Leaving Marxism

This chapter details how James Burnham began questioning Marxism in the late 1930s in the wake of Joseph Stalin's purges. The Nazi–Soviet Pact and the Soviet invasion of Poland further eroded his faith. He pivoted by challenging Leon Trotsky's assumption that the Soviet Union was a state for the working class and openly disavowed Marxist concepts like the dialectic, the unity of opposites, and the inevitable victory of the proletariat. Stalin was not the problem in the USSR, he wrote; Marxism was. Trotsky fired back. Consistent with ideas that he had presented in his classic The Revolution Betrayed (1937), Trotsky had refused to fault Marxism. The revolutionary declared that Stalin and his bureaucratic clique had perverted the revolution. He blamed Burnham's inability to correctly interpret Soviet affairs on his bourgeois American upbringing. The chapter investigates this dramatic breakup that was codified in important Trotskyite texts, such as “A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party” (1939) and “An Open Letter to Comrade Burnham” (1940).