A letter from Monty Johnstone
Dear Comrade,
Your editorial remarks 'Against Monolithism' and your positive appreciation of the discussions in Marxism Today in your Spring 1977 issue are to be welcomed. In that spirit I was happy to see you publishing an article joining issue with my writings on Trotsky and the Popular Front.
Although of course I disagree with the arguments of the article by Patrick Camiller and will at a later stage reply to them, I consider that up to the beginning of the 'Conclusion' on page 30 it represents legitimate controversy. However I am appalled and disgusted at the so-called conclusion, which totally abandons the terrain of reasoned argument to engage in utterly unwarranted personal abuse and defamation, describing me as an 'amateur forger', 'scurrilous intellectual swindler' engaged in 'intellectual prostitution' — and a 'shady character' (page 30). It is on a par with the worst kind of SLL/WRP character assassination and is in marked contrast to the Blackburn-Ali reply to Geoff Roberts in Red Weekly. It is clearly incompatible with reasoned and civilised discussion of the important points at issue.
I am not a little puzzled that you should think fit in your editorial to 'explain' such language of calumniation — euphemistically described as a 'harsh tone' — 'by the provocative character of Monty Johnstone's anti-Trotskyism'. What the hell does that mean? Is 'provocation' deemed to be a generic attribute of any criticism of Trotsky in the same way as in the language of WRP paranoia any such criticism automatically considered 'provocative'? If so, perhaps one could be told how? Actually, I am quite unable to fathom what it is that makes my latest Cogito article 'provocative' whereas International welcomed the tone and approach of its predecessor — Trotsky — His Ideas — and described it, much to the fury of Workers Press, as 'a thorough and vigorous criticism of Trotsky's ideas, based on an analysis of their content and application' which 'meticulously refuted the slanders against Trotsky' current in the Stalin period. Patrick Camiller's attack was apparently triggered off by a five-word quotation in a footnote referring not to the Popular Front at all but to the Second World War. Quoting Trotsky's statement that, if 'the present war' did not promote revolution in any of the advanced countries, 'nothing else would remain except only to recognise that the socialistic programme, based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society, ended as a Utopia'. I argued that both this and his grossly over-optimistic predictions about the war's prospects for the Fourth International 'revealed his own impatience'. In a footnote to this I wrote that Ralph Fox, the British Communist writer killed early in the Spanish Civil War, 'aptly described this characteristic in Trotsky as the mark of "the petty bourgeois in a hurry"'. If I had appreciated the emotional chords that this would apparently touch, I should have refrained from adding the Fox quotation, whilst maintaining my point about impatience, which I think is amply borne out by the quotations from Trotsky to which it refers.
However, simple reading of the offending footnote quoted above shows that I did not say, as Patrick Camiller alleges, that 'Trotsky had all the features of what one Ralph Fox aptly described...as "the petty bourgeois in a hurry"'. There can be no justification at all for his statement that at this point I 'finally broke loose and felt free to heap on Trotsky one of those epithets coined in the high Stalin period', let alone for the wild and defamatory attacks on me that ensue, compared with which my use of the Fox quotation appears positively courteous.
So contrary is all this to your declared editorial intention 'to avoid vulgar polemics or slanders' and promote 'real debate' that I trust you will agree to publish a repudiation of the libellous remarks in the article's 'Conclusion', along with an apology, and an unconditional withdrawal by Patrick Camiller.
Yours fraternally,
MONTY JOHNSTONE
Patrick Camiller replies:
I must first apologise for some remarks at the end of my article. It was clearly wrong to suggest that Monty Johnstone is in any literal sense a forger, intellectual prostitute or shady character. It is evidently not the case and I never wished to imply that his method of analysis is the product of personal disreputability. The possibility that my remarks could be taken in that way was an unfortunate error on my part.
However, one term to which Monty Johnstone objects — 'scurrilous intellectual swindler' — raises a different problem. Perhaps the word scurrilous is too strong [illegible] example of his general method of distorting Trotsky's positions.
Johnstone claims to have found proof perfect of petty-bourgeois 'impatience' and 'revisionist forebodings' in Trotsky's last writings. But the context and actual thrust of the passage quoted by Johnstone are the exact opposite of what he would like us to believe. We have no space to document this fully here — readers should themselves refer to the article 'The USSR in War' contained in In Defence of Marxism. Let us simply note that from beginning to end it consists of a sustained attack on the then widespread idea [illegible] doomed to be submerged in an engulfing bureaucratic tide. It is thus astounding to hear Monty Johnstone using against the proletarian revolutionary Trotsky the very same term ('petty-bourgeois') which the Fourth International used as a scientific characterisation of these moods of desperation which it fought mercilessly at the time. Furthermore, the phrase 'if "the present war"...' which is 'quoted' by Johnstone is in fact separated for the bulk of the passage by a whole page!
This is Trotsky's real argument: 'If, however, it is conceded that the present war will provoke not revolution but a decline of the proletariat, then there remains another alternative...the replacement of democracy wherever it still remained by a totalitarian regime... signalising the eclipse of civilisation.' What is this but a re-posing, in the concrete conditions of the rise of fascism and world war, of the classical alternative advanced by Marxists: socialism or barbarism? If, following the war, the organisations of the working class had been everywhere destroyed, then human civilisation would indeed have been threatened. Every child knows that that is not what happened. We know too that the colossal post-war rise of the proletariat was held back from revolutionary consummation by the cynical calculations of imperialist and Stalinist politicians at the tables of Yalta. But that is another story that Trotsky was prevented from seeing by the axe-blows of the GPU.
The main point here is that Johnstone's method consists not only of ripping quotes out of context but of distorting the sense of the quoted idea itself. Trotsky was simply spelling out the real historical basis on which revolutionary Marxists would have to abandon a socialist perspective. Is that a sign of petty-bourgeois impatience or despair? Under what conditions would Johnstone abandon a socialist perspective? Those mentioned by Trotsky, or some others?
My second general point is that Monty Johnstone's hue and cry about the WRP leaves a rather distasteful impression. For the undoubtedly slanderous attacks made by the WRP on its opponents pale into political insignificance beside the massive machinery of slander, violence and brutal torture directed by the international network of Stalinist bureaucracies in Eastern Europe and the USSR. Does Johnstone approve of its barbarities in the USSR, Poland or Czechoslovakia? I am sure he does not. Yet he backs its historical record as a tradition, and he is happy, indeed proud, to remain in the same world movement as the Stalinist oppressors of the working class. This is, of course, the result not of personal degeneracy on Johnstone's part, but of his continuing political attachment to an utterly degenerate and [illegible] approach to the 1930s.
It emerges too from that little 'five-word quotation' from Ralph Fox introduced at the end of his Cogito article. Since this appears in a general conclusion which ranges Trotsky and Trotskyism under the phenomenon of petty-bourgeois impatience, and since it refers to a book which consistently portrays Trotsky as an alien class intruder in the workers movement, the subtle distinction which Johnstone now tries to draw between having the characteristic impatience of a petty bourgeois and actually being one seems rather specious. After all, impatience is also a [illegible] workers movement, and it becomes petty-bourgeois only when it engulfs its bearer in a frenzied divorce from the realities of the class struggle.
At any event, Johnstone genuinely believes that in 1977 in Britain it is possible to be taken seriously as a scholarly and sober writer on the history of the workers movement while quoting the standard opinions on Trotsky of Stalin's propaganda machine of 1933. In this, and in his distortions of Trotsky's positions, he betrays a lack of the most elementary standards of historical research — a lack which, while disturbing in any writer, becomes profoundly provocative in someone from the Stalinist tradition attempting to discuss Trotsky's struggle in the 1930s.