Earl Browder, Liquidationist

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Earl Browder, Liquidationist
by michael pugliese
08 April 2002 18:56 UTC


   From Daniell Aaron's history of the Left and the literary
intelligentsia. Preface by Alan Wald, Columbia Univ. Press.
M.P.

>...Maltz's article bristled with heresies. Had he written it
during the united-front days of 1935-39 or in the war years of
Soviet-American co-operation, when everybody from Monsignor Fulton
Sheen to Captain Eddie Rickenbacker had kind words for the Stalin
regime,27 it might have slipped by without commercial censure.
It appeared, however, well after the famous Jacques Duclos letter
of May 1945 presaged the end of peaceful collaboration between
the United States and the Soviet Union and the bankruptcy of
"Browderism." William Z. Foster now headed a reorganized Communist
Party, which Browder had dissolved in May 1944 and had reconstituted
as the Communist Political Association. A week before the publication
of Maltz's article, Browder, once hailed as "the beloved leader
of our movement," was expelled from the party as a "social imperialist."
Maltz, in his innocence, had expressed his scorn for a historian
he knew of who after reading the Duclos letter felt obliged "to
revise completely the book he was engaged upon." But Howard Fast
did not agree with him, nor did Joseph North, Alvah Bessie, Mike
Gold, John Howard Lawson, Samuel Sillen, or William Z. Foster,
each of whom sharply reprimanded Maltz for his dangerous "revisionism."
   Maltz's article, it seemed, was "liquidationist," "anti-progressive,"
and "reactionary." In effect, he argued for a split between the
citizen and the writer in saying that art and politics don't
mix.

^^^^^^^^

CB: Still sounds like a correct criticism of Maltz today.  Art and politics _do_ mix. Especially with writers.  What's your problem with this criticism ? ( See recent discussion on LBO).


^^^^



 Were this true, the Communist Party, the most political
of movements, would be the most detrimental to the writer. In
fact his description of the Duclos letter as another "headline,"
and his plea that writers place human experience above politics,
simply invited the writer to dispense with the party altogether.
Most reprehensible to his critics was Maltz's conception of the
self-contained writer, who irrespective of his social views might
produce a work of true literary value.28

^^^^^^^^

CB: This is not a virtuous aesthetic. It is a rotten aesthetic. The key to the value of a literary work is its social content. ( See Finkelstein in favor of the valuable social content of Shakespeare, for example, in _Who Needs Shakespeare_ ?)

^^^^^^^



   These counterarguments were advanced firmly and sometimes
harshly be fellow writers, but no one was more anti-Maltzian
than Maltz himself when he acknowledged his errors a few months
later in the party press.
   His "one-sided, non-dialectical approach," he confessed, had
been revisionist in the worst sense. "For what is revisionism?"
he asked. "It is distorted Marxism, turning half-truths into
total untruths, splitting ideology from its class base, denying
the existence of the class struggle in society, converting Marxism
from a science of society and struggle in apologetics for monopoly
exploitation." Because of his mistaken zeal, the enemies of the
Left had once more been able to raise the cry of "artists in
uniform." Clearly his "fundamental errors" indicated a "failure
to break deeply old habits of thought." He had "severed the organic
connection between art and ideology." He should have explained,
as the histories of Céline, Farrell, and Dos Passos did so well,
how "a poisoned ideology and an increasingly sick soul can sap
the talent and wreck the living fibre of a man's work." Although
he thought his article better suited to the slanderous social-democratic
New Leader than to The New Masses, he saw at least one merit
in its publication: the intense answers it provoked marked a
return to sound Marxist principles, which under the misleadership
of Browder had been abandoned. Unable to attend a New Masses
symposium on the subject of "Art As a Weapon," at which his mistaken
ideas were once again dissected, he sent a message of congratulation
from California.29
   Foster, who spoke at the symposium, had already pronounced
the last words on the Maltz case in The New Masses. The evil
genius, he said, was really Browder. Just as his "imperialist
theories" set the party "to tailing after the capitalists in
the field of politics," so Maltz accepted the "bourgeois propaganda
to the effect that art is 'free' and has nothing to do with the
class struggle." His views, said Foster, "happily being corrected
by Maltz himself," would "make the artist merely an appendage
and servant of the decadent capitalist system and its sterile
art." Of course the party did not want to "regiment the artists,"
but Maltz's incorrect assumptions "had to be discussed with all
the sharpness necessary to achieve theoretical clarity."30
   If Foster's tone was benevolent, his words indicated plainly
enough what the party expected from its artists. Isidor Schneider
notwithstanding, political correctness was more important than
being "faithful to reality." The novelist and Spanish Civil War
veteran Alvah Bessie expressed Foster's mind faithfully when
he told Maltz: "We need writers who will joyfully impose upon
themselves the discipline of understanding and acting upon
working-class-theory."

^^^^^^^^

CB: And don't we ?  The idea that there is no discipline between here and freedom is illusory.  Didn't Harriet Tubman need discipline to win all of that freedom for people  ?   The idea of the artist as an individual absolutely free of social and political connection is quite essentially bourgeois , and is a source of an enormous amount of the ideological poison that saturates Americans' brains.

There is quite a bit of selective quoting, in the above , and the anti-communist bias of the poster and the author raise more suspicions, but this is the same Michael Pug, redbaiting anti-communism , so William Z. Foster, et al. will have to attract others to their articles in full defense.


Of course, you don't think that Ezra Pound , the Fascist, represented decay and disease.  Howard Fast's rhetoric sounds on point. Marx's metaphor of the decaying husk is still valid today.  The U.S. is pretty putrid.

^^^^^

^^^^^




Fosterism in 1946 doomed any hopes that Schneider and other New
Masses editors may have entertained about the liberating of Left
culture. "Political tactics" were elevated "into political principles,"
and the "emergency mindedness and crude political determinism
of the past," deprecated by Schneider, once again pervaded Left
criticism.31
   Between the ouster of Browder and the Khrushchev "revelations"
in 1956, the party rode herd on its dwindling corps of writers,
as Howard Fast luridly described it in The Naked God, but Communism
as a cultural movement continued to slacken.
   Mainstream, a literary quarterly giving its "allegiance to
the Marxist science of history, culture, and human progress,"32
began bravely in the winter of 1947 and suspended publication
after four issues. The New Masses, which had changed its format
and refurbished its staff in 1946, folded in January 1948. The
successor to both, Masses & Mainstream, came out in March 1948
as a monthly. It is still in existence, but its writers are virtually
unnoticed, its circulation under 6,000. Only its readers know
of the Left Wing books it reviews, books published by obscure
firms and unjustly ignored by the bourgeois press.
   Many were asking with Howard Fast in 1949: "Where are the
great ones of the 'thirties, the whole school of talented progressive
writers who arose out of the unemployed struggles led by the
Communist Party...?33 Most of them were still alive, but they
were dead to the movement.




footnote, p. 425

...Howard Fast was an expert practitioner of the decay-and-disease
school of Communist polemic. He could write of Ezra Pound's Bollingen
Award: "Like a foul fistula, overloaded with pus, this corruption
exploded in the presentation of the Bollingen-Library of Congress
award to the fascist poet, Ezra Pound." Literature and Reality
(N.Y., 1950) p. 18.