by F. Forest
Comrades Warde and Wright have entitled their answer to the documents of "Johnson-Forest", "Marxist Method and Ideas - and the Methods and Ideas of 'Johnson-Forest'".2 Clearly, what is involved is not a minor matter. Comrades Warde and Wright maintain that their approach leads to practical conclusions, while that of "Johnson-Forest" leads to "political inertia". What is at stake here, however, is not activity or inactivity. What is at stake here is a political line. The allegedly "ideal system" of "Johnson-Forest" led it to affirm that the Stalinists would not capitulate to the bourgeoisie in each country. What did the practicalism of Comrades Warde and Wright lead them to say?
Their central thesis is that the monstrous phenomenon of Stalinism has set the thinking of "Johnson-Forest" reeling backward to "a museum of pre-Marxist antiquities" (p. 2).3 The make mincemeat out of Proudhon. Proudhonism, however, is not the problem in 1951.4 Stalinism is. The nature of Stalinism and how to fight it remain the basic problems for the Marxists of our day.
Comrade Trotsky marked out a clear division between the bureaucracy, which, he said, would not defend state property, on the one hand, and the masses who would defend it, on the other hand. He founded a new, Fourth International as an organ for the destruction of the Stalinist Third International. Since the death of Trotsky, the Stalinist counter-revolution has come to full theoretical bloom in the revision of Marx's greatest work:
(1) The Stalinists have affirmed that the law of value was applicable to all societies. thus they separated what Marx united: the law of value from the law of surplus value which it contained.
(2) They ordered that Chapter I of Volume I of CAPITAL be omitted from its "study". While they have thus vitiated its dialectical structure.
(3) They have substituted for the law of the decline in the rate of profit as the law of capitalist collapse, the averaging out of the rate of profit as "the law of capitalism".
there is no secret about this wholesale corruption of Marxian political economy. The Stalinists write full encyclopedias on the question, and put it in tart slogan form for "the masses to understand". What the Fourth International had to say about all this? Not a word. Small as "Johnson-Forest" is, and as "politically inert" as its total conceptions allegedly make it, it took the field against the Stalinists and their apologists in this country for their vitiation of Marxism. In State Capitalism and World Revolution, the Stalinist revisions are detailed once again. Special emphasis is placed on the theory of the collapse of capitalism irrespective of the market: "In his strictly logical theory Marx excluded any idea that the system would collapse because goods could not be sold ... It is possible to keep silent about this, but to deny it - that is impossible".5
I thought the challenge had been made clear enough. But Comrades Warde and Wright remain silent on all this. Why?
Involved here is nothing less than the clothing of the naked exploitation of labor in Marxist garments. Then how can proletarian revolutionists remain silent in the face of it? Could it be because the whole pivot of those revisions is the concept that since there is no private property in Russia, there can be no exploitation of man by man? It is the further contention of the Stalinists that, although the categories of CAPITAL abound in Russia, it is a "fascist-Trotskyist-Bukharinist" slander to assert that the economy thereby is state capitalist.
It is not clear that Comrades Warde and Wright, imprisoned in their concept of state property equals workers state, cannot fight the Stalinist revisions without first revising their theory of state property? And while they hesitate, Comrade Pablo plunges in, head first.6 Attention has been called most sharply to the fact that both on the question of the law of value operating "in a transformed fashion", and on the economics and politics of state capitalism, Pablo has sided with the revisionists. What have Comrades Warde and Wright to say on that?
1 William F. Warde was the party name of George Novack. John G. Wright was the party name of Joseph Vanzler. Both were leading intellectual figures in the Socialist Workers' Party (USA).
2 William F. Warde & John G. Wright "Marxist Method and Ideas and the Methods and Ideas of 'Johnson-Forest'", Discussion Bulletin No. 7, April 1951, Socialist Workers' Party: New York.
3 Ibid..
4 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is sometimes referred to as the "father of anarchism". He was a contemporary of Karl Marx and they both worked together, and were critics of each others' works.
5 "Chapter 2: The Stalinists and the Theory of State-Capitalism", from C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya & Grace Lee (Boggs), State Capitalism and World Revolution, (1950).
6 Michel Pablo was the pseudonym most often used by Michael Raptis (1911-1996). Pablo was one of the leading Trotskyists in Europe in the 1940s and the played a major role in reconstituting the Fourth International in Europe at the end of the Second World War. The Johnson-Forest Tendency criticised Pablo in the Introduction to State Capitalism and World Revolution.