On
Sept 27 of this year the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) published an article with the imposing title,
1982: Marxism, the revolutionary party, and the critique of Healy’s Studies
in Dialectics, by Christoph Vandreier, a leading member of the Sozialistische
Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party) of Germany. [1]
The
article is a transcript of a lecture the author gave at the Socialist Equality Party Summer School of 2023. The lecture included the following diatribe about me and
Frank Brenner,
North’s polemic against Alex Steiner
and Frank Brenner is undoubtedly particularly important. North, in his
engagement with Steiner and Brenner, developed further the very conception we
discussed during the last hour. The book is a Marxist attack on all the various
schools of subjective idealism such as postmodernism, the Frankfurt School, and
existentialism. It is a powerful defense of materialism. As David North writes:
The real issue is that you do not agree
with the International Committee’s insistence that the fight for socialism
requires the development, within the working class, of both a profound
knowledge of history—particularly that of the socialist movement itself—and the
most precise and concrete understanding possible (by means of ever more exact
conceptual approximations) of the objective movement of the world capitalist
system in all its complex, contradictory and interconnected forms. What you
refer to falsely as “objectivism,” is the Marxist striving to accurately
reflect in subjective thought the law-governed movement of the objective world,
of which social man is a part, and to make this knowledge and understanding the
basis of revolutionary practice. For all your talk about “dialectics” and the
“fight against pragmatism,” everything you write demonstrates indifference to
the requirements of developing a working-class movement whose practice is
informed by Marxist theory.
It is remarkable how in Steiner and
Brenner the conceptions of Healy, their theoretical mentor, merge with all the
anti-Marxist theories floating around in the universities. This itself
underlines once again the importance of the struggle against Healy’s
conceptions and shows how important it was to continue this struggle.
Their rejection of the Enlightenment
and therefore of reason, their insistence on utopia and a breaking up of the
family, etc., are all animated by the same spirit: to detach Marxism from
science, from the close study of the class struggle and its history, and to
transform it into a beautiful idea that fits the life of petty-bourgeois
existence. Marxism is not supposed to solve the crisis of revolutionary
leadership, but the sexual problems of Frank Brenner.
We
have not had much to say about the WSWS recently. This is not because we think
there has been any sign of a positive turn in that organization. In fact its
trajectory continues in the direction of extreme sectarianism and open
hostility to the working class combined with crude opportunism. This is a
combination, a unity of opposites if you will, not as unusual as some may
think. As Trotsky wrote of the sectarians in his time, ‘The urge to stand to
the left of Marxism leads fatally to the centrist swamp’. [2]
We have previously documented the SEP’s occasional prostration to bourgeois
nationalism, echoing the opportunist practice of Healy as well as that of the
despised ‘Pabloites’. [3]
The
reason we have devoted little attention to the SEP and the WSWS in the recent
period was because our personal focus has changed from journalistic activity to
theoretical and cultural activities, and we saw no reason to follow the twists
and turns of this organization. In any case we have said pretty much all there
is to say about the WSWS and the SEP and there is nothing more that needs to be
said. But as they say ‘the devil never
dies’, and no matter how many times slanders have been responded to, politically
and morally bankrupt individuals will repeat the same slanders over and over
again. Furthermore, the staying power of lies and slanders has
grown exponentially with the rise of social media and the world of ‘alternative
facts’ they create. Nevertheless the historical record demands a response even
if it will only impact that handful of readers who remain committed to the
search for truth.
Vandreier
tosses in his attack on us in the midst of a hagiographic account of North’s
battle against Healy’s butchery of dialectics and his “consistent” struggle for
Trotskyism. We debunked this false narrative
long ago.
I
do not have any personal animus toward Mr. Vandreier. I never met him and I have no doubt he
is sincere in his beliefs. He is simply acting
on the basis of how he has been trained for political leadership by David
North. The fact that he has allowed
himself to be molded into an unquestioning acolyte of North - his lecture is
peppered with dozens of quotations from the great man himself -indicates that
he is not exactly what one would call a critical thinker. However, while Mr.
Vandreier may not know any better, special responsibility for the evolution of
the SEP and its sister organizations into the semi political cult it is today
must fall on the shoulders of those older comrades who should have known
better. In this connection special mention must be made of Fred Mazelis, David
Walsh, Bill Van Auken, Fred Choate, Ulrich Rippert, Chris Talbot, Nick Beams and a
handful of others. Given the absence of any pushback or criticism
within the leadership of the SEP and its international partners, no mechanism existed for correcting North’s errors.
Like Healy, he was given a free hand. The result was an abandonment of theory,
an unchecked drift toward extreme sectarianism and an organizational structure
that does not tolerate any internal criticism.
For decades every National Conference of the Socialist Equality Party approved
every resolution brought before it with a unanimous vote. The SEP is not the only organization on the
left that does not tolerate internal debate,
but it is unique in openly bragging about it. [4]
The permanent revolution web site has
over the years published dozens of essays as well as entire volumes comprising
our assessment of David North and the organization he has led since 1975.
I
am responding to Vandreier not because I care about his personal attacks against
me and Frank Brenner. Such a personal attack would only concern me
if it comes from someone for whom I have some respect. I provide this material
rather to demonstrate to those who are able to intelligently reflect on the
issues raised, that David North as an essential part of his gross falsification of the history of his
organization, has for decades spread a fictitious narrative not only about me
and Frank Brenner, but also about the intellectual history of the Frankfurt
School and other philosophical trends of the 20th century. He has
embellished over the years a mythology about his unique role in rescuing
Trotskyism from oblivion. Mr. Vandreier’s
lecture, as well as the other lectures of the SEP Summer School are the latest
episodes in this decades long disinformation project. Because some people mistakenly believe that
North is a spokesperson for Marxism and Trotskyism, his words and actions
unfortunately influence what some people believe Marxism is all about. This
constitutes nothing less than a crime against the political and intellectual
integrity of Marxism.
To
summarize Vandreier’s allegations against Frank Brenner and me, he claims that:
2. We reject the Enlightenment and reason.
3. That we “insist” on Utopia.
4. That we support the breakup of the family.
5. All the above are expressions of our commitment “to detach Marxism from science, from the close study of the class struggle and its history, and to transform it into a beautiful idea that fits the life of petty-bourgeois existence.”
Let’s
take a look at each of Vandreier’s claims.
1. What does it mean to say that Gerry Healy was our “theoretical mentor”? Admittedly, when we joined the Workers League in the early 1970’s we were impressed by Gerry Healy’s consistent defense of Trotskyism against opportunism and by his ability to speak directly to workers and convey to them the ideas of revolutionary socialism in a manner they could easily grasp. David North also commented on this side of Healy in a political obituary he wrote many years ago. To quote North,
Healy
possessed an uncanny ability to articulate and convey that conviction, and
therein lay his astonishing gifts as an orator. He had the rare ability to move
a mass audience. At the peak of his form, he could literally raise thousands to
their feet. And this effect was achieved by inspiring his audiences with
confidence in the power of the historical principles of the Fourth
International and the revolutionary strength of the English working class. [5]
What
North wrote here is absolutely true. Practically anyone who joined the movement
in this period, including David North, was inspired by Healy. None of us at that time knew anything about
Healy’s abuse of female comrades, something that was only made public in
1985. This period also predated by
several years Healy’s adoption of what he called the “practice of cognition”, the
sad caricature of dialectics that became Healy’s focus and which was
accompanied by a capitulation to bourgeois nationalism. Is Mr. Vandreier
claiming that we were more “influenced” by Healy than David North or for that
matter any other comrade who entered the movement in this period? Is he claiming that we have adopted, and
remain faithful, to this day, to Healy’s butchery of dialectics? As a matter of
fact we published a critique of Healy’s mangling of dialectics that in every
respect is far superior to anything David North wrote. [6]
Or is Mr. Vandreier simply repeating the smear campaign against us that David
North has prosecuted for the past two decades?
2. 2. Mr. Vandreier claims that we “reject
the Enlightenment and reason”. We answered this intellectual slander 16 years
ago! In summing up our discussion of the
Enlightenment, we wrote,
…in
recent years, the traditional liberal defense of the Enlightenment has been
complemented by a distinct form of right-wing Enlightenment boosterism.
Proponents of this intellectual trend include such figures as Sam Harris and
Christopher Hitchens. Harris, in his book, Letters to a Christian Nation,
defends a version of Western Enlightenment culture that is distinctly chauvinist
and supportive of “humane” imperialism. Hitchens, as is well known, is a former
leftist who has become an enthusiastic supporter of the Bush Administration and
its “War on Terror”. But Hitchens puts his own spin on his support for the Bush
Administration. He claims that the Left has abandoned the Enlightenment (and
indeed there is some truth to that statement when applied to most petty
bourgeois radical groups) whereas the Bush Administration is defending those
very values by exporting the principles of Western democracy to Iraq. In the
face of such gangrenous claims to the legacy of the Enlightenment, the task of
Marxists, one would think, would be to stake out an understanding of the
Enlightenment such that it is clearly differentiated from both the liberal and right-wing
narratives. Conversely, an oversimplified and schematized version of the
Enlightenment can only lend credence to the liberal and right-wing accounts. [7]
Our
discussion of the Enlightenment then, far from rejecting it and celebrating irrationalism, was a warning that Marxists
must differentiate themselves from the liberal and right wing ‘defense of the
Enlightenment’. Failure to do so, ironically, only lends aid and comfort to
irrationalism. This is evident on college campuses today where the failure of
Marxists to articulate their own narrative of what was positive about the
Enlightenment and what was missing in it, is grist for the mill for the rise of
“wokeness” and other intellectual rubbish that rejects the Enlightenment and
the tradition of rationalism. Missing a
Marxist critique, it is understandable why radicalized college students, who
have been taught that the Enlightenment is compatible with and even encourages capitalism,
imperialism, patriarchy and racism, would embrace a philosophy of
anti-Enlightenment. This antipathy to
the Enlightenment is no mystery when its leading ‘defenders’ are right wing
polemicists such as the late Christoher Hitchens and Sam Harris or worse still,
the neo-cons in the State Department.
And to be sure, while Marxists should defend the progressive side of the
Enlightenment against the “woke” crowd, they should also not forget the various
lacunae that characterized the Enlightenment.
It is a fact that misogyny, racism and antisemitism was taken for
granted by some of the key defenders of the Enlightenment such as Voltaire and
Kant.
3. 3. Vandreier claims that we “insist” on
Utopia. The impression is thereby
conveyed that we are calling for a return to the Utopian Socialism of the 19th
century and rejecting the scientific Marxism that superseded it. All this and related smears by North about
our “neo-utopianism” are based on a willful misreading of an essay by Frank
Brenner that we published 20 years ago.
The essay is an historical account of the role of utopian vision in
inspiring the masses. Along the way
there are discussions of the how the right wing of Social Democracy tried to
counterpose utopian vision to scientific socialism, how the history of the
socialist movement continues a tradition born in Ancient Greece of the “good life”, eudaemonism, how the
role of the family is impacted by changes in the relations of
production, and many other issues that should be of interest to Marxists. I would
not expect the crude name-callers of North’s entourage to appreciate such a
serious intellectual approach to the subject matter – these are after all
people who believe that anyone on the left who is not under their control is a
member of the “pseudo-left” - and I have
little doubt that Mr. Vandreier never read the essay, but one of the lessons it
draws is that the common belief “…that once Marxism had made socialism into a
science, utopianism became irrelevant” is mistaken. Brenner, commenting on this common
misconception wrote,
The
primary text on which this view is based is Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and
Scientific, and there is no question that there, as elsewhere, both he
and Marx subjected utopian socialism to a profound critique that was crucial to
the whole project of a scientific socialism. But that critique didn’t render
utopianism irrelevant, any more than the advent of Marxism rendered Hegel’s
philosophy or Smith and Ricardo’s political economy irrelevant. The development
of Marxism was a dialectical one, a ‘transcendence’ that terminated the
ideologically rooted illusions and limitations of its predecessors, while at
the same time preserving – or perhaps more correctly, rediscovering – their
positive content. This is widely understood in relation to Hegel, whose influence
on Marx was evident long after the latter had settled accounts philosophically
with Hegelianism. The utopian socialists, however, have been ignored, even
though there is ample indication in the writings of Marx and Engels that the
ideas of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen continued to play an important role in
their thinking. [8]
To
prove the last point, Brenner provides a quote from Marx’s writing on the Paris
Commune,
From
the moment the working men’s class movement became real, the fantastic utopias
evanesced – not because the working class had given up the end aimed at by
these Utopians, but because they had found the real means to realize them – but
in their place came a real insight into the historical conditions of the
movement and a more and more gathering force of the militant organization of
the working class. But the last two ends of the movement proclaimed by the
Utopians are the last ends proclaimed by the Paris Revolution and by the
International. Only the means are different and the real conditions of the
movement are no longer clouded in utopian fables. [9]
4. 4. Vandreier claims that we advocate the
breakup of the family. Such a statement
has an uncanny resemblance to the mudslinging of the far right that liberals
and socialists are out to destroy the traditional family. And it has about as much truth value as the
ravings of Steve Bannon.
It
is but another echo of a gross distortion of our position that North has been
spreading for two decades. The charge
is aimed chiefly at Brenner because he has written extensively about the
changing role of the family, gender relations and how they are being
transformed today. He also discussed the theories of some of the
Freudo-Marxists about how the nuclear family structure in bourgeois society
becomes an engine of psychological and ideological repression. Because of his theoretical work in this area,
North claimed that Brenner was advocating the dissolution of the family
structure and that a revolutionary transformation of society was not possible
until a new family structure replaced the one we have. This is of course complete nonsense. Brenner was pointing out that it is capitalism,
not he, that is responsible for the dissolution of the nuclear family. What other conclusion can you draw when more
than 50% of the population is driven to divorce and break-up, and when birth
rates are declining, as a direct result
of economic pressures faced by the working class today? Brenner was also making
the point that a fundamental change of the family structure will face a long
and difficult path even after a revolution.
It is the same point made by Trotsky in an essay in his anthology, Problems
of Everyday Life.
In
regard to family relations and forms of individual life in general, there must
also be an inevitable period of disintegration of things as they were, of the
traditions inherited from the past which had not passed under the control of
thought. But in this domain of domestic life the period of criticism and
destruction begins later, lasts very long, and assumes morbid and painful forms
which, however, are complex and not always perceptible to superficial
observation. [10]
Brenner
also recognized, contrary to North’s accusation against us, that revolutions do
not and cannot wait for all forms of cultural backwardness to be overcome. As we wrote 18 years ago,
As
for workers being able to make a revolution despite lingering backwardness on
matters like the family, there isn’t anything difficult or idealist about
understanding how that can happen. A male worker can be a revolutionary and yet
abuse his wife. A working-class family can support the socialist cause and yet
be homophobic or not want their children to marry anyone from a different race
or religion. It is obvious that in any mass revolutionary movement, such
contradictions will abound. Of course making the revolution will itself be a
transformative experience, but on its own it cannot resolve all these problems. [11]
5. 5. Finally Vandreier concludes that we
“…detach Marxism from science, from the close study of the class struggle and
its history, and to transform it into a beautiful idea that fits the life of
petty-bourgeois existence.”
This
is an embellishment of another falsehood initially spread by North almost 20
years ago – namely that we have no real interest in the class struggle and the
development of concrete political perspectives.
But the record belies this claim.
We have written extensively on a multitude of topics relating to the
class struggle in the US and internationally and have often subjected the
perspectives of the WSWS to a withering critique. Any casual perusal of the
permanent-revolution web site will bear that out. But this claim made by North
about our Ivory Tower indifference to the class struggle was never more than a
distraction to turn attention away from the focus of our concern over the
years. And that was our insistence,
following in the footsteps of Trotsky, that training in dialectics is essential
to the building of a revolutionary movement. We have maintained and still
maintain that the abandonment of training in dialectics, and for that matter
any education in even the basics of Marxism, is the reason why the SEP and its
sister organizations have turned into sclerotic sectarian cults.
We
anticipated their overt anti-unionism long ago when we undertook a theoretical
review of their understanding of unions as part of our critique of their
actions during the New York transit workers strike of 2005. [12]
The
riposte about our being drawn to the comforts of a middle-class lifestyle is
one of those afterthoughts thrown in to poison the well against us. Indeed we
have had families and careers and enjoy the modest pleasures we are able to
afford, but we have never travelled in business class as North has done. Nor have we had the luxury of travelling all
over the world to attend film festivals as David Walsh does.
As
a parting shot there is the ad hominem outburst by Mr. Vandreier about Frank
Brenner’s “sexual problems.” If writing
about the changing roles of the family, gender and sex as Brenner has done,
qualifies one as having sexual problems, then one would have to add Frederick
Engels to that category as even a
cursory look at his study of the family will bear out. [13]
We
will further address some of the more egregious historical falsifications contained
in Vandreier’s lecture in a subsequent installment.
[1] 1982:
Marxism, the revolutionary party, and the critique of Healy’s Studies
in Dialectics
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/09/28/heal-s28.html
[2] Sectarianism,
Centrism and the Fourth International, http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2009/05/sectarianism-centrism-and-fourth.html
[3]
See for instance our essay, The WSWS as a Left Apologist for Bourgeois
Nationalism in Iraq, https://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch02.pdf
[4]
See our essay, Distorting the history of the International Committee, https://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/distorting_history.pdf
[5] Gerry
Healy and his Place in the History of the Fourth International https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/healy/11.html
[6] See A
Charlatan Exposed https://permanent-revolution.org/archives/charlatan_exposed.pdf
[7] Marxism
without its head and its heart https://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch06.pdf
[8] To
know a thing is to know its end https://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/to_know.pdf
[9] Marx
and Engels, On the Paris Commune, pages 165-6.
[10] From
the Old Family to the New, July 13, 1923, in Problems of Everyday Life,
p. 39, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/women/life/23_07_13.htm
[11] Marxism
without its head or its heart p. 219
https://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch08.pdf
[12] Marxism
without its head of its heart p. 132-135 https://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch05.pdf
[13] Frederick
Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,
International Publishers, 1972,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm
