Petty-Bourgeois Moralists and the Proletarian Party [1]¶
Core Argument¶
In this polemical article from April 1940, Trotsky dissects the split within the American Socialist Workers Party, framing it as a class conflict between proletarian discipline and petty-bourgeois individualism. The chapter’s core argument is that the minority faction—led by Burnham, Shachtman, and Abern—did not represent a legitimate political tendency but rather the moralising pretensions of intellectuals who could not accept democratic majority rule. Trotsky presents the sequence of events with surgical clarity: the minority participated in the convention, accepted its legality, then proceeded to steal the party’s theoretical journal, New International, after being offered two of five editorial posts. This theft, he insists, is not an organisational quirk but the logical expression of a worldview that substitutes moral ideals for materialist analysis.
Trotsky grounds his critique in Marxist tradition, recalling that Marx and Engels attacked ‘True German Socialism’ for precisely this substitution of morality for class analysis. He draws a direct line to the Russian Social Revolutionaries, who counterposed a ‘moral ideal’ to historical materialism and ended up betraying the workers to the bourgeoisie in 1917. The polemic is devastating: whenever a petty-bourgeois intellectual begins talking about high moral standards, Trotsky warns, one must guard one’s pocketbook. The stolen journal is the proof.
The chapter’s most substantive theoretical intervention concerns the ‘Third Camp’ slogan. Trotsky demolishes this schema as mechanistic pseudo-symmetry. Burnham and Shachtman posit three camps: France and England; Hitler and Stalin; and their own. Trotsky points out that this leaves out the entire colonial world—India, China, the oppressed nations—which cannot be assigned to either imperialist camp. A Marxist defends India against England despite India’s participation in the imperialist war; why, then, can one not defend the Soviet Union against Germany despite Stalin’s pact with Hitler? The ‘Third Camp’ is not a political position but a petty-bourgeois sanctuary, a rhetorical refuge for those who cannot bear the complexity of dialectical analysis.
The polemic against Burnham is especially sharp. Trotsky challenges the minority to publish Burnham’s article ‘Science and Style’, the sole programmatic work of the faction, confident that it would reveal the hollowness of their ‘revolutionary Marxism’. Shachtman is dismissed as an attorney for other people’s views, a man who made a profession of lacking views of his own. The chapter closes with a call to advanced workers to grant no confidence to this ‘third front’ of the petty bourgeoisie, and with a defiant assertion that the Fourth International will march forward despite betrayals and cheap gibes.