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From International Socialist Review, Vol.20 No.3, Summer 1959, p.66.
Transcription & mark-up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
A letter from Maxwell Armstrong of Toronto rated as the most gratifying response to our spring issue. The author has seen a lot of socialist publications. He was Vice-Chairman of the Workers party of Canada before it became the Labor Progressive party. He left it even before the Trotskyists were expelled in 1928, as he saw the party degenerate under the influence of Stalinism. He helped to form the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, but got fed up with its reformism. Today he belongs to the Socialist Educational League.
“I have been a convinced Marxian socialist,” he writes, “since 1912 when I graduated from the ranks of militant atheism. (I read the Truthseeker of New York.)
“Materialism gave me the key to the riddle: Why does religion still persist after what the eighteenth century Rationalists did to it? Marx made that clear.
“I have read nearly all the philosophers from Plato to Professor Joad and a considerable number of expositions of Marx. But I have never read a more splendid essay on the subject than the one in your last issue, Socialism and Humanism, by William F. Warde. Any intelligent fourteen-year-old school boy could grasp its main propositions in one reading.
“Socialist Humanism is the true heir and the culmination of all Humanism from the Ionian school down to the rebels against Stalinism.
“I may add that all the other articles were excellent, particularly, The United Nations, and How the Miners Won. I am passing the issue on and will do what I can to get subscriptions. Keep up the good work.”
In response to Theodore Edwards’ article, The United Nations, A. Binder of New York takes issue on several points:
“The article seems to me to represent squarely the confusion that comes from adherence to old dogmas.
“You state that Lenin and Stalin approached this question in opposite ways. This is quite true. But you have to take into account the changed international situation. It is ridiculous to repeat the old slogans at all times, in all places, under all circumstances.
“Stalin committed many crimes against socialism and even perverted many good deeds of his. This doesn’t mean that everything he did was wrong and that in principle his decision to join the League of Nations at the time of the paramount Hitler danger was one of his crimes ...
“You would be consistent (although wrong) if you applied the same attitude to the United Nations yourselves. But this is not the case. Instead of sticking to the old Leninist definition that the League of Nations No.2 (i.e., the United Nations) is a ‘thieves kitchen’ (which is to some extent true) and consequently advising any workers state to hold aloof from it, you say instead: ‘any workers state has to engage in diplomatic relations with capitalist powers. It has the right, therefore, to send its representatives to such organizations as the United Nations.’ This indicates that in principle you too are not against the participation of a workers state in the United Nations for diplomatic activities – which by no means are confined to propaganda only.
“You have anyhow some reservations about the attitude of the workers state even when it does participate in the United Nations; namely, ‘it does not have the right to participate in sowing illusions about it.’ Quite right. Unfortunately in another context you seem to sow even more illusions about the UN than the criticized Soviet bureaucracy.
“The leaders of the Soviet Union, even during the peak of the war-time ‘big alliance,’ understood the inherent danger of converting the United Nations into an instrument of other capitalist powers against the Soviet Union and therefore insisted (as other big powers) in a unanimous vote of the big powers in the Security Council. They acted, of course, not so much out of inherited and not always observed principles as out of the sense of self-preservation and realism. But here your sympathy seems to be on the side of the smaller states (exemplified by a quotation from Carlos Romulo of the Philippines!) against ‘this domination of the great powers’ and you even approvingly say that they were ‘correctly denouncing it as a violation of the principles of democracy and sovereign equality.’
“How can you square your ‘principled’ position against sowing illusions about the UN with upholding the illusions of the small states, which are in most cases only pawns of the big powers?!
“You are correct in repeating the old truth that peace is a class question. But it seems to me that it is too doctrinaire to proclaim that ‘as long as class society continues to exist, war is inevitable.’ Maybe in the last instance you will be right. But to exclude in our time of the ‘A’ and the ‘H’ bomb even the possibility of averting the world catastrophe of nuclear war is as irresponsible a position as your opposition (from the left) to ‘peaceful coexistence.’
“Maybe you do not sow illusions about the possibilities of avoiding war as long as capitalism exists but on the other hand you sow the most dangerous ‘disillusions’ (i.e., despair and apathy) against the world movement for peace, which encompasses hundreds of millions in all countries.
“You can insist that ‘no peace petitions will prevent war’ but the mass movement for peace is a very important factor in preventing the war and it does not make sense for left wingers to scorn it and stand aside, occupied by ‘pure,’ ‘revolutionary’ propaganda (which will even less prevent the war).
“Please take these remarks not as malicious criticism but as sincere advice from an old friend to revise your old dogma (in Trotsky’s language ‘rearm’) and adjust it to the new era full of dangers and prospects ...”
Do you agree or disagree with this point of view? Send your opinion in early.
G.B., a British Columbia reader, describes how a trip to Poland in 1955 led him to entertain grave doubts about the Communist party in Britain after he saw the startling contrast between the way the bureaucrats and workers lived. The Hungarian revolution sickened him still more. He dropped out of the Communist party but still went along with its theories about how to achieve peace through some kind of deal with Western capitalism.
“Many other things troubled me, such as the question of my own position in the socialist movement. How could I remain a militant worker and revolutionary socialist and yet be outside an organization of socialists? But who were the socialists?”
He and his wife considered the Labor Progressive party, but decided it wasn’t what they sought.
Trying to find the correct explanation for such things as the lack of democracy and the lack of equality in the Soviet Union, the couple read books by Isaac Deutscher. This led them to the works of Trotsky, where they found the answers they were seeking.
“The purpose of this letter is to show the importance of contact between socialists of all points of view, and of course the importance of literature in the campaign to win more doubting former members of the Communist party into the ranks of the revolutionary socialists.”
G.B. adds that “your excellent magazine deserves an ever widening circle of subscribers.”
Reading the winter issue, he “spent about six hours studying Arne Swabeck’s article on inflation, production and profits. Very good material and just what is needed in the present fight for the shorter work week, higher wages and against unemployment. Although the article is excellent and the subject covered very adequately for a person who has a reasonable understanding of Marxist economics, I think it is probably a bit beyond the ken of people such as me.”
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