The vicissitudes of the heterodox

In his introduction to our book The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism, Sean Matgamna wrote:

“The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, which had distant origins as ‘1953’, that is, sharply anti-Stalinist ‘Cannonites’, made our way to the Third Camp politics of the Heterodox Trotskyist tradition by our responses to successive political events, rather than by way of a sudden conversion. Then we revised our ideas about the history of the Trotskyist movement: we ‘went back to 1940’, to the parting of the ways of the two main Trotskyist currents [when Max Shachtman and the ‘Heterodox’ were expelled for arguing that ‘defence of the USSR’ was no guide to working-class policy in Stalin’s 1939-40 war on Finland]...

“Despite [the] vicissitudes [of the ‘Heterodox’ current], and despite the fact that it does not come down to us as a neatly-codified package transmitted by a continuous chain of organisational and intellectual activity, that tradition, and the formulations of its politics form a rich heritage. As well as the political disputes, mistakes, and degenerations, there is also a magnificent record of indomitable devotion and courage in the fight for socialism against both capitalism and Stalinism”.

Yet in the USA, there seems to be, or have been until recently, “a continuous chain” of the Heterodox tradition. Andrew Stone Higgins’s book, and his interview, tell much much about the “vicissitudes” of a big link in that (in fact) not quite continuous chain, the ISC/IS between 1964 and the late 1970s.

Many of the documents from the ISC/IS are now available online, thanks to the work of the Marxist Internet Archive: see bit.ly/wp-is and bit.ly/is-doc. I have not studied them fully, but such knowledge as I’ve picked up prompts some comments on the book and the interview.

Max Shachtman and the Heterodox Trotskyists of the 1940s insisted (rightly, I think) that they were the authentic continuators of Trotsky’s overall ideas, and that the self-styled “Orthodox Trotskyists” had departed from those ideas, pro-Stalinistically.

In the 1950s, however, as Shachtman faded (heart attack 1951, new partner 1951, move to suburban Long Island 1954), and Hal Draper took over as the main writer of the Heterodox Trotskyists (by then called ISL), the take changed. Less “we are the Trotskyists, and the ‘Orthodox’ are imposters”, more “they are the Trotskyists, and we are different”.

Higgins cites Gabe Gabrielsky as saying that Draper’s “Independent Socialism” was “an entirely new tendency”. Draper’s actual words were milder: “a new socialist synthesis”. Draper cited Marxian, Fabian-Revisionist, anarcho-syndicalist, and “Leninist” as the older syntheses.

When the ISC printed Draper’s Two Souls of Socialism in 1966, the cover had Lenin and Trotsky among the images of the “good” soul. But the valuable “Clipping Books” which Draper produced in the mid-1960s for the Independent Socialist Club campus stalls (yes, they ran stalls every day, followed up by individual discussions with people who showed interest, and frequent well-advertised meetings: that is how they grew, not just by engineering “broad movements” like the Peace and Freedom Party and getting flow from there) — those “Clipping Books” are mostly Draper’s own articles from the mid-1950s, not a selection from the whole “Heterodox” tradition.

The “Clipping Books” have much of value, but they are a half-version of the Heterodox tradition, from a period when it was perplexed and losing energy. According to Julius Jacobson, “half the New York membership” (and New York was by far the main centre) were in psychotherapy.

Phyllis Jacobson records that Draper “was remote. He was a wonderfully educated, brilliant guy, who had few real friends in the movement”. So he wrote, often very well, but he tended to the scholastic rather than the interventionist.

All that, I think, explains three things.

First, why Draper didn’t last long in the ISC/IS. He was reluctant from the start. He seems to have concurred with Phyllis Jacobson’s assessment: “we ended up as a sect with practically no members. We ended with zilch”, which led her and Julius Jacobson doing their launch of New Politics (for which Draper wrote) in 1961 on the basis of sponsorship by the Socialist Party’s old reformist leader Norman Thomas and agreed access to the SP mailing list. The Jacobsons and Draper were hostile to Shachtman’s edging into Democrat and union-boss politicking, but their dissent was not a drive to maintain an independent Marxist organisation.

Draper did excellent work when, later, he turned to writing scholarly exegesis of Marx’s writings, often digging out Marx’s real meaning from decades of Stalinist “slant” read onto it. But political direction and scholarly exegesis are not the same thing.

Second: Draper’s take on the Stalinist states as “bureaucratic collectivist” fared badly among the post-ISC fragments. Most (including the Australian IS, founded by ex-Berkeley migrant Tom O’Lincoln) abandoned it for versions of “state capitalist” designation, sometimes very poor ones like Tony Cliff’s.

The Introduction to Independent Socialism “Clipping Book” included a text by Shachtman on “bureaucratic collectivism”, but a thin and late one (1954). By then Shachtman had tacitly gone over to Joseph Carter’s view, so the text declares: “The first thing to grasp about Stalinism is that world capitalism is at the end of its rope” (emphasis added). Capitalism is collapsing. It could be into bureaucratic collectivism or into socialism. Better the socialist way.

Decades later, Draper’s sidekick Ernie Haberkern told a Workers’ Liberty forum in London that the clearest example then in the world of “bureaucratic collectivism” was the International Monetary Fund, because it was more bureaucratic than simple profit-maximisation. That was close to the “convergence theories” popular in the 1970s, according to which the (sort of) liberalising and marketising USSR and the increasingly plan-minded Western powers were converging towards a common future of “industrial society”.

Views vary within Workers’ Liberty on whether “bureaucratic collectivism” can be rescued. I think not (and that “deformed state capitalism” is a better framework). Probably most in Workers’ Liberty disagree with me. However, Draper’s stripped-down version of bureaucratic collectivism is now untenable.

Stalinism arose in China because capitalism was “at the end of its rope” there? Look at Taiwan and at mainland China since 1989. In Korea because capitalism was “at the end of its rope” there? In Vietnam ditto? Etc.

Capitalism generates terrible crises and suffering, but it had not come to a halt in the early 1960s, and has not now.

Third: “democratic centralism” became a big issue in the ISC/IS groups. Those who wanted to be more “Trotskyist” also wanted to be more “democratic centralist”, but in an addled way.

The term “democratic centralism” was coined by the Russian Mensheviks (yes, Mensheviks, not Bolsheviks) as an approving summary of the organisational changes made by the German Social Democracy (SPD) in 1905 to create more coherence than the ramshackle old structure from its period of illegality (1879-1890). The SPD remained pluralist, more so than the emergency regime which the Bolsheviks had to resort to in the Russian civil war, and nothing like the “Zinovievite” version of “democratic centralism” (called “Bolshevisation”) imposed on the Communist Parties in 1924-5.

“Democratic centralism” means, for us, simply an effort to work out the truth of issues, and to seek coherence in action to promote that truth, with wide rights for minorities to voice objections, including publicly. It is the alternative to members being guided more by the immediate pressures on them in their different spheres (in different unions, for example, or when they gain trade-union positions); to a culture of fudge and theoretical indifference; and to a passive, only half-paying-attention, membership which can be manipulated but cannot gain sufficient common conviction for energetic collective activity. The pre-1914 SPD’s disease was much more a culture of compromises to reduce conflict than of excessive “centralism”.

However, in the ISC/IS, the arguments were mostly about “democratic centralism” of a “Zinovievite” form (appointment from the central office of local organisers, etc.), with an irrationally hectic perspective (win leadership in the workplaces within a few years by dragooning students into factories) and an expulsion-happy culture. Other groups, including ourselves, had ex-students “industrialising” then without the same frenzy. But ISC/IS seemed to flip between frenzy and looseness (don’t fuss about “the line”, as long as activity looks buoyant and successful).

The “Zinovievism”, together with the thinness of the political-cultural base, must be the reason why the ISC/IS was so very split-prone, with at least eight serious splinters between 1969 and 1979. The splits are not explained by a decline in working-class struggle in the USA. The “Orthodox Trotskyist” SWP, weaker than the “Heterodox” YPSL in the early 1960s, had membership growing until the late 1970s. US strike statistics show no sharp fall until the mid 1980s.

The “Heterodox Trotskyist” Workers Party, in its day, had a well-explained alternative both to “Zinovievism” and to flaccidity. But that wasn’t presented in the Clipping Books, and seems never to have got a hearing.

Draper’s Two Souls of Socialism text, first written in 1960 for Michael Harrington’s Anvil, a plea for a “from below” “soul” of socialism against the “from above” soul, however, got and still gets a wide hearing.

Daniel Randall and I have argued that this most famous text of Draper’s is, despite some well-written denunciation of Stalinism, shoddy.
Even in its revised version of 1966, when allocating all varieties of socialism to “from above” or “from below” boxes, it refuses to classify Bolshevism and anarcho-syndicalism.

Its treatment of anarchism is a travesty, equating anarchists in general with the worst of Proudhon and Bakunin. Its treatment of German Social Democracy in its best years is also a travesty (it denounces it as thoroughly socialism-from-above).

“From below” is a poor soft-soap alias for “working class”. Many variants of socialism have seen capitalism as being crowded out by socialistic initiatives “from below” (cooperatives, municipal socialism, “liberated zones”, etc.) rather than being overthrown. Consistent working-class socialism seeks to organise the working class, currently “below”, to become “above” by overthrowing the capitalist state. Also, on the way, to win reforms legislated “from above” (from the legal ten-hour day onwards).

The text suggests that capitalism will be ousted by one form or another of socialism, whatever we do. Only there are bad socialists who want to do it “from above”, and good ones who want it “from below”. The difference is a moral rather than a class one.

In his first Clipping Book, Draper included a good 1955 text by himself on “Why the Working Class”. But the Independent Socialist Clubs’ first manifesto of 1964 is not class politics. It wants a “third party”, but “by the labour and civil rights movements and other progressive forces”, not a workers’ party.

The ISC manifesto wanted a “Third Camp” which is defined as “those who reject both war blocs” (not, as the Workers Party, or all the Trotskyists in 1938-9, had it, as the working class). The difference is not pedantic. In European politics in the late 1940s and early 1950s, “Third Camp” or “Third Force” mostly meant a hope for Europe, or social democracy, or a Europe led by social democracy, to be a pole against both the USSR and USA.

The ISC/IS’s “worker turn” may have been driven as much by “competitive” exigencies as by rational analysis. If young people angry to overthrow capitalism find socialists telling them it can be done quickly (and, in the 1960s, citing say Cuba as an example), and others saying yes, but wait, we want a better socialism, then they are likely to go for the imperfect socialism now (maybe to be improved later). Thus, pressure on IS to “compete” by proposing to do the better socialism quickly, just by getting into factories and soon leading the workers there.

Marx never wanted to be labelled Marxist, Lenin never wanted to be labelled Leninist, and Trotsky never wanted to be labelled Trotskyist. After a while we may have little choice. Saying we are Marxists may convey little, but saying we are not Marxists conveys a lot of bad things. We in Workers’ Liberty have little choice now but to go along with the “Third Camp” label, but in awareness of its limitations. □