Pedantic but interesting

Hal Draper was an American Trotskyist who left the Trotskyist movement in 1940 together with Max Shachtman. Draper became a leading member of the Shachtmanite Workers Party, later called the International Socialist League. The group was revolutionary socialist and Marxist but not narrowly Trotskyist, and claimed to represent a “Third Camp” equally opposed to fascism, Stalinism and the Western powers. Shachtman soon evolved further to the right and began to support the United States in the Cold War. Draper therefore broke with him and founded a competing group, the International Socialist Club, later the International Socialists. For some reason, Draper left the International Socialists soon afterwards, but he never broke with his “left-Shachtmanite” political convictions. The last decades of his life, Draper was an independent scholar specializing in lengthy tomes about Marx and Lenin. As an interesting aside, Hal Draper was the brother of historian Theodore Draper, most known for his works on the American Communist Party.

I admit that I'm somewhat ambivalent towards the Draperite corpus. Draper is extremely pedantic and “literalist” in his approach to Karl Marx, V I Lenin and other revolutionary socialist thinkers. Every time poor Lenin uses the same word in two different ways, Draper cries “contradiction” and proceeds accordingly. Draper (who was a librarian by trade) expects every word or turn-of-phrase to have just one meaning, like a symbol on a card in a library catalogue. It's also a strange inversion of the method used by political sects which treat the writings of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky as holy writ. It's as if Draper expects that Marxist writings should be “literal” and free of contradiction (like a King James Bible, perhaps?), and therefore cannot hide his disappointment at discovering that they are not! That being said, Draper now and then does say useful things. Personally, I don't share Hal Draper's revolutionary socialist convictions, but I nevertheless find his exegeses of the Marxist classics to be of some interest.

“War and Revolution: The Myth of Lenin's `Revolutionary Defeatism'” was originally published in 1988. It's based on a similar study published by Draper in 1953-54. I've been looking for this work for quite some time, but it has been long out of print. The Center for Socialist Studies should be commended for having reprinted it in a cheap paperback edition (although it could have needed a better proof reader). Everyone who studied the issue probably agrees with Draper that the exact meaning of Lenin's phrase “revolutionary defeatism” isn't entirely clear. The only thing that's obvious is that Lenin didn't support the war efforts of Czarist Russia, instead calling for the revolutionary overthrow of the autocracy. But what was the exact relationship between this and his call for “defeat” of Russia in a war? Did it mean support for Russia's enemies? In World War I, that would have been Germany. And whose “defeat” are we talking about: the government's or the country's? Is it defeat at the hands of a foreign power, or at the hands of the revolution? What does it mean to “wish” or “desire” defeat of Russia in a war? What does it mean to say that defeat is the “lesser evil” compared to a victory?

In his usual pedantic style, Draper reaches the conclusion that Lenin didn't have a clear line on any of these issues, that he put forward at least four different positions on “revolutionary defeatism” during World War I, and that Leo Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg had a more clear anti-war line, despite not using the catchphrases “defeat” or “defeatism”. I'm far from convinced that Draper has proved his point here. However, he makes several other observations which I believe are correct. During the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, Lenin's “revolutionary defeatism” really did mean support for the enemy, i.e. Japan. Lenin (perhaps wrongly) saw Japan as a progressive power pitted against rotten Czarism and therefore welcomed the victory of the Mikado over the Russian forces in the Far East. This is different from the meaning “revolutionary defeatism” acquired during World War I, when Lenin tried to internationalize the slogan to mean opposition to both sides in a war (i.e. both the Entente and the Central Powers, and more specifically both Russia and Germany). Draper also attempts to show, convincingly in my opinion, that Lenin *dropped* the slogan of “revolutionary defeatism” after the overthrow of Czarism in March 1917. Lenin still opposed the war, now led by the Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky, but he realized that the “defeat” slogan would be met with incomprehension or hostility by ordinary workers and soldiers, who were “honest defensists”. The anti-war program had to be put forward in a way that would appeal to these defensist workers, something Lenin tried to do by promising to defend Russia if the bourgeoisie would be overthrown by the revolutionary masses. This is similar to the approach taken by Trotsky during World War II with the “Proletarian Military Policy” and (more controversially) the approach taken by the Militant Tendency in Britain during the Falklands-Malvinas war in 1982. It's interesting to note that Lenin explicitly said in 1918 that the Bolsheviks weren't “defeatists” in 1917.

An intriguing point made by Draper is that the slogan of revolutionary defeatism, paradoxically, is based on a social-patriotic assumption (the “social-patriots” were the pro-war socialists): the only alternatives in a war are “defeat” or “victory”, either the military defeat of Czarist Russia (which logically means the victory of its foreign enemy) or else the military victory of Czarist Russia (which equally logically means the defeat of its foreign enemy). Since defeat of your own country or government is unacceptable to most people, the only realistic option becomes the social-patriotic one of supporting your country. Draper believes that many revolutionary socialists became social-patriots during World War II or the Cold War precisely because defeat of the Western powers at the hands of Hitler or Stalin was seen as intolerable. Draper's alternative is to create a “Third Camp” which continues the class struggle even under war conditions, but without using ultraleft adventurist slogans about “defeat”. The either-or proposition (either victory or defeat) must be transcended, something only the independent struggle of the workers against the war can accomplish. In this, Trotsky and Luxemburg are better guides than Lenin.

“War and Revolution” also has some problems. For some reason, Draper hotly denies that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels supported “progressive” nations (including some “imperialist” ones) against “reactionary” ditto. This was the position of Lenin in 1904-05, but supposedly not the position of his great teachers. This, however, is singularly unconvincing. Draper wants to cast Marx and Engels in the role of “third campists”, once again showing his dogmatic streak. With Lenin proven to be a contradictory muddle-head, at least old Karl and Friedrich must be unsullied fonts of wisdom! Another problem with Draper is that he never seriously considers whether the Bolsheviks actually *did* work for the enemy during World War I. Germany was certainly interested in the defeat of Russia and paid handsome sums of money to Russian revolutionaries of various stripes. While there probably isn't any direct evidence for German monetary transfers to the Bolsheviks, high-ranking officials in Kaiser's Wilhelm's administration did brag about financing Lenin's party in internal memoranda. A final problem with Draper's position overall is that he takes a “Third Camp” position on World War II, something I consider blatantly absurd. During that war, it was necessary to work for the complete victory of the Allies. It's difficult to escape the “social-patriotic” supposition that strikes in the American war industry would have aided the Nazis!

“War and Revolution” is a tedious read and probably too narrow for the general reader. It's not an introduction to the subject. You have to be familiar with the topic of revolutionary defeatism to really appreciate it. However, if the finer points of Marxist theory, Leninist strategy and left-Shachtmanite exegesis is your thing, I would argue that Hal Draper is a necessary read.