It is with profound sadness that I hear about the death of Alan Gelfand, who truly was a fighter for socialism. I never met Alan, and I regretfully cannot call him my friend, but his struggle had a profound bearing on my own political development.
The conclusion of his struggle against the Socialist Workers Party (US) in 1983 coincided with the year I became involved in the Trotskyist movement. After a year as a supporter, I finally joined the WRP before the split, which was, in itself, a seminal moment for me. Although, as a teenager, I spent well over a thousand pounds on Marxist literature from the then Militant Tendency, they had nothing on the history of American Trotskyism. After the split, the then minority held classes on American Trotskyism.
I read James Cannon’s “The Struggle for a Proletarian Party” and many other works. I still have the books in my Library. Again, it was during the Split that I became familiar with the history of recent American Trotskyism, as embodied in the struggles of the Workers League. One thing that always struck me was the high level of camaraderie among the American comrades. They were on a different political and intellectual level and somewhat inspiring. Meeting Jean and Bill Brust was a thrill of a lifetime.
The first time I heard about the Security and the Fourth International (I had purchased a copy of How the GPU Murdered Trotsky but never read it, a bad habit that continues to this day) was when I read David North’s articles on the Death of Tom Henehan. Leon Trotsky and the development of Marxism, 1982, was published in the Young Socialists paper of the Workers Revolutionary Party. These articles were reprinted in the pages of the Young Socialist in 1984. I always read the YS paper as it contained far more interesting articles than the Newsline, which seemed more of a comic to me at the time. I learnt nothing about Trotskyism from it.
It was during the split that I learnt not only about the Security and the Fourth International investigation, but it was my first introduction to Gelfand’s struggle. During the division, a large number of internal documents were circulated by the minority. A large number of these documents pertained to security and the Fourth International. But it was only with the release in 1985 of the two books The Gelfand Case: A Legal History of the Exposure of U.S. Government Agents in the Leadership of the Socialist Workers Party – Volumes One and Two (1 and 2/ I and II), Paperback that I really began to fully understand the havoc caused by the murderous agents of the GPU.
Gelfand will always have a special place in my political heart. It is inspiring that he faced death with the same approach he had to life, as the great poet Dylan Thomas wrote.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at the close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Finally, as David North wrote, “In his final words to a comrade and close friend, Alan said: ‘It’s hard to say goodbye. But I have joy in my heart and a smile on my face, and confidence in the movement and in my comrades.” Alan Gelfand will never be forgotten. His place in this history of the Fourth International and the hearts of his comrades is secure.”[1]
Notes
Alan Gelfand: A fighter for socialism and historical truth-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/11/08/eprm-n08.html
Harold Robbins Archive-https://findingaids.library.nyu.edu/tamwag/wag_175/
Register of the Socialist Workers Party records-https://oac.cdlib.org/static_findaids/ark:/13030/tf1k40019v.html
[1] Alan Gelfand: A fighter for socialism and historical truth-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/11/08/eprm-n08.html
Fascism] affects white and black people alike … The fight against fascism is a common fight for both of us; we approach it from two different directions and perspectives. We are the immediate victims. If they come for us in the morning, they will go for you that night. So be with us that morning, and we will be with you that night.
James Baldwin
The progress of a class toward class consciousness, that is, the building of a revolutionary party which leads the proletariat, is a complex and contradictory process. The class itself is not homogeneous. Its different sections arrive at class consciousness by different paths and at other times. The bourgeoisie participates actively in this process. Within the working class, it creates its own institutions or utilises those already existing to oppose certain strata of workers to others. Within the proletariat, several parties are active at the same time. Therefore, for the greater part of its historical journey, it has remained politically divided. The problem of the united front, which arises during specific periods most sharply, originates therein. The historical interests of the proletariat find their expression in the Communist Party when its policies are correct. The task of the Communist Party consists of winning over the majority of the proletariat, and only thus is the socialist revolution made possible. The Communist Party cannot fulfil its mission except by preserving, entirely and unconditionally, its political and organisational independence apart from all other parties and organisations within and without the working class.
Leon Trotsky-Bureaucratic Ultimatism (1932)
Socialist Workers Party member Geoff Brown is the author of the new book A People’s History of the Anti-Nazi League. The ANL was launched in November 1977 to counteract the growing threat from racists and fascists who were spurred on by sections of the ruling elite who saw the fascists as a battering ram against the increasing radicalisation of the working class.
As the 2010 statement by the Socialist Equality Party stated, “The global crisis plunged Britain into a period of intense class conflict, which brought it closer to revolution than at any time since the 1926 General Strike. As a major financial centre, it was especially vulnerable to the sweeping capital movements that occurred following the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system. The Wilson government was forced into a series of devaluations and major spending cuts. In 1969, it brought forward the White Paper, “In Place of Strife”, to enforce legal sanctions against strikes.
The orthodox Trotskyists in the Socialist Labour League (SLL) warned that the Labour left’s refusal to lead a struggle against Wilson was paving the way for the return of a Conservative government and the imposition of even more savage measures against the working class. In 1968, Conservative MP Enoch Powell was sacked from the shadow cabinet after delivering his notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech, which sought to whip up anti-immigrant sentiments. But Powell’s remarks were only the initial expression of a right-wing shift by the Tories, who, by 1970, had adopted a radical, free-market agenda. Based on the monetarist economic policies of Milton Friedman, they advocated an end to the “bailout” of inefficient companies, the curtailing of social provisions, and a legal offensive against wildcat strikes.[1]
It must be said from the outset that the formation of the ANL had nothing to do with Trotskyism or Leon Trotsky’s advocacy of the United Front. According to the SWP, the “ Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky conceived the idea of the united front, which unites groups that are very different, such as reformists and revolutionaries.”
What Trotsky wrote on the United Front is opposed to what the SWP did. He wrote, ‘In entering into agreements with other organisations, we naturally obligate ourselves to a certain discipline in action. But this discipline cannot be absolute in character. If the reformists begin to put the brakes on the struggle to the obvious detriment of the movement and act counter to the situation and the moods of the masses, we, as an independent organisation, always reserve the right to lead the struggle to its conclusion, and this without our temporary semi-allies. It is possible to see in this policy a rapprochement with the reformists only from the standpoint of a journalist who believes that he rids himself of reformism by ritualistically criticizing it without ever leaving his editorial office, but who is fearful of clashing with the reformists before the eyes of the working masses and allowing the latter to appraise the Communist and the reformist on the equal plane of the mass struggle. Behind this seemingly revolutionary fear of ‘rapprochement’ there really lurks a political passivity which seeks to perpetuate an order of things wherein the Communists and reformists each retain their own rigidly demarcated spheres of influence, their own audiences at meetings, their own press, and all this together creates an illusion of serious political struggle….
“On the question of the united front, we see the very same passive and irresolute tendency, but this time masked by verbal irreconcilability. At the very first glance, one is hit between the eyes by the following paradox: the rightist party elements with their centrist and pacifist tendencies, who … come simultaneously to the forefront as the most irreconcilable opponents of the united front. … In contrast, those elements who have … held in the most difficult hours the position of the Third International are today in favour of the tactic of the united front. As a matter of fact, the mask of pseudo-revolutionary intransigence is now being assumed by the partisans of the dilatory and passive tactic”[2]
The SWP said it had “no secret agendas. What we say is what we do. We were running it as a united front. We couldn’t do anything that would undermine the agreement; we had a basic agreement that we were focusing on the NF.” Alongside Stalinists and reformists, the SWP had the backing of other pseudo-left parties that broadly supported the ANL, with the political scoundrel Tariq Ali writing “Hats Off to the SWP”
However, the real purpose of the SWP’s ANL United Front was to develop a pseudo-reformist alliance, aimed at deflecting a revolutionary confrontation between the working class and the British ruling elite. While from the outside the ANL was seen as an adjunct to the SWP, it was, in reality, directed by the top leadership, with SWP’s party leader, Tony Cliff, pulling the strings. Cliff was the ideological founder of the SWP, and his organisation rejected every basic tenet of Trotskyism; however, this did not stop it from using elements of Trotsky’s perspective or analysis to suit its own political objectives. Throughout his life, Cliff sought to associate the SWP with Leon Trotsky as a historical figure. But in reality, it opposed Trotsky’s analysis of the Stalinist bureaucracy and denied the viability of the Fourth International that Trotsky founded in 1938. Trotskyism was “a cul-de-sac”, Cliff wrote, while “Trotskyists suffered from the psychological need to believe in miracles.”[3]
The SWP’s perversion of the United Front tactic was also reflected in its work within the trade unions. As Paul Holborow relates, “one of the most significant considerations regarding how the ANL was established so quickly and widely as a grassroots organisation is what the SWP or the International Socialists had done industrially, particularly since the first miners’ strike in 1972 and before. Crucially, we had 22 rank-and-file papers that were an essential part of our industrial strategy for developing a rank-and-file movement that could fight independently of the trade union bureaucracy.5 This enabled us to very quickly establish sizeable groups of manual and white collar workers in their places of work—firefighters, car workers, civil servants, bus workers, dockers, teachers, engineers, council workers and many others. Perhaps the most impressive example of this was when miners’ leader Arthur Scargill and I spoke at a 200-strong delegate conference, and the following Monday, 60,000 Yorkshire miners went to work with the yellow ANL sticker on their helmets.”[4]
The purpose of the Socialist Workers Party’s rank-and-file committees, then as now, while providing tame “left-wing” criticisms of the labour and trade union bureaucracy, was to work might and main to politically block any independent movement of the working class. One problem for the pseudo-left groups is that they themselves now make up a significant faction of the trade union leadership at national, regional, and branch levels. They have been responsible for numerous betrayals and are now calling on rank-and-file members to rebel against the same bureaucracy to which they belong.
The publication of Brown’s book this year coincides with the SWP’s resurrection of the United Front campaign. According to Holborow, “When John McDonnell said last summer that we need to build an ANL-type movement, I think he was entirely right in spirit, but the context today is so different from what it was 40 years ago. Then, there was a militant rank-and-file movement. Britain was in turmoil, and the opposition to the ruling class was much more extensive and articulate. We are building in a completely different time, in the era of neoliberalism and all the ravages that this has produced for the labour movement. This makes it in many ways more necessary than ever to have an ANL-type organisation, but also more complicated.”[5] In August, McDonnell had declared, “It’s time for an Anti-Nazi League-type cultural and political campaign to resist” because “we can no longer ignore the rise of far-right politics in our society.”
This is the same McDonnell who, despite being expelled from the Labour Party by its right wing, grovelled before Starmer and begged for re-admittance to this right-wing party of big business. He wrote 11 op-eds in The Guardian, capitulating to Starmer and his right-wing allies. The SWP and its pseudo-left allies have offered him a means to resurrect his “left” reputation.
As Tony Robson and Chris Marsden point out, “There is, however, a significant difference between the 1970s and the present day. Whereas in 1977, the SWP acted with the benediction of the Labour and trade union lefts, today it speaks as the officially designated representative of the Trades Union Congress. The SWP has, over the decades, integrated itself into the highest echelons of the trade union bureaucracy, assuming leading positions in several unions to complement the niche it has established within academia. It speaks today not merely as the bureaucracy’s apologist, but as its officially recognised spokesman on the left.”[6]
[1] The mass movement against the Heath government-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-uk/32.html
[2] Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Communist International, vol. 2, New York and London, 1953, pp. 91–96, 127–128].
[3] Tony Cliff-Trotskyism after Trotsky-www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1999/trotism/ch03.htm
[4] The Anti Nazi League and its lessons for today-https://isj.org.uk/the-anti-nazi-league/
[5] The Anti Nazi League and its lessons for today-https://isj.org.uk/the-anti-nazi-league/
[6] The significance of the British Socialist Workers Party’s call for a new “left alternative”
Given that the average age for a United Kingdom postal worker is around fifty-five, it is a fair bet that the majority of postal workers have witnessed over four decades of betrayals by the Communication Workers Union(CWU).
A small number of postal workers in their late sixties or seventies, believe it or not, are still working. They would remember the first national postal strike in 1971[1]. I raise this matter because the most pressing question facing postal workers at the moment is the issue of leadership.
Over the last five decades, postal workers have witnessed betrayal after betrayal and have seen their pay and working conditions decimated. It is time to face the facts: the CWU is nothing more than a company union that is doing the current owner, Daniel Kretinsky’s, dirty work. There is no line it will not cross to impose Amazon-style working conditions that will turn Royal Mail into an Amazon-style company with all the implications that entails.[2]
Postal workers have not been taking these attacks by the company and the union lying down. They have met these attacks head-on with every weapon at their disposal. However, it is time to face the facts: the old way of struggle has not worked. Do not get me wrong, I am not saying not to strike, but what is the new perspective that postal workers must fight for?
Leadership is an art. As the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky said, “There is an ancient, evolutionary-liberal epigram: Every people gets the government it deserves. History, however, shows that the same people may in the course of a comparatively brief epoch get very different governments (Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain, etc.) and that the order of these governments doesn’t at all proceed in the same direction: from despotism to freedom as was imagined by the evolutionist liberals. The secret is this, that a people is comprised of hostile classes, and the classes themselves are comprised of different and in part antagonistic layers which fall under different leadership; furthermore, every people falls under the influence of other peoples who are likewise comprised of classes. Governments do not express the systematically growing “maturity” of a “people”. Still, they are the product of the struggle between different classes and the different layers within the same class, and, finally, the action of external forces – alliances, conflicts, wars and so on. To this should be added that a government, once it has established itself, may endure much longer than the relationship of forces which produced it. It is precisely out of this historical contradiction that revolutions, coup d’etats, counterrevolutions, etc., arise.
The very same dialectic approach is necessary in dealing with the question of the leadership of a class. Imitating the liberals, our sages tacitly accept the axiom that every class gets the leadership it deserves. In reality, leadership is not at all a mere “reflection” of a class or the product of its own unrestrained creativeness. Leadership is shaped in the process of clashes between the different classes or the friction between the various layers within a given class. Having once arisen, the leadership invariably arises above its class and thereby becomes predisposed to the pressure and influence of other classes. The proletariat may “tolerate” for a long time a leadership that has already suffered a complete inner degeneration but has not as yet had the opportunity to express this degeneration amid significant events. A great historic shock is necessary to reveal sharply the contradiction between the leadership and the class. The mightiest historical shocks are wars and revolutions; precisely for this reason, the working class is often caught unawares by war and revolution.[3]
It is pretty clear that postal workers have been caught unawares by the unprecedented nature of the attacks on their pay and conditions. They have, in Trotsky’s words, witnessed a great historical shock. It is time to face reality square on and realise that the CWU is dead and is just waiting to be buried.
Postal workers have tolerated the CWU for a long time because they did not really have an alternative, but now they do. Firstly, they have the World Socialist Website (wsws.org). Its analysis has been second to none in terms of accuracy and perspective. It offers a new way forward for postal workers. The CWU bureaucracy knows it is in a fight to the finish, so much so that it has lashed out at the WSWS on several occasions.[4]
Postal workers need a new organisation. The way forward is the struggle to build the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC). Although it is small at the moment, it has the only socialist perspective to take on both the CWU bureaucracy and Royal Mail. While it must join and build this new organisation, the task facing postal workers is a political one. The philosopher Hegel was fond of saying, “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk”, and this is true for postal workers today. To be blunt, postal workers do not have much time to build this leadership. Any delay in building the PWRFC will mean that, soon, there will be nothing left to defend.
Given that the average age for a United Kingdom postal worker is around fifty-five, it is a fair bet that the majority of postal workers have witnessed over four decades of betrayals by the Communication Workers Union(CWU).
A small number of postal workers in their late sixties or seventies, believe it or not, are still working. They would remember the first national postal strike in 1971[1]. I raise this matter because the most pressing question facing postal workers at the moment is the issue of leadership.
Over the last five decades, postal workers have witnessed betrayal after betrayal and have seen their pay and working conditions decimated. It is time to face the facts: the CWU is nothing more than a company union that is doing the current owner, Daniel Kretinsky’s, dirty work. There is no line it will not cross to impose Amazon-style working conditions that will turn Royal Mail into an Amazon-style company with all the implications that entails.[2]
Postal workers have not been taking these attacks by the company and the union lying down. They have met these attacks head-on with every weapon at their disposal. However, it is time to face the facts: the old way of struggle has not worked. Do not get me wrong, I am not saying not to strike, but what is the new perspective that postal workers must fight for?
Leadership is an art. As the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky said, “There is an ancient, evolutionary-liberal epigram: Every people gets the government it deserves. History, however, shows that the same people may in the course of a comparatively brief epoch get very different governments (Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain, etc.) and that the order of these governments doesn’t at all proceed in the same direction: from despotism to freedom as was imagined by the evolutionist liberals. The secret is this, that a people is comprised of hostile classes, and the classes themselves are comprised of different and in part antagonistic layers which fall under different leadership; furthermore, every people falls under the influence of other peoples who are likewise comprised of classes. Governments do not express the systematically growing “maturity” of a “people”. Still, they are the product of the struggle between different classes and the different layers within the same class, and, finally, the action of external forces – alliances, conflicts, wars and so on. To this should be added that a government, once it has established itself, may endure much longer than the relationship of forces which produced it. It is precisely out of this historical contradiction that revolutions, coup d’etats, counterrevolutions, etc., arise.
The very same dialectic approach is necessary in dealing with the question of the leadership of a class. Imitating the liberals, our sages tacitly accept the axiom that every class gets the leadership it deserves. In reality, leadership is not at all a mere “reflection” of a class or the product of its own unrestrained creativeness. Leadership is shaped in the process of clashes between the different classes or the friction between the various layers within a given class. Having once arisen, the leadership invariably arises above its class and thereby becomes predisposed to the pressure and influence of other classes. The proletariat may “tolerate” for a long time a leadership that has already suffered a complete inner degeneration but has not as yet had the opportunity to express this degeneration amid significant events. A great historic shock is necessary to reveal sharply the contradiction between the leadership and the class. The mightiest historical shocks are wars and revolutions; precisely for this reason, the working class is often caught unawares by war and revolution.[3]
It is pretty clear that postal workers have been caught unawares by the unprecedented nature of the attacks on their pay and conditions. They have, in Trotsky’s words, witnessed a great historical shock. It is time to face reality square on and realise that the CWU is dead and is just waiting to be buried.
Postal workers have tolerated the CWU for a long time because they did not really have an alternative, but now they do. Firstly, they have the World Socialist Website (wsws.org). Its analysis has been second to none in terms of accuracy and perspective. It offers a new way forward for postal workers. The CWU bureaucracy knows it is in a fight to the finish, so much so that it has lashed out at the WSWS on several occasions.[4]
Postal workers need a new organisation. The way forward is the struggle to build the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC). Although it is small at the moment, it has the only socialist perspective to take on both the CWU bureaucracy and Royal Mail. While it must join and build this new organisation, the task facing postal workers is a political one. The philosopher Hegel was fond of saying, “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk”, and this is true for postal workers today. To be blunt, postal workers do not have much time to build this leadership. Any delay in building the PWRFC will mean that, soon, there will be nothing left to defend.
“That, in a Europe blood-stained by more than four years of total war, crushed under the most hideous yoke of the imperialisms, whose prisons and concentration camps are gorged with the victims of the most savage and most systematic repression, our organization has been able to hold its European assembly, to work out and define its political line of struggle, of itself constitutes the most eloquent manifestation of its vitality, its internationalist spirit, and the revolutionary ardour by which it is animated.
Fourth International statement
“The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only ‘ripened,’ they have begun to get somewhat rotten.”
Leon Trotsky
Michel Pablo, a renegade from Trotskyism, died at the age of eighty-four in 1996. Pablo’s betrayal of his former political principles was aptly celebrated by the Greek ruling elite at the time. When he died, the PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement) government gave him a state funeral. As the proverb says, “By your friends shall ye be known”
Hall Greenland’s biography of Pablo is the first of its kind. Alex de Jong, writing for the Pabloite International Viewpoint, believes “He’s (Pablo) finally gotten the biography he deserves.”[1]De Jong is correct because this is a politically naive account and largely absolves Pablo of his treachery. Anyone expecting anything different from a member of the Green Party is going to be sadly disappointed.
However, Greenland’s book is not without some merit, tracing Pablo’s early political life. Pablo attended the founding conference of Leon Trotsky’s Fourth International and took part alongside fellow Trotskyists in the anti-Nazi resistance in wartime France. The book describes how many Trotskyists during the war years were living on borrowed time; not only were they hunted by the Gestapo, but they were murdered in droves by the Stalinists.
Many writers, including Greenland, imply that despite some heroics, Trotskyists played “little or no part in the struggle to project a revolutionary defeatist line,”
But as the Marxist David North points out, “ outside the Fourth International, there was no other tendency in the workers’ movement that opposed the imperialist war! The Trotskyists were hounded and persecuted by a “popular front” of fascists, “democratic” imperialists and Stalinists precisely because they upheld the banner of revolutionary defeatism and proletarian internationalism.
He continues, “The French Trotskyists Marc Bourhis and Pierre Gueguen were executed by the Nazis on October 22, 1941. Their comrade Jules Joffre was shot in 1942. In October 1943, the secretary of the French section, Marcel Hic, was arrested by the Gestapo, deported to Buchenwald and then to Dora, where he was murdered. Dozens of other French Trotskyists were arrested and also perished in the Nazi death camps. Despite the repression, the Trotskyist PCI published, starting in August 1940, seventy-three clandestine issues of its newspaper, La Verité, whose circulation was 15,000 copies.”[2]
Despite describing how the Stalinists murdered Trotskyists at will Greenland follows in the footsteps of every Stalinist, Pabloite and related middle-class radical organizations, and the intellectually corrupt academic milieu of pseudo-leftists who in the words of North “continue to ignore, deprecate and deny the overwhelming evidence that the penetration of the US Socialist Workers Party SWP by GPU agents played a critical role in the assassination of Trotsky. The role of Sylvia Callen (a.k.a. Sylvia Franklin, Sylvia Caldwell, Sylvia Doxsee), the personal secretary of James P. Cannon, as a GPU spy has been conclusively established. The same is true for Robert Sheldon Harte.”[3]
There are many problems with this book. The main one being is Greenland’s complete lack of understanding of the origins and nature of Pablo’s opportunism and subsequent betrayals caused by this opportunism. It is impossible to go into any great detail of Pabloite opportunism. For anyone interested, David North’s The Heritage We Defend is the best starting point.
As North points out in his book, the origins of Pablo’s opportunism began over the debate over the class nature of Yugoslavia and the Eastern European buffer states had become transformed, under the pressure of alien class forces, into a political platform for sweeping opportunist revisions of the basic Trotskyist program and its historical perspective. Pablo was the living embodiment of Trotsky’s sayings, “Without correct theory, there cannot be correct politics or more precisely, ‘every sociological definition is at the bottom a historical prognosis.”
North writes, “ The theories advanced by Pablo of ‘generations of deformed workers’ states” and “war-revolution” articulated the pessimism and demoralisation of broad layers of the Fourth International beneath the impact of unfavourable objective conditions. The political conceptions which were to become known as Pabloism emerged as an adaptation to the restabilization of capitalism, on the one hand, and to the apparent strengthening of the Stalinist bureaucracy, on the other.
Refracted through the political prism of the Cold War, the objective situation appeared to be dominated by the global conflict between the imperialist forces, spearheaded by the United States, and the Soviet Union and those labour and national revolutionary movements dominated by Stalinism. The real underlying conflict between the world bourgeoisie and the international proletariat—of which the Cold War was only a partial and distorted manifestation—receded from the political consciousness of those within the Fourth International who were reacting impressionistically to world events.[4]
Pablo’s capitulation to hostile class forces was not a pretty one to watch and had disastrous consequences for the working class. After he rejected revolutionary politics, Pablo, up to his death, was a supporter of ecology movements and women’s liberation. Along with his other renegades from Trotskyism, Ernest Mandel Pablo, he advocated not the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism but that workers should undertake a form of Self-Management to counteract capitalism’s attacks on them.
Pablo advocated ‘generalised self-management or direct democracy’. He utilised his friendship with the Algerian bourgeois nationalists to put this experiment into practice. As Peter Schwarz writes, “Pablo himself and other leading French Pabloites placed themselves unconditionally at the service of the Algerian Liberation Front (FLN), and took over organisational responsibilities, such as the printing of illegal newspapers, fake banknotes and counterfeit passports. They even set up a weapons factory in Morocco. After the victory of the FLN over the French colonial regime, Pablo entered into the service of the Algerian government. As special advisor to the head of state, Ben Bella, Pablo was responsible for the introduction in Algerian factories of the forms of “workers’ self-management” first initiated in post-war Yugoslavia.”[5]
In his book Self-management in the struggle for socialism, Pablo explains, “In the economic sphere, the purpose of the plan is to determine the general conditions under which the self-managed enterprises can act and coordinate their efforts for the ultimate interests of society as a whole. We use the term social rather than economic plan to stress the fact that the plan seeks the balanced overall evolution of the society towards socialism, and that this affects the determination of so-called economic aims; the real aim of the plan is to satisfy the real social needs of the working people and citizens, with decisions made democratically from the bottom up and vice-versa, in a process of interaction which is constantly readjusting the objectives sought, even while the plan is being executed.[6]
As the above quote shows, Pablo’s self-management plan would be introduced peacefully and with the full cooperation of the capitalists; at no stage did Pablo advocate, let alone attempt, the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.
Although Greenland’s book is the first and only biography of Pablo, it should not be the last. It is incumbent on the Trotskyist movement to write its biography of this renegade from Trotskyism to train and arm future revolutionaries as to the nature of Pablo’s opportunism and betrayals.
[1] The Revolutionary Life and Times of Michel Pablo-internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article8471
[2] The Fourth International in World War II-The Heritage we Defend-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/heritage/07.html
[3] The place of Security and the Fourth International in the history of the Trotskyist movement-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/08/14/dujg-a14.html
[4] The Nature of Pabloite Opportunism-The Heritage We Defend
[5] The politics of opportunism: the “radical left” in France-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2004/05/lft4-m22.html
[6] Self-management in the struggle for socialism-https://www.marxists.org/archive/pablo/1972/selfman/main.htm
“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
Tom Paine
“The sensible way to proceed — I think this is how Marx and Engels proceeded — is to develop a methodological view: historical materialism or dialectical materialism, whatever you want to call it. Then, you approach any material with that framework in mind, but you have to be able to go where the material leads you. Engels warned that you cannot start forcing the historical material into a ready-made format. I took that approach with my book. Of course, I had read a great deal of secondary material, but I wanted to go where the historical archives and contemporary material would take me. I did not wish to influence my work, nor did I intend to engage in debates with other Marxists or currents, in order to determine where history would go. After you have done that, you can demarcate it and illuminate it by — in a relatively minor way — dealing with other currents and approaches. What makes something Marxist is that it is the application of that method. “
John Rees
John Rees’s Fiery Spirits offers a new perspective on the English Revolution. Fiery Spirits establishes Rees as the leading contemporary continuator of the Marxist tradition, initiated by Christopher Hill and Brian Manning in writing the history of the 17th-century English revolution.
The latest book complements both Rees’s PhD thesis and his The Leveller Revolution, as well as his most recent publication, Marxism and the English Revolution. Rees is a gifted historian, and his latest book is well-written and thoroughly researched. It neither downplays nor overplays the Fiery Spirits, presenting a relatively objective assessment of their role in the English Revolution.[1]
Like the great historian Christopher Hill, Rees is sensitive enough to his historical sources to detect the social currents that brought people of diverse social backgrounds into struggle against the king, and well-grounded enough in history to identify new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic guise in which they appeared. The Fiery Spirits, who were some of the revolution’s ideologues, ransacked the Bible and half-understood historical precedent to justify some theory that explained their actions.
Rees’s new perspective centres on a small group of highly influential MPs. These “fiery spirits” played a significant role in shaping the course of the English bourgeois revolution, which ultimately led to the establishment of an English republic. Through their radical parliamentarianism, combined with mass protest, these revolutionaries pushed the revolution forward to its conclusion.
Rees is careful not to elevate these Fiery Spirits above the role played by Oliver Cromwell, who was, after all, the leader of the English revolution. As the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky once wrote, “ Cromwell was a great revolutionary of his time, who knew how to uphold the interests of the new, bourgeois social system against the old aristocratic one without holding back at anything. This must be learnt from him, and the dead lion of the seventeenth century is, in this sense, immeasurably greater than many living dogs.”[2]
One of the main tasks Rees had was to rescue these “Fiery Spirits” from what E.P. Thompson once wrote was the “condensation of history”. They have been buried under a large number of dead dogs, and it is to Rees’s credit that he has rescued them. Henry Marten, Peter Wentworth, Alexander Rigby, and others deserve their place in history, and this work traces the radicalism of these Fiery Spirits in some cases back to the reign of Elizabeth I.
Dominic Alexander makes an interesting point in his review of Rees’s book: He writes, “In one sense, this partial continuity is evidence of how deeply the causative factors of the English Revolution were ingrained in the nation’s history. The conflict was not, as many revisionist historians have tended to argue, a mere accidental product of contingent events and personalities. The Fiery Spirits is, however, not so much a riposte to that vein of argument as it is a response to a more interesting one about the autonomy of the political sphere in the unfolding of the Revolution. The long pre-history of the parliamentary opposition faction is one proof that even granting the relative independence of the political sphere, causation there also runs deep into the history of early modern England”.[3]
Rees’s book presents a relatively orthodox Marxist understanding of the English bourgeois revolution and its leading actors. It is therefore perhaps surprising how little Rees uses the work of Leon Trotsky; there is no direct quote of Trotsky in any of Rees’s latest books. For any Marxist, Trotsky should be the basic starting point for any analysis of revolutions and their actors.
Trotsky writes, “The English revolution of the seventeenth century, precisely because it was a great revolution shattering the nation to the bottom, affords a clear example of this alternating dual power, with sharp transitions in the form of civil war. The English Revolution of the seventeenth century, precisely because it was a profound revolution that shook the nation to its core, affords a clear example of this alternating dual power, with sharp transitions in the form of civil war. Initially, the royal power, resting on the privileged classes or the upper echelons of these classes – the aristocrats and bishops – is opposed by the bourgeoisie and the circles of the squirearchy that are closely associated with it. The government of the bourgeoisie is the Presbyterian Parliament supported by the City of London.” [4]For Rees, this “dual Power began in the very early part of the 17th century.
The hallmark of a good book is that even seasoned readers who have studied this period for ages can learn something new. Rees presents new material that highlights the extraordinary level of factionalism and revolt that preceded the outbreak of revolution. From an early period, the Fiery Spirits led this rebellion. As Alexander writes, “The connections between the activities of the radicals in the Commons and the popular movement became, as Rees shows, the key dynamic driving events in the years 1640-1. The fiery spirits were indeed a minority in the Commons. Still, the weight of popular support behind their moves, such as Henry Marten’s during the struggle over the attainder of the King’s chief advisor Earl Strafford, meant that, as in this instance, ‘the course of events proceeded on the path that Marten advocated, not that which Pym still trod’ (pp.163-4). Indeed, during this confrontation, which led to Strafford’s execution, Pym lost control of parliament. Popular mobilisations against Strafford made the difference; one MP wrote, ‘unless this Earl be sacrificed to public discontentment I see not what hopes we have of peace’ (p.165).[5]
The Great historian E. H Carr was fond of saying, “Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.” This maxim should be applied to Rees. The Fiery Spirits is, without doubt, a significant addition to our understanding of the English bourgeois revolution. It contains new detailed research and reinterprets significant episodes and stages of events. Rees recalibrates our understanding of the revolution from a historical materialist standpoint. However, to what extent you could describe Rees as a revisionist is open to conjecture.
When I asked AI this question, its reply was “while John Rees engages with historical revisionism to some extent, his primary framework is that of Marxist historiography, which is distinct from the broader category of revisionist historians who challenge traditional interpretations.” Not much help.
There is something Jesuitical about Rees’s ability to write history from a relatively orthodox Marxist perspective while retaining the political outlook of a pseudo-left. He appears to retain the ability to compartmentalise his mind and pursue a scientific Marxist approach to history, up to the point where his radical politics, to some extent, draw the line. He is perhaps aided by an approach that was further encouraged by the extreme specialisation of academic life, which enables him to concentrate on very narrow areas of history that never bring him into direct conflict with his political organisation, Counterfire, on political questions.
Speaking of which, in a previous article, I wrote this: “Rees was a member of the SWP before leaving to found the Counterfire group in 2010, as a significant split from the SWP. Counterfire specialises in providing a platform for the remnants and detritus of pseudo-left politics. The group is thoroughly convinced of the power and longevity of capitalism and is hostile to the working class and genuine socialism. Counterfire and Rees’s occasional use of Marxist phrases, and even rarer references to the Russian revolutionaries Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, are for the sole purpose of opposing the independent political mobilisation of the working class on a revolutionary and internationalist programme. Counterfire’s self-proclaimed “revolutionaries” are bitterly opposed to the orthodox Marxism represented by the World Socialist Web Site, the Socialist Equality Parties, and the International Committee of the Fourth International. “[6]
While I do not personally subscribe to Rees’s political outlook, I can nonetheless recommend this book as highly as his previous work. Rees is a historian well worth reading, and it should be interesting to see what he is working on next. As Ann Talbot wrote about Hill which equally applies to Rees “A historian that stands head and shoulders above his detractors and his books deserve to be read and reread, and if with a critical eye, it should always be with the knowledge that his limitations and faults as much as his great historical insights and innovations are the product of his time. He may be bettered, but never dismissed, and only bettered by those who have studied him closely.[7]
“But who then, at that time [during the Stalinist repression], protested? Who stood up to shout his disgust? The Trotskyists can claim this honour. Following the example of their leader, who paid for his stubbornness by receiving the blow of an axe, they fought Stalinism totally, and they were the only ones. At the time of the great purges, they could no longer shout out their revolt except in the frozen vastness to which they were dragged to be more easily exterminated.”
Leopold Trepper: The Great Game
One of my favourite bookshops is the Amnesty International in Hammersmith, London. It is neither pretentious nor ostentatious, just a straightforward second-hand bookshop. I like it because you occasionally find a gem of a book. One such book was Peter Weiss’s Trotsky in Exile. I usually steer well clear of books on Trotsky’s life because they are inadvertently written by writers who are politically hostile to Trotsky and generally not worth reading, let alone reviewing. However, this play or book is different.
“Trotsky in Exile” is a play by German playwright and artist Peter Weiss, first performed in 1968. The play is a fictionalised account of the last years of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s life. Trotsky was residing in exile in Mexico and under constant threat from Stalin’s assassins.
The play is structured as a series of dialogues between Trotsky and various figures from his past and present, mostly revolutionaries, including his wife, Natalia Sedova, his son, Lev Sedov, and his former comrades in the Bolshevik Party. Through these conversations, Weiss explores Trotsky’s revolutionary ideology and his views on the Soviet Union under Stalin. The more Weiss read, the more he became a strong opponent of Stalinism. In 1967, this led him to meet one of Trotsky’s most important biographers, Isaac Deutscher.
Weiss’s portrayal of Trotsky as a complex and conflicted figure is an honest one. Outside of Trotsky’s writings on the impact of exile and political isolation on his family, this is one of the few books that examines his personal life in detail. While being faithful to Trotsky’s politics, Weiss employs Brechtian theatre devices, such as music and dance, to create a sense of distance and alienation. This style serves to underscore the play’s political and ideological themes, highlighting how history and ideology shape individual lives and experiences.
Peter Weiss (1916-1982 is arguably one of Germany’s most important artistic figures. He was an extraordinarily talented artist. He worked as a painter, novelist, filmmaker, and dramatist throughout his life. Weiss was comfortable in German literary and artistic circles. He was fond of Bertolt Brecht, seeing The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny in 1930.
In the 1960s, Weiss had a friendship with the German-born, Swiss writer Hermann Hesse. In a letter to his long-time friend Hesse in 1961, Weiss writes, “I am very preoccupied with the art which first comes about when reason, rational thinking is switched off. I have been unable myself to resolve this conflict: sometimes it seems to me that the most essential lies in the dark and the subconscious, then however it occurs to me that one can only work today in an extremely conscious way, as if the spirit of the times demands that the writer does not lose his way in regions of half-darkness.”
Unlike most of his generation of artists, Weiss was deeply interested in the seminal experiences of the twentieth century – the crimes of fascism, the October Revolution, and its subsequent betrayal by the Stalinist bureaucracy.
It is hardly surprising, given the political hostility to Leon Trotsky and the Trotskyist movement in general, that a play that is broadly sympathetic to Trotsky and his revolutionary life has hardly been performed, let alone written about. With 2016 marking the 100th anniversary of Weiss’s birth, no attempt was made to stage “Trotsky in Exile”.
As Stefan Steinberg writes, “To my knowledge, the play is unique in its attempt to portray Trotsky’s life and political struggle on stage. The work has its flaws and, on occasion, reveals the influence of Weiss’s discussions with Ernest Mandel, the leader of the Pabloite Unified Secretariat. What is striking about the play, however, is Weiss’s valiant effort to correct all manner of Stalinist falsifications, to restore Trotsky to his rightful place in history as a leader of the Russian Revolution alongside Lenin and as the principal Marxist opponent of the Stalinist degeneration in the Soviet Union.
Of great interest also in Trotsky in Exile is Weiss’s recognition of the central role of culture in assessing the October Revolution and Trotsky’s historical significance. Weiss had studied Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution and devotes a scene of his play to a discussion among Lenin, Trotsky and leaders of the Dadaist art movement. In Zurich in 1916, Lenin is known to have met political co-thinkers in the same café frequented by Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck and other leading lights of the Dada movement. With legitimate poetic licence, Weiss brings the remarkable figures together in a discussion about the prospects for art in a post-revolutionary Soviet Union. A later scene features Weiss’s old mentor Breton in discussion with Trotsky and Diego Rivera in Mexico.”[1]
In the 1960s, Weiss became increasingly politically radical. One form this radicalisation took was, as mentioned by Steinberg, was Weiss’s conversation with Ernest Mandel.[2] Weiss had no fundamental understanding of Mandel’s politics. Mandel broke from orthodox Trotskyism. As Max Brody points out
“Mandel sought to provide the economic justification for the rejection by Pabloism of the revolutionary role of the working class. He claimed capitalism had reached a new stage, in which the imperialist powers had resolved the inner contradictions that resulted in the barbarity of the early 20th century. He initially referred to this new period as “neo-capitalism. “To make the central point from the outset, Mandel’s embrace of Pabloism did not flow from an incorrect economic theory, but the reverse. His economic analysis was based on his rejection of the revolutionary role of the working class as the harbinger of capitalism’s demise.[3]
Weiss’s inability to understand the differences between orthodox Trotskyism and the Pabloism of Ernest Mandel was behind his decision to include Joseph Hansen in his book. However, Weiss did not know that Hansen was heavily involved in the assassination of Leon Trotsky. However, once Hansen’s treachery was in the public domain, Weiss should have at least told his readership of Hansen’s role in the assassination of Leon Trotsky.
According to a document entitled The Role of Joseph Hansen “The initial stages of the (Security and the Fourth International)investigation uncovered recently declassified documents, which revealed the conspiracy that prepared Trotsky’s assassination and the fatal role played by agents who had managed to infiltrate all the major political centres of the Fourth International. The ICFI uncovered documents relating to the activities of agents such as Mark Zborowski, who became the principal assistant of Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov. Zborowski played a key role in the murder of Sedov and other leading members of the Fourth International in Europe.
Another important Stalinist agent, who supplied the Kremlin with valuable information on Trotsky’s activities, was Sylvia Caldwell (née Callen), the personal secretary of James P. Cannon; however, the most significant information uncovered by the ICFI related to the activities of Joseph Hansen. Documents discovered in the US National Archives and others obtained through the Freedom of Information Act revealed that Hansen, immediately after the assassination of Trotsky, sought out and established a covert relationship with high-level US government agents. One such document, a letter from the American Consul in Mexico City to an official in the State Department, dated September 25, 1940, reported that Hansen “wishes to be put in touch with someone in your confidence located in New York to whom confidential information could be imparted with impunity.”[4]
Weiss’s radicalism and defence of Leon Trotsky against the slander of the Stalinists led to his investigation by the East German Stalinist police, following the publication and production of Trotsky in Exile. Weiss, in the eyes of the Stasi, had become a traitor.
The Stasi’s “Operational Information No. 551/69” of September 5, 1969, reported “that the enemy side is making massive efforts to win over and misuse famous authors for deliberate and destructive ideological purposes,” and “it should be recognised that the enemy has succeeded in turning the author Peter Weiss, who has been successfully featured in our theatres. The Stasi report described Trotsky in Exile as a “clear commitment to anti-Soviet positions” and made clear it favoured a total ban on the work and its author in the GDR.
To conclude, as Weiss writes, “ Every word that I write down and submit for publication is political. It is intended to reach a large audience and achieve a specific effect. I submit my writings to one of the communication media, and then they are consumed by the audience. The way in which my words are received depends to a great extent on the social system under which they are distributed. Since my words are but a small and ever-diminishing fraction of available opinions, I have to achieve the greatest possible precision if my views are to make their way”[5]
Notes
1. The Heritage We Defend David North, 1988. The Heritage We Defend was first published in book form in 1988. Its origins lie in the political struggle waged by the ICFI and the Workers League, the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party of the United States, from 1982 to 1986, to defend Trotskyism against the nationalist opportunism of the ICFI’s former British section, the Workers Revolutionary Party.
2. Peter Weiss The Necessary Decision- Ten work points of an author in this divided world-NLR I/47•Jan/Feb 1968
[3] The ICFI’s exposure of Ernest Mandel’s “neo-capitalism” and the analysis of the global economic crisis: 1967–1971-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/09/09/rvtn-s09.html
“Disaster nationalism is not fascist. These movements do not seek to overthrow electoral democracy. Except the RSS in India – the grass-roots cadre organisation supporting Modi’s BJP – they do not command far-right, paramilitary mass movements.”
Richard Seymour
“Fascism comes only when the working class shows complete incapacity to take into its own hands the fate of society.”
Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It
“In the meantime, the first characteristic of a revolutionary party is- to be able to look reality in the face.”
Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It
“If we place events in this more historically comprehensive context, it is clear that January 6 marks a new stage in a protracted process of democratic breakdown. We have witnessed in recent days efforts by historians and journalists to claim that really nothing of great importance happened on January 6, and that everything will more or less return to normal. This dangerous underestimation of the danger is based not merely on an incorrect evaluation of American conditions.”
David North.
While it is usually not possible to tell a book by its cover, you can usually gauge a book by its first page. Probably the greatest example of this is Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, which is arguably the most stunning introduction to a book in modern literature. The same cannot be said about Richard Seymour’s first page.
The quote from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is perhaps fitting, given that Seymour is not a Marxist but a pseudo-leftist, and both Adorno and Horkheimer were anti-Marxists.
As Peter Schwarz says, “The first thing that comes to mind when reading ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ is the complete absence of any reference to concrete historical, economic or political events, social classes, political parties or questions of perspective. Neither the policies of the Social Democrats nor those of the Communist Party are examined. Not even Hitler is mentioned. Instead, everything is treated at the level of pure thought, which is presented as an independent subject, completely detached from thinking individuals, social consciousness, the struggle of classes and the struggle of ideas. Horkheimer and Adorno describe this as “thought … reflecting on its own guilt.”[1]
Seymour does examine in a limited manner concrete historical, economic and political events, which is not the problem; however, he does so not from the perspective of a Marxist but from that of a radical leftist. In Richard Seymour’s book, Trump is not a fascist but another far-right leader who is peddling a non-Marxist term called “Disaster Nationalism”.
There are many sides to a Marxist, and one of those sides is clarity of thought and action. Arguably, the greatest Marxist thinker of the 20th century, apart from Vladimir Lenin and the modern-day Trotskyist David North, was Leon Trotsky. You would have thought that if someone was looking to understand modern fascism and be given a book contract to do so, you would consult the most brilliant authority on the subject, and that is Trotsky. Yet in Seymour’s book, Trotsky warrants one tiny mention with no quotes from his major works on German and Italian fascism.
This is Trotsky’s approach: “What is fascism? The name originated in Italy. Were all the forms of counter-revolutionary dictatorship fascist or not (That is to say, before the advent of fascism in Italy)? The former dictatorship in Spain of Primo de Rivera, 1923–30, is called a fascist dictatorship by the Comintern. Is this correct or not? We believe that it is incorrect. The fascist movement in Italy was a spontaneous movement of large masses, with new leaders from the rank and file. It is a plebian movement in origin, directed and financed by big capitalist powers. It issued forth from the petty bourgeoisie, the slum proletariat, and even to a certain extent from the proletarian masses; Mussolini, a former socialist, is a “self-made” man arising from this movement.
Primo de Rivera was an aristocrat. He occupied a high military and bureaucratic post and was chief governor of Catalonia. he accomplished his overthrow with the aid of state and military forces. The dictatorships of Spain and Italy are two different forms of dictatorship. It is necessary to distinguish between them. Mussolini had difficulty in reconciling many old military institutions with the fascist militia.
This problem did not exist for Primo de Rivera. The movement in Germany is analogous mostly to the Italian. It is a mass movement, with its leaders employing a great deal of socialist demagogy. This is necessary for the creation of the mass movement. The genuine basis (for fascism) is the petty bourgeoisie. In Italy, it has a very large base – the petty bourgeoisie of the towns and cities, and the peasantry. In Germany, likewise, there is a large base for fascism. It may be said, and this is true to a certain extent, that the new middle class, the functionaries of the state, the private administrators, etc., can constitute such a base. But this is a new question that must be analysed. To be capable of foreseeing anything about fascism, it is necessary to have a definition of that idea. What is fascism? What are its base, its form, and its characteristics? How will its development take place? It is necessary to proceed in a scientific and Marxian manner.”[2]
Seymour does not proceed in a scientific or Marxist manner. If he did, he would behave like any decent historian or writer and examine the only orthodox or classical Marxist movement on the planet, which is represented by the Marxists who write for the World Socialist Website. They have written extensively on the rise of modern fascism. It suffices to say that Seymour did not contact them or quote their analysis.
Their analysis of the rise of Trump and his brand of American fascism cuts across Seymour’s pseudo-left perspective, which is to downplay the rise of world fascism. Marxist writer Joseph Kishore believes that the return of Donald Trump to power represents “the violent realignment of the American political superstructure to correspond with the real social relations that exist in the United States. Trump’s rise and return to power are not an aberration but the product of deep-rooted crises in American and world capitalism. His administration is carrying out a historic restructuring of the state, tearing apart the remaining democratic constraints on oligarchic rule, and preparing for global war.”
While it is one thing to describe Trump and his gang as fascists, it is another to set his dictatorship in the same context as the rise of Hitlerite fascism in 1933. David North, the chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site and national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (US), in his introductory remarks to the post-election online webinar “The Election Debacle and the Fight Against Dictatorship,” cautions:
“ Now, it is not the position of the SEP and the WSWS that the accession of Trump to the presidency is the equivalent of Hitler’s 1933 victory. The United States is not Weimar Germany, and the transformation of the United States into a police state dictatorship backed by a mass fascist movement will not, whatever Trump’s intentions, be achieved overnight. But it would be politically irresponsible, and contribute to the success of Trump’s aims, not to recognise the dangerous implications and real consequences of last Tuesday’s election. At the very least, it is necessary to take Trump at his word.[3]
Which Seymour does not. He is not alone in underplaying the dangers of the rise of fascism in America. Alan Woods, leader of the Revolutionary Communist International (RCI), the successor to the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), published an article that starkly illustrates the complacent and anti-Marxist orientation of his and other political tendencies. Revealingly titled “Trump victory: a kick in the teeth for the establishment,” the article echoes Trump’s fraudulent claims of being an anti-establishment figure while downplaying the immense dangers posed by a Trump presidency to the working class.
Woods writes, “The ruling class of America – firmly supported by the governments of Europe – was determined to keep him [Trump] out of office, by fair means or foul. After Trump was ousted in the 2020 election, everything was done to prevent him from running again… All the numerous attacks against him rebounded and turned against those who were seen, correctly, as being involved in a conspiracy to prevent him from re-entering the White House.[4]
The World Socialist Website opposed Wood’s complacency, writing, “This portrayal is false. The ruling class was not ‘determined to keep [Trump] out of office.” Significant sections of the financial and corporate elite, including billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, actively supported Trump, viewing his authoritarian and pro-business agenda as a means of furthering their class interests. Others, like Jeff Bezos, have proclaimed their support for Trump after the election.” The article went on to reiterate its position that Trump and his allies were not fascists.
Seymour, like many of his pseudo-left fellow travellers, downplayed the 2006 coup attempt by Trump and his supporters in his latest book. In his article “Myths about the January 6th Capitol Building Events,” written by Roger D. Harris, a member of California’s Peace and Freedom Party, joins Seymour in his criminal underplaying of the coup attempt. Harris writes, “The riot was no attempted coup; it was just a sitting president unprecedentedly calling a march on the Capitol… signifying a breakdown of bourgeois political norms. What did happen is that a sitting president unprecedentedly called for a march on the Capitol to contest an election, signifying a breakdown of bourgeois political norms. Quite unlike Al Gore, who took a hit for elite political stability rather than contest the 2000 presidential election, Trump flagrantly broke the rules of orderly succession.”[5]
There is a degree of confusion, complacency, and even a hint of deception in Seymour’s analysis; when he writes, “ Disaster nationalism is not fascist. These movements do not seek to overthrow electoral democracy. Except for the RSS in India – the grass-roots cadre organisation supporting Modi’s BJP – they do not command far-right, paramilitary mass movements. The fascism that is being prepared through this sequence will not resemble classical fascism. The world that made fascism — colonialism, class civil war, revolution, and intense industrial modernisation-has passed. The new world is one in which the big questions will be those raised by the climate crisis: who gets what and who does without, who lives and who dies. Neonate fascism, whether green or brown, is preparing the terrain for a war on what it sees as mutant or out-of-place biology: the migratory or criminal.”[6]
Analogies with the past are fraught with danger, especially when examining the rise of fascism. Yet, the past can serve as a guide for today. Crucial to understanding the rise of fascism today is a systematic study of the past, especially the work of Leon Trotsky. As Trotsky writes: “German fascism, like Italian fascism, raised itself to power on the backs of the petty bourgeoisie, which it turned into a battering ram against the organisations of the working class and the institutions of democracy. But fascism in power is least of all the rule of the petty bourgeoisie. On the contrary, it is the most ruthless dictatorship of monopoly capital. Mussolini is right: the middle classes are incapable of independent policies. During periods of great crisis, they are called upon to reduce to absurdity the policies of one of the two basic classes. Fascism succeeded in putting them at the service of capital.
“Trotsky’s understanding of fascism can be used to understand today’s fascism. Seymour’s reluctance to study or utilise Trotsky’s work on fascism stems from his political views, which are a mishmash of liberal, Stalinist, and reformist traditions. Seymour joined the Socialist Workers Party in 1998 and fully immersed himself in their anti-Trotskyism. Pseudo-leftists Mike Kidron and Chris Harman, for economics; Alex Callinicos, for political philosophy; and Tony Cliff, for the weltanschauung, were his heroes. A second layer of influence was the ‘political Marxists,’ including Ellen Wood and Robert Brenner, and thirdly, Althusser, Gramsci, Poulantzas, Stuart Hall, and the Birmingham School. Is it any wonder Seymour is completely vague and indelicate regarding the rise of fascism in America
As the Marxist George Lavan Weissman wrote: “An indiscriminate use of the term (fascism)reflects vagueness about its meaning.” Asked to define fascism, the liberal replies in such terms as dictatorship, mass neurosis, anti-Semitism, the power of unscrupulous propaganda, the hypnotic effect of a mad-genius orator on the masses, etc. Impressionism and confusion among liberals are not surprising. However, Marxism’s superiority lies in its ability to analyse and differentiate among social and political phenomena. That so many of those calling themselves Marxists cannot define fascism any more adequately than the liberals is not wholly their fault. Whether they are aware of it or not, much of their intellectual heritage comes from the social-democratic (reformist socialist) and Stalinist movements, which dominated the left in the 1930s when fascism was scoring victory after victory. These movements not only permitted Nazism to come to power in Germany without a shot being fired against it, but they failed abysmally in understanding the nature and dynamics of fascism and the way to fight it. After fascism’s triumphs, they had much to hide and therefore refrained from making a Marxist analysis, which would, at the very least, have educated subsequent generations.[7]
This book lacks merit and should not have been allowed past the editorial stage by Verso. The fact that the Pabloites at Verso share Seymour’s politics should not come as a surprise. If the Scribes at Verso wanted to understand the rise of global fascism, they could have at least reprinted some of Leon Trotsky’s works. We wait with bated breath for this to happen.
[1] The rise of fascism in Germany and the collapse of the Communist Internationaw.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/10/le9-all.html
[2] Extracts from a letter to an English comrade, November 15, 1931;
printed in The Militant, January 16, 1932-www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm#p1
I think that the celebration of 1640—and especially of 1649—did something for the Party in giving it confidence in a non-gradualist tradition to an extent that it is difficult for the younger generation perhaps to realise.
Christopher Hill
“Thus, as far as he is a scientific man, as far as he knows anything, he is a materialist; outside his science, in spheres about which he knows nothing, he translates his ignorance into Greek and calls it agnosticism.”
Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
This is the first book-length semi-biography of the Stalinist intellectual A. L. Morton (1903–1987). It follows hot on the heels of biographies of Raphael Samuel: A Portrait of a People’s Historian (ANU Lives Series in Biography) by Sophie Scott-Brown, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History by Sir Richard J. Evans, and, recently, Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian by Michael Braddick. All four were members of the Communist Party Historians Group.
It is striking that Palgrave has Morton as a pioneer of the study of Utopianism rather than Marxism. Indeed, Morton was pretty much a pioneer of utopianism, radical history, and English national identity. However, he is best known for his works A People’s History of England (1938) and The English Utopia (1952). Crossley’s book is extensively researched, making use of Morton’s archive held at the Marx Memorial Library in London. His book includes archival work carried out at The National Archives of recently released secret service files.
It is undisputed that Morton was one of the most important influences on a whole generation of historians, both inside and outside the Communist Party. As Eric Hobsbawm relates:
“Our achievements were not insignificant. First, there is little doubt that the rise of ‘social history’ in Britain as a field of study, and especially of ‘history from below’ or the ‘history of the common people’, owes a great deal to the work of the members of the group (e.g. Hilton, Hill, Rude, E. P. Thompson, Hobsbawm, Raphael Samuel). In particular, the serious concern with plebeian ideology—the theory underlying the actions of social movements—is still largely identified with historians of this provenance, for the social history of ideas was always (thanks largely to Hill) one of our main preoccupations. Second, the members of the group contributed very substantially to the development of labour history.
Third, the study of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century was largely transformed by us; and though this is largely due to Hill’s ‘dominant position in the field of Revolutionary studies today’, Hill himself would be the first to agree that the debates among Marxist historians on the Revolution and his work, from 1940 onwards, played a part in the development of his views. The historiography of the English Revolution today is by no means predominantly Marxist; on the other hand, but for the Marxists, it would certainly be very different. Fourth, members of the group have influenced the general teaching of history through the often very popular general textbooks which they have written, as well as through other works. In this respect, A. L. Morton pioneered the way with his People’s History, which still remains the only Marxist attempt to write the entire history of Britain (or rather England). Fifth, the journal founded in the worst days of the Cold War by a group of Marxist historians, Past & Present, has become one of the leading historical journals in the world. Though it was never Marxist in the literal sense, and even dropped its sub-title ‘a journal of scientific history’ in 1958, the initiative, and to some extent the general stance of the journal, originally came from the Marxists, and their contribution to it was therefore crucial, at least in the early years when it established its standing. These are not negligible achievements. They justify recalling the ten fruitful years which began with Leslie Morton’s desire to consult other Marxist historians for the second edition of his People’s History. At all events, if no one else reads this memoir with interest or profit, one thing is certain: it will recall a part of their past to the middle-aged and ageing survivors of the Historians’ Group of 1946-56, wherever their paths have since taken them. [1]
As Crossly writes, “A People’s History of England is probably the first Marxist history of the nation. It explains the transformation from ancient forms of societies through the rise and fall of feudalism and on to capitalism, the rise of the working class, and the potential for a new era of socialism. For Morton, these transformations in England were the product of competing class interests and technological advances. The book stood in stark contrast to the usual histories of the nation, focused on its supposed great individuals.”[2]
Morton’s book is well written and not without merit. Crossley is correct when he says that Morton’s work was guided by the political needs of the Communist Party’s popular front campaign. But for too long, this work has been labelled Marxist. As this quote from Raphael Samuel shows, it is not a historical materialist approach but borders on mysticism at times:
“This version of people’s history invoked the authority of Marx, but it borrowed freely from the positivist sociology of Spencer and Comte as well as, in another direction, from Darwinian biology. Folk-life studies in this period were conducted in the same spirit, using the comparative method to situate myths in an evolutionary grid. The deterministic vision is no less apparent in the ‘folk psychology’ of Wundt – a kind of historical ethnography of mental characteristics and in those various theories of mass behaviour which make the individual a compulsive creature of instinct. The most deterministic history of all was that of human geography, which explained the character of peoples by reference to geography, climate, and soil.”[3]
Or to put it more precisely as Ann Talbot does “The Communist Party sponsored a form of ‘People’s History’, which is typified by A.L. Morton’s People’s History of England, in which the class character of earlier rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as representatives of a national rary tradition. This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries. People’s history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy—which provided a democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr.”[4]
Crossley is correct to point out Morton’s gifts and range of subjects. However, like other members of the CPHG, there were two subjects that he could not write about: one was the Russian Revolution, and the other was the rise of Stalin. A discussion on the work of the great Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky was also taboo. As Ann Talbot points out
“ There is something Jesuitical about the relationship of these historians to Marxism. They seem to have been capable of partitioning their minds and pursuing a scientific Marxist approach to history up to the point where the Stalinist bureaucracy drew the line, like the Jesuit scientists who would pursue their investigations as far as the Church authorities permitted, but no further. It was an approach that was further encouraged by the extreme specialisation of academic life that enabled them to concentrate on very narrow areas of history that never brought them into direct collision with the bureaucracy on political questions.”[5]
Eric Hobsbawm justified their actions saying, “There are several reasons why, by and large, our work as historians did not suffer more from the contemporary dogmatism. First, it must always be remembered that even during the most dogmatic Stalinist period, the authorised versions of Marxist history were concerned with genuine historical problems, and arguable as serious history, except where the political authority of the Bolshevik Party and similar matters were involved. While this patently made it a waste of time to debate, say, the history of the Soviet Union—except to discover new citations with which to embellish official truth—it left substantial scope for genuine analysis over the greater part of the human past. Indeed, the debates of Soviet historians could be reasonably integrated into such a discussion, and the work of some of them which survived from earlier periods (such as that of E. A. Kosminsky on feudal England) or was published during these years (such as B. F. Porshnev’s study of popular risings in France) was respected and influential outside Marxist circles, even when not accepted. Moreover, communist intellectuals were encouraged (if they needed any encouragement) to study the texts of Marx and Engels as well as of Lenin and Stalin; nor was there (according to Stalin himself) an obligation to accept all of them as literal truth. In brief, the received orthodoxy both of historical materialism and of historical interpretation was not, except for some specific topics mainly concerning the twentieth century, incompatible with genuine historical work. “[6] David North wrote a reply about Hobsbawm’s craven capitulation, writing:
The Russian Revolution is dangerous territory for Professor Hobsbawm, for in this field his scholarship is compromised by his politics. Hobsbawm once confessed that as a member of the CPGB, he had avoided writing about the Russian Revolution and the twentieth century, because the political line of his party would have prevented him from being entirely truthful. Why he chose to remain a member of a party that would have compelled him to tell lies is a question to which he has never given a convincing answer. It would have been best for him, and no loss to the writing of history, had he continued to limit himself to events before 1900.”[7]
Despite Morton’s criticism of what he called “naïve utopianism” in his book The English Utopia (1952), Morton was guilty of idealism and could easily be described by Marx if he were alive today as a Utopian Socialist, not a Marxist. The English Utopia (1952) traces what Morton believes was an unbroken thread of radicalism. The book charted the history of utopian thinking and utopian literature about peasant hopes, the rise of bourgeois thought, and the emergence of socialism. Just like his book A People’s History, Morton’s book on Utopia continued the CP’s popular front politics and supported the CP’s reformist British Road to Socialism. Morton saw the CP as the inheritors of English radicalism. Morton also wrote the book to counteract what he saw as an attack on England’s pure radical tradition from what he termed US Imperialism’s interference in British history. Crossley writes:
“Morton’s criticisms of American imperialism were sharp and unambiguous, and that they turn up in the final editing of The English Utopia meant that Morton wanted them to be taken seriously. Indeed, we should see such criticisms as part of the heightening of CPGB criticisms of American imperialism and accompanying cultural dominance (e.g., through cinema, comics, books, philosophy) as Morton was finishing off the book.4 In April 1951, the National Cultural Committee of the CPGB ran a conference on the American threat to British culture, with the proceedings published in a special edition of Arena. As well as attacking the malign influence of American culture, an accompanying emphasis in this era was to promote English and British cultural traditions, radical or otherwise. The work of the Communist Party Historians’ Group was tied up with this agenda, not least with its sharp focus on English and British history. In his role as chair of the Historians’ Group, Rodney Hilton wrote in support of the Cultural Committee. He suggested that the culture of the ruling class was in “utter decay” and dependent on the “American imperialists”. He likewise embraced the task of exposing American bourgeois culture while promoting a progressive patriotism to oust the “bastard patriotism” of the ruling class.”[8]
To a large degree, Morton has been largely forgotten by historians. While I am all for rescuing Historians from what E. P Thompson called “The Condescension of Posterity”, I am not sure we desperately need to reclaim Morton’s legacy as Crossley wants to. What is Morton’s legacy? He was undoubtedly a skilled historian, and most of his books are worth reading, but he was no Marxist. At best, he was a Utopian socialist and at worst, he was a Stalinist who stayed in the British Communist Party and slavishly supported and justified every betrayal.
[1] The Historians’ Group of the Communist Party-Eric Hobsbawm-www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/the-historians-group-of-the-communist-party.
“The angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”
Walter Benjamin
“A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ which I described in connection with my critique of Schopenhauer as ‘a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity.
Georg Lukács’
“Why did the German Revolution fail to lead to victory? The causes for this lie wholly in tactics and not in objective conditions… In 1923, the working masses realised or sensed that the moment of decisive struggle was approaching. However, they did not see the necessary resolution and self-confidence on the side of the Communist Party.
Leon Trotsky
“A rich old man dies; disturbed at the poverty in the world, in his will he leaves a large sum to set up an institute which will do research on the source of this poverty, which is, of course, himself,”.
Bertolt Brecht
“Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”
Bertolt Brecht, referring to Arturo Ui (representing Adolf Hitler), in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941)
Grand Hotel Abyss is a useful, if somewhat idiosyncratic, examination of the Frankfurt School. The founding of the school was in direct response to the failure and betrayal of the German revolution of 1918/23. Leon Trotsky posed the question :
“Why did the German Revolution fail to lead to victory? The causes for this lie wholly in tactics and not in objective conditions… In 1923, the working masses realised or sensed that the moment of decisive struggle was approaching. However, they did not see the necessary resolution and self-confidence on the side of the Communist Party.”[1]
The so-called “Marxist intellectuals”, centred around the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, drew extremely pessimistic conclusions from the defeat of the German revolution. To a man, they blamed the working class for the defeat, not the German Communist Party. As Jeffries puts it: “It was as if the proletariat had been found wanting and so had to be replaced as revolutionary agent by critical theorists.”[2]
Grand Hotel Abyss – takes its name from the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács’s derisive term for the Frankfurt school :
“A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ which I described in connection with my critique of Schopenhauer as ‘a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered.’ (Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, Neuwied 1962, p. 219).
The fact that Ernst Bloch continued undeterred to cling to his synthesis of ‘left’ ethics and ‘right’ epistemology (e.g. cf. Philosophische Grundfragen I, Zur Ontologie des Noch-Nicht-Seins, Frankfurt 1961) does honour to his strength of character but cannot modify the outdated nature of his theoretical position. To the extent that an authentic, fruitful and progressive opposition is stirring in the Western world (including the Federal Republic), this opposition no longer has anything to do with the coupling of ‘left’ ethics with ‘right’ epistemology.”[3]
This book is a group biography. The early part of the book describes the origins of the school. From the very beginning, the school was financed heavily by sections of the German bourgeoisie. As Bertolt Brecht once quipped, “A rich old man dies; disturbed at the poverty in the world, in his will he leaves a large sum to set up an institute which will do research on the source of this poverty, which is, of course, himself,”. These financiers had such a significant influence on the institute that the words “Marxism” or “revolution” were not mentioned in the early papers issued by the institute’s members. It is fair to say that the Institute for Social Research was compromised from the start.
Economist Henryk Grossman dominated the school’s early work. As the Marxist writer Nick Beams explains “In 1929 Henryk Grossmann publication of his book The Law of Accumulation and the Breakdown of the Capitalist System explained that it was the “great historical contribution” of Rosa Luxemburg that she adhered to the basic lesson of Capital and sought to prove that “the continued development of capitalism encounters absolute economic limits.” The problem with Luxemburg’s analysis, however, was that it shifted the crucial contradictions of capitalism from the sphere of production to the sphere of circulation. “Realisation” was not the problem for the long-term development of capitalism. Rather, the problem was the insufficient extraction of surplus value to sustain capitalist accumulation, which expressed itself in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.[4]
It is extraordinary that the Institute had little or no contact with the two main parties of the working the Social Democratic and Communist parties. Towards the end of the 1920s, the work of the institute came to be dominated by one of its leaders, Max Horkheimer.[5].
As Martin Jay writes “In one of the very few concrete political analyses Horkheimer wrote during the pre-emigration period, “The Impotence of the German Working Class,” published in 1934 in the collection of aphorisms and short essays known as Dämmerung (the German word means both dawn and twilight), he expressed his reasons for scepticism concerning the various workers’ parties. The existence of a split between an employed, integrated working-class elite and the masses of outraged, frustrated unemployed produced by capitalism in its current form, he argued, had led to a corresponding dichotomy between a Social Democratic Party lacking in motivation and a Communist Party crippled by theoretical obtuseness.”
The SPD had too many “reasons”; the Communists, who often relied on coercion, too few. The prospects for reconciling the two positions, he concluded pessimistically, were contingent “in the last analysis on the course of economic processes…. In both parties, there exists a part of the strength on which the future of mankind depends.” At no time, therefore, whether under Grünberg or Horkheimer, was the Institute to ally itself with a specific party or faction on the left. In 1931, one of its members characterised its relationship to the working-class movement in these terms: “It is a neutral institution at the university, which is accessible to everyone. Its significance lies in the fact that for the first time, everything concerning the workers’ movement in the most important countries of the world is gathered. Above all, sources (congress minutes, party programs, statutes, newspapers, and periodicals) … Whoever in Western Europe wishes to write on the currents of the worker’s movement must come to us, for we are the only gathering point for it.[6]
Horkheimer was the father of “Critical Theory”. Most, if not all, leaders of the Institute, including Adorno, had no faith in the revolutionary capacity of the working class. Rolf Wiggerhaus writes “None of them [the leaders of the Frankfurt School] put any hopes in the working class…Adorno expressly denied that the working class had any progressive role to play.” (The Frankfurt School—Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, MIT Press, 1992, p. 123)
“The Frankfurt School transformed Marxism from a theoretical and political weapon of the proletarian class struggle into a form of supra-class cultural criticism, expressing the political pessimism, social alienation and personal frustration of sections of the middle classes. Max Horkheimer and his closest collaborator, Theodor Adorno, reverted to philosophical traditions that Marxism had opposed—the critical theory of Kant, the “critical criticism” of the Young Hegelians and various forms of philosophical subjectivism from Schopenhauer to Heidegger.
Traumatised by the experience of National Socialism, they denied the revolutionary potential of the working class. Contrary to Marx, in whose view the development of the productive forces blew apart capitalist property relations and unleashed an epoch of social revolution, in their opinion, the development of the productive forces plunged society into barbarism and solidified capitalist rule. “The powerlessness of the workers is not merely a ruse of the rulers, but the logical consequence of industrial society”, they claimed, and further: “The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression”. The only way out of this social dead end was critical thinking: “It is the servant which the master cannot control at will”. The revolutionary subject, therefore, according to these theorists, was the “enlightened individual” and not the proletariat.”[7]
This leads me to another leading member of the Institute, Walter Benjamin. Benjamin, although a gifted writer, led a torturous life and committed suicide at an early age. He too succumbed to the pessimism of the age and, like his co-thinkers, opposed orthodox Marxism and wrote off the working class as a revolutionary force for the overthrow of capitalism.
Before his death, he wrote the following: “The angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”[8]
As Bernd Rheinhardt writes “Some time after writing these lines, Benjamin, fleeing the Nazis, took his own life in 1940. His situation was desperate, stranded on the French-Spanish border, he anticipated his immediate arrest by the Nazis. On the one hand, the pessimistic viewpoint expressed in that citation stemmed from personal despair. At the same time, it was nourished by confusion arising from unresolved questions concerning the rise of fascism in Europe and the political degeneration of the Soviet Union under Stalinism.”
It is safe to say that Benjamin was not the only one of the Frankfurt School who had a pessimistic outlook stemming from an incorrect perspective regarding the rise of German fascism. The leading representatives of the Frankfurt School lived most of their adult lives in a state of political prostration.” The maestros of ‘critical theory’ and the “negative dialectic” were, when it came to political analysis, incompetent and perennially disoriented. The rise of fascism and defeats of the working class in the 1930s shattered whatever confidence they may have had at some time in the possibility of socialist revolution. Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno—published in 1947 and generally considered the founding philosophical statement of the Frankfurt School—pronounced the downfall of all prospects for human progress.”
The analysis on the Frankfurt School by the Fourth International and particularly one of its leaders, David North, has come under sustained attack by several pseudo-left organisations and individuals, such as Javier-sethness who writes.
“In his “Marxist Critique” of The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism, and The Politics of the Pseudo-Left, David North, a high-ranking member within the Trotskyist Fourth International, chairman of the U.S. Socialist Equality Party (SEP), and editor of the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), reprints polemical essays (2003-2012) voicing the response of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to the heterodox theoretical suggestions made by fellow travellers Alex Steiner and Frank Brenner to incorporate greater concern for psychology, utopia, gender, and sexuality into the ICFI’s program. Whereas Steiner and Brenner sought to open the Fourth International to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and Wilhelm Reich’s sex-pol approach, North repudiates any such suggestion as beyond the pale and communicates his revulsion with the Frankfurt School as an alternative to Marxism-Leninism. To rationalise his dismissal of Critical Theory, he rather baselessly ties its legacy to the rise of postmodernist irrationalism. North essentially claims any left-wing intellectual “deviation” from the ICFI’s Trotskyism irredeemably to espouse “pseudo-left,” “petty bourgeois,” “anti-Marxist,” even “anti-socialist” politics. To sustain such fantasies, North presents a highly dishonest, even unhinged analysis of the Frankfurt School theorists and theories.”[9]
There is not much point in answering this facile argument, and doing so would only encourage further stupidity, and I am pretty sure North can defend himself against this infantile attack.
While Jeffries’ book is well researched and readable, it suffers from a major weakness. At no time does he examine what orthodox Marxists have said on the subject of the Frankfurt School. North’s book is not mentioned, and I doubt Jeffries has read any of the articles in it or, for that matter, contacted any leading writers from the World Socialist Website.
Also, the most important Marxist of the 20th century, Leon Trotsky, gets no mention. Trotsky wrote numerous articles and pamphlets on Germany in the fire of events. The German edition of his writings on Germany, published in the 1970s, contains 76 articles written between 1929 and 1940, the overwhelming majority in 1932 and in 1933. Unlike members of the Frankfurt School, Trotsky aimed to change the course of the Communist Party. With a correct policy, this party would have been able to stop the rise of National Socialism and prevent Hitler’s victory.
The thinkers of the Frankfurt School — Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas, Benjamin, Wellmer, Marcuse — were all for theorising capitalism and barbarism and thought little about changing it. The residents in the Grand Hotel Abyss were about theory, not action.
[8] On the Concept of History-https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html
[9] The Marx and Philosophy Review of Books-marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/8113_the-frankfurt-school-postmodernism-and-the-politics-of-the-pseudo-left-review-by-javier-sethness/
A Trumpet of Sedition 