S LIBERAL HELPERS

37immediate reaction of European and North American front" policies? It waved Allende's bloody shirt, made aCPers during late September and October to the Labor martyr of the bungling opportunist, plunged hystericallyCommittee's predictive analysis m a year before the into more extreme _cnanifestations of the same s_uicidalevent of the way in which Allende's Chile regime policy.would fall. The obvious vindications of Trotsky's warn- Contrary to "Old Trotskyist" theology, discrediting ofings was cause for the extremes of lying against Trotsky CP policy does not 1necessarily result in mass movementsjust as the fall of Allende put hysteria into right-wing toward the organization of the vindicated critics.CPers' rage against the Labor Committees. The rank. Usually, as in the Chile case, exactly the contrary occurs.and-file CPers' conscience was enraged by the irrefutable Demoralization, per se, usually impels the CPers toevidence (in both examples) that "popular front" lunge more hysterically toward partial reconciliationrealpolitiking is always counterrevolutionary in effect, with some large t'action of even the enemy politicalThe opportunist socialist isthus confronted by a machines! Contrary to the strategy for Trotskyismconflict between his reason (self-consciousness) and his associated with tile James P. Cannon traditions, theinfantile passions for fearful "popular front" militant working-class rank-and-file is not rational; it isgregariousness (his Ego). neurotic, and its governing neurosis (bourgeois ideology)This conflict was examined under the caption, "The usually impels it, umder stress, toward deeper submissior lAgony of Self-Consciousness" in "The Sexual Impotence to capitalism.0f the PSP." One with psychoanalytical experience can The demoralize,5 CPer of 1973, like his predecessors ofidentify the obsessive qualities of the'conflict as being in 1934-35, was imp_;lled toward a "popular front" betra' yalproportion to the political phenomena we are attributing of rational class :self-interest. He plunged into a m ,oreto that neurotic impulsion, profound, more obsessive Ego-state, and becameWe have the following conspicuous features of the therefore violent in his attitudes toward those :whoCP_zrs' circumstances to consider. Firstly, as a self- created internal threats to his hysterical behavioT:.esteemed pariah in capitalist society, a potentially oractually persecuted politica', minority, he is subjected notTrotsky's "G_.rmany '' 1929-33 articles, thusonly to the rational concerns he requires as a matter of paralleling 1972-73 Labor Committee analysis of? Chile,"political combat sense," but also experiences an acuteupsurge of his neurotic "fears Of rats." The neurotic speak to the reason, the self-consciousness of (in particular)the CPer. They strengthen self-consci ousness,aspect of the matter impels him toward violentlyeven awaken it. Self-consciousness, informe d in itspropitiatory behavior toward larg e strata of possible judgement, conder, nns the suicida.l infantilis'm of theallies e.g., the social democracy, the liberals. InEgo. The Ego lashes back, shrieking in rage, '"Don't tryaccordance with lawful psychodynamics , this same tocontrol me. I know what's best for me." The attack onneurotic fear plunges him, more intensely than usual,his own restive self.consciousness :,isaccomTpanied by ainto an obsessive Ego-state, characterized by a more vicious attack on externgtl allies cpf self-ccmsciousness.acute ploy of the infantile passions (fear, rage, object- Self-consciou*snes_; dictates chant,ing the mental stateelation) and obsessively gregarious impulsions, of not only the CPer' thus affected, but hi's commitmentHis obsession, his rage, is immediately focussed to that changing of state, from Ego state to selfagainsthis own self-consciousness. He must, so to speak, consciousness, of o'ther CPers, mitlitant: workers, etc.,angrily blind himself to any internal voices which, by and hence to create new, left-heg_._mortic revolutionaryexposing the degraded quality of his Ego-impulsions, institutions. It means abandoning the (2P perspective ofmight weaken or otherwise interfere with what his Ego is opportunist "peaeet'ul coexistence'" t_Lctical maneuversgrimly determined to do. within the existing capitalist frameworl _, and resolving toWitness the case of CP Chile policy. Since the election change the system f,andamentally, ql_his, in turn, means• '6 * " ''of Allende, the CP press throughout the world had held rising above natlonahst and l?arochial idiociesChile up as a model to be emulated, as the modern road generally to establish an international party per se. Itto socialism in the Age of Peaceful Coexistence. To demands, in place of reallocating existing producedmaintain that course in Chile, the CPC endorsed and wealth, a programmatic concepti on of coordinatedeven incited butcheries and other repressions of Chilean world-wide qualitative developmen t of the productiveleftists, workers, and farmers. Then, inevitably, in due forces.course, Allende was dumped, fulfilling precisely the In every respect, S:elf-consciousn_;ss of the implicationscourse of development of which the CP's leading socialist of the Chilean even_ts demands r_:jecting the view of acritics had warned. How, then, did the CPUSA react to fixed order of reality, a view of merely reordering thethis bloody proof of the suicidal character of its "popular existing elements ol( reality. It d, emands hubristic (i.e.,