A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party¶
Core Argument¶
A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party
This chapter dissects the theoretical and political degeneration of a minority faction within the Socialist Workers Party, led by Burnham, Shachtman, and Abern, arguing that their opposition represents not a legitimate Marxist tendency but the intrusion of petty-bourgeois method into a proletarian party. Trotsky locates the root of this deviation in a shared hostility to dialectical materialism, the very logic of revolutionary thought.
The faction’s theoretical eclecticism is exposed through its treatment of the dialectic. Burnham and Shachtman’s article Intellectuals in Retreat failed to explain the hostility of American intellectuals to Marxism, substituting a description of pragmatism for a materialist analysis. Worse, they declared that disagreement over dialectical materialism need not affect political conclusions, thereby sanctioning an unprincipled theoretical bloc. Trotsky had warned Shachtman in January 1939 that this stance was a blow to Marxist theory, a warning confirmed when Burnham—a pragmatist by method—constructed his non-proletarian, non-bourgeois theory of the Soviet state, and Shachtman took an evasive position. The dialectic, Trotsky insists, is not a scholastic ornament but the science of thinking itself, related to formal logic as higher mathematics is to lower. Where vulgar thought sees static identities, dialectics grasps phenomena in continuous change, determining the critical limit where quantitative shifts become qualitative. This is the logic of evolution, rooted in objective nature: Darwinism and the transformation of chemical elements are its triumphs. Marx applied this method to create a scientific classification of societies based on productive forces and property relations.
The political consequences are stark. Burnham’s definition of the USSR as “not a workers’ and not a bourgeois state” is a purely negative, non-dialectical abstraction, a pre-Darwinian Linnaean classification that ignores class nature. Answering questions of origin and qualitative transformation leads to the conclusion that the USSR remains a degenerated workers’ state. The opposition’s shift on defence of the USSR and its equation of both sides in the Soviet-Finnish war—ignoring that the Red Army expropriates landowners and introduces workers’ control—are attributed to petty-bourgeois pressure, not Marxism. The turn to the ‘organisational question’ is not a factional manoeuvre but reflects a deeper method with social roots. Burnham embodies pragmatism, Shachtman eclecticism; Abern is the core professional, leading a traditional group bound by old personal ties from the early Left Opposition. This clique, almost familial in character, represents a petty-bourgeois propagandistic circle against the emerging proletarian party. The majority more consistently expresses proletarian tasks, and the next convention must reject these anti-Marxist novelties while preserving unity, for most opposition members remain capable of re-education.