Two Steps Back
“No coarser insult, no baser defamation, can be thrown against the workers than the remark, ‘Theoretical controversies are for the intellectuals’ ”
“Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement the only choice is — either bourgeois or socialist ideology . . . This does not mean, of course, that the workers have no part in creating such an ideology. They take part, however, not as workers, but as socialist theoreticians, as Proudhons and Weitlings; in other words, they take part only when they are able, and to the extent that they are able, more or less, to acquire the knowledge of their age and develop that knowledge.”
Imagine the composition of the more than twelve hundred member audience, on a March evening in 1950, packed into New York’s Webster Hall to hear a public debate on the subject “Is Russia a socialist community?” The event, organized by the Eugene V. Debs Society, was chaired by the then thirty-three year old sociologist, C. Wright Mills, and pitted Earl Browder, deposed General Secretary of the Communist Party, still a staunch Stalinist, against the leader of the Trotskyist Workers’ Party, Max Shachtman. This event is a fascinating relic of American radical politics and an exemplary one, considering how little interest there is on the Left today in engaging in public debate. Present throughout the transcript are ideological concerns that would provide the backdrop for the sixties and seventies “New” Left. Individually, each presentation provides a rough sketch of a party line for the CP-USA and the Trotskyist Workers’ Party. But taken as a pair and in conversation they offer a composite image of how political practice of the day was rooted in questions regarding the nature of capitalism and the historical legacy of Marxism. Through contestation they probe what the Marxist Left at the time confronted with utmost difficulty. This inquiry into the theory and practice of leftist politics was a significant point of departure for Mills’s intellectual endeavors.
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