Comrades Warde and Wright accuse "Johnson-Forest" of having slipped into Hegelianism in its "pure idealist form". Their point seems to be that our ideas on Christianity prove their accusation of idealism. The charge is grotesque. I am sorry to have to weary the comrades once more with a paragraph from WORLD REVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVES which we had already quoted in STATE CAPITALISM AND WORLD REVOLUTION:
"Hegel saw objective history as the successive manifestations of a world spirit. Marx placed the objective movement in the process of production. Hegel had been driven to see the perpetual quest for universality as necessarily confined to the process of knowledge. Marx reversed this and rooted the quest for universality in the need for the free and full development of all the inherent and acquired characteristics in productive and intellectual labor. Hegel made the motive force of history the work of a few gifted individuals in whom was concentrated the social movement. Marx propounded the view that it was only when ideas seized hold of the masses that the process of history moved. Hegel dreaded the revolt of the modern mass. Marx made the modern proletarian revolution the motive force of modern history. Hegel placed the guardianship of society in the hands of the bureaucracy. Marx saw future society as headed for ruin except under the rulership of the proletariat and the vanishing distinction between intellectual and manual labor" (p. 70).1
A minority finds it difficult enough to keep up with all the things that have to be discussed to add to its burdens by a discussion on Christianity. I see no reason why I should assist Comrades Warde and Wright in having such a discussion.
More serious is their contention that the "idealism" of "Johnson-Forest" must lead it to deny national struggles. This simply is not true. The truth is that "Johnson-Forest" supported the national resistance movements during the war. It urged the Movement to enter them and there raise the banner of the Socialist United States of Europe. The Movement on the other hand, remained on the sidelines throughout the period of this tremendous mass upsurge.
Comrades Warde and Wright, in contrast to our attitude to "abolish all distinctions", go with great precision into the analysis of Stalinist Russia. They cite this time nine essential features. the point at issue, however, is not the "nine essential features", but the one political conclusion. Trotsky, like Lenin, based his political conclusions on the essential features of the economy. He said that the Stalinist bureaucracy and the Stalinist parties were headed back toward private property. That was the distinction he drew between the Third and Fourth International. But every tendency or sub-tendency in orthodox Trotskyism will subscribe to the nine "essential features" and then draw what will soon be nine different political conclusions. Exactly what is the position of Comrades Warde and Wright on this question of Stalinism and private property?
The same dilemma faces Comrades Warde and Wright when they attack us on the theory of the party. I haven't the slightest doubt that all tendencies in the Fourth International will agree on the list of "essential features" of the Leninist conception of the party. But here again, as they constantly do, and as they must, Comrades Warde and Wright are applying one set of ideas to a set of circumstances qualitatively different. It was not that the Social Democratic parties in Lenin's day were mass parties. It was that they were mass parties which would not seize the power. Lenin was striving for a party which would seize the power, against parties which, from his economic and social analysis, he was convinced would not seize it. Are the Stalinist parties of today a repetition on a higher scale of the Social Democratic parties? Trotsky believe they were. We say they are not. Exactly what do Comrades Warde and Wright believe?
the vanguard party today faces a very concrete enemy in the counter-revolutionary theory of the party put forward by the Stalinists all over the world. The Stalinists are not bad leaders while we offer ourselves as good ones. For what they intend to do - suppress the self-mobilization of the proletariat - the Stalinists are as good leaders as could be imagined. We say that the Fourth International is and must be an organization that aims to do exactly what the Stalinists try with all their might to prevent. What the proletariat is concerned with today is not whether or not the mass parties will seize power. The problem is: when they do, must it inevitably end in the one-party totalitarian dictatorship? We posed the answer to this problem, not to the problem that Lenin faced. Perhaps we did not make ourselves as clear as we could have on that point in our document, STATE CAPITALISM AND WORLD REVOLUTION. But at this stage of the discussion there is no reason for confusion. The principles by which a revolutionary party must be built still remain Lenin's in essence. We do not question that at all. What we do is pose the answer to the problem of the party today.
Leninism is not a matter of "essential features". Leninism is the struggle for annihilation of whatever stands in the way of proletarian power. Comrades Warde and Wright must first decide what kind of party it is they are fighting against before they can decide what is the correct Leninist theory of the party for 1951. What kind of party are we trying to build? We are trying to build a party which will destroy, not Menshevism in 1903, nor the Social Democracy in 1919, but Stalinism in 1951.
Comrades Warde and Wright end by characterizing "Johnson-Forest": "Nothing less than the traditions, methods and ideas of scientific socialism here confront an attempt to revise Marxism which would drag the theory of our movement back more than a century and derail it politically" (p. 25).2 What we accuse Comrades Warde and Wright is not 100 years old, or even 11. We are strictly contemporary. Every point that is raised comes back to the question: What is the nature of Stalinism? Trotsky had an answer. "Johnson-Forest" have an answer. Comrade Marcy has an answer. But, the plain truth of the matter is that Comrades Warde and Wright have none. Sooner or later they will have to choose. To make the correct choice our Party has only to look at its historical origin and the struggles by which it has arrived at maturity.
June 5, 1951
1 The quote is from: CLR James, 'Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity', (1947). It is quoted in full in "Chapter 11: Philosophy in the Epoch of State Capitalism", from C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya & Grace Lee (Boggs), State Capitalism and World Revolution, (1950).
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.