History Andtheory

chapter 7 History and Theory

Bryan Palmer and Paul Le Blanc

Articles throughout the various sections of these volumes are steeped in ‘history and theory’. Some of what is presented here could have been included in previous chapters. For example, Grace Carlson’s critique of racist ideology and William Gorman’s study of W.E.B. Du Bois are related to materials in chapters dealing with racism and anti-racism, Myra Tanner Weiss’s critique of Sternberg grew out of the factional struggle in the Fourth International, Joyce Cowley’s article on the history of women who fought for the right to vote could be placed with other ‘new stirrings’ materials, etc. In the same vein, various contributions in chapters throughout these volumes could be legitimately placed here. The Trotskyist movement was like that – history and theory infused its origins as Trotsky and many others throughout the world grappled with what had gone wrong with ‘the revolution betrayed’. With the founding of the Fourth Inter- national and its American section, the Socialist Workers Party, discussions of history and theory were never separable from political discussions of the cur- rent time and prescriptions for the future. At the same time, there is something to be said for highlighting the sus- tained attention given to matters of history and theory in the US Trotskyist movement – particularly the breadth and diversity represented here. For as the premier capitalist nation in a global system ordered by an accumulative regime driven by the quest for profit, the United States exhibited trends in its development that could be discerned throughout the advanced political economies of the world. But it also had its peculiarities. How all of this factored into under- standing the dynamics of revolutionary possibility were of central importance to those struggling to create alternatives to the far-reaching regime of acquisit- ive individualism. In the years stretching from the 1920s to the 1960s, capitalism gave rise to the destructive crises of the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, world war, and imperialist aggressions that unleashed deepening colonialist deform- ations. American history, replete with the complexities of a colonial past that had unleashed an early movement of national liberation, was complicated by the subsequent ambiguities of class struggle that took place within a history scarred by chattel slavery’s long legacy of racial divides and intense regional differentiations. As a case study of revolutions made, unmade, and remade, the

United States was a unique configuration of the general development of capitalism, complicated by the kinds of specific particularities that distinguished one national context from another. George Novack (under the name William F. Warde) was one of dissident Marxism’s most accomplished theoreticians. Active in the Trotskyist defense of civil liberties, Novack worked closely with John Dewey, a proponent of Amer- ican pragmatism in the fields of philosophy, education, and political theory, being centrally involved in the 1937 International Inquiry into the Moscow Tri- als that Dewey chaired and that vindicated Leon Trotsky in the face of Stalinist depictions of the founder of the Left Opposition as a counter-revolutionary guilty of innumerable crimes.1 Novack continued this labour and civil liberties work, so vital to dissident Marxism’s development, by leading the cam- paign to defend those prosecuted under the Smith Act in the 1940s. He kicked off this practical building of a coalition dedicated to exonerating and free- ing those charged and later convicted in the state trials reaching from 1941–43 with a historical account of just how integral revolutionary thought was to the entire history of the United States (see ‘The Right to Revolution’ in the ‘History and Theory’ chapter of Volume 1 of this documentary trilogy). Jailing people for espousing revolution, Novack argued, flew directly in the face of what the United States was about. This did not, of course, mean that revolutionary ideas always triumphed, or that there were not historical occurrences of shameful bigotry and viol- ent suppression of peoples and their entitlements that were central to Amer- ican history. ‘Progress’ in the United States came with considerable costs, as Novack explained in his pioneering Marxist analysis of the Native American experience, in which racist genocide was exposed as central to the triumph of American capitalism. Compromised somewhat by the limited understandings of the time in which this essay was written, Novack’s sensitivity to the ways in which the ‘First Nations’ of the United States were brutally suppressed as part of the preconditions of capitalist development, was nonetheless testimony to the basic insights of Marxist analysis (Document 5). As Novack (again, writing as Warde) would later suggest in a 1957 pamph- let, ‘The Irregular Movement of History: The Marxist Law of the Combined and Uneven Development of Society’, the dialectics of historical development revealed how the path of humanity’s advancement was disfigured by episodes

1 Novack had earlier produced a key philosophical text on dialectics (Novack 1969), later pro- ducing another on materialism (Novack 1965a), while grappling with challenges posed by existentialism (Novack 1965b), and would later produce a Marxist critique of Dewey and pragmatism (Novack 1975).