Max Shachtman and His Left: A Socialist's Odyssey through the "American Century"
By Peter Drucker
Humanities Press, 1994. 346 pp., $29.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
"If there is a gram of Marxist blood left in me, it will take a hundred miracles to get me to support the US", declared Max Shachtman (with Jim Cannon, one of USA's two leading Trotskyists) in 1948. By the time of his death in 1972, however, he had supported US wars and invasions of Korea, Cuba and Vietnam, and had backed Johnson and Nixon for president — all the time regarding himself as a Marxist.
The odds are against a hundred miracles and much more in favour of a political transfusion that transformed Shachtman from a Marxist revolutionary to a "State Department socialist" as his critics dubbed him. Drucker's book recounts Shachtman's tragic and twisted evolution. It offers a cautionary tale on how to become a right-wing "socialist" in three easy decades.
In 1920, the young Shachtman joined the Communist Party in New York. He refused to blindly follow the roll-back of the Russian Revolution by the Stalinist bureaucracy and became a Trotskyist in 1928. Twenty years of committed work in the isolated and slandered Trotskyist groups followed, achieving occasional significant influence in some unions and labour struggles.
Shachtman was a dynamic organiser and a tireless speaker — witty, trenchant, passionate (and long: there was a standing Trotskyist joke that "Stalin expected to create socialism in one country and Shachtman in one speech").
Shachtman led a large split from the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in 1940, essentially over whether Stalin's Soviet Union could be considered a workers' state (and therefore worth defending in the world war) if the workers didn't run the country. Shachtman was inclined to answer in the negative (though still seeing nationalised industry as a historic advance). Nevertheless, he saw in some of his allies in this debate (future renegades from Marxism like Max Eastman, Irving Howe and Sidney Hook) the "dangerous tendency to let anti-Stalinism swell until it overwhelmed opposition to capitalism".
Yet Shachtman was to travel this same path himself, over Korea, Cuba and Vietnam, and dovetailing with McCarthyism by joining the union bureaucrats' witch-hunt of communists in trade unions during the Cold War.
Under the guise of anti-Stalinism, Shachtman completed his switch from Marxism to right-wing social democracy. He saw the post-war British Labour government as an example of socialism won through "peaceful, legal, electoral means", and he thought the Democratic Party could become a "force for civil rights and social reform" in the US.
Shachtman and his followers became enmeshed in the Democratic Party machine trying to impact on its policies. By "winning office and influence" in the party apparatus, "he could even imagine that he had the ear of the President".
But to make this strategy work involved Shachtman in a contradiction — the Democrats had to win office and that meant subordinating all extra-parliamentary demands and action to conservatising and pragmatic electoral needs. It meant dropping napalm on Vietnam. Shachtman's was the common fate of many radicals who renounce an independent revolutionary political challenge for the more "realistic" manoeuvring in parliamentary parties which aim to administer, not bury, capitalism.
Shachtman still called himself a Marxist but some, like former Trotskyist Tariq Ali, argued that to call the Cold War Democrat Shachtman a "socialist in any sense at all, is to denude the word of all meaning".
Drucker (himself a Trotskyist) is more hesitant to make such an assessment, but he should know his Lenin (and New Testament) better than that — political judgments, according to Lenin, should be made not by what people say they are but by what they do ("By their works shall ye know them", agrees the New Testament).
Stalin, after all, saw himself as a Marxist, Bush and Clinton believe they are white knights of freedom and democracy, Keating feels he is (in part) a "labour" man. They were and are nothing of the sort. Shachtman cheered on the Marines, the military missionaries for US capitalism.
Shachtman's volte-face has lessons for us today. His bloated and all-consuming anti-Stalinism led him to side with his own, more "democratic", ruling class against foreign Stalinist evils, instead of opposing both. Just so did some left-wing radicals side with the B52s as they rained on the people of Iraq in the name of liberty against a "new Hitler".
Shachtman abandoned the strategy of social change through industrial and political struggle in the streets and factories and offices, in favour of currying backroom influence with the top levels of trade unions and parliamentary parties. All the resulting compromises, pragmatism, right turns and adaptation to the system he had given up overthrowing and was now working within, are a sad lesson on how to become an obstacle to the socialist hopes and energies that people like Shachtman once had.