Essays On The Russian Question

...These articles, reprinted here without change, suffer from a narrowness of frame: too many are polemics against orthodox Trotskyism and therefore stale (though the long attack on Isaac Deutscher remains extremely cogent...

...Shachtman's theory, for one thing, in making the existence of poiit ical democracy the major criterion for designating a society as a "workers State," undercut the various brands of "vulgar Marxism" which still flourish at the moment, and often in the strangest places...

...Spanish Refugee Aid (Honorary Chairmen Pablo Casals and Salvador de Madariaga) has been helping these refugees for 10 years...

...paper) During the 1940s and 1950s the author of this book was the leader of a tiny radical organization, the Independent Socialist League...

...The totalitarian character of the Stalinist regime is thereby determined and—despite the concessions and modifications it may grant under popular pies sure—thereby fixed...

...Within the terms of the Marxism to which he still adheres, Shachtman was the most gifted political thinker to emerge from the anti-Stalinist left in the United States...

...Shachtman argued that mere state ownership of basic industries, even if it were the last remnant of a proletarian revolution, did not warrant calling Russia a "workers state," for in regard to a statified economy the decisive criterion was not the property form, that is, nationalization of industry, but property relations, that is, which class has control of the nationalized property...

...But it was not...

...Put so briefly and schematically, the issue at stake may seem parochial...

...The vast majority is dominated by a minority which monopolizes all po litical and economic power and aims at maintaining social relations that are even more alien to so cialism than they are to capitalism...

...There are 100,000 Spanish Republican refugees in France...

...The ruling class too is unique, in that it does not own the national property which it rules but does "own" the state...

...it kept breaking into various fragments, a very few members going back to Trotskyism, another few of its leading figures onto the editorial board of DISSENT when the magazine was started in 1953, and most, under Shachtman's leadership, into the Socialist party several years ago...

...they are repetitious and verbose...

...Shachtman has now collected the articles he wrote for The New International, a Marxist journal, on "the Russian question," the major issue, though after a time not the only one, leading to his divergence from Trotskyism...

...Many are now over 60, crippled by war wounds, their health broken in prisons...

...The group was, I think, the most intellectually reflective, and therefore the most indecisive and tortured, of the recent American Marxist tendencies...

...and to reject as well the belief that it is capitalist or moving toward capi talism . . . I regard this new so ciety...

...One wishes that Shacht man had troubled to write a book based on his articles, structuring his argument and dropping the references and asides which now merely irritate...

...The name [he writes] is meant to reject the belief that Stalinist so ciety is in any way socialist or is compatible with socialism...

...In any case, the articles collected in this book should be of value to all those who wish to study Russian society at a level more serious than journalistic speculation and empirical notation...

...Since he also agreed with Trot sky that the term "state capitalism" was too vague and confusing to be applied to the kind of society emerging in Russia, he ventured upon the bold step—bold, certainly, for a Marxist— of calling Russian society "bureaucratic collectivist...

...Originally a fracture from the American Trotskyist movement—it quarrelled with Trotsky over the character of the Rus so-Finnish war, insisting that the Russian invasion was an act of imperialism, no more deserving of political support than the Trotskyists were willing to give any of the belligerent powers—the ISL, under Shachtman's intellectual guidance, soon moved away from the Leninist tradition and uneasily approached the politics of what might be called left social democracy...

...they can often afford only one meal a day...

...The difference between Shachtman and Trotsky came finally to rest on whether Stalinist Russia could still be designated as a "workers state...

...Much can be said against the anti-Stalinist left of the past few decades, but it needs also to be said to its credit that, in its own special vocabulary and within its constricted range of analysis, it anticipated a num ber of crucial problems troubling seri ous political thinkers at the present time...

...Which makes one regret again that the solid thought and analytic gifts displayed in these essays were not put at the service of an integrated book that would analyze the origins and nature of "bureaucratic collectivism...

...New York: Donald Press, 360 pp...

...ity too often overcame him, he did not gain a reputation in the intellectual world...

...But if the book shows evidence of indiscipline, it also shows something quite admirable: a man trying to think, struggling to preserve convictions deeply imbedded in his experience yet constrained by the evidence and by his own sense of intellectual obligation to modify some of his ideas and abandon others...

...Please do what you can for these Spaniards who lost everything in the first war against fascism...

...as a unique form of class exploitation and oppression...

...Saying this much, however, Shachtman had to face severe and perhaps insoluble problems: e.g., given the universal trend toward state ownership of major industries, is "bureaucratic collectivism" merely an historical quirk, the product of peculiar conditions created by an effort to WHERE ARE THE HEROES OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR...

...establish a proletarian regime in a backward nation like Russia, or is it a portent of a world society of tomorrow, replacing traditional capitalism and reducing socialism either to historical obsolescence or to an ethical ideal no longer, as Marxists had supposed it to be, an integral part of the historic process...

...and they simply assume a number of Marxist premises which many socialists have since been obliged to question...

...It derives its vast economic power and privilege ex clusively from the political power it exercises through its chosen in strument, the Communist party...

...If you can do this we will select a family with whom you can correspond...

...In an economy that is statified, political and economic power tend to become indistinguishable, and, argued Shachtman, if it is true, as both he and Trotsky recognized, that the workers in Russia had no power under the Stalinist dictatorship, then there was no meaningful sense in which Russia could be called a "workers state...

...The roots of its power over society reposing entirely in this political power, the ruling class cannot per mit even such measures of popular political control as are possible un der capitalism...

...In effect Trotsky argued that the continued state ownership of major industries in Russia, occurring as it did in the context of a revolutionary disintegration, warranted calling Russia a "workers state," even if also a degenerated and, apparent paradox, a counterrevolutionary "workers state...

...But because he seldom tried to reach an audience beyond the hermetic left-wing world, because he clung to an unpopular version of Marxism, and because his gifts showed themselves better in speech— he was a brilliant debater—than in writing, where his weakness for prolix...

...You can help by "adopting" a Spaniard and sending him money regularly...

...WILL YOU "ADOPT" A REFUGEE...