Did the SEP abandon permanent revolution in Iraq?

The following letter was posted by an Anonymous reader on the blog “A brief note on the publication of "Steiner, Brenner and Neo-Marxism: The Marcusean Component" as a response to my reply. I am posting the response Anonymous sent and a further reply. Since it is reasonable to assume that other SEP members and supporters share the views presented by Anonymous, I am posting his comments and my reply as a new blog entry.

Dear A. River,

Your observation about my previous comment makes some good points. I did make the statement from the point of view of someone who had already decided what position I favored and consider the theoretical points to be clear. Practice then becomes the issue.

anyway, you asked:

"The concluding chapter of Marxism Without its Head or its Heart proposes a few simple steps that the SEP can undertake to begin to reorient their practice. The IC leadership has not responded to any of these proposals. Perhaps you can tell us what you think of them?"

to begin:

You mentioned Iraq in the chapter, saying the WSWS supports "bourgeois nationalism." The WSWS calls for an end to the occupation, but apparently this is equivalent to supporting bourgeois nationalism for you. The WSWS has not supported any bourgeois faction in Iraq. I'm not sure about your view here, but you must be insisting on some alternative to this demand for withdrawal. I presume either it is a controversy drawn up that insists this demand is a repudiation of a demand for socialism in the country, thus keeping the country bourgeois. It is what we call a transitional demand. Otherwise you may advocate some sort of occupation uprising or occupation aided-revolution, but you'll have to enlighten us.

With your demands, though they sound on their face to be interesting, most of them are, in my view (such cultural and historical articles, events), done extremely well by the ICFI and WSWS. A good sounding argument is the youth league argument, but you'll have to prove colleges are poor arenas for movement building. I am a working class youth who is working my way (hopefully) through colleges. I hope to go to a state college after getting my associate's degree. The comrades I have met who are students at colleges are, as far as I can tell, excellent socialists. As for the calls for democracy, freedom of criticism and the emphasis on learning to a greater extent than of that of the WSWS, these can only be seen in the light of your psychosexual and utopian views which you want to introduce and the ICFI doesn't want to introduce (and in my opinion rightly so). It isn't a question of democracy, its a question of citizenship, so to speak, and in an ideological sense.

Now, perhaps or perhaps ultimately you merely try to win over the socialists of the ICFI because you like their character and you've had a long association with them. Now this you can't blame the ICFI for opposing. I am tired of their opposition because I'm not sure if it is strictly necessary in its current form, but I understand it, for any organization would be forced to do the same. Your whole site is a back-and-forth with the ICFI, they just have an article every month.

Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately I do not share your confidence that the theoretical issues are already solved and can be shelved accordingly. I hope you will consider the theoretical with the practical critiques Steiner and Brenner offer. You really haven’t told us—beyond mere assertion--why you consider these theoretical issues a shut case, nor have you expressed an anti-critique of Steiner and Brenner’s criticisms of the ICFI leadership’s descent into objectivism. Again, I urge you to make a thorough examination of what Steiner and Brenner actually wrote.

As to your substantive criticisms:

1. Chapter 2 of MWHH argued that the WSWS coverage of Iraq constituted “the abandonment of the permanent revolution and the embrace of bourgeois nationalism in the form of a Shiite cleric and his militia.” [1] Your invocation of the ICFI’s call for an end to the occupation is missing the point of Steiner and Brenner’s criticisms. Everyone on the Left wants to end the occupation. Even Obama in his mealy-mouthed speeches expressed such sentiments. Revolutionary Marxists have a much higher standard to meet. Our perspective has to be based on Trotsky's permanent revolution, which fights for the independent mobilization of the Iraqi working class. If we abandon that perspective, then there is nothing that distinguishes Marxism from liberalism when it comes to the struggle against imperialist war. But if you actually read through the analysis presented in MWHH, it is absolutely undeniable that the WSWS did abandon the perspective of the permanent revolution in Iraq. They adopted a very different kind of perspective, one which boosted so-called "national resistance" against the occupation. Trodding a well-worn path taken by many middle class radicals (and before them, by Stalinists) this perspective led the WSWS to become a cheerleader for bourgeois nationalists in Iraq, specifically the Shiite cleric al-Sadr.

The language the WSWS used in its coverage of the war was not Marxist, but rather colored by a non-class perspective of “national resistance”. The working class disappeared from their coverage in 2004 (and beyond) once the Sadrist uprising gained attention in the mainstream and caught the eye of the radical middle class (i.e. Naomi Klein). The WSWS lavished praise upon Sadr and characterized his politics in pseudo-Marxist phraseology, claiming his banal anti imperialism represented a “leap” in consciousness [2]. Hyperbolic rhetoric saturated the coverage, as the Sadrist uprising resurrected in the minds of WSWS journalists the respective ghosts of the French Resistance and the founding fathers [3]. Steiner and Brenner warned,

“Once you are freed of the nagging problem of class, then all kinds of glorious parallels suggest themselves, as we saw earlier with the French resistance etc. {Patrick} Martin now enlists the shades of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and one can almost see the fife and drum marching through the dusty streets of Najaf and Fallujah. But alas the shade of Leon Trotsky, author of the theory of permanent revolution, is nowhere to be seen in this heroic scenario.” [4]

Only much later, when the Sadrists failed to advocate a “no” vote on the Iraqi constitution the Quisling installed government drafted in 2005, did the WSWS suddenly figure out Sadr was a typical bourgeois nationalist after all. It took the WSWS an astonishing 18 months to figure out the ABCs of Marxism. But nevertheless the adaptation to bourgeois nationalism continued. WSWS writers expected and supported anti imperialist responses from the Iraqi masses, but did so without any perspective for building an independent Marxist movement. Such statements from James Cogan and others on the WSWS staff amounted to objectivist daydreams, with the job of liberation outsourced to the “Iraqi masses” (defined without an analytical class criterion), and with a blind eye to the working class struggles in Iraq. Without a class analysis and program as a guiding thread, the WSWS abandoned the Iraqi working class to the machinations of the bourgeoisie. To conclude:

“The WSWS paid no attention to the struggles of the Iraqi workers because it became a proponent of so-called “national resistance.” But to ignore the working class means to abandon any effort to build a revolutionary party. And so there has never been a single article on the WSWS devoted to the call for the building of a Trotskyist party in Iraq or the spelling out of what such a party would stand for. Nothing expresses the WSWS’s abandonment of the permanent revolution more clearly than this. Capitulating to bourgeois nationalism is a black hole that blots out both the working class and Marxism.” [5]

All of this has been painfully documented in Chapter 2 of Steiner and Brenner’s polemic. My summary cannot do justice to what--in my opinion--is the most damning section of MWHH. I encourage you to study it carefully. These criticisms have been totally ignored in the most dishonest fashion by the IC leadership. Those readers who are nurtured only on what WSWS tells them are shamefully left in the dark as to the real content of Steiner and Brenner’s critique.

2. Steiner and Brenner are not against recruiting students in colleges and universities for Trotskyism. But it was a conscious decision on the SEP’s part to limit their youth movement, the ISSE, solely to students. Steiner and Brenner cited an article from Znet which contained some damning statistics that demonstrate higher levels of education are out of reach for many. To quote from that same article:

“Commonly held definitions need not apply any more. "Public" no longer means public if the majority of people can't afford or have access to institutions of higher education. Community colleges also increased tuition by 14%, the second largest increase since 1976. What "community" will attend these schools? Certainly not the 12.4% of the U.S. population who live on less than $18,400 yearly - a community of 34.6 million in the U.S. who see a college education well out of their reach.” [6]

Your anecdotes aside, it was argued in the concluding chapter of MWHH that “the astronomical costs of higher education now put it out of reach for most working class youth and even many middle class youth…a smaller percentage of working class youth are now able to attend college than in previous generations…” [7] No matter how you state it, the SEP is losing (what James Cannon called [8]) its proletarian orientation by limiting its recruitment to the campuses. This opens the party up to middle class forces. Such a strategy spawns an internal dialectic in the party’s increasing adaptation to the mentalities of middle class politics, namely the mindsets of pragmatism and liberalism. Such adaptation is unavoidable in the absence of a proletarian counterweight and scrupulous ideological training in dialectics and Marxism for new recruits.

Again, our objection is not to recruiting college students but rather to limiting recruitment almost exclusively to such students. This is in stark contrast not only to the Trotskyist movement under Cannon but also to the earlier history of the SEP's predecessor, the Workers League. There used to be demands formulated by the WL that addressed the oppressed sections of working class youth, from the unemployed to minorities. Compared with its predecessor the SEP doesn’t come close to engaging these forces. There simply is no attention paid to unemployed and minority youth in the current activities of the SEP. [9].

3. Your conception of party democracy is alien to the traditions of Bolshevism. This was a tradition that countenanced intense debate even as foreign imperialism and civil war were threatening the very existence of the young workers state. At the time it seemed as if Moscow and Leningrad might very quickly be overrun by German troops who would only face a weak Soviet army that was in the process of disintegration. But in Alexander Rabinowitch’s penetrating study, The Bolsheviks in Power, the author provides a plethora of examples of how intense the debate was within the Bolshevik Party during even this stage of what was perceived as an imminent collapse of the new Soviet Government. [10].

Your distinction between “citizenship” in the party and democracy is a confused one. It has nothing to do with the Leninist principle of democratic centralism. Trotsky, a supporter of psychoanalysis, would have been kicked out of the Bolshevik party by your standard for being “obsessed” with “psychosexual” politics.

I will end this reply with a quote from Lenin, who was an advocate of democratically conducted debate within socialist parties:

“It is necessary that every member of the Party should study calmly and with the greatest objectivity, first the substance of the differences of opinion, and then the development of the struggles within the Party. Neither the one nor the other can be done unless the documents of both sides are published. He who takes somebody’s word for it is a hopeless idiot, who can be disposed of with a simple gesture of the hand." [11]

Anyone who has actually read the material presented by Steiner and Brenner, concomitant with North’s, the Talbots’, and Haig’s polemics know who has followed the spirit of objectivity Lenin outlined here and who has not. [12]

Fraternally,

Andrew River


1. See Chapter 2 of Marxism Without its Head or Heart: The WSWS as a Left Apologist for Bourgeois Nationalism in Iraq:
http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch02.pdf

2. From David North,
“We have taken serious note of the appeal issued by al-Sadr to the people of the United States. This appeal must reflect a new awareness among the Iraqi masses that American imperialism is not a monolithic force, and that the United States is torn by internal social divisions. It also expresses a realization that the Iraqi people must seek support beyond the borders of their own country. This development in consciousness was already anticipated in the mass international anti-war demonstrations of February 2003, and provides fresh substantiation of the emergence of new and more favorable conditions for the building of the World Party of Socialist Revolution.” Quoted from Greetings from David North to Australian SEP: “A devastating blow to the myth of American invincibility”, WSWS, Apr. 12, 2004:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/apr2004/dn-a12.shtml

3. See “An exchange on Nader, Kerry and the US war in Iraq”, WSWS, June 1, 2004: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/apr2004/dn-a12.shtml

4. Marxism Without Its Head or Heart chapter 2, ibid

5. ibid

6. Quoted in the Conclusion to Marxism Without its Head or Heart:
http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch11.pdf

Read the Znet article here:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2003-11/09pandya.cfm

7. Conclusion to Marxism Without its Head or Heart, ibid

8. The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, James Cannon:
http://marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1940/party/index.htm

9. From the Conclusion to Marxism Without its Head or Heart: “Something also needs to be said about the launching of the youth movement, The International Students for Social Equality, (ISSE) which is oriented to students on college campuses. We find it troubling that this youth movement is limited to the college campus milieu. In the context of the recent political evolution of the IC, it is another sign of the crystallization of the dominance of middle class forces within the party. There is a notable contrast here with the work the party did among working class youth in the past. An important achievement of the Workers League in the early 1970s was the building of a youth movement, the Young Socialists, that gained a substantial following among working class and minority youth. The Young Socialists actively fought against the pernicious influence of Black Nationalism and other reactionary ideologies on the home base of its adherents and more than held its own. It organized rallies and demonstrations against unemployment, imperialist war, and fought to unite the struggles of the youth with those of the working class as a whole. It also educated a layer of youth in the principles of Marxism. Yet today the successor organization of the Workers League, the Socialist Equality Party, proposes nothing for the most oppressed sections of the working class, the unemployed youth, African American and Hispanic youth. This is another unmistakable sign of the party’s growing estrangement from the working class.”

10. See Alexander Rabinowitch’s discussion of this period in the internal life of the Bolshevik party in his comprehensive The Bolsheviks in Power. See particularly Part 2 “War or Peace” chapter 6 “The Socialist Fatherland Is in Danger”, pp 173-174.

11. Quote from Lenin as printed over the masthead of the first issue of The Militant, 15 November 1928. Also quoted in the Conclusion to Marxism Without its Head or Heart ibid

12. The removal of the hyperlinks to Steiner and Brenner’s documents in Adam Haig’s polemic “Steiner, Brenner, and Neo-Marxism: the Marcusean Component” is just the icing on the cake of a campaign to disorientate readers of the WSWS and members of the SEP. This was a conscious decision made by the editorial board in order to avoid their readers having direct access to the documents Haig cites from permanent-revolution.org. See “Of sterile flowers, poisonous weeds, and a political smokescreen” by Alex Steiner and Frank Brenner:
http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/haig_smokescreen.pdf

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History in the making and the making of history

By Frank Brenner

We are being constantly told by the mass media that today is a day of 'history in the making'. And there are millions of people, including many workers and many on the left, who believe this, at least to some degree: the massive crowds that have come to Washington to watch the inauguration of Obama are evidence of that. In cities throughout the US and around the world, people stopped work to watch the event on tv.

It hardly needs to be said that as Marxists we understand that this is a huge case of political demagogy. But I want to consider something different - I want to ponder the notion of 'history in the making'. This is a telling example of the counterfeits of freedom that characterize bourgeois society and particularly bourgeois democracy. By this I mean that bourgeois society continuously offers the illusion of freedom while denying its substance. Thus today the masses are being invited to watch 'history in the making', which is to say that they get to be passive spectators while the powerful (and of course the wealthy) get to make history.

In feudal times the coronation of a new king served similar purposes, and the more astute and 'progressive' monarchs very much encouraged the participation of the 'rabble': the king was meant to be seen as the 'people's king' and much effort was spent to encourage a symbolic identification with him.

Bourgeois politics has taken this a good deal further: this symbolic identification is now bound up with the ideology of nationalism. This is by no means limited to democratic forms of bourgeois rule; on the contrary, fascism in particular took this kind of identification furthest of all.

Walter Benjamin talked about how fascism aestheticizes politics, by which he meant that it transforms politics into a grand spectacle or better still a kind of national psychodrama. The giant Nazi rallies, such as the one at Nuremberg recorded in the Leni Riefenstahl movie, “Triumph of the Will,” is a perfect example of that. No doubt many of those who attended such rallies were convinced that they too were witnessing ‘history in the making’.

To be sure, bourgeois democracy approaches these matters somewhat differently. But for a long time now, as the socioeconomic divisions have widened at the base of society, there has been a major effort to divert attention away from these divisions by an ever greater aestheticizing of politics. This has been most noticeable in the US, though American techniques in this regard have increasingly been copied by ruling parties around the world. From the Reagan years on, the principal narrative of this psychodrama was the so-called ‘culture wars’ whereby ‘honest’, ‘authentic’ conservatives were fighting to defend the family and American ‘values’ against liberal elites.

With Obama’s election, the narrative has changed – it is now about ‘the audacity of hope’, about social ‘cooperation’, ‘compassion’, ‘duty’ and ‘responsibility’. Just as American capitalism survives on borrowed money, so the American political elite is now borrowing on the political capital of the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, to say nothing of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. These are potent symbols and Obama and his circle are doing their best to capitalize on them. Under these conditions, it has never been more important for Marxists to draw the clearest possible distinction between liberalism and socialism.

One such distinction is over history and how it is made. The millions who come to Washington or watch on tv to witness ‘history in the making’ are actually being treated to a political ‘reality television’ show. What we need is not to watch ‘history in the making’ - by others! - but to make history ourselves. That is the dividing line between bourgeois and socialist democracy. The ‘beautiful’ illusions of freedom have to give way to a freedom from illusions.

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Of sterile flowers, poisonous weeds and a political smokescreen

On Jan. 6, the WSWS carried yet another polemic against us, the second one in a week. This one came with a purple prose title, “Adam Haig responds to Alex Steiner’s burst of outrage”.
Burst of outrage? This same Haig had four days earlier posted a 17-page attack on us in which he baldly declared that we “cannot be regarded as Marxist-Trotskyists”, claimed that we reject the materialist conception of history, are skeptical about the revolutionary role of the working class and much else.

We posted a brief response (a little over a page in length) on our website blog in which we pointed out that most of the essay was devoted to using Herbert Marcuse as a straw man and that much of the rest of it brought in irrelevant material regarding Erich Fromm and Slavoj Žižek.

There was no “burst of outrage” in what we wrote. It is true that we called the title of Haig’s piece pretentious and we characterized his ruminations on Fromm and Žižek as the kind of padding a clever graduate student would engage in, but this is pretty routine stuff in the cut-and-thrust of polemical debate, and given what we were dealing with, it was eminently fair comment. By any objective measure, our criticisms of Haig were a good deal more restrained than his accusations against us.

But that isn’t how Haig saw it. Our brief note enraged him and he vented his anger in a new posting which the WSWS editors were only too happy to run (a point we will come back to). In this latest posting we are accused of writing an “angry response”, of making “several outrageous charges” in our brief note, and that we are supposedly “intent on discrediting the ICFI.” Steiner, “in his hysteria,” apparently “employs a deceitful use of quotation marks”. Later we are told that Steiner “exploded” and later still that Steiner “has no capacity for logical argumentation.” The piece winds up by consigning us to the garbage heap of history (having “embraced Herbert Marcuse, Freudo-Marxism, and Utopia … it is fairly clear where they [i.e. Steiner and Brenner] will end up”).

“Hysteria”, “exploded”, “burst of outrage” – the violence of this language is striking. Clearly, the “hysteria” here is Haig’s, not ours. In psychology this is known as projection; in a more familiar idiom it is a case of the pot calling the kettle black...Click here to read entire essay

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A brief note on the publication of "Steiner, Brenner and Neo-Marxism: The Marcusean Component"

On January 2, the World Socialist Web Site greeted the New Year by offering its readers yet another polemic that attempts to discredit us, this one with the pretentious title, "Steiner, Brenner and Neo-Marxism: The Marcusean Component". [1] This isn’t the place for a substantive reply, but a few quick points are in order:

First, the basic premise of this essay is a misrepresentation of our attitude to the Frankfurt School and Marcuse. The author, one Adam Haig, states:

“One of the arguments Steiner and Brenner make is that despite the incompatibilities of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory with orthodox Marxism, not everything by the critical theorists is worthless. That is beside the point. The question is whether or not Frankfurt School critical theory is Marxism.”

Why is it “beside the point” to claim that “not everything by the critical theorists is worthless”? Haig is simply dodging the substance of our position and replacing it with a different view, i.e. “that Frankfurt School critical theory is Marxism.” This is what is called setting up a straw man, and Haig then spends 17 pages knocking him down, arguing against something that we never claimed. In this respect as in many others, Haig merely echoes the misrepresentations advanced by ICFI leader David North in his various polemics against us, particularly the series “The Frankfurt School vs. Marxism: The Political and Intellectual Odyssey of Alex Steiner”. [2]

Second, in the manner of a clever graduate student, Haig pads his essay with several pages of completely extraneous material on Erich Fromm and Slavoj Žižek. We have never cited the latter’s views in any of our polemical material and our few references to Fromm are confined to his writings from the early 1930s, long before his politics (and psychology) lost their revolutionary edge. Haig has clearly been trained by North in the ‘art’ of cooking up amalgams: Marcuse leads him to Fromm (even though their differences on psychoanalytic theory were of a fundamental nature) and Fromm then allows Haig to throw in ‘socialistic humanism’, left-liberalism, Eugene McCarthy and the proverbial kitchen sink.

(One has to say in passing that while this essay offers very little of intellectual or political merit, it is a striking – and frankly depressing – indication of how newer party members and supporters are being trained. They are being taught that one ‘defends’ Marxism through setting up straw men, cooked-up amalgams and smear campaigns. It would be hard to think of a worse indictment of the present leadership of the ICFI than this kind of miseducation of young comrades.)

Finally, a small but telling point. From the time it first appeared a little past midnight on Jan 2 to some hours later that morning, this essay went through a slight ‘change’. The first edition of this essay had some footnotes citing our essays. The footnotes included hyperlinks to the essays that were referenced on our web site, http://www.permanent-revolution.org/. Several hours later, the hyperlinks were removed. Right now, there is no way for anyone reading this essay online to link directly to any of our material. The footnotes refer to something called “Permanent Revolution” (without the hyphen). For instance, here is footnote 1:

1. Alex Steiner, “Unable to Answer Our Political Criticisms: The WSWS Resorts to a Smear Campaign,” Permanent Revolution, 9 November 2008.

It is not even clear whether “Permanent Revolution” is a web site or the name of a periodical or a book. It is true that the enterprising reader who is determined to find our material can do a Google Search and eventually they will be led to the URL,
http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/smear_campaign.htm,
but of course the editors of the WSWS who removed the original hyperlink to this document are banking on the fact that the great majority of their readers will not be so enterprising.

Now it is one thing not to insert hyperlinks in the first place but it is something yet again to remove hyperlinks that were already there. This was obviously a deliberate decision made by the editors of the World Socialist Web Site to prevent people from actually reading the views of a polemical opponent.

This little ‘edit’ is particularly ironic given the following statement in the essay itself:

“Ironically, Steiner claims that ‘feelings of “party-patriotism” will blind many members and supporters’ from seeing ‘the [Socialist Equality] party's abstentionism and estrangement from the working class,’ and that ‘the SEP's theoretical degeneration’ has been laid bare in Marxism without Its Head or Its Heart. Steiner has a very low opinion of the ability of SEP members and supporters to seriously think through theoretical, political, and historical questions.”

Actually, it seems that it is the WSWS editorial board that “has a very low opinion” of the abilities of its readers and of party members; otherwise, they would have left the links in and allowed readers to judge for themselves the validity of our criticisms.

Alex Steiner
Frank Brenner
Jan. 2, 2009.


[1] Adam Haig, “Steiner, Brenner and Neo-Marxism: The Marcusean Component,” WSWS, Jan. 2, 2009:
http://wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/bren-j02.shtml
[2] http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/oct2008/fran-o22.shtml

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One Year Anniversary of Marxism Without its Head or its Heart

December 16, 2008 marked a year since we completed posting Marxism Without its Head or its Heart (MWHH).

Before we started posting it (in ten instalments beginning in September 2007), David North had claimed that the passage of a year without a response to a polemic (he was speaking of his own Marxism, History and Socialist Consciousness) constituted the passing of “something akin to a statute of limitations.” This was a hypocritical claim for North to be making, since (as we pointed out at the time) he himself had ignored our earlier polemics for three years.

In any case, if we look back on the last year, it is true that we received a response to MWHH, but only in a formal sense. This ‘response’ – by North, assisted by Ann and Chris Talbot – turned out to be a smear campaign against Alex Steiner. When it came to the substance of our criticisms of the International Committee’s political line, neither North nor the Talbots had anything to say. When it came to the philosophical issues, their ‘response’ was equally telling: while the Talbots mounted a blatant defence of empiricism and positivism, North’s only reference to dialectics was a contemptuous sneer. Dialectics remains a dead letter in the IC, as does any theoretical struggle against pragmatism.

It is a fair assumption that we won’t see a further response that actually addresses those issues. In that sense, the passage of a year is significant because if the IC leadership had been able to answer our criticisms, they would have done so already instead of resorting to an ad hominem attack on Steiner. Our analysis has withstood an important test.

The global financial meltdown guarantees that the coming period will be one of great political upheaval. As the old mainstream political consensus collapses, there will be a resurgence of interest in revolutionary Marxism among militant workers, youth and intellectuals. We are confident that Marxism Without its Head or its Heart will come to be seen as having made a positive contribution to that resurgence.

Frank Brenner
Alex Steiner
Dec. 21, 2008

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A footnote to the SEP’s 2008 election campaign:

My less than brilliant career as a write-in voter

By Alex Steiner

I have previously commented on the anemic quality of the SEP’s 2008 election campaign.[1] The SEP claimed to be running a write-in campaign, (having waited to launch their campaign until it was too late to get on the ballot anywhere). But it was obvious that even as a write-in campaign, the party was just going through the motions. A small but telling indication of this is that the SEP did nothing to warn its supporters of the problems they might face in actually placing a write-in vote. As I discovered when I went to vote myself, those problems could be formidable.

I arrived at the grammar school gymnasium where the voting takes place in my Brooklyn, New York neighborhood in the latter part of the evening, when I knew the lines would be shorter, but also well ahead of the 9 PM closing time for the polls. I was determined to vote SEP, which I thought would be a relatively straightforward matter. However, once I entered the voting booth, I realized that I did not recall the exact mechanics of submitting a write-in vote and there was nothing in the voting booth in the way of instructions that would assist me. I therefore signaled to one of the poll workers that I wished some assistance.

Once I got the attention of the volunteer I explained to him what I wanted to do and he simply did not understand the concept of a write-in vote at all. I then asked him to consult with his supervisor where I hoped to have better luck. It turned out that the supervisor, a middle-aged woman with a very business-like attitude only had a little bit more knowledge than the volunteer. She understood the concept of a write-in vote but had no idea how to do it with Brooklyn’s antiquated manual voting machines. Finally, she located an instruction booklet that actually had a section explaining how to cast a write-in ballot. It seems there was a button on the upper left that you have to press down and at the same time slide over a metal fastener over a rectangular space to the left of the position for which you want to cast your ballot. The metal fastener is supposed to unlock a paper ballot where you can write in your preference.

This sounded simple enough and armed with a new degree of confidence I thanked the supervisor for showing me the directions and told her that I wanted to complete my vote. However, during the interval while I was attempting to obtain these directions, other people were waved through and allowed to vote. This created a logistical problem for the volunteers as my return to the voting booth required that they fill out a new form for me. They seemed reluctant to do this, claiming that this would “disrupt” their orderly procedures. When I pointed out that it was not my fault that asking for assistance for a simple problem should not have been the cause of any disruption, the supervisor with whom I was speaking asked me why I couldn’t just vote the “normal” way, i.e. for one of the candidates whose names were on the ballot, instead of causing trouble with my unorthodox request. I replied that I had a right to vote in whatever manner was allowed in the State of New York and casting a write-in ballot was one of the options that voters had before them.

As soon as I mentioned my rights, the supervisor’s attitude changed from one of mild annoyance to overt hostility. She then informed me that I could not go back into the voting booth to cast my ballot unless I was accompanied by two election officials. When I asked her why I should have this kind of supervision imposed on me, she claimed that the instruction booklet stated that anyone casting a write-in ballot can only do so if there are two elections officials standing by with that person in the voting booth. I could not believe the instruction booklet said any such thing and I asked her to show me where it said that. She pointed to a line where the instruction booklet stated that “If the voter requests assistance, two elections officials must enter the booth with that voter.” I explained that this sentence in the instruction manual applied to a situation where the voter was requesting assistance and I was not requesting any assistance. Now that I understood the procedure for casting a write-in ballot, I wished to avail myself of this option and cast my ballot in private as is my right.

My insistence upon my right to cast my write-in ballot in private further alienated this woman and she claimed that I could not vote until she obtained “clearance” from higher election authorities. She then got on her cell phone to make some calls. This went on for several minutes. After a while I once again insisted on my right to vote and went up to the police officer guarding the place and complained that I was in effect being denied my right to vote. At that point, the elections supervisor with whom I had been squabbling brought in reinforcements in the form of a higher election official, another middle-aged woman who sported a button on her lapel indicating that she had some kind of authority over the entire voting place. After explaining the problem to this woman she promptly echoed what the supervisor had said, that I can only vote under supervision, even though the booklet was very clear that this was required only in the case where the voter asks for assistance.

I once again insisted on my right to vote in privacy. When confronted by this unexpected rejection of her authority to dictate the terms of my voting, the elections official finally relented and said that I may vote without supervision, but I would only be given three minutes in the booth. She also threatened to find out my name and retaliate against me in some unspoken manner if my insistence on voting for a write-in candidate wound up”destroying” her statistics. Although her conditions were obviously capricious and unfair, I felt that I had at least won a partial victory and it was not fruitful to continue the argument with her. I agreed to her conditions and finally, after receiving a duplicate voting card, went in for the second time to cast my write-in vote. (I exited the first time without actually voting for anyone when I tried to obtain assistance initially.)

It was only then that I discovered that all my efforts and good intentions had been in vain. Although I followed the instructions in the booklet religiously, the slot where the paper ballot is supposed to reveal itself refused to open. I was the victim of a faulty voting machine. I left in disgust, unable to cast my ballot for the SEP.

I can only wonder how many other supporters of the party had similar experiences. Interestingly, there has been no article posted on the WSWS reporting on how many votes the party received, something that was standard practice in other party campaigns. [2] What is ironic about my little comedy of errors in the voting booth is that I was taking this write-in campaign more seriously than the SEP was.

A last point that’s worth reflecting on: what accounts for this virtual non-campaign on the SEP’s part? If ever there were an election that cried out for a socialist voice to be heard, this was it. And yet none of the movements to the left of the Democratic Party made themselves heard in this campaign, from Ralph Nader and the Greens to the various middle class radical groups. Of course the mass media adulation for Obama did much to drown out such voices, but it is also the case that these tendencies adapted themselves to the Obama campaign, either by toning down their own campaigns or abandoning them altogether.

If we consider the SEP’s behavior in this broader context, then its failure to fight for ballot status or mount a serious write-in campaign was also an adaptation to these bourgeois class pressures. Those pressures express themselves through the political base of the SEP, which is increasingly middle class college and university students, the layer of the population who most fervently supported Obama. A serious election campaign would have forced these students to swim against the stream of Obama’s popularity, and clearly this was something the party leadership wanted to avoid.



[1] http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/labels/election_2008.html

[2] One example can be found in this report written in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 election –
Socialist Equality Party gains significant support in US elections,
by Joseph Kay, 4 November, 2004
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/nov2004/sep-n04.shtml

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Unable to answer our political criticisms the WSWS resorts to a smear campaign

Unable to answer our political criticisms

The WSWS resorts to a smear campaign

 

By Alex Steiner

 

In politics a sure sign that you can’t answer criticism is that you try to change the subject. And one of the most tried and true methods for doing that is to smear the reputation of your opponent: discredit the critic so as to ignore the criticism.

 

That is precisely what the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has done with its series, “The Frankfurt School vs. Marxism: The Political and Intellectual Odyssey of Alex Steiner.”[1] This series, by SEP chairman David North (along with an addendum by Ann and Chris Talbot), purports to be a response to the polemic, Marxism Without its Head or its Heart (MWHH), written by me and my colleague, Frank Brenner. But it addresses not a single one of the criticisms we made of the International Committee’s political line. Instead it is a blatant effort to discredit my reputation.

 

To that end, the series resorts to the usual modus operandi of smear campaigns – lies, half-truths, innuendoes and pulling quotes out of context. At its sleaziest, it becomes an exercise in character assassination, as in North’s claim that I suffer from “extreme emotional volatility, susceptibility to discouragement when confronted with problems, and pessimistic view of life.” After that ‘diagnosis’, there is presumably no need to take the arguments of such an individual seriously. (How ironic that North, who routinely denounces any references to psychology as subjective idealism, should resort to armchair psychologizing when it suits his purpose.)

 

It should be said that this way of dealing with criticism and political dissent is quite common in middle class radical circles. A notable example are the Spartacists and their various offshoots, whose internal disputes frequently involve mutual accusations of being ‘insane’, ‘deranged’ etc. That North now stoops to these kinds of accusations says more about the state of his political degeneration than about my state of mind.

 

The bulk of North’s document is supposedly an account of my “political and intellectual odyssey” over the last four decades. This account bears about the same relationship to the truth as North’s psychological ‘diagnosis’. It relies heavily on private correspondence, often of a personal nature, ripped out of context.

 

Furthermore, while North (and the Talbots) attack me for being “duplicitous” in not posting this material, supposedly because I was trying to hide my real positions, they themselves never post these texts, choosing instead to pick out whatever quotes they find ‘useful’. If this material is as damning as they claim, why not let readers judge for themselves? This is indicative of the intellectual dishonesty that pervades this enterprise.

 

I will be posting all the relevant texts and also issuing a full reply to this smear campaign in due course. What I am posting now is a preliminary statement in order to warn readers of the nature of these documents and the political motives behind them. In this regard, a number of points need to be made:

 

First, the title of the series – “The Frankfurt School vs. Marxism” – is a misnomer. There is little discussion of the Frankfurt School, let alone a serious critique of the latter from the standpoint of Marxism. The only purpose for the title is to prettify a smear campaign with a veneer of theoretical high purpose. As we have pointed out in MWHH, the International Committee has never produced anything resembling a serious analysis of the legacy of the Frankfurt School. North invokes the latter as a bogeyman epitomizing irrationalism and then uses that to discredit me through guilt by association.

 

Second, there is a striking disconnect between North’s ‘line of attack’ on me in this series and his previous polemic, Marxism, History & Socialist Consciousness. There North condemned Brenner and myself for allegedly ignoring the party’s political line in our critique. It was the political line, North insisted, that was the paramount concern in assessing the work of the revolutionary movement:

 

[T]he way this has been done in the history of the Marxist movement is through a careful and exhaustive analysis of the political line of the organization that is the subject of the criticism. If you had chosen to proceed in this theoretically principled manner, there is no shortage of materials upon which you would be able to draw …The response of the International Committee to these historic changes would easily fill up several dozen volumes. However, nowhere in your document is there to be found any analysis, or even reference to, the political line of the International Committee.[2]

 

In fact it wasn’t true that we had ignored the IC’s political line in our previous documents[3], but in MWHH we greatly expanded our criticisms, providing precisely the “careful and exhaustive analysis” that North had demanded. I will cite here just the three most noteworthy examples:

 

1.      We devoted an entire chapter (34 pages) to a detailed analysis of the WSWS line on Iraq. That chapter examined dozens of WSWS articles over a three-year period (2004-2007), and based on that analysis we contended that the party had abandoned the perspective of the permanent revolution in Iraq. The WSWS failed to report on any of the struggles of the Iraqi working class and it never put forward a perspective or program for building a Trotskyist party in Iraq. Instead the WSWS became a left apologist for a bourgeois nationalist Shiite cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr.[4]

 

2.      We devoted another chapter (29 pages) to examining the party’s perspective on the everyday struggles of the working class and the trade unions. We looked at the WSWS’s abysmal intervention in the New York City transit strike of December 2005, we showed how the SEP had come to adopt an abstentionist propagandism completely alien to the traditions of Trotskyism, and how the party had become almost totally estranged from the working class in its political activity. [5]

 

3.      We also looked at the shameful record of the WSWS and the SEP in relation to the mass demonstrations that swept Mexico in the summer of 2006 in protest over the ruling party’s attempt to steal the presidential election. While over a million workers marched through the streets of Mexico City (or fought pitched battles with police in Oaxaca), the SEP made no effort to intervene in this mass movement, to hold a meeting or even issue a programmatic statement on the crisis. Whatever coverage there was on the WSWS were routine rewrites from the bourgeois press, and only one article was ever translated into Spanish.[6]

 

Faced with this “careful and exhaustive analysis” of major aspects of his party’s political line, North’s response has been to say absolutely nothing about any of these issues! Instead he has decided to say a great deal about me.

 

To anyone not blinded by an unthinking party loyalty, it should be obvious what is going on here: North has no answers to our criticisms, and so to avoid discussing them he has resorted to an ad hominem attack. Even if North’s claims about me weren’t full of distortions and lies, even if I were an idealist, a Frankfurt School devotee and “emotionally volatile” to boot – none of this has any bearing on the SEP’s political line. Either our criticisms of the latter are valid or they aren’t, and the only principled way to respond to them would have been to address their substance with the kind of “careful and exhaustive analysis” that North demanded in relation to the party’s political line. That neither North nor the Talbots have a word to say on any of these issues exposes the thoroughly unprincipled nature of their document. Beneath their many claims to be defending the heritage of Marxism lies a cynical and demagogic agenda that is a discredit to Marxism.

 

That agenda is to ‘personalize’ this polemical dispute in order to poison the atmosphere so that no party member or supporter will give any consideration to our criticisms. This is already evident in some of the letters the WSWS has posted regarding North’s latest document. One such letter declared: “Steiner and Co. will soon enough be urging on the fascistic buffoons at the Sarah Palin rallies, all in the name of irrationality and ‘sexuality.’”[7] This vile and inflammatory slander was posted without comment by the WSWS editorial board, which means they either condone such slander or consider it reasonable commentary. The mentality behind this letter is the mentality this smear campaign is designed to engender.

 

One further point needs to be made here. At the end of his document, North impugns me for my supposedly “new political relations” with the New Space, which he presents as a kind of political “swamp” consisting of various radical academics who have come together to push the agenda of the Frankfurt School and destroy Marxism.  He further claims that I have tried to keep this new “political affiliation” a secret from the readers of our web site and at the same time I have tried to keep my connections to Trotskyism a secret from the New Space because such ties are looked upon with disdain by the radicals who populate the New Space and whose approval I desperately seek.

 

There is not a word of truth in anything about this account of my association with the New Space. First of all, the New Space is not a political organization at all.  It is thus not possible for me to have a “political affiliation” with it.  My affiliation with the New Space is that of an instructor, not a political spokesman. The New Space is an alternative educational institution that was founded to provide a venue where left wing ideas and theories can be discussed and studied. 

 

It is true that there are people of different political persuasions who attend the talks and classes at the New Space and it is also true that the instructors at the New Space cover a wide variety of political and philosophical tendencies. There have been instructors and lecturers who exhibit some sympathy for some members of the Frankfurt School whereas other lecturers are quite hostile to the Frankfurt School. In any case, the Frankfurt School is not a major item in the syllabus of the New Space classes.

 

As for my own work there, I have taught classes on Hegel, specifically his Phenomenology of Spirit, Philosophy of History, and Logic. I have never hidden my Trotskyist politics from my students but I also haven’t advertised my politics, as it has no bearing on the courses I teach. In this respect I am no different than at least one SEP member that I am aware of, who has taught for decades at a major university: I very much doubt that he advertised his Trotskyist politics in the course catalogue of his university. (I might add, however, that there is one difference between myself and this comrade: I have never earned a cent for my lectures, which I do on a voluntary basis.)

 

The North/Talbot document is a shameful work. As I’ve said, a full response to its many lies and distortions is forthcoming, but even at this preliminary stage it is possible to state that this work marks a new low in the degeneration of the leadership of the International Committee, which behaves increasingly in a manner that besmirches the name of Trotskyism.

 

 

---

[1] http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/oct2008/fran-o22.shtml

[2] Marxism, History & Socialist Consciousness, pp. 3-4.

[3] North could only make this allegation by completely ignoring my 2004 document, The Dialectical Path of Cognition and Revolutionizing Practice, which contained a 12-page section titled “Where  is the International Committee Going?”, devoted precisely to the party’s political line: http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/dialectical_path.pdf 

[4] http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch02.pdf

[5] http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch05.pdf

[6] http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch01.pdf

[7] Note:  This letter was originally posted in a special letters section of the WSWS: “Letters on ‘The Frankfurt School vs. Marxism’”, WSWS, Nov. 8, 2008: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/nov2008/corr-n08.shtml  If you now go to that location, the offensive letter is gone.  See the following for the full story of the “disappearing letter”, The Revealing Case of a Disappearing Letter, by Frank Brenner,

http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/p/the-revealing-case-of-disappearing.html

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