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Title: Bookchin’s Trotskyist decade
Author: Janet Biehl
Date: January 2013
Language: en
Topics: Murray Bookchin, trotskyism, history, biography
Source: Platypus Review 52 (December 2012–January 2013). Retrieved on 2020-04-28 from https://platypus1917.org/2012/12/01/bookchins-trotskyist-decade-1939-1948/][platypus1917.org]].  Proofread online source [[http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=4890, retrieved on November 20, 2020.

Janet Biehl

Bookchin’s Trotskyist decade

MURRAY BOOKCHIN IS KNOWN TODAY as the intellectual originator of radical

ecology in the early 1960s. Social ecology, as he named it, was and

remains a program for the decentralization of society into small-scale

communities that, in confederation, would manage and control a

socialized “post-scarcity” economy. The communities would be integrated

with the environment, powered by renewable energy, grounded in

sophisticated automated and miniaturized technology, and self-governed

by citizens in a face-to-face democracy. His work was highly influential

in the 1970s, when his writings were translated into many European

languages.

His mature ideas were the culmination of decades of intense

concentration on the problem of renewing the revolutionary project. Born

in the Bronx in 1921 to Russian Jewish immigrants, he received his

earliest radical socialist education as a child from his grandmother, a

dedicated Socialist Revolutionary. In 1930 he entered the Communist

movement, joining the Young Pioneers and then, in 1934, the CPUSA’s

Young Communist League, becoming education director of his branch during

the movement’s ultra-revolutionary Third Period.

In 1935 Stalin, recognizing the threat that Nazi Germany posed to the

Soviet Union, terminated the Third Period and called instead for

Communists around the world to seek Popular Front alliances. That is,

they were to abandon their efforts on behalf of socialist revolution and

instead make alliances with more conventional parties, even ultimately

social democratic and bourgeois parties. The shift came as a shock to

Bookchin. By the end of the 1939 he left the CPUSA and found a more

comfortable ideological home with the Socialist Workers Party. The

Trotskyists, after all, were still revolutionaries, identifying as the

true Bolsheviks, hoping to overthrow not only western capitalism but

Stalin’s regime as well.

Part I: The Socialist Workers Party

A new world war had begun. To the Trotskyists of the Fourth

International, it seemed to be following the scenario of the Great War.

Once again Germany was the aggressor. Once again, advanced capitalist

countries were competing for hegemony. Once again, the war was

imperialist. In fact, the Second World War seemed to be a continuation

of the First. So for this war, Trotskyists would follow the same

playbook that had worked so well the last time. Back in 1917, the

Bolsheviks had opposed the war, so the Trotskyists of 1939 would do the

same. In 1917 war-weary Russians had rallied to the Bolsheviks; now the

interwar proletariat too would rally to the Bolsheviks’ true heirs. In

1917 the war had led to revolution; the new war would end in multiple

revolutions. The Russian proletariat would overthrow Stalin’s regime,

the German workers would overthrow the Nazis, and the Western

proletariat would demolish capitalism. The war, Trotsky predicted

confidently in July 1939, would “provoke with absolute inevitability the

world revolution and the collapse of the capitalist system.”[1]

All should and would be persuaded to give their allegiance to the Fourth

International, whose program, said Trotsky, would “be the guide of

millions, and these revolutionary millions will know how to storm earth

and heaven.”[2] Surely with such a great revolutionary at the helm, and

with the laws of history on their side, the proletariat would indeed

lead the world to socialist revolution.

In early 1940, the American SWP had 2,500 members. Many of those in the

New York section were children of Jewish immigrants. Most were quite a

bit older than nineteen-year-old Murray. Felix Morrow, age thirty-four,

was the author of Revolution and Counterrevolution in Spain, which

explained how Stalinists had suppressed a Spanish anarchist revolution

on the peninsula. Al Goldman, forty-three, had been Trotsky’s attorney

during the 1938 Dewey Commission inquiry.

SWP meetings must have been dazzling, attended by radical intellectual

luminaries like Sidney Hook, whose understanding of dialectics was

unsurpassed; Dwight Macdonald, a well-known journalist; and others. They

made Trotskyism, for a time, “the leading American radical movement in

terms of per capita brain power.”[3]

All shared a great admiration for the intellectual architect of the

Russian Revolution and the commander of the Red Army, the paragon of the

activist intellectual, a man of letters who could also lead and command

troops. Like Murray, they admired his courage and determination in

defying Stalin. For ten years he had been chased by a relentless police

force over three continents and subjected to a slanderous propaganda

campaign, yet he never faltered. “In the 1930s he stood up against

Stalin almost entirely alone,” recalled Murray years later. For that,

“Trotsky won my deep admiration and ideological support.”[4]

The New York SWP, in fact, helped sustain Trotsky down in Coyoacán,

buying him a house there, supplying bodyguards, and sending money. They

maintained an active correspondence and traveled to Coyoacán to meet

with him. “We were in very, very intimate contact with him after he came

to Mexico,” said SWP chairman James P. Cannon.[5]

One of the bright stars in the New York SWP was Jean van Heijenoort, who

had been Trotsky’s international corresponding secretary during the

1930s.[6] In 1940 van Heijenoort married a New Yorker and moved to the

city, where he frequented SWP meetings. If there was such a thing as

revolutionary glamour, van Heijenoort had it. He dazzled Murray. “I knew

Trotsky’s secretary!” he would tell me fifty years later, recalling the

frisson of being only one degree of separation from the bearer of

revolutionary hope.

Now that Stalin had turned the dream of socialism into an unimaginable

abattoir, all these people might well have given up on it. But Trotsky

led them to understand that Stalin was an aberration. As Murray’s friend

Al Goldman once remarked, Trotsky “wrote and explained, and we read and

understood and continued the struggle.”[7] The socialist author George

Lichtheim observed, “Trotskyism stood for the utopian side of Communism:

belief in an imminent world revolution.”[8]

Not that they found Trotsky himself beyond criticism. He had helped

suppress non-Bolshevik political parties in 1918–19. He had helped the

Bolsheviks ban factions within their own party. He had approved the

formation of the Cheka, just after the October Revolution. When the

SWP-ers questioned Trotsky about these matters, he tried to justify them

all as historically necessary.

But most troubling of all was the atrocity at the Kronstadt naval base

in 1921, in which the Red Army had brutally suppressed the sailors’

pro-democracy movement. None other than Leon Trotsky had carried it out.

In 1939 the SWP-ers asked him for an explanation. Trotsky’s response:

“How could a proletarian government be expected to give up an important

fortress to reactionary peasant soldiers?”[9] When Dwight Macdonald,

unsatisfied, challenged him further, Trotsky shut down the discussion.

“Everyone has the right to be stupid, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the

privilege,” he sneered.[10]

Nonetheless, the SWP-ers gave Trotsky the benefit of the doubt. And

within their own group, they aired every nuance, every small difference

of opinion, in protracted discussions.

Murray couldn’t attend SWP meetings as faithfully as he had done in the

YCL. In late 1939, he was committed to organizing the proletariat for

the coming revolution, following Trotsky’s injunction. So he took a job

in industry. Each day he commuted from the Bronx apartment that he still

shared with his mother to Bayonne, New Jersey, where he worked from

eight to five in a foundry.[11]

A foundry is a place that manufactures metal castings, from which

duplicates of an object may be generated. Metal is heated in a furnace,

and once it is molten, it is poured into a mold. When it is cool enough,

the object is finished in various ways.

Murray worked as a molder and a pourer—arduous, punishing work,

requiring great physical strength and stamina. The working conditions

were brutal: the heat was intense and searing, and the noise

mind-numbing. The air, laden with hazardous substances, was dangerous to

breathe. As Murray poured heavy hot metal into molds, the heat seared

his face, and the load strained his five-foot-five frame. Still, the SWP

exhorted its members to excel at their work—in order to gain the respect

and confidence of their fellow workers, they must be “the best workers

on the job.”[12]

Afterward, he managed to get to SWP meetings sometimes, but not as often

as he liked. “A hard day’s work does not help you go to meetings that

evening … after working in a foundry for a full day. I could hardly keep

my eyes open on the train.”[13]

In 1940, the United Electrical Workers (UE), a new industrial labor

union, set up a local in Bayonne, and Murray and his fellow foundry

workers were proud to join. They elected him shop steward, which meant

he handled their grievances about overtime pay and working conditions.

He felt a special urgency to defend the blacks among his fellow workers

(they were the majority) against racial discrimination.

At the same time Murray was trying to recruit them for the SWP. Chairman

Cannon advised that SWP members must actively propagate “our ideas to

their fellow workers—try to get subscriptions to our paper, try to

influence union members to come to our lectures and classes and in

general work to gain sympathy and support for the Party and its

program.”[14] That was no mean feat, in a Stalinist-controlled union

like the UE. Nonetheless Murray talked up the SWP and Trotsky’s ideas

enthusiastically to anyone who would listen.[15]

When they showed any interest at all, he would eagerly explain basic

principles of Marxism to them. He tried to start study groups and

“engage in theoretical conversations that went beyond mundane trade

union interests.” But most of the foundry workers merely tolerated that

kind of talk, “perhaps out of friendship or perhaps even out of

curiosity.”[16] He had at least one success: Archie Lieberman, a union

organizer, joined the SWP.[17] But in general, no matter how hard he

tried, he could not get the Bayonne foundrymen to rally to the banner of

the Fourth International.

Back in New York, the Trotskyists were agitated. In November 1939,

Stalin, fresh from overrunning eastern Poland, had invaded Finland. The

giant Russian bear was now in the process of swallowing this small

peaceable country. Outraged, Max Shachtman (who had co-founded the SWP

with James Cannon) and other SWP-ers condemned the Soviet invasion of

Finland as an act of imperialist aggression.

In Coyoacán, Trotsky heard of their objections and shot back that the

invasion was by no means imperialistic—the Soviet Union was still a

socialist state and as such was incapable of imperialism. Despite all of

Stalin’s atrocities, the Soviet Union was still the home of the

Bolshevik revolution. Lenin’s nationalization of industry remained in

place. By definition superior to bourgeois-democratic Finland, it was

justified in invading Finland—as well as eastern Poland. Trotsky

demanded that his followers endorse both.

In New York, Shachtman retorted that the Soviet Union no longer had

anything at all to do with socialism. By no stretch of the imagination

was it a workers’ state. It was a prison camp, ruled by latter-day

tsars, “a modern despotism of immense proportions drenched in

blood.”[18] It was entitled to no support whatsoever from any decent

person.

Trotsky remained obdurate and insisted that his followers do the same.

At an SWP convention in April 1940, Cannon obliged, upholding Trotskyist

orthodoxy. Disgusted, Shachtman walked out and formed a separate party,

called the Workers Party. Most of the SWP’s stellar intellectual members

left with him. Once upon a time Trotsky the scholar-activist had

attracted these thinking people; now Trotsky the dogmatic ideologue was

driving them away.

But some remained in Cannon’s SWP, and among them were Murray and his

friends Al Goldman, Felix Morrow, Jean van Heijenoort, and Dave Eisen.

By staying, they could remain loyal to the hero of the Russian

Revolution—that transcendent fact still meant something to them.

A few months later, in August 1940, Trotsky was at his desk, penning a

diatribe against the imperialist war, when a Stalinist agent entered the

room and plunged an ice ax into his brain. A few hours later he was

dead. With that act, Stalin achieved his goal of killing off the entire

Bolshevik revolutionary generation.

When he heard the news, Murray was undoubtedly heartbroken. The whole

Fourth International went into deep mourning—but it also redoubled its

determination to carry out Trotsky’s program: to turn the Second

Imperialist War into an international socialist revolution.

When the United States entered the war, most Americans embraced the

cause enthusiastically. The Trotskyists were among the few who

dissented. In their view, the war between Hitler and the capitalist

countries was imperialist, period. If Hitler wished for world

domination, in their view, so did the capitalist West. Regardless of

whether the Axis or the Allies were victorious, capitalism after the war

would still be stepping on the workers’ necks. So the SWP refused to

take sides—just as Lenin had refused to take sides in the First World

War.[19]

Nonetheless, the Trotskyists were not conscientious objectors. In fact,

Trotsky encouraged his followers to join military forces, to learn to

fight in preparation for the revolutionary conflict. But since Murray’s

diabetic mother depended on him for her daily insulin injections, he was

exempted from the draft. That status left him free to try to spark the

revolution in Bayonne.

American factories were converting to war production, and as the

government sent them ever more orders, industry pressured workers to

work longer hours and faster. But many industrial workers, a feisty lot,

newly unionized by the CIO, were having none of it. In 1941 more

American workers went on strike than in any year since 1919. They saw no

contradiction between patriotism and demanding better pay and working

conditions.

Industrial leaders appealed to American workers to patriotically

sacrifice their right to strike for the duration of the war. In December

1941, the Roosevelt administration asked them to take a “no-strike

pledge.”

Since many of the new CIO unions were dominated by Stalinists, they

complied happily—the United States was allied with the Soviet Union now,

and mere workers’ discontents must not be permitted to obstruct the

defense of the socialist fatherland. Stalinists tightly controlled the

UE, to which Murray belonged; in fact, by 1940–41, the UE was “the main

Communist fortress in the labor movement.”[20] Stalinist bosses staffed

the union with their own members, permitted no strikes, and demanded

stepped-up war production.[21]

But the Trotskyists rejected the no-strike pledge as class collaboration

and opposed intensifying production for the imperialist war. Fomenting

strikes was basic to their program of sparking proletarian revolution,

so they continued to urge revolutionary labor militancy.

The UE’s Stalinist leadership realized that they could use the no-strike

pledge as a tool to control obstreperous locals like Bayonne. “The

Stalinists were anxious to break us,” Murray once told me. His fellow

Bayonne organizer Archie Lieberman agreed that the UE Stalinists were

“the worst strikebreakers.”[22] They positioned their comrades

strategically at meetings; they “deliberately muddled embarrassing

questions” and “overawed dissenters with vituperation and character

assassination.”[23] During this period, Murray’s local elected him to

serve on the District Four (Bayonne) council, where the confrontations

proved harsh. The Stalinists tried to neutralize him by offering to pay

him, rather lavishly, for doing his heretofore-unpaid work as a shop

steward and organizer. He declined.[24]

Instead, he threw himself into encouraging strikes. He talked to the

workers about the SWP and proletarian revolution. They listened

patiently, and nodded. Then when Murray paused to take a breath, they

raised bread-and-butter issues of working conditions and wages. They

showed no interest in overthrowing capitalism—they wanted to strike for

concrete, immediate results. “There was no prospect I could awaken

anything revolutionary in them.” Far from joining the SWP, “they always

drifted away.... And that was very, very shaking to me.”[25]

Trotsky had thought the Fourth International’s opposition to the war

would rally the workers to its banner. Instead it made them extremely

unpopular. As van Heijenoort put it, the Trotskyists’ opposition to the

war made them veritable pariahs, “comme des chiens lepreux.”[26]

At least they could find solidarity among themselves at SWP

headquarters. Doubtless after a hard day of futile agitating, it must

have felt good for Murray to sit down and relax among his own kind.

Part II: Josef Weber

Sometime in 1941 or 1942, a new face showed up at SWP headquarters.

Small in stature, Josef Weber looked a bit like Richard Wagner, an

effect enhanced by the heavy German accent and a certain flamboyance. He

had escaped the Gestapo, Weber told the SWP-ers crowded around him.

Born in 1901, he had joined the German Communist Party (KPD) by 1918.

But in the next years, as Stalin began persecuting Trotsky, eventually

driving him into exile, Weber sympathized with the old commander of the

Red Army and joined the International Left Organization (ILO). After

Hitler came to power in 1933, the German Trotskyists reorganized as the

International Communists of Germany (IKD). Some stayed in the Reich and

tried to organize workers in factories to rise up against Hitler; the

rest emigrated to European capitals. Weber went to Paris, where he wrote

for and edited Unser Wort, the IKD’s newspaper. The paper tried to

report on the comrades’ activities in Germany, but that soon became

impossible, because organizing the proletariat against Hitler soon

became impossible. Anyone who even tried to talk to workers and hand out

literature was arrested. The Gestapo quickly tracked down the IKD-ers

and arrested them.[27]

But Hitler had to be stopped, and Weber recognized that the only groups

resisting him were the churches. At an IKD conference he made his case

to his fellow Trotskyists: given the impossibility of organizing the

proletariat to resist the Nazis, they had to support the churches’

struggle. That view horrified his comrades, many of whom left the IKD

altogether rather than give up on Bolshevik orthodoxy. More faction

fights broke out, in which Trotsky, whose stay in France coincided with

Weber’s years in Paris, endorsed Weber.[28] Nonetheless the IKD soon was

reduced to a tiny group around Weber in Paris, appealing to the comrades

abroad for help.

In May 1940 the Nazis invaded France and in June marched down the Champs

Élysées in triumph. By then Weber joined the crowds of Parisians fleeing

south for Marseilles, with whatever possessions they could grab. Once he

reached the southern port, Weber managed to gain a spot on one of the

last boats of refugees (sponsored by the Emergency Rescue Committee).

After a protracted stop in Martinique, the boat made landfall in North

America, probably in New York.

Surely sunburned from Martinique, Weber made his way to the headquarters

of American Trotskyism, on University Place. The comrades must have

welcomed him—he was an impressive figure, having eluded the Nazis twice.

He told them about the IKD. “We are one of the oldest and most stable

organizations of the Fourth [International.] … Under conditions and

difficulties about which [you] do not have the slightest notion, we

issued a paper [Unser Wort] in the emigration and up to the outbreak of

the war, published brochures, books and documents.”[29] And he could

boast of receiving the ultimate accolade: “Leon Trotsky greatly esteemed

our work and never corrected us in a single political question.”[30]

He was cultivated and charming, able to converse about literature and

art and music as well as politics. The Americans must have been in awe

of him.

But they were also hungry for news about the coming proletarian

revolution. They wanted to know where in Europe the proletariat was

resisting Hitler.

He’d written an article on that very subject, he told them, and handed

them the manuscript for “Three Theses,” written in Martinique. They must

have started reading it eagerly, but as they turned its pages, it surely

made their blood run cold.

The European workers’ movement, the article said, was scarcely

breathing. The Nazis had smashed all the labor unions and left-wing

parties; they had murdered, imprisoned, and exiled the proletarian

leaders; they had prohibited the expression of revolutionary ideas. As a

result “there is no longer an independent … proletarian political or

workers’ movement.” All that remains “are individuals and weak and

uneven groups.” Resistance groups exist, but they do consist not of

workers alone but of “all classes and strata,” including farmers, the

“urban petty bourgeoisie,” intellectuals and priests, officers and

merchants, students and professors. Moreover, the cause for which they

are fighting is not socialism but national liberation. Once they throw

off Nazi rule, Weber’s paper said, they will want bourgeois-democratic

government, from “freedom of assembly, press, organization, religion and

the right to strike to the right of self-determination of all nations.”

Blanching, the Americans forced themselves to read on: “It is a total

error to believe that one can participate in political life while

ignoring the democratic demands.” Trotskyists, Weber urged, must support

this all-class, national, pro-democratic struggle against fascism, for

they have a responsibility “to take up the demands of all oppressed.”

And Europe has “no more burning problem … than the national liberation

of nations enslaved by Germany.”[31]

The Americans reacted “as if they had suddenly been doused with cold

water.”[32] The paper called into question “not only the policy and

programme of the Fourth International but the validity of Trotskyism

itself.”[33]

One of the Americans, Felix Morrow, had the temerity to offer faint

praise.[34] But Jean van Heijenoort, Trotsky’s old secretary, overruled

him. Europe’s national liberation movements are not our potential

allies, Trotsky’s old secretary said—they are obstacles to socialism.

Then van Heijenoort turned to Weber. “The more I read your documents,”

he scolded the German, “the more I am against them. We will ... see if

we have to part company.”[35] After van Heijenoort chastised him, Morrow

fell into line and joined Weber’s critics.[36] Chairman Cannon, for his

part, pronounced “Three Theses” heresy.[37]

Trotskyist condemnations of Weber’s ideas continued for a year, in the

pages of Fourth International. Weber wrote replies, but the editors

refused to publish them. Only after fourteen months was the original

troublesome article, “Three Theses,” finally published, in the December

1942 issue;[38] but even then it was accompanied by an official

response, authored by Goldman and Morrow, explaining to readers that

Weber’s article was factually wrong: “the liberation struggle has

actually unfolded under the leadership of workers’ organizations and

workers’ groups,” it stated, and was determined to achieve socialism.

Morrow and Goldman pronounced it “embarrassing” to have to explain to

the German comrade “the ABC’s of Marxism.”[39]

Indignant regurgitations of orthodoxy must have grated on Weber.

Nonetheless he praised Morrow and Goldman for writing the reply—“they at

least honestly wanted to discuss.” By contrast, van Heijenoort remained

intransigent: “The senior schoolmaster,” Weber mused, rejects the whole

notion of a “democratic revolution.”[40]

But Weber’s challenge seems to have shaken up Morrow and Goldman. As his

ideas percolated in their minds, they developed doubts.

Of course Weber was right: resistance movements were emerging in every

occupied country, and workers did participate in them, but so did

employers. Leftists participated, but so did social democrats and

liberal republicans and Christian democrats and monarchists. Together

people of all political persuasions and social classes spread

disinformation and created diversions, published underground newspapers,

gathered intelligence, performed sabotage and cut communications,

derailed trains, bombed tracks, and blew up ammunition depots. They did

it all in a struggle not for socialism but for national liberation.

And across almost the whole political spectrum, except for anarchists

and pacifists and a few others, they supported the Allies against the

Axis, democracy against fascism. In 1941 Philip Rahv, a sometime

American Trotskyist who edited Partisan Review, warned the comrades

bluntly: “let us not lull ourselves … about the ability of the workers

to fulfill the Marxist prophecies.”[41]

Part III: The SWP Minority

If Murray missed a lot of SWP meetings in 1943–44, he may be forgiven.

At the Bayonne foundries, grievances were simmering along with the

molten metal.

In the war industries, corporate profits and executive salaries were

soaring, but workers’ wages had not even kept up with the cost of

living, and then in 1943 they were frozen. Now the assembly lines were

speeding up, and work hours were longer.[42] At the war’s outset,

Communist-dominated unions had pledged not to strike. But now as

grievances accumulated, the pledge seemed crippling.

At least the workers could bargain with management, through shop

stewards like Murray. But business and government had no tolerance for

worker militancy. A “recalcitrant worker”—one who wanted labor

militancy—“would be advised that the police had the ‘goods’ on him, that

he would do well to find another job or relax his militancy for a

while.” Such a worker had to assume that “failure to mitigate his

political or union activities” could lead to conscription or dismissal.

As for shop stewards, rebellious ones would be “called into ‘personnel’

offices or receive visits from the cops.” Perhaps Murray was speaking of

his own experience in writing these words.[43]

And when bargaining broke down, workers mounted wildcat strikes, without

union authorization. Beginning in the spring of 1943, wildcats swept

through heavy industry, “on a scale that dwarfed all previously recorded

turnover and strike activity,” according to one historian.[44] Was the

revolution coming at last? No—most of the wildcats were of short

duration. A half dozen or a few hundred employees would perform their

jobs more slowly for a certain time, or stop working for one shift, or

picket for a few days.[45] The wildcats might lead to mediation, but not

to revolution.

In New York, the SWP members got their hopes up in 1943, when they

learned that Italian industrial workers were striking at important

factories in Milan and Turin and forming workers’ councils—soviets.[46]

Trotskyists rejoiced at “the first day of the proletarian revolution in

Italy, the first day of the coming European revolution.”[47] That

October, an SWP party plenum saluted the Italian workers for

demonstrating that “the workers in alliance with the peasants and

colonial peoples will prove capable of overthrowing capitalism.”[48] Van

Heijenoort had tricked Weber into staying away from that meeting.

Outraged, Weber berated the SWP-ers, asserting that one would have to be

“blind” not to see that “the broad masses of Europe are ‘national’ in …

their demand for independence.”[49]

Cannon suggested that German emigration had a “certain psychology” and

was “a little bit screwy.”[50] Weber shot back that the SWP had

shuttered its eyes—it had proved to be unwilling “to conduct an open,

loyal, unprejudiced discussion and to make possible a correct

orientation for the international movement.”[51] It was not at all

surprising that the people of Europe, in all their multiparty resistance

movements, had ignored the Fourth International. But if the Fourth had

followed his advice and supported national liberation, then it could

have placed itself “at the head of the movement at least

propagandistically and agitationally,” and it “could have won … a

substantial influence upon the consciousness of the masses.”[52] Perhaps

the Fourth could really have been a vanguard. But instead—gallingly—the

Stalinist parties were playing a prominent role in various nations’

resistance movements—and winning great prestige as a result. That could

have been us, Weber must have seethed.

By now Goldman and Morrow were admitting that Weber was right. Even

stalwart van Heijenoort conceded that the French resistance included not

only workers but “large strata of the petty bourgeoisie,” as well as

“civil servants, students, sons and daughters of bourgeois families.”

Its immediate objective was not a socialist society but “the

overthrowing of the German yoke,” while its broader aims were

“democratic and patriotic.”[53] Precisely.

The German expatriate must have bent his new friends’ ears about the

International’s mistreatment of him. “Do you believe,” he asked them,

“that the best way of promoting the European revolution” consists of

“gagging and discrediting” European exiles like himself? “Who is it you

want to make the European revolution with,” he snorted, “if not those

rare specimens who have survived the European catastrophe physically and

politically?”[54] He had them.

Goldman and Morrow admitted their mistake. As for van Heijenoort, he was

now making himself “a sort of ‘champion’ of the national

question”—albeit, Weber complained, without crediting him as his

source.[55]

In November 1943 Felix, Al, and van Heijenoort took the daring step of

forming a faction, called the SWP Minority (known to history as the

Goldman-Morrow faction). Murray and his friend Dave Eisen joined them.

Ever since Max Shachtman’s revolt and departure in 1940, Chairman Cannon

had dreaded the emergence of another faction, the precursor to another

split. In the SWP Minority he faced such a faction. And as Trotsky had

done in 1940, he responded to its creation by insisting that SWP members

maintain an undeviating commitment to orthodoxy. Nothing in Trotsky’s

program of 1938–40 was to be changed.

Not long afterward, in early 1945, the European secretariat would write

a new political analysis—by copying phrases from Trotsky’s 1938

Transitional Program. “Seven years, and such years, had passed by, but

the European Secretariat did not change a comma,” marveled Morrow.[56]

It was because of such rigidity, Goldman warned, that the “intellectual

level of the party has degenerated since Trotsky’s death.” During the

war years, “anyone who presented any new idea”—perhaps he was thinking

of Weber—“was looked upon as a disturber of the peace.” Cannon preferred

to build a homogeneous “monolith,” he claimed, rather than a

revolutionary party.[57] Murray agreed that Cannon’s behavior was

dogmatic and authoritarian: “I learned that [the Trotskyists] were no

different from the Stalinists.”[58]

By 1944, he had toiled for five years in the hellish foundry. He’d done

his best to organize his fellow workers for the revolution—he’d fought

the UE Stalinists on their behalf, and tried to teach the workers about

Marxism. He and Archie had even managed to form a small SWP Minority

local in Bayonne, the only local the Minority ever had.[59] But it had

gone nowhere. So he hung up his apron and goggles for the last time and

left the foundry.

He was drawn to the auto industry, probably because the United Auto

Workers (UAW) was the country’s most militant union, a spearhead of

labor activism. The UAW was then locked in a bitter struggle at General

Motors, “the most hard-bitten and reactionary corporation in the world,”

as Murray recalled, inimical to the new industrial unionism. During the

war, GM’s corporate profits had doubled, and executive salaries

skyrocketed; management had refused to share in the wartime

sacrifices.[60] In 1943 the UAW believed management was taking advantage

of its no-strike pledge to roll back workers’ gains. So wildcat strikes

abounded: “no other industry [besides auto] saw a majority of its

workers participate in wildcat strikes and no other union [besides the

UAW] experienced such a large and persistent rank-and-file revolt.”[61]

After the frustrations of Bayonne, this raging class conflict must have

been irresistible. Fortunately, the UAW (unlike the UE) was not

controlled by Stalinists. So he took a job in a GM machine shop on

Eleventh Avenue in Manhattan, between 55^(th) and 56^(th)

Streets[62]—and got a UAW card.

The easier workload and shorter commute meant he could spend more time

at University Place talking politics with his SWP Minority friends. Now

that the war was turning in the Allies’ favor, they were addressing an

important question: In the absence of a proletarian revolution—what

would happen after the Allied victory? In 1944, for all anyone knew, the

industrial West might well fall back to Great Depression conditions, or

even worse.

To answer this question, Josef Weber, who had been right about so many

things, came out with a new article, long and theoretical, called

“Capitalist Barbarism or Socialism.” Since Weber was now on the outs

with Cannon, the renegade Max Shachtman published it in his New

International in October 1944.[63]

Weber’s premise (following Rosa Luxemburg) was that in the absence of

socialism, the world was reverting to barbarism. Once the Allies

defeated the Axis, the capitalist nations would increasingly follow the

path laid out by Nazi Germany. Economic and political development would

go into reverse and “violently thrust” their onetime citizens into

“bondage and slavery.”[64] They would forcibly resettle people by the

millions in prisons and ghettoes, in forced labor and concentration

camps. Deprived of all human rights, they would be subjected to “spydom

and stool-pigeonry, police-military surveillance.” This, said Weber,

would be “the permanent fate of a considerable percentage of mankind.”

Barbarism, in other words, looked very much like the Third Reich, its

labor and population policies extended as a “world phenomenon.”[65] He

called this vision of decline the “theory of retrogressive movement,” or

the “retrogression thesis.”

The article’s bombastic prose style makes it almost unreadable today; it

is laden with ex cathedra assertions, esoteric Marxist jargon, and

grandiose pomposity. Most bizarrely, it is infused with metaphors of

pungent organic decay. Capitalism is said to be “declining,

disintegrating, rotting”—to be “putrefying.”[66] Few social theorists

since Spengler have so lavishly deployed metaphors of organic rot.

Eager to talk, Murray visited Weber at his Bronx apartment. Surely Weber

(age forty-three) was happy to see the eager young proletarian

intellectual (age twenty-three) standing before him, telling him about

the militant but nonrevolutionary Bayonne proletariat. Surely Weber

invited him in, sat down, and recounted his poor treatment at the hands

of orthodox Trotskyism. Perhaps he explained Luxemburg’s “socialism or

barbarism” formulation to Murray. (“I was in the KPD when she was

alive!,” Weber might have said.) He might have read aloud from her

Junius Pamphlet about the choice the world faced: “either the triumph of

imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome,

depopulation, desolation, degeneration—a great cemetery. Or the victory

of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the

international proletariat against imperialism and its method of

war.”[67]

Since socialism wasn’t in the offing, the world was headed toward

barbarism. The victorious Allies were planning to “retrogress” Germany

and Japan, to turn them into slave states and drive their economies back

to precapitalist levels.

It’s already happening, he might have assured Murray. In mid-1944,

Russia’s plans for the postwar world included the dismemberment of

Germany and the destruction of its Ruhr industrial capacity. Germany

would have to pay huge reparations, to provide which millions of Germans

would have to toil in slave labor for more than a decade. (“Everything

that Germany possesses ‘above the minimum necessary to survive,’ has to

contribute to the reparations fund for compensating the allied nations,”

read one Russian planning report.)[68] Weber might easily have pulled

out a newspaper dated a few weeks earlier, with an account of the Quebec

Conference of September 16. Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed on a plan

for the postwar order, devised by U.S. Treasury Secretary Hans

Morgenthau, which would dismantle Germany’s industrial capacity.

According to the memorandum the conference issued, “This programme for

eliminating the war-making industries in the Ruhr and in the Saar is

looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily

agricultural and pastoral in its character.”[69]

You see? Weber might have insisted. The victorious imperialists are

going to “retrogress” Germany to an agricultural hinterland, dependent

on the Americans for manufactured goods and scientific knowledge.

They’ll turn the German population into a slave labor force. They’ll

deprive them of culture and education. It’s monopoly capital at work:

the Americans will eliminate their major capitalist rival and thereby

artificially extend the existence of their own imperialism. But American

capitalism too will retrogress. You’ll see—Americans too will lose their

civil rights and democratic institutions and become slaves.

To Murray, the retrogression thesis seemed like a stroke of genius. In

his own short life, he had seen homelessness and dislocation, tribunals

and expulsions, antiunion goon squads and a fiery workplace hellhole.

Weber, for his part, was living testimony to the realities of forced

migration, flight, and internment. To Murray’s eyes, the retrogression

thesis seemed quite plausible. To his eyes, the article might even have

seemed like a follow-up to Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional Program. And the

German expatriate himself seemed to be Trotsky’s successor, perhaps even

the next Bolshevik hero.

Part IV: After the War

A few months later the Allies took Berlin, and in August 1945 the

Japanese surrendered to MacArthur. Trotsky’s prediction that the war

would terminate in proletarian revolutions proved to be utterly wrong.

The once-militant German proletariat had fought for Hitler all the way

to the bunker; Stalin was stronger than ever, having played a crucial

role in defeating Hitler; and in the capitalist countries, the workers

had supported their national war efforts almost universally. The

allegedly unshakable laws of history had turned out to be nothing more

than wishful thinking.

Or had they? No sooner did the no-strike pledge pass into history than

the American working class roared to life. Just after V-J day,

industrial workers from coast to coast went out on strike, calling for

full employment and wage increases. By October 1945, the strike wave was

gigantic: 43,000 oil workers, 200,000 coal miners, 44,000 lumber

workers, 70,000 truck drivers, and 40,000 machinists had all downed

tools.[70] At General Motors, the UAW had demanded a 30 percent wage

increase—which GM refused. On November 21, 300,000 workers—among them

Murray—struck, pitting “one of the largest and most militant unions in

the country against one of the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful

employers.”[71]

Within twelve months of V-J day, more than five million American workers

had gone on strike (although not all at the same time). It was the

largest strike the United States had ever seen.[72] American workers

demonstrated that they had the power to bring the economy to a halt. Was

this the long-awaited postwar revolutionary upsurge?

It was not. On March 13, after 113 days, the UAW, having exhausted its

limited strike fund, ended the strike, accepting a small wage increase

and some fringe benefits and contract changes.[73] Workers in the other

industries soon returned to work as well, with modest gains. Industry

had dug in its heels and prevailed.

Meanwhile in April 1946, the Fourth International laid down the law to

Josef Weber: he would have to submit to party discipline and go back to

Germany, or else be expelled. Weber shrugged—and the Fourth expelled

him.[74]

Then a few months later, amid the chaos of demobilization, Murray was

finally drafted into the U.S. Army. For years he had had deferments for

taking care of his mother; it’s unclear what changed in 1946. In any

case, he didn’t mind: “I was still a Bolshevik. I believed that we

should be trained for armed insurrection,” and besides, the army was

“where the workers were.”[75] Far from being a conscientious objector,

“I was a conscientious soldier.”[76]

So in August he reported to the induction center and was soon stationed

at Fort Knox, Kentucky, the army’s center for mechanized cavalry.[77]

There he dodged friendly fire during military exercises. While he was

there, letters from New York kept him up to date on political

developments. In November, an SWP convention charged Felix Morrow and

Dave Eisen with disloyalty. Cannon did not let them respond to the

charges. The orthodox SWP-ers vilified the two Minority members, to wild

applause. When the vote came to expel them, only four voted against it.

They were out.[78]

Weber was already out, and now Felix and Dave. Murray knew he too was on

his way out. Once again he was losing his political home.

In early 1947, the U.S. Army decided to end the draft and release all

postwar draftees. On June 14, after ten months of service, Murray was

honorably discharged. Two weeks later the army officially became a

volunteer body. He went back to the Bronx apartment he shared with his

mother.

If he were losing his political home in the SWP, he could at least

continue as a labor organizer. He returned to work at GM, perhaps

thinking the UAW would mount another strike—this time a revolutionary

one.

But just at that moment, GM had decided on a new strategy: it would

co-opt its 400,000 blue-collar workers. In the spring of 1948, GM

offered the UAW a contract with a guaranteed annual wage, benefits for

sick leave, health insurance, and vacations, as well as improved working

conditions. In exchange, the UAW was to guarantee that its members would

not strike for two to four years.

A revolutionary union would have rejected the offer and forced annual

wage negotiations, but the UAW accepted it. As if that collapse of

revolutionary will were not enough, it went on to eliminate shop

stewards and replaced them with full-time grievance men who were paid,

not by the union, but by the company. Even the presidents of some UAW

locals now drew their salaries from the company. “The radical workers of

yesterday,” Murray lamented, “stopped wearing their union buttons and

moved to the suburbs.”[79] The labor unions had been brought “into

complicity with capitalism,” and now the “workers thought they were part

of the company rather than on a battleground.”[80]

The great settlement of 1948 demonstrated once and for all that while

the industrial proletariat might sometimes be class conscious and even

militant, it was not revolutionary. Industrial workers tried to make the

best of what they could do within the existing system.

For Murray, a lifelong Marxist, it came as a shock. For if the

proletariat was not revolutionary, then proletarian socialism was an

illusion, and Marxism—which had ruled his mind for eighteen years, had

been his oxygen, his food and drink—was based on a fallacy. He left

General Motors, surely dazed. Politically he was at ground zero, a

homeless person.

As a veteran, drawing twenty dollars a week, Murray had the liberty to

ponder all these dizzying changes. In his political dislocation, he was

in good company. He and other refugees from the failed Marxist movements

congregated in the low-priced restaurants and cafeterias of Fourteenth

Street.

Here Murray could sit down with other lost souls, to solidarize with

them in their pain, to analyze what had happened, and to figure out what

to do next. In the cafeterias they could discuss freely, as they could

not at the Trotskyist or Stalinist headquarters only a few blocks away.

Here he met Dwight Macdonald, who was now editing Politics, an

independent left magazine. “Let us face the fact that Trotsky’s deadline

is here and that his revolution is not,” Macdonald was given to

saying.[81] But the problem wasn’t just Trotskyism, Macdonald

continued—what had ended was Marxism itself. “The validity of Marxism as

a political doctrine stands or falls on its assertion that the

proletariat is the historical force which will bring about socialism.”

Since the proletariat had not lived up to this assertion, “the rock of

Historical Process on which Marx built his house has turned out to be

sand.”[82]

Perhaps it was here that he learned that Felix Morrow had given up

radical politics altogether. He had wasted half his life in radical

politics, he said, and now he was through. He went and got a regular job

in publishing, at Schocken Books.[83] Perhaps it was here, sometime

later, that he learned that Jean van Heijenoort had given up too. One

hundred years after Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto, he

concluded, there was nothing good to show for it. He ceased political

activity and became a professor of mathematics.

Murray must have been relieved when his old friend Dave Eisen came in

and sat down with him. They surely discussed the latest brainstorm from

Josef Weber. He had suggested that the rest of the SWP Minority leave

the SWP and form a new, independent group with him, one that would find

its own way. They could start a new magazine in order to figure out the

new direction.

Weber had been right about the European resistance, and he was right

about deindustrialization—witness the Morgenthau plan. And now he was

right about retrogression. Newsreels were showing skeletal Jews in

concentration camps, the stacks of unburied dead, the gas chambers, the

still-smoldering crematoria. Murray had been reading the transcripts of

the Nuremberg trials—the forced labor, starvation, tortures, and

enslavement. The mass graves in eastern Europe; Stalinist massacre at

Katyn forest and Nazi massacre at Babi Yar; the U.S. bombing of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki—it was all a descent into barbarism. It was

retrogression.

Weber never came to the Horn & Hardart, so Murray and Dave would have

had to visit him at his Bronx apartment. When they all sat down

together, amid the German books and papers, they surely talked about the

great dilemma. Weber sympathized with the problem: “Everyone understands

‘something is wrong.’ That ‘something’ is the failure of the socialist

movement to lead society under conditions most favorable to it: war and

its aftermath.”[84] And he might have told them that he agreed with

those who said Marxism—as “the theory and praxis of the ‘proletarian

revolution’ and the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’”—was dead. Yes

indeed, Marxism was “absolutely dead.”[85] But socialism? To give up on

socialism would be to usher in barbarism. That Weber could not do.

Perhaps Weber settled back in his chair. In 1939, shortly before Trotsky

was killed, he might have told them, he said something very important.

He said that if somehow the war should end without a revolution, “then

we should doubtless have to pose the question of revising our conception

of the present epoch and its driving forces.”[86] In other words, he

said we would have to rethink the socialist project.

He’d been circulating his 1944 article, “Capitalist Barbarism or

Socialism,” to his friends in Germany. Those who agreed with him about

retrogression were starting a new magazine called Dinge der Zeit. The

first issue had just come out—dated June 1947, the month of Murray’s

discharge. The new group would be publishing an English-language sister

edition, called Contemporary Issues. It wouldn’t be like the Trotskyist

journals, suppressing discussion. Its pages would be open and

transparent.

Trotsky had enjoined them to rethink the socialist project, to renew it

for the postwar world. They agreed to work with Weber. Together they

would choose socialism over barbarism. |P

[1] Leon Trotsky, Writings, 1938–39, ed. Naomi Allen and George Breitman

(New York: Pathfinder, 1974), 232.

[2] Trotsky, Writings, 1938–1939, ed. Allen and Breitman (New York:

Pathfinder, 1974), 87.

[3] William L. O’Neill, The Last Romantic: A Life of Max Eastman (1978;

reprint New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1991), 191–92. Among their

European comrades and sympathizers were Victor Serge, a onetime

Bolshevik who had been imprisoned by Stalin and now lived in Paris; the

Ukrainian Boris Souvarine, expelled by the Comintern in 1924, and author

of an important critical biography of Stalin; and C.L.R. James, author

of the seminal 1938 work on Toussaint Louverture, Black Jacobins.

[4] Bookchin, “A Marxist Revolutionary Youth,” interview by Janet Biehl,

in Bookchin, Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left (Edinburgh

and San Francisco: A.K. Press, 1999), 44.

[5] James P. Cannon, Socialism on Trial: The Official Court Record of

James P. Cannon’s Testimony in the Famous Minneapolis “Sedition” Trial,

4^(th) ed. (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1965), 69, 68.

[6] Anita Burdman Feferman, Politics, Logic, and Love: The Life of Jean

van Heijenoort (Wellesley, Mass.: A.K. Peters, 1993), 116.

[7] Albert Goldman, “Trotsky’s Message—Socialism Is the Only Road for

Humanity. Extracts from Albert Goldman’s Speech at the New York Trotsky

Memorial Meeting, Aug. 21, 1942,” Militant, Aug. 27, 1942.

[8] George Lichtheim, A Short History of Socialism (Glasgow: Fontana

Collins, 1975), 282.

[9] Quoted in Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 3, The

Breakdown, trans. P. S. Falla (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978),

195.

[10] Michael Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and

Politics of Dwight Macdonald (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

[11] Bayonne foundries in 1939–43 included the Bayonne Steel Casting

Company, the Bergen Point Iron Works, the Bergen Point Brass Foundry,

and Babcock and Wilcox. I don’t know which of them, if any, was Murray’s

employer.

[12] James P. Cannon, Socialism on Trial: The Official Court Record of

James P. Cannon’s Testimony in the Famous Minneapolis “Sedition” Trial,

4^(th) ed. (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1965), 38–39, 37.

[13] Bookchin, video interview by Doug Morris, “Reflections,” 1994,

author’s collection.

[14] Cannon, Socialism on Trial, 39.

[15] Bookchin, interview by Doug Richardson (1973), unpublished,

author’s collection.

[16] MBVB, part 13.

[17] On Archie Lieberman, see “The Lessons of Working Class History,”

Against the Current 57 (Jul. 1995) and Against the Current 59 (Nov.–Dec.

1995); David Finkel, “Remembering Archie Lieberman,” Against the

Current, Mar. 1, 2003, 41, online at

bit.ly

.

[18] Kevin Coogan, introduction to Dwight Macdonald, The Root Is Man

(1946; New York: Autonomedia, 1995).

[19] Socialist Workers Party, “Resolution on Proletarian Military

Policy,” Sept. 1940, quoted in Robert J. Alexander, International

Trotskyism, 1929–1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement (Durham,

N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 815.

[20] Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict That Shaped

American Unions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977),

279.

[21] “Bayonne Locals Push on Action to Win the War,” UE News, Dec. 20,

1941; “400 Delegates of 158 Shops Discuss Problems of War,” UE News,

Jan. 31, 1942.[

[22] Quoted in David Finkel, “Remembering Archie Lieberman,” Against the

Current, Mar. 1, 2003, 41, online at

bit.ly

.

[23] Cochran, Labor and Communism, 285–86.

[24] Richardson interview.

[25] MBVB, part 13.

[26] Fefernan, Politics, Logic, 201.

[27] On Weber’s years in Paris from 1933 to 1939, see his articles

(published under the pseudonyms “Johre” and “S. Johre” and “Lux Adorno”)

in Unser Wort, available on microfilm from Mikrofilm Archiv, Dortmund;

Josef Weber (as Ernst Zander), “Some Comments on the Organizational

Question” (written Jan. 1, 1951) CI 11, no. 44 (Sept.–Oct. 1962); Robert

J. Alexander, International Trotskyism, 1929–1985: A Documented Analysis

of the Movement (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991); Wolfgang

Alles, “German Trotskyism in the 1930s,” Revolutionary History 2, no. 3

(Autumn 1989), 7, online at

bit.ly

; Margaret Dewar, The Quiet Revolutionary (Chicago and London:

Bookmarks, 1989); Siegfried Kissin, “My Political Experiences in the

Trotskyist Movement,” ed. Ted Crawford, in Revolutionary History 13, no.

1 (n.d.),

bit.ly

; Pierre Broué, “Otto Schüssler: A Biographical Sketch,” trans. Ted

Crawford, from “Quelques proches collaborateurs de Trotsky,” in Cahiers

Leon Trotsky no. 1 (Jan. 1979);

bit.ly

; and “Franz Meyer,”

bit.ly

.

[28] On Trotsky’s approval of Unser Wort and Weber, see “A Real

Achievement,” Jan. 24, 1934, in Leon Trotsky, Writings, 1933–34, ed.

George Breitman (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972); Leon Trotsky,

“Results of the Open Letter,” written Jan. 18, 1936, in George Breitman,

ed., Writings of Leon Trotsky, Supplement (1934–40) (New York:

Pathfinder Press, 1979); Leon Trotsky, “The International Conference

Must Be Postponed,” written Sept. 26, 1937, in Breitman, Writings of

Leon Trotsky, Supplement (1934–40), 742.

[29] Josef Weber (as IKD), “The SWP and the European Revolutions,” New

International, Dec. 1944, 414. In this period Weber signed his writings

as “IKD” or “the AK of the IKD.”

[30] Josef Weber (as IKD), “The SWP and the European Revolutions,” New

International, Dec. 1944, 414.

[31] Weber (as IKD), “Three Theses,” 3–5.

[32] Weber (as IKD), “SWP and European Revolutions,” 412.

[33] Sam Levy, “The Proletarian Military Policy Revisited,”

Revolutionary History 1, no. 3 (Autumn 1988).

[34] Rodolphe Prager, “The Fourth International During the Second World

War,” Revolutionary History 1, no. 3 (Autumn 1988).

[35] “Daniel Logan” is a pseudonym for Jean van Heijenoort; see Lubitz’

TrotskyanaNet,

bit.ly

. He is quoted in Weber (as IKD), “SWP and European Revolutions,” 413.

[36] Prager, “Fourth International.”

[37] Albert Goldman, The Question of Unity Between the Workers Party and

the Socialist Workers Party (Long Island City: Workers Party Press, Jan.

1947).

[38] Weber (as IKD), “SWP and European Revolutions,” 414.

[39] Felix Morrow [and Albert Goldman], “Our Differences with the ‘Three

Theses,’” Fourth International 3, no. 10 (Dec. 1942), 372–74, online at

bit.ly

. The only byline was Morrow, but, in “Capitalist Barbarism,” Weber says

the piece was written by “Morrow and Morrison,” Morrison being a

pseudonym for Goldman. See Lubitz’ TrotskyanaNet,

bit.ly

.

[40] Weber (as IKD), “SWP and European Revolutions,” 415.

[41] Philip Rahv, “Ten Propositions and Eight Errors,” in Edith

Kurzweil, ed., A Partisan Century: Political Writings from Partisan

Review (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 66.

[42] On wartime labor struggles, see James B. Atleson, Labor and the

Wartime State (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); and Nelson

Lichtenstein, Labor’s War At Home (New York: Cambridge University Press,

1982).

[43] Murray Bookchin (as Harry Ludd), “The Fate of American Civil

Liberties.” CI 4, no. 16 (Nov.–Dec. 1953), 324.

[44] “By the end of 1945, 3.5 million workers had engaged in 4,750 work

stoppages, costing employers 38 million workdays,” quoted in Atleson,

Wartime State, 132.

[45] Joshua Freeman quoted in Atleson, Wartime State, 141–42.

[46] “Italian Workers Elect Own Factory Committees,” Militant, Sept. 21,

1943.

[47] Quoted in Peter Jenkins, Where Trotskyism Got Lost: World War Two

and the Prospect for Revolution in Europe (Nottingham: Spokesman Books,

1977), online at

bit.ly

.

[48] SWP, “Perspectives and Tasks of the Coming European Revolution,”

Resolution Adopted by the Fifteenth Anniversary Plenum of the Socialist

Workers Party, Nov. 2, 1943, Fourth International 4, no. 11 (Dec. 1943),

329–34.

[49] Weber (as IKD), “SWP and European Revolutions,” 412.

[50] Ibid., 414.

[51] Ibid., 413.

[52] Ibid., 412–13.

[53] Ibid., 413. Again, Weber refers to “Daniel Logan,” a pseudonym for

Jean van Heijenoort.

[54] Ibid., 414.

[55] Ibid., 412–13.

[56] Felix Morrow, “Perspectives of European Revolution: It Is Time to

Grow Up: The Infantile Sickness of the European Secretariat,” Fourth

International 7, no. 7 (Jul. 1946), 213–18.

[57] Albert Goldman, The Question of Unity Between the Workers Party and

the Socialist Workers Party (Long Island City: Workers Party Press, Jan.

1947).

[58] Murray Bookchin, interview by Jeff Riggenbach, Reason, Oct. 1979,

34–38.

[59] Archie Lieberman, “The Lessons of Working-Class History,” Against

the Current, Jul. 1, 1995, 42; David Finkel, “Remembering Archie

Lieberman,” Against the Current, no. 103 (Mar.–Apr. 2003).

[60] Kevin Boyle, “Autoworkers at War: Patriotism and Protest in the

American Automobile Industry, 1939–1945,” in Robert Asher and Ronald

Edsforth, eds., Autowork (Albany: SUNY Press, 1955), 118–19. See also

George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

[61] Alteson, Wartime State, 144.

[62] MBVB, part 21; Christopher Gray, “The Car Is Still King on 11^(th)

Avenue,” New York Times, Jul. 9, 2006.

[63] Weber (as IKD), “SWP and European Revolutions,” 414.

[64] Weber (as IKD), “Capitalist Barbarism,” 333–34.

[65] Ibid., 331.

[66] Ibid., 330–31.

[67] Rosa Luxemburg, Junius Pamphlet (1915), chapter 1, online at

bit.ly

. The idea of a choice between “Socialism or Barbarism” actually went

back to Marx and Engels. In the Communist Manifesto, they wrote that the

class struggle would end “either in the revolutionary reconstitution of

society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” Karl

Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, chapter 1,

online at

bit.ly

.

[68] The report was issued by a commission headed by deputy commissar

for foreign affairs Ivan Maisky in July 1944. Quoted in Robert

Gellately, Stalin’s Curse (New York: Knopf, 2013).

[69] Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy,

1932–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 475. Weber’s hometown

of Gelsenkirchen is in the Ruhr area.

[70] Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (Boston: South End Press, 1977), 228–30.

[71] John Barnard, American Vanguard: The UAW During the Reuther Years,

1935–70 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 215. Quotation is

from Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 108.

[72] James Matles and James Higgins, Them and Us: Struggles of a Rank

and File Union (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1974), 141–42;

Art Preis, Labor’s Giant Step: Twenty Years of the CIO (New York:

Pioneer Publishers, 1964). Brecher, Strike, 228–30.

[73] Matles and Higgins, Them and Us, 146.

[74] On the SWP’s resolution against the IKD, see Robert J. Alexander,

International Trotskyism, 1929–1985: A Documented Analysis of the

Movement (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 428; and “Motions

Adopted by the Political Committee of the Socialist Workers Party,” in

Goldman, Question of Unity, Appendix Q; Dave Eisen to Leo Brownstein,

May 27, 1946, courtesy Dave Eisen.

[75] MBVB, part 11.

[76] MBVB, part 14.

[77] John E. Kleber, ed., The Kentucky Encyclopedia (Lexington:

University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 346.

[78] Eisen to Brownstein, Nov. 2, 1946; Eisen to Brownstein, Dec. 5,

1946; IKD Faction to WP, “High Road or No Road”; Eisen to Barney Cohen,

October 22, 1946, courtesy Dave Eisen.

[79] Murray Bookchin, “Postwar Period,” interview by Doug Morris, in

Bookchin, Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left (Edinburgh and

San Francisco: A.K. Press, 1999), 47–48.

[80] MBVB, part 31.

[81] Dwight Macdonald, The Root Is Man (1953), reprinted in The Memoirs

of a Revolutionist: Essays in Political Criticism (New York: Farrar,

Straus & Cudahy, 1957), 33.

[82] Macdonald, Root Is Man, 267.

[83] Eisen to author, May 2008.

[84] The IKD Faction to the WP, “The High Road or No Road,” written Apr.

18, 1947, New International (Aug. 1947).

[85] Josef Weber (as Wilhelm Lunen), “The Problem of Social

Consciousness in Our Time,” CI 8, no. 31 (Oct.–Nov. 1957), 505.

[86] Leon Trotsky, “The USSR in War,” (Sept. 25, 1939), in In Defense of

Marxism: The Social and Political Contradictions of the Soviet Union

(1942; New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), 50. Weber wrote about this

passage in 1947 in IKD Faction to WP, “High Road or No Road.” Macdonald

invoked the same quote in his 1946 essay “The Root Is Man,” in

Macdonald, The Root Is Man (New York: Autonomedia, 1995), 32.