Each of these men had a record of long-term commitment to the working class. Each, though, moved eventually to take up a position of categorical support for imperialism.

Plekhanov

Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov (1856-1918) was a committed revolutionary and an outstanding Marxist theoretician. As a youth he joined the Narodniks’ Land and Freedom Party, but in 1879 broke with it because of his opposition to individual terrorism. He went on to reject peasant socialism and became the key founder of the first Marxist organisation in Russia, the Emancipation of Labour group.

Later, in 1898, he helped establish the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and from 1900 agreed to be one of the five editors of Iskra, whose aim was to put the RSDLP onto solid foundations. Plekhanov joined with Lenin in attacking anti-Marxist trends: economists, legal Marxists and left nationalists.

When the RSDLP split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions in 1903, Plekhanov initially sided with Lenin. In effect they were joint leaders of the majority. However, putting party unity above everything, Plekhanov soon scurried off to join the Mensheviks.

In World War I, Plekhanov came out as a social-chauvinist, reasoning that, as Germany’s victory would be disastrous for the world’s proletariat, the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia was preferable to the central powers. Accordingly, he backed a German defeat by ‘his’ bourgeoisie.

On his return to Russia, Plekhanov supported the provisional government established after the 1917 February revolution. He thoroughly approved of the fact that this was politically a bourgeois government; breaking from his past, he declared that it was absolutely essential that Russia became fully capitalist - only then could it hope to embark on another revolution.

Little wonder, then, that Lenin wrote in the ‘April theses’: “Ex-Marxist Mr Plekhanov evidently does not care to recall Marxism ... these poor Russian social-chauvinists - socialists in word and chauvinists in deed.”¹

Following his dogmatic logic, Plekhanov condemned the October 1917 revolution and openly lined up with the worst enemies of the working class.

Hyndman

Henry Mayers Hyndman (1842-1921) founded Britain’s first socialist party, the Social Democratic Federation, in 1881. Although Eleanor Marx was a member, Engels was distinctly lukewarm.

Hyndman was a rich man and gave generously to the SDF. But he ran the organisation as if he owned it. He was, in a word, a labour dictator. In reality his politics were Marxist in name only. But they dominated. Hence, while the SDF propagandised widely for socialist ideas, including doing not too badly in council and parliamentary elections, there was also the distinct whiff of jingoism.

William Morris, Eleanor Marx, Edward Aveling and their allies broke with the SDF in December 1884 and formed the Socialist League, largely due to what they termed Hyndman’s absolutism, jingoism and political opportunism.

In 1900 Hyndman led the SDF into the Labour Representation Committee, the body tasked with setting up the Labour Party. But the SDF withdrew (a tactical blunder) when the LRC refused to agree to socialism as an objective. Later, he successfully expanded the SDF by winning over a layer from the left of the Independent Labour Party. That resulted in the formation of the British Socialist Party in 1911.

Like Plekhanov, Hyndman sided with his ‘own’ bourgeoisie as the ‘lesser evil’ in 1914. Though Britain was locked into an imperialist alliance with tsarist Russia, he ranted and raved against ‘Prussianism’. He claimed to be defending civilisation against the forces of militarism and barbarism.

Rightly, internationalists in the BSP rebelled. They issued their own paper, The Call, and sought to defeat Hyndman and the social-imperialists. At the Easter 1916 conference of the BSP the internationalists won a majority. The Callbecame the official paper of the BSP, which went on to play the leading role in the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920.

As soon as he was defeated, Hyndman split. He formed the appropriately named National Socialist Party. After the 1917 October revolution he supported imperialist intervention against the young Soviet republic - again like Plekhanov, his bitter opposition to the Bolsheviks originated in his belief that Russia, being economically backward, was ready for nothing but capitalism and the rule of the bourgeois class.

His last work, The evolution of revolution (1921), was notable for its diatribes against Lenin and his “furious fanatics”, who “endeavour to impose an altogether premature social system upon a vast empire”. This was “wholly harmful, foredoomed to failure and certain in the long run to help reaction”. An imperialist-backed counterrevolution was preferable for Hyndman.²

Shachtman

When still a teenager, Max Shachtman (1904-1972) joined the US Workers’ Council, This was a short-lived organisation critical of the Communist Party of the USA, but which subsequently merged with it.

Shachtman became the CP’s youth organiser in Chicago and edited Young Worker. Shachtman went on to become an alternate member of the central committee. However, he refused to go along with Stalin and his socialism in one country and instead looked to Leon Trotsky. Expelled from the CPUSA, together with fellow central committee members Martin Abern and James P Cannon, in October 1928, he organised around The Militant. Shachtman was its managing editor. Along with Abern and Cannon, he founded the Communist League of America. In 1930 he was the first American to visit Trotsky, who was at that time living in exile in Turkey. Shachtman attended the first European conference of the International Left Opposition in April 1930, going on to represent the CLA on the ILO’s international bureau.

With the growth of the Socialist Party, Cannon and Shachtman agreed with Trotsky that it was correct to commit themselves to entry work. However, in due course, Shachtman developed illusions about the SP leadership moving nearer to Marxism than the parties of either the Second of Third Internationals. Trotsky bitingly dismissed this as “an absolutely unmerited compliment”.³

Trotsky felt that his US followers tended toward opportunism and, in particular, “Shachtman revealed excessive adaptability toward the left wing of the petty bourgeois democrats: political mimicry - a very dangerous symptom in a revolutionary politician! ... Alas, sitting in the Bronx, it is much easier to display irreconcilability toward the Kremlin than toward the American petty bourgeoisie.”⁴

Shachtman’s assessment of the Socialist Party was fittingly answered in 1937, when the Trotskyists were expelled. Out in the cold they formed the Socialist Workers Party. However, with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact in 1941, deep divisions opened up. Shachtman took a minority position in opposing defence of the USSR. Against Trotsky’s dogged insistence that the Soviet Union remained some kind of workers’ state, Shachtman argued that it was ‘bureaucratic collectivist’, ruled by a reactionary ruling class capable of engaging in imperialist invasions.

In 1940, following a special convention, Shachtman led 40% of the membership out of the SWP to found the Workers’ Party. Amongst them were Hal Draper, CLR James and Martin Abern.

Initially Shachtman’s third camp was to be equidistant from Stalinism and capitalism. However, within a decade he was declaring that Stalinism was the greater enemy of the working class. To reflect this change the WP became the Independent Socialist League and then in 1958, after accepting ‘democratic socialism’, dissolved itself into the Socialist Party.

Finally sealing his divorce from any kind of proletarian politics, Shachtman supported the US war on Vietnam and its abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.

Notes

1. VI Lenin, ‘The tasks of the proletariat in the present revolution’:www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/04.htm
2. HM Hyndman The evolution of revolution:www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/hyndman/1921/evrev/chapter33.htm
3. Quoted by Trotsky in ‘From a scratch - to the danger of gangrene’, from his 1940 work, In defence of Marxism: www.marxistsfr.org/archive/trotsky/idom/dm/21-scratch1.htm
4. Ibid.