The Marxist Case for Richard Nixon
From America in our Time, the Marxist reason to elect Richard Nixon.
Harrington has described one particular meeting at which Max Schachtman “launched into a Marxist attack on pacisfism and the moralistic approach to politics. In Max’s view, a condemnation of the Vietnam War primarily on the grounds that it was immoral was an excercise in phrase-mongering.” Schacthman and his freinds argued, on spurious Marxist grounds, that because the peace movement was largely middle class, which it was, ergo it must be acting in a manner contrary to the interests of the working class. There was a profoundly pessimistic assumption that the mass of of the working class would inevitably support the war: an assumption that was, in spite of some dramatic and highly publicized symbolic events, only partially borne out, and which might have been even less justified if the Left, in 1965 or even earlier, had thrown its considerable influence with organized labor into the scales against the war.
Michael Harrington, in the end, broke with Schachtman on this issue and finally resigned his cochairmanship of the Socialist Party rather than “pretend any solidarity with people who, in the name of Marxism, were helping Richard Nixon.” Bayard Rustin, on the other hand, found himself in the tragic posture, for a lifelong pacifist, of justifying the war in the name of a radical coalition that never materialized.
(Actually this isn’t what I was looking for. I was looking for Schachtman in 1972 further explaining his Marxist precepts in support of Nixon. Maybe I’ll find it when I get back to this search.)
Some neoconservatives such as former Trotskyist dialectician Max Schachtman, whose arguments were influential with top members of the ALF-CIO hierarchy, offered reasons for voting for Nixon in purely Marxist terms: if the AFL-FIO isn’t backing McGovern and it represents the proleteriant, then which side are you on?
— Max Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, p 115