Re: [Marxism] Victoria Woodhull and dogmatic Marxism

[Tom Chisholm <thomaswchisholm@xxxxxxxxx>]

We should be careful to take Messer-Kruse?s book
concerning the First Int?l without giving it a
critical scrutiny it deserves.  I have worked with
Messer-Kruse and have taken his classes and, although
I respect his scholarship and teaching, I consider him
to be dogmatic in his anti-Marxism (once I heard him
declaiming in class that Marx?s labor theory of value
was ?racist?) and I disagree with the basic thesis of
his book: that the Marxist sectarianism of the Sorge?s
faction was responsible for the fragmentation of the
American section of the First Int?l through its
hounding of the ?Yankee Reformers? who presumably
constituted forces of cultural and sexual liberation
reminiscent of the 1960s cultural revolution.

First of all, such representative ?Yankee Reformers?
as Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin
are hardly models of genuine working-class socialist
feminism.  Woodhull worked as a ?clairvoyant? and
?magnetic healer? in her parents? traveling medicine
show and Claflin believed in spiritualism, necromancy,
teetotalism, and was later indicted for manslaughter
because of her work for her father?s charlatan cancer
clinic that led to a woman?s death.  Claflin was
Commodore Vanderbilt?s mistress and Woodhull his
financial adviser (Cornelius Vanderbilt, who fell
under the two gold-digging sisters? charms, set them
up the stockbrokerage firm Woodhull, Claflin, &
Company).  Moreover, both sisters left the movement
when they couldn?t make use of it for their
politically dilettantish, social-climbing ends:
Woodhull married a rich English banker, John Biddulph
Martin, and both sisters found acceptance in the
English upper class, publishing books and periodicals
on eugenics.

However heavy-handed Sorge?s faction may have been in
their ?purges?, you could easily argue that the First
Int?l, first and foremost a working-class
organization, has no place for such middle-class and
ideologically suspect members who abused the Int?l?s
?open door? policy.

Marx and Engels, anyway, are not responsible for what
took place on the grounds in the American section:
they received missives about this matter and made
occasional comments, but they never had the command or
power that, say, the central committee members would
do in a Marxist-Leninist Party (which is a very
different type of organization).  Messer-Kruse (and
Louis following suit) tends to exaggerates the role of
Sorge as M & E?s protégé (if this were so, Bakunin
should be similarly condemned for his far closer
association with Nechaev--which, on historical
grounds, I?ll oppose too).

Also, I?m not at all convinced by Louis?s point that
?Lenin was the very first Marxist to SYNTHESIZE the
proletarian and non-proletarian elements of the
revolution,? that his ?most radical departure was to
support the demands of the Russian peasantry who had
been regarded by orthodox Marxism as an alien and
hostile class.?  As early as 1897, Lenin was attacking
proposals to base a Russian peasant revolutionary
movement on traditional communal landholding of the
mir as being premised on ?honeyed grandmother?s tales?
and derogatively calling these advocates of the
Russian commons ?sentimental Romantics?.
Notwithstanding Lenin?s contention that the mir would
suffer irreparable erosion under capitalist
development and class differentiation among the
peasants, even on the eve of the revolution, little
less than half of peasant lands, ?7.4 million holdings
were still communally owned? and, after the
revolution, this ?village organization which stood for
all the collectivist aspects of village life, and
which had been rooted in the village for centuries,
was given no part whatsoever to play in the
collectivization of the peasantry,? only ?to perish in
the holocaust of the collectivization? (according to
Moshe Lewin, a historian quite sympathetic to Lenin).


If Lenin was ?like a Protestant Reformation
revolutionary who attacked old beliefs at their root?,
whose ?articles were nailed to the door of
institutionalized Marxism,? this is apt only in the
sense that he became a founding figure of another
orthodoxy and that his arguments did not question the
economic develomentalist logic of ?institutionalized
Marxism?, just as Luther?s 95 theses did not question
the core assumptions of the Roman church.  But still
this is unfair to both Lenin and Luther: Lenin wasn?t
an anti-Semite who called for the slaughter of
peasants during the latter?s revolutionary war like
Luther was and, unlike Lenin, Luther drew from the
feudal moral economy an eminent disdain for usurers as
when he said, as Marx quotes at length in Capital,
?Whoever eats up, robs, and steals the nourishment of
another, that man commits as great a murder (so far as
in him lies) as he who starves a man or utterly undoes
him?And since we break on the wheel, and behead, the
highwayman, murderers, and housebreakers, how much
more ought we to break on the wheel and kill?hunt
down, curse, and behead all usurers.?

Incidentally, I went to a panel on the Haymarket
Bombing that Messer-Kruse organized at last year?s
Wayne State labor history conference.  Melvyn Dubofsky
moderated, with several critical respondents
(including James Green and Bryan Palmer) to
Messer-Kruse?s main presentation, which attacked the
post-Haymarket left scholarship as a whitewash and
purported to empirically ?prove? the anarchist guilt
for the Haymarket bombing on the basis of police
records and speculations on trajectory of ballistics
from sketchy postmortem evidence.  Even if he were
right on correcting a few statistical error concerning
the number of dead bodies from Haymarket, the larger
question that M-K never answered was what was the
political point to his presentation, which completely
ignored the historical context of the harsh, indeed
mortal, working conditions that US workers suffered in
the 1880s and the subsequent legal railroading of the
Haymarket martyrs.

Tom Chisholm


--- Brian Shannon <brian_shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> On Jun 6, 2006, at 8:27 PM, Louis Proyect wrote:
>
> >
>
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/american_left/woodhull.htm
> > Marx, Woodhull and Sorge
> >
> > Dogmatic Marxism's hostility toward "non-class"
> demands has been
> > around for a very long time, judging from the
> evidence of Timothy
> > Messer-Kruse's "The Yankee International:
> 1848-1876." (U. of North
> > Carolina, 1998) Furthermore, you are left with the
> disturbing
> > conclusion that this problem existed at the very
> highest levels of
> > the first Communist International, and included
> Marx himself.
>  Woodhull was
> the first one in the U.S. to publish the Communist
> Manifesto. It
> could be argued that Marx's support to Sorge is less
> significant than
> Woodhull's support to Marx.



> Marx and Engels were always opposed to every form of
> sectarianism
> (despite language in private that matches some on
> Marxmail or worse).
> For this reason, I wonder whether the association of
> Marx with the
> practice of Sorge (and by extension DeLeon many
> years later), of
> which he had only a limited knowledge, will bear the
> guilt by
> association that Messer-Kruse (via Proyect) implies.
>
> >
> Brian Shannon
>
>

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