Tag: Leon Trotsky

More on George Novack, Trotskyist philosopher, from a visitor

Almost seven years ago, I concluded “When George Novack was an ‘entranced disciple’ of Whitehead” with “If you [visitors to this site] can shed any light on Novack’s life and times, please do so in the combox. Thanks.”

Well, yesterday, Michael Zimmerman, a diligent student of Novack’s writings, took the time to correct misapprehensions I was laboring under. He granted permission to publish our brief correspondence, all dated today, which I include below in full with gratitude.

A general, “metaphilosophical” answer to Novack and other philosophers may be inferred from my Philosophy after Christ. — A.G.F.

Here is Mr. Zimmerman’s first message:

I recently came across your blog post dated November 6th, 2019 titled “When George Novack was an ‘entranced disciple’ of Whitehead.” It caught the attention of my search engine while I was doing some research on the life of Novack. What immediately stood out is that you have mistakenly labeled a picture of novelist James T. Farrell as being that of George Novack.  Farrell’s picture carries the caption “George Novack, 1905-1992. Circa early 1930s.”[I have corrected this. — A.G.F.]

You ended that entry with an open request for comments from anyone who can shed light on Novack’s life and times. As a student of his, I thought I would offer some insights into what his work has to say on the positions you have attributed to Novack.

Firstly, Marxism-Leninism became a term of self-reference for the petty-bourgeois Stalinist caste and its loyalists in the nationalist communist parties in order to conflate their counterrevolutionary movement with the workers and peasants revolution of the early 20th century. To my knowledge, Novack never called himself a Marxist-Leninist, but firmly aligned himself with the Trotskyist movement, having personally worked with Leon Trotsky politically and philosophically, and having given his life’s work in service of a Trotskyist party. This is an important clarification because search engines and large language models (such as ChatGPT and Gemini) are using your website to justify claims about Novack as a Marxist-Leninist, a title which cannot apply to Novack given the trajectory of his political life. Continue reading “More on George Novack, Trotskyist philosopher, from a visitor”

Trotskyist power didn’t “degenerate” into slavery, but began with it. The irony of C. L. R. James’s support for compulsory labor.

(The series continues)

The essence of War Communism [1918-1921] was that we actually took from the peasant all his surpluses, and sometimes not only the surpluses, but part of the grain the peasant needed for food. We took this in order to meet the requirements of the army and to sustain the worker.—Vladimir Lenin [1]

Kronstadt sailors, 1921, posing with a flag vowing “Death to the bourgeoisie.”

Every communist intellectual, no matter how humanistically educated, has an ethical Achilles’ Heel. C. L. R. James was no exception. For years, I’ve been fascinated by his story and ideas. (Feel free to search his name on this site.) Every so often, however, I splash my face with cold water to remind myself of the horrors that James shut out of view (when he didn’t rationalize them outright). If I’ve created the impression that I’m starry-eyed over an intellectual’s literary achievement at the expense of flesh-and-blood victims of the policies he owned, then I must counter that impression.

In the mid-1930s, James was an apologist for Lenin and Trotsky’s “War Communism,”[2] i.e., bloody totalitarian dictatorship, including their suppression of the revolutionary sailors at the Kronstadt naval base in March 1921.[3]  That is, the Pan Africanist James sided with a social system as evil as the one that had enslaved Robert Alexander James, his grandfather, in the New World.

After creating the Red Army, Trotsky introduced into factories and fields an army’s characteristic regimentation of labor, thereby helping to install new slave masters to replace Russian serfdom’s. Some socialists noticed. As Paul Avrich, cited in the first note above, wrote:

Menshevik leaders compared the new regimentation to Egyptian slavery, when the Pharaohs used forced labor to build the pyramids. Compulsion, they insisted, would achieve no more success in industry than in agriculture.[4] Continue reading “Trotskyist power didn’t “degenerate” into slavery, but began with it. The irony of C. L. R. James’s support for compulsory labor.”