New Left, Local Control, and Fascism

66
fected with Stalinophobia, as Trotsky's extended de- The SWP's character was given its present form by
bate with the Cannonite leaders on the SWP's CP policy the developments of the 1957-61 period.
demonstrates beyond doubt. In that same debate, we
see a correlation made between this Stalinophobia and The Twentieth Congress and Hungary represented
the failure to include political content in the North. for Trotskyism, "the crack in the Stalinist monolith,"
west Organizer. the breakup of the Stalinist hegemony which had stood
in the way of any significant Trotskyist influence in the
left-radical movement generally. No one could now
This same conclusion must be reached by examining delude even himself to accept the Stalinist version of
SWP trade-union policy in the period of Roosevelt's Trotskyism or the Moscow Trials. No one could
"equality of sacrifice" period. The revolutionaries in seriously dispute the Trotskyist charges that Stalin had
the SWP responded to this Roosevelt ploy by moving systematically betrayed revolutions in the twenties
that if employers' bureaucrats incomes should be set at (China), the thirties, or in the immediate post-war pera
maximum level of $25,000.00, workers should accept iod of Europe and Asia, had unsuccessfully attempted to
this same ceiling. The SWP leadership, led by Dobbs prevent the Chinese Revolution. Excepting the fact that
and Cochran, immediately launched a factional cam- habituated attitudes do not succumb easily to such unpaign
against this left-danger in the SWP trade-union important influences as the light of truth, the SWP was
factions, also suppressing publication of documents on in a position to recruit whole layers of viable dissident
the trade-union question which Trotsky had insisted be groupings from the CP and to struggle for hegemonic
published, position in the new left-radicalism which emerged in
the course of the 1957-58 recession: provided that the
That is, the irony of the Cannon-Schachtman Fight is SWP had the actual revolutionary qualifications for
that both main factions involved were acting under the this work.
impulsion of the same anti-class-for-itself tendencies.
However, in each case, the rate of movement was in The SWP did approach the CP layers; it recruited the
slightly different directions and accelerating at slightly- entire left-wing of the Schachtmanite youth and did
different rates. The energy for this factional struggle proceed to build the rudiments of a new youth movewould,
however, seem unexplained in empirical terms merit, the YSA. Even so, it was unable to offer anyone
unless weexamine such subsequent factional struggles more than a literary-eschatalogical perspective for
as the Cannon-Cochran split of 1953. Again, the dif- socialism in the U.S. "If we do the right things, day by
ferences separating the two factions were seemingly day, recite the correct orthodox formulations, maintain
minute. Cannon thundered about "conjunctural per- strict party organizational discipline, we shall make the
spectives," but not a single member of the majority revolution bye-and-bye." Hardly new recipes for old
leadership had a single, concrete fact to submit in CP'ers. The SWP offered them nothing better than a
rebuttal to the minority's position on this question, somewhat more intellectual climate, freer discussion
Here, in 1953, both factions were an amalgam, which atmosphere, and slightly less sense of pariahdom than
began to respectively fissure, at different rates, im- they had enjoyed in the old CP- in an infinitely
mediately following the split. The only real issue for the smaller organization, further removed from the possi-
Cannonite faction as a whole in 1953 was the danger of bility of power than the old CP itself.
llquldationism. This fight, against the rather plain
liquidationist implications of the Cochran-Clarke areal- These ventures, pressed initially by Cannon and
gam, took the form of Cannon's defense of "Trotskyist certain layers within the CP, produced small gains,
orthodoxy," but that defense never went beyond de- with effect of embittering the suppressed social-groupfense
of the "divine inspiration" embodied in tradi- ing differences within the SWP. The collapse of the
tional literary sources. In 1939-40, the issue was also Independent Socialist Party tactic ("Regroupment")
liquidationism, the liquidation of Trotskyism's estab- and the ebb of the Cuban upsurge among youth ("Fair
lished position as institutionalized Trotskyism to the Play for Cuba"), raised the old fears of liquidationism:
dissident left-wing ranks and peripheries of the Comin- "these endless outside tactical maneuvers!" "It is nectern
parties, a part of the "orthodox baggage" which essary to stop all this freewheeling organizing and get
Schachtman was more readily disposed to toss over- down to essentials, such as selling the newspaper,
board for faster travelling, tightening up the organizational discipline, and tossing
out the 'unassimilable types' and 'bad apples' who tend
After 1953, the "dog days" of prolonged isolation to rock the well-ordered party-ship."
from virtually all possibility of "outside" political ferment,
up to 1957, completed the process of turning the So, beginning with the 1961 SWP convention, a
SWP into an ingrown centrist sect. A few adventurist, .general purge, completed in 1965, was launched and
hair-brained efforts to multiply the membership by conducted under the old centrist war-cry, "The party
sheer might and main of will and "proletarian super- is everything!"
activism," and the SWP was transformed, from the
standpoint of serious politics, into an inert old revo- What happened is this. The SWP, largely due to the
lutionaries' society, efforts of the very layers who have been systematically