S LIBERAL HELPERS

45oriented is, unlike ordinary trade-union "rank-and-file predecessors for developing promising cadres into quailcaucusbuilding," more or less self-defined as political, fled socialist thinkers. Any individual who attempted toThe centrist traditionally represents the party as the pursue self-development to such an end was subjected topoh_ical complement of the organized labor union an increasing pressure of vulgar personal abuse, until hemovement. The professedly apolitical character of estab- either resigned or repented. A review of what passed forlished trade-unions is the working point here. In the case internally-developed "theory" in the pages of the 1930sof the professedly political petit-bourgeois radical fer- and 1940s New International and Fourth Internationalment, this thct creates an immediate formal conflict magazines reflects this. Excepting principally some workbetween the socialist party and the "spontaneity" by John G. Wright and articles by Trotsky and other(government-organized or other) which it tails. So the non-SWP authors, the only decent copy is of an ordinarytransfer of tailist methods from "labor" to petit-bour- journalistic sort of popular socialist reporting. Notablegeois strata did involve a crisis respecting the SWP's evidence includes the now-hoary series of publishedconception of the socialist vanguard party, lectures on "dialectical materialism" by George Novaek,a banal collection of vulgar homilies, whose hegemony inin a labor upsurge, this difference would have caused that organization is itself preponderant evidence of thea probable split in a Dobbs-led SWP. Was Dobbs in- wretched standard of "Old Trotskyist" intellectual life.sensible of this? The cited book, together with abundant To Cannon, the acceptable model of a party intellectualcorrelating evidence over the 1960s, indicates business- Was a "politically reliable" academic recruit who Couldmanager Dobbs never took the petit-bourgeois perspec- popularize the outcome of his bourgeois formal educativeseriously as anything more than a source of party tion in his field.gate-receipts.That is the essence of centrism. It is the essence of Cannon last exemplified this publicly in a 1964 ad-Communism in Dobbs' vulgarized but otherwise faithful _lress embracing the Ford Foundation-sponsored "Tripleexpression of its central distinction. That is key to the Revolution" statement as an authoritative bourgeoisirony of Dobbs' biography: that from the first instant he work for exploitation by the socialist movement. To theassumed sole leadership of the SWP, it proceeded to SWP leadership, it was sufficient to supplement thebecome an increasingly anti-labor petit-bourgeois practical experience of "the day-to-day movement" withanarcho-syndicalist cult, and then the LEAA-controUed useful selections of reportage, statistics and assortedfascist gang it is today. "new discoveries" from the work of accredited capitalistauthorities. The party therefore required a not-excessiveThe"OId Trotskyism" number of certified experts who could attend to theculling and popularization of such prefabricatedThe degradation of Trotsky's strategical conceptions "authoritative materials".to a bowlderized catechism of "positions," to the deadform of mere predicates of a religion, is the product of Although Cannon has been variously reported to haveessentially the same ruse by which the 1891-1914 SPD occasionally cited the task of "intellectual hegemony,"partcihnoise similarly degraded the reading of Karl the SWP leadership of even his reign was viciouslyMarx. The kernel of this is Cannon's "proletarian party" opposed to developing within its ranks the quality ofpolicy, a replication of the "proletarian kernel" policy of creative activity typified by even the leading revotheBebel-Ebert-Kautsky faction of 1907-13. lutionary strata of the pre-1917 European socialistmovement.Taking his views more or less directly from the CPUSA There was more to this anti-intellectual philistinismtradition of the 1920's, Cannon was always personally than personal social prejudice. Cannon rejected theidentified by vulgar social prejudice against revo- Marxian principle that the consciousness of evenlutionary intellectuals. Although the surviving accounts militant worker-organizers must be qualitatively transsuggesthe was always prudent enough to rationalize his .tbrmedfrom a class-in-itself to a class-for-itself content.philistinism, by citing valid evidence against academic He insisted that the militant worker already possessedtypes of phrasemongering or mere existentialist absurdi- the socialist world-outlook in an essential, rudimentaryties, the pervasive dishonesty of his tactic was to amal- form. As the cited passage from Dobbs implies, thusgamate petit-bourgeois Clowning with its opposite, merely simplifying the kernel of Communism, the SWPrigorous creative revolutionary thought, saw the workers as requiring nothing more than theThe apparent difficulty in presenting a variety of informing of their already-existing "proletarian outexemplarycases is itself the most telling evidence against look." "Theory", to Cannon et al., was the algebraichim. There was never a program in the SWP or its calculation of the need for socialism from the informa-.