I have no idea what you mean by "right wing." A right wing in the
bourgeois sense? Or right wing in the Marxist sense, as Bukharin's Marxism
in the 1920s. Furthermore, it is anti-Marxist to extrapolate Schachtman's
cold-war politics from the theories he held in 1938. CLR James was a "state
capitalist" but never ceded an inch to the bourgeoisie. His cothinker Raya
Dunaskaya founded the group News and Letters and they have been around for
decades without ever cozying up to the American bourgeoisie.
The only explanation for the rightward shift of Schachtman is the same as
it is for Stalinists who became apologists for US foreign policy (Jay
Lovestone, Whittaker Chambers, etc.). Bourgeois society exerts powerful
class pressures, especially on those people who are part of the
intelligentsia.
>> What are you suggesting -- that ideology has no effect on one's political development? That it's all the result of "powerful class forces" exerted by "bourgeois society"? Nonsense. The relationship between an ideological starting point and one's subsequent political path is not mechanical. Some of those who embraced the state-capitalist line, such as IS and its various offshoots, remained in the socialist camp. But others, most famously Schachtman and Burnham, did not. IS would argue that they misinterpreted the state-capitalist theory and used it as an excuse to go galloping into the camp of the bourgeoisie. Perhaps. But one might counter that S&B were actually following the implications of the theory out to the bitter end. If the USSR was simply a bourgeois state, then it was a bourgeois state of a particularly horrible sort, esp. post-1945 when Stalin, renouncing the Popular Front liberalism of the war, had lapsed back into his murderous paranoia. Given that, and given all the war scares of the period about red tanks overrunning Western Europe, it seemed particularly easy to embrace the West over the East and the most militant, anti-Communist portion of the Western camp at that. Most of the "trotskysant" intellectuals associated with the Partisan Review in the late 30s did just -- Rahv and Phillips, Sidney Hook, Mary McCarthy, etc. Not all were as fanatical as S&B. But, ironically, maybe that's because they weren't as intellectually rigorous.
Dan Lazare.