Max
Shachtman was born in 1904. A trade union activist he joined the American
Communist Party and contributed to the journals, The
Young Worker and the Labor Defender.
James
Cannon,
the first chairman of the American Communist
Party, attended the Sixth Congress of the Comintern
in 1928. While in the Soviet Union he was
given a document written by Leon Trotsky
on the rule of Joseph Stalin. Convinced
by what he read, when he returned to the United
States he criticized the Soviet government. As a result of his
actions, Cannon and his followers, including Shactman, were expelled
from the party.
Cannon
and Shactman now joined with other Trotskyists to form the Communist
League of America. The party also published the journal,
The Militant. In 1938 the party changed its name to the
Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
Shachtman
left the Socialist Workers Party in 1940 and established the Workers
Party (WP). In 1949 the organisation became known as the Independent
Socialist League (ISL). Under Shachtman's leadership the party rejected
the revolutionary path to socialism.
As
well as contributing to the The Militant,
Shactman also wrote for The New International,
Socialist Appeal and Labor
Action. Max Shachtman died in 1972.
(1)
Max Shachtman, Socialist Appeal (October 1936)
Unless we are the "gullible idiots" who Trotsky says would
have to people the world if the charges made against the sixteen men
just tried and shot in Moscow, were to be believed, we must conclude
that the very indictment and execution of Zinoviev, Kamenev and the
fourteen others constitute in actuality the most crushing indictment
yet made of the Stalin regime itself. The real accused in the trial
were not on the defendants' bench before the Military Tribunal. They
were and they remain the usurping masters of the Kremlin - concocters
of a hideous frame-up.
The official
indictment charges a widespread assassination conspiracy, carried
on these five years or more, directed against the head of the Communist
party and the government, organized with the direct connivance of
the Hitler regime, and aimed at the establishment of a Fascist dictatorship
in Russia. And who are included in these stupefying charges, either
as direct participants or, what would be no less reprehensible, as
persons with knowledge of the conspiracy who failed to disclose it?
Leon Trotsky,
organizer and leader, together with Lenin, of the October Revolution,
and founder of the Comintern.
Zinoviev:
35 years of his life in the Bolshevik party; Lenin's closest collaborator
in exile and nominated by him as first chairman of the Communist International;
chairman of the Petrograd Soviet for years; member of the Central
Committee and the Political Bureau of the C.P. for years.
Kamenev:
also 35 years spent in the Bolshevik party; chairman of the Political
Bureau in Lenin's absence; chairman of the Moscow Soviet; chairman
of the Council of Labor and Defense; Lenin's literary executor.
Smirnov:
head of the famous Fifth Army during the civil war; called the "Lenin
of Siberia;" a member of the Bolshevik party for decades.
Yevdokimov:
official party orator at Lenin's funeral; leader of the Leningrad
party organization for many years; member of the Central Committee
at the time Kirov died.
Ter-Vaganian:
theoretical leader of the Armenian communists; founder and first editor
of the party's review, "Under the Banner of Marxism."
Mrachkovsky:
defender of Ekaterinoslav from the interventionist Czechs and the
White troop during the civil war.
Bakayev:
old Bolshevik leader in Moscow; member of the Central Committee and
Central Control Commission during Lenin's time.
Sokolnikov:
Soviet ambassador to England; creator of the "chervonetz,"
the first stable Soviet currency.
Tomsky:
head of the Russian trade union center for years; old worker-Bolshevik;
member of the Central Committee and Political Bureau for years.
Rykov:
old Bolshevik leader; Lenin's successor as chairman of the Council
of People's Commissars.
Serebriakov:
Stalin's predecessor in the post of secretary of the C.P.
Bukharin:
for years one of the most prominent theoreticians of the Bolsheviks;
chairman of the Comintern after Zinoviev; editor of official government
organ, Isvestia.
Kotsubinsky:
one of the main founders of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.
General
Schmidt; head of one of the first Red Cavalry brigades in the Ukraine
and one of the country's liberators from the White forces.
Other heroes
of the Civil War, like General Putna, military attache till yesterday
of the Soviet Embassy in London; Gertik and Gaevsky; Shaposhnikov,
director of the Academy of the General Staff; Klian Kliavin.
Heads of
banking institutions; chiefs of industrial trusts; heads of educational
and scientific institutions; party secretaries from one end of the
land to the other; authors (Selivanovsky, Serebriakova, Katayev, Friedland,
Tarassov-Rodiondv); editors of party papers; high government officials
(Prof. Joseph Lieberberg, chairman of the Executive Committee of the
Jewish Autonomous Republic of Biro-Bijan); etc., etc.
Now to
charge, as has been done, all these men and women, plus hundreds and
perhaps thousands of others, with having engaged to one extent or
another, in an assassination plot, is equivalent, at the very outset
and on the face of the matter, to an involuntary admission by the
accusing bureaucracy.
1. That
its much-vaunted popularity and the universality of its support among
the population, is fantastically exaggerated.
2. That
it has created such a regime in the party and the country as a whole,
that the very creators of the Bolshevik party and revolution, its
most notable and valiant defenders in the crucial and decisive early
years, could find no normal way of expressing their dissatisfaction
or opposition to the ruling bureaucracy and found that the only way
of fighting the latter was the way chosen, for example, by the Nihilists
in their struggle against Czarist despotism, namely, conspiracy and
individual terrorism.
3. That
the "classless socialist society irrevocably" established
by Stalin is so inferior to Fascist barbarism on the political, economic
and cultural fields, that hundreds of men whose whole lives were prominently
devoted to the cause of the proletariat and its emancipation, decided
to discard everything achieved by 19 years of the Russian Revolution
in favor of a Nazi regime.
4. And,
not least of all, that the Russian Revolution was organized and led
by an unscrupulous and perfidious hand of swindlers, liars, scoundrels,
mad dogs and assassins. Or, more correctly, if these were not their
characteristic in 1917 and the years immediately thereafter, then
there was something about the gifted and beloved leadership of Stalinism
that reduced erstwhile revolutionists and men of probity and integrity
to the level of swindlers, liars, scoundrels, mad dogs and assassins.
These are the outstanding counts in the self-indictment of the bureaucracy.
To them must be added the charge of a clumsy and cynical frame-up.
Even a casual examination of the very carefully edited record of the
trial that has thus far been made public, so thoroughly reveals its
trumped-up, staged nature, as to deprive all the avidly made "confessions"
of so much as an ounce of validity.
(2)
Max Shachtman, speech at New York City's Webster Hall on 30th
March, 1950.
If the
cold horror of Stalinist despotism, that vast prison camp of peoples
and nations, represents the victory of socialism, then we are lost;
then the ideal of socialist freedom, justice, equality, and brotherhood
has proved to be an unattainable Utopia; then the National Association
of Manufacturers is right in saying that while capitalism is not perfect
and has a couple of defects here and there, socialism is a new slavery;
then we must be resigned to that appalling decay of modern civilization
that is eating away the substance of human achievement. But if it
can be shown that Stalinist Russia is not socialism, that it has nothing
in common with socialism, that it is only another and very ominous
lesson of what happens to society when the working class fails to
fight, and extend its fight, for socialism, or when its fight is arrested
or crushed; if it can be shown that Stalinist Russia is a new barbarism
which results precisely from our failure up to now to establish a
socialist society, to extend the Revolution of 1917 that took place
in Russia - then, despite the agony that grips the world today, there
is a hope and a future for the socialist emancipation of the race.
It is from that standpoint and no other that I will seek to show that
Stalinist Russia has nothing at all in common with socialism. The
best way to begin is by defining socialism.
Socialism
is based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means
of production and exchange, upon production for use as against production
for profit, upon the abolition of all classes, all class divisions,
class privilege, class rule, upon the production of such abundance
that the struggle for material needs is completely eliminated, so
that humanity, at last freed from economic exploitation, from oppression,
from any form of coercion by a state machine, can devote itself to
its fullest intellectual and cultural development. Much can perhaps
be added to this definition, but anything less you can call whatever
you wish, but it will not be socialism.
Now, if this definition
is correct - as it has been considered by every socialist from the
days of Marx to the days of Lenin - then there is not only not a trace
of socialism in Russia, but it is moving in a direction which is the
very opposite of socialism.
It is absolutely true that
by their revolution in 1917 the Russian working class, under the leadership
of the Bolsheviks, took the first great, bold, inspiring leap toward
a socialist society. And that alone, regardless of what happened subsequently,
justified it and made it a historic event that can never be eliminated
from the consciousness of society. But it is likewise true that the
working class of Russia was hurled back, it was crushed, and fettered
and imprisoned, and that every achievement of the revolution, without
exception, was destroyed by the victorious counter-revolution of the
Stalinist bureaucracy which now rules the Russian empire with totalitarian
absolutism.
Last
updated: 1st August, 2002
Available
from Amazon Books (order below)
