Coping with the Coldwar, Global and Domestic

chapter 5 Coping with the Cold War, Global and Domestic

Paul Le Blanc

At the close of the twentieth century, the ColdWar was described as a ‘confront- ation – military, economic, ideological – between two great superpower blocs, the United States and the Soviet Union’, that constituted ‘the central story of our times’. For US Trotskyists, this posed particular challenges, both in regard to Marxist theory and practical politics, matters already discussed in the intro- ductory chapter of this volume as well as in Chapters 3 and 5. As this chapter’s first two essays by James P. Cannon indicate, the political and intellectual pres- sures bearing down on the revolutionary left were intense, and the same was true within the labor movement and beyond. One critical-minded historian of the US left has suggested that the Socialist Workers Party – despite serious mis- takes and limitations – ‘managed to chart an honourable course through the difficult World War II and Cold War years avoiding the Scylla of Stalinism and the Charybdis of imperialism better than any other American radical group of its time’.1 The creation of the ‘two great superpower blocs’ in a contest for global ‘defense’ and dominance involved an effort to secure ‘the American Century’ that US publishing mogul Henry Luce had advocated, which from a Marxist standpoint could naturally be theorized with reference to an imperialism flow- ing naturally and necessarily from the capitalist needs for secure global mar- kets, expanding investment opportunities, and ready supplies of raw materials, but what was the meaning of the USSR’s expansion into Eastern Europe (where Communist Party dictatorships – loyal to the USSR – were established)?2

1 Isaacs and Downing 1998, p. ix – a volume providing a useful overview, particularly in com- bination with LaFeber 2006, Heller 2006, and Williams 2009; impacts on intellectual life are traced in Lasch 1969, pp. 63–114 and Saunders 1998; impacts on the labor movement in Cochran 1977, and Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin 2003; impacts in both realms, and in other realms, are documented in Caute 1978; evaluation of SWP performance in all of this can be found in Wald 1987, p. 309. (‘Scylla and Charybdis’ is a reference from Greek mythology, which involves making one’s way between two evils – similar to saying that one is between a rock and a hard place, or the devil and the deep blue sea). 2 On imperialism in the Cold War era, see Magdoff 1978 and Heller 2006. On the development of the USSR’s ‘satellite states’,see: Claudin 1975, pp. 307–548; Eley 2002, pp. 278–328; Priestland 2009, pp. 204–33, 273–314; Fejtö 1974, pp. 7–63; Harman 1988.

A majority within the Fourth International (among whom was the brilliant young theoretician Ernest Mandel, referred to as ‘Germain’ in discussions and debates) asserted that the USSR remained a degenerated workers’ state, as Trot- sky had argued, but that since Stalinism is incapable of being a revolutionary force, the new ‘satellite’ states in the USSR’s power bloc remained some variant of capitalism. This was initially the perspective of a majority in the Socialist Workers Party as well – but the position was sharply and effectively challenged by Joseph Hansen and (under the party name E.R. Frank) Bert Cochran. The nuanced and informative positions they advanced soon changed minds among majorities of US and world Trotskyists (including Mandel).3 As we have already noted, there were also strong counter-arguments among Trotskyists – denying that the USSR could be considered any kind of workers’ state, degenerated or otherwise. In the previous volume we noted the theory of ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ pungently articulated by Max Shachtman and his co-thinkers. In Chapter 5 we saw the conception of ‘state capitalism’ advanced by the Johnson-Forest tendency, whose partisans ended up agreeing that such comrades as Hansen and Cochran had demonstrated the consistency of their analyses with Trotskyist fundamentals – and therefore ended by rejecting Trot- skyism in all its forms. A different variant of ‘state capitalist’ theorization, remaining within a basic Trotskyist framework, was developed in Britain by Tony Cliff.4 There were other analytical approaches as well, and in his massive explora- tion of Marxist theorizations, Marcel van der Linden has suggested that ‘numer- ous attempts were made to understand Soviet society, some with solid empir- ical foundations, but most lacking them; some consistent and carefully thought-out, others illogical and superficial’. Van der Linden notes that for Trotsky ‘planned economy and bureaucratic dictatorship were fundamentally incompatible’. He envisioned either the working class once again taking con- trol of its own workers’ state, clearing away the bureaucratic deformations and (within the context of working-class revolutions spreading to other lands) mov- ing forward to socialism, or instead a continued bureaucratic decay ultimately resulting in a collapse that would pave the way for capitalist restoration – which is, of course, what took place 50 years after his death. The weak point in Trot- sky’s conceptualization was pinpointed by his one-time follower in Britain, Tony Cliff (and articulated by others as well): ‘If the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class, then you cannot have a workers’ state

3 Frank 1979, pp. 67–84; Alexander 1991, pp. 304–16. 4 See: Shachtman 1962; Jacobson 1972; Dunayevskaya 1992; Cliff 1974.