On the ‘Workers’ Party [1]¶
Core Argument¶
Here Trotsky subjects the recent split in the American Socialist Workers Party—which produced the rump ‘Workers’ Party’ led by Max Shachtman, James Burnham, and Dwight Macdonald—to a dialectical analysis. He rejects a mechanical assessment of whether political differences were “enough” to warrant a split. The question must be considered dynamically: differences that appear minor in abstraction acquire a different weight when they express a social gravitation away from the proletariat and toward petty-bourgeois circles. The fact that the minority split despite the majority’s efforts to prevent it proves, for Trotsky, that an inner social incompatibility was at work.
Trotsky’s polemic is directed above all at the intellectual character of the opposition. Burnham is dismissed as a snob who treats revolutionary commitment as a disposable intellectual fashion—picking up and abandoning parties as a general might abandon his guns because they are not perfect. The worker, by contrast, treats his theoretical tools with the same seriousness as his trade tools; he does not demand fantastic, non-existent ones. Macdonald is judged not a snob but “a bit stupid.” Trotsky quotes Macdonald’s call for “scepticism towards all theories” combined with “devotion to the revolutionary fight of the masses” and finds it a scandalous abdication. A revolutionary cannot work without a working theory; to propagate theoretical scepticism at the moment of crisis is treachery. Macdonald’s article is offered as proof that the Workers’ Party is not serious.
The chapter also engages Macdonald’s theoretical challenge to Trotsky’s analysis of fascism. Macdonald had questioned whether fascism is merely a form of Bonapartism—a temporary autonomous state power playing one class off another—or whether it constitutes a new form of society. Trotsky restates his own position: fascism shares with old Bonapartism the use of class antagonisms to maximise state independence, but it operates in a declining bourgeois society, not an ascending one. Fascism is an attempt to overcome the contradiction between modern productive forces and private property without abolishing private property, and to do so within the cramped borders of the national state—a contradiction that issues in war. Macdonald’s scepticism, Trotsky implies, is not a superior critical stance but a failure of theoretical nerve, born of fear before the terrible epoch ahead.
Trotsky concludes with a historical reflection on the use of intellectuals in the proletarian party. The First International had trouble with the poet Freiligrath; the Second and Third with Maxim Gorky; the Fourth with Diego Rivera. Burnham was “good stuff” only so long as he could be used—but Mussolini too was once “good stuff.” The worker cannot forget what the intellectual abandons.