From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 24, 12 June 1950, p. 7.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Saul Berg’s proposal for a policy different from either Shachtman’s or Hall’s illustrates a not-infrequent tendency in discussions such as this. His conclusion is: Hall’s criticism of Shachtman is correct in general, but we must allow for exceptions from Hall’s position.
Advocacy of “making exceptions” may sound like advocacy of “flexibility,” etc., but the advocate has to face a prior question. On what basis are these exceptions to be made?
A provision merely for making exceptions by itself merely opens the door to unprincipled freewheeling. In these days particularly, when the pressure of bourgeois politics on the socialist movement (and of the labor bureaucracy on socialist thinking) is tremendous, comrades will do well to think their positions out to the full before jumping for a “new” line, out of a feeling of isolation.
Comrade Berg seems to realize this, for he asks “comment from elsewhere in the country” to work out his proposal “exactly enough.” His own justifications for his conclusions are certainly not worked out.
(1) Berg bases much on the fact that a PAC club like Abner’s, being under CIO discipline, could not act more independently than it did. What is the relevance of this to our policy – assuming that it is a fixed and unchanging fact?
In the first place, it means that the proposal twice put forward in LA in articles by Comrade Ferguson – that Abner’s PAC now run him independently in the main election, as a result of his defeat in the primary – is meaningless.
Comrade Ferguson’s proposal is a good one. Berg negates it, perhaps without realizing the import of his argument. This is not fatal to Berg’s view, but we wonder whether he has worked out the consequences of his view.
– More important: Assuming that the club cannot run an independent candidate, how does Berg jump from this conjunctural fact to justification of socialists supporting candidates in primaries of the capitalist parties?
We hesitate to press the logic of Berg’s point even one step further, since we are sure that Berg does not do so himself, but – what if CIO discipline also makes it impossible for any affiliated union or local to run or support independent candidates? (It can!) What does that do for Berg’s distinction between policy for a PAC club and policy for a union?
CIO discipline cannot impose an unsocialist policy upon us. A proposal to support candidates in capitalist party primaries has to be justified on its own grounds, and not by considerations of opportunity.
Berg further claims that support of candidates in capitalist party primaries is a necessary deduction from our advocacy of building PAC clubs into year-round functioning organizations. This is fantastic.
One of our points has been precisely that there are many political activities and tasks for the PAC besides its annual support of capitalist candidates, and that permanent consistent functioning will strengthen its independent moods.
But, asks Berg, suppose the only thing PAC clubs can do is follow CIO discipline? How then can it really become a year-round functioning organization without ... what?
Here again the immediate consequences of Berg’s arguments must carry him beyond his own conclusion.
Berg himself proposes his tactic only for exceptional cases. Does this then mean that in most cases (that is, all other cases) it is meaningless to advocate building PAC clubs into functioning organizations? Or is it the other alternative: that in all the other cases, we must be led to support capitalist candidates not as an exception but as a rule?
Consider Berg’s only generalized formulations: “It is only where the question arises of what the rank-and-file and secondary leaders should do with a genuine year-round political-action movement that they have built, that we must deviate from our labor-party position” in the way he proposes.
“Only”! Where does this stop? On the basis of Berg&tsquo;s general consideration, why stop merely with supporting candidates in capitalist primaries? That is where Berg is determined to stop, to be sure – right now – but once socialist analysis is traded for free-wheeling, politics asserts its own logic. The usual cries about “flexibility” and such do not stop it.
Berg wants to find a reason for supporting such campaigns as Abner’s. He invites help in finding a reason. It would be wiser to try to draw conclusions from thought-out reasons, than to try to suck out a reason from a predetermined (or wished-for) conclusion. This method of approach to the question should be a danger sign to comrades who find themselves adopting it.
Most unthinking of all is Berg’s final claim that his view must represent a “consensus,” since it allows for support of Abner while avoiding both the Hall and Shachtman positions. This is as big a jump as any in Berg’s quite jumpy thinking on the question.
I can with no difficulty at all invent a half dozen other positions (all equally opportunist or worse) which allow for support of Abner while differing from Shachtman and Hall. Not any of them thereby becomes a consensus by virtue of that fact.
The vote of the NC majority on Abner took place on the statement of a specific conclusion, unmotivated by any general considerations. The proponents of “exceptionalism” have to work out a general motivation before they can even claim to have a “position,” let alone one which is a “consensus.”
The above is directed to Berg’s discussion because, in my opinion, even more clearly than Shachtman he reflects a prevalent mood – the desire to find a shortcut to the stimulation of independent political action in the midst of a temporarily unfavorable situation. In the grip of such a mood, some comrades tend to find the simplest exercise of reason an offense to “flexibility.”
In my opinion, Shachtman’s resolution is an outgrowth of this mood – equally characterized by unwillingness to recognize the most immediate political consequences of his proposal, which are not essentially different from Berg’s exceptionalism.
The situation from which it arises – the decline of labor-party sentiment following Truman’s razzle-dazzle victory in 1948 – is already beginning to pass. It is to be hoped that its further weakening will not find the socialist vanguard bogged down in the discrediting “realism” of pointing to the Democratic primaries as the road to independence!
Last updated on 7 January 2024