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R. Fahan

The SWP Fumes and Froths

(10 April 1950)

From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 15, 19 April 1950, p. 7.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).

At the Shachtman-Browder debate a leaflet was distributed by the Cannonite Socialist Workers Party which, with all due respect, can be characterized only as a minor scandal.

The leaflet is headed: Trotskyism vs. Browder-Shachtman. This is already an appalling amalgam. Who or what is “Browder-Shachtman?” Is it not an abysmal lapse from the most elementary standards of socialist ethics to lump together Browder, a Stalinist, and Shachtman, an anti-Stalinist Marxist? True, the SWP disagrees with Shachtman, and has every right to criticize his ideas. But this does not mean that it has the right.to speak as if Browder and Shachtman could possibly have anything in common. This sort of thing isn’t politics; it’s filth.

The leaflet complains that “Neither Browder nor Shachtman officially represent movements whose ideas they will presume to defend in the debate.” In fact, Cannon’s Bureau of Good Trotskyist Housekeeping seems to approve of Browder more than of Shachtman since “At least it can be said for Browder that ... he continues to defend ... treacherous Stalinism. Shachtman, however, makes his appearance as a thoroughgoing. imposter,” (How these SWP epigones love the “official” – what else have they?)

Shachtman pretends to speak “officially” only for the Independent Socialist League. If he claimed to represent the Fourth International or the SWP or the SP or the Epworth League or the Boy Scouts or the Bronx Hikers Club – then he would be an imposter. But simply because he has not received the stamp of approval from Cannon is hardly reason to speak of him as an “imposter.” (And by the way, what a dignified and principled vocabulary the SWP has – “imposter” – as if it were running a detective agency.)
 

Official Secret

In any case, suppose Shachtman represented “officially” no movement whatever. Would he then not have the right to debate against the view that Russia is a socialist community? Do only “official” representatives, their ideological passports stamped by Cannon, have the right to speak against Stalinism? How revealing this is of the SWP mentality, bureaucratized from beginning to end!

What is most interesting, however, in the SWP’s leaflet is its omissions. It begins with a trumpet blast against imposters, unofficial representatives, etc., etc. But then what about its own position on Russia, “officially” represented by its leaflet?

The “official” position (perhaps it would be more accurate to say the official secret) of the SWP is that Russia is a degenerated workers’ state and that it should be “defended” from capitalist attack. All that its leaflet says, however, on this score is that “Trotskyism distinguishes between the parasitic caste in the Soviet Union and the non-capitalist property relations in that country ...” But this isn’t a statement of the SWP position; it is an evasion. The SWP position is not merely that there is. a distinction between the bureaucratic caste and the property relations, but that Russia is a “workers state.” And as for “non-capitalist property relations” that again is an evasion : the only people who believe there are capitalist property relations in Russia are the followers of the forgotten man, J.R. Johnson, who are in the SWP and are doing their best to keep their positions a secret. Shachtman doesn’t believe there are capitalist property relations in Russia; the ISL doesn’t say so, either. To say that the property relations in Russia are “non-capitalist” is not yet to say whether they are part of a “workers state.”

So tell us, “official” Trotskyist pundits, why in this leaflet to an advanced political audience do you omit to say, as your program requires you should, that Russia is a workers state?

Tell us again, “official” Trotskyists, why you do not say anything about “defending” this “workers state”?

Is that “official” revolutionary intransigence? Or is it just shamefaced cowardice?
 

Can It Be Simply Stupidity?

Considering the semi-hysterical and third-period Stalinist tone of the entire atrocity, the outright and unadorned lie which it contains is not out of place: “During the 1948 presidential campaign, under cover of impartiality, he [Shachtman] supported the R. Fahan The SWP Fumes and Froths (10 April 1950)prowar ‘Socialist’ Norman Thomas for president-of the U.S. against the class-war prisoner, the Trotskyist Farrell Dobbs ...” Shachtman and the Independent Socialist League, as readers of LABOR ACTION know, urged in 1948 a vote for any of the three socialist candidates and specifically refused to favor any one above the other. For that matter, the authors of the leaflet know it just as well. But Stalinoid types will be Stalinoid types, even when they write diatribes for the SWP instead of the Daily Worker.

A final word: there is a difference of opinion on the motive for this extraordinarily cheap SWP attack. Some .people think it bureaucratic stupidity, some mere pique. There is something to be said for both opinions, of course, but we lean to the former. For after all, suppose Cannon could have debated Browder ... would the subject have been how best to defend the “workers’ state”?

[Editor’s Note: With all due respect to Comrade R. Fahan, we wish to point to a third theory: that the said leaflet was written and mimeographed in the dead of night by the seven-year-old son of SWP’s building janitor. This theory is the simplest one which explains everything and is therefore, so to speak, most scientific.]

 
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