George Novack Remembered

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8 SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 1992 George Novack was born in Boston, Mass., in 1905. He died in New York City on July 30, 1992.

For most of his 86 years of life, Novack was deeply, passionately involved in the struggle for socialism, for the American revolution, which, as Leon Trotsky said, "will lift the whole world on its shoulders!"

I first met George Novack in 1941, at a convention of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). To me, Novack was one of the "old timers," one of the founders of the Trotskyist movement in the United States. I was a trade-unionist newcomer who had just begun to study Marxist theory, Marxist philosophy. Novack already had a name in this field. I wanted to talk to him.

Luckily, during a lunch break, we happened to be seated at the same table. I introduced myself and asked a few questions. I was rewarded with a short lecture on the great importance of studying Marxist philosophy. He was very helpful and friendly. He suggested books, like Lenin's "Materialism and Empirico-Criticism." In parting, he told me that I should write to him if I had further questions. I did so.

The next time I came to New York, I slept on a couch in George and Evelyn's front room. (Evelyn Reed, Novack's wife and political collaborator, author of several books on women's liberation, died in 1979.)

We became friends. Of course, we talked mostly politics and about people involved in politics. I knew nothing of his early life until his book "Polemics in Marxist Philosophy" came out in 1978.

In his own words: "As the only son of immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe, 1 escaped the lot of a rabbinical student thanks to the voyage of my father and mother to the New World late in the 19th century. This fortuitous circumstance has buttressed my belief in the determinate effect of their social situation on people's destinies. Growing up in the suburbs of Boston, I was directed in high school toward Harvard. ...To my family this upward step on the educational ladder was to provide a passport to success and wealth in one of the professions or as a business executive. Alas for the dreams of parents for their children! My university training was to be put to quite different uses."

Harvard At Harvard, Novack began in the field of creative writing and literature, but soon switched to philosophy. This was in the early, conservative 1920s when capitalism was booming—no courses in Marxist philosophy were available. He studied every philosopher from Plato, to Kant, to the pragmatism of John Dewey. Later, as a Marxist, he was to put all this valuable knowledge to good use.

While at Harvard, he also read the nonrecommended books of the "muckrakers" —Upton Sinclair's exposures of the evils of capitalism in "The Brass Check" and "The Goose Step," and Lewis Mumford's "The Golden Day," a criticism of the crass commercialism of 19th century American culture.

Novack recalled that "at the end of the book, Mumford invoked Walt Whitman's invitation to remold America along plebian, democratic lines: 'Allons! The road is before us!' "As naively idealistic youth will do, I took this injunction more literally than the author intended, and wanted to send him word that I was all set to join the glorious crusade to conceive the new world he projected. When I later migrated to New York and became acquainted with Mumford, I soon saw the unrealism of his utopian plans for making this country into a 'complete and harmonious society' without a political confrontation with the power of the ruling class." ("Polemics," pages 14 and 15.)

By 1927, Novack had become bored with Harvard and left without a degree. In New York, he entered the publishing business. In a short time, he became the advertising manager for the big publishing George Novack in 1979 Novack in 1944 on his way to present petitions for release of Minneapolis 18.

firm, E.P. Dutton (1929 to 1933).

Alan Wald, in his book "The New York Intellectuals" (University of South Carolina Press, 1987), relates how Novack in New York became acquainted with leftist writers and activists, including Trotskyists. Wald says that under the impact of the 1929 stock market crash and the subsequent Great Depression of the 1930s, Novack "reoriented his thinking." He began to study Marx and Trotsky.

Novack continued to work in the publishing business, but became more and more involved in politics. He played a key role in several major battles in the defense of civil liberties. This included the Scottsboro Case in Alabama in 1933, where nine black youth were falsely accused of raping two white women. The youths were sentenced to death or long prison terms. On appeal, the sentences were overturned and they were freed.

In the fall of 1933, Novack attended a meeting at Irving Plaza in New York at which James P. Cannon, Max Shachtman and Diego Rivera—the Mexican muralist-proclaimed the need for a new international to replace the Stalinist international. Soon afterwards, Novack joined the fledgling Trotskyist group headed by Cannon-the Communist League of America (CLA)-and plunged full time into political activity as a speaker, writer, and organizer.

Defense of Leon Trotsky On Jan. 9, 1937, Leon Trotsky and his wife, Natalia, arrived at the port of Tampico, Mexico. Trotsky, exiled by Stalin and hounded from country to country, had been granted political asylum by Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas.

In the words of Natalia Trotsky: "Lev Davidovich [Trotsky] warned that he would refuse to disembark unless friends came to meet us ... the GPU had its agents in Mexico ... then a launch drew up and all our fears evaporated. We were greeted by honest and smiling faces ... Max Shachtman, George Novack, who introduced himself as secretary of the Trotsky Defense Committee in the United States; the painter Freda Kahlo ... the artist Diego Rivera; journalists; Mexican officials; and comrades. ... There was encouraging news from New York; the whole New World seemed to have been incensed by the Moscow crimes. We gulped the air of freedom." ("The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky," Victor Serge and Natalia Sedov Trotsky, Basic Books, Inc., page 210.)

In 1936, Novack became the national secretary of the American Committee for Defense of Leon Trotsky. He helped organize the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials. In April 1937, this commission-chaired by eminent philosopher and educator John Dewey—went to Mexico, interrogated Trotsky for eight days, and concluded: "We therefore find the Moscow Trials to be frame-ups. We therefore find Trotsky and Sedov [Trotsky's son] not guilty." ("Not Guilty: Report of the Commission," Harper & Brothers, 1938.)

James T. Farrell, author and close triend of Novack and the American Trotskyists, said that Trotsky "utterly demolished the macabre fables of the Moscow Trials for any human being who is susceptible to reason." ("New York Intellectuals," page 139)

In 1941, when the U.S. government indicted 29 leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and Trotskyist leaders of the Teamsters union in Minneapolis, Novack became national secretary of the Civil Rights Defense Committee (CRDC). One hundred and fifty unions, representing five million workers, and hundreds of other supporters of civil liberties, backed the Minneapolis Case victims. (A detailed story of the Minneapolis Case appeared in Socialist Action, December 1991.)

A Marxist educator George Novack was a person of many talents. In my opinion, however, his greatest contributions were as the Marxist scholar and educator who most successfully blended political activity with the production of popular pamphlets and books that reached a broader public. His cial, completely accessible to beginners in the study of Marxism.

Novack took up the polemical cudgels against just about every opponent or critic of Marxism, Trotskyism, and any enemy of historical materialism and dialectical materialism. He wrote or edited 15 books, ranging from "Origins of Materialism" (Pathfinder Press, 1965) to "Polemics in Marxist Philosophy" (Pathfinder 1978).

In "Polemics" (pages 269-70), Novack tells of a conversation he had with Trotsky the day after Trotsky landed in Mexico. "Trotsky brought forward the name of Max Eastman ... he became tense, agitated. 'Upon going back to the States,' he urged, 'you comrades must at once take up the struggle against Eastman's distortion and repudiation of dialectical materialism. There is nothing more important than this. Pragmatism, empiricism, is the great curse of American thought. You must innoculate younger comrades against its infection.""

Novack was greatly influenced by this conversation. He did what Trotsky asked of him.

In "Pragmatism Versus Marxism, an Appraisal of John Dewey's Philosophy" (Pathfinder Press, 1975), he explains and refutes the philosophy of history of the American capitalist class, starting with Benjamin Franklin: "Time is money" and "Wealth is happiness."

Novack asks the question, "What is pragmatism? First pragmatism is what pragmatism does. It is the habit of acting in disregard of solidly-based scientific rules and tested principles ... pragmatic people rely not on laws, rules and principles which reflect the determinate factors of objective reality, but principally upon make-shift, rule-of-thumb methods and improvisations based on what they believe might be immediately advantageous. Such is the kind of practice out of which the theorizing of pragmatic philosophy has grown."

He then cites a Mobil Oil Corporation advertisement: "Businessmen are pragmatists, and with their daily feedback, they readily abandon dogma whenever their survival instincts tell them to. It has become less and less a question of what they want to do or might like to do, but what their common sense and survival instinct tell them what they have to do." (Page 17, my emphasis.)

He goes on to explain that the pragmatist theoreticians, especially liberals like John Dewey, are both progressive and reactionary: They want to reform capitalist society to meet the needs of the proletariat and they support many progressive causes, but their basic philosophy defends capitalism.

Read Novack! His books are available at Socialist Action bookshops and booktables.

In 1979, when Evelyn Reed died, my wife, Ruth, and I invited George to visit us in San Francisco. He came and stayed for several days. Mostly we reminisced about Evelyn. George played Fats Waller phonograph records (Evelyn's favorite) over and over again, with tears in his eyes. We renewed our friendship.

But in 1981, when the new Jack Barnes leadership of the Socialist Workers Party began to renounce Trotskyism, to destroy democracy in the SWP-and then in 1983 proceeded to expel and ostracize most of the surviving founders of the party—Novack remained silent. He neither attacked nor defended, but simply retired to the sidelines. He would no longer talk politics with old friends and comrades.

Cannon explained in his book "The History of American Trotskyism" that some people cannot surmount the wall of ostracism. I believe that problem was George's personal tragedy.

He knew better.

However, George Novack will always be remembered with respect and affection for the great contributions he made to the study of Marxism.- A. H.