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{ "content": "Cochran and the other editors of the American Socialist were reared in the Leninist school and played a considerable role in building the Socialist Workers party and defending its basic principles. They were an integral part of the Trotskyist cadre shaped in hard struggles such as the one against the Sh...
{ "content": "A section of the Cochran group was composed of trade unionists who had experienced in their own way some wear and tear. Beginning as militants devoted to the socialist cause, these unionists had become isolated and softened with prosperity until they came to feel that nothing “real” or tangible was left...
{ "content": "The major accomplishment, according to Braverman, in addition to the launching of the American Socialist was “the decision not to conduct a polemic with the SWP.”This curious accomplishment meant a refusal to explain to militant workers, or anyone else, why they left the SWP, what the issues in dispute ...
{ "content": "All this is dismissed as simply outward trappings, inner-group jargon, family circle memories and old grudges lingering from ancient factional squabbles! But in the regroupment test this absence of theory proved fatal. On the other hand the doctrines, methods and theory to which the SWP adhered gave ano...
{ "content": "Weiss Archive   |   Trotskyist Writers Index   |   ETOL Main PageMurry WeissTwo Concepts of Socialist UnityWhat Basis for Regroupment?(Winter 1957)From International Socialist Review, Vol. 28 No. 1, Winter 1957, pp. 3–11.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On...
{ "content": "Radical workers fighting for a socialist society are divided by program. The basic dividing line is class struggle versus class collaboration, i.e., revolutionary Marxism versus reformism. The two major proponents of class collaboration are Stalinism and Social Democracy. For all the difference between ...
{ "content": "“The present situation in our opinion, underlines the urgency of the outlook put forward by Eugene Dennis at the National Committee meeting of the Communist Party of a new ‘mass party of socialism in our country’ and the need to ‘create conditions for such a necessary and historic development.’ We belie...
{ "content": "“There are many differences among forces on the Left, serious and important. In the first place, we need to discuss these differences with each other, argue things out; we must also strive to work together and act together on those things about which we Can agree, and in these discussions together, work...
{ "content": "By the beginning of September, 1956 the “discussion as to advisability” had already led to outright opposition to such activities. At the Sept. 1-2 meeting of the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party it was reported that the Los Angeles Local was scheduling a debate with the Communist Par...
{ "content": "In sum, the SP-SDF merger has the following political basis: acceptance of the foreign policy of the State Department socialists; support of the labor bureaucracy’s Democratic Party politics; support of the Second International program and organization including all “socialists in power” and, therefore,...
{ "content": "“I have also been relieved following recent talks with Max Shachtman since it seems the ISL (Independent Socialist League) looks upon unity with the SDF as a first step toward a re-built socialist movement under the banner of the Socialist Party and will therefore refrain from that sectarian crossfire I...
{ "content": "There are two interconnected premises for Shachtman’s position and we believe both must be rejected if a revolutionary socialist regroupment is to be achieved. Shachtman holds thatSocial Democracy is progressive in relation to the present stage of development of the American working class; we should, th...
{ "content": "Weiss Archive   |   Trotskyist Writers Index   |   ETOL Main PageMurry Weiss and Bert DeckMoscow and the Chinese Revolution(Spring 1962)From International Socialist Review, Vol.23 No.2, Spring 1962, pp.40-45.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)...
{ "content": "The MR editors attempt an explanation of the divergences. More accurately, they seek the fundamental basis for the Chinese views. But they do not propose to uncover the social, historical and economic roots of the Russian position since this position is believed to be realistic and flexible and therefor...
{ "content": "The early years (1925-27) were marked by the growth of a vast democratic revolution led by the Chinese bourgeoisie, its party, the Kuomintang, and its leading figure – General Chiang Kai-shek. The Chinese proletariat led by the Communist Party was moving on the road of Bolshevism modeled on the October ...
{ "content": "The international communist vanguard originated in the Russian Bolshevik cadre. The great authority won by the Bolsheviks in their victory of 1917 permitted them to become the nucleus of a world organization of a new type. THE subsequent degeneration of the Russian Communist Party under Stalin strangled...
{ "content": "“In general, it is only a change in the objective situation itself that undermines a dogmatic leftist position and leads to its abandonment. And this we believe will turn out to be true in the case of China, as it has in other cases in the past.”They, then, indicate the nature of the predicted change in...
{ "content": " MIA: History: ETOL: Document: Education for Socialist Bulletin: Struggles Against Fascism at the End of World War II 1. Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line—Socialist Workers Party [US] Education for Socialist Bulletins— Struggles Against Fascism at the End of World War II 1. Section Two: Struggles Agai...
{ "content": "The line of the campaign was to mobilize the organized forces of the working class for a struggle against Smith. We reasoned: Smith is here to build a mass movement; to win financial support from influential capitalists; to organize combat groups; to unite all reactionary forces under a single banner; t...
{ "content": "The comrades of the Section Executive Committee were fully aware of the pressure the Shachtmanites would attempt to exert on the party when we adopted our policy. If we had considered the question from the point of view of factional pluses and minuses, of “getting the best” of the Shachtmanites in a pet...
{ "content": "Although the full effectiveness of our resolutions campaign cannot be measured by the list of unions in which we passed resolutions, the score is nevertheless impressive. In all cases the unions forwarded the resolutions to other unions with a “snowballing” effect. Through the direct initiative of the p...
{ "content": "At both meetings Smith made great capital out of the feeble showing of the Shachtmanites. “We are thousands and they are 25 or 50 at the most, and they talk of breaking up our meeting. If we went out and said ‘boo’ they’d run. Even the left-wing CIO is not represented out there.” In general, he employed...
{ "content": "The Tuesday meeting proved to be an extremely representative gathering of the trade unions, racial minority organizations, religious and Hollywood groups. A sprinkling of bourgeois politicians decorated the occasion with the typical Stalinist attempt to distort a united front into a peoples’ front masqu...
{ "content": "There were approximately 400 present at the Tuesday meeting. The night before at the SEC we had elaborated a three-point policy to be following by the party caucus. (1) Continue the united front after the Friday meeting as an organ of struggle against fascism; (2) For a preponderance of representative...
{ "content": "We distributed our leaflet in over 8,000 copies. The four proposals are the pivotal points around which we propose to agitate in the shops and the unions during the coming period. The slogans for antifascist shop committees we regard as extremely potent in possibilities. There, the initiative will more ...
{ "content": "Our tactic was fully confirmed by the course of events. The objective implications of Smith’s activity were so ominous in the setting of the present economic and political situation, that the trade union officials, the Stalinists, the Negro and Jewish leaders could not fail to be alarmed. Our task was t...
{ "content": "Weiss Archive   |   Trotskyist Writers Index   |   ETOL Main PageMurry WeissThree Radical Parties and the 1960 Elections(Summer 1960)From International Socialist Review, Vol.21 No.3, Summer 1960, pp.67-69, 85.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL...
{ "content": "This is all that the “peace forces” in the Democratic party have done. Yet the Communist party is enthralled once more with Stevenson. A headline in the May 29 Worker reads: “Stevenson’s Blast on Ike Gains Wide Support.” And on page four of the Midwest Edition: “Stevenson Urges Change in US Foreign Poli...
{ "content": "It is, however, this very premise of the cold war that is now beginning to be questioned by the American people and particularly by the new generation of youth. The stream of lies and brazen provocations emanating from Washington during the recent crisis has shaken large sections of the population from ...
{ "content": "Weiss Archive   |   Trotskyist Writers Index   |   ETOL Main PageMurry WeissThe Vindication Of TrotskyismKhrushchev’s Report on Stalin’s Crimes(Summer 1956)From International Socialist Review, Vol.27 No.4, Summer 1956, pp.79-83.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trots...
{ "content": "There are many things that Khrushchev did not reveal in his report. The atrocities against the leaders of Jewish culture were not mentioned. Neither was Stalin’s international murder-machine. Nor was anything said on how this machine was used in Spain, how it was used to liquidate Trotsky’s secretaries,...
{ "content": "If the Soviet Union has indeed entered the domain of socialism, then, how explain the fact that instead of witnessing the withering away of the functions of the state, it experienced, during the last three decades, the enormous growth of an oppressive state apparatus that maintained its rule by perpetra...
{ "content": "Actually, it was the Trotskyist opposition that as early as 1923 proposed that the Soviet Union embark on a central industrial plan and that a struggle be opened to collectivize agriculture as a weapon against the growing kulak (capitalist) element in the countryside. This proposal was hooted down deris...
{ "content": "This contradiction, Trotskyism taught, manifested itself in the struggle between the Soviet working class and the dictatorship of the bureaucratic caste. The fate of the struggle between the workers and the bureaucracy was tied to the fate of the world-wide struggle of classes. Stalinism, the politics o...
{ "content": "Weiss Archive   |   Trotskyist Writers Index   |   ETOL Main PageMurry WeissThe Fracturing of the Monolith(Spring 1961)From International Socialist Review, Vol.22 No.2, Spring 1961, pp.44-47, 54.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). Despite the...
{ "content": "The foregoing examples disclose what the Kremlin’s “peaceful coexistence” policy looks like in practice. But Stalin’s hopes for an indefinite preservation of the status quo – one which would allow the privilege-seeking Soviet bureaucracy to rule unhampered at home – was rudely shattered by the course of...
{ "content": "The next big open break appeared in June 1953, a few months after Stalin’s death. Two million East German workers organized a general strike for economic improvements and democratic rights. The presence of 300,000 Kremlin troops did not deter them. The German Communist party was temporarily shattered by...
{ "content": "Although the Soviet CP leadership and the Chinese CP leadership forego naming one another in their denunciations of “dogmatism” and “revisionism,” and although they have joined in common resolutions, their dispute is known to be bitter and deep-seated. And if Moscow now elevates “peaceful coexistence” t...
{ "content": "Murry Weiss Archive   |   Trotskyist Writers Index   |   ETOL Main PageMurray WeissCP-Frankensteen Forces ProposeAid to FBI Hounding of Unions(22 November 1941)From The Militant, Vol. V No. 48, 29 November 1941, p. 2.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Li...
{ "content": "D. D. KosambiExasperating EssaysOn The Trial of SokratesIn the year 399 B.C, an Athenian dikastery, consisting of a panel of 500 citizens, sentenced to death an aged compatriot named Sokrates. Two accounts of the case have come down to us, both by pupils and admirers of the accused: Plato and Xenophon. ...
{ "content": "The philosopher was aged seventy at the time of his trial, and had led an exemplary public life except for his unfortunate habit of \"perverting youth\". He began life as sculptor, but left the field, to Pheidias and others of that rank, to betake himself to an incessant examination of the foundations o...
{ "content": "To mention just one other name, familiar to readers of the Dialogues, we take Nikias, the successor to Perikles. He was responsible for the most disastrous venture in the whole course of the Peloponnesian war: the Sicilian expedition. He lost his own life in it, being put to death by the Spartans when t...
{ "content": "D. D. KosambiExasperating EssaysThe Kanpur RoadHe sat there in his doorway like some great idol. A sad, benign smile-a smile of pleasure, not necessity-on that strong brown face heightened the impression. But his stiff white beard, parted and curled away from the middle, wide shoulders that bore their y...
{ "content": "I repassed this scene of a childhood memory in 1938 and thought it symbolic that the Sardar never did guide me to my destination. The way I had travelled through the intervening years would never have been his way. My struggles, too, had been in many lands, but chiefly in classrooms, laboratories, facto...
{ "content": "D. D. KosambiExasperating EssaysINTRODUCTIONOccasional letters show that these essays (and the short story) still continue to attract some readers. Re-publication has been undertaken at their request in the hope that the demand is not restricted to those who voiced it. At any rate, the journals of the f...
{ "content": "answer. The OM Marxism has too often consisted of theological emphasis on the inviolable sanctity of the current party line, or irrelevant quotations from the classics. Marxism cannot, even on the grounds of political expediency or party solidarity, be reduced to a rigid formalism like mathematics. Nor ...
{ "content": "D. D. KosambiExasperating EssaysThe Bourgeoisie Comes of Age in India The long-awaited publication of Jawaharlal Nehru's book on India [Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, (Calcutta, 1946)], past and present, has in many ways justified the great hopes raised by the author's distinguished record in...
{ "content": "Far more serious to the present reviewer is the absence of the question \"why.\" No attempt at history can be regarded as mature which does not, within the framework of the author's ideology, make some attempt at analysis. For the ancient period we find considerable difficulty in explaining certain fact...
{ "content": "Not only has Nehru neglected to take note of this accumulation, but he has also been unable to grasp just what this quantitative change has done qualitatively to the character of the- Indian middle class, a class which may now be said to be firmly, in the saddle. A few drops from the banquet (generally ...
{ "content": "In dealing with the stirring events of August, 1942 (p. 579f.), Nehru has given the parliamentary side of the question in a straightforward manner. The external observer, however, may be struck by one noteworthy point which has not even been visualized in the book. When the All India Congress Committee ...
{ "content": "The OM thesis at this time was that the British would never transfer power to the Indian National Congress. The OM solution was that the Hindus and the Muslims, somehow equated to the Congress and the Muslim League, should unite to throw out the foreign imperialists. The question of the class structure ...
{ "content": "D. D. KosambiExasperating EssaysImperialism and PeaceScience and FreedomIn 1949, I saw that American scientists and intellectuals were greatly worried about the question of scientific freedom, meaning thereby freedom for the scientist to do what he liked while being paid by big business, war departments...
{ "content": "The other statements may also be briefly illustrated. Two painters painting the same scene will produce substantially different pictures; two people clicking the shutter of the same camera pointed at the same object will not. The fruits of ritual depend upon the rank of the celebrant, and only the king,...
{ "content": "One of the major contributions of science is that it separates theory from technique, specifically from productive technique. If you look at our village workmen, you find them still producing excellent work with quite inferior tools simply because the workman masters the individual tool, makes it an ext...
{ "content": "Science is not mere accumulation of experimental data. No experiment is great unless it settles some disputed theory; no theory is a striking advance unless it explains puzzling experimental data, or forecasts the results of unperformed expefiments. But one has only to look at the way the scientific cen...
{ "content": "But occasionally, as with Priestley, the conflict between the scientist and the class that dominates society becomes too great for the individual and for his discoveries to gain proper recognition. This is not a characteristic merely of the bourgeois period. During the middle ages, we find Europeans tur...
{ "content": "If this be admitted, we are near the end of the inquiry. The reason why the scientist in a capitalist society today feels hemmed in and confined is that the class he serves fears the consequences of change such as has already taken place over a great part of the world's surface. The question of the desi...
{ "content": "D. D. KosambiExasperating EssaysThe Quality Of Renunciation In Bhartrihari's PoetryIEven the comprehensive work of Winternitz (Geschichte d. lndischen Literatur III, 137-145) gives us next to no definite information about the person of Bhartrihari, one of the greatest of all Indian poets and the first t...
{ "content": "Unfortunately, our hero does not always show the same fol1rsquare stance to the blows of fortune as does Dante ( \"Iosto ben tetragono ai colpi della fortuna\"). Both speak of the misery of enforced voyages in strange places, the bitter taste of a stranger's bread (Tu proverai si come sa di sale/lo pane...
{ "content": "But surely the comparison with an European poet of so recent a date is hardly fair to Bhartrihari, because of the difference in the means of production of their respective environments. So let us first look at the poetry of Sadi, also an oriental poet. one who lived in a world whose means of production ...
{ "content": "\"The earth an attractive bed, his arm an ample pillow, the sky a canopy, the breeze a serviceable fan, the moon for a bright lamp and detachment his mistress, the peaceful ash-besmeared ascetic sleeps as happy as any king\". That is, our ascetic at bed- time fairly wallows in all the pleasures of the w...
{ "content": "are among the fine gifts of good fortune! There is no overspiced Hellenistic aberration here, and certainly no Freudian repression of the libido; not even Archilochus could have been more frank and unashamed as to his weaknesses. One can only pity the miserable pedagogue who, even in the strongly anaest...
{ "content": "Bhartrihari, then, is the poet of his class; a class that had not fulfilled its function, and a poet who, try as he might, could not but lay bare the class yearnings and weaknesses. This at once explains his success and his failure. But he is not a poet of the people. The Indian poets who made a real an...
{ "content": "The greatness of an author does not lie in mere handling of words. Indeed, the finest craftsmanship of such manipula- tion is impossible without the expression of a new class basis. This does not mean that every writer who seeks enduring fame must express only the glory of the dictatorship of the prolet...
{ "content": "D. D. KosambiExasperating EssaysImperialism and PeaceWe do not have, today, the peace yearned for by millions all over the world. In Korea we see a full-scale modern war waged relentlessly against an entire nation whose one wish, for centuries, has been unity, with independence from foreign aggression. ...
{ "content": "The crooked roots of imperialism lie deep in the need for profits and ever more profits- for the benefit of a few monopolists. The \"American way of life\" did not solve the world problem of the great depression of 1929-33. In the United States this was solved by World War II. But only for a time. Korea...
{ "content": "But there is one important difference between that period and the present. There were then large powers such as the British Empire and the United States which could assume a position of formal neutrality while fascism was being built up as a military and political counterpoise to Communism. Even this fo...
{ "content": "D. D. KosambiExasperating EssaysThe Function of Leaders in a Mass MovementTo what extent do \"mere agitators\" determine the course of a revolution? Would it be possible to suppress all such upheavals by the judicious and timely action of a few people? Or is a change of nature inevitably the inner contr...
{ "content": "Finally, we have seen cases of leadership by dispersion as well as leadership that concentrates social forces. This often happens when a class not in power gains its predominance by uniting with a lower class which it must normally exploit. In that case, methods have to be devised for the dissipation of...
{ "content": "D. D. KosambiExasperating EssaysThe Decline of Buddhism in IndiaThe Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Chuang (630 A.D.) saw images that had sunk into the damp Indian soil, and was told local prophecies to the effect that the religion of the Teacher would vanish completely when the image had sunk out of sight altoge...
{ "content": "That the universal monarchy and the religion of the universal society were parallel is proved by the rise of both in Magadha, at about the same time. Not only Buddhism, but numerous other contemporary Magadhan sects preached about the same thing: the Jains, Ajivikas, and others all denied the validity o...
{ "content": "D. D. KosambiExasperating EssaysOn The Revolution In ChinaNo honest and reasonably alert visitor to China can fail to be impressed by the remarkable changes in the country and the people. The material advances shown by the new system since so recent a year as 1952 leap to the eye. New factories, mines, ...
{ "content": "Ultra-Marxists find that the Chinese revolution had a peasant basis and leadership and not a proletarian; hence, they conclude that the revolution cannot be socialist, or communist. A view that need not be discussed seriously is that it is just one of the periodic upheavals which begin every three centu...
{ "content": "The Paris Commune was lost precisely because the peasantry was not drawn into the struggle on the side of the workers. The Russian revolution was completed by the triple alliance of workers, soldiers and peasants. The fundamental contradiction between (the essentially co-operative) modern factory produc...
{ "content": "The essential point is very simple. No revolution (as defined above) today in a backward country has any chance of effectiveness, or even of survival, unless it is planned and carried out as a socialist revolution. Industrialisation is not a prerequisite of socialism in such countries, as so many theori...
{ "content": "The Chinese method had one advantage over all others, including the Russian, in that the confidence of the food producers, with accurate knowledge and full control of the food supply, were assured from the start over an increasingly larger area. The arts of genuine persuasion were mastered by the techni...
{ "content": "D. D. KosambiExasperating EssaysOn The Class Structure of IndiaA hundred years ago, Karl Marx was a regular correspondent of the New York Tribune, one of the direct ancestors of today's New York Herald-Tribune. Among his communications was one, published on August 8, 1853, entitled \"The Future Results ...
{ "content": "How thoroughly British rule undermined Indian feudalism has been dramatically demonstrated by events of recent years. The police action undertaken in 1948 by India's central government against Hyderabad, the largest and most powerful remaining feudal state, was over in two days. Political action in Trav...
{ "content": "Therefore, the fact that the government is the biggest capitalist, the main banker, the greatest employer, and the ultimate refuge or ineffable solace of the bootlicking intelligentsia makes for only a formal, superficial, difference. The main question to ask is: what special class-interest does this go...
{ "content": "In a sense the tragedy of the Indian bourgeoisie is that it came of age too late, at a time when the whole capitalist world was in a state of incurable crisis and when one-third of the globe had already abandoned capitalism forever. In fact, the Five Year Plans mentioned above are self-contradictory in ...
{ "content": "All these factors together, however, will not prevent rapid disillusionment at promises unfulfilled, nor the inevitable mass protest against hunger, the ultimate Indian reality. There may come a time when the Indian army, officered by Indian bourgeois and aided by a transport system designed for an army...