[Marxism] THE AGE (Melbourne, Australia): Nuclear no nightmare, says unionism's new face

[Louis Proyect]

David Picón Álvarez wrote:
> Well, I've read (don't know how true it is) that the intellectual core of 
> neoconservatism is mostly constituted by ex-trotskyists. For whatever 
> conjunctural reason (probably Franco's dictatorship didn't help) trotskyism 
> never had much pull in Spain, so I think to this day I haven't yet met any 
> in the flesh.

Is there a connection between Leon Trotsky and Paul Wolfowitz?

posted to www.marxmail.org on June 10, 2003

(Jeet Heer is a Canadian journalist, who linked Trotsky to Paul 
Wolfowitz in a National Post article recently. These are comments on 
selected paragraphs from his piece that can be read in its entirety at: 
http://www.nationalpost.com/search/site/story.asp?id=EC4AD553-8A1D-4324-8D37-A99B2DFF9F85)

JEET HEER: As evidence of the continuing intellectual influence of 
Trotsky, consider the curious fact that some of the books about the 
Middle East crisis that are causing the greatest stir were written by 
thinkers deeply shaped by the tradition of the Fourth International.

In seeking advice about Iraqi society, members of the Bush 
administration (notably Paul D. Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of 
Defence, and Dick Cheney, the Vice-President) frequently consulted Kanan 
Makiya, an Iraqi-American intellectual whose book The Republic of Fear 
is considered to be the definitive analysis of Saddam Hussein's 
tyrannical rule.

As the journalist Christopher Hitchens notes, Makiya is "known to 
veterans of the Trotskyist movement as a one-time leading Arab member of 
the Fourth International." When speaking about Trotskyism, Hitchens has 
a voice of authority. Like Makiya, Hitchens is a former Trotskyist who 
is influential in Washington circles as an advocate for a militantly 
interventionist policy in the Middle East. Despite his leftism, Hitchens 
has been invited into the White House as an ad hoc consultant.

COMMENT: If Makiya's "Republic of Fear" has anything to do with 
Trotskyism, except the fact that the author spent some time in the 
movement as a youth, then one presumes that Saul Bellow's racist screed 
"Mr. Sammler's Planet" must also be linked with Leon Trotsky as well, 
since Bellow also spent a brief time in the Trotskyist movement. For 
that matter, one might link orthodox Judaism with Trotskyism since Isaac 
Deutscher and I were both bar mitzvahed and ate kosher through adolescence.

Other than the fact that Kanan Makiya spent five minutes or so in the 
Fourth International, there is absolutely nothing to link him to the 
intellectual and political traditions represented by Leon Trotsky. 
Consider the interview he gave to an Argentine journalist on September 
23, 1938 in which he defended a "fascist" Brazil against a "democratic" 
Great Britain?

In order to understand correctly the nature of the coming events we must 
first of all reject ... the false ... theory that the coming war will be 
a war between fascism and "democracy." ... I will take the most simple 
and obvious example. In Brazil there now reigns a semifascist regime 
that every revolutionary can only view with hatred. Let us assume, 
however, that on the morrow England enters into a military conflict with 
Brazil. I ask you on whose side of that conflict will the working class 
be? I will answer for myself personally -- in this case I will be on the 
side of "fascist" Brazil against "democratic" Great Britain. Why? 
Because in the conflict between them it will not be a question of 
democracy or fascism. If England should be victorious, she will put 
another fascist in Rio de Janeiro and will place double chains in 
Brazil. If Brazil on the contrary should be victorious, it will give a 
mighty impulse to national and democratic consciousness of the country 
and will lead to the overthrow of the Vargas dictatorship.

Or the letter wrote to an English comrade on April 22, 1936 which not 
only defended feudal Ethiopia against capitalist Italy, but was full of 
praise for the Negus, ie. Haile Selassie, who made Saddam Hussein look 
like Martin Luther King Jr. by comparison, and contained the remarkable 
formulation that "A dictator can also play a very progressive role in 
history".

Indeed, the Trotsky of history has much more in common with the reviled 
Ramsey Clark and WWP than he does with the Cruise Missile "leftists" 
Heer falsely linked him with.

JEET HEER: Other supporters of the Iraq war also have a Trotsky-tinged 
past. On the left, the historian Paul Berman, author of a new book 
called Terror and Liberalism, has been a resonant voice among those who 
want a more muscular struggle against Islamic fundamentalism. Berman 
counts the Trotskyist C.L.R. James as a major influence. Among 
neo-conservatives, Berman's counterpart is Stephen Schwartz, a historian 
whose new book, The Two Faces of Islam, is a key text among those who 
want the United States to sever its ties with Saudi Arabia. Schwartz 
spent his formative years in a Spanish Trotskyist group.

COMMENT: Just because Paul Berman claims that CLR James was an 
influence, there is no reason to take him at his word. By the same 
token, George W. Bush claims that Jesus Christ influences his policies, 
when any sensible person understands that the White House owes much more 
to Joseph Goebbels. Berman is a rigid anti-Communist. During the 1980s 
he used his Village Voice bully pulpit to castigate the Sandinista 
government in terms similar to Oliver North. CLR James was a 
revolutionary; Paul Berman was and is a liberal no matter who he 
mistakenly thinks "influenced" him. In fact, his latest book simply puts 
forward his liberal prejudices in unambiguous terms as the title 
suggests: "Terror and Liberalism" (he is for liberalism).

JEET HEER: To this day, Schwartz speaks of Trotsky affectionately as 
"the old man" and "L.D." (initials from Trotsky's birth name, Lev 
Davidovich Bronstein). "To a great extent, I still consider myself to be 
[one of the] disciples of L.D," he admits, and he observes that in 
certain Washington circles, the ghost of Trotsky still hovers around. At 
a party in February celebrating a new book about Iraq, Schwartz 
exchanged banter with Wolfowitz about Trotsky, the Moscow Trials and Max 
Shachtman.

"I've talked to Wolfowitz about all of this," Schwartz notes. "We had 
this discussion about Shachtman. He knows all that stuff, but was never 
part of it. He's definitely aware." The yoking together of Paul 
Wolfowitz and Leon Trotsky sounds odd, but a long and tortuous history 
explains the link between the Bolshevik left and the Republican right.

COMMENT: I would not take anything that Schwartz says seriously. There 
is not a single political or religious sect that he has not dipped his 
big toe in, from Trotskyism, anarchism, and "libertarian socialism" on 
the left, to Buckleyite conservatism on the right. He is now a devout 
Sufi Muslim, a faith that he discovered in the Balkans while writing 
pleas on behalf of imperialist intervention. The old Jewish saying would 
apply to Schwartz: "A chazer bleibt a chazer." (A pig remains a pig.)

JEET HEER: To understand how some Trotskyists ended up as advocates of 
U.S. expansionism, it is important to know something about Max 
Shachtman, Trotsky's controversial American disciple. Shachtman's career 
provides the definitive template of the trajectory that carries people 
from the Left Opposition to support for the Pentagon.

COMMENT: The rest of Heer's article spells out the connections between 
people like Paul Berman and Max Shachtman, which of course has more than 
a grain of truth. But this has less to do with Shachtman's connections 
to Trotsky than his *break* with Trotsky. In a very real sense, 
Shachtman is the spiritual and ideological father not only to those who 
spent 30 seconds in the Trotskyist movement, but to Michael Berubé, Todd 
Gitlin, Eric Alterman, Leo Casey, Stanley Aronowitz, and dozens of other 
1960s and 70s radicals and left-liberals who have learned to worship the 
American flag since 9/11. But then again, the blame might not be put 
totally on Shachtman's shoulders. It would probably make sense to 
connect the Cruise Missile left to its true progenitors, namely the 
trade union bureaucrats, intelligentsia and parliamentarians of the 
Second International who backed their own bourgeoisie in WWI. Of course, 
Lenin and Trotsky broke with these traitors back in 1914 and Trotsky 
himself never betrayed his own principles until his death. In his fight 
with Max Shachtman and James Burnham over how to characterize the USSR 
after the Stalin-Hitler pact, Trotsky was faced with the same kind of 
liberal prejudices and inability to think in class terms that was on 
display when a large swath of the left, including some "Marxists" 
cheered on NATO's war against the Serbs. His words seem as timely as ever:

"It is necessary to call things by their right names. Now that the 
positions of both factions in the struggle have become determined with 
complete clearness, it must be said that the minority of the National 
Committee is leading a typical petty-bourgeois tendency. Like any 
petty-bourgeois group inside the socialist movement, the present 
opposition is characterized by the following features: a disdainful 
attitude toward theory and an inclination toward eclecticism; disrespect 
for the tradition of their own organization; anxiety for personal 
"independence" at the expense of anxiety for objective truth; 
nervousness instead of consistency; readiness to jump from one position 
to another…"