First Published: Workers Vanguard No. 273, January 30, 1981
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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There’s trouble in “the Trend” these days. The former New Lefties who several years ago baptized themselves the “anti-revisionist, anti-dogmatist trend’–because they don’t like either Russia (“revisionist”) or China (“dogmatist”)–are finding out that double-negative politics lead nowhere. As the Peking Stalinists developed their anti-Soviet alliance with U.S. imperialism during the late ’70s, the “Trend” picked up disillusioned Maoists who felt uncomfortable walking hand-in-hand with the bloody butchers of Indochina. But as the Carter/Reagan Cold War drive heats up, they have found fence-sitting an increasingly impossible position. Today the trend of the Trend is clearly slouching toward Moscow. And No. 1 trend-setter is Irwin Silber, former associate editor of the Guardian and long-time RCA Victor mascot of Moscow Stalinism.
Two years ago Silber split from the Guardian to form his “National Network of Marxist-Leninist Clubs” (NNMLC). The clubs have since been replaced by the looser form of discussion groups, study projects and forum series sponsored by his Line of March journal. While Silber calls for “rectification” of the disoriented “Marxist-Leninist” milieu, the Trend’s other main pole around the Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC) calls for “fusion” with the everyday struggles of the working class. This was embodied in the so-called Organizing Committee for an Ideological Center (OC1C), formed by assorted Maoist local collectives in 1978. But lately the OCIC has undergone a process of self-mutilation in the form of Stalinist “white chauvinism” trials which boomeranged and sparked mass resignations. Many of the departees are now leaning toward Silber’s Line of March (LOM).
Particularly with Silber’s present political line, someone unfamiliar with the American left might think the “Trend” and the Spartacist League (SL) today occupy positions relatively close together on the political spectrum. Silber’s support to Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, for instance, led Euro-communist Dorothy Healey to bait him for “Trotskyism.” However, such a view is an optical illusion. The Trend set is moving from soft right-wing Maoism to fellow traveling with the Kremlin. For Silber this marks a return to his political stance of the 1950s. A Guardian (8 October 1979) “On the Left” column was not being demagogic when it commented:
However, in reacting against China’s reactionary foreign policy, LOM has increasingly dropped the struggle against revisionism and tends more and more to view the Soviet Union as a major force in the struggle against imperialism.
Of the Trend one can truly say, “left in form, right in essence.”
There is another crucial difference as well. Although the politics of the hard Maoist and ex-Maoist Stalinist organizations–Mike Klonsky’s Communist Party Marxist-Leninist (CP-ML), Jerry Tung’s Communist Workers Party (CWP), Bob Avakian’s Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), Nelson Peery’s Communist Labor Party (CLP), Milt Rosen’s Progressive Labor Party (PLP)–are profoundly counterrevolutionary, their cadre are far more serious-minded than the trendy Trend-ers. What separates the “Trend” from the Spartacist League is not just or even primarily our Trotskyist world analysis (which we suspect they crib for use against Maoist opponents). Rather it is our willingness to swim hard against the stream of prevailing radical/liberal public opinion. This Bolshevik hardness they see as “sectarianism.” Thus the main components of the Trend are centrally defined by Menshevik-type anti-vanguardism.
The “Trend” dates its origins from Peking’s support to the CIA-engineered South African invasion of Angola in 1975-76. Angola was the first fruit of Maoist China’s alliance with Washington against the Soviet Union, and the first time Chinese foreign policy utterly repelled broad radical sentiment. In particular, black radicals and even liberals instinctively solidarized with the Angolan nationalists and Cubans fighting the armed forces of apartheid imperialism. Whatever sympathy American black militants had for Maoism was killed along with white-supremacist South Africa’s commandos on the Angolan battlefield. And the Guardian’s turn to critical Maoism was marked by the departure of its long-time Peking loyalist, Carl Davidson. Henceforth, the “independent radical news-weekly” took a posture of “comradely criticism” toward China, but had no independent policy of its own.
When Peking attacked Vietnam in early 1979 in collusion with the United States, Guardian editor Jack Smith could only throw up his hands in despair. Commenting “evenhandedly” on the Chinese invasion of Soviet-aligned Vietnam and Hanoi’s invasion of Pol Pot’s Cambodian land of death, a front-page headline lamented, “End Wars in Indochina” (Guardian, 7 March 1979). Rebelling against this middle-of-the-road policy, Irwin Silber resigned from the editorial board. In a pamphlet, “The War in Indochina,” he proclaimed, “Today, China’s international line and actions represent a greater concession to U.S. imperialism than the Soviet Union ever dared propose.” His call for complete political solidarity with the “genuine Marxist-Leninist” Vietnamese leadership was Silber’s bridge back to the Moscow camp.
Afghanistan soon made it clear that this was the real content of Silber’s call for a “rectification of the general line of the US communist movement.” Mao clinking glasses with Nixon while B-52s carpet bombed Hanoi may have made New Left Maoists queasy; with Angola and the China-Vietnam war many of them passed from critical Maoism to becoming Stalinoid lost souls wandering in the no man’s land between Russia and China. And here was the USSR supporting a leftist regime under attack by a gang of Islamic clerical reactionaries backed by U.S. imperialism and the Peking bureaucracy. Silber commented:
Therefore, the Soviet leadership frequently does support revolutionary struggle as a way to weaken its major foe–always carefully weighing the possible consequences if it should go too far in confronting the U.S.” “In many of the crucial confrontations with imperialism (i.e., Vietnam. Angola, Zimbabwe, Palestine, etc.), the Soviet Union winds up on the correct side of the barricades.– Irwin Silber, “Afghanistan– The Battle Line Is Drawn”
Silber made his mark by seizing on the Cold War uproar over Soviet intervention in Afghanistan as the moment for the soft/critical/ex-Maoists’ crossing of the Ussuri on the road back to Moscow.
As indicated by its wishful self-designation, “the Trend” likes to present itself as a new, broad, dynamic current in the American left. This is a completely false picture. When one speaks of the Trend, one is basically talking about Silber’s Line of March, not simply because it is the largest and most dynamic group. In the midst of the disillusioned, disoriented “M-L” milieu, Silber is a man who knows where he wants to go. He knows, because he’s been there. For over three decades the Guardian has represented a relatively defined radical/liberal audience. It has sought to be the voice of the fellow traveler, the petty-bourgeois wing of a (non-existent) popular front. And Silber is now calling the tune because he first and most clearly recognized that rad/lib stomachs were too weak for Peking’s increasingly unpopular front with U.S. imperialism.
It is anything but a historic accident that the Guardian originated as the organ of the Progressive Party of Henry Wallace. In 1948 there was a bourgeois popular-front breakaway movement, for which the Communist Party (CP) provided the organization and troops, around FDR’s naive and quixotic former Democratic vice president. Volume 1, Number 1 of the National Guardian was dated 18 October 1948, in the heat of Wallace’s presidential campaign. Its editorial statement stressed the paper’s continuity with the liberal politics of the Roosevelt period: “This editorial point of view will be a continuation and development of the progressive tradition set in our time by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and overwhelmingly supported by the American people in the last four elections.”
By 1950 Wallace had renounced the Progressive Party, supported “our boys” in the Korean War and made copious mea culpas for having been a “Commie dupe.” After a disastrous showing by Progressive candidate Vincent Hallinan against Adlai Stevenson in 1952, the CP returned to its old policy of boring from within the Democratic Party.
A number of CP fellow travelers associated with the Progressive Party and the American labor Party (AI.P) in New York–Hallinan. National Guardian co-editor James Aronson. Paul Sweezy–dissented from this policy. This did not represent a more leftist impulse compared to the Communist Party, simply a more freelancing style. William Z. Foster’s demoralized CP labeled McCarthy a fascist and prepared to take a dive. But how can a milieu of fellow travelers operate in semi-clandestinity? This would require a discipline and commitment utterly alien to them. Without CP backing the moribund Progressive Party and ALP folded entirely, but the Hallinan/Aronson group maintained the paper and the politics. The Guardian came to see itself as the candle of nostalgia for the popular front in the dark night of McCarthyism.
This amorphous popular-front literary politics of the National Guardian (“the Progressive Newsweekly” as it then called itself) on a journalistic level was reflected by Sweezy’s Monthly Review on an academic level. Both catered to the largish CP periphery and saw themselves as somewhere within the world Stalinist movement. The paper served as the “collective organizer” not of a communist vanguard, but of what editors Cedric Belfrage and Aronson referred to in a chapter heading of their book as “The Extended Guardian Family”:
As radical America became more and more an undefined ghetto, our advertising columns were modestly swollen by inmates who depended on taking in each other’s washing. –Something to Guard; The Stormy Life of the National Guardian, 1948-1967
Soon they were “peddling coffee tables, Guatemalan skirts, ’Kantwet’ baby beds”; later came the Guardian picnics, tours, etc. Insofar as they had a political perspective at all, they were waiting for (or at any rate hoping for) a new and more successful version of the Progressive Party.
In the early/mid-’60s, the Guardian began to favor the “Third World” Stalinist regimes–Castro’s Cuba, Mao’s China, Ho’s Vietnam–as against Moscow. (Here again the parallelism with the Monthly Review holds.) Wilfred Burchett, the Guardian’s former Moscow correspondent, turned up in Hanoi, and the paper gradually took on many characteristics of the New Left: Third Worldism, black nationalism, sectoralist politics in the U.S. This gave it an entree to the new radical generation, in more than a few cases the sons and daughters of old Stalinists and fellow travelers, who were looking for a militant alternative to the stodgy Khrushchev/Brezhnev bureaucracy.
In February 1968 there was a palace coup in the Guardian offices, and the insurgents declared their solidarity with the Vietnamese guerrilla fighters. In order to abolish hierarchy the “new Guardian collective” demolished former editor Aronson’s office with an axe. But real control was in the hands of mod-rad journalist Jack Smith who brought in writers from SDS and the “underground press.” Irwin Silber signed on a few months later as “cultural editor” (he had earlier published the folk music magazine Sing Out) and eventually became the paper’s political guru. The “new Guardian” declared itself to be part of the “Marxist-Leninist” movement. This was, of course, de rigueur in New Left radical circles at the time, as even English professors were waving Mao’s Little Red Book. In the absence of a genuine popular front and lacking an established Stalinist party in the U.S. to identify with, the distinction between vanguard party and “progressive” fellow traveler was unclear. In actuality, the basic nature of the Guardian tendency did not change, as subsequent developments showed.
In the wake of the 1969 split in SDS, the various Maoist tendencies and collectives regrouped themselves into competing “M-L” vanguards: Klonsky’s October League, Avakian’s Revolutionary Union, Peery’s Communist League. (Indeed, many of the Guardian’s new staff members soon departed on their way to joining various left parties, including the Spartacist League.) But the Guardians role in all this was to maintain that such “party-building” formations were “premature.” The more serious Maoists in the early 1970s were not especially concerned with Silber & Co.’s positions on the nature of the Soviet Union, the power struggles in China, the black question, etc.– positions which were ill-defined, tentative and changeable. What Silber was known for, what he was really “hard” about, was opposition to the formation of any Leninist vanguard party.
This was not simply a matter of dilettantism or personal softness. From its inception as the voice of the Progressive Party, the Guardian has been the expression of American popular front-ism par excellence. Silber himself left the Communist Party together with the right-wing opposition led by Daily Worker editor John Gates. The Gatesites concluded on the basis of Khrushchev’s “secret report” to the CPSU 20th Congress and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution not only that Stalinism was bankrupt, but the future lay in Democratic Party liberalism. Silber’s Guardian looked forward to the creation not of a communist vanguard party, but rather of a broad “radical” party embracing even left-wing bourgeois politicians (analogues of Henry Wallace) and trade-union bureaucrats, as well as self-styled “Leninists.”
So what are Irwin Silber’s credentials for leading a “Marxist-Leninist” organization? Far and away the most important thing about him is that for years he has passed himself off as a “Marxist-Leninist,” but for the past quarter century has made a science out of fellow traveling–first with “Uncle Joe,” Nikita, Fidel, then Mao and now once again back to Brezhnev.
The Guardian’s popular-frontist opposition to a would-be Leninist vanguard party created a natural bloc between it and various localized New Left Maoist collectives–such as the PWOC, the Tucson Marxist-Leninist Collective, the Potomac Socialist Organization–which for their own particular reasons had stood outside the “party-building” process of the early/mid-1970s. This anti-“vanguardism” is the real origin of the Trend, whatever positions were developed later on. As we noted in our article “The Maoists United Will Never Be Repeated”:
In general those New Left collectives which did not adhere to serious party formations by the end of the Maoist regroupment period of the early 1970s degenerated into hardened circle-spirit Menshevik groups. Cliquism, local ultra-parochialism, extreme hostility to Marxist theory and program and sub-reformist activism became the norm. The very existence of these collectives represented a contradiction. As self-proclaimed ’Marxist-Leninists,’ they were formally committed to building a centralized party; in practice they rejected such a formation. –WV No. 183, 25 November 1977
It is enough to list the political backwaters where the collectives subsist–Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Tucson, Eugene, Oregon, etc.–to understand that they are New Left holdovers preserved in a time capsule by their isolation.
But even for these left-wing mugwumpcrs, some form of national ties is useful if only as a pretense to politics. So in February 1978 some 30 “M-L” collectives got together under PWOC leadership to form the Organizing Committee for an Ideological Center. The OCIC was based on 18 points of mush-mouthed generalities– for socialism, against capitalism, for the working class, against the CP, fight racism/sexism/opportunism–plus the obligatory “Trotskyism equals bourgeoisie,” the “main enemy is US imperialism” (against Pekinese running dogs yapping about the “polar bear”), and the real political core: “fusing of the communist movement with the class struggle.” In platitudes inherited from their strange encounter with Mao tse-tung thought, this is the PWOC/OCIC “fusion” line–that all questions can be resolved through immersion in the daily struggles of the proletariat.
Over the next two years there was a running crossfire in the pages of the Guardian between Silber’s “rectificationists” and the “fusionists” led by PWOC’s Clay Newlin. The mutual charges were usually correct, though understated. Newlin would repeat over and over “practice is primary,” and issue such polemical gems as:
For the simple reason that as soon as one understands the full meaning of essence as organizing principle– particularly its indication of the role of essence as the pivot of connection between the basic features of a process–one can easily expose the idealism inherent in the rectificationist formulation of the essence of party-building. Whereas ’essence means particularity’ tends to obscure that idealism. – Organizer. August 1980
Apparently Newlin is seeking to invent a new Kantian category, the jabberwock imperative! But the PWOC honcho gets some good digs in against Silber, whose perpetual “pre-party period” (PPP) excludes actual “party-building” as “premature.” According to Silber:
The particularity of organization in the pre-party period (ignored by the leading organizations of the new communist movement) means that all organizations must be conscious of their limitations.
The all-sided form in a period without a material basis fostered the tendency toward organizational competition, the drive for organizational hegemonism, and the sectarian characteristics of the period. –NNMLC, “Developing the Subjective Factor” (May 1979)
No material basis–in 1979, 62 years after the Russian Revolution?! But then the kind of party a “serious” Silber would build could have nothing in common with the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky. Rather than a communist vanguard it would be another Klonsky-type “party” which can only be an obstacle to proletarian revolution. Initially, many Trenders saw the PWOC/OCIC as the more serious pole. They went into the unions, actually tried to make something out of the hodgepodge collectives. But in the last six months OCIC has experienced massive internal hemorrhaging as a result of a seemingly bizarre “anti-white chauvinism campaign.” Was this a throwback to late-’60s New Left guilt-tripping about “white skin privilege”? But then why such an exodus? The resignation/expulsion list reportedly includes the entire Tucson, Minneapolis and Eugene, Oregon collectives, fragmentation of the Potomac Socialist Organization, as well as half of the Bay Area Workers Committee and 40 percent all told of OCIC’s western region. Newlin recently admitted that “approximately 100” people had “voluntarily quit” the PWOC/OCIC.
An “Open Letter to the Party Building Movement” signed by 50-plus dissidents denounced Newlin’s campaign as a cynical maneuver: “It is employing opportunist methods to whip the cadre into line and eliminate all opposing views rather than face political struggle on the fundamental questions before our movement head-on.” Surprise! “White chauvinism” witchhunts have a hoary tradition in the American Stalinist movement, being used to harden up the membership as far back as 1931. This time around it was no doubt intended to divert attention from–or scapegoat the ranks for–the OCIC collectives’ failure to go anywhere with their low-level economist organizing. It always worked fine before, but when PWOC tried it, the result was a giant fiasco. Newlin asks:
What kind of a communist movement is it that when challenged to combat white and petty bourgeois chauvinism in its ranks suffers not only extensive opposition, but even a mass of resignations? – The Organizer, December 1980
No kind, of course. Behind this so-called “white flight” from the OCIC is the fact that the collectives are not made up of Stalinist cadre but of soft New Leftovers. When bureaucratic strong-arm tactics are used on these fellow travelers (from the Russian term sputnik), instead of abjectly confessing many just spin out of orbit. So the attempt to hammer this Menshevik mush into a vanguard party predictably failed (this sure looks like the death knell for the OCIC). In any case, a low level of class struggle is hardly favorable to workerist groups, and the force of world events is making itself felt even on these committed parochialists. Four years ago they could perhaps bury themselves in the latest Philadelphia garbage strike and dismiss such questions as Angola as having no relevance on the shop floor. But with the post-Afghanistan Cold War drive and Reagan in the White House, it is impossible to ignore international issues in the plants, particularly the all-important Russian question.
The PWOC/OCIC Stalinoid workerists have been forced out of their ostrich holes and are now stumbling empirically from position to position, trying to orient themselves by keeping an eye on the “main enemy.” Reluctantly they came out for Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. A few months later they enthusiastically backed the Communist Party’s Hall/Davis election campaign, praising in particular the fact that the CP platform doesn’t call for socialism. On the other hand, they hailed the Polish strikes in August for “More Meat and Democracy.” However, in September the PWOC declares, “The political thrust of the movement is predominantly progressive,” while the next month a more contradictory verdict is returned:
The demands won by the workers, while registering important democratic gains for the working class, also create political space for forces that are basically hostile to socialism or at the very least oppose those policies necessary to move Poland forward. This includes the powerful Catholic Church, much of the dissident community and elements of the peasantry.” –Organizer, October 1980
But just what is to be done to “move Poland forward”? Where does the PWOC stand vis-a-vis the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy?
That, of course, is the heart of the question, the one they can’t escape. “Poland is certainly not a capitalist country,” writes the PWOC. What is it then? They don’t say. This confusion is expressed even more elaborately in a lengthy double-talking treatise by the academic-Eurocommunist Tucson Marxist-Leninist Collective:
We do not believe that there are no significant restraints on the growth and reproduction of capitalism in Poland, nor do we find that a new bourgeoisie has been created which holds state power as a class... Poland may not be capitalist, but that in no way minimizes the very serious problems with which it is faced. – Theoretical Review, November-December 1980
In contrast, a Line of March spokesman simply condemned the Polish strikes and supported the bureaucracy: “The government’s policy of opposition to independent trade unions was correct. The line of the Soviet Union which saw the settlement as a retreat was correct. The tendency toward capitalist restoration will be exacerbated” (Guardian, 17 September). So for all Silber’s talk of Moscow still being “revisionist headquarters.” he has nothing to say to the Polish working class except that they should once again obey their Stalinist masters!
As Trotskyists we emphatically defended Soviet intervention against imperialist-aided Islamic reaction in Afghanistan (“Hail Red Army!” was our famous headline), and we have loudly warned against the capitalist-restorationist danger in Poland, calling for solidarity of Polish workers with the Russian proletariat. If and when it comes to military defense of the revolutionary gains of the deformed workers states, we shall be at our posts. But in the contradictory situation created by the Baltic strikes, we do not write off the Polish working class, consigning them to the camp of clerical nationalism. The key task for a revolutionary (Trotskyist) vanguard in Poland would be to split the new union movement, winning over the mass of workers from the Catholic church-led forces. The PWOC worker-ists have no program for such an independent struggle for communist leadership, and to a dyed-in-the-wool fellow traveler like Silber it is literally inconceivable.
Silber does admit, however, that at issue in polemics over Afghanistan (and Poland) is really the role of the Soviet Union, and he makes the obvious point: “In order to assess the actions of the USSR, one needs first to determine what kind of society it is and what general policy or line guides its development.” He contends that “despite serious shortcomings and deformations in the theory and practice of Soviet socialism, a capitalist counterrevolution has not been affected in the USSR” (“Afghanistan–The Battle Line is Drawn”). Silber has seized on American radicals’ strong emotional attachment to Vietnam and capitalized on Afghanistan, where Moscow (for once) is supporting a clearly progressive cause. But barely critical support to “Soviet socialism” isn’t going to be an easy pill for his ex-Maoist audience to swallow, as he realizes:
In addition, this trend was deeply infected by the anti-communist prejudices of U.S society in general and the New Left in particular, so that there existed in the anti-revisionist movement a ready audience for the wildest slanders which could be concocted about the Soviet Union. – Bruce Occena and Irwin Silber, “Capitalism in the USSR? An Opportunist Theory in Disarray,” Line of March, October-November 1980
Hence the need for a “rectification movement” to overcome the anti-Soviet views in the “M-L” milieu, to bring the popular front back into kilter...with the Moscow camp.
So part of the polymorphous Trend is a Soviet Union Study Project, whose first publication is a new pamphlet. The Myth of Capitalism Reborn: A Marxist Critique of Theories of Capitalist Restoration in the USSR, by Michael Goldfield and Melvin Rothenberg. Line of March praises this “break-through theoretical work” whose political significance “can hardly be overstated,” since it refutes “the two main theories advanced on behalf of the restoration thesis,” those of Martin Nicolaus and Charles Bettelheim. This is sheer political dishonesty. You wouldn’t know it from LOM but Nicolaus’ attempt to prove Russia capitalist was first trumpeted from the pages of the Guardian, which ran it as a 28-part series from February to October 1975. And the associate editor and chief “theoretician” of the then-Maoist Guardian was today’s great rectifier, Irwin Silber (who privately claimed to be “unconvinced” by Nicolaus). Moreover, the first, central refutation of Nicolaus’ and Bettelheim’s “restoration theses” was published by Workers Vanguard in the fall of 1976, later reprinted as the Spartacist pamphlet, Why the USSR Is Not Capitalist, many of whose arguments are repeated in the Trend pamphlet.
Goldfield and Rothenberg do not, however, answer the most basic questions facing revolutionaries. If there is “an enormous growth in bureaucracy” in the USSR, how do you get from there to the communist goal of the withering away of the state? The authors admit that their “break-through” pamphlet leaves out “the international role of the Soviet Union” and that it doesn’t “represent a fully developed line on the Soviet Union.” Concluding that Russia is not capitalist, something the bourgeoisie has known ever since 1917, they fail to say what Russia is. In contrast, Trotsky’s analytical conclusion–that the Soviet Union is a bureaucratically degenerated workers state–and the programmatic consequence, his call for proletarian political revolution to oust the parasitic caste, are a Marxist guide to action. This is, in fact, the only coherent basis for intransigent defense of the degenerated/deformed workers states against imperialism and for communist opposition to both Moscow and Peking Stalinism.
While generally preferring to disappear contemporary Trotskyism, the Silberites are nonetheless forced to concede: “The great-power chauvinism of the Soviet Union (and subsequently China) lent new credence to Trotsky’s long discredited opposition to building socialism in one country” (Line of March, May-June 1980). Long discredited opposition? The credibility (scientific validity) of a theory is the result of its predictive power. So where did this great-power chauvinism come from? As early as 1929, Trotsky predicted that the doctrine of “socialism in one country” would lead to national chauvinism not only within the Russian leadership but throughout the world Communist movement:
If it is at all possible to realize socialism in one country, then one can believe in that theory not only after but also before the conquest of power– It will be the beginning of the disintegration of the Comintern along the lines of social-patriotism. [emphasis in original] – The Third International After Lenin
Unlike the Maoists’ truly discredited “theory” of the restoration of capitalism in Russia, Trotsky’s analysis and program have stood the test of time, explaining as well the Stalin-Tito split, the Sino-Soviet dispute, the China-Vietnam war and the rise of Eurocommunism.
And what about China’s reactionary alliance with U.S. imperialism, which certainly no one in the “Trend” anticipated. Eleven years ago, when Silber & Co. couldn’t praise Mao’s China enough, we wrote.
At the present time, the Vietnam war and the extreme diplomatic and internal difficulties of the Chinese state have forced the Maoists to maintain greater hostility to imperialism and verbally disclaim the USSR’s avowed policy of ’peaceful coexistence’ while themselves peacefully coexisting with Japan. However, we must warn against the growing objective possibility–given the tremendous industrial and military capacity of the Soviet Union–of a U.S. deal with China. Should the imperialists adjust their policies in terms of their long run interests (which would take time, as such factors as U.S. public opinion would have to be readjusted), the Chinese would be as willing as the Russians are at present to build ’Socialism in One Country’ through deals with imperialism at the expense of internationalism. –“Development and Tactics of the Spartacist League” (30 August 1969), Marxist Bulletin No. 9, Part II, 30 August 1969
Only when empirical reality simply overwhelms him does Silber recognize the great-power chauvinism of the Chinese as well as the Russian regimes. Shortsightedness (always a hallmark of Stalinism) is hardly a qualification for revolutionary leadership.
But Silber has focused on a real contradiction: a whole generation educated in the New Left which is hostile to the Soviet Union, partly out of anti-Communism, as we have pointed out before, but also out of revulsion for the sellout Kremlin bureaucrats who starved the Vietnamese revolution of sophisticated weapons to face the U.S. terror bombers; who stood for “peaceful coexistence” while Mao and Castro called for “picking up the gun.” Silber tries to lay claim to Vietnam and Cuba, the popular causes and symbols of struggle of yesteryear. But to bring the ex-’60s radicals to Brezhnev is a big hurdle to cross–this is the job of the “rectification movement” for a new “General Line.” If Silber & Co. are gaining over the Guardian crowd it is because they have a clear line of march down the Moscow road. As for the collectives around the PWOC, they will doubtless remain mired in sub-reformist activism and parochial irrelevance.
It is truly unconscious irony that Line of March takes as its watchword the classic Marxist dictum that “its purpose is not just to understand the world, but to change it.” For the Silberites have nothing to do with changing the world, even in terms of paper program. Their concept of program never goes beyond the vague hope that some element in the Russian or Chinese bureaucracy might “rectify” itself. Sort of a reverse Khrushchev–back to the “good old days” of Stalin and Beria, minus the “errors,” of course. They don’t fight for a communist party to carry out socialist revolution in the capitalist West; they aren’t for a communist party to carry out an anti-bureaucratic political revolution in the Stalinist East. The Silberites, like the Guardian, simply put out a publication, hold forum series, start a few study projects: just a base to pressure the rad/lib milieu. They can “study” forever and it will lead to nothing. They cannot study the history of the Third International without examining the Stalin-Trotsky conflict. And this they seek above all to avoid. A party flows from program, and it is the revolutionary program of Trotskyism they refuse to confront.
Irwin Silber has come full circle, from Bulganin to Brezhnev. It would, however, be too bad if many of those radicals who broke with Chinese Stalinism over its connivance with American imperialism end up tailing the Kremlin betrayers they once rightly despised. The difference between the “Trend” and Trotskyism is the gulf between the communist perspective of a vanguard party leading a conscious working class to power and the non-perspective of finding the most “progressive” of the powers that be. As we stated in the introduction to our pamphlet China’s Alliance with U.S. Imperialism (1976): “It is not enough to dissent from the outright counterrevolutionary acts of Chinese foreign policy. It is not enough to support whatever forces appear to be battling imperialism or domestic reaction at any given moment. The counterrevolutionary policies emanating from Peking and Moscow must be destroyed at their root. And that root is the privileged bureaucracy which ’defends’ collectivized (proletarian) property relations by intriguing with imperialism–in a word, Stalinism It is the historic task of Trotskyism, and no other tendency, to lead the working class to the overthrow of the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracies and place the enormous resources of the Sino-Soviet states totally in the service of world revolution.”