Trotskyism, anti-
Stalinism, and US
intellectuals: an
ambiguous legacy
Introduction The extraordinary influence of Trotsky and Trotskyism on US literary intellectuals in the 1930s, and to a lesser extent thereafter, has been widely noted by historiographers of the Left. The subject has received attention, of vastly uneven quality, in several dozen histories, biographies, and autobiographies, not to mention numerous essays, novels, plays, and poems.' In fact, while Trotskyist organisations in the US continue to receive almost no attention from scholars, the indirect impact of this movement on the youthful thinking of many established literary intellectuals is now recognised as a vitual sub-field in US cultural history.2
This notice, which had hardly run its course, is due to the intellectual achievements of two generations of writers variously influenced by Great Depression Trotskyism, many of whom are of Jewish descent and made their professional lives in New York City. Technically speaking, most were not "Trotskyist', since they never held membership in Trotskyist organisations, and professed hybrid views that rapidly changed. Somewhat more accurately, they comprised at that time an 'anti-Stalinist left' ', an independent communist current of thought of which Trotskyism
50 International Marxist Review was a central component. In fact, many of those intellectuals who committed themselves to Trotskyist organisations for any length of time did not participate in the subsequent rise to prominence of this group and are neglected in most studies. 3
The first generation of these writers was born around 1905, initiating careers in the 1930s; the second was born around 1920, participating in revolutionary student activities in that same decade. Many in both groups later came to be associated with leading politico-cultural journals of the New York intelligensia such as Partisan Review, Politics, Commentary and The New York Review of Books. Contibutors to these journals from the anti-Stalinist Left include literary and art critics such as Philip Rahv, Lionel Trilling, Diana Trilling, Irving Howe, William Phillps, Leslie Fiedler, Dwight MacDonald, Lionel Abel, F. W. Dupee, Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg; the philosopher Sidney Hook; the art historian Meyer Schapiro; social scientists and political commentators such as Seymour Martin Lipset, Melvin J. Lasky, Irving Kristol, and Philip Selznick; and novelists and poets such as James T. Farrell, Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Eleanor Clark, Isaac Rosenfeld, Harvey Swados, and Delmore Schwartz. By the 1950s, most were anti-communists, and in retrospect, are said to have initiated a tradition in their post-revolutionary phase known as that of the 'New York Intellectuals' or 'New York Family'. History and tradition Two factors explain the intersection of the Trotskyist movement and an important segment of the US intelligentsia in the 1930s. One is the sociohistorical substructure of the Great Depression and the manner in which this economic crisis was resolved during and after World War Two. The other is the peculiar, semi-autonomous tradition of the US cultural Left, partly formed by events and personalities that pre-date the Depression itself.
Form a historical materialist perspective, the left-wing formation and then right-wing transformation of the Trotskyist-influenced intelligensia occured the context of contradictory yet interelated developments within the US economy and society. These were the breakdown of US capitalism in the 1930s, followed by its world-wide expansion and ideological hegemony in the 1940s.
The breakdown was signalled by the great stockmarket crash of 1929, producing massive unemployment. By 1932, 25% of the workforce, or 13 million, were inactive. Breadlines for the starving, and 'Hoovervilles' for the homeless, were common features of the Depression landscape. Between 1929 and 1932, the personal income of Americans declined by more than 50%. A million farms were lost to mortgage holders between 1930
Trotskyism, anti-Stalinism, and US intellectuals 51 and 1934. Four-fifths of the banks were closed by early 1933. The monetary system was near ruin.
While the political and cultural impact of this situation was dramatic, only a few years passed before events just prior to World War Two introduced many complications into the political outlook of revolutionary intellectuals. First, the appearance of fascism, combined with disillusionment in the USSR, undermined the intellectuals' internationalist outlook. Then, a new world relationship of forces coalesced and culminated in the international domination of US imperialism under the slogan, 'The American Century'.
Of course, the pressure of the events of the early 1930s propelled a larger number of established and aspiring intellectuals to the Left than ever before. But it is also crucial to recognise that this radicalisation did not take place without a prior history. During the 1920s—generally seen as a decade of feverish speculation and high dividends—certain nucleii of intellectual left-wing resistance formed, and remained in place at the time of the Crash. This tradition considerably influenced the subsequent development of the intellectual Left, including its association with Trotskyism.
Among the most important components of this background was the evolution of the Communist movement in the 1920s. Initiated in 1919 when the Communist and Communist Labour parties were forced out of the Socialist Party, by 1923 the two groups united and began to attract various intellectuals to several of its projects. One of these was the New Masses magazine, created in 1926 with funding from the anarchist Charles Garland. This publication had direct links of continuity with two famous predecessors from the World War One era, The Masses and the Liberator. Another project of the Left was the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee, which significantly pulled many writers towards the Left, even if not all the way to communism. In addition, in the 192Us an independent Marxist journal, Modern Quarterly, attempted to unite Marxism and a Bohemian cultural outlook that anticipated the interests of the anti-Stalinist Left of the 1930s. The magazine impressario-editor, V. F. Calverton, considered himself a Communist until 1933, and contributed to Communist publications.
The US cultural Left in the 1920s was also influenced by the international faction fight and expulsion of the Left Opposition. Trotsky had been a source of inspiration to three leading Communist intellectuals-Michael Gold, Joseph Freeman, and Max Eastman; however, only Eastman came openly to Trotsky's defense, leading to his de facto expulsion from the Communist literary circles in the late 1920s.
The unique and contradictory features of Eastman can not be ignored in taking into account the subsequent evolution of the anti-Stalinist Left. On the one hand, Eastman was a charismatic, extraordinarily talented journalist and polemicist who displayed great personal courage and integrity
52 International Marxist Review on several occasions. On the other, he was egotistical, unpredictable, and a fanatical opponent of the philosophy of Marxism, which he continually ridiculed as a metaphysical religion. Eastman's move toward the Left Opposition and then, in the post-Moscow Trial days, to vulgar anti-communism, predated most of the other 'Trotskyist intellectuals'; his philosophical pragmatism was more simplistic; and he did not share the penchant for European literary modernism that became one of the hallmarks of the Partisan Review. Yet in many respects his career contains the essential ambiguities of the phenomenon of "Trotskyist literati' that would appear in various forms in younger and more diverse individuals. The crisis of the anti-Stalinist Left From about 1933 to 1937, momentum began to gather for what was an exciting, creative, dynamic trend among New York intellectuals aimed at establishing a communist alternative to the official Communist Party. This alternative trend rejected Stalinism as well as social democracy, basing itself on the original Leninist objectives of the October Revolution. No doubt, a few mavericks among this early anti-Stalinist Left may have had individual orientations other than this democratic Leninism, but such was the essential outlook. These were the politics that predominated among the initiating circle of dissident Communists in the League of Professionals and the National Committee for Defense of Political Prisoners of mid-1933, led by Sidney Hook, Elliot Cohen, James Rorty and Herbert Solow. Anti-Stalinist Leninism then linked this first group to the second wave of left-wing anti-Stalinism, that of the Partisan Review group of late 1936, led by Philip Rahv.
In addition, the political character of the new independent communist trend was conducive to a certain degree of overlap with the main Trotskyist group of that time which was called, sequently, the Communist League of America, the Workers Party of the US, the Appeal faction of the Socialist Party, and, after 1938, the Socialist Workers Party.
However, a crucial transformation occurred in the latter part of the 1930s: the successive blows of the demoralising impact of the Moscow Trials, the defeat of the Spanish Revolution, the growing threat of fascism, the onset of World War Two, and finally the Cold War witch-hunt, the character of this movement profoundly changed. Their critical Leninism and revolutionary internationalism were expunged, and their appreciations of Stalinism became vulgarised through the conflation of Stalinism and fascism into a single genus when they appropriated the ideological mystification of 'totalitarianism' . The Trotskyist movement itself suffered isolation and underwent a sequence of near-debilitating splits between 1940 and 1953.
Despite the perpetuation by some in, later years of the ambiguous name
'anti-Stalinist Left' for tactical reasons, the original movement was for all practical purposes dead among post-war intellectuals. The anti-Stalinist
Left was replaced in the early 1950s by a hybrid offspring now known as or marginalising some of the older ones. This new trend among the intellectuals mainly epoused Cold War liberalism. A few, such as James
Burnham, went all the way over to the traditional anti-communism of National Review, and another small group, associated with Dissent, espoused
Thus we see that anti-Stalinist radicalism in and of itself had a dual nature as it evolved under difficult conditions in the US during and after the 1930s. It allowed the possibility of a revival of classical Marxism or a sharp turn to the right, depending on individual circumstance and the complexity of the context in which an individual became and attempted to
In sum, the initial project of constructing a communist alternative to the official Communist Party between 1933 and 1937 was a positive development that in some ways even today might serve as a model under certain circumstances. What is crucial is that this movement rejected Stalinism as well as social democracy, basing itself on the original Leninist objectives of the October Revolution. This is the only basis on which an 'anti-
Stalinist left' in the US or in any capitalist country has validity for revolutionary socialism, although such an attitude in itself is hardly sufficient for responding to the complexities of world events in the past fifty years.4
Lest we be harsh on the failures of our predecessors to the point of indulging in unearned self-righteousness, it may be useful to conclude by pointing out that there is simply no panacea for solving the difficulties involved in sustaining Marxist political paractice during unpropitious times, such as those that destroyed the once promising movement of Trotskyist literati.
Yet the disappointing if not disgraceful record of so many of the intellectuals who were at one time part of the anti-Stalinist Left should remind us that this Marxist practise is precisely what must be sustained for the emancipation of humanity from exploitation by class, gender and race.
In spite of the positive features of their early far left phase, this predecessor group of Marxist intellectuals failed in sustaining many components of Marxist practice. These are precisely the ones to which we should pledge ourselves today. The include, first of all, a rigorously internationalist perspective; second, activist affiliation with authentic counterinstitutions in bourgeois society; and third, a determination to view the world from the point of view of the oppressed groups in society.
Beyond this, we can not afford to relinquish a revolutionary socialist the 'New York intellectuals' anti-communist social democracy.
remain an anti-Stalinist radical.
Conclusion
Trotskyism, anti-Stalinism, and US intellectuals 53
', involving some new figures and excluding
54 International Marxist Review vision of total structural transformation, as did even the best among these predecessors. In the case of Marxist intellectuals functioning in institutions that primarily produce bourgeois ideology to legitimate bourgeois society, such as universities (the location of most intellectual work today, unlike the 1930s), it seems to me to be doubly important to have one foot in the future. Perhaps we should even say one foot in 'utopia', as Michael Löwy cogently argues in his provocative essay, 'Marxism and Revolutionary Utopia'-just so long as the other foot is planted firmly in reality. 5
Notes 1. Detailed biographical information can be found in my book, The New York
Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina
Press, 1987). Since its publication, several new studies have appeared devoted in part or even entirely to this subject: Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment (New York: Time Books, 1986); Jonathan
Arac, Critical Genealogies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987);
Terry A Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Sidney Hook, Out of Step (New York: Harper and
Row, 1987); Maurice Isserman, If I had a Hammer (New York: Basic Books,
1987); Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals (New York: Basic Books,
1987); Vincent B Leitsch, American Literary Criticism from the 30s to the 80s
(New York: Columbia University press, 1987); and Mark Shechner, After the
Revolution: Studies in the Contemporary Jewish-American Imagination
(Bloomington, Indiana: University of Indiana press, 1987). Needless to say, many discussions of the influence of Trotskyism are superficial, inaccurate, and, in the case of autobiographies, used to settle political 2. The social category of "intellectuals' is complex, and the transformation of this category in the US from the 1930s to the present is a subject for a separate essay, if not a book. Here the 'literary intellectuals' or 'literati' under consideration are those whose Marxist cultural critque in the 30s was embodied in the efforts of Partisan Review, Modern Quarterly later, Modern Monthly, as well as in the pages of publications of Trotskyist organisations, to find a ground of reconciliation betweeen Marxist theory and experimental Modernism, and the eschew the political coding of literary form and the substitution of political for aesthetic criteria. Although a number of scholars influenced by Trotskyism-such as Lewis Coser, Seymour Martin Lipset, Philip
Selznick and Melvin Tumin-would later have a major impact on social sciences, no research to date has indicated an analogous influence in the physical sciences. 3. Two New England Poets who commited themselves to Trotskyism in the
1930s are the subject of my book, The Revolutionary Imagination: The Poetry and Politics of John Wheelwright and Sherry Mangan (Chapel Hill, North
Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). A study of Duncan
Trotskyism, anti-Stalinism, and US intellectuals 55
Ferguson, the most important sculptor who became a Trotskyist, appears as
'Sculptor on the Left', Pembroke Magazine 19 (1987): 32-56. The contributions of George Novak, John G Wright, Evelyn Reed, and some others are briefly described in The New York Intellectuals. 4. Marxist intellectuals today cannot be content with the repetition of pieties of the past, but must be prepared to present perspectives that frankly and selfcritically address concerns about past failures of self-proclaimed Marxist-
Leninists. In this regard, the Fourth International's resolution, 'Socialist
Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat' (New York: Intercontinental Press, 1980) and Ernst Mandel's Revolutionary Marxism Today (London: Verso, 1979), may be regarded as helpful models. 5. Against the Current 2, No. 2 (March-April 1987): 33-37.
LIVIO MAITAN