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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. IV No. 25, 22 June 1940, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
When the Norman Thomas and Lovestone groups voted for the American Labor Party bureaucrats’ pro-Ally resolution on October 4, 1939, but insisted they were voting for it merely as an anti-Stalinist resolution, we wrote:
“As they yielded previously to the pressure of the Stalinist regime and its ‘democratic’ allies, now they yield to the pressure of the democratic imperialists. Can one imagine, for a moment, that these people will stand up under the pressure of the warmongers when the war comes here?” (Appeal, Nov. 3, 1939).
Unfortunately our prediction is already coming true, even before America’s entry into the war.
The process of the Lovestoneites in moving toward an open pro-Ally position was undignifiedly hastened when, without advance preparation in their press, their leading trade union official, Charles S. Zimmerman of Dressmakers Local 22, voted 100% with the Dubinsky pro-war line at the convention of the International Ladies Garment Workers, it is true that not all the Lovestoneites followed Zimmerman at the convention. It is likewise true, however, that in every conflict between Zimmerman and other Lovestoneites, it ends up with Zimmerman having his way. For he is the “mass base” of the Lovestoneites, and Jay Lovestone has never in his motley career let principles stand in the way of preserving the connections of his group with the Local 22 payroll.
In the May 25 issue of Lovestone’s Workers Age appeared a pro-Ally article which, the editors announced, they would answer the following week. They would answer it to refute it, they indicated. The next issue, however, announced: “E.B.’s questions on the war, published in the last issue of this paper, will be discussed in full very soon. Technical reasons made it impossible to deal with these questions in the present issue, as we had promised.” The next issue after that was silent altogether. Then, in the June 15 issue, which appeared after Zimmerman’s performance at the ILGWU convention, there is an announcement of a series of articles to appear in the next issue on The War and Socialist Policy. “They will bring forward certain new approaches to socialist policy on the war,” the announcement says. As usual with a dirty job, the author of the articles will be Will Herberg, editor of Workers Age. The “new approaches,” we can safely predict, will be as old as Social Democracy’s betrayal of socialism in 1914.
The direction the Lovestoneites are moving was cautiously indicated by Jay Lovestone’s Some Further Reflections (Workers Age, June 1 and 8). Buried in the body of the article appeared this:
“For Hitler and for the world as a whole, this war will spell for some time either total prestige or total ruin of fascism. Should he win, fascism would win tremendously. Should he lose, there are many reasons to believe that fascism will lose all, not only, in Germany and Italy, but in all countries. This is true despite the headway made by totalitarianism even in the most democratic countries.”
To understand the full implications Of this line, one must refer to the numerous articles recently appearing in the Workers Age favoring a “re-evaluation” of Marxism. The chief exponent of this revisionism is Lewis Corey, a member of the Lovestone group. The revision involves abandoning of the Marxist theory of the state. What follows? If the victory of fascism is worse than the victory of the “democracies,” as Lovestone indicates, and if the road to socialism is through the present state “growing into” a socialist order by “democratic” – i.e., non-revolutionary – processes, then there is no reason in the world for not supporting the “democracies” in the War.
For years the Lovestoneites, like everybody who still had any vestiges of Marxism left, explained that fascism is an economic phenomenon: the form taken by capitalist domination in this epoch of the decline of capitalism. The Workers Age explained that the totalitarian trend within the “democracies” would grow whether the “democracies” won or lost the next war, and that the only way to prevent this is proletarian revolution. All this elementary Marxism is now being thrown overboard by the Lovestoneites, under the pressure of American imperialism, and particularly under the pressure of the agents of American imperialism in the labor movement.
This final mutation of the Lovestoneites is no surprise, we have already said. In April James P. Cannon, summing up the history of such groups as a warning to the petty-bourgeois opposition in our party, gave their history in a few words:
“In the terminology of the Marxist movement, unprincipled cliques or groups which begin a struggle without a definite program have been characterized as political bandits. A classic example of such a group, from its beginning to its miserable end in the backwaters of American radicalism, is the group known as ‘Lovestoneites.’
“They were wild-eyed radicals and ultra-leftists when Zinoviev was at the head of the Comintern. With the downfall of Zinoviev they became ardent Bukharinites as quickly and calmly as one changes his shirt. Due to an error in calculation, or a delay in information, they were behindhand in making the switch from Bukharin to Stalin and the frenzied leftism of the Third Period. To be sure, they tried to make up for their oversight by proposing the expulsion, of Bukharin at the party convention they controlled in 1929. But this last demonstration of political flexibility in the service of rigid organizational aims came too late. Their tardiness cost them their heads.
“Their politics were always determined for them by external pressure. At the time of their membership in the Communist Party it was the pressure of Moscow. With their formal expulsion from the Comintern a still weightier pressure began to bear down upon them and they gradually adapted themselves to it. Today this miserable and isolated clique, petty-bourgeois to the core, is tossed about by bourgeois democratic public opinion like a feather in the breeze.”
The storm of war is blowing and the Lovestoneites are swept along with it like the cynical cowards that they are.
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