was not really a Founding after all:<br /><br />"The founding congress was the outcome of theoretical, political and organizational work within the United States and internationally that spanned more than a decade. The predecessor of the SEP, the Workers League, initiated the process of transforming itself into a party in June 1995."<br /><br />In other words, the 1995 Congress only “initiated” the Founding of the SEP but it took another 13 years to consummate this Founding. It is hard not to avoid the impression that little more is involved here than playing with words. But leaving that aside and accepting that at long last the SEP has been founded in 2008, presumably this new step in the party’s development is based on a change in the relationship between the party and the working class that was anticipated in the 1995 Founding Congress. Has this change actually happened?<br /><br />Alas, we see no evidence of any such change. If anything, the SEP’s predecessor, the Workers League, had a much more vital relationship to the working class in the period from 1985-1995 than in the period from 1995-2008. One need only mention the intervention into the Mack Ave Fire in Detroit in 1993 where the Workers League initiated a Commission of Inquiry that won wide support, or the intervention into the Hormel strike of 1985-1986 or the work related to the UAW strike of Caterpillar in 1992. Has there been anything comparable in the last 13 years?<br /><br />What in fact has taken the place of these interventions into working class struggles? The answer clearly is journalism. In the past 13 years the Socialist Equality Party has evolved an abstentionist orientation whose primary work consists in publishing news articles for the World Socialist Web Site. We have analyzed the theoretical roots of this degeneration extensively in our series Marxism Without its Head of its Heart. [3] As we noted in that series, we are the last ones to denigrate the need for revolutionary journalism and the use of the communications revolution represented by the Internet to reach new layers of the working class and intelligentsia that was not possible with a print media. But when the sole preoccupation of the movement consists in writing news articles - and articles one might add that are often indistinguishable from left liberal commentary - then we have a severe problem.<br /><br />The main rationale for the Founding Congress is then certainly not a fundamental change in the relationship between the party and the working class. Rather it is to be found in the following cryptic statement:<br /><br />"The launching of the World Socialist Web Site in February 1998, which rapidly developed into the most widely read Internet-based socialist publication in the world, led to the expansion of the political influence of the ICFI and a significant influx of new members into the Socialist Equality Party. "<br /><br />The Congress it appears was launched in order to absorb and accommodate the new members. We do not doubt that the SEP has indeed recruited a significant layer of new members. But so far as we can tell the great bulk of these new members come from a middle class student milieu through the work of the ISSE (International Students for Social Equality). That in itself is certainly not a crime, but as we noted in Marxism Without its Head of its Heart, relying on a middle class student movement that is bereft of working class youth poses certain dangers:<br /><br />"Something also needs to be said about the launching of the youth movement, The International Students for Social Equality, (ISSE) which is oriented to students on college campuses. We find it troubling that this youth movement is limited to the college campus milieu. In the context of the recent political evolution of the IC, it is another sign of the crystallization of the dominance of middle class forces within the party. There is a notable contrast here with the work the party did among working class youth in the past. An important achievement of the Workers League in the early 1970s was the building of a youth movement, the Young Socialists, that gained a substantial following among working class and minority youth. The Young Socialists actively fought against the pernicious influence of Black Nationalism and other reactionary ideologies on the home base of its adherents and more than held its own. It organized rallies and demonstrations against unemployment, imperialist war, and fought to unite the struggles of the youth with those of the working class as a whole. It also educated a layer of youth in the principles of Marxism. Yet today the successor organization of the Workers League, the Socialist Equality Party, proposes nothing for the most oppressed sections of the working class, the unemployed youth, African American and Hispanic youth. This is another unmistakable sign of the party’s growing estrangement from the working class."[4]<br /><br /><br />The real purpose of the Congress seems to have been the elevation of this middle class layer to leadership positions inside the movement. This is particularly evident in the selection of Joseph Kishore for the post of National Secretary of the SEP. Kishore has no history of being involved in any struggles of the working class, nor has he made any contribution to Marxist theory, which are the traditional criteria by which leaders have been chosen in the Trotskyist movement. Rather it seems he is representative of this new layer of recruits on which the SEP is betting its fortune – middle class students willing to write articles for the World Socialist Web Site and leave difficult theoretical and political issues to the leadership, namely North. In other words, this Congress does mark a change in the relationship of the party to the class, but in a decidedly negative sense:<br />It is yet one more indication of how remote the party is from any involvement in the life of the working class and how its political base is now drawn almost exclusively from a petty bourgeois college student milieu.<br /><br /><br />We will comment elsewhere on the documents produced by the Founding Congress of the SEP and the 2008 Election Campaign.<br /><br />Alex Steiner</div><div align="left">Sept 29, 2008<br /><br />[1] Socialist Equality Party holds founding Congress,<br /><a href="http://wsws.org/articles/2008/sep2008/cong-s19.shtml">http://wsws.org/articles/2008/sep2008/cong-s19.shtml</a><br /><br />[2] The 1995 talk "The Workers League and the founding of the Socialist Equality Party" had been available online but seems to have disappeared after a recent reorganization of the WSWS. It was also published as a separate printed pamphlet by that title. I am leaving the URL in case the WSWS resurrects the online version, but the last time I tried it (Feb 2, 2009) I received a "Page Not Found" error. <a href="http://www.wsws.org/sections/category/icfi/wlsep.shtml">http://www.wsws.org/sections/category/icfi/wlsep.shtml</a><br /><br />[3] <a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch01.pdf">http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch01.pdf</a><br /><br />[4] <a href="http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch11.pdf">http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch11.pdf</a> </div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-3408006910622294382?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062509833711600070.post-49564881683150894262007-12-02T22:46:00.000-08:002009-01-22T09:36:34.836-08:00Comment on the Publication of Marxism, History and Socialist ConsciousnessA COMMENT:<br /><br /><br /><br />On Aug. 17, the World Socialist Web Site announced the publication of a printed version of David North's polemic, "Marxism, History and Socialist Consciousness" and posted North's introduction to this volume. A brief comment is in order here. North claims that because it has been a year since he wrote his document, there is no further point in waiting for a reply from us because "something akin to a statute of limitations has been passed." We were unaware that any such limitation existed; it is certainly a novelty in the history of Marxist polemics. We could add that until this moment it would seem that North himself was unaware of such a limitation since he waited 3 years to respond to Brenner's 2003 document, "To know a thing is to know its end", and as we point out in our reply, he has to this day not answered Steiner's 2004 document, "The Dialectical Path of Cognition and Revolutionizing Practice". The only conclusion one can draw is that North applies this "statute of limitations" only to his opponents but not to himself. The fact is that from the moment we received North's document, we made it clear both that we would be responding to it and that our response would necessarily be a lengthy one. It often takes longer to unravel distortions than to make them, and North's polemic is replete with distortions. More importantly, we saw our responsibility as entailing not only answering North's arguments but also placing this polemic in the context of the political evolution of the International Committee. All that took time - in fact a little more than a year - and we make no apologies for that. We are convinced that the serious and principled nature of our forthcoming statement will be evident to any objective-minded reader. North, on the other hand, proceeds in an increasingly cynical manner. This is particularly evident in the curious timing of this book launch. In July we posted an announcement on our website that we would be issuing our reply to North in September. North was certainly aware of that, and yet he chose to publish the book a month before our reply is due. (One might add here that North is not only the writer of this book but also its publisher, so the decision as to when to issue it was entirely up to him.) Why not wait to see what we have to say? If the political education of party members was the primary concern, that surely would have been the way to proceed. Instead, it is obvious that this book launch is meant to preempt any further discussion, to declare that (given North's fondness for legal metaphors) the 'case is closed' and thus to provide himself with an alibi in advance for ignoring our forthcoming reply. The readers of the WSWS should not be fooled. What North fears is an honest and thorough discussion of the issues we have raised. We are confident that this attempt to marginalize and silence us will not succeed.<br /><br /><br /><br />August 18, 2007<br /><br />Frank Brenner, Alex Steiner<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2062509833711600070-4956488168315089426?l=www.permanent-revolution.org%2Fforum%2Fblogger.html' alt='' /></div>Alex Steinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09128453587484101609noreply@blogger.com0