Paul Siegel 1916-2004: Marxist scholar and activist

by Jeff Mackler and Cliff Conner

A week before Paul Siegel’s death on April 26, he delivered his last lecture to a group of 15 New York Socialist Action comrades, friends, and potential members. He had prepared the class meticulously and reviewed its contents with comrades at the Socialist Action branch meeting the week before. His subject, "Has the Empire Overstepped Itself?" was designed to demonstrate that the horrors presently being perpetrated by American imperialism are a reflection of a deepening crisis of world and U.S. capitalism rather than a measure of their strength and stability.

Comrades report that Paul’s voice initially faltered, but he struggled mightily in an attempt to deliver the steady and deliberate presentation that had marked his life’s work as a revolutionary socialist educator. He managed to regain his composure and finished with renewed vigor, but the rapid advance of terminal disease denied him the clarity that had characterized his writing and speech for more than 50 years.

Paul’s final educational effort was deeply appreciated; his last appearance on the political stage stood as a testament to his courage and will. He was surrounded by comrades, friends, and family, and had even convinced his hospice worker to attend his lecture as a way to introduce her to the ideas of socialism.

Three months earlier Paul’s doctors had told him he had inoperable and untreatable cancer, and advised him to "put his affairs in order." Characteristically, he immediately set to work on a new book. He selected 20 articles he had previously written on the subject of Leon Trotsky and wrote a new introduction for the collection, which will be published by Socialist Action. Meanwhile, we visited him and asked him to tell us about his life and the events and ideas that shaped it.

Paul was born on June 24, 1916, in Patterson, N.J., to Jewish parents who had emigrated from Bialystock in Tsarist Russia, now Poland. He graduated from City College of New York and went on to earn a Ph.D in English Literature from Harvard University in 1941.

At that time Harvard’s anti-Semitic quota system limited the number of Jews to a tiny few. Similarly, Harvard’s placement agency explained that it was "difficult" to find academic jobs for Jewish graduates. With employment opportunities thus limited, Paul became subject to the newly instituted military draft and was inducted into the U.S. Army shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He served in a medical unit in England for four years. Paul described himself as a "Norman Thomas socialist" during his high school years until in 1936 he joined the Young Communist League, the Communist Party’s youth group. "I must be the only person in the world who became a Stalinist by reading Trotsky," he told us. Paul had read Trotsky’s "Whither England?" and was appalled to learn about the betrayal perpetrated by the social democrats who dominated the leadership of the reformist Labour Party.

But Paul’s brief flirtation with the CP ended with the infamous Moscow Trials, where Leon Trotsky and his co-thinkers in the Left Opposition were pilloried and sentenced to death. Max Shachtman’s "Behind the Moscow Trials" and Trotsky’s "Revolution Betrayed" drew him to the Trotskyist movement.

He happened upon a copy of the Trotskyist Socialist Appeal newspaper and met a Socialist Workers Party leader, the young George Weissman, which led Paul to found the Cambridge SWP branch, winning new members from Harvard and Radcliff.

A year later he joined the Boston SWP branch, where his education advanced under the leadership of Larry and Gusty Trainor and the renowned Marxist and feminist doctor and early abortion rights advocate, Antoinette Konikow.

The postwar rush back to the universities, encouraged by the government’s funding of education through the GI Bill of Rights, created the teacher shortage that landed Paul jobs teaching English literature, first at the University of Connecticut and CCNY and then for seven years at Ripon College in Wisconsin.

At Ripon he led a successful fight to prevent the establishment of a right-wing think-tank. But his resulting "persona non grata" status, as Paul called it, "happily led to my release from my contract and to my acceptance in 1956 at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus," where he remained until his early retirement in 1978.

Paul felt no compunction to refrain from signing the McCarthy-era anti-communist loyalty oath required by LIU president Admiral Richard L. Conolly. He became chair of the English department and was one of the campus’s leading antiwar activist professors.

Paul took great pride in a gift of a portrait of Leon Trotsky presented to him by radical students in the Students for a Democratic Society group (SDS), whom he allowed to use his department’s mimeograph machine to produce antiwar literature. At the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement, when the U.S. invaded Laos and Cambodia, it was Paul who presented the motion to the LIU faculty to discontinue regular classes and turn the university into an institution of opposition to the war.

This is how Paul described the proceedings: "Someone called for a roll-call vote based on the idea that the faculty would be intimidated. But students invaded the hall to observe the discussion and vote. The resolution passed, to everyone’s amazement. Some parents threatened to sue the university, but the faculty thought that this was the highest level of education. The administration opposed it."

"The president of the Brooklyn Center of LIU, Aldridge, associated with the Rockefellers, later scolded the faculty and told us that we had to get the students to tone down their behavior, and he glared at me as he spoke. I stared back until he turned away," said Paul proudly.

Paul never abused his position as a professor by forcing his socialist views on his students, but his public activism made them well aware of his radicalism. A student once asked him, "Professor Siegel, why is it that although most of the well-known Marxist intellectuals of your era have renounced Marxism, you haven’t changed your views?" Paul replied, "I suppose I must be more conservative than they are."

Paul’s antiwar activity extended nationally to the Modern Language Association, an academic institution not previously known for its radicalism. But "the great ferment among young radical teachers like Louis Kampf and Paul Lauder led to Kampf’s election to the vice-presidency, and, in accord with the organization’s bylaws, automatically the next year to the presidency."

Paul celebrated the MLA victory with a call back to New York to his loving wife Edith, whom he had met when both were members of the SWP. (Paul and Edith originally "bonded" as a result of their hitch-hiking together to the SWP’s Trotsky School in the New Jersey countryside.) "Edith," he said, "There’s been a revolution here." Someone nearby overheard Paul’s comment and took it to mean that Paul was one of the old guard, fearful of the MLA’s new direction. "My god, they’re terribly afraid of us," Paul overheard him say. Paul responded as he got off the phone, "No, I don’t fear you. It’s the new leadership that I was hailing."

Paul had his differences with Lauder and Kampf. They believed that the university system was geared to turning out conformists to ruling-class ideology. Paul, influenced by the Belgian Trotskyist Ernest Mandel, was more favorably inclined to the new generation of student youth. "We were both right," Paul observed. "Once the draft was ended, the students did become more conservatized. But so did everyone else."

Paul left the SWP in 1953 with a split led by Bert Cochran. He agreed with Cochran’s characterization of the SWP as "sectarian" on several issues, but upon reflection years later, reversed this assessment and rejoined the SWP in 1978 after working with it on several projects. He had been a contributor to the short-lived Cochran publication, the American Socialist.

Paul’s resumption of work with the SWP began when he edited an anthology of Trotsky’s writings, "Literature and Art," and he became a frequent contributor to the SWP’s monthly magazine, International Socialist Review. He considered the SWP leader, author, and organizer, George Breitman, whom he had met in the New Jersey branch of the SWP, among his closest associates.

Another close friend, Annette Rubenstein, often jousted with Paul over differing interpretations of Shakespearean literary criticism, Paul’s academic specialty. Rubenstein, an ex-CP supporter, came to work closely with the SWP and Paul in the "regroupment" period following Soviet head of state Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes.

He fondly recalled her observation following a panel debate, in which he and Rubenstein participated, held on the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution. "Whatever our differences," Paul recalled Annette as stating, "we have more in common than all the others outside the movement." This remark touched Paul’s heart and reflected his life-long open-minded approach to those with whom he disagreed or who held opinions that differed from the "party line."

Paul rejected the commonly held academic notion that Shakespeare’s writing was timeless. His Marxist training taught him, Paul noted, that "no one was above ideology." Paul’s view that "Shakespeare expressed the Christian humanist ideology of the new Tudor aristocracy" was not widely accepted in the U.S., but was praised highly by Marxist interpreters of Shakespeare around the world.

In the spirit of literary exploration and openness (as opposed to revealed truth) Paul noted, "I favor any and all interpretations of Shakespeare, but I found that if you worked with his text rather than against it, you did better."

Paul believed that most Stalinist intellectuals had given up their political principles. He noted as an example the monolithic bureaucratism that led Mao Tse-Tung to ban Shakespeare in China. In contrast, Paul observed, Marx appreciated Shakespeare, while Lenin preferred Pushkin as against the futurists of his time.

"But Lenin," Paul noted approvingly, "never tried to impose his opinions."

That was Paul’s tradition. He never insisted that others agree.

Paul authored and edited numerous books and articles on literary and political subjects throughout his adult life. His "Shakespearean Tragedy and the Elizabethan Compromise" (1957), "Shakespeare in His Time and Ours" (1968), "Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Novel" (1979) and "Shakespeare’s English and Roman History Plays: A Marxist Approach" (1986) constitute a treasure chest of insight into the value of Marxist analysis in literature and politics.

Paul’s last book, published by Socialist Action’s Walnut Publishing Company in 1991, "The Great Reversal: Politics and Art in Solzhenitsyn," presents an insightful account of the evolution of the celebrated Soviet writer and Nobel laureate, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from a brilliant revolutionary critic of the Stalin era to a pro-monarchist reactionary recluse.

Solzhenitsyn’s early works, "Cancer Ward" and "The First Circle," seemed to echo a popular cry for a return to the policies of Lenin and Trotsky. His reversal found him repudiating both people and condemning the United States for capitulating during the war in Vietnam.

Solzhenitsyn, the most translated author in world history, was regarded as the equal of Tolstoy in regard to critical analysis of an existing regime, and the equal of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as a novelist. Paul’s insightful analysis of his reversal is presented with a clarity that brings to bear the full power of his Marxist method.

LIU’s academic culture was not based on the "publish or perish" ethic. Paul explained that absent this compulsion, he wrote for his own satisfaction and for the education of those interested in ideas that elucidated life itself.

"Academic books, as a rule, don’t make money," Paul noted without a tinge of regret. Paul’s approach to his work was to complete his books first and then seek a publisher rather than the more traditional method of writing a prospectus first and then testing out the publication waters.

"With one exception," he told us, "I never made money publishing books." Paul’s reference here was to his popular work, "The Meek and the Militant: Religion and Power Across the World" (1986), a Marxist view of religion that has delighted readers interested in a balanced approach to the origin and function of religion in society.

The book was inspired when Paul’s daughter Rosalind married her first husband, a Mormon, who presented Paul with a book defending his religious viewpoint. Paul took the time to reply with an analysis of the book, exposing the fallacies of the author while praising the intentions of those who fought for religious freedom. The exchange that followed inspired Paul to write a book on the subject.

While finding a publisher proved troublesome, the problem was overcome when, according to Paul, a militant atheist won a faction fight within the Zed Books publishing house, and the project was set into motion.

In the course of finalizing the work, the foremost scholar of the 17th-century English Revolution, Christopher Hill, after reading the manuscript, suggested that Paul "go more lightly" where Paul had used references from Marx and Engels against various religious figures. In contrast, the leading SWP intellectual, George Novack, also read the opening chapters and urged him to remain firm. "Don’t apologize," said Novack. Paul didn’t follow Novack’s advice entirely but apologized for his own deference by stating, "One must hate the sin but love the sinner, particularly religious people who fight for social justice."

Finding a publisher for his clearly Marxist-based literary analysis always proved difficult. This was certainly the case with Paul’s "Revolution and the Twentieth-Century Novel," a work that was held up by Indiana University Press for a long while before its rejection.

Paul later learned that Indiana University Press’s "referee" for the book was the New Left guru of the time, Louis Kampf of the MLA, who stood in opposition to all "high culture." Kampf had previously collaborated with Paul in the MLA fight during the Vietnam War but stood in sharp opposition to Trotskyism. The book was eventually published in 1979 by the SWP’s Pathfinder Press.

Paul left the SWP for the second time in 1983 after he had joined with an opposition current in that party that rejected the current SWP leadership’s break with its Trotskyist traditions and program.

He was summarily expelled from the party during the "Christmas Eve Massacre," when a group of New York SWPers were called into the party headquarters and told, without recourse, that their membership had been terminated. "We’re back to square one," Paul remembered telling an older comrade, David Weiss. "But we continued."

Twenty years ago, Paul became a founding member of Socialist Action, the organization that stands in continuity with the program of the pre-1983 SWP and with the historic traditions of the Fourth International, founded by Leon Trotsky. He was an elected delegate to several Socialist Action national conventions and served as a member of the party’s Control Commission for many years.

In 1989, in the Gorbachev era, Paul participated in the first Trotskyist delegation to visit the Soviet Union since Leon Trotsky himself had been expelled six decades earlier. Initiated by Socialist Action, the delegation included Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban (Sieva) Volkov; Vlady Kibalchich, the son of Left Oppositionist and anti-Stalinist fighter Victor Serge; Pierre Broué, director of the Leon Trotsky Institute in Paris, and several members and friends of Socialist Action.

Paul became co-chair of the Moscow Trials Campaign Committee, based in New York. The committee organized an international campaign demanding the rehabilitation of Leon Trotsky and other victims of the Stalin era purges. Paul’s lifelong companion Edith passed away at the end of 1999. His daughter Rosalind invited him to live with her and her family in Ohio, but he decided to remain in New York, where he could best pursue his political and intellectual activities.

Although he was in frequent contact with many friends, an octogenarian living alone is not in the best of situations, so one of his granddaughters, Jenni, moved in with him to provide daily companionship and a helping hand. Paul’s family was one of the great joys of his life; in addition to Rosalind and Jenni, he is survived by grandchildren Christie, Noah, Jessica, and Halle. Paul Siegel was our beloved comrade and friend. His efforts for a democratic and socialist world engaged his entire life. His work will be carried forward by his co-thinkers in Socialist Action and by all others who fight for a world free from capitalist oppression and exploitation.

Your work is done, dear Paul. You have gently passed the banner to thousands and more.

Letter to my comrades

Leon Trotsky, writing his testament in the belief that he might die shortly, spoke of his "happiness " in having been "a fighter for the cause of socialism." Of this cause he said, "To participate in this movement with open eyes and with an intense will—only this can give the highest moral satisfaction to a thinking being."

This credo has been my own guide in life—although, not being Trotsky, I have not followed it with the same relentless determination and unswerving dedication that he did.

I have also tried, within the limits of my abilities, to use Trotsky’s method in the analysis of historical events.

Marxism, he held, was not a congealed dogma but a method of inquiry and an evolving doctrine that is constantly seeking to catch up with ever-changing life, as what had been secondary trends gain ascendancy over what had been the dominant trends.

Trotsky, furthermore, taught us to swim against the stream. After the defeat of the 1905 revolution, the Bolshevik party was reduced to 30 or 40 members.

By February 1917 the membership had gone up to 23,000, based in the working class, and at the time of the October Revolution it had gone up to 400,000.

Firmness and a policy that answered to the needs of the Russian workers and peasants propelled the party into the leadership of the working class. We must learn from past struggles and from the analyses of them by the great teachers of Marxism. We have valuable contributions to make for an understanding of today’s struggles, but we must also learn from the masses as we participate with them in those struggles. —PAUL SIEGEL

The Legacy of Leon Trotsky by Paul Siegel

Paul Siegel wrote the following essay shortly before his death. Siegel intended it to serve as the introduction to a forthcoming book or pamphlet, composed of articles he wrote in recent years for Socialist Action newspaper on the subject of Leon Trotsky’s political legacy.

Trotsky did not regard Marxism as a rigid dogma but as an evolving doctrine that sought to keep up with and incorporate the changes that occur in life. It is not carried away, however, by fleeting and superficial changes of the moment but observes basic trends and also the new trends that manifest themselves and begin to predominate.

Marxism uses the method of the materialist conception of history, which, contrary to caricatures of it, is not simplistic economic reductionism.

The materialist concept of history perceives that the complex interactions that take place as different developments in the various spheres of intellectual activity—philosophy, religion, law, art, etc.—affect each other and react upon the economic development on which they are all ultimately dependent and which in the last analysis asserts itself decisively.

Through this mode of inquiry, here all too concisely and abstractly stated, Trotsky cast light on what for most political observers was dark. At a time when the United States was generally regarded as pacifistic and opposed to colonization, Trotsky predicted that it would become the world's most powerful empire, seeking markets and fields of investment in China and Asia generally and seeking control of the world's raw materials, particularly oil, which World War I had shown to be of paramount industrial and military importance.

He also predicted that the United States, as the foremost capitalist country, would lead the fight against communism, with "no enemy of Bolshevism more principled and more savage than American capitalism." But, said Trotsky, despite America's opposition, communism would gain influence in the undeveloped countries of the East. In China, he stated, the United States would find "among the popular masses not the religion of Americanism but the political program of Bolshevism translated into the Chinese language."

The Chinese revolution was indeed a severe blow against American imperialism even though it was carried out under the leadership of a Communist Party schooled in Stalinism that had been driven out of the cities by Chiang Kai-Shek and was based on an army of peasants, not the working class. Trotsky had not excluded the victory of the revolution under these circumstances, but he was well aware of the impediments these circumstances entailed in carrying out Bolshevism's program.

Trotsky had warned at an earlier stage that Chiang Kai-Shek, with whom the Chinese Communist Party had entered into a coalition, was an unreliable ally who would turn against it. This view was sharply attacked by Stalin, who led a bureaucratic faction in the leadership of the Russian Communist Party. When Chiang Kai-Shek did indeed strike out at the Chinese Communists in an immense blood-bath [in 1927], many of Trotsky's followers felt that this vindication of his view would cause him to gain in the struggle against Stalin. Trotsky, however, replied that, on the contrary, this would consolidate the position of the conservative bureaucracy, which feared revolution abroad as serving to encourage opposition at home and as inhibiting its ability to make deals with foreign powers. This in fact turned out to be the case.

Trotsky derived his forecast of Chiang's reversal from his theory of the permanent revolution, which he first propounded in 1906. This theory stated that revolution could first occur in the colonial countries, into which the major powers had introduced features of capitalism but whose native capitalists could only act as agents of foreign capital and were unable to lead the way to full-fledged capitalist social and political systems. The revolution in these countries would have to be made by the working class, which would take it in a socialist direction. Revolution there could, however, create a chain-reaction that would proceed to the advanced capitalist countries.

This theory, proven negatively in China in 1927, was proven positively in Russia in 1917. The Bolshevik revolution set off a wave of revolutionary activity that has now been largely forgotten but which alarmed the statesmen of the time. The British prime minister Lloyd George wrote in a secret memorandum to the statesmen gathered at Versailles, "The whole existing order in its political, social and economic aspects is questioned by the masses of the population from one end of Europe to the other."

However, the Italian, German, Austrian, and Hungarian revolutions were defeated and crushed in blood. Trotsky, like other Marxists, including Lenin, regarded it as axiomatic that socialism could only be constructed in the conditions of plenty made possible by the international planning of working-class governments that had come to power in a number of advanced capitalist countries.

But instead of such conditions there was a terrible situation in the Soviet Union as a result of the military intervention of fourteen capitalist countries that gave strength to the counter-revolutionary White Guards in a ferocious civil war.

Under these circumstances power was usurped by a bureaucracy concerned chiefly with the special privileges it arrogated to itself from a working class that was decimated and demoralized.

The nationalization of the means of production had made possible industrialization on an unprecedented scale, and in the early years of the revolution subsistence was guaranteed and free education and health care were instituted. These achievements persisted but were attenuated and overwhelmed under the brutal reaction of an increasingly autocratic bureaucracy.

During the Great Depression and the rise of fascism, however, Western intellectuals in great numbers looked to the Soviet Union, generally uncritically, as a source of hope. Trotsky spoke of them as "radical tourists" who liked to think that socialism could be attained without further struggle.

Trotsky prophetically stated that their fear of criticizing the Soviet regime stemmed not from a fear of "the fragility of the Soviet Union, but of the fragility of their own sympathy with it."

Trotsky, on the other hand, saw the Soviet regime as "a preparatory regime transitional from capitalism to socialism" that could revert to capitalism or go on toward socialism. Its fate would be determined in struggle both against the bureaucracy and its capitalist enemies.

Faced with the increasing problems entailed by the bureaucratic mode of administering the economy, larger and larger sections of the bureaucracy, he said, are coming to see that they could "insure their positions of privilege only through rejection of nationalization, collectivization, and monopoly of foreign trade."

This, of course, is what is happening in the Soviet Union today—as it is also happening in other underdeveloped countries that have had revolutions—even though during the Cold War the conventional wisdom was that the Soviet Union was a monolithic entity impervious to change except, it was implied, for regime-change imposed from without.

With World War II impending, Trotsky saw that the weak position of the Soviet Union might force it to make a deal with one of the imperialist blocs against another. He regarded this as a possible necessity but one that was a great danger, for any capitalist ally would be treacherous. And indeed, towards the end of World War II, the United States recruited Eastern European troops who had worked for the Nazis to be parachuted into the Soviet Union as espionage agents.

Trotsky after Munich was one of the very few who predicted the Hitler-Stalin pact, which startled the world. Another person who did so was Walter Duranty, the Stalin apologist on The New York Times, whose many warnings on the subject were disregarded.

What Trotsky denounced was the use of Communist parties to serve the diplomatic needs of the Kremlin instead of acting as fighters for revolution. The French party's support during the Franco-Soviet pact of the Popular Front government, a coalition with capitalist parties, disoriented the workers and contributed to the Nazis' military victory.

The American party's veering from all-out support of Roosevelt under the flag of anti-fascism to an attack on American imperialism lost it much of its periphery, created an impression of the party as a mere agent of the Soviet government later exploited by McCarthy, and contributed to a sense of confusion among party members that had a long-term effect, notably after the Khrushchev revelations.

While Trotsky opposed the French Popular Front as a means of fighting Nazism, he understood before anyone else the Nazi danger. In 1931, before Hitler came to power, he wrote, "On the direction in which the solution of the German crisis develops will depend not only the fate of Germany itself (and that is already a great deal) but also the fate of Europe, the destiny of the entire world, for many years to come."

He exhorted the German Communist and Social Democratic parties to form a united front that would call out their millions of followers to confront the Nazi gangs and make clear that they would fight to prevent them from taking power. Instead, the Social Democratic party supported for president, as a "lesser evil" than Hitler, General Hindenberg, who then appointed Hitler as chancellor, enabling him to come to power.

The Communist Party for its part attacked the Social Democrats as "social fascists," "the moderate wing of fascism. " Neither of the two parties realized what Trotsky so clearly perceived, that the Nazis would destroy the parliamentary system on which they relied and pulverize them in concentration camps.

He even anticipated Nazi genocide before the word was invented. "The Nazis are against assimilation but not against annexation," he wrote in 1933.

"They prefer the extermination of the conquered 'inferior' peoples to their Germanization." Trotsky regarded Nazism not as an aberration from contemporary society but as representative of the forces of barbarism existing beneath its surface. "Capitalist civilization is disgorging undigested barbarism—such is the physiology of National Socialism," he said in the same article.

The choice for him was that of socialism or barbarism, as Rosa Luxemburg proclaimed it to be at the beginning of the twentieth century, at a time when many expected the coming century to be a time of unparalleled progress but which turned out to be a century of two great wars of unheard-of destruction, a devastating world depression, genocide and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

He realized the difficulties of revolution by a class that, unlike the bourgeoisie in feudal society, did not grow in wealth and power, but he also saw the contradictions of capitalism as constantly emerging and impelling workers to look for revolutionary solutions.

To find these solutions they need to study the lessons of past struggles and to profit from what they learn from their struggles today. The legacy of Leon Trotsky will be of great aid in this titanic undertaking.

This article first appeared in the May 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.