Re: [Marxism] Petty Bourgeois--the consciousness yardstick

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Another key element of Trotskyist sectarianism is its tendency to turn
every serious political fight into a conflict between worker and
petty-bourgeoisie. Every challenge to party orthodoxy, unless the party
leader himself mounts it, represents the influence of alien class
influences into the proletarian vanguard. Every Trotskyist party in
history has suffered from this crude sociological reductionism, but the
American Trotskyists were the unchallenged masters of it.

Soon after the split from the SP and the formation of the Socialist
Workers Party, a fight broke out in the party over the character of the
Soviet Union. Max Shachtman, Martin Abern and James Burnham led one
faction based primarily in New York. It stated that the Soviet Union was
no longer a worker's state and it saw the economic system there as being
in no way superior to capitalism. This opposition also seemed to be less
willing to oppose US entry into WWII than the Cannon group, which stood
on Zimmerwald "defeatist" orthodoxy.

Shachtman and Abern were full-time party workers with backgrounds
similar to Cannon's. Burnham was a horse of a different color. He was an
NYU philosophy professor who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
He reputedly would show up at party meetings in top hat and tails, since
he was often on the way to the opera.

Burnham became the paradigm of the whole opposition, despite the fact
that Shachtman and Abern's family backgrounds were identical to
Cannon's. Cannon and Trotsky tarred the whole opposition with the petty-
bourgeois brush. They stated that the workers would resist war while the
petty-bourgeois would welcome it. It was the immense pressure of the
petty-bourgeois intelligentsia outside the SWP that served as a source
for these alien class influences. Burnham was the "Typhoid Mary" of
these petty-bourgeois germs.

However, it is simply wrong to set up a dichotomy between some kind of
intrinsically proletarian opposition to imperialist war and
petty-bourgeois acceptance of it. The workers have shown themselves just
as capable of bending to imperialist war propaganda as events
surrounding the [first] Gulf War show. The primarily petty-bourgeois
based antiwar movement helped the Vietnamese achieve victory. It was not
coal miners or steel workers who provided the shock-troops for the
Central America solidarity movement of the 1980's. It was lawyers,
doctors, computer programmers, Maryknoll nuns, and aspiring circus
clowns like the martyred Ben Linder who did. Furthermore, it would be
interesting to do a rigorous class analysis of the
Shachtman-Burnham-Abern opposition. Most of its rank- and-file members
were probably Jewish working-class people who more than anybody would be
susceptible to pro-war sentiment during this period. When the Nazis were
repressing Jews throughout Europe, it's no surprise that American Jews
would end up supporting US participation in WWII.

With Trotsky's help, Cannon defeated the opposition. Burnham shifted to
the right almost immediately and eventually became a columnist with
William F. Buckley's "National Review". Shachtman remained a socialist
until his final years, but like Lovestone who preceded him, eventually
embraced a right-wing version of socialism that was largely
indistinguishable from cold-war liberalism. Unreconstructed Trotskyists
might point to the trajectory of Shachtman and Burnham and crow
triumphantly, "See it was destined to happen! The middle-class will
always betray socialism."

History often moves in wayward directions, however. The next big fight
in American Trotskyism began in the early 1950's around the question of
whether Stalinist parties were moving to the left under the impact of
world events. The European Trotskyists said they were and urged their
co- thinkers everywhere to join the CP's. The American Trotskyist
leadership saw this as an attack on the purity of
Marxism-Leninism-Trotskyism and opened up ideological warfare on the
Europeans.

Of course, the Europeans were completely correct on this question. Their
main leader was an individual named Pablo. SWP leaders never mentioned
his name without attaching the epithet "revisionist" to it. The CP did
the same thing with Franco, except in that case the epithet was
"butcher", and it was accurate.

The fight had culminated in a split in the world Trotskyist movement.
The Europeans appeared totally vindicated in 1956, when the Krushchev
revelations caused the CP's to go into a total crisis. Krushchev, the
leader of the Communist Parties internationally, seemed to share the
critique of Stalin that the Trotskyists had been advancing for decades.
(The European Trotskyists have always been much more in touch with
political reality and the mass movement than the Americans. In the
global regroupment process that is taking place today, the European
Trotskyists can conceivably play a vanguard role in fighting
"vanguardism".)

CP'ers would have given Marxists a real hearing, if they were comrades
instead of sideline critics. Cannon, however, would have nothing to do
with the CP's. He preferred to remain pure in his little Trotskyist
cathedral wagging his finger at the evil Stalinists. His sectarianism
was palpable. The SWP did manage to recruit a few disillusioned CP'ers
in the late 1950's and early 1960's. Nobody was able to forge a new left
wing movement out of these important openings unfortunately.

A minority faction in the SWP supported the European perspectives. Did a
new group of middle-class wastrels in top-hats and tails mount such an
attack on the working- class vanguard perspective of revolutionary
Marxism? No, this time the opposition was working-class to the bone. The
leader was UAW veteran Bert Cochran, who had participated in some of the
biggest organizing fights in the late 1930's. He was in Detroit and his
supporters were industrial workers like himself. How did Cannon explain
this anomaly?

This was simple. The Cochranites were simply "petty-bourgeoisified"
workers. Here was Cannon's verdict:

"Since the consolidation of the CIO unions and the 13-year period of war
and postwar boom, a new stratification has taken place within the
American working class, and particularly and conspicuously in the CIO
unions. Our party, which is rooted in the unions, reflects that
stratification too. The worker who has soaked up the general atmosphere
of the long prosperity and begun to live and think like a petty
bourgeois is a familiar figure in the country at large. He has even made
his appearance in the Socialist Workers Party as a ready-made recruit
for an opportunist faction."

There you have it. Whether you are on an assembly-line or own a bagel
shop, you can succumb to the dreaded "petty bourgeois" illness. It seems
that the only prophylactic is to be a party full-timer. When Burnham
refused Cannon's invitation to work for the party full-time, Cannon
commented, "We deemed it unworthy of the dignity of a revolutionary
leader to waste his [sic] time on some piddling occupation in the
bourgeois world and wrong for the party to permit it. We decreed that no
one could be a member of the Central Committee of the party unless he
[sic] was a full time professional party worker, or willing to become
such at the call of the party." There is little doubt in my mind that
Burnham would have remained Burnham had he remained at NYU or had gone
to work in the SWP apparatus. This mechanical conception of
consciousness has nothing to do with Marxism. It is the crudest sort of
economic determinism.

full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/organization/lenin_in_context.htm

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