On A Petty-Bourgeois Philistine: A Letter to Albert Goldman¶
Core Argument¶
In this letter dated 9 August 1940, Leon Trotsky delivers a scathing polemic against Dwight Macdonald, whom he identifies as a petty-bourgeois philistine and intellectual orphan of the renegade Burnham. The core argument is that Macdonald’s article in Partisan Review represents not a serious Marxist intervention but a plagiarised and intellectually dishonest compilation, devoid of perspective, proportion, or elementary honesty. Trotsky charges that Macdonald, having been left in Shachtman’s party as the lone representative of ‘Science’ after Burnham’s desertion, now serves up a poor pastiche of ideas drawn from the Trotskyist arsenal, presenting them as his own discoveries while opposing to them banalities he falsely attributes to Trotsky’s own positions.
The letter’s central polemic targets Macdonald’s call to “examine again with a cold and sceptical eye, the most basic premises of Marxism.” Trotsky seizes on this as the hallmark of a petty-bourgeois intellectual preparing his own desertion from revolutionary politics. He argues that revolutionary activity cannot be grounded in theoretical scepticism; the two are an “awkward inner contradiction.” Devotion to the revolutionary struggle of the masses, Trotsky insists, is impossible without theoretical understanding of the laws governing that struggle. Such assurance can only be won through theoretical insight into the class struggle, not through a posture of scepticism toward all theories, governments, and social systems. The latter, he concludes, is nothing but preparation for personal desertion—a prediction that Macdonald would indeed follow Burnham into the camp of reaction.
Trotsky also directs fire at Shachtman, who as General Secretary remains silent while the “most basic premises of Marxism” are attacked by petty-bourgeois philistines and snobs. The letter thus situates itself within the factional struggles of the American left in 1940, following the split from the Socialist Workers Party and the formation of the Workers Party under Shachtman. Trotsky’s analysis draws on the Marxist theory of the class struggle as a science, not a matter of personal intellectual posture, and he condemns the substitution of scepticism for revolutionary commitment as a symptom of petty-bourgeois degeneration. The letter is a defence of Marxism as a coherent, scientifically grounded theory of revolutionary practice, and a warning against the intellectual fashions that would dissolve it into academic doubt.