DAVID TWERSKY
463
In the time remaining him in Mexico , Trotsky writes to James
Cannon in New York and John Dewey to try and obtain a United
States visa. It takes only a few weeks to receive the thundering "No"
from Washington. London has also refused. It quickly becomes
clear that Leon Trotsky , leader of two revolutions, orator extraor–
dinaire, thinker and revolutionist , has nowhere to go.
Some of his old friends in America organize a petition to over–
turn the State Department decision . Despite the letter to Cannon,
Max Schachtman sees what he can do, which isn't very much. Even
Max Eastman joins in . Arguing with his new conservative friends
for his old teacher , he tries , but fails-the New Deal days are over.
After a generation of defeat, the conservatives smell blood. The
liberals are worried: they may lose the White House. This is the last
thing they need . Is he ready to recant? Would he testify about Red
spy networks? No? Too bad.
Within the old left-wing community, he is still hated by the
fellow travellers and party members . Among his old friends and
followers, there is still affection, admiration . But there are increas–
ing signs of criticism: why, exactly, the attack on Kronstad? Would
it really have been so different if he would have won? Would
Djugashvili be today in Coyoacan? Old friends drift away. Even his
formidable intellectual power gradually loses its gravitational hold.
One splinter party in New York is dangerously close to renouncing
everything back to the beginning; like Darwin and Freud, their
heresy begins with creation. Moreover, everywhere his few remain–
ing followers are harried by official Communists.
As his correspondence draws out his days, he finds that he anx–
iously awaits each day's mail. He comes to know the mailman and
chats with him every morning. Fewer and fewer letters arrive. His
face grows as thin as the mail sacks . His former secretary, Dunayev–
skaya, is busying herself over "state capitalism," an error. If the
Soviet state had "degenerated" under Stalin, Trotsky nonetheless
regarded it as a "workers' state," the first in human history, and
deserving of support. Trotsky would depart from this position only
far enough to qualify his support as "critical."
Dunayevskaya's mistake was to write the Soviet Union off as an
altogether new form of social organization, unanticipated in Marxist
eschatology . Schachtman was experimenting along similar lines,
ultimately rejecting the state capitalist description for his own orig–
inal "bureaucratic collectivism." From that point of departure, his
party colleague James Burnham moved on to his own new paradigm
