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On 06.04.2013 13:23, Angelus Novus wrote:
Lou wrote:
I regard CLR James as the greatest Marxist thinker to come out of the
Trotskyist movement after Trotsky's death.
And James' close comrade Marty Glaberman was precisely one of those "City College
boys" that turbulo refers to.
Marty spent decades working in a Detroit auto factory, and then went on to
write (IMHO) the most insightful analysis of the shop-floor activity of the
American working class.
So I guess those "City College boys" were good for something,
Further to this unspeakable debate about the proletarian credentials of
those that supported Shachtman and those that supported Cannon in the
1940 split. To describe the class origins of the members who had been
students at CCNY in the 1930s as petty bourgeois as distinct from those
members elsewhere is stretching things a bit.
If I recall CCNY was the only institution of higher education that was
open for the vast majority of young people of working class and
immigrant backgrounds. It was actually known as the "college of the
proletariat", such was its reputation.
I fail to see why former CCNY students should be regarded as petty
bourgeois while other college boys who supported Cannon weren't.
Examples of the latter were Joseph Hansen and Harry Braverman - until
the latter proved how petty bourgeois he was by joining Bert Cochrane. I
even remember reading somewhere that Farrell Dobbs had spent a few terms
at college - and judging by the line of the CLA in the early 1930s that
made him part of a counter-revolutionary mass - cf. A.M. Glotzer:
Student Youth and the Workers Movement, The Militant, 1 June 1931
<http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/glotzer/1931/06/students.htm>
- of course some might argue that Glotzer was already tainted because,
after all, 9 years later he joined Shachtman & Co.
This is of course nonsense - but it it the level at which a lot of the
arguments about "petty bourgeois" oppositions have been posed since the
1940 split down to the recent past! For some "orthodox" Trotskyists all
the articles in "In Defence of Marxism" have taken on the status of Holy
Writ. However, some of the articles weren't exactly Trotsky's finest.
Particularyl the articles about the "petty bourgeois opposition". It
wasn't a good argument then and it's absolute bullshit today!
During the the war the oh so proletarian SWP was a theoretical desert -
anybody who was in any way creative ended up being driven out of the
movement - do we need to list them: Morrow, Goldman, Heijenoort, James
on more than one occasion and numerous others. After the way they were
treated it's no great surprise that many of them turned away from
revolutionary politics. The Workers Party, on the other hand, creatively
grappled with the new issues as they came up - they weren't always right
but they did at least try. That they eventually burned out was as much a
result of the objective conditions as it was of theoretical weakness on
their part or their innate "petty bourgeoisness".
Lazy argumentation like this makes me very angry and is a travesty of
Marxism! If you disagree with somebody, present counter-arguments! Don't
blame your differences on the fact that you're a crystal pure
proletarian and your opponent is an incurable petty bourgeois.
Einde O'Callaghan
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