It is important to keep in mind the climate of rapidly-evolving world crisis in which the Johnson-Forest tendency was developing and attempting to break new ground. The majority in the Workers Party, around Max Shachtman and James Burnham, used a version of Bruno Rizzi’s theory of “bureaucratic collectivism,” a new managerial mode of production, to characterize the class nature of the U.S.S.R., rather than the state capitalist analysis developed by James, Dunayevskaya and Lee. But the minority’s discontent with the Workers Party majority was no mere semantic dispute and went well beyond the “Russian question.”
In spite of the Shachtmanites’ break with Trotsky, they retained the kind of an “a-theoretical pragmatism” which Trotsky had discerned in them in his last book In Defense of Marxism (1940).1 The Johnson-Forest tendency was heading in another direction, around a radically innovative recovery of the Hegelian backdrop to Marx which would influence James’s and Dunayevskaya’s later contributions from then on.
In 1943, the Workers Party participated in the series of wildcat strikes that shook the American auto industry at the same time that the United Mine Workers under John L. Lewis were waging a long illegal strike in the Appalachian coal fields. These strikes were major challenges to the wartime “no strike pledge.”2 The wartime wildcats and the massive postwar strike wave of 1945–1946 spurred them to look for a deeper conceptualization of working-class self-activity in Marxian theory. Dunayevskaya’s knowledge of Russian gave her access to Lenin’s 1914 Philosophical Notebooks (almost unknown at the time in the English-speaking world) and Lee’s knowledge of German opened the way to Hegel’s Logic and to the then also almost-unknown Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.3 The wartime and postwar insurgency of American workers had pushed Johnson-Forest to question the limits of Workers Party orthodoxy. No revolutionary current in the world, in those years, took as seriously as Johnson-Forest the idea that “philosophy must become proletarian.” The self-activity of the wildcatting workers led James, Dunayevskaya and Lee to the philosophical expression of self-activity in Hegel’s thought.
Their discontent with the Shachtmanite majority led Johnson-Forest in 1947 to rejoin the SWP. They remained there until 1950, exiting with State Capitalism and World Revolution, a book co-authored by James and Dunayevskaya. In the three years Johnson-Forest remained in the SWP, James also participated in party discussions on the American “Negro question” (as it was then called), arguing for support for separate struggles of blacks as having the potential to ignite the entire US political situation, as they in fact did in the 1950s and 1960s.
Johnson-Forest were animated again by the remarkable strikes in the Appalachian coalfields of 1949–1951, the first wildcats against automation. Dunayevskaya (then living in Pittsburgh) organized a study group of striking miners around basic texts of Marx and the new Hegelian insights about self-activity. It was also during the coalfield strikes that the tensions first surfaced between Dunayevskaya and James that resulted in their split in 1955.
James had already used an extended stay in Nevada in 1948 to write Notes on Dialectics (only published in 1980. In this work, James got onto paper what he had taken from the wartime and postwar strikes as well as the recovery of Hegel they inspired. The main historical thread is a study of the role of the petty bourgeoisie from the English Revolution of the 1640s to the French Revolution (1789–1794) to the triumph of Stalinism. 4
Once out of the SWP, Johnson-Forest founded its own organization—Correspondence. But the tensions that had surfaced in the 1949–1951 coalfield wildcats led to a split in 1955. Through his theoretical and political work of the late 1940s, James had come to the conclusion that the revolutionary party was no longer needed (as it had been before 1917) because its truths had been absorbed in the masses. In 1956, he would see the Hungarian Revolution as confirmation of this). He was not sure what would replace it. Dunayevskaya had agreed that the Leninist vanguard party was outdated, but felt, in contrast to James, the need for some kind of revolutionary organization. In 1953, James was deported from the United States to Britain, and the polemic continued. The split was consummated in 1955, when Dunayevskaya and her faction founded the group News and Letters. 5
1955 was also the year of the first big postwar UAW wildcat, a watershed event in the American working-class movement touching off a series of wildcat strikes which only grew in intensity until 1973. Similar developments in France, such as the Nantes aerospace wildcat of the same year, were theorized by the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie, which had also broken with Trotskyism in the late 1940s, and which was animated by such figures as Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort and Daniel Mothe. (“S ou B,” as it was popularly known, had been publishing material on the new forms of struggle in the U.S, from its earliest issues). Contacts between Johnson-Forest and Socialisme ou Barbarie date from the late 1940s.
The 1945–1946 period in the United States witnessed the last major strike wave called by the official CIO leadership, and the last one in which the leadership still felt capable of controlling the ranks. In the turmoil of the postwar “return to normalcy,” with 20 million discharged military personnel and armaments workers about to rejoin the civilian work force in a situation widely anticipated as a probable return to 1930s depression conditions, the strikes were an attempt to take back terrain lost during the unions’ enforcement of the wartime no-strike pledge. From that point onward, the famous “postwar settlement” by the UAW evolved in which wage and benefits increases offered by management, and supported by the union, were exchanged for total management hegemony over shop floor conditions in the plants. The 1955 UAW wildcat, in answer to another such contract touted by Reuther, was the American auto worker’s response to this arrangement. It was to the great credit of James and Lee to sense the importance of this development in its proper terms and to theorize it in Facing Reality, by bringing it into relationship with similar developments in Britain and in France.
When working-class revolution failed to materialize in the immediate postwar period, a deep demoralization had overtaken most of the small revolutionary milieu in Europe and the United States The onset of the Cold War took a further toll, and a third world war seemed likely. Instead of Trotsky’s prophecy of revolution, Stalinism had extended itself to Eastern Europe, China and Korea. Among militants who did not simply abandon working-class politics, official Trotskyists grappled with the problem of how to relate to these new “workers’ states” created not by revolution but by the Red Army, or by peasant armies. One international Trotskyist current, initiated by Michel Pablo predicted centuries of Stalinist hegemony, and argued that Trotskyists would have to survive these centuries by clandestinely infiltrating the large Stalinist parties.) Pablo’s theory had no sooner been articulated when it was refuted by the East Berlin worker uprising of 1953, but that revolt was quickly crushed. In this climate, Johnson-Forest, and (after the 1955 split) the separate Facing Reality and News and Letters groups, had the advantage, based on their insights into the wartime and postwar wildcats, of seeing a new historical moment open up to which both Stalinists and orthodox Trotskyists were blind—the moment of autonomous working-class self-activity outside and against political parties and unions that would continue for nearly two decades.
These insights had their limits, as the following text will argue, but they seemed of intoxicating clarity when the Hungarian workers, with no vanguard party in sight, established a Republic of Workers’ Councils in the fall of 1956. 1956, of course, was also the year of Khrushchev’s speech to the 20th Party Congress, of Polish worker ferment in Poznan, and of the humiliation of Britain and France in the Suez crisis in the Middle East. The conjugation of these three events were a thaw announcing an upward curve of struggle into the mid-1970s. It was this insight, with its strengths and weaknesses, which made Facing Reality a classic.
By the time he co-authored Facing Reality with Lee and Castoriadis, James had concluded that the task of revolutionaries was, in contrast to Lenin’s time, to “recognize and record” the advance of the “new society” within the old. His view was at antipodes from the formulations of the early Lenin in What Is To Be Done, according to which revolutionary intellectuals would bring class consciousness to workers, the latter being incapable of going beyond trade-union consciousness without such an intervention. (Lenin repudiated this view after the 1905 revolution in Russia.) James argued later that Lenin himself had “recognized and recorded” the Russian soviets of 1905, and that the task of revolutionaries in the present was similarly to recognize forms of struggle and organization, and to provide a press in which the tensions of the present could be argued out among different currents of workers.
What follows, then, is my sense of a “balance sheet,” written in 2002, of the successes and failures of the approach presented in Facing Reality.
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This is almost certainly not the point to establish precise definitions, except perhaps to say that precision itself matters more than it might appear.↩︎
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Martin Glaberman, War Time Strikes: The Struggle Against the No-Strike Pledge in the UAW During World War II. Detroit: 1980.↩︎
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The first English-language translation of the latter texts, which played an important role in the Marxist renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s, initially appeared in the press of the Johnson-Forest tendency in 1947.↩︎
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One of James’s main polemical targets in Notes on Dialectics is the Trotskyist interpretation of Stalinism as a force that “betrays” the working class. James shows Stalinism as part of a worldwide transformation in the direction of state capitalism:
“Whatever their social origin, whatever their subjective motives, the fact remains that stalinism finds this caste of labor leaders all over the world, in China, in Korea, in Spain, in Brazil, everywhere, intellectuals, labor leaders, workers who rise–the caste grows, changes composition, but it remains as an entity. It faces death, undergoes torture, finds energy, ingenuity, devotion, establishes a tradition, maintains it, develops it, commits the greatest crimes with a boldness and confidence that can only come from men who are certain of their historic mission.”
“As I think over Trotsky’s writings, I can see this sequence of cause and effect in an endless chain. This happened, then the other, then the Stalinist bureaucracy did this; then; and so he keeps up an endless series of explanations, fascinating, brilliant, full of insight and illumination, to crash into his catastrophic blunders at the end. We, on the other hand, who show that Stalinist cause could create the mighty worldwide effect because it elicited class forces hostile to the proletariat and inherent in capitalist society at this stage in its development, we restore to the proletarian struggle the historical struggle of the classes with social roots. We finish away with the demoralizing, in fact self-destroying, theory that everything would have been all right, but for the intervention of Stalinist corruption.”
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Peter Hudis, a current member of the International Marxist Humanist Organization, tells the story of the evolution of James, Dunayevskaya and Lee during these strikes in Historical Materialism, No. 11/4 (2003), pp. 275–288. In a letter, dated September 17, 1951, and quoted in Hudis, James characterized Dunayevskaya’s strategy for intervention in the strike as a “proposal to send leaders down there to edit and organize and generally to lead like SWP leaders.”↩︎