Source: The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 43, 25 October 1948, pp. 1 & 2.
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The debate between Farrell Dobbs, Presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party and Norman Thomas, Presidential candidate of the Socialist Party, held in New York, Oct. 17, was an important event in the 1948 election. It was the only debate in which two candidates for the highest office in the country discussed their programs from the same public platform. It was also the first time in many years that workers of New York had the opportunity to hear issues debated by leading representatives of opponent working class parties. The audience was estimated at 1,000.
Farrell Dobbs, opening the debate, sought to prove that only the socialist program of Marxism can lead humanity from poverty, fascism, and imperialist war to peace, freedom and abundance and that the Socialist Workers Party has consistently adhered to this program while the Socialist Party under Norman Thomas has abandoned Marxism and in World War II openly supported American imperialism.
Norman Thomas claimed in his presentation that the Socialist Workers Party does not have a scientific attitude toward the social and political realities of the day, but adheres to Marxism as to a religion, that we must reject this theologian’s approach to the burning questions of our time and adopt a realistic way of looking at the world.
The debate thus boiled down to the question, does the science of Marxism still apply to present day realities or has it become an out-moded doctrine that must be replaced by something more “scientific”?
“We are actually dealing here with a century-old struggle waged by the adherents of scientific socialism against all pretenders who have advocated, under a socialist label, programs and theories that have nothing in common with socialism,” Dobbs declared in his opening remarks.
Comrade Dobbs posed four basic questions: “Why has the bankrupt system of capitalism survived? Why has the Russian revolution degenerated? Why has the scourge of fascism lacerated mankind? Why have the devastations of one world war been followed by another, with a third and more terrible war in open preparation?”
The imperialists could “dragoon the socialist working class of Europe into the first world war in 1914 thanks only to the betrayal of the Social Democratic leaders.” These leaders preached socialism in peace-time but when “war broke out they forgot their promises and supported the war of the imperialists. They set the pattern in World War I which Norman Thomas followed in World War II.”
By way of contrast, Lenin and Trotsky and their collaborators, who adhered to the program of Marxism, “fought capitalism in war as in peace” and succeeded in leading the great Russian revolution of 1917.
This socialist revolution, had it spread to the other European countries, “would have sounded the death knell of capitalism” but the Social Democratic leaders who “continued to preach socialism in words” placed themselves “at the service of the capitalist class and its regime. The Social Democratic leaders saved tottering capitalism, and took over the responsibility of government when the capitalists were no longer able to rule in their own name.”
These Social Democratic leaders instigated the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemberg who were trying to prepare the socialist revolution in Germany. “It was this ruthless crushing of the German socialist revolution that opened the road to Hitler and enabled Stalinism to rise in Russia.”
Dobbs then pointed out that Stalinism is a “cowardly, national reformist movement which began with the repudiation of revolutionary internationalism and thereby broke fundamentally with the doctrines and the traditions of Bolshevism.”
Thus Stalinism has nothing in common with Marxism. “At bottom, Stalinism has very much in common with the reformist Social Democrats. The Stalinists,” declared Dobbs, “have consistently ar.d unceasingly fought the Marxist Internationalists, the Trotskyists, with every weapon from frameup and slander to mass murder and individual assassination, while they have frequently collaborated in the most intimate manner with the reformist socialists of the Social Democratic camp in all countries of the world, including the United States.
“The prolonged survival of capitalism, with all its frightful consequences, is due primarily to the influence and the treacherous work of these two reformist currents in the labor movement, one falsely calling itself ‘socialist,’ and the other ‘Communist.’ All the might of American imperialism could not save international capitalism, nor save itself, without their aid.”
Dobbs then explained why the program of Marxism retains its full validity. So long as an irreconcilable conflict of class interests exists between the workers and their capitalist exploiters, “the political program of a working class party must be determined accordingly. All the political actions and judgments of a workers’ party must always be directed against the capitalist class, and never be taken in collaboration with them. The class struggle is the central and governing principle of socialist politics.”
This class struggle must be carried “to its necessary conclusion – that is, to the victory of the working class and the abolition of capitalism.” In this way the “socialist society will be realized. This is the teaching of Marxism. There is no other way.”
A successful socialist revolution in America would mean not only the end of reactionary capitalist regimes throughout the world but in addition “the monstrous Stalinist regime of police oppression, forced labor and bloody purges could never survive the American socialist revolution.”
Comrade Dobbs then analyzed the position of Norman Thomas, demonstrating that it represented not socialism but bourgeois liberalism. Prior to World War II, Thomas promised to oppose imperialist war; but when the conflict broke out, he broke his promise. Norman Thomas “derives his basic policies from the American State Department, as shown by his support of the imperialist war from 1941 to 1945 and his present support of the Marshall Plan which is nothing but the program of preparation for another world war.”
In contrast to the bourgeois liberalism of Norman Thomas, Dobbs demonstrated how the program of the Socialist Workers Party, independent of both the Kremlin and Washington, and in the tradition of Marxism “is designed to Serve the interests of the working people and not of their masters or bureaucratic betrayers.”
Dobbs concluded:
“The alliance of the American imperialists with all the reactionary, privilege-seeking elements throughout the World is a great and fearsome power. But the alliance of the great American working class with the oppressed and freedom-seeking peoples of the world is a still mightier power. And in the end it will prevail.”
Norman Thomas in reply declared: “The difference I will accept is this: Farrell Dobbs hails as scientific that which seems to me in a peculiar and rather appalling sense theological.”
Thomas attempted to depict the real world as he views it – “a world in which there are very grave dangers – the danger of war. I look out at a world in which poverty is unconquered, despite our marvelous technological power. I look out on a world in which the increase, as if by explosion of populations in certain lands threatens the whole world with hunger unless we can vastly improve agricultural practice, stop the erosion of top soil, and voluntarily, probably, check the increase of population.”
Thomas praised the democracy he sees in America: “It is a capitalist country in which it has been demonstrated that if and when the workers generally desire, they can win a great deal for themselves and they can win it by pretty orderly processes.” Thomas held that democracy “has a good deal of reality” in capitalist America, otherwise “we wouldn’t be holding this meeting.”
In reply to the charge that he collaborated with the capitalist class, Thomas pointed to the “collaboration of people” in giving Leon Trotsky a hearing in Mexico and in demanding a pardon for the 18 Trotskyists railroaded to prison during World War II for, their socialist views. He did not bother to point out that the “collaboration” scored by Dobbs was specifically collaboration with the imperialist war-mongers and their agents in the State Department on behalf of the Wall Street war preparations program.
In contrast to the picture he painted of democracy in America, Thomas pointed to the Soviet Union where the Stalinist regime is in power. “The most complete tyranny that the world jias ever seen in action. Now don’t read me words out of a book. Don’t tell me there is no private property and there is no capitalist class.
The state has taken over the functions. The dictatorial state has taken over the functions of the old capitalist class and your bu- [text missing here] and there is no capitalist class, more tyrannical than capitalists under the curbs that we have succeeded in imposing.”
This state of affairs in the Soviet Union, Thomas held to be a direct consequence of Bolshevism. “The arid controversies, the bitterness, the cold impersonal cruelty that have worked such woe on the great scale of mighty Russia are all to be found in the: history of the Bolshevik party before 1914.”
Thomas saw the main job as one to stop “the drive which has taken the slave state to the very borders of central Germany.” “How is it going to be stopped?” he demanded.
Thomas advocated as a realistic program an appeal to all nations to disarm: “The end of the armament race and the strengthening of the United Nations, abolishing of, veto power. Those who want that, have a program, a program worth advocating.”
At the conclusion of his first rebuttal, Dobbs asked Thomas why he had broken his promise to oppose war, solemnly given in the resolution passed by Thomas and his friends at the 1936 Socialist Party convention.
Thomas was forced to give an explanation:
“I never was a 100 percent satisfied in 1936 with that resolution. It was a compromise resolution. But I was willing to accept it as a compromise resolution of that date. It did not prove adequate to the development of facts in the following years.”
He tried to make out a difference between one imperialist war and another, trying to justify his support of World War II in contrast to his opposition to. World War I, He came to the conclusion that revolution was not likely in “any conceivable, time,” All we had was a “tremendous choice of evils.” And so he decided that the best thing he could: do was to give “critical support” to the imperialist war.
Farrell Dobbs ended the debate by expressing his confidence in the revolutionary capacities of the American working class:
“Norman Thomas doesn’t believe that the workers have the power to make a revolution and that’s why he falters and halts and leans back on the American State Department. He’s got no faith in the working class. We HAVE. And that’s where we differ fundamentally with the Socialist Party. We have unbounded faith in the mighty American working class and we stake our lives on that future that will be made by the struggle to make a proletarian revolution, overthrow the capitalist system and build a socialist America and go on from there to build a socialist world.”
Last updated on: 29 March 2023