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

[Paul Flewers]

David P 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. >

It's a bit of a canard that neo-conism is essentially the product of
superannuated old Trots. Certainly, there were a few former members of Max
Shachtman's Workers Party who played a key role in establishing the
neo-cons' forefathers in the late 1940s and early 1950s; this is well
covered in Alan Wald's The New York Intellectuals. The Shachtmanites from
their very beginning in 1940 sloughed off rightward-moving individuals and
splinters, starting with James Burnham. 

The current leading neo-cons seem to have a different background, although
they have been joined by some renegades from the left, such as Christopher
Hitchens.

Over the decades, renegades from the left have come from all its factions;
the official communist movement (pro-Moscow): Jacques Doriot in France,
Frank Chapple in the UK, various CPUSA members during the Cold War; Maoism:
particularly in France (where a transition to the right seems almost
obligatory), and in China (a full-scale transition of the party to
pro-capitalism); old-style syndicalism: Mussolini; anarchism: Hervé, social
democracy: de Man, Mosley, Déat; dissident communists: Lovestone and many of
his colleagues... Trotskyism has no monopoly over renegacy. As for Spain,
the former POUM leader Gorkin became a Cold War social democrat.

Something I was discussing with some friends just yesterday evening was the
way that the intellectual level of such people often really declines as they
move to the right. Burnham is an illustrative example; his writings in the
SWP's New International were of some merit; his Managerial Revolution and
The Machiavellians are worth a read; the postwar material of his that I've
read is thin and clichéd. Hitchens' writings today are a poor shadow of what
they were 20 years back.

Paul F