Marxism without its head or its heart: A reply to David North: Chapter 4: The long road back to pragmatism

John Dewey

[Chapter 1]  [Chapter 2] [Chapter 3]

Marxism Without its Head or its Heart: A Reply to David North

By Frank Brenner and Alex Steiner 

Chapter notes for the 2026 edition

·       The case of James Burnham

Chapter IV:

·      The Long Road Back to Pragmatism 

·      The Janus Face of Pragmatism

 

·      Deweyism and the Dialectic

 

·      Deweyism and American Trotskyism: Max Eastman and Sidney Hook

 

·      James Burnham: The Confluence of Deweyism with Positivism

 

·       How Pragmatism Looks on the Ground                                                                                    

Chapter notes for the 2026 edition

In Chapter 4 we examine the impact of pragmatism on the socialist movement in the U.S. This was an area of research that was a product of original theoretical work by the International Committee of the Fourth International in the 1960’s.  Credit should be given to Tim Wohlforth for his work in this area. Wohlforth’s examination of pragmatism was the product of a turn by the ICFI at the time to fundamental philosophical questions that had emerged in the course of the split with the Socialist Workers Party in 1963.  It was in the course of the struggle over reunification with the United Secretariat that the question of philosophical method took center stage for the first time in the Trotskyist movement since the struggle by Trotsky and Cannon against the Shachtman-Burnham faction in 1939. 

Wohlforth wrote a series of articles for the ICFI publication Fourth International in the early 1960s with the tile “Struggle for Marxism in the United States”. This was eventually published as book by Labor Publications, the publishing outlet of the Workers League, in 1971.  In the Introduction Wohlforth wrote, 

The central theme of this book, that an abandonment of the Marxist method for pragmatism is at the roots of the degeneration of the SWP, comes from this international collaboration. In fact the study which led to writing it was initiated after discussions in England in February 1964. The bulk of the book itself was completed later the same year. The book is thus the collective product of the international movement and our struggle to construct the revolutionary party in the United States.

(The Struggle for Marxism in the United States 1971) 

Despite its shortcoming – the relationship of pragmatism to the history of the Marxist movement in the US was over-simplified – it was a pioneering effort that deserves some recognition. Wohlforth returned to this topic in a series of lectures in the early 1970’s that was later published as a pamphlet titled “Marxism and American Pragmatism”. Neither of Wohlforth’s books, The Struggle for Marxism in the United States, nor the pamphlet, Marxism and American Pragmatism, are available from Mehring Books, the publishing outlet of the ICFI.  In fact, nothing written by Wohlforth, the founder of the Workers League ­­— predecessor organization of the SEP — is available from Mehring Books. With the exception of references to the split with Wohlforth in 1975, you can hardly find a single mention of Wohlforth in any of the publications of the ICFI and absolutely nothing about his writings on pragmatism.  Not only did his passing in 2019 not rate an obituary, it didn’t even rate a mention!

Before engaging in any further discussion on the role of pragmatism within the Marxist movement credit should also be assigned to George Novack of the Socialist Workers Party for his attempt at a Marxist assessment of pragmatism written in the 1970s.  In the Introduction to his book, Marxism vs. Pragmatism, Novack explained how his work was the fulfillment of a commitment he made to Trotsky,

 

This work is the long-overdue fulfillment of a request made by Leon Trotsky in 1940 to his co thinkers in the United States. In connection with a deep-going struggle and split in the Socialist Workers Party, which raised for consideration many fundamental issues of philosophic method and its relation to revolutionary politics, he stressed the urgency of undertaking a thorough critique of pragmatism from the Marxist standpoint.

(George Novack, An Appraisal of John Dewey’s Philosophy: Pragmatism versus Marxism, Pathfinder Press, 1975, p. 14)

 

Novack does an excellent job in tracing the historical context of the emergence of pragmatism and shows how it is a continuation of themes that defined the ideology of the more radical elements of the American bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie since the time of the American Revolution.  He also exhibits a sensitivity to the dialectical nuances of the relationship between philosophy and class that were not present in some of his earlier writings. To take one example,

A philosophy which stems from and fills special class needs does not become a passive byproduct or epiphenomenon. Engendered by given historical, economic, political, scientific, and intellectual conditions, it becomes in its turn an influential cause which stamps its imprint upon an entire culture, inspires the thinking of large layers of people, and guides their conscious conduct. Entering as an active factor into social life, it serves as a weapon in the struggles of contending class forces. In our time, this has been the role of pragmatism in the United States, existentialism in Western Europe, and Marxism on a world scale.

(Novack, 1975, p.10) 

It must be acknowledged that Novack’s investigation of pragmatism went beyond the previous efforts of Wohlforth and the ICFI.  But it was very much a one-off kind of thing as it had absolutely no impact on the political practice of the Socialist Workers Party. Less than a decade after its publication the Socialist Workers Party was effectively dead. It had openly renounced Trotskyism and began a series of purges to eliminate the last vestiges of its working class base and anyone with ties to the old guard of Cannon and Dobbs. The book was only published as a purely educational endeavour with little connection to the building of a party or its practice. 

Thus, despite its shortcomings, the critique of pragmatism as key to building a revolutionary socialist movement was a unique feature of the theoretical work of the International Committee decades ago. You will not find anything like this in the theoretical output of any other Marxist group. And you can no longer find it in the output of the present-day “International Committee of the Fourth International”. 

The impulse to clarify issues of philosophical method ended by the 1970’s. And while some lip service was paid to the need to return to an exploration of pragmatism following the split with Healy in 1985-1986, it never happened.  By the time we were writing our polemic in 2007 this chapter of the history of the ICFI was but a dim memory in the minds of some of the older comrades and a complete unknown among the younger ones. 

It therefore came as a huge surprise to us when North claimed, in his response to our earlier polemic, Marxism vs Objectivism, that he and the Editorial Board of the WSWS had engaged in “massive anti-pragmatic exercises” without actually writing a word about the subject! That was the backdrop to Chapter 4 of Marxism without its head or its heart. 

As has been the case throughout our polemics, we had to expend a good deal of preliminary work in Chapter 4 unravelling North’s obfuscations just so we could get to the point of presenting the real issues that divided us.  We initiated the discussion of pragmatism with an examination of the work of the late Richard Rorty, who at that time was the most outspoken public intellectual professing the philosophy of pragmatism.   We noted that Rorty’s version of pragmatism seemed to have many similarities to various forms of cultural relativism and skepticism as embodied in postmodernism.  Indeed Rorty himself made the connection between his version of pragmatism and postmodernism.  At the same time Rorty identified himself as a champion of the philosophy of John Dewey.  Yet any examination of Dewey’s philosophy would have difficulty finding a kinship with postmodernism.  Dewey, unlike the postmodernists, thought that the task for philosophers was to provide a guide for a scientific enterprise that he viewed as tentative but not arbitrary.  That work could be focused in all areas traditionally associated with philosophy as well as the natural and social sciences. Thus he had something to say about ethics, politics, education, art and culture. This consideration led us to a discussion of the dual nature of pragmatism, its subjective side, as exemplified most clearly in Williams James, and its objective side as exemplified in Dewey and C.S. Peirce.  A dismissal of pragmatism as merely another form of subjective idealism ignores this dualism and, as we found in North, avoids the more important issues that divide Marxism from pragmatism.   

Those issues were the focal point of two books that had been published in the years prior to our polemic — Christopher Phelps’ intellectual biography of the young Sidney Hook, appropriately titled, Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist, and Brian Lloyd’s study of the impact of pragmatism on the socialist movement in the U.S. in its early years, Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism 1890-1922. Neither book was ever reviewed or even mentioned in any of the literature produced by the ICFI. Other self-professed Marxist groups, with few exceptions, likewise ignored the publication of these two important studies. 

At the time when we wrote Chapter 4 we hoped that our discussion of the dual nature of pragmatism and the recent historical investigation into that topic would elicit some interest on the part of the ICFI given its previous history of engagement with the philosophy of pragmatism and the priority that this question had been given in the struggle to build a movement in the American working class.  We received no response from within the ranks of the ICFI.  

We examined the philosophy of Dewey and the ambivalent legacy he inherited from Hegel. He borrowed certain concepts from Hegel that served him well in his stand against dogmatism and rigid thinking while at the same time crusading against the dialectic. The built-in contradiction in Dewey’s philosophy mirrored the built-in contradiction of his politics. His form of progressive liberalism sought to defend a democratic culture while adapting itself to the predatory capitalism that marked America as it became a major imperialist power at the end of the 19^th century and the early years of the 20^th century. 

We examined Dewey’s influence on some of the early supporters of Trotsky, Max Eastman, James Burnham and Sidney Hook, and what that tells us about the antagonistic relationship between Marxism and pragmatism despite certain superficial similarities. We also examined the relationship between pragmatism and positivism and noted that whereas pragmatism begins with a healthy skepticism toward positivism, it inevitably joins hands with positivism with all the consequences that we discussed in the previous chapter.  Finally we examined how pragmatism works in the real life struggles of the working class once it finds a broader audience outside of academia.  This is where we find the ”natural”  philosophy endemic to the American working class. It’s a form of pragmatism shorn of all sophisticated explanations – the bare assertions that only immediate goals count and principles are irrelevant. It’s the mentality that propels backroom deals by union bureaucrats and lesser-evil politics. 

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The case of James Burnham

The case of James Burnham is particularly instructive.  He grew up as a scion of the bourgeoisie, his father being a wealthy industrialist from Chicago. His social life included attending parties and soirées with the Astors and Vanderbilts.  He had the best education money can buy and graduated first in his class at Princeton and went on to Balliol College in Oxford.  But he was  radicalized as a young man when he saw the effects of the Great Depression on the working class. He was also inspired when reading Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, published in English in 1932. In 1934 he joined the radical pacifist A. J. Muste in the founding of the American Workers Party. That party soon fused with the American Trotskyist group led by James Cannon and Max Shachtman, the Communist Wokers League, to form the Workers Party.  After a brief sojourn through the Socialist Pary in 1937, the Socialist Workers Party emerged as the Trotskyist organization in the United States. Burnham was a participant in these transformations and wound up in the leadership of the SWP.  His talents as a writer and educator were quickly recognized and he shortly thereafter took on the editorship, with Shachtman, of the theoretical journal of the Socialist Workers Party, The New International.  He also became a member of the Political Committee of the SWP. 

Mirroring the separation between his elitist lifestyle and his commitment to the working class, he also separated Marxist politics, to which he adhered, from Marxist philosophy, which he summarily rejected.  This created a rift with Trotsky even prior to Burnham’s role in the factional struggle in the SWP that followed.  Reacting to an article co-authored by Burnham and Shachtman in January of 1939, Intellectuals in Retreat, Trotsky wrote, in a private letter to Shachtman, 

Comrade Burnham says: ‘I don’t recognize the dialectic.’ It is clear and everybody has to acknowledge it. But you say: ‘I recognize the dialectic, but no matter; it does not have the slightest importance.’ Re-read what you wrote. This section is terribly misleading for the readers of the New International and the best of gifts to the Eastmans of all kinds.. 

As a philosopher Burnham was closer to positivism than to Dewey’s form of pragmatism.  He thereby differentiated himself from his colleague at New York University, Sidney Hook, who had been a student of John Dewey’s. Another early supporter of Trotsky, Max Eastman, had also been a student of Dewey.  Yet Hook, unlike Eastman, thought that he could reconcile pragmatism with Marxist philosophy. Hook was a defender of the dialectic for a number of years during which he held a series of public debates with Eastman on that topic.  

One fascinating episode in this intellectual history of admirers of Trotsky who disdained the dialectic occurred when Burnham was commissioned by Trotsky to respond to an essay by Eastman in which he asserts that Marxism has no scientific basis and the dialectic is merely an article of faith introduced by Marxist to justify views that have no empirical confirmation.  This moment nicely captured not only Eastman’s overt contempt for the dialectic but also Burnham’s then covert contempt as well a full two years before Burnham’s political break with Marxism.  It is nicely captured by Burnham’s biographer: 

“[According to Eastman] Marx, however, never asked what it was about man that ensured “each according to his ability, each according to his need.” Eastman writes that Marx just assumed this, based only on the dialectic. No wonder Marxists were surprised by the Soviet catastrophe. Eastman singled out Trotsky for his inability to adjust his attitude toward socialism and the dialectic.

Trotsky requested that Burnham reply, and the latter obliged in “Max Eastman as Scientist.” 

The piece condemns Eastman while only partly defending Marxism. Burnham insists that Eastman’s new position as a nonbeliever did not make his analysis superior; it just meant he had less knowledge of the facts than Trotsky. Burnham concedes that Marx’s scientific method may lack rigor, but that did not invalidate Marx’s political philosophy…Notably, this piece [by Burnham] never refutes Eastman’s ideas about the dialectic. In fact, it does not even use the word.”

(Byrne, 2025, p. 36) 

If Burnham’s evasions about the dialectic sound familiar it is because Burnham was philosophically in 1938 in the same place as the esteemed leader of the ICFI, David North, occupies today.  The only difference is that North, unlike Burnham, sometimes employs the word dialectic, but otherwise he dismisses it in practice. Much the same can be said about a variety of leaders of various groups of self-proclaimed Trotskyists.

I discussed North’s evasion of the dialectic at length in the article, A Case Study in the Neglect of Dialectics ~ Permanent Revolution.  See also my analysis of the inadequacy of North’s critique of Popper which roughly parallels Burnham’s positivist view in 1938 that Marxism only requires more empirical data in order to become a true science: Marxism without its head or its heart: A reply to David North: Chapter 3: Their science and ours ~ Permanent Revolution 

Once the factional struggle in the Socialist Workers Party got underway in 1939 Burnham openly acknowledge his rejection of dialectics, which he considered, ironically, a form of mysticism, much like his erstwhile polemical opponent Max Eastman had done earlier.  Burnham’s later political trajectory is well-known. Having split from the Socialist Workers Party with Shachtman he very quickly penned a letter of resignation and renounced Marxism altogether, its political project as well as its philosophy.

Initially, Burnham joined forces with a stable of former leftists who were characterized as the “non-Communist left”. These included people like Sidney Hook, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Melvin J. Lasky, Franz Borkenau, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone and Stephen Spender. Just one year after his break with Marxism, in 1941, he published a book, The Managerial Revolution, that argued that a new class of managers and bureaucrats had replaced the old ruling class of capitalists and that neither socialism nor democracy was any longer possible. The book hit a nerve and was an enormous success, being heralded by many as the most important and influential book of the 1940’s.  But Burnham was steadily moving to the right. By 1947 Burnham became a zealous Cold Warrior and advocated a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. By 1953 he was employed by the CIA as a planner of the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the left-nationalist leader of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh.  That same year he also broke with the liberal anti-communists around the journal Partisan Review as a result of his enthusiastic support for McCarthyism.  In 1955 he co-founded, along with the right wing ideologue William F. Buckley, the conservative journal National Review.  The influence of Burnham and the National Review cannot be over-estimated as fodder for the rise of the New Right in American politics. Burnham is today credited with being the intellectual godfather of both paleo-conservatism as well as neo-conservatism, right wing intellectual currents whose eventual incarnation brought us Trump and the authoritarian MAGA movement. Rarely has the outcome of a factional battle inside a tiny political party on the fringes of left-wing politics, in which one’s philosophy was considered a key question, resulted in such an enormous historical shift.

James Burnham (left) with Arthur Koestler at the Congress for Cultural Freedom in West Berlin, 1950. Photo: Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo.

***********

It is no exaggeration to say that our discussion of pragmatism in this chapter, written in 2007, went beyond any previous attempt in providing a Marxist critique of this philosophy from within the Trotskyist tradition.  It should also be noted that the publication of this material was met with stone silence for the past 18 years. Not only did we never receive a response from North and the ICFI, but no other self-professed Trotskyist group has seen fit to either comment on our discussion or conduct their own investigation of pragmatism. The only Trotskyist organization that regularly comments on philosophical questions is the Revolutionary Communist International. They deserve credit for at least acknowledging the importance of philosophy in building a socialist movement.  But if you look at what they have to say about pragmatism, it is just a rehash of some very old arguments, as if we have learned nothing more since George Novack wrote his book in 1975. ( See the post Marxism and the Fight against American Pragmatism - Revolutionary Communists of America on the RCI website.) The vacuity of theoretical work on the part of all the organizations claiming to share the legacy of Trotsky is quite a comment on how far they have strayed from that legacy when you recall that Trotsky considered the struggle against pragmatism to be critical to the building of a revolutionary socialist movement in the United States. 

We are republishing this material today in the hope that anyone who is seriously interested in building a socialist movement in the heart of the imperialist behemoth of America will be prepared philosophically and politically for the coming struggles. To turn a phrase that described John Dewey’s project as being armed against “the Hegelian bacillus”, the task for American Marxists is to arm themselves against “the pragmatist bacillus”.

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Chapter IV:

The Long Road Back to Pragmatism 

Richard Rorty

We made the point that so invisible has pragmatism become in the IC’s outlook that when the late Richard Rorty [1] was discussed in one of North’s lectures, no mention was made of his role as the leading proponent of pragmatism. North shrugs this off:

Do you seriously believe that no one in the audience knew that Richard Rorty, America’s most celebrated philosopher, is a pragmatist? Or that they were unaware that postmodernism is itself a major tendency within contemporary pragmatic philosophy. (17-18)

In other words, it wasn’t worth mentioning because everyone already knew. But how did they know? Surely not from the WSWS, since there has never been an article examining Rorty’s evolution in the context of the history of pragmatism, much less an analysis of the relationship of postmodernism to contemporary pragmatism, or for that matter any discussion at all of contemporary pragmatism.[2] It is utter nonsense to suppose that workers and youth unfamiliar with philosophical literature will automatically know of Rorty’s affiliation to pragmatism, much less of the latter’s relationship to postmodernism. This is nothing more than a crass evasion on North’s part. The truth is that Rorty’s pragmatist credentials weren’t mentioned because the fight against pragmatism is of absolutely no interest to the IC of today.

But there is something more in North’s formulation that needs to be considered. When North says that “postmodernism is itself a major tendency within contemporary pragmatic philosophy” he is in effect saying that by attacking postmodernism he has therefore disposed of pragmatism and we need no longer be concerned with it. 

To write that “postmodernism is itself a major tendency within contemporary pragmatic philosophy” without any further discussion or clarification, as North does, is to accept the narrative woven by Rorty himself, who made the following astonishing statement when characterizing the relationship between pragmatism and postmodernism:

James and Dewey were not only waiting at the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy traveled, but are waiting at the end of the road which, for example, Foucault and Deleuze are currently traveling.[3] 

Rorty’s narrative does contain a partial truth. There is some justification for Rorty claiming the legacy of William James (and the French postmodernists for that matter). James after all, pretty much invented the notion of pluralism as a guiding principle in both epistemological and political matters. Thus he can with some legitimacy be seen as the precursor of Rorty’s attack on the possibility of objective truth or the postmodernists’ notion of ‘otherness’ and ‘differance’.[4] Although even there, Rorty’s claim to the legacy of James would have to be qualified. For one thing, Rorty denies that philosophy is of any importance whatsoever for political life. It is basically a private matter in which every individual construct his or her own ‘narrative’ of the way the world works.[5] James on the other hand thought that the personal and the political were inseparable. James also held to a notion of human nature that was determined through the mechanism of Darwinian evolution. Rorty rejects all such claims about human nature as holdovers from metaphysics and ‘essentialism’.  Yet it cannot be denied that Rorty took a few basic themes in the work of James and radicalized them in the direction of postmodernism. Rorty can therefore with some legitimacy see himself as the culmination of the Jamesian strand of pragmatism and its convergence with postmodernism.

However, when it comes to the legacy of Dewey that is quite another matter. Although in his public pronouncements, Rorty has claimed this legacy - much more insistently than that of James - many followers of Dewey bristle at the suggestion.[6] As we will see, Dewey’s instrumentalism is very far removed from Rorty’s brand of neo-pragmatism.[7]

North apparently accepts Rorty’s account of the evolution of pragmatism and its culmination in Rorty. This is made clear when North, quoting himself, writes of Rorty that,

 

He proposes to banish from discussion the product of more than 200 years of social thought. Underlying this proposal is the conception that the development of thought itself is a purely arbitrary and largely subjective process. Words, theoretical concepts, logical categories, and philosophical systems are merely verbal constructs, pragmatically conjured up in the interest of various subjective ends. The claim that the development of theoretical thought is an objective process, expressing man’s evolving, deepening, and ever-more complex and precise understanding of nature and society is, as far as Rorty is concerned, nothing more than a Hegelian-Marxian shibboleth. (18)

North then rhetorically asks, 

Is this not, Comrades Steiner and Brenner, a concise and correct explanation of an essential conflict between Marxism and pragmatism? (18)

No Comrade North, this is not a correct explanation of the essential conflict between Marxism and pragmatism.

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The Janus Face of Pragmatism 

C. S. Peirce and William James; drawing by David Levine,  New York Review of Books

While North’s characterization may serve as a depiction (again with some qualifications) of James’s form of subjective idealism, it leaves out of the picture the far more influential varieties of pragmatism represented by Peirce, Dewey and their intellectual descendants.  Contrary to Rorty (and North), Dewey would doubtless roll over in his grave if anyone had asked him whether he thought that his philosophy would eventually culminate in the subjective idealism and cultural relativism of Rorty and the French postmodernists. 

What North’s explanation buries is precisely what has characterized pragmatism from its inception in the writings of C.S. Peirce and William James - its dualistic nature.  Pragmatism presents us with a Janus face, encompassing both a subjective and an objective visage in uneasy residence under the same banner.  The subjective side of this duality can be located in the extreme individualism and cultural relativism championed by William James.  The version of neo-pragmatism championed by Rorty and other contemporary neo-pragmatists such as Stanly Fish and Donald Davidson clearly traces its lineage to this tradition.  The objective side of this duality, on the other hand, can be traced back to C.S. Peirce and John Dewey.  Hilary Putnam and Nicholas Rescher are some of the leading contemporary exponents of this trend, which can be called, following the nomenclature of Nicholas Rescher, ‘objectivist pragmatism’. 

Objectivist pragmatism repudiates the relativistic conclusions of Rorty and company and seeks to ground philosophy in something like Peirce’s idea of a scientific community or Dewey’s concept of experience.  Peirce had a strong commitment to the objective nature of scientific truths, though insisting on their tentative and fallible status. Dewey’s philosophy of instrumentalism likewise sought to ground ideas in the collective experience of a historically situated community. It is clearly at odds with James’ appeal to personal intuition.

What is the basis for such contradictory theories coexisting under the same label? This was first explained by Leon Samson, an American Marxist social theorist of the 1930s, who wrote:

It is also of interest to note that this contradiction that inheres in pragmatism is natural to a nation that is in the process of transition to an imperial order or things. Imperialism, as is well known, shifts the focus of a nation’s history from internal self-development, which depends in the main, on the competitive capacity of enterprising individualism, to a policy of a “place in the sun,” that, finding a unified national front politically indispensable, can no longer tolerate declarations of independence among its individual members and demands, on the contrary, a mood of fatalistic surrender to an objective destiny. This is the reason pragmatism, appearing in America during its imperial turning point, was bound to be torn into the two opposite poles of subjective and objective, theoretic self-sufficiency and practical applicability, the illusion of fancy and the fatality of fact. And this is also the reason for the earlier Jamesian emphasis on the subjective and the latter-day Deweyan emphasis on the objective test for truth. For instrumentalism, in a measure, abandons the Jamesian base, when instead of talking about the “will to believe” it increasingly emphasizes the social barometer for truth and thus reflects more closely the contemporary imperialistic leavening of the people, their reduction to de-individualized Behavioristic robots.[8] 

Samson’s insight into the dual character of pragmatism was more fully explored in a relatively recent study of the impact of pragmatism on the Marxist movement in the United States by Brian Lloyd. Lloyd wrote, 

This duality [of pragmatism], I argue, represents the manifestation in philosophy of the faultline that historians of U.S. political thought have charted by distinguishing during this same period between an old and new liberalism – roughly, a politics rendered obsolete by and a politics geared to accommodate the emergence of corporate capitalism. James’s fear and loathing of the big and the national correspond to the outlook of the petty bourgeoisie that dominated the mercantile culture of small proprietor, localized capitalism.  He battled the philosophical world’s totalizing abstractions and acquisitive monisms with the same aggrieved sense of purpose that motivated this class to fight the monopolists and the gold bugs. The mission Dewey assigned to philosophy embodied a different set of ideological imperatives. While James defended the individual and the immediate against the indignities of big organizations and expansive concepts, Dewey saw great promise in the cooperative and social character of industrial America and modern science. Like the builders of the modern corporation, he was driven to produce a more general and impersonal kind of knowledge than circulated in face-to-face communities of farmers and merchants.  His credo that “abstraction is liberation” matched the strategy of the railroad magnate, the scientific manager, and the financier, who plotted in their own way to order and control the particulars or raw experience – specifically, to subordinate the local, the artisanal, and the laissez-faire to the rationality of mass production and the imperatives of a national market. In his preference for the continuous over the discrete, the coordinated over the disjointed, the integrated over the autonomous, Dewey sided in the realm of ideology with the real-life despoilers of all that James held dear.[9]          

Samson’s and Lloyd’s historical approach clarifies the common misconception that sees a similarity between pragmatism, particularly its Peirceian/Deweyan variant, and many of the fundamental tenets of Marxism. The tentative nature of scientific knowledge, the repudiation of dogma and formalism, the rejection of rigid dichotomies between fact and value, the recognition of the social construction and class origins of ideology, and the placing of social practice at the center of the theory of knowledge are all trends that over the years have impressed some into theorizing a convergence between Marxism and pragmatism.[10] Yet history shows that this supposed convergence was largely a misunderstanding, resulting on the one hand from the low level of theoretical development of the early American Marxist and socialist movement, where pragmatism largely filled the void, and on the other hand the temporary alliance between the working class and a section of the petty bourgeoisie and intelligentsia who rebelled against the harsh consequences of American capitalism and the horrors of an unbridled imperialism.[11] 

The tension between Rorty’s brand of neo-pragmatism and the classical formulations of pragmatism were thus present at the very beginning. Peirce found William James’s subjectivist appropriation of pragmatism so disconcerting that he was considering renaming his doctrine “pragmaticism” to distinguish it from James’s enterprise.

The contemporary pragmatist Nicholas Rescher considers the endeavors of Rorty and other neo-pragmatists to be diametrically opposed to the Peircean tradition: 

In recent years, pragmatism has been further transmogrified by theorists who have quite other axes to grind.  In their hands, too, it has become something very different from its Peircean original – an instrument, not for pursuing objective validity, but rather one for demolishing the very idea of objectivity in these matters. In this way, pragmatism has been transformed step-by-step with postmodern theorists from William James to Richard Rorty into a means for authorizing a free and easy “anything goes” parochialism that casts objectivity to the winds. We have a total dissolution – a deconstruction or indeed a destruction – of the Peircean approach that saw the rational validity of intellectual artifacts to reside in the capacity to provide effective guidance in matters of prediction, planning, and intervention in the course of nature.[12]

It is this branch of objectivist pragmatism, along with its cousins empiricism and positivism that today represents the biggest theoretical challenge facing the Marxist movement.  But North’s identifying of postmodernism and pragmatism conveniently ignores this other branch of pragmatism. North is attempting to cover up the failure of the movement to do any serious theoretical work on the pressing issues presented by classical pragmatism.  Where are the essays on John Dewey, Sidney Hook, and Hilary Putnam? (North did present a lecture on Dewey about a decade ago, but that was concerned primarily with Dewey’s politics and only tangentially with his philosophy.) And while postmodernism certainly exerts some influence, particularly among academics and middle class radicals, we are not the first ones to note that the grip of the ‘POMOS’ is definitely on the wane today. One indication of this is the refusal of all but a handful of diehards to label themselves as “postmodernists”.

By ignoring the major division within the tradition of pragmatism North can claim that he has disposed of pragmatism when all he has done is engage in some superficial jabs against postmodernism. And the treatment of postmodernism is hardly any better. We made the point in Objectivism or Marxism that,

The critique [of postmodernism] in the summer school lectures is notable for how theoretically threadbare it is. We get virtually no analysis of the ideas of Derrida or Foucault or Rorty. Philosophical problems are reduced to a simple litmus test – for or against objective reality; beyond that, they are a mere sideshow to politics. Hurling a few very belated barbs at postmodernism is not the development of revolutionary theory but its evasion. 

North’s claim that the only progeny of pragmatism are the most irrational schools of subjective idealism is but another evasion of the responsibility to examine Deweyism and its influence on the Marxist movement.  To reinforce his claim, he even goes so far as to enlist two minor intellectual supporters of Italian fascism, Giovanni Pappini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, as negative poster boys for the perils of Jamesian subjective idealism.  Now it is true that William James’s form of pragmatism accentuated the subjective idealist tendencies within that movement and it is also true that Pappini and Prezzolini had been inspired by their reading of James, but the mystical viewpoint of Pappini has about as much to do with the ideas of Peirce and Dewey as a higher primate bears resemblance to a nematode, although both have a common ancestor. One may as well blame the Futurist and Modernist movements in art for Pappini, as he was also an enthusiastic supporter of those movements.  Compare the words of Pappini, 

I did not accept reality. No words can express my disgust at the physical, human, rational world, which suppressed me and did not leave room and air enough for my restless wings, [13]

 with those of  C.S. Peirce, 

Different minds may set out with the most antagonistic views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a force outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion.  This activity of thought by which we are carried, not where we wish, but to a foreordained goal, is like the operation of destiny. No modification of the point of view taken, no selection of other facts for study, no natural bent of mind even, can enable a man to escape the predestinate opinion.  This great law is embodied in the conception of truth and reality.  The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. [14] 

While there are certainly problems with Peirce’s concept of truth as that which naturally emerges as the consensus of a scientific community, it is still many miles distant from Pappini’s extreme personalism and subjective idealism. It is however much easier to declaim against the worst excesses of irrationalism and postmodernism than to engage in a serious critique of classical pragmatism precisely because it is the latter that has historically been a major influence within American Marxism.

There is something further that needs to be said about North introducing into a discussion of pragmatism the theories of such intellectual lightweights as Pappini and Prezollini.  This is North’s intellectual dishonesty. North quotes Pappini as a singular lesson in the dangers of the pragmatist elevation of voluntarism.  North fails to mention that the source for his discussion of Pappini and Prezzolini, Cornelis De Waal’s book, On Pragmatism, discusses them in the context of an overview of the Florentine school of pragmatism that thrived in the years prior to the First World War. As De Waal’s account demonstrates, the Florentine school of pragmatism exhibited the same dualism that marks pragmatism as whole. For within the Florentine school one could find not only the “magical pragmatism” of Pappini and Prezollini, but a variant of objectivist pragmatism in the works of Giovanni Vailati and Mario Calderoni.  This version of Florentine pragmatism, what De Waal calls “logical pragmatism”, took its inspiration not from James but the work of Peirce. De Waal includes a nice summary of the differences between the divergent strains of Florentine pragmatism:

According to Vailati, pragmatism is often misinterpreted as a justification for the subject’s believing anything she wants to believe. This he calls the pragmatism of the will-to-believists. In contrast, Vailati argues that pragmatism ought to go in the opposite direction.  Far from suggesting a subjective turn, pragmatism embodies a quest for more objectivity by its unrelenting insistence on experiments and hard facts. The pragmatic maxim is not a personal criterion but a public criterion, in which meaning and truth are interpreted in terms of the scientific method.[15] 

Though North goes out of his way to dig up the long forgotten work of Pappini and Prezollini, he does not examine the views of their Florentine opponents or even hint at their existence.  He cannot claim ignorance for the source for his discussion of Pappini and Prezolini, the book by De Waal, fully documents their conflict with Vailati and Calderoni. Similarly, in his discussion of Rorty and his version of neo-pragmatism, North ignores the legacy of Dewey. What accounts for this one-sided take on pragmatism, to say nothing of the decades-long ignoring of the subject that preceded it? The answer is evident in North’s remarks on what he considers to be the main philosophical problem we face today: 

You write in the most haughtily abstract manner of the need for a struggle against pragmatism, but seem wholly unaware that it spawned numerous tendencies in the 20^th century that sought to dissolve – through the extreme glorification of the transformative capacities of human practice – the essential ontological distinction, upon which dialectical materialism insists, between the objective world and the forms of its reflection in subjective consciousness. From the recognition that the world in which man lives is one acted upon and changed by human activity, certain pragmatic tendencies proclaimed it philosophically absurd to speak of an objective reality, existing independently of man, that places limits on man’s activity. Thus, from the absence of an absolute separation between object and subject, they deduced the non-existence of even a relative separation. The subjective premises of James’ pragmatism were developed in this extreme form by F.C.J Schiller, Henri Bergson, Georges Sorel, and the Italians Giuseppe Prezzolini and Giovanni Pappini. The latter are particularly significant, inasmuch as the politically fascistic implications of the extreme forms of subjective voluntarism espoused in their pragmatism emerge most openly. (33) 

Thus, for North, the main problem posed by pragmatism is the possibility of an extreme voluntarism.  North makes this statement explicitly and even generalizes it to encompass the entire history of the 20^th century:

Pragmatic voluntarism can have disastrous results even in the context of radical left politics. A political initiative that is based on an impressionistic appraisal of the objective situation, which assumes that subjective determination can, under all circumstances, impart to the political situation a revolutionary potential that may not be present objectively, can leave the working class exposed to a devastating counter-attack.

This danger, I should stress, is not merely a theoretical possibility. The history of 20th century revolutionary movements is littered with the political and social wreckage created by voluntarist policies that ignored the objective logic of law-governed historical and socio-economic processes. Stalin’s policies (i.e. collectivization, super-rapid industrialization) should provide sufficient proof of the disastrous consequences of policies formulated with insufficient knowledge of or indifference to the existing objective conditions and which exaggerate the transformative revolutionary potential of subjective will. (34-35) 

But this is simply to read the history of the 20^th century upside down. The main philosophical problem facing the American working class, as indeed the international working class, is not excessive voluntarism, but precisely the opposite, an excessive willingness to adapt to existing reality. This is the basis of all forms of opportunism and reformism.  It is the underlying ideology of trade unionism. And it is this ideology that has received sustenance from the objectivist forms of pragmatism. 

It is one thing when Trotsky criticized the voluntarist turns of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the 1930s and it is quite another when North declaims against the dangers of excessive voluntarism. For in North’s case his statements have to be viewed in the context of a movement whose main activity is commenting on events.  What an objectivist practice always lacks is the quality of revolutionary will. Trotsky put it thus:

It is necessary to remember that Marxism both interprets the world but also teaches how to change it.  The will is the motor force in the domain of knowledge too. The moment Marxism loses its will to transform in a revolutionary way political reality, at that moment it loses the ability to correctly understand political reality. [16]

Furthermore, North’s assessment that the essence of Stalinism is practice based on an excessive voluntarism goes counter to the historically worked-out perspective the Trotskyist movement has developed over many decades. The essence of Stalinism was an opportunist adaptation to the status quo of an isolated workers state in a backward country.  The Stalinist bureaucracy reacted pragmatically to the objective situation it encountered. In its early stages these pragmatic adaptations were capable of a left wing and “voluntarist” character to be sure.  Thus we see the episodes of forced collectivization in the late 1920s and the ultra-left Stalinist policy of the “Third Period” in the early 1930s whereby the Social Democrats were labeled “social fascists” and any possibility of a united front against Nazism was ruled out. Similar episodes were repeated in the history of Chinese Stalinism. In the early 1950s Mao proclaimed the “Great Leap Forward” which sought to industrialize China overnight by building furnaces in every peasant’s backyard. In the 1960s Mao proclaimed the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” during which students were mobilized in a campaign against a section of the bureaucracy that was said to be taking “the capitalist road”. But these turned out to be merely swings within the context of an overall right wing orientation. It is clear today, as it was to the Trotskyist movement at the time, that these ultra-left adventures were merely episodic reactions within a fundamentally right wing turn. Trotsky, when analyzing the experience of the struggle against Stalinism at the time of the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, summarized it thus: 

In the very heat of the “Third Period” we forecasted with absolute precision that this paroxysm of ultra-Leftism would lead inevitably to a new opportunistic zigzag, immeasurably more profound and fatal than all those preceding. In the days when the Communist International still played with all the rainbow colors of “revolutionary defeatism”, we warned that from the theory of “socialism in a single country” there would flow inevitably social-patriotic conclusions with all their treacherous consequences. The Seventh Congress of the Comintern provided a truly remarkable confirmation of the Marxian prognosis. And what happened? The leaders of the S.A.P., who have forgotten everything and learned nothing, hail the new and severest stage of an incurable disease, discovering in it symptoms . . of a realistic convalescence. Isn’t it clear that we have two irreconcilable positions before us?

 

From the above-indicated point of view, it is in the highest degree interesting what will be the precise reaction to the Seventh Congress of that Left-Centrist party which has been hitherto closest to the Communist International, namely, the I.L.P. of England. Will it be attracted by the vile “realism” of the Seventh Congress (”united front”, “masses”, “middle classes”, etc., etc.) or will it, on the contrary, be repelled by the belated and all the more fatal opportunism (class collaboration under the hollow banner of “anti-Fascism”, social-patriotism under the cover of the “defense of the U.S.S.R.”, etc.)? The future fate of the I.L.P. hinges upon this alternative.

 

One may say, in general, that regardless of the isolated partial stages and episodes, the turn of the Communist International sealed by the Congress simplifies the situation in the working class movement. It consolidates the social-patriotic camp, bringing closer the parties of the Second and Third Internationals, regardless how matters proceed with organizational unity. It strengthens the centrifugal tendencies within the Centrist groupings. To the revolutionary internationalists, i.e., the builders of the Fourth International, it opens up all the greater possibilities.[17]

As far as Trotsky was concerned then, what finally marked the political character of Stalinism was not its occasional voluntarist episodes, but the,

…vile “realism” of the Seventh Congress (”united front”, “masses”, “middle classes”, etc., etc.)”, which was marked by “…fatal opportunism (class collaboration under the hollow banner of “anti-Fascism”, social-patriotism under the cover of the “defense of the U.S.S.R.”, etc.)  

The corollary phenomenon that Trotsky highlights in the above passage is the reaction to this voluntarism on the part of centrist outfits like the Independent Labour Party. The ILP, while criticizing the ‘excessive voluntarism’ of the Comintern during its brief period of ultra-left swings, felt more comfortable when Stalinism found its natural equilibrium in a turn toward open class collaboration. North, on the other hand, prefers to focus on voluntarism as the main danger to rationalize his own abstentionism. And that means burying the fight against the principal strand of pragmatism, the one that stems from Dewey.

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Deweyism and the Dialectic

Deweyism in particular has played an important role in cementing an alliance between the petty bourgeois intelligentsia and American capitalism.  Although the initial impulse of Deweyism lay in the Progressive movement and its hostility to capitalism, by the turn of the century this movement was played out. When the petty bourgeois intelligentsia made their peace with American capitalism they at the same time invoked the specifically American character of Deweyism as a counterweight against the alien influence of Marxism.  Dewey’s support for American imperialism in World War I is one telling example of this trend.  The transformation of Max Eastman and Sidney Hook from sympathizers of Trotsky in the 1930s into rabid cold warriors in the 1950s is another such example. As the work of Lloyd and other historians demonstrates, Dewey’s form of pragmatism was embraced by leading intellectuals of the Socialist Party in the years just before World War I as a specific American counterweight to the influence of European Marxist theory.[18]

If we consider what it was about Dewey’s form of pragmatism that the radical intellectuals found so attractive, the answer is to be found in the conception of science articulated by Dewey.  In many cases these radical intellectuals were looking for an alternative to the vulgar Marxism that emanated from the Second International and they thought they found it in Dewey’s more flexible yet still “objective” conception of science as a collective, experimental enterprise.  This was a specifically American form of “science” that reinforced the prejudices of American exceptionalism, namely that socialism would come to America in its own unique form and manner irrespective of developments internationally. Sidney Hook, the foremost theoretician of the convergence between Marxism and pragmatism characterized his project as an attempt, 

… to develop a kind of Americanized Marxism, strengthened by John Dewey’s activist theory of mind and knowledge, as well as his philosophy of education and naturalistic humanism,  that would be in consonance with the American revolutionary tradition.[19]

Whereas Hook, at that point in his career, still thought that the dialectic was compatible with pragmatism, another pragmatist from the same era, Jim Cork, also arguing for a convergence between pragmatism and Marxism, completely dismissed the dialectic. 

If the pragmatists would stop confusing Marx with some Marxists, recognize the hard, ineradicable,  humanist-democratic core of Marx’s thinking as akin to their own, and implement their praiseworthy, general value judgments with concrete instrumentalities applied to political and social questions; and if the socialists on their part would drop overboard the ludicrous excess baggage of the dialectic, rid themselves of the remaining shreds of inevitabilism, abandon their narrow class conception of democratic values, and learn to think experimentally in politics … their positions would converge on a set of common hypotheses leading to common activities. [20] ooH      

Dewey himself, over the course of a very long career as the leading American philosopher and public intellectual, went from radical Progressivism in his early period, to advocating a form of socialism during the New Deal and opposing Roosevelt from the left, to ending his career as an anti-Communist liberal, (though one opposed to the persecution of Communists.)  The divergence of possible political views emanating from Dewey can be seen as well in the careers of other pragmatists.[21]

Dewey’s influence on the socialist and later the communist movement cannot be discounted. Having adopted Dewey’s conception of instrumentalism, left liberal and socialist intellectuals in the early years of the 20^th century thought they had developed a methodology that was superior to the positivist notion of a “value free” science and with it the deadening embrace of opportunism that was evident in the case of Hilferding.  At the same time, Dewey promised to rid philosophy of what he called “the Hegelian bacillus”. This was an attractive proposition to many left wing intellectuals who were predisposed to reject out of hand anything resembling outmoded European modes of speculative metaphysics. It did not help that virtually all anyone knew of Hegel and dialectics was transmitted second and third hand by way of the conservative school of neo-Hegelians in the U.S. and Britain at that time.

Dewey’s notion of science, while nominally opposed to the positivist idea of a “value free” enterprise, was not in the end significantly different from it. Dewey held onto a conception very similar to the positivist definition of truth as encompassing only propositions that can be empirically verified. This well-known “verification criteria of truth”, a hallmark of positivism, was advocated by Dewey in his Essays in Experimental Logic, where he wrote that “verification and truth completely coincide.” And while Dewey always held onto the idea of process that he inherited from his youth as a student of Hegel, he completely rejected the entirety of dialectical logic.

The tradition of pragmatism has displayed an ambivalent attitude toward positivism. In its early years the pioneers of pragmatism were highly critical of positivism and the dogmas of empiricism, but by mid-century the leading American pragmatists had pretty much embraced positivism. Whereas Dewey and others criticized positivism as well as traditional empiricism as dogmatic, they borrowed much from the positivists. The 1930s in particular was a period when there was a great deal of cross fertilization between American pragmatism and the school of logical positivism that emerged in Europe, thanks in part to the arrival on American shores of a large contingent of refugees from the Nazi-controlled German and Austrian universities.  One author described this convergence between pragmatism and positivism thus,

The pragmatists, to varying degrees, sought to develop a method imbued with the values and procedures of science so that philosophy could take its rightful place alongside the other sciences in the academy. Philosophers who were not pragmatists, such as Arthur O. Lovejoy and Morris Cohen, also incorporated a scientific orientation and method into their philosophies, so that, by 1930, when logical positivism began to be known in the United States, there was widespread agreement, if not universal assent, that a properly conceived philosophy adopted the methods and values of science, if it did not itself become simply another science.[22]

The important thing to remember is that pragmatism was vulnerable to being influenced by positivism, despite the overt antipathy to positivism by some of the founders or pragmatism, as a result of its rejection of dialectics and its more or less wholesale dismissal of the entire history of philosophy as constituting one long metaphysical illusion. The practical upshot of this confluence between pragmatism and positivism, when it came to Dewey’s public political pronouncements, was that he often lost his way, becoming trapped in some of the same illusions that overtook the liberal intelligentsia.

Dewey was a complicated and contradictory figure. His deep-seated beliefs about the integrity of the scientific enterprise and his commitment to genuine democracy, including democracy in the economic realm, often found him practically alone, going against the stream of liberal and left public opinion. This was certainly the case when he agreed to head the commission investigating the Moscow Trials. He also exhibited great courage criticizing the Roosevelt Administration from the left throughout the 1930’s, in opposition to virtually the entire liberal intelligentsia represented by people like Walter Lippman. Yet his personal courage and commitment to democratic ideals was in itself an insufficient guarantee against being blinded by some of the same illusions that overtook other members of the liberal intelligentsia.

Perhaps the biggest mistake in Dewey’s life was his uncritical enthusiasm for Woodrow’s Wilson’s entry of America into the First World War. It is telling that the arguments he used to support the war were based on his notion of science as a collective experimental enterprise. He saw in the rapidly expanded role of the government in mobilizing the economy for the war effort a harbinger of the rational reorganization of society that he considered to be the goal of socialism, a goal consonant with his own ideal of an egalitarian society. Dewey’s commitment to a naively conceived ideal of America’s role

as a catalyst of democracy abroad made him particularly vulnerable to the false internationalism with which Wilson cloaked the ambitions of American imperialism. Thus he played the role, however unconsciously, of a left liberal apologist for Woodrow Wilson’s war propaganda. Writing in 1915 at the height of the pro-war hysteria, he proclaims,

War to put a stop to war is no new thing. History shows a multitude of wars which have been professedly waged in order that a future war should not arrive. History also shows that as a pacifist, Mars has not been a success. But a war to establish an international order and by that means to outlaw war gains force and this war becomes a war for a new type of social organization. It will be a war of compelling moral import.[23]

To be sure, other pragmatists who were members of the left-liberal intelligentsia, some of whom had been very close to Dewey, were appalled by his support for the war. Randolph Bourne, who took up the cudgels in a series of blistering polemics against Dewey’s support for Wilson’s War, deserves particular credit. Bourne tried to demonstrate that Dewey’s stand was inconsistent with his stated principles, that no justification for support for the war was possible in terms of Dewey’s scientific instrumentalism. 

The ‘liberals’ who claim a realistic and pragmatic attitude in politics have disappointed us in setting and up and then clinging wistfully to the belief that our war could get itself justified for an idealistic flavor, or at least for a world-renovating social purpose. If these realists had had time in the hurry and scuffle of events to turn their philosophy on themselves, they might have seen how thinly disguised a rationalization this was of their emotional undertow.[24] 

Bourne’s stand against Dewey is to be commended.  It is however, hardly the case, as Westbrook claims, that “Bourne turned pragmatic realism back upon Dewey”[25], and thereby demonstrated the validity of the pragmatic method. At bottom, Bourne’s analysis of the war, although more worthy of our sympathy than Dewey’s, still remained rather shallow, recognizing neither the interests of classes nor the economic crisis of world imperialism that precipitated it. It was thus inevitable that Bourne would likewise entertain certain illusions about the possibilities of pacifism. While opposing outright U.S. entry into the war, Bourne supported a “realistic pacifism” that “argued for the use of naval force to keep the shipping lanes free, a policy of ‘armed neutrality’ aimed directly at the submarine problem.”[26]  If this episode in the history of pragmatism indicates anything, it is that Dewey’s form of scientific instrumentalism provides a very poor method for finding one’s way in a rapidly changing political situation. More generally, we can say that even an attempt to improve upon the positivist ideal of science as a “value free” enterprise, as Deweyism was, shows by its failure in a critical moment, the false “objectivity” that such a concept of science entails.

 [Return] 

Deweyism and American Trotskyism: Max Eastman and Sidney Hook

Max Eastman (center) with Eugene V. Debs and Rose Pastor Stokes (1918)

Dewey’s form or pragmatism had an early impact on the American Trotskyist movement in the person of Max Eastman. Eastman, a student of Dewey and a member of the Socialist Party and later the American Communist Party, was a very early supporter of Trotsky in America, at a time when there was as yet no Trotskyist movement. Eastman provided Trotsky with much needed assistance during the initial years of the latter’s period in exile. He was also the translator into English of Trotsky’s monumental classic, The History of the Russian Revolution.  Eastman was also an avowed opponent of the dialectic, eschewing it as so much mystical rubbish.  Eastman is of interest for our account because he developed the clearest formulation of the supposed antithesis between science and the dialectic.

The rejection of illusions – religious, moralistic, legal, political, aesthetic – is the immortal essence of Marx’s contribution to the science of history, and to history itself. And if he did not succeed in rejecting also the illusions of philosophy, those who really esteem his life and his genius ought to carry out that process. Marx himself declared that philosophy, like law and politics and religion and art, is subject to an economic interpretation at the hands of science. But he also declared – and within a year of the same date – that Hegel wrote the true history of philosophy. Since Hegel’s history of philosophy is a history of “the self-developing reason,” a “history of thought finding itself,” these two statements are directly contradictory, and we have to choose between them. We have to choose between Marxism as a Hegelian philosophy, and Marxism as a science which is capable of explaining such a philosophy.[27]  

Sidney Hook (https://casacarlini.com/sidney-hook-the-philosopher-who-outraged-everyone/ )

No account of the influence of pragmatism in the early years of American Trotskyism can be complete without a mention of Sidney Hook.  Hook was in some ways the philosophical antithesis of Eastman. While Hook was also a student of Dewey’s, he was a professional philosopher whereas Eastman was a free-lance journalist.  He was one of the few professors who openly embraced Marxism.  Not only that, but Hook took up the philosophical defense of the dialectic against Eastman’s snide dismissal. In fact, in the 1930’s, Eastman and Hook staged a series of public debates around the country on the question of the dialectic.

For some years in the 1920’s and 1930’s Sidney Hook was the most important Marxist intellectual in America. He was the first person to introduce the ideas of the Left Hegelians to an English speaking audience and was also one of the first to discuss the theme of alienation that played a prominent role in Marx’s early writings.[28] Hook also played an important political role in the early years of the Trotskyist movement as he facilitated the merger between original Trotskyist group around James Cannon and a group of workers around A.J. Muste to form the Workers Party. Hook was also instrumental in enlisting the services of John Dewey to head the investigation into the Moscow Trials. Philosophically, Hook is particularly noteworthy because he articulated the most systematic defense of a philosophical convergence between Deweyan pragmatism and Marxism.[29] Yet Hook’s defense of the dialectic proved to be short-lived and he eventually turned his back on Marxism altogether and ended his career as a right wing social democrat and Cold Warrior. 

 [Return]

James Burnham: The Confluence of Deweyism with Positivism 

James Burnham 

Hook and other left intellectuals prepared the ground for an easy traverse between Marxism and pragmatism.  This soon had reverberations not only on the edges but within the leadership of the Trotskyist movement. A generation of left intellectuals was seduced by the false objectivity of Deweyan “science”.  Among these can be counted the figure of James Burnham. His evolution had a direct impact on the history of the Trotskyist movement. Burnham in fact provides a salutary case study. He ended his career as an editor of the right wing National Review and was given an award for distinguished service by President Ronald Reagan. He is credited with being the intellectual inspiration behind both paleo-conservatism and neo-conservatism. 

But in the 1930s, Burnham, along with Max Shachtman, were the leading Trotskyist intellectuals in the United States, contributing many articles to the theoretical publications of the Trotskyist movement.  In 1939 he and Shachtman became the chief spokesmen for the opposition inside the Socialist Workers Party. Burnham was philosophically a pragmatist in the mold of John Dewey and even in his most ardent days as a Trotskyist always disdained the dialectic. When the struggle broke out in the movement in 1939, Burnham argued against the dialectic invoking the pragmatic conception of “Science” as an alternative. The following extract from Burnham’s polemic against Trotsky, Science and Style, is typical:

Since in the course of the factional struggle,’ you write, ‘the question (of dialectics) has been posed point blank ...’ How innocent, objective and impersonal, Comrade Trotsky! Dialectics, suddenly, like Banquo’s ghost, thrust its wild face into our political midst, to dismay all sceptics. But, alas, as in the case of all ghosts, it was a very human hand that manipulated the apparatus producing our supernatural phenomenon; and that hand was yours, Comrade Trotsky. Like all good mediums, you attribute the visitation to the working of another and a higher realm—to ‘the logic of events’, the ‘historical course of the struggle’—but like all good observers, we will admire the artistry, and smile at the explanation.

I can understand, and even sympathise with, your recourse to dialectics in the current dispute. There is little else for you to write about, with every appeal you make to actual events refuted the day after you make it, with each week’s development in the war smashing another pillar of your political position. An argument about dialectics is 100 per cent safe, a century ago or a century hence. Among those lofty generalities, no humble and inconvenient fact intrudes; no earthiest (sic) or observation or experiment mar their Olympian calm; those serene words remain forever free from the gross touch of everyday events.[30]

The only thing unique about Burnham’s remark is that it was written by a leading intellectual in the Socialist Workers Party. Otherwise it is typical of the disdain toward the dialectic that marked pragmatist and positivist circles.

The thin veneer of Burnham’s Marxism was already evident years earlier when, as a leading figure of the American Trotskyist movement, he was asked by Trotsky to write an article for the New International against Eastman’s “retrograde adventure.” Burnham was even then already in Eastman’s camp philosophically speaking.  As Burnham would explain many years later, “he found himself agreeing with Eastman despite himself.”[31]

The article Burnham wrote for the New International, Max Eastman As Scientist, included the following equivocation about Marxist philosophy at the very beginning,

In the first place, he [Eastman] revives at length his perennial attack upon the “philosophy” and “religion” which he attributes to Marx. Now, the problem of what Marx “really meant” is an interesting one for scholarly research. We all know, moreover, that Marx made a number of false statements. None of us, if we take historical method seriously, is surprised that Marx was limited by the stage which scientific knowledge had reached in his day, or that his terminology was influenced by the social context in which he lived. I, for one, agree with Eastman that it is desirable to change, in part, this terminology, in order to bring it more closely into accord with contemporary scientific method and practice.

However, these problems of scholarly research and linguistic reform are comparatively leisurely, impersonal and postponeable. The Marxism which is of decisive moment to revolutionists is not the dried letter of Marx’s books but the theory and strategy of the living revolutionary movement.[32] 

Later, Burnham challenges Eastman’s credentials as a scientist, without however in any way challenging Eastman’s conception of science,

It is Eastman’s claim that he approaches his problem, and reaches his conclusions, as a scientist; and he criticizes Marxists for not being scientific. I wish to begin by examining Eastman’s right to this claim, as shown by the evidence of the article itself. I certainly agree with Eastman about the desirability of employing scientific method in all problems where truth and falsity are at issue; but a method is not scientific merely from being called so by its user.

Point 2 in the revision is much more remarkable. “Problems of being and of universal history arising from this situation should be acknowledged to exist ...” Do I need to remind scientist and anti-metaphysician Eastman that contemporary science recognizes no problems of “being” or of “universal history”? These, the problems of traditional, arch-metaphysical Ontology and Cosmology are interpreted by contemporary science as either empirically meaningless or purely analytic, and are ruled out of scientific discourse. “It is a question,” Eastman writes, “of going forward or of being stuck in the mud.” Here, as elsewhere, Eastman is not in the least going forward in the light of contemporary science, but returning backward to pre-Marxian conceptions, to the very rationalist metaphysics which Marx himself so vigorously rejected.

As the above text makes clear, Burnham accepts what is essentially a positivist notion of science as a “value-free” enterprise guided strictly by testable hypotheses and empirical observations.  He differs with Eastman only in his contention that Eastman’s claims to support this notion of science are false.  He chides the latter for introducing arcane philosophical issues about “being” and “universal history” that have no place in “science”. In other words, for Burnham, Eastman wasn’t enough of a positivist!

To anyone who had followed his philosophical evolution, it should have been no surprise that when Trotsky raised the issue of the dialectic in the 1939-40 party struggle, Burnham took refuge in the positivist conception of “Science” and asserted that the introduction of the dialectic into the discussion was “a red herring”. In this stand, Burnham was simply following in the footsteps of Dewey, who had pledged to rid philosophy of the “Hegelian bacillus”. The antidote to this bacillus was one version or another of “science”. The appeal to science became the touchstone for justifying one’s conduct in the public realm.  We have already seen how this argument was used by Dewey in justifying his stand on World War I.

This discussion brings us back directly to North’s unwillingness to discuss Dewey’s philosophy. The secret behind this intellectual abstentionism is that North is unwilling to interrogate his own notion of “science” lest he find it resembles that of Dewey more than that of Marx.  In fact, North’s version of science is actually closer to the positivist model of science than Dewey, for at least Dewey was clear about the connection between knowledge and interests.  North considers the criteria of Marxist science to be the ability to make successful predictions: 

Marxism, as a method of analysis and materialist world outlook, has uncovered laws that govern socio-economic and political processes. Knowledge of these laws discloses trends and tendencies upon which substantial historical ‘predictions’ can be based, and which allow the possibility of intervening consciously in a manner that may produce an outcome favorable to the working class. (36)

Whereas for Dewey the actual process of inquiry was guided by material interests (although Dewey denied that material interests expressed themselves through the class struggle), for North, interests are only acknowledged as the culmination of the process where we “intervene” after we have gained knowledge of laws and tendencies in order  “to produce an outcome favorable to the working class.”[33] In either case, the dialectic has nothing to do with it, which means that from the standpoint of Marxism, North’s conception (and of course Dewey’s) involves a profound misconception of science. As Lukacs rightly explained in History and Class Consciousness:

When ‘science’ maintains that the manner in which data immediately present themselves is an adequate foundation of scientific conceptualization and that the actual form of these data is the appropriate starting point for the formation of scientific concepts, it thereby takes its stand simply and dogmatically on the basis of capitalist society. It uncritically accepts the nature of the object as it is given and the laws of that society as the unalterable foundation of ‘science’. In order to progress from these ‘facts’ to facts in the true meaning of the word it is necessary to perceive their historical condition as such and to abandon the point of view that would see them as immediately given: they must themselves be subjected to a historical and dialectical examination.[34] 

 [Return]

How Pragmatism Looks on the Ground

One final question raised by pragmatism, one that North entirely fails to consider, is how philosophies such as pragmatism and postmodernism express themselves in the day to day consciousness of the working class. This is an area of investigation that is yet to be plumbed, but it should be obvious why it is important to understand this process.  It is through the lens of everyday consciousness that prevailing notions are stripped of their academic garb and translated into practical activity.  The version of pragmatism we encounter in this arena is likely to be an eclectic form of that expounded in the academic journals and contain inconsistent admixtures borrowed from other sources. John Dewey, in one of his key essays, noted the difference between pragmatism as understood by its leading theorists and its popular interpretations:

Many critics have jumped at the obvious association of the word pragmatic with practical. They have assumed that the intent is to limit all knowledge, philosophic included, to promotion of “action,” understanding by action either just any bodily movement, or those bodily movements which conduce to the preservation and grosser well-being of the body.  James’s statement that general conceptions must “cash in” has been taken (especially by European critics) to mean that the end and measure of intelligence lies in the narrow and coarse utilities which it produces.[35]  

Dewey undoubtedly has a valid point in distinguishing philosophical pragmatism from its vulgar associations.  Some criticism of pragmatism, including material written from a supposedly Marxist perspective, has indeed been guilty of conflating philosophical pragmatism with its reflection in the popular imagination. Nevertheless, there is a definite relationship between pragmatic philosophy and the “pragmatism” of the ordinary understanding. This relationship was nicely articulated by Nicholas Rescher, who wrote, 

In everyday usage, “pragmatic” contrasts with “principled.” Pragmatic individuals or policies are concerned for expediency instead of principles – they prioritize the achievement of desired results, without much scrupulous care about the ways and means of their realization. “The ends justify the means” is their motto. In particular, pragmatism in its political sense turns on the illustrative contrast between the “principled” statesman who pursues changeless aims through acting on fixed rules and stable goals, and the “pragmatic” politician whose position is flexible and whose opinions and actions bend with the wind of shifting conditions and circumstances. Pragmatic in this sense involves to what is practical, down-to-earth, and opportunistic, as opposed to that which is idealistic and scrupulous about long-term consequences and larger causes.  It is – or should be – clear that this sort of thing is not at issue with philosophical pragmatism.

However, “pragmatism” in the everyday usage sense of the term and in its philosophical sense agree in one important respect. Philosophical pragmatism also accepts that absolute perfection – the idealized very best – is generally unrealizable. And it therefore insists that we must be prepared to accept that the best we can achieve in practice has to be acknowledged as good enough: that it makes no sense – be it in matters of knowledge or planning or action or evaluation – to regard the best that can be had as just not good enough. For example, consider the sceptic who says that even the best “knowledge” we can achieve still does not qualify as genuine – as altogether certain and absolute. “Get real!” replies the pragmatist: “Neither with theoretical knowledge nor with anything else does it make sense to ask for something that simply cannot be had.” Against more idealistic tendencies of thought, pragmatism thus takes the realistic position that we have no sensible alternative but to make do with the best we can get.

The tenor of the term’s ordinary usage therefore does carry over to philosophical pragmatism to some extent.[36] 

This is a good summary of the thrust of pragmatic politics.  The “realistic” position “that we have no sensible alternative but to make do with the best we can get” is the guiding principle of all brands of reformist politics.  It is without question the dominant ideology of our time. And whereas pragmatism was initially a specifically American product, it has now – riding on the tailwinds of globalization – spread across the planet.

When Trotsky said that pragmatic ways of thinking were the bane of the American working class, he was referring to the manner in which a specifically American form of bourgeois ideology plays itself out concretely in day to day struggles.  Pragmatic ways of thinking in the working class are not precisely the same as the theories that are expounded by John Dewey and others.  But at the same time there is a relationship between the two. That is why in grappling with the weaknesses of Dewey we are also grappling with some of the limitations of working class consciousness, though we ought not to expect to find a clear articulation of the theories of John Dewey in the implicit philosophical assumptions behind, say, trade union politics. 

Pragmatism as a way of thinking and acting preceded its official philosophical articulation. For good reason, it has been called America’s “National Philosophy”.  George Novack, who was personally entrusted by Trotsky in 1940 to do special theoretical work on pragmatism, put it thus:

The pragmatic viewpoint emerged organically from the special conditions of American historical development. It came to flourish as a normal mode of approaching the world and reacting to its problems because the same social environment that shaped the American people likewise created an atmosphere favoring the growth of pragmatism. It permeated the habits, sentiments, and psychology of the American people and their component classes long before receiving systematic formulations by professional philosophers. In fact, these philosophers were as much influenced by those surrounding conditions of life which gave rise to pragmatism as the fellow citizens they thought and spoke for. [37]

It is only necessary to think through the implications of what kind of theoretical and practical work is required to get beyond a way of thinking that ‘organically permeates our habits, sentiments and psychology’, to begin to get a handle on the enormity of the theoretical tasks facing Marxists in this ideological climate. This was the challenge that Trotsky articulated to the Socialist Workers Party in 1940. Trotsky understood that the majority faction lead by Cannon was vulnerable to the same ideological illusions to which the Burnham-Shachtman minority had succumbed. He warned the SWP leadership that unless it undertook a conscious effort to train its members in Marxist dialectics and the role of pragmatism, they too could become unwitting spokesmen for alien class forces at some future turn of events. Unfortunately, Trotsky’s advice was not heeded and his prognosis was borne out. The SWP abandoned the effort to train its membership in dialectics only a short period after the death of Trotsky, and found itself pragmatically drifting for the next two decades until it finally abandoned Trotskyism altogether in the early 1960s. The SWP did undertake some important political work in this period, particularly its break with Pablo in 1953, but in the final analysis its reliance of adhering to Trotskyist orthodoxy to maintain its revolutionary perspective proved fatally inadequate.[38]    

These lessons from the history of the struggle against pragmatism in the SWP and the tragic demise of that organization as a revolutionary party should have been burnt into the consciousness of every comrade.  They were the mother’s milk upon which new comrades were nurtured in the International Committee in the 1960s. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case.

Steiner’s 2004 document showed that when comrades speak ‘off the record’, it is quite openly admitted that empiricism and pragmatism are no longer an important concern of the movement.[39] Despite all of North’s fulminating (including a resort to name-calling), the simple truth is that there is absolutely no attention being paid to the fight against pragmatism in the IC today. And to that extent the movement has turned its back on a vital part of the revolutionary heritage of Trotskyism.[40] 

The hallmark of classical pragmatism, as we have seen, is its spurious ‘realism’, its adaptation to the world as it is, what Trotsky called “bowing down before the accomplished fact”. And that can manifest itself as much in abstentionism as in opportunism. It is abstentionism and the embrace of a positivist conception of science that have marked the IC’s long road back to pragmatism. Along that road the lessons of In Defense of Marxism and of the 1963 split with the American SWP have been completely abandoned. In the next chapter we will explore the consequences of abstentionism for the work of the IC in the working class.

 [Return]

NOTES

[1] Rorty passed away earlier this summer (2007).

[2] Steiner included a brief discussion of Rorty in an article on Martin Heidegger published in the WSWS: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/heid-a05.shtml. Nevertheless the topic of Rorty and postmodernism was incidental to the main theme in that essay. The WSWS has also featured discussions of Rorty’s politics, but pointedly, not his philosophy: http://www.wsws.org/polemics/1996/oct1996/colum.htm

[3] Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, , p. xviii

[4] Rorty has argued, again with some degree of legitimacy, that Nietzsche is another precursor of his in this respect.  On the other hand, his claim to a Hegelian pedigree is based on a crude misreading of Hegel’s notion of historicism. 

[5]  To quote Rorty, ‘…within our increasingly ironist culture, philosophy has become more important for the pursuit of private perfection rather than for any social task.’ Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, 1989), p.94.

[6]  For example, the contemporary pragmatists David Depew and Robert Hollinger have written,

“On no possible interpretation, however, can Dewey be construed as treating democratic culture as one in which the private expressive life is to thrive at the expense of the public life of shared learning, making and governing. What is more seriously doubtful however is whether Rorty’s refusal to regard the public sphere as a site for the realization of intrinsic goods is consistent with the deepest impulses of pragmatism itself, and its continuity as a tradition over time…Rorty’s version of pragmatism incorporates the ideas of Max Weber and Daniel Bell more than the ideas of Dewey.” Depew and Hollinger, “Introduction: Pragmatism and the Postmodern Condition”, in Pragmatism: From Progressivism to Postmodernism, (Praeger, 1995), p. 236.

[7]  Still another commentator, remarking on the kinship between Rorty and James, made the following observation, “Rorty can chose whomever he wishes for his philosophical grandfather. But it is surprising that Rorty should find in Dewey, more than in William James, an appropriate ancestor. After all, much of Rorty’s recent work … would seem to have a more appropriate and obvious precursor in James.” George Cotkin, William James and Richard Rorty: Context and Conversation, in Pragmatism: From Progressivism to Postmodernism, p. 38. 

[8] Leon Samson, The New Humanism, p. 5-6. Samson is an intriguing figure about whom very little is known. He wrote three books (at least that we know of), the last and most influential being Toward a United Front: A Philosophy for American Workers (1933). From the books themselves, it is evident that he was a Marxist, and it seems that Samson was either a supporter or member of the Trotskyist movement in the Thirties. (The source for the last piece of information is Prof. Michael Kazin, who, in response to a query from Brenner, related that Irving Howe had told him that he had known Samson in the Thirties and that he was then a Trotskyist.)

 

[9] Brian Lloyd, Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism 1890-1922, pp. 24-25. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

[10] Among the numerous pragmatists who attempted to reconcile pragmatism with Marxism Max Eastman and Sidney Hook were perhaps the most noteworthy.  Eastman in particular deserves serious attention as he was early on the most vociferous champion of a lobotomy of the dialectic from Marxist theory. Eastman felt that Marxism could become a genuine science only if it was shorn of what he considered its mystical Hegelian heritage.    

[11] George Novack, along with other commentators,  notes that Dewey first came to prominence as a philosopher in the age of the Robber Barons and became the high-minded spokesperson for the ideas of Progressivism as a political movement:

Dewey belongs wholly to this movement.  He was a foremost participant in many of its most important enterprises.  In time he became the supreme and unchallenged theoretical head of the movement...Dewey performed for the philosophy of Progressivism a service similar to that performed by Henry George and Veblen for its economics, Beard for its history, Parrington for its literary criticism, Holmes and Brandeis for its jurisprudence, Sandburg for its poetry, Charles Edward Russell and Lincoln Steffens for its journalism.

 George Novack, Pragmatism versus Marxism: An Appraisal of John Dewey’s Philosophy, Pathfinder Press, p. 40.

 

[12] Nicholas Rescher, Realistic Pragmatism: An Introduction to Pragmatic Philosophy, p 63.  

[13] Un uomo finito, 1912  http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/papini.htm

[14] C.S. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” in the anthology, Pragmatism: A Reader, edited by Louis Menand, p. 45. 

[15] Cornelis De Waal, On Pragmatism, p 81. Wadsworth Philosophical Topics, 2005.

[16] Leon Trotsky, “Perspectives on American Marxism: Open Letter to V. F. Calverton”, Nov. 4, 1932, in Writings of Leon Trotsky: 1932, p. 296.    

[17]  “On The Seventh Congress of the Comintern”, first published in New International October 1935,

   Volume 2 No. 6 pages 177-179.

  http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1935/1935-comintern.htm

[18] The previously cited work of Brian Lloyd, Left Out, explores in great depth the intellectual influence of pragmatism on the early socialist and communist movement in the United States.  That this important work has never been reviewed or even mentioned on the World Socialist Web Site is yet another indication of the IC’s utter indifference to the history of pragmatism and its relationship to Marxism.

[19] From “Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx”, quoted by the biographer of Dewey, Robert Westbrook, in John Dewey and American Democracy, p. 467.

[20] From “John Dewey and Karl Marx”, Quoted in Westbrook, p. 466.

[21] The contemporary pragmatist, Hillary Putnam, began his career as a Maoist and is now a left-liberal social reformist. It is well known that Sidney Hook, one of John Dewey’s most gifted students, who began his career by trying to wed Marxism and pragmatism ended it by repudiating Marxism and supporting Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War, even when he still called himself a socialist. As the careers of Sidney Hook and James Burnham show, it is quite possible to be a pragmatist in the mould of Dewey and espouse strongly right wing views.

[22] Daniel J. Wilson, “Fertile Ground: Pragmatism, Science and Logical Positivism”, in Pragmatism: From Progressivism to Postmodernism, ed. Robert Hollinger and David Depew, ( Praeger, 1995), p. 123

[23] From “Morals and Conduct of States” (1918), quoted in Westbrook, p. 209.

[24] Randolph Bourne, “A War Diary”, (1917), quoted in Westbrook, p. 206.

[25] Westbrook, p. 207.

[26] Westbrook, p. 207.

[27] Max Eastman, Marx and Lenin: The Science of Revolution (New York, 1927), p. 46.

[28] Thanks to a visit to the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow in the 1920’s, Hook was given an advanced look at some of Marx’s previously unpublished early works.   Hook presented this material in his book, From Hegel to Marx: Studies in the Intellectual Development of Karl Marx.

[29]  Christopher Phelps defends the relevance of Hook’s attempted reconciliation of Deweyism and Marxism in his intellectual biography of Hook in his Marxist period, Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist.

[30] In Defense of Marxism, “Science and Style: A Reply to Comrade Trotsky”, New Park Publications, p.235.

[31] John P. Diggins, Up From Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual Development, (Columbia University Press, New York, 1994), p. 173.

[32] “Max Eastman as Scientist”, From New International, Vol.4 No.6, June 1938, pp.177-180.

 http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/burnham/1938/06/eastman.htm

[33]  Dewey’s attitude to positivism was ambivalent. In his early writings he made some well-reasoned critiques of the positivist model of science, but in the end his form of instrumentalism was not distinctly different than that of the positivist model.

[34] Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 7.

[35] Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery in Philosophy” in Pragmatism: A Reader, p. 227.

[36] Nicholas Rescher, Realistic Pragmatism: An Introduction to Pragmatic Philosophy, (State University of New York Press, 2000), pp. 48-49.

[37] George Novack, Pragmatism versus Marxism, p.19.

[38] A good account of the SWP’s embrace of pragmatic methods of work in its internal life and how this impacted on its political evolution in this period can be found in Tim Wohlforth’s 1965-1966 study, The Struggle for Marxism in the United States: A History of American Marxism.  North’s discussion of this period in his The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International, written two decades later, provides an accurate historical account of this period but pays little attention to the philosophical issues behind the differing positions that emerged.

[39] In a private correspondence, Chris Talbot, of the British Socialist Equality Party, made the following statement:

The problem with this emphasis is that it assumes that vulgar materialism and empiricism are the main philosophical opposition faced by Marxists...That may have been the case for the circles [Scott] Meikle [author of Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx] was writing for, twenty years ago, but it is certainly not true today.

 In a similar vein, a member of the German Socialist Equality Party, speaking at a meeting in Berlin, said that the task for Marxists today consisted in forming a “united front” with empiricists against the postmodernists. This comrade was not speaking in an official capacity but he undoubtedly expressed, perhaps in more candid terms, the thinking of much of the movement today about these philosophical issues.

[40]  That the International Committee at one time emphasized the lessons of the 1939-40 struggle can be easily demonstrated by a perusal of the literature produced by the International Committee in the period from 1961-1970.  An important contribution in this respect was Tim Wohlforth’s series, The Struggle for Marxism in the United States: A History of American Marxism.  The essays in this series first appeared in the theoretical journal of the International Committee, Fourth International, during the years 1965-1966.   While Wohlforth’s work suffered from a number of problems, it was nevertheless a pioneering effort of paramount importance in the education of the members in the early years of the movement. It revived, for the first time since 1940, the question of the relationship between Marxism and pragmatism in the building of the revolutionary movement. Wohlforth’s conclusion is worth repeating for it speaks directly to the issues we have addressed:

Cannon’s whole history is the story of American Marxists facing a new situation which made it impossible for them to simply maintain a revolutionary perspective on American soil. They were forced to turn elsewhere for their programme.  But they took over this programme without understanding the method which produced it and sought to survive by simply applying it to the American scene empirically – with a method hostile to the method which produced the programme. Trotsky’s role and Trotsky’s intervention made it possible for the SWP to survive as long as it did. All other tendencies had long since broken from the revolutionary road. But in the end the SWP turned on Trotskyism itself and repudiated a revolutionary perspective in the United States.

The American Marxists of the future must begin their work with an understanding of the history of this 40 year struggle for Marxism in the United States. The main lesson of this history is the need for American Marxists, no matter how few in number, to begin their qualitative theoretical development through an understanding of the Marxist method. Only such a qualitative development will prepare them to reach the new generation of working-class militants now clearly coming on the scene in the United States. Any formation which continues to neglect this task will simply be bypassed by revolutionary developments in the United States, regardless of size of the amount of ‘busy work’ they do.

 

              The fact that Wohlforth failed to heed his own advice and later abandoned the movement does not detract from his important contribution in its early years.

              Many of the key theoretical and programmatic statements issued by the International Committee in relation to the struggle against the SWP’s reunification with the Pabloites in the early 1960’s stressed the need for serious educational work on pragmatism and dialectics.  Take for example the following statement that Steiner quoted in his 2004 document: 

Empiricism, ignoring the history of philosophy, rejects the dialectical theory of knowledge as ‘metaphysics’. Only the dialectical materialist view can explain the world, because it includes a materialist explanation of the development of our concepts as well as of the material world which they reflect. Empiricism must be rejected, not made more ‘consistent.’ There are many sides to this methodological error of Hansen’s.

Trotsky warned the SWP leadership in his last writings that they must encourage a determined struggle on the theoretical front against the ‘American’ philosophy of pragmatism, a more recent development of empiricism; unless this was done, there would be no real Marxist development in the U.S. 

 

Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Volume 4,(Labor Publications), p. 76 

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