[Marxism] Re: Browder

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Well, I thought that Mark went a little over the top in his comments on
Brown, as did Brown on Mark.  On the Marxism List, what else is new?

Basically I think the whole transformation of popular frontism as an
all-embracing term for all forms of class collaboration on a capitalist
basis, so that popular frontism becomes the central problem facing
humanity, is dead wrong.  It was dead wrong when (with occassional pangs
of doubt) I held to it in the SWP and it is wrong now.

How do you apply popular frontism to the civil war period, when the
issue was whether  capitalist production based on the sale of labor
power or plantation slavery would hold political power across the
nation.  What does this have to do with the era the Soviet workers'
state, the communist international, the New Deal, and all that?
Its pure and simple analogy-making, but there is no real historical
connection.

The fact is that you could not even have a genuine workers' movement in
the United States until this question was resolved.  The proletariat as
a class could not consistently confront the bourgeoisie as its enemy.
Marx was right to point out that even in the strictest capitalist sense
of the term "free", labor in the white skin could not be free while
labor in the Black skin was in chains.

The endless debates over the "popular front" eliminate the concrete
debate over expressions of class collaboration, whose interests they
serve, what their effects will be, and how the working class movement
can advance or hobble itself?  Were their problems of procapitalist
class collaboration in Indonesia in the early 1960s and Chile under
Allende.  Sure.  Was their popular frontism? No.  And I imagine it may
be likewise in Bolivia today.

For far leftists, the argument tends to go like this: If it is a popular
front, it must be opposed.  If it is not a popular front, it must be
supported.  This is a very convenient categorization, especially for
purposes of judging from afar (easy to come up with opinions on the
"Union of the Left" in France or the Green Party or just about anything
else with one or two facts in hand. But what if the characterization is
worthless?  How can it be used to settle any dispute on tactics or
strategy?

In my opinion, the "third capitalist party" stance that the SWP adopted
in 1948 toward the Progressive Party is dead wrong.  This has since
applied far more absurdly to the Eldridge Cleaver campaign, Barry
Commoner, and the Green Party.  All of these formations were rooted in
broad middle-class unrest with the course of capitalism, unrest whose
political expression, including the middle-class characteristics, ran
deep among working people.  None of them, including the PP once it got
going as a real campaign, represented any political motion in the ruling
class at all.

The "third bourgeois party" analysis reflected the tendency in the party
to identify the petty-bourgeoisie broadly and exclusively as though it
were a unified social formation (except for the farmers perhaps) that
necessarily represented and supported the bourgeoisie in politics. Today
this identification has been carried to the point of complete withdrawal
from the "petty bourgeois politics" (and that's what they mostly are,
given the general absence of the working class from political life) of
opposition to the course of US imperialism at home and abroad.
Basically, the reasoning was if it is not the revolutionary party and
not the labor party and (later) not the Black Party, it is a bourgeois
party.  More a process of elimination by the use of categories rather
than a concrete analysis.

The Progressive Party, although it also fit well with Moscow's moves
against capitalism in Eastern Europe and the initial "hard line" in the
Cold War, was also powered, in my opinion, by the accumulated anger and
embarrassment in the party at the damage done to the party in the
working class and Black community elsewhere by the policies known as
Browderism -- actually the policies demanded by Moscow during World War
II.  When  the policy swing to the left came, Browder became a
convenient and probably needed scapegoat for the party ranks, who had
felt the isolation growing as they sought to enforce the no-strike
pledge, pulling away from the real fight taking place for Black rights,
fawning over Roosevelt, opposing democratic rights in the labor
movement.  They had felt, especially in the last years of the war, that
their isolation was growing -- opening them up to leftish attacks from
the likes of Reuther at the beginning of the cold war.  The Stalinist
"Browderite" policy contributed greatly to the deep decline of the CP
even while it seemed at the height of national prominence.

For some, the PP was the road to showing a new commitment to militancy.

I think I need to learn more about the Progressive Party in the United
States than I do.  I know the Wallace story pretty well and the CP
story, but I know little about the party and its campaign.  I wonder if
anyone can tell me how to get the two volume work on the party by, I
believe, Curtis Macdougal.

Strategically, I am still a "labor party/Black party" person and not a
Third Party-ist. My support to the Green Party in the last election, the
first time I did anything like that, was based on the complete absence
of anything really worth supporting even on the far left.  And on
realizing the absurdity of the "third bourgeois party" characterization
of Nader and the Greens on the far left.

But I think we in general and I in particular need to ground our
politics more concretely in knowledge of the social forces involved.
Fred Feldman




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