Dewey's essay is invaluable. I commend it to everyone.
His conclusion (after a very thorough analysis of Trotsky's argument):
> One more consideration may be added about class struggle as a means. There
> are presumably several, perhaps many, different ways by means of which the
> class struggle may be carried on. How can a choice be made among these
> different ways except by examining their consequences in relation to the
> goal of liberation of mankind? [Trotsky's] belief that a law of history
> determines the particular way in which the struggle is to be carried on
> certainly seems to tend toward a fanatical and even mystical devotion to
> use of certain ways of conducting the class struggle to the exclusion of
> all other ways of conducting it. I have no wish to go outside the
> theoretical question of the interdependence of means and ends. but it is
> conceivable that the course actually taken by the revolution in the
> U.S.S.R. becomes more explicable when it is noted that means were deduced
> from a supposed scientific law instead of being searched for and adopted
> on the ground of their relation to the moral end of the liberation of
> mankind.
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Dewey is very vague here, except for a gratuitous slur of Trotsky whom he
otherwise admired and defended. I think the issue turns on the question
which has always divided revolutionary Marxists like Trotsky from social
democrats and left liberals like Dewey: Can a successful class struggle for
power be conducted peacefully or must it necessarily resolve itself through
violence?
Dewey would have us believe "there are presumably several, perhaps many, different ways by means of which the class struggle may be carried on" but he doesn't indicate what these other possibilities are. History shows pretty conclusively that classes don't surrender their property and power peacefully, and that the transition is a brutal one, so Dewey's charge that Trotsky is a fanatic and a mystic for subscribing to this "law" seems to me to be wildly unfair. But then again maybe the debate is not about power. Dewey, like other social democrats and liberals, favours the gradual piecemeal reform of capitalism rather than it's violent overthrow and sees milder forms of "class struggle" within that context. The argument at bottom is really over ends rather than means, as Dewey presents it.
Nor has Dewey persuaded me that the degeneration of the Russian Revolution was owing to the Soviet leadership's adherence to "a supposed scientific law" rather than to Russia's social and economic backwardness which produced Stalin, aggravated by the failure of the revolution to spread to the West which would have broken the siege and come to the aid of the USSR.
Maybe I've missed the point of Dewey's critique, and SA can elaborate on what in particular he found new and invaluable in it.