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On 7/18/15 4:10 PM, Andrew Pollack via Marxism wrote:
And that's because, after all (hold onto your hat, Louis), Synapsismos is a PETTY BOURGEOIS trend in the workers' movement.
Another key element of Trotskyist sectarianism is its tendency to turn every serious political fight into a conflict between worker and petty-bourgeoisie. Every challenge to party orthodoxy, unless the party leader himself mounts it, represents the influence of alien class influences into the proletarian vanguard. Every Trotskyist party in history has suffered from this crude sociological reductionism, but the American Trotskyists were the unchallenged masters of it.
Soon after the split from the SP and the formation of the Socialist Workers Party, a fight broke out in the party over the character of the Soviet Union. Max Shachtman, Martin Abern and James Burnham led one faction based primarily in New York. It stated that the Soviet Union was no longer a worker's state and it saw the economic system there as being in no way superior to capitalism. This opposition also seemed to be less willing to oppose US entry into WWII than the Cannon group, which stood on Zimmerwald "defeatist" orthodoxy.
Shachtman and Abern were full-time party workers with backgrounds similar to Cannon's. Burnham was a horse of a different color. He was an NYU philosophy professor who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He reputedly would show up at party meetings in top hat and tails, since he was often on the way to the opera.
Burnham became the paradigm of the whole opposition, despite the fact that Shachtman and Abern's family backgrounds were identical to Cannon's. Cannon and Trotsky tarred the whole opposition with the petty-bourgeois brush. They stated that the workers would resist war while the petty-bourgeois would welcome it. It was the immense pressure of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia outside the SWP that served as a source for these alien class influences. Burnham was the "Typhoid Mary" of these petty-bourgeois germs.
However, it is simply wrong to set up a dichotomy between some kind of intrinsically proletarian opposition to imperialist war and petty-bourgeois acceptance of it. The workers have shown themselves just as capable of bending to imperialist war propaganda as events surrounding the Gulf War show. The primarily petty-bourgeois based antiwar movement helped the Vietnamese achieve victory. It was not coal miners or steel workers who provided the shock-troops for the Central America solidarity movement of the 1980's. It was lawyers, doctors, computer programmers, Maryknoll nuns, and aspiring circus clowns like the martyred Ben Linder who did.
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