Poumista

Gosh it’s a long time since I last did this.

I was browsing through the Marxist Internet Archive and noted a few recent additions.

SHACHTMANISM 1939-1944-1948

These texts all relate to American Third Camp Trotksyism. In 1939, its future leaders were still in the SWP, one grouping around Max Shachtman, another around Albert Goldman and Felix Morrow, and a third around CLR James and Raya Dunayevskaya. The Workers’ Party, led by Max Shachtman, was formed in 1940 as a breakaway from the Socialist Workers Party, which Shachtman had led with James P Cannon.  The WP took a more uncompromisingly anti-Stalinist line than the SWP. By 1944, James and Dunayevskaya were in the WP, which they left with their grouping (the Johnson-Forest Tendency) to rejoin the SWP by 1948. Goldman, on the other hand, had stayed in the SWP but had joined the WP by 1948, although by the end of the year, with James T Farrell, he had left to join the far larger Socialist Party of America while Morrow did not join any party.

Added to the Felix Morrow Archive:

• Barcelona Workers Face Supreme Test (1939)
• Roosevelt Condemns Jews to Be Permanent Pariahs (1939)
• All Races, Creeds Join Picket Line (1939)
• British Officials Prepare to Dash Zionist Hopes (1939)
• Why the Defeats in Spain? (1939)
• British Overlords Sole Gainers in Palestine Conference Plan (1939)
• Fight Repressions in Spain (1939)
• The Only Way to Fight Against Fascism Is to Organize Workers’ Defense Guards (1939)
• Spanish C.P. Leaders Seek Peace with Madrid Junta (1939)
• ‘The Way to Fight Against Fascism Is to Lie Down and Make Believe You Are Dead’ (1939)

These texts are interesting for their strong sympathy with the Jews of Palestine, seen as victims of British imperialism, and for the linking of this issue with the struggle against fascism in Spain and beyond. They also show how Stalinist forms of anti-fascism were at best partial and argue for a more militant form of anti-fascism.

Added to the Max Shachtman Archive:

• The “Big Three” – Hitler’s Aids (1944)
• An Epigone of Trotsky (first part of sharp polemical attack on the young Harry Braverman, who had made a rather hackish critique of Shachtman in the SWP’s journal Fourth International) (1944)
• Misunderstanding or Folly? (exchange of letters with the British RCP) (1944)
• Stalinism – Anti-Labor in Theory and Practice (1948) [This is a very interesting piece, setting out the idea of Stalinism and American free market capitalism as two rival imperialist camps, and Stalinists as agents of Russian imperialism but with a specific material base in the labour bureaucracy and petty bourgeois intelligentsia at a time of capitalist contraction.]

Added to the C.L.R. James Archive:

• Labor’s Apathy to the War (1944) (as J.R. Johnson)
• Great Britain: People Revolted by U.S. Race Prejudice (1944) (as W.F. Carlton)
• Hillman and the Corruption in U.S. Politics (1944) (as J.R. Johnson)
• Negroes Need a Labor Party (1944) (as W.F. Carlton)
• What Russia Wants in Germany (1944) (as J.R. Johnson)
• Does Cheap Patronage Cancel Oppression? (1944) (as W.F. Carlton)
• Capitalism Taboos ‘Equal Opportunity’ for Negro People (1944) (as W.F. Carlton)
• Why U.S. Workers Should Support National Liberation Struggles (1944) (as J.R. Johnson)
• Mr. Minor, This War Is NOT Like the Civil War of 1861 (1944) (as W.F. Carlton)
• Stalin Leads Wolf Pack in Shameful Lust for Blood of German Workers (1944) (as J.R. Johnson)
• No Alternative for Negroes but to Fight for Labor Party (1944) (as W.F. Carlton)
• Ban on GI Jim Crow a Paper Edict Unless Negroes and Labor Enforce It (1944) (as W.F. Carlton)
• Paris Masses Did It Themselves! (1944) (as J.R. Johnson)
• World Events Are of Great Importance to U.S. Labor (1944) (as J.R. Johnson)

Added to the new Ernest Rice McKinney Archive in the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL):

• Ten Years of U.S. Labor History (as David Coolidge) (1944)
• What is the Meaning of “Free Trade Unions”? (as David Coolidge) (1944)
• Miners Want Local Autonomy – Without Strings (as David Coolidge) (1944)
• Slander Campaign Paces CP Scab Program (as David Coolidge) (1944)
• Mass Action (column) (as David Coolidge) (1944)
• Lewis in the Dark on Real Significance of the Miners’ Strikes (as David Coolidge) (1944)
• John L. Lewis Chooses the Pro-Big-Business, Anti-Labor Republicans (as David Coolidge) (1944)
• Toward a New Trade-Union Program – II (as David Coolidge) (1944)
• CIO-AFL – End Policy of Retreat, Open Labor Offensive! (as David Coolidge) (1944)
• Miners, Too, Need a Labor Party (as David Coolidge) (1944)
• Autonomy Bid Loses in UMWA (as David Coolidge) (1944)

MIA does not yet have a biography of Rice McKinney. This is from the University of Pittsburgh’s archive:

Born in Malden, West Virginia, in 1886, McKinney, also known under the pseudonym David Coolidge, was the son of a coal miner. At different points in his life, McKinney endeavored a variety of jobs which included becoming editor of, This Month, a columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier (1932), Executive Secretary of the Unemployed Citizens’ League of Allegheny County (1933), a Social Worker, and Assistant to the Director, Kingsley House. In 1916 an oral history conducted at Columbia University resulted in McKinney writing a 116 page book of memoirs published by Harvard University, The Reminiscences of Ernest Rice McKinney. The memoir deals with the development of the National Unemployed League, depression days; organizing steel workers for CIO, membership in the Workers’ Socialist Party; upgrading African Americans in industry; Working Men’s Welfare Committees; Workers Party of the United States (Trotskyist Group) and its relationship to Communist and Socialist Parties; and McKinney’s resignation from Workers Party.

Workers’ Liberty add:

McKinney had joined the Communist Party in Pittsburgh in 1920, at the age of 24, and A J Muste’s Conference for Progressive Labor Action in 1929. With the CPLA, he joined the US Trotskyists in 1933. He had sided with Shachtman and Draper when they divided from the “orthodox” Trotskyists in 1939-40 over attitudes to the USSR’s invasions of Poland and Finland. In 1950, like others around that time, and while remaining socialist-minded, he drifted away from organised politics.

Louis Proyect adds:

In 1943 CLR James submitted a resolution titled “The Historical Development of the Negroes in American Society” to the Workers Party for discussion and adoption. It was a conscious attempt to apply Lenin’s support for the self-determination of oppressed nationalities in general to the specific problem of self-determination for black America, an internal quasi-colony.

His was a minority position. Within the Workers Party, James had been derided as an ultraleftist and an eccentric. Max Schachtman, the party leader, called James a “literary man” as a put-down. The fact that James had led study circles on Hegel and Capital was another sign that James was not a real Bolshevik. The party member most hostile to James, however, was Ernest Rice McKinney. He gave James the nickname “Sportin’ Life”, after the villainous pimp in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. (Again, I tip my hat to Scott McLemee who provides this background data in his excellent introduction to “CLR James and the Negro Question”.)

Writing for the party majority, McKinney put forward the classic “black-white unity” position of American socialism directly opposed to James’s embrace of black nationalism:

“The white worker must take the lead and offensive in the struggle for the Negro’s democratic rights…The white workers are strongly organized, they have had ages of experience and they are powerful. On the other hand, no matter how great their courage and determination, the Negroes are organizationally, financially and numerically weak in comparison with the white workers, and woefully and pitifully weak in the face of present-day capitalism…”

Added to the new Andrzej Rudzienski Archive:

• Stalinist Terror Hits Polish Opposition (1948)
• Textile Strike in Lodz Revolutionary Protest Against Stalinist Regime (1948)
• Mikolajczyk’s Role Exposed (1948)

I’d never heard of Rudzienski and couldn’t find much about him. This is from James Robertson in Revolutionary History:

The Shachtman WP-ICL had a journalistic collaborator, apparently a Polish emigré probably resident in Chile, who wrote on Latin American affairs under the name Juan Rey or Juan Robles. When writing on East Europe he used the name Andrzej Rudzienski, which might have been his real name.

In May 1952 ‘Juan Rey’ raised the call for a workers’ government in Bolivia, criticising the FOR, official section of the Fourth International, for tailing the bourgeois nationalist Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR – Revolutionary National Movement)

Whereas this is also from RH:

a series of reports written from different parts of Latin America which appeared mainly in the Workers Party newspaper, Labor Action, with increasing regularity during the late 1940s and early 1950s over the pseudonyms of ‘Juan Robles ’and ‘Juan Rey’. Why the author saw fit to change his pen name is not at all clear, any more than his real identity. But it is almost certain that he was the Peruvian Trotskyist Emilio Adolfo Westfallen (Bestfalling), a founder of the GOM, which changed its name to the POR (Peru) in 1947, who was a supporter of Shachtman.

Added to the Natalia Sedova Trotsky Archive:

• Natalia Trotsky Raps Fraud in Times Story (1948)

This is an attack on the Stalinist-turned-Gaullist Andre Malraux for claiming some affiliation with Trotsky. The letter from Sedova is also quite hostile to Victor Serge. It doesn’t make much sense without the context, which is supplied here by Richard Greeman:

in January 1948, a month after Serge’s death, that great confabulator André Malraux launched a macabre press campaign claiming Serge as a deathbed convert to Gaullism.[7] The sad fact is that six days before he died, Serge had sent a grossly flattering personal letter to Malraux, begging the support of de Gaulle’s once and future Minister of Culture (and Gallimard editor) to publish his novel Les Derniers temps in France.[8] Desperate to leave the political isolation and (fatally) unhealthy altitude of Mexico for Paris, Serge indulged in an uncharacteristic ruse de guerre, feigning sympathy for Malraux’s “political position” — according to Vlady, at his urging. Serge’s ruse backfired. His letter and the news of his death reached Paris simultaneously, and Malraux seized the moment by printing selected excerpts and leaking them to C.L. Sulzberger, who published them in the N.Y. Times — thus recruiting Serge’s fresh corpse into the ranks of the Western anti-Communist crusade.[9]

Aside from this letter, there is zero evidence in Serge’s writings, published and unpublished,[10] of sympathy for Gaullism or Western anti-Communism — quite the contrary.

Added to the Hal Draper Archive:

• Socialist Victory Is the Goal We Must Fight For! (1948) [celebrating the centenary of the Communist Manifesto]
  Stalin’s Role in the Nazi Pact (as Philip Coben) (1948) [exposing the awfulness of Stalin’s relations with fascism]

Added to the Albert Goldman Archive:

• Partition One Thing; Aid to Jews Another (letter) (1948) [Also very interesting, setting out an argument for the rights of Jews in Israel to defend themselves against the Arabs who are seen as a reactionary force, but also against partition and for a united but democratic Palestine with minority rights.]

Added to the Irving Howe Archive:

• Books You Should Know … (book review) (1948) (review of R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism)
• How Stalin “Saved” the Polish Jews .. (1948)
• Stalin Purges Musicians (1948)
• Observations on the Events in Czechoslovakia (1948)

Added to the Susan Green Archive:

• Karl Marx: Scientist and Man of Action, 5 January 1948

As well as Sarah Green, an important activist in the Third Camp scene for a while, there are pieces by two other women: Reva Craine and Mary Bell. I don’t know anything about either – if any readers do, please leave a comment.

Added to the Stanley Plastrik Archive:

• Palestine – A Defense of Labor Action’s Policy (as Henry Judd) (1948)
• Socialist Thought Abroad (as H.J.) (column) (1948) [This very interesting piece discusses Pierre Naville, James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution, the theory of “state Bonapartism”, the British ILP’s FA Ridley, the Revolutionary Communist Party of India’s Sudarshan Chatterji,

Stanley Plastrik had served as an enlisted man in the infantry in France during World War II and returned there later to earn a doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris. He later joined the faculty of the Staten Island college after teaching in high school for a time. He would later go on to co-found and edit Dissent magazine.