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Debates and Interventions

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Debates and Interventions chapter 6 Debates and Interventions Paul Le Blanc Items in this chapter give a sense of other issues on which there were divergent opinions debated within the Socialist Workers Party. One dispute arose in regard to Isaac Deutscher, whose writings had a power- ful impact through the 1950s and 1960s. A Polish Trotskyist in the 1930s who had considered the 1938 formation of the Fourth International to be premature and a sectarian mistake, he reinvented himself in the 1940s, when – as an ex- Trotskyist and refugee in Britain – he became fluent in English and achieved international prominence as a journalist. His focus was international events, with a specialty on Eastern Europe and the USSR, but in 1949 he produced a massive, scholarly biography of Joseph Stalin. Deutscher wrote as a sophistic- ated Marxist, with a strong Trotskyist influence but a decidedly independent bent. His well-researched portrait of Stalin offered a detailed, nuanced, and illuminating account of the revolutionary movement and struggles through which Stalin was shaped, of Stalin’s own climb to power, and of the subsequent policies he advanced, with attention to what Deutscher considered not only the bad and the ugly, but also the good. Specifically, Deutscher saw Stalin – despite his brutality and national nar- rowness, despite his distortions of Marxism and suppression of an inner-party democracy that had been the norm in the time of Lenin, despite the vicious and murderous quality of many of his policies – as having played a largely progressive role in overseeing and helping advance the industrialization and modernization of the USSR, which could provide the basis for a future socialist society. Deutscher believed such socialism would necessarily require genuine democracy and freedom of expression, with a humanism absent from Stalin’s personality and practices, but that this might be achieved through political reform, even self-reform, of the existing bureaucratic rule. He saw the Stalin- ist bureaucracy and the bureaucratic dictatorship as continuing to represent – in highly distorted and often destructive form, to be sure – some of the original revolutionary aspirations of the 1917 revolution, and that the foreign policy of the USSR in the Cold War had progressive qualities as well, as a counter- balance to US imperialism and as a force often inclined, for its own systemic reasons, to deploy Soviet military forces or to aid various anti-colonial and © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004389281_007 debates and interventions 461 national liberation struggles, in order to make more and more of the world non- capitalist.1 This corresponded to the orientation in the Fourth International represen- ted by Michel Pablo, and Deutscher’s work had consequently been targeted for polemical assault, including by none other than James P. Cannon himself – ‘Trotsky or Deutscher? On the New Revisionism and Its Theoretical Source’. As the factional struggle receded into the past, and as Deutscher produced the first and then the second volume of his monumental biography of Trotsky – The Prophet Armed and The Prophet Unarmed – the attitude toward Deutscher began to shift, with Joseph Hansen repeating some of the criticisms while at the same time acknowledging virtues in Deutscher’s account.2 But with the publication of the final volume, The Prophet Outcast, Hansen offered the fairly laudatory review presented here – which, as we can see, generated a sharp cri- ticism from George Breitman, with a rejoinder in which Hansen stuck to his guns.3 Far more contentious was an ongoing debate around the Chinese Revolu- tion of 1949, and particularly around the subsequent regime and policies under the leadership of Mao Zedong (most commonly before the 1970s spelled Mao Tse-tung) and his comrades in the Chinese Communist Party. After the dis- astrous destruction of what had been a very substantial Chinese Communist movement in 1927 (due to its leadership reluctantly following directives of the Stalin-Bukharin leadership of the Communist International), Mao and other survivors fled to and regrouped in China’s rural hinterlands. Here they eventu- ally built up a powerful peasant base, fighting against Japanese invaders as well as the corrupt right-wing Nationalist dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek. The pop- ular support that had by the end of the Second World War enabled them to win a civil war against the Nationalists, declaring the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The Chinese Trotskyists, some of whom had been top leaders of the Com- munist Party up to 1927, were either imprisoned or forced into exile with the establishment of Mao’s regime, and they themselves were sharply divided on how to interpret and respond to events. There were also differences among US Trotskyists.4 1 Deutscher 1967. For Deutscher’s journalism, see Deutscher 1970. For some background mater- ial, see: Horowitz 1971; Deutscher 1968; Caute 2013. 2 Cannon 1954; Hansen 1960. George Breitman’s two-part polemic on the Stalin biography (1949), and his five-part critique of the first of Deutscher’s Trotsky volumes (1954), each part taking up a full page in the Militant, can be found in the George Breitman Internet Archive at: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/breitman/index.htm (accessed 22 June 2016). 3 The three volumes have been combined into a single-volume edition – Deutscher 2015. 4 The 1927 massacre of Communists in China is the focal point of one of the twentieth cen-.
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