A political lesson from America in the 1940s

Around fifteen years ago, while reading David North’s The Heritage We Defend (Savunduğumuz Miras)[*], I came across a remarkably interesting and instructive episode in the history of the American socialist labour movement -one of which I had previously been unaware. I do not believe that this episode, which illustrates one of the fundamental differences between Stalinism and Trotskyism in remarkably clear and simple terms, is widely known in Turkey. I therefore thought it would be useful to write a short piece recounting what happened. After all, that is one of the principal aims of this blog.

The episode may be briefly summarised as follows: in the early 1940s, as the flames of the Second World War spread rapidly, the Stalinist Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) enthusiastically supported the state’s persecution of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) under a deeply reactionary law. Yet only a few years later, when the same machinery of repression was turned against the Communist Party itself, the SWP -regardless of how it had previously been treated would go on to defend the CPUSA unconditionally against state persecution.

Let us now take a closer look at how this contrast -one that constitutes a political lesson in its own right- came about.

The prosecution of the Trotskyists, backed by the Stalinists

In the spring of 1941, the Roosevelt administration, working in collaboration with the right-wing bureaucracy of the Teamsters union, launched a sweeping offensive against the SWP and Teamsters Local 544, the party’s most important working-class base in Minnesota. The Trotskyists, who had led the great Minneapolis truck drivers’ strikes of 1934, were targeted not only because of their militant trade union struggles but also because of their uncompromising opposition to the impending imperialist war.

On 27 June 1941, the FBI raided the SWP’s offices in Minneapolis and St Paul, seizing party documents and Marxist publications. On 15 July, charges were brought against twenty-eight people, including the SWP’s National Secretary, James P. Cannon, and the party’s leaders in Minneapolis. One of the charges was brought under the reactionary and repressive Smith Act, which had been passed a year earlier, and accused the defendants of advocating the forcible overthrow of the government. This was the first time the Act had been used against the SWP.

The trial began on 27 October 1941 and concluded on 8 December, the day the United States formally entered the Second World War. Eighteen of the defendants were found guilty and sentenced to prison terms of up to eighteen months. Cannon and the other SWP leaders began serving their sentences in 1944.

The reactionary Smith Act was first used against the Trotskyists. Pictured here are fourteen of the eighteen Socialist Workers Party (SWP) members convicted under the Act in 1941. Back row, left to right: Farrell Dobbs, Harry DeBoer, Edward Palmquist, Clarence Hamel, Emil Hansen, Oscar Coover and Jake Cooper. Front row, left to right: Max Geldman, Felix Morrow, Albert Goldman, James P. Cannon, Vincent Dunne, Carl Skoglund and Grace Carlson.

This was not merely a criminal prosecution. Its purpose was to silence a revolutionary socialist tendency that opposed the imperialist war and wielded real influence within the working class, albeit on a limited scale -and, if possible, to put an end to the SWP’s legal existence altogether. Indeed, the SWP was the only American working-class party whose leaders were imprisoned during the war years.

Far from opposing this assault, the Stalinist Communist Party of the United States enthusiastically supported the prosecution brought by the government. The Stalinists’ position was rooted not only in their particular hostility towards the Trotskyists but also in the foreign-policy interests of the Soviet bureaucracy, which it served. Following Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, Stalinist parties had turned, in the name of “anti-fascist unity”, towards alliances with the ruling classes of their own countries; they supported the Roosevelt administration and US entry into the war. Consequently, in the eyes of the Stalinists, the SWP -which upheld an independent working-class political perspective in opposition to the imperialist war- was itself an obstacle that had to be eliminated.

Here, one of the defining features of Stalinist politics was laid bare: an attempt was being made to “resolve” a political dispute within the workers’ movement by means of the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state. Instead of answering the Trotskyists through political struggle, the Stalinists relied on the FBI, prosecutors and the courts to do the job for them.

The same law now turns against the Communist Party

Yet this support for the bourgeois state soon recoiled on the Stalinists themselves. With the onset of the Cold War, the American ruling class no longer had any need for its temporary wartime allies. In 1948, twelve leaders of the Communist Party of the United States were indicted under the very same Smith Act that had been used against the SWP seven years earlier.

Robert Thompson (left) and Benjamin J. Davis, leaders of the Communist Party of the United States prosecuted under the Smith Act, pictured with their supporters in 1949.

The SWP faced a choice between two possible courses of action. It could have pointed to the Stalinists’ betrayal in 1941 and said: “You supported what was done to us; now you must bear the consequences.” Or, regardless of how it had itself been treated in the past, it could defend the Communist Party against state repression.

The SWP rightly chose the latter course.

Farrell Dobbs, the party’s presidential candidate in 1948 and one of the defendants in the Minneapolis trial, wrote to the Central Committee of the Communist Party on 28 July 1948 on behalf of the SWP Political Committee. The letter described the Smith Act as a weapon directed against the political and trade union movements of the working class as a whole and proposed the formation of a united working-class front against the prosecution. Addressing the Stalinists, who had refused to defend the SWP seven years earlier, the party stated unequivocally: “Now that you are under attack, we, the first victims of the Smith Act, offer you our aid.”

The SWP stressed that the profound political differences between the two parties should not be allowed to stand in the way of a united defence. The Communist Party did not respond to this appeal. Moreover, even while its own leaders were being prosecuted by the state, it continued to support the anti-communist witch-hunt against James Kutcher, an SWP member who had lost both legs in the war. Despite this, the SWP fought against the prosecution of the CP leaders, the McCarthyite investigations and, later, the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Militant, the SWP’s newspaper, continued its campaign to mobilise the labour movement to save the Rosenbergs into the final week, denouncing their impending execution as “legal murder”; following their deaths, it condemned the murder of the Rosenbergs.

Political defence is not political conciliation

The SWP’s position certainly did not mean forgetting the crimes of the Stalinists or accommodating itself to their politics. Cannon’s approach drew a sharp distinction between two principles: waging an uncompromising political struggle against the influence of the Stalinist bureaucracy within the working class, and defending Stalinist organisations against attacks by the capitalist state.

Cannon and Dobbs

Cannon regarded the Stalinist parties as organisations rooted in the workers’ movement but headed by treacherous leaderships. The problem of Stalinism could not, therefore, be handed over to the FBI, prosecutors or the bourgeois courts. Only the working class itself could overcome the influence of Stalinism within the workers’ movement, through a political struggle waged on the basis of a revolutionary programme. An attack by the capitalist state on the Stalinists did not “rid” the workers’ movement of Stalinism; on the contrary, it strengthened the apparatus of repression that would be used against all workers’ organisations.

The SWP’s defence of the Communist Party was therefore neither a gesture of tolerance nor a display of magnanimity. It was a principled class position grounded in the political independence of the working class. The Trotskyists waged their struggle against the Stalinists not in alliance with the bourgeois state, but as part of the struggle against it. This was the fundamental truth that the CP leadership either failed-or refused- to grasp in 1941: the law and the courts used against the Trotskyists would inevitably be turned against the Stalinists and the rest of the workers’ movement once the political conditions permitted.

The contrast could not have been sharper. The Stalinists applauded the imprisonment of the Trotskyists; the Trotskyists, by contrast, rushed to the Stalinists’ defence when the same state sought to imprison them. The former was the response of a bureaucratic apparatus seeking to eliminate a political rival within the workers’ movement through state repression. The latter, despite all their political differences, was a revolutionary socialist response that upheld the shared democratic rights of the working class against the bourgeois state.

The lesson this historical episode holds for us today is clear: the repressive apparatus of the state cannot be regarded as a neutral instrument for weeding out the “wrong” tendencies within the workers’ movement. A weapon whose use against our political opponent we pass over in silence today will be turned against us tomorrow. Political disputes within the working class must be fought out not in police stations and courtrooms, but through open and principled political struggle.

[*] David North, The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International, Detroit: Labor Publications, 1988. The information and assessments presented in this article are drawn principally from two successive chapters of North’s book, entitled “The SWP and American Stalinism” and “Revolutionary Defeatism in World War II”. A Turkish translation of the book was published in 2018: David North, Savunduğumuz Miras: Dördüncü Enternasyonal’in Tarihine Katkı, trans. Halil Çelik, Istanbul: Mehring Yayıncılık, 2018. As I have not read this translation, I cannot offer any assessment of its quality. This needs to be stated explicitly because, unfortunately, serious problems are all too common in Turkish translations of Marxist works, particularly those belonging to the Trotskyist literature. It would, however, be unfair to the translator and the publisher to include a translation I have not read within the scope of this general problem. It may well be -and I hope it is- an excellent translation.