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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. 5 No. 3, 18 January 1941, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Lovestone group (“Independent Labor League of America”) has announced that it has dissolved, by decision of its recent national convention. In a Declaration announcing the end of the organization, it calls upon all radical groups to “join forces in making a new start towards a genuine American democratic socialism” – and to begin that new start by following the ILLA into limbo.
Presumably, with the death of the ILLA, its final Declaration is its last word on what the coming “genuine American democratic socialism” should be. But God help the mariner who tries to sail by their directions!
In a word, the Lovestone Declaration is a complete confession of bankruptcy, which blusteringly tries to cover up its nakedness by the whining lie: “Everybody else has failed too.”
Among the ideologies the expiring Lovestoneites list as having failed is that of Bolshevism. The implication is conveyed that they, the Lovestoneites, tried the road of Bolshevism, and it proved a false road. A lie made out of whole cloth.
The story of the Lovestone group is worth telling in some detail, for there is an important lesson to learn from it – although scarcely the one that the Lovestoneites offer. That story was summarized by Comrade James P. Cannon in his pamphlet, The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, published in April 1940. He wrote then:
“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.’ This group, which took its name from the characterless adventurer who has been, its leader, poisoned and corrupted the American Communist movement for many years by its unprincipled and unscrupulous factional struggles, which were carried on to serve personal aims and personal ambitions, or to satisfy personal grievances. The Lovestoneites were able and talented people, but they had no definite principles. They knew only that they wanted to control the party ‘regime’. As with Abern, this question always occupied first place in their calculations; the ‘political’ program of the moment was always adapted to their primary aim of ‘solving the organization question satisfactorily’, that is, in their favor.
“They were wild-eyed radicals and ultra-leftists when Zinoviev was at the head of the Comintern. With the downfall of Zinoviev and the violent right swing of the Comintern under Bukharin, 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 Lovestoneites never had any independent program of their own. They were never able to develop one in the years since their separation from the official Communist Party. Today their paper, the Workers Age, is hardly distinguishable from a journal of left liberalism. A horrible example of the end result of unprincipled ‘organizational’ politics.”
Since Comrade Cannon wrote this, the Lovestoneites, pushed still further by bourgeois democratic public opinion, became above all advocates of “all-out” aid to England.
The end of the Loyestoneites is the handwriting on the wall for their ilk. The Norman Thomas group, coming ever closer to a pro-British line (elsewhere in this issue we deal with their latest moves in this direction), is already little more than an appendage to Norman Thomas’ radio program. Even the traditional Social Democratic Federation appears to have little basis for an independent existence in the war situation; its frenzied cries for “all out” aid to Britain merely duplicate what Roosevelt does louder and more skillfully. And the group which most resembles the Lovestoneites in personal character and “political” methods, the Abern-Shachtman “Workers Party”, sees its future mirrored.
Abern-Shachtman united with Burnham “merely” on the question of “the party regime” – à la Lovestone. Just like Lovestone, however, Abern-Shachtman found themselves at the conclusion of this “bloc’’ the advocates of the politics of Burnham. Here is striking proof of the political law that groups and cliques which have no program of their own become the instruments of the program of others. Shachtman, who loudly protested that he was not advocating the anti-Soviet position of Burnham, has now published his own position which turns out to be ... the position of Burnham.
The Lovestoneites did not conceal their warm sympathy for Burnham-Shachtman. Here, they felt, were kindred spirits. They were right.
The war, Comrade Trotsky wrote shortly before his death, will destroy all such centrist organizations. The debris will be cast aside and the arena cleared for the titanic struggle between the only two real forces in modern society: the bourgeois ruling class and the proletariat led by the revolutionary Bolshevik party. The quicker Lovestone and his kind leave the arena, the better for the revolutionary movement. It is not accidental that the dissolution of the Lovesoneites coincides with the moment when our party reaches the highest point in morale and activity in our history.
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