RECLAIMING THE AMERICAN RIGHT

ISI Books

Contents

Chapter One

In a lifetime of political writing, James Burnham [showed] only one fleeting bit of positive interest in individual liberty; and that was a call in National Review for the legalization of firecrackers! -Murray N. Rothbard, The Betrayal of the American Right, 1970

The intellectual crisis of socialism preceded the political and military collapse of the socialist bloc by more than fifty years. Ever since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Left has suffered numerous setbacks-the Moscow Trials, the Hungarian revolt, the revelations of Stalin's crimes-each one setting off a wave of defectors. Over the years, the intellectuals among them have coalesced into a potent ideological force. What characterizes this otherwise diverse fraternity is that, for the most part, they started out in the Third International and wound up in the camp of Ronald Reagan via the Fourth-the Fourth International, that is, stillborn rival to Stalin's Comintern, founded by Leon Trotsky after his expulsion from the Soviet Union. Trotsky's schismatic sect never achieved a mass following and went into decline after his assassination, in 1940, by a Stalinist agent. For a brief moment during the thirties, however, Trotskyism was a fad that swept through the radical intelligentsia of Manhattan and environs and corralled quite a few.

By taking refuge in the doctrines of Trotsky, who taught that the Russian party had been taken over by a "bureaucratic caste," these leftist intellectuals could hold on to their core beliefs even as the Moscow trials were going on. The Revolution, said Trotsky, had been betrayed, and the only thing left to do was to build a new International, reclaim the banner of authentic communism, and overthrow the bureaucrats so that true socialism could be unleashed. The Trotskyites made a great show of denouncing the Stalinist terror, rightly claiming that hundreds of thousands went into Stalin's prisons and never came out. What they neglected to say was that Trotsky's policy, had he won, would have been no less bloodthirsty. The only difference was that he would have chosen different victims, and, perhaps, executed them at a more leisurely pace.

Those who still retained their faith in socialism, but were profoundly affected by the sight of the purges and the show trials, were naturally attracted to the Trotskyist movement. Trotsky's problem, however, was that while he insisted on the distinction between anti-Stalinism and anti-Sovietism, in practice these two were often blurred. In an important sense, the Fourth International became a kind of halfway house between communism and reconciliation with bourgeois society. A whole bevy of intellectuals in retreat from communism parked themselves in the Trotskyist organization for some months or years at a time. Long after abandoning Marxism and Socialism, these types retained their Stalinophobia. Their fixation intensified with the years, the one constant encompassing careers that started out in the Trotskyist youth group and ended up in the conservative movement.

Intellectual defectors from communism have always played a key role in the modern conservative movement. Up until the Great Revolution of 1989, there was always a spot on the right-wing lecture circuit for ex-Communists, who enthralled conservative audiences with lurid tales of internal subversion directed by Kremlin masterminds. Benjamin Gitlow, a top leader of the Communist Party from its founding, was one of the first to go that route, and was followed by many others, a great number of whom eventually found themselves on the staff of the National Review. Whittaker Chambers was one; Frank S. Meyer, the conservative polemicist and theoretician of "fusionism," was another. Freda Utley and Eugene Lyons, both ex-Communists, were also on the NR staff at its birth, along with ex-leftists Max Eastman and Ralph de Toledano. These, then, were the precursors of today's neoconservatives, who made careers out of destroying what they had once fought to build, and whose lifelong obsession colored the modern conservative movement in its formative years.

But there are some striking differences, as well as obvious similarities, between these disparate figures. The ex-Stalinists, who came directly into the anticommunist movement from the Kremlin-loyal Communist Party, such as Frank S. Meyer, for the most part became genuine conservatives, even if of an idiosyncratic sort. Meyer, once a top Communist official, was the progenitor of the old "fusionist" school of conservative thought, which sought to fuse the best features of conservatism and libertarianism.

On the other hand, the great majority of those who came in from the anti-Stalinist Left, usually one sort of Trotskyist or another, were an altogether different breed. They retained more of their old allegiances and stubbornly resisted rejecting the central moral and political premises of collectivism. The conversion of the ex-Trotskyist intellectuals to the conservative cause was-with a single important exception-a long process extended over many years. Instead of jumping over to the other side of the political spectrum, this group of mostly New York-based intellectuals-such as Max Shachtman, who was one of the three original founders of the American Trotskyist movement-slowly worked themselves over from the Far Left, sidling up to the Social Democracy, then worming their way into the Democratic Party. By the time the sixties came around, Shachtman was supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Vietnam War. His ex-comrades on the left contemptuously dismissed him as a "State Department socialist," but his commitment to socialism never truly dimmed, although it was radically modified.

The Trotskyist Phase

The key to understanding the motive power behind the Long March of the neoconservatives from one end of the political spectrum to the other is to be found in an obscure but pivotal event. On September 5, 1939, at a meeting of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party, the Trotskyist Party in the U.S., James Burnham and Max Shachtman began a factional struggle against Trotsky and the party leadership that was to end, less than a year later, in a split. This mini-event was set off by a big event, namely, the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the opening shots of World War II.

One the eve of the war, the American Trotskyists, considered somewhat fashionable up until that point, suddenly found themselves in a difficult position. Although they had always enjoyed the advantages of being considered "idealists," Communists who nevertheless could afford the luxury of denouncing the crimes of Stalin, there was a hitch with the Hitler-Stalin Pact: Trotsky stubbornly insisted that the Soviet Union must be defended, "against the Stalinists and in spite of the Stalinists."

As the Soviets, in league with the Nazis, attacked Poland, Finland, and gobbled up the Baltic states, being a Trotskyist was no longer so attractive. The intellectuals recruited in bulk at the height of the Moscow Trials defected in droves. Most notable and visible of these was James Burnham, a top Trotskyist leader and theoretician, who taught philosophy at New York University and was to become one of the most influential figures of the American Right, the great-grandfather of today's neoconservatives.

When Burnham, as a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee, rose to challenge Trotsky, he set off a factional explosion, the momentum of which eventually hurled him and his circle to the other end of the political spectrum. From Trotskyism to Reaganism is a long way to travel; the "Big Bang" that sent them on their way was World War II. "It is impossible to regard the Soviet Union as a workers' state in any sense whatever," declared Burnham at that fateful meeting. "Soviet intervention [in World Wat II] will be wholly subordinated to the general imperialist character of the conflict as a whole and will be in no sense a defense of the remains of the Soviet economy."

The orthodox Trotskyists, led by James P. Cannon and energetically supported by Trotsky, argued that the Fourth International had always defended the USSR against the threat of capitalist restoration, and they saw no reason to change course. The Soviet Union, though degenerated, was still a "workers' state": the "gains of October," though besmirched and endangered by the Stalinists, were still essentially intact and had to be defended.

Burnham had come into the Trotskyist movement via A. J. Muste's American Workers Party, which fused with the Trotskyist organization (then known as the Communist League of America) in December of 1934. As a leader of the AWP, Burnham was co-opted onto the National Committee of the new organization and absorbed into the Trotskyist movement. As a leading figure in the anti-Stalinist left, a respected intellectual who often graced the pages of Partisan Review, the avant-garde literary journal of modernist Marxista, Burnham was an important acquisition for the Trotskyists.

He was a loyal member of the Fourth International from 1934 until the winter of 1939-40, and in that time he rose to occupy an important place, especially in the New York organization. For live years, he went along with the twists and turns of the Trotskyist leadership, entering the Socialist Party in 1936, when the Trots conducted a factional "raid" on the party of Norman Thomas. Burnham then dutifully joined the SWP when it reconstituted under its own banner in 1937. He was willing to play ball with the Socialist Workers Party as long as it looked like Trotskvism might be the coming thing; that is, until the outbreak of World War II.

The irony is that, less than a year before, Burnham and Shachtman had coauthored an attack on former fellow-traveling intellectuals such as Sidney Hook, Eugene Lyons, and Max Eastman for the party theoretical magazine, New International, entitled "Intellectuals in Retreat," and foretelling their own apostasy with preternatural accuracy. The article ridiculed what it called the "League of Abandoned Hopes" as hopelessly flighty petit-bourgeois intellectuals, fly-by-night operators who had abandoned the USSR in its darkest hour. In describing the Eastman-Lyons-Hook pattern, they foreshadowed their own. At first, the apostates denied their renegading by bringing up essentially peripheral arguments, such as the validity of dialectical materialism and abstract quibbles about "democracy" and "freedom"-which, of course, the authors dismissed out of hand. But all of this is irrelevant, said Burnham and Shachtman during their orthodox phase, because what it really came down to was the Soviet Union, the "Russian question." The "main intellectual disease from which these intellectuals suffer may be called Stalinophobia, or vulgar anti-Stalinism," they wrote. This affliction was generated "by the universal revulsion against Stalin's macabre system of frame-ups and purges. And the result has been less a product of cold social analysis than of mental shock; where there is analysis, it is moral rather than scientific and political."

Nine months later came the shock of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The two main currents of Socialism, National Socialism and International communism, merged into a military and political alliance, and suddenly the macabre specter of "Communazism" was looming over the rubble that was Europe. Under the impact of these events, Burnham and Shachtman took out a joint membership in what they had once mockingly referred to as the "League of Abandoned Hopes," with Burnham as chief theoretician and Shachtman as his attorney and chief factotum. They refused to defend the Soviet Union in this war or any other because, they said, it had degenerated into a phenomenon that had become indistinguishable from Hitlerism-into a new form of class society which they called "bureaucratic collectivism," competing with capitalista for control of the world.

As the Red Army rolled into Poland, crushed the Baltics, and attacked neutral Finland, it was obvious to the Burnham-Shachtman group-about 40 percent of the SWP membership, including most of the intellectuals and virtually all of the youth-that the military alliance of the two totalitarian powers was more than just an alliance of convenience. A certain ideological affinity was at work here, and events gave new impetus to this perspective.

Up until the U.S. entry into the war, this view of the Soviet Union in left-wing circles had been confined to a few "ultra-lefts," the anarchosyndicalists, the followers of the German theorist Karl Korsch, and the Italian Bordigists, who contended that the Soviet Union had reverted to capitalista. This theory had only a small following, and understandably so. As Stalin "liquidated" the kulaks and all vestiges of private property and liberalism, it was difficult to argue that capitalista was being reborn. However, the Shachtman-Burnham faction had come up with a new variation of the old "ultra-left" argument, which combined the Trotskyist theory of the Kremlin oligarchy as a caste of Stalinist Brahmins with Burnham's innovation: the bureaucracy, he claimed, represented a new class based not on private property but on collectivized property forms.

This challenge to party orthodoxy upset the orthodox Trotskvists and outraged Trotsky himself, who was sitting in his fortified compound in Coyoacn, Mexico, embattled and nearing the end of his long struggle to build the phantom "Fourth International." There had already been a few attempts on the old revolutionary's life, and soon a Stalinist agent provocateur would succeed where the others had failed. It was the last battle of Trotsky's life, and be attacked Burnham as if he knew it. In several open letters the old revolutionary declared his contempt for the bourgeois professor, who dared question the mystic dogma of dialectical materialism. "Educated witch-doctor" was among the more temperate epithets hurled from Coyoacn.

Nor did Burnham restrain himself. His answer to the founder of the Red Army, "Science and Style," marked his break with the Marxist movement. In this article, he exhibited all of the symptoms of the "disease" he had warned readers of the party theoretical magazine against: disbelief in the dialectic and a "Stalinophobia" that equated the Soviet regime with Hitler's Germany. Although at the time he protested that "[i]t is false that we reject Marxian sociology," soon he would reject Marxism completely.

The Theory of the Managerial Revolution

A mere three months after penning "Science and Style," having just spoken from the platform of the new party he had helped to organize with Shachtman, Burnham dropped off his letter of resignation with the secretary at the Workers Party headquarters. "The faction fight in the Socialist Workers Party, its conclusion, and the recent formation of the Workers Party have been in my own case the unavoidable occasion for the review of my own theoretical and political beliefs," he wrote. "This review has shown me that by no stretching of terminology can I any longer regard myself, or permit others to regard me, as a Marxist." Marxism could no longer contain the limits of Burnham's evolving worldview. "Not only do I believe it is meaningless to say that 'socialism is inevitable' and false that socialism is 'the only alternative to capitalism'; I consider that on the basis of the evidence now available to us a new form of exploitive society (what I call 'managerial society') is not only possible as an alternative to capitalism but is a more probable outcome of the present period than socialism."

This is the origin of the theme and title of Burnham's famous book, The Managerial Revolution (1941), in which be propounded his view that a new form of class society, spearheaded by a new elite, was virtually unstoppable. According to Burnham, the new ruling elite is made up of administrators, technicians, scientists, bureaucrats, and the myriad middlemen who have taken the means of production out of the hands of the capitalists. This bloodless coup occurred by virtue of the fact that the managers administer and therefore have come to control the production process. "In the earlier days of capitalism," we are told, "the typical capitalist, the ideal of ideologists before and after Adam Smith, was himself his own manager so far as there were managerial functions." But all this ended by "the growth of large-scale public corporations along with the technological development of modern industry," which has "virtually wiped such types of enterprise out of the important sections of the economy," except for marginal "'small businesses' which are trivial in their historical influence."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from RECLAIMING THE AMERICAN RIGHTby Justin Raimondo George W. Carey Copyright © 2008 by ISI Books. Excerpted by permission.
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