‘Science and Style’ [1]¶
Core Argument¶
In this letter of 23 February 1940, Leon Trotsky delivers a polemical intervention into an internal faction fight within the Socialist Workers Party, provoked by James Burnham’s document ‘Science and Style’. Trotsky’s core argument is that Burnham’s text, far from being a serious theoretical contribution, is a belated and derivative rehash of pre-Marxist petty-bourgeois socialism. He draws an explicit historical parallel: Burnham merely repeats, with ‘modernised’ illustrations, what the Russian ‘legal Marxist’ Peter Struve wrote more than forty years earlier and, to a significant degree, what Eugen Dühring attempted to teach German Social Democracy three-quarters of a century ago. Trotsky thus places Burnham in a lineage of anti-dialectical revisionism that Marx and Engels had already demolished. The theoretical worth of the document, he insists, is nil — ‘the thousand-and-first professorial refutation of dialectics has no more worth than all its precedents’. The interest is entirely political.
Trotsky’s key claim is that Burnham’s document reveals the true character of the opposition faction. The ‘abscess is open’. The theoretical inspirer of the opposition has nothing in common with scientific socialism or the proletarian revolution. Trotsky directly addresses Comrades Abern and Shachtman, demanding they state their position on Burnham’s ‘science’ and ‘style’. He argues that the concrete issue of Finland, however important, is merely an episode; the changing international situation can dissipate divergences on that question. But Burnham’s entire conception — on science, Marxism, politics, and morals — is irreconcilable with revolutionary Marxism. Trotsky warns that those preparing for a split would be tied for years to a ‘leader’ whose outlook is fundamentally alien to the Fourth International.
The polemic is sharp and unforgiving. Trotsky contrasts the tradition of Marx, Engels, Franz Mehring, Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg — which Burnham has proclaimed ‘reactionary’ — with Burnham’s own conceptions, which he characterises as a belated reproduction of pre-Marxist petty-bourgeois socialism. He invokes the historical precedent of revisionism, arguing that in the epoch of bourgeois society’s death-agony, the political consequences of ‘Burnhamism’ would be far more immediate and anti-revolutionary. The letter concludes with a direct challenge: ‘Comrades Abern and Shachtman, you have the floor!’ The document is thus a strategic intervention to force a political clarification and isolate Burnham’s influence within the party.