When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973-Carl Davidson"s "Left in Form, Right in Essence:United front against fascism"

Markin comment on this series:

No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.

When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.

So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
*******
Carl Davidson"s "Left in Form, Right in Essence:United front against fascism"

The Trotskyists believe they are the only authentic practitioners of the policy of the united front.

Yet in practice. they have opposed full implementation, either from rightist or “leftist” positions.

The most apparent example of this role was the Trotskyist attitude toward World War 2, in which they took a “defeatist” position towards the capitalist governments fighting the fascists, called for the “revolutionary” overthrow of the Soviet government and opposed the united front with the national bourgeoisie in the colonial countries invaded by the fascists.

The fact that the Trotskyist line led them inevitably to these positions substantiated the charge that they objectively served the interests of the fascists.

Trotsky and his followers tried to justify their line with a “left” cover, stating that they called for a revolution in Germany, the “unconditional defense” of the Soviet Union (but not its leadership) and the defeat of the capitalists everywhere through socialist revolution. They then tried to back it all up by drawing a doctrinaire analogy with World War 1, where the Leninists called for the proletariat in all capitalist countries to work for the defeat of their own bourgeoisie by “turning the imperialist war into a civil war.”

“It is really ridiculous,” wrote Georgi Dimitrov in 1936, “when ‘left’ phrasemongers of various kinds oppose these tactics (of the united front), adopting the pose of irreconcilable revolutionaries. If we are to believe them, all governments are aggressors. They even quote Lenin, who, during the imperialist war of 1914- 1918. correctly rejected the argument of the social-chauvinists that’ we were attacked and we are defending.’ But the world at that time was divided into two military-imperialist coalitions which were equally striving to establish their world hegemony and which had equally prepared and provoked the imperialist war. At that time there were neither countries where the proletariat was in power nor countries with a fascist dictatorship.”

But now the situation is different. Now we have: (1) a proletarian state which is the greatest bulwark of peace; (2) definite fascist aggressors; (3) a number of countries which are in direct danger of attack by fascist aggressors and in danger of losing their state and national independence; (4) other capitalist governments which are interested at the present moment in the preservation of peace. It is, therefore. completely wrong now to depict all countries as aggressors. Only people who are trying to conceal the real aggressors can distort the facts in such a manner.

A number of main contradictions came to the fore during World War 2: between bourgeois democracy and bourgeois fascism between and within the imperialist powers; between the imperialists and the colonies; among the imperialist powers; between the working class and the bourgeoisie in all capitalist countries; between the first socialist state and all the capitalist countries, and between the first socialist state and the fascist powers.

Of all these, which was the principal contradiction whose development determined or influenced the development of the rest? In the period of World War 2, it was the contradiction between the Soviet Union and the fascist powers. The principal, immediate enemy – as opposed to the enemy in general – of all the world’s peoples was the fascist powers of Germany, Italy and .Japan and their lackeys.

Strategic meaning

What did this mean for proletarian strategy? First, that Marxists-Leninists everywhere called for a united front of all working class organizations against fascism, on the basis of which would be built an even broader popular front which was in contradiction to the fascists, including even the temporary and wavering allies to be found in the camp of the bourgeois-democratic capitalist governments.

The Trotskyists opposed this line under the guise of upholding the proletarian united front while rejecting its broader extension in the popular front. They believed that the capitalist camp could not be split and that efforts to do so on the part of proletarian revolutionaries in each country and the Soviet Union internationally amounted to so much “class collaboration.”

It was true that the capitalist countries initially wavered or opposed the Soviet Union’s call for a united defense against the fascists. Many elements of the bourgeoisie wanted the fascists to attack the Soviet Union first, while they stood on the sidelines watching the two powers exhaust each other so they could pick up the pieces later.

Trotsky, himself, believed that this was the inevitable course. In 1932 he wrote, “It would be sheer political stupidity to believe that once they came to power, the German National Socialists would begin with a war against France or even against Poland.”

Hitler-Stalin Pact

The Soviet leadership completely understood that sooner or later, they would have to fight the German fascists. But precisely this question – sooner or later? – made all the difference in the world. Since the bourgeois democracies continued to stall on the question of the united front and the German fascists were in the process of making up their minds of who to attack first, the Soviet leadership waited until the last possible moment and then decided to force the issue.

The method chosen was the Soviet-German non-aggression pact, more popularly known as the Hitler-Stalin pact. Its signing sent the Trotskyists into a frenzied howl but in actuality it constituted one of the most brilliant diplomatic moves of the period.

It meant that the capitalist governments were attacked first, that the Germans would have to fight eventually on two fronts at once, that the Soviet Union would not have to fight alone and that the international popular front isolating the principal fascist enemies would become a reality. In short, it meant the defeat of fascism.

The Trotskyists, of course, saw it as only one more “betrayal” of the working class. In their view, it was the Communists who were primarily responsible for fascism’s coming to power in Germany in the first place.

In this way the Trotskyists cover up for the political force that actually paved the way to power for the fascists – the German Social-Democrats.

Refused united front

The German Social-Democrats refused at every point in the struggle to form a united front with the German Communists against the rising power of the fascists. Instead, they shared governmental power with the bourgeoisie, collaborated with them in suppressing the struggles of the working class and pursued the line of the peaceful, constitutional path to “socialism.” In both theory and practice, however, they were tools of the capitalists for maintaining the stability of bourgeois rule.

In Austria, for example, even after Hitler had come to power in Germany, the Social-Democrats begged for an agreement with the fascists. even going so far as to volunteer cooperation with a two-year suspension of the constitution and the parliament so long as it was done “constitutionally.”

For these reasons, the Communists correctly attacked the leadership of the Social-Democratic parties as “social-fascists,” that is, “socialists in words, fascist in deeds.” (Lenin had attacked the same parties during World War I as “social-imperialists” for defending their own capitalists.) In this way, the Communists sought to expose to the masses the actual implications of following the line of the Social-Democrats.

For Trotsky, this amounted only to so much name-calling. He pointed out the obvious fact that the Social-Democrats stood to be smashed with the victory of fascism and that this constituted an objective basis for a united front.

Decisive factor

The problem. however, was that it was not obvious to the Social-Democrats who feared proletarian revolution more than the victory of Hitler. This factor proved decisive.

This is not to say that the German Communist party made no mistakes or that their errors were insignificant. One of their main weaknesses was a social-democratic or right error. This was seen in the building of their party primarily on the basis of electoral districts, rather than on factory cells. They also made a number of ultra-“left” errors, including a one-sided emphasis on the “united front from below,” rather than a more persistent effort at unity with the Social-Democratic leaders as well, even if this was turned down. They also at one point perpetrated the illusion that the Hitler government would be short-lived and that the proletarian power would quickly replace it.

The Trotskyists believe that the Communists’ errors were the decisive factor in preventing the united front from being embraced by the Social- Democratic leaders. But this is utopian. The Communists would have been able to strengthen their influence among the masses of the Social-Democrats but the leadership had objective ties to the bourgeoisie. To think otherwise is to deny the character of the labor aristocracy as the agent of the capitalists within the workers movement.

This is reflected in this country in the Socialist Workers party’s one-sided emphasis on the union leadership in the united front against the Vietnam war. While Trotskyists went all-out to get endorsements from trade union leaders for antiwar demonstrations, they did no organizational work among the rank-and-file for the struggle against imperialism. Despite their running debate with the revisionists on the single-issue, multi-issue question, this is where they share with the Communist party a thoroughly rightist approach to the question of the united front.

The Trotskyist movement in the 1930s went on to merge with the Social-Democrats and the Trotskyists in this country joined the Socialist party of Norman Thomas. This and other aspects of the Trotskyists’ history in the U.S. show what left phrases mean in practice.

When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973 -Carl Davidson's "Left in Form,Right in Essence:Trotskyism and China today"

Markin comment on this series:

No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.

When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.

So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
*************
Carl Davidson's "Left in Form,Right in Essence:Trotskyism and China today"

“The ‘Russian question’ has been the main axis in world politics for nearly four decades,” states the Socialist Workers party’s 1955 resolution on the Chinese revolution.

“It now has found its extension and deepening,” the SWP continues, “in the ‘Chinese question.’ ”

The Trotskyists pose the question fairly enough. Their conclusions, however, just as in the past, lead them to the other side of the barricades.

What made the “Russian question” a touchstone for revolutionaries, demarcating Marxist-Leninists from right and “left” revisionists, was the existence of the proletarian dictatorship and its undertaking of the task of socialist construction “in one country.” The Trotskyists opposed the former in practice by denying the latter in theory.

Today China represents the main example in the world of the proletarian dictatorship and is likewise a touchstone for revolutionaries. But the Chinese revolution has also “deepened and extended” the question on two fronts: in the international arena through its call for a united front of all the world’s peoples against the “two superpowers” of U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism and in the domestic arena through its example of continuing the class struggle by the means of the “great proletarian cultural revolution” in socialist society.

Liu and Lin

In these two arenas the SWP has opposed the gains of the Chinese revolution. In general, it has attacked the policies of the Chinese Communist party under the leadership of Mao Tsetung as “ultraleftist” domestically and “rightist” internationally. In reality, however, it is the Trotskyists who vacillate between right and “left” opportunism and to the extent that their views have been reflected in China, it has been in the lines pursued by Liu Shao-chi and Lin Piao.

How is this manifested? In China’s socialist construction the theoretical link between Trotsky and Liu Shao-chi can be seen in the “theory of productive forces” put forth by both figures.

The Sept. 19, 1969 issue of Peking Review sums up the “theory” as claiming that “the socialist road cannot be taken in any country where capitalism is not highly developed and the productive forces have not reached a high level ... After the seizure of power (Liu Shao-chi) raised it to oppose socialist transformation in a futile effort to lead China on the road to capitalism.”

Liu Shao-chi’s line came into sharp conflict with Mao’s over the collectivization of agriculture through the development of the cooperative system. “Some people have expressed the opinion,” Liu is quoted as saying in The Struggle Between the Two Roads in China’s Countryside, “that steps should be taken gradually to shake the foundations of private ownership, weaken it until it is nullified and raise the mutual aid organizations for agricultural production to the level of agricultural producers cooperatives as a new factor for ‘overcoming the peasants’ spontaneous tendency.’ This is an erroneous, dangerous and utopian conception of agricultural socialism.”

Liu held the view that farming had to develop for some time on an individual basis and that “mechanization” had to occur before “cooperation.” His struggle with Mao on the issue, together with severe natural calamities, hindered the development of China’s people’s communes and was not decisively defeated until the cultural revolution.

What are the Trotskyist views on this struggle? “China’s productive forces,” states the SWP in 1955, “are far from adequate to give the statized property a socialist character.” This is rooted in Trotsky’s own position where, in 1936, he summed up the essence of the “productive forces” line.

Vulgar evolutionism

“Marxism,” writes Trotsky, “sets out from the development of technique as the fundamental spring of progress.” Marxism, of course, does no such thing. It posits the class struggle as the motive force of historical development, including the development of the productive forces. Trotsky simply replaces revolutionary dialectics with vulgar evolutionism.

The SWP also sympathized with Liu’s line on the communes. “Abolition of private property on the land,” states Daniel Roberts in the May 1959 SWP Discussion Bulletin, is an “irrational and utopian” objective, “as long as China’s technological development and industrial equipment remain low. Communist social relations can evolve only on the basis of a technology that stands higher in its development and universal application than the heights reached under capitalism in the advanced industrial countries.”

“Does setting up the communes violate the peasants’ petty bourgeois aspirations to be individual farmers?” Roberts asks. He believes that it does and that, at most, the peasants might defer this individualism, for a brief time. After this period some peasants will have become bureaucrats or workers “and then we can also expect that tens of millions of peasants will want at last to engage in individual farming plus some form of voluntary cooperation.”

“The peasantry,” as Lenin put it, “has two souls,” one aspiring toward petty capitalism and the other casting its lot with the proletariat. What the Chinese experience has demonstrated is that “technique in command” leads them along the former path while “politics in command” leads to the latter. Given correct leadership the peasant masses, states Mao, “have a potentially inexhaustible enthusiasm for socialism.”

“The ‘theory of productive forces’ hawked by Liu Shao-chi,” states Peking Review, “onesidedly describes the progress of society as the natural outcome of the development of the productive forces, chiefly the instruments of production. It completely denies that, Under certain conditions, the superstructure and the relations of production play the principle and decisive role in relation to the economic base and the productive forces; it also denies the proletariat’s consciously making revolution under the guidance of revolutionary theory, seizing political power and changing the relations of production that play the decisive role in greatly developing the productive forces and pushing social development ahead.”

China’s cultural revolution represented the massive class struggle between these two lines in every sphere of life. Its results have represented a tremendous advance for proletarian revolutionary forces, not only in China but throughout the world.

Side with revisionists

The Trotskyists, however, have tended to side with the modern Soviet revisionists in their evaluation of its results. They view it as an anti-intellectual, anti-cultural purge of one group of bureaucrats by another and if any “progressive tendencies” were involved at all, they would be found in the camp opposed to Mao Tsetung’s line.

For instance, SWP activist Les Evans, writing in the January 1973 International Socialist Review, interprets the cultural revolution in China’s educational system in the same fashion as the revisionists:

“The new standards,” he writes, commenting on university admissions policies, “are supposed to favor the children of workers and peasants, but clearly when the total enrollment is so sharply restricted this can have little application for the Chinese masses.”

Loyalty “downgrades”

The new standards downgrade educational performance and replace it with the criterion of unwavering loyalty to the regime ...
While the universities have been restricted to party members (a false claim – CD), the regime has stepped up its campaign to deport masses of city youth to remote areas of the countryside.

What the CPC has done, of course, is to apply Mao’s line of “serving the people” to its academic standards, rather than relying solely on the grading system in evaluating students. It also requires that students be selected directly from production in factories and communes, rather than entering the universities directly from the lower schools.

Its “deportation of youth” consists of the policy of tempering the masses of urban youth in continuing the revolution, going among the masses of rural workers and peasants – the basic social reality of China – to learn from them, assist the revolution in the countryside and remold their class outlook in the process.

Evans also attacks the principle of criticism and self-criticism, the leading role in the revolutionary committees of the CPC and the May 7 cadre schools, where cadres manifesting bureaucratic attitudes toward the masses are re-educated in the spirit of serving the people.

Al] this, according to the Trotskyists, amounts to so many violations of what they term “worker’s democracy” but in reality represents the practice of the CPC slogan, “Fight self, repudiate revisionism.”

To the SWP this is unbearable and only confirms their 1955 assertion that “the Mao bureaucracy succeeded in the very course of the third Chinese revolution in imposing a totalitarian state power” which the SWP claims must be overthrown “by iron necessity.”

In evaluating China’s role in international affairs, the Trotskyists switch over and put on their ultra-“leftist” hat. Here the 1955 SWP statement attacks Mao for working to “confine the revolution to China’s borders.”

What does this mean? One indication is the Trotskyist attack on China for “betraying” the Vietnamese revolution. The “evidence” is that China has not given the Vietnamese “adequate” aid. Since the Vietnamese state that China has given them whatever they needed and the Chinese have given whatever the Vietnamese have asked, what do the Trotskyists consider “adequate?”

In his pamphlet, China and the U.S., SWPer Dick Roberts gives a hint. The imperialists were stopped in Korea when China sent in its troops, he points out. “But the Chinese did not send troops to aid the Vietminh,” he adds.

Thus “adequate” aid boils down to China’s giving the People’s Liberation Army their marching orders. This is the theory of the “export” of revolution, which is opposed by both the Chinese and Vietnamese leaderships, as contrary to the basic principle that the revolution in each country must be based mainly on self-reliance, on the masses of people in each country themselves. Only then can international aid have its greatest effect.

“We have always believed,” a Chinese official stated in a 1972 interview with the Guardian, “that revolution cannot be exported ... Look at the countries of Eastern Europe which depended primarily on the Soviet Union to make revolution. They have very limited independence. Albania achieved victory by relying on its own efforts – and it is staunch and independent today. A revolution cannot succeed if the revolutionary forces do not rely on their own efforts and do not mobilize the great masses of people but place hope on aid from abroad.” (From Unite the Many, Defeat the Few, a Guardian pamphlet on China’s foreign policy.)

In addition to their opposition to the principle of self-reliance as “autarchic,” Trotskyism also attacks the Chinese call for an international united front of the world’s peoples against the “two superpowers” of U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism as a class collaborationist betrayal of the national movements in the small and medium-sized countries in the colonial world.

Support for struggles

“In our objective,” the Chinese official told the Guardian, “national struggles must not be subordinated. China has friendly and diplomatic relations with a number of countries. This should not have any effect on the revolutionary forces in those countries ... China is not against peoples’ struggles in reactionary countries or in countries where a progressive government is in power. Countries want independence, nations want liberation, people want revolution. We support this.”

Regarding countries with which we have diplomatic relations, we support the government insofar as it is engaging in struggle against the two superpowers, not in its suppression of local struggles. We believe that in giving firm backing to governments against the domination of one or two superpowers we are helping the forces of national liberation and revolution.

United front

Just as in their views on the national united front in the colonial countries, the Trotskyist line on the world scale makes no distinctions in the enemy camp, between enemies in general and particular or principal enemies at various times and stages. As a result, the revolutionary forces are left more isolated from both strategic and tactical allies, however temporary and wavering they may be.

Finally, the Trotskyists blur the distinction between the revisionist countries and the socialist countries and on most questions side with the former. For instance, in 1963 the SWP denounced Albania as one of the most despicable Stalinized regimes in Europe and added that “the internal regime of communist Yugoslavia is much freer.”

When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973 -Carl Davidson's "Left in Form, Right in Essence:The national liberation struggle"

Markin comment on this series:

No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.

When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.

So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
*********
Carl Davidson's "Left in Form, Right in Essence:The national liberation struggle"

“The strength of Marxism,” writes Leon Trotsky in The Third International After Lenin, “lies in its ability to foretell.”

Trotsky made the remark in a 1928 commentary on the Chinese revolution. In the same work he also made a number of predictions which, if he is measured by his own standard, place him considerably outside and opposed to the camp of those who deserve to be called Marxists.

Everyone knows, for instance, of the magnificent and heroic role of the Chinese peasant masses as the main force of the revolution, as the backbone of the Red Army and, under the proletarian leadership of the Chinese Communist party, as a vital component part of socialist construction in China today.

What did Trotsky “foretell?”

“Numerically the Chinese peasantry constitutes an even more overwhelming mass than the Russian peasantry,” he writes in the same work. “But ... the Chinese peasantry is even less capable of playing a leading role than the Russian At present this is no longer a matter of theoretical forecast, but a fact verified completely in all its aspects.”

It is also a matter of fact that the Chinese revolution was characterized by a protracted period of dual power for nearly two decades. “Red political power,” sustained by the Red Army and organized by the CPC, was established in a number of liberated zones stretching over vast areas and incorporating scores of millions of people. The governments of the base areas rallied the masses and step-by-step carried out the democratic tasks of the revolution, including land reform and the struggle against the Japanese imperialists.

New Democracy

Mao Tsetung termed the character of the state power and economy in these areas as “new democracy,” or a proletarian-led “dictatorship of all revolutionary classes over the counterrevolutionaries and traitors.” Their existence was seen as the first stage of the Chinese revolution, which would be completed in the main when they were extended over the entire country. At that time the revolution would immediately and uninterruptedly pass over to its second stage of socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Such a development was possible, Mao said, because of the moribund character of imperialism and the fact that the October revolution in 1917 had placed the bourgeois-democratic revolutions in the colonial countries on the side of the proletarian socialist world revolution. “It is no longer a revolution of the old type,” Mao stated in 1940, “led by the bourgeoisie with the aim of establishing a capitalist society and a state under bourgeois dictatorship. It belongs to the new type of revolution led by the proletariat ...” What Mao had done, in effect, was to creatively apply and further develop Lenin’s theory of the “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” to the concrete conditions in China.

Again, what did Trotsky “foretell?”

The formula of the democratic dictatorship has hopelessly outlived its usefulness ... the third Chinese revolution, despite the great backwardness of China, or more correctly, because of this great backwardness as compared with Russia, will not have a “democratic” period, not even such a six-month period as the October Revolution had (November 1917 to July 1918) but it will be compelled from the very outset to effect the most decisive shake-up and abolition of bourgeois property in city and village.

Lashing out at “some metaphysics-mongers plus a few Trotskyites who, brandishing their pens like lances, are tilting in all directions and creating bedlam,” Mao said in a 1940 summary:

It is a utopian view rejected by true revolutionaries to say that the democratic revolution does not have a specific task and period of its own but can be merged and accomplished simultaneously with another task, i.e., the socialist task (which can only be carried out in another period), and this is what they call “accomplishing both at one stroke.”

History has proved Mao correct. But rather than face the bankruptcy of their mentor, the present-day Trotskyists are reduced to slandering the Chinese revolution and rewriting history in a manner worthy of the Kuomintang. The U.S. Socialist Workers party’s 1955 resolution on the Chinese revolution, for instance, sums up the new democratic period that mobilized the Chinese masses to resist Japan and to future victories against Chiang Kai-shek in the following manner:

After the defeat of the second Chinese revolution, they withdrew from the cities and established an armed peasant base. For a span of over 20 years, they used this armed power to rule over the backward and scattered peasant masses. In this manner the uncontrolled, cynical, self-willed bureaucracy consolidated. They applied to the revolution the methods of deceit and ultimatism, in order, at every stage, to safeguard their interests, their power, their privileges. Each success rendered them more contemptuous and fearful of the masses, more convinced they could cheat the class struggle with impunity.

Contrary to the SWP, however, this was the most daring and dramatic period in Chinese history. Hundreds of millions of Chinese, inspired by the leadership of Mao Tsetung and the CPC, “stood up” and turned over centuries of feudal domination. Tens of thousands flocked from the Kuomintang areas to the liberated zones, where the CPC had established, for the first time, an uncorrupted and democratic system of rule that, by all accounts, won the hearts and minds of the Chinese people. By all accounts, that is, except three: those of the Chiang Kai-shek reactionaries, the Japanese fascists and the Trotskyists.

Given its evaluation of the CPC, how does the SWP think the proletarian dictatorship ever managed to come to be in China? Apart from being counter-revolutionary, the reasoning is nothing short of bizarre. By their logic, it could only have been done spontaneously by the peasants. without the leading role of the proletariat, in opposition to the CPC every step of the way and, most decisively, because of Soviet prestige and the U.S. invasion of Korea!

SWP hits “Mao & Co.”

“Throughout the revolution,” states the SWP resolution, “Mao & Co. continued to impose arbitrary restrictions and limits upon its course. The agrarian reform was carried out ‘in stages’ and was completed only when the assault of American imperialism stimulated the opposition of the landlords during and after Korea. The Chinese Stalinists were able to ride into power because the Chinese working class had been demoralized by the continuous defeats it suffered during and after the second Chinese revolution, and. by the deliberate policy of the CPC, which subordinated the cities, above all, the proletariat, to the military struggle in the countryside and thereby blocked the emergence of the workers as an independent political force. The CPC thus appeared in the eyes of the masses as the only organization with political cadres and knowledge, backed, moreover, by military force.”

The SWP has another interesting facet. It characterizes the periods of 1925-27 and 1936-47 as years of “Maoist crimes.” What happened between 1928 and 1935? Why does this period get off the hook? One reason could be that this was the time when Mao still did not have hegemony within the CPC, when its central committee was dominated by the “three ‘left’ lines,” most disastrously by the ultra-leftism of the Li Li-san line.

Li Li-san’s attack

Li Li-san attacked Mao for “right opportunism” because he made distinctions between his enemies, because he didn’t oppose the entire bourgeoisie all at once, because he built rural base areas rather than launching frontal attacks on the cities all at once, and because Mao refused to expropriate the millions of “rich” peasants and petit bourgeoisie and “force” them into the revolution. Trotsky would have agreed. “The drive on the rich peasants,” he stated in 1923, “will be the first and not the second step of the Chinese October.” The SWP would have sympathized with Li Li-san, too. “The armies and regime of Chiang,” states their resolution, “could have been knocked down like rotten pieces of wood had the CPC at any time summoned the masses in the cities to rise.”

What was the cumulative result of the “three ‘left’ lines” in China? Disaster. All except one of more than a dozen base areas were lost. The Red Army, which Mao’s influence had carefully built up. was reduced to a fragment of its former size and power. The situation was only reversed by Mao’s assumption of leadership and his political direction of the unprecedented epic of the Long March.

How could Trotsky be so mistaken that his views led both him and his followers into the camp of counter-reVolution? The essence of the matter is found in Trotsky’s liquidation of the national question.

“What is the most important, the fundamental idea of our theses?” Lenin asked at the Comintern’s Second Congress. “The distinction between oppressed nations and oppressing nations. We emphasize this distinction – in contrast to the Second International and bourgeois democracy.

The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonies and backward countries,” he also noted, “but must not merge with it, and must unfailingly preserve the independence of the proletarian movement ...”

Trotsky’s view

Trotsky made the same distinction, all right, hut arrived at the opposite conclusion: “The Russian bourgeoisie was the bourgeoisie of an imperialist oppressor state; the Chinese bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie of an oppressed colonial country. The overthrow of feudal Tsarism was a progressive task in old Russia. The overthrow of the imperialist yoke is a progressive historical task in China. However. The conduct of the Chinese bourgeoisie in relation to imperialism, the proletariat and the peasantry, was not more revolutionary than the attitude of the Russian bourgeoisie towards Tsarism and the revolutionary classes in Russia, but, if anything, viler and more reactionary. That is the only way to pose the question.”

Didn’t the Chinese national bourgeoisie at times conduct armed struggle against the imperialists? Yes, Trotsky notes, but then countered this by stating that the Russian capitalists, too, fought foreign imperialists. Trotsky forgets one “minor” point. The Russian capitalists fought in an inter-imperialist war to subjugate backward nations; the Chinese fought a war of national liberation.

Rejects alliance

Despite the experience of the Chinese revolution, the present-day Trotskyists continue to uphold their reactionary views. “Any perspective of collaborating with the ‘national’ bourgeoisie or certain of its so-called progressive sectors must be rejected,” states the resolutions of the 1968 World Congress of the so-called Fourth International. “Parallel to this, all equivocal conceptions or formulas on the nature of the revolution such as ‘national democracy,’ ‘people’s democracy,’ ‘anti-imperialist revolution,’ or ‘bloc of four classes,’ which have been irretrievably refuted ... must be rejected.”

This is the real reason why the SWP refused to support the political program of the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam and stood with Washington in their refusal to support the demand, “Sign the Treaty Now!”

As succinctly stated in Forward Along the Path Charted By Karl Marx, written by the Vietnamese revolutionary Truong Chinh, the Vietnamese revolution is precisely a two-stage revolution, passing through a “new-type bourgeois-democratic revolution,” comprising at that stage an alliance of “four revolutionary forces,” including the “national bourgeoisie.” It has conducted the “national democratic” revolution in the liberated zones, conducted a people’s war based on the principle of self- reliance and on its completion, will uninterruptedly pass over to the socialist revolution.

Hiding behind “leftism”

The SWP opposes all this as so much “counterrevolution,” but has tried to hide its real views on Vietnam from the masses of anti-imperialist activists behind “left” phrases. For the SWP to come out in the open with its views on the line summed up by Truong Thinh would only lead to a greater self-exposure of~the renegade character of the Trotskyist line.

“The Trotskyite theory of permanent revolution,” states the Albanian commentator Agim Popa, “is also the theory of the negation of the national movement in the development of the revolutionary, movement, the theory of the overestimation of the external factor and the negation of the internal factor as decisive in the revolution and, in the last analysis, a theory of the ‘export’ of revolution.” These concepts also apply to the Trotskyist line on China’s view of the united front and the cultural revolution.

When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973-Carl Davidson's "Left in Form,Right in Essence:The two-stage revolution"

Markin comment on this series:

No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.

When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.

So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
********
Carl Davidson's "Left in Form,Right in Essence:The two-stage revolution"

Trotsky’s last stand in his battle against the Comintern, while he was still within its ranks, was on the question of the Chinese revolution.

Today his contemporary followers stand in opposition to China’s path of socialist developmnent and its contribution to the strategy of world revolution.

What is the connection between the two?

The heart of the Trotskyist position on the Chinese revolution lies in its failure to grasp the essence of the revolution’s first stage as a bourgeois-democratic revolution combining the agrarian struggle against feudalism with the national liberation struggle against foreign imperialism.

China in the 1920s was a vast semi-colonial and semi-feudal country. Its population was overwhelmingly comprised of rural peasants under the yoke of a large feudal landholding class. The nation was disunited, torn apart by warlord rivalries throughout the country, and through competing imperialist powers dominating and looting its various coastal cities.

The Chinese industrial proletariat was small hut militant, concentrated in a few urban centers. The bourgeoisie was weak and divided. Its most powerful sector was a class of compradors or “bureaucrat capitalists” integrated with colonial interests and linked to feudal forces. In between there was a more numerous national or “middle” bourgeoisie, itself hemmed in by the feudal warlords and foreign capital, but exploiters of the workers and peasants nonetheless. At the other end was also a large urban petty bourgeoisie, comprised of many diverse strata.

Friends and enemies

This is a brief summary of a more detailed picture of China drawn by Mao Tsetung in his 1926 essay, Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society. Mao wrote the work in order to answer the question he posed as of “the first importance for the revolution: Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?” He answered in the following way:

Our enemies are all those in league with imperialism-the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big landlord class and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them. The leading force in our revolution is the industrial proletariat. Our closest friends are the entire semi-proletariat (the peasant masses) and petty bourgeoisie. As for the vacillating middle bourgeoisie, their right wing may become our enemy and their left wing may become our friend – but we must be constantly on our guard and not let them create confusion within our ranks.

Trotsky completely opposed this position, which was essentially the same as that of the Comintern’s call during the 1920s for a revolutionary “bloc of four classes” in China. The “bloc” was seen as a national united front of the workers, peasants, petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie. The spearhead of the struggle was to be aimed at foreign imperialism. Its leading force was to be the proletariat and its motive force was to be the agrarian revolution of the peasant masses against the feudal landlords.

Politically, the bloc took the form of an alliance between the Communist party and the Kuomintang (KMT), which was at that time waging a massive armed struggle against feudal and imperialist forces. The CP joined its ranks, following the guidance of the 1923 Third Congress of the Comintern, led by Lenin, to “push the Kuomintang leftward.” While members of the KMT and its armies, however, the CP was to maintain its political and organizational independence in order to bring into effect the leading role of the working class within the united front. While the KMT was comprised of all classes, it represented the interests of the national bourgeoisie. initially under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen and later of Chiang Kai-shek.

Trotsky considered the “bloc of four classes” counter-revolutionary and a manifestation of “Menshevism” imposed in China by Stalin. In his view the struggle had to be spearheaded against the bourgeoisie as a whole. At the same time, he played down or dismissed entirely the feudal and imperialist targets of the revolution.

“No landlords”

“There is almost no estate of landlords in China,” Trotsky wrote in a ludicrous passage in his 1929 work, The Permanent Revolution. “The landowners are much more intimately bound up with the capitalists than in Tsarist Russia, and the specific weight of the agrarian question is therefore much lighter than in Tsarist Russia.”

Stalin, in a reply to Trotsky at a 1927 meeting of the Comintern, noted the vast and elemental upsurge of the peasants against the feudal landlords and asked:

Where does the agrarian revolution in China, with its demand for the confiscation of the landlords’ land, come from? ... Surely, the agrarian revolution cannot have dropped from the skies?

Trotsky practically liquidated the agrarian content of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and limited its scope mainly to the interests of the national bourgeoisie. “The Chinese revolution,” he states in The Chinese Revolution and the Theses of Comrade Stalin, “has a national bourgeois character principally because the development of the productive forces of Chinese capitalism collideE with its governmental customs dependence upon the countries of imperialism.”

“The revolution in China,” Stalin answered Trotsky ironically, “is primarily, so to speak, an anti-customs revolution ...”

“Permit me to observe,” he continued, “that this is the viewpoint of a state counselor of His Highness’ Chang Tso-lin (China’s self- proclaimed emperor.)”

If Trotsky’s viewpoint is correct, then it must be admitted that Chang Tso-lin and Chiang Kaishek are right in not desiring either an agrarian or a workers’ revolution and in striving only for the abolition of the unequal treaties and the establishment of customs autonomy for China.

Rightist in essence

Thus through its “left” form of opposition to the national united front during the anti-feudal and anti-imperialist stage of the revolution, Trotsky’s viewpoint is revealed to be rightist in its essence.

How were these questions reflected in the actual practice of the Chinese revolution? The Trotskyists have claimed that Chiang Kai-shek’s betrayal of the united front and massacre of Communists in 1927 conclusively demonstrated the “counter-revolutionary” character of the Comintern line at the time as well as Mao’s line as it is still being developed and applied today.

The Chinese Communist party believes that its line was correct during “the early and middle stages of the 1924-27 period and was summed up by Mao in his Analysis of Classes ... Toward the end, however, as Chiang Kai-shek shifted increasingly to the right and the national bourgeoisie, in the main, deserted the revolution, the party’s line came to be dominated by the right opportunist policies of Chen Tu-hsiu, the CPC’s general secretary.

In the face of the KMT’s efforts to subordinate the CPC, spurred on by the growing fear of the worker and peasant upsurge within the KMT leadership, Chen Tu-hsiu pursued a policy of “all alliance and no struggle” within the united front, thus liquidating the proletariat’s leading role. (he also feared the peasant risings, believing they had “gone too far” and that they were a “conservative” force “unlikely to join the revolution.” In practice this meant capitulation to the betrayal of Chiang Kai-shek.

“Left” opposition to peasants

At the same time a second deviation arose in the CPC, the “left” opportunist line of Chang Kuo-tao, aimed at “all struggle and no alliance.” While Chen Tu-hsiu only curried favor with the KMT and discounted the peasants. Chang Kuotao urged reliance “only on the labor movement” and likewise discounted the peasants.

Opposed to what was identical in both the right and “left” opportunist lines was Mao Tsetung, who organized and supported the agrarian revolts, stating that “without the poor peasants there would be no revolution.” Mao’s policy on the united front throughout the Chinese revolution was one of both “unite with and struggle against,” always maintaining the independence of the CPC, its leading role among the masses and its armed power.

Mao’s position did not win hegemony at the time. “In 1927 Chen Tu-hsiu’s capitulationism,” Mao wrote later in 1937, “led to the failure of the revolution. No member of our party should ever forget this historical lesson written in blood.”

Which tendency was most represented by the general line of the Comintern? “I know that there are Kuomintangists and even Chinese Communists,” Stalin stated in 1926, “who do not consider it possible to unleash revolution in the countryside, since they fear that if the peasantry were drawn into the revolution it would disrupt the united anti-imperialist front. That is a profound error, comrades. The more quickly and thoroughly the Chinese peasantry is drawn into the revolution, the stronger and more powerful the anti-imperialist front in China will be.”

For as much as a year prior to Chiang Kaishek’s 1927 coup, the Comintern had urged and warned the Chinese CP to work for the “resignation or expulsion of Rights from the Kuomintang.” Six weeks prior to the coup, it stated, “It is necessary to adopt the course of arming the workers and peasants and converting the peasant committees in the localities into actual organs of governmental authority equipped with armed self-defense ... The Communist party must not come forward as a brake on the mass movement; the Communist i arty should not cover up the treacherous and reactionary policy of the Kuomintang Rights, and should mobilize the masses around the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist party on the basis of exposing the Rights.”

In the main, the Comintern advocated a policy put into practice independently by Mao and ignored or opposed by both Chen Tu-hsiu and Chang Kuo-tao. There were also a number of mistakes, some of which were corrected and others which had more serious consequences. Most significant was the role of Borodin, a key Comintern advisor in China at the time who vacillated on carrying out the Comintern line and took a number of positions close to Chen Tu-hsiu.

If Trotsky’s line can be said to have had anything in common with Chinese reality, however, it was closest to the “left” opportunism of Chang Kuo-tao. Trotsky later saw in Chiang Kai-shek’s coup the “completion” of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the onset of new period of “stabilization” in China. What actually transpired was a prolonged period of renewed crisis, civil war and “dual power” in the form of liberated bases in the countryside. Trotsky’s line here, which called for a “constituent assembly” and legal struggle for democratic rights, was thoroughly rightist and devoid of any connection with the actual course of class struggle.

From The Archives Of The International Communist League- The Stalinist School of Falsification Revisted- A Reply To The "Guardian"- Part Two-SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY

Markin comment:

In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.

After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.

I am continuing today  what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.

However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973

Markin comment on this series:

No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.

When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.

So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
******
The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited

These articles were originally serialized in Workers Vanguard, in 1973, starting in the 22 June issue [No.23] and concluding in the 10 October issue [No. 30]

Reply to the Guardian

THE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION REVISITED

2. SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY

The story of the origins of the Stalinist doctrine of "socialism in one country" is one of the usurpation of power by a bureaucratic stratum at the head of the first workers state in history. This privileged caste consolidated itself in the Soviet state apparatus which was formed as a necessary means of defending the conquests of the October Revolution in a backward peasant country, ravaged by civil war and isolated by the imperialist blockade and the triple defeat of proletarian revolution in Germany (1919, 1921 and 1923). These unfavorable conditions required a policy of "compromise" and consolidation rather than a blind "extension" of the revolution. Attraction of bourgeois experts to aid in the rebuilding of industry, guarantees to the middle peasants in order to end the famine, a policy of united front with the reformist leaders of the labor movement in the capitalist countries in order to find a road to the masses--these were the necessary tasks of the hour. To reject "compromises" on principle, as did the "Left Communists," to reject the use of bourgeois experts on principle and call for the replacement of state management of industry with trade union control, as did the "Workers' Opposition," could only lead to defeat. All the same, every compromise brings with it dangers.

Lenin was aware of these dangers from the beginning and set up the "Workers and Peasants Inspection" (Rabkrin) as early as 1919 in order to curb bureaucratic abuses. The Rabkrin, however, was headed by Stalin and became in effect his private police force.

By the time of the 11th Party Congress in 1922, Lenin was forced to observe:

"If we take Moscow with its 4,700 Communists in responsible positions, and if we take that huge bureaucratic machine, that gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom? I doubt very much whether it can truthfully be said that the Communists are directing that heap."

And in his very last writing, "Better Fewer, But Better" (1923) he called for an all-out war on bureaucratism, a drastic curtailment of the Rabkrin and its amalgamation with the Control Commission, noting that the former "does not at present enjoy the slightest authority." In a postscript to his "Testament" Lenin called for Stalin's removal as General Secretary of the Party.

The Triumvirate vs. Trotsky

But simple administrative actions could not abolish a phenomenon thrown up by history itself, rather than by individual or organizational failings. The country was tired from five years of starvation and civil war, tired of waiting for a European revolution which did not come. This mood and the conservative interests of the vast bureaucracy, which overwhelmingly dominated the Communist Party itself, were reflected soon after Lenin's death by the consolidation of power in the hands of the Triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, and the practical exclusion of Trotsky from the central leadership.

A sharp crisis in the party broke out the winter of 1923-24 over the combined issues of party democracy and industrialization. The "New Economic Policy" of cooperation with the peasantry had led to the emergence of a strong kulak (rich peasant) element in the countryside which was increasingly conscious of its bourgeois interests in opposition to the Soviet government, while industry continued to grow at a "snail's pace"; at the same time Stalin was running the party as a private fiefdom through the system of appointed secretaries. Trotsky demanded a sharp turn toward centralized planning and industrialization, an offensive against the kulaks and the return of democratic norms within the Party. The Triumvirate opposed this. (A year later Bukharin, who supported Stalin's policies, made his famous speech about "building socialism at a snail's pace" and calling on peasants to "enrich yourselves"!). What is more, they moved to make sure their line would prevail at all costs: during February-March 1924 no less than 240,000 raw recruits were brought into the party in the "Lenin levy," and as soon as they were enrolled they were lined up as voting cattle to back the line of the General Secretary (Stalin). By this and various other bureaucratic maneuvers he was able to eliminate almost all oppositionists from the May 1924 Party conference, which was turned into an anti-Trotsky rally.

The second engagement in the battle was begun with the "literary controversy" over Trotsky's" Lessons of October," an introduction to his articles of 1917 in which he exposed the role played by the current party leaders during the revolution. The fact that Zinoviev and Kamenev had opposed the insurrection, resigned from their government and party posts and demanded a coalition with the Mensheviks, or that Stalin had called for support to the Provisional Government of Prince Lvov in March 1917, was not widely known among the younger generation and was extremely embarrassing to the ruling group.

They counterattacked by denying that there was ever a right wing of Bolshevism, claiming that Trotsky played an insignificant role during the insurrection and launching a campaign accusing Trotsky, the organizer of the October Revolution and the Red Army, of never having broken with his pre-1917 views of conciliation with the Mensheviks. They also charged him with being hostile to the peasantry and continuing to hold to his theory of "permanent revolution" against Lenin's formula of the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the peasantry and the proletariat." The latter charge was correct, but they had to ignore the fact that Lenin came over on all the essential aspects of permanent revolution in his "April Theses" of 1917, that he had explicitly abandoned his earlier formulation and had waged a furious struggle particularly against Kamenev on this point. For the rest, they could rely only on lies and slander.

It is true that Trotsky wrongly called for conciliation with the Mensheviks until 1914, but he was convinced by the betrayals of the reformist Social Democrats in World War I that a split was inevitable and necessary. Lenin himself remarked that, "Trotsky long ago said that unification is impossible. Trotsky understood this and from that time on there has been no better Bolshevik" ("Minutes of the Petrograd Committee of the Bolshevik Party," 1 [14] November 1917). Stalin, on the other hand, called for unification with the Mensheviks as late as April 1917 when the issue was sharply posed and Tseretelli (the Menshevik leader) was soon to enter the bourgeois Provisional Government!

"Order of the day: Tseretelli's proposal for unification.

"Stalin: We ought to go. It is necessary to define our proposals as to the terms of unification. Unification is possible along the lines of Zimmerwald-Kienthal [antiwar conferences in World War I]."
--"Draft Protocol of the March 1917 All-Russian Conference of Party Workers"

As for Kamenev-Zinoviev, the other two members of the Triumvirate and supposed defenders of Leninism against Trotsky, they called for conciliation during and after the insurrection itself (call for a joint government with the Mensheviks) and opposed the uprising! No right wing in the Bolshevik party? Lenin called them "strikebreakers of the revolution" and called for their expulsion if they did not return to their posts.

"Forgetting" such important episodes of the revolutionary struggle also requires the deliberate rewriting of history. Thus when the minutes of the Petrograd Committee of the Bolsheviks in 1917 were being published the editors simply cut out the meeting in which Lenin commented that "there has been no better Bolshevik" than Trotsky! However, one of the printers managed to pass a galley proof to Trotsky and it has been preserved for posterity. Concerning Trotsky's role in the October Revolution things were a bit stickier since John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World showed in great detail Trotsky's role as the organizer of the insurrection. So when the campaign against "Trotskyism" began Stalin summarily announced that Reed had distorted the facts, a discovery which had escaped everyone's eyes for the previous seven years. Lenin's "Testament" was also suppressed (though Khrushchev later admitted its validity).

Stalin Discovers "Socialism in One Country"

Even a steady diet of lies, distortions and slander could go only so far in securing the power of the new ruling clique. Stalin-Zinoviev-Kamenev were particularly vulnerable because in the theoretical arsenal of post-1917 Bolshevism, in the resolutions of the Communist International or the program of the Russian Communist Party, there was nothing which would "justify" the Triumvirate's increasingly conservative appetites. They needed a new theory which would be a clear alternative to Trotsky's permanent revolution. This was found in the doctrine of "socialism in one country."

In the current Guardian series on Trotskyism Carl Davidson defends this Stalinist theory with the claim that it is good Bolshevik coin:

"On the other hand, Trotsky stood in opposition to the Bolsheviks in claiming that the proletariat was bound to come into 'hostile collision' with the broad masses of peasants during socialist construction and that 'without direct state support from the European proletariat, the working class of Russia cannot maintain itself in power and transform its temporary rule into a durable socialist dictatorship."
--Guardian, 11 April 1973

This is a myth manufactured out of whole cloth. Until December of 1924 nobody in the Bolshevik party, not even Stalin, claimed that it was possible to build socialism in one country, without direct state aid from a victorious proletarian revolution in Europe.

"Socialism in one country" is a complete perversion of Marxism in the service of a parasitic bureaucratic clique which desires above all to escape from the logic of history and to build a comfortable nest isolated from the class struggle. In Engels' first draft of the Communist Manifesto this "theory" is clearly rejected. He wrote:

"Question Nineteen: Can such a revolution take place in one country alone?

"Answer: No. Large-scale industry, by creating a world market, has so linked up the peoples of the earth, and especially the civilized peoples of the earth, that each of them is dependent on what happens in other lands....The communist revolution will, therefore, not be a national revolution alone; it will take place in all civilized countries, or at least in Great Britain, the United States, France and Germany, atone and the same time."
--F. Engels, "The Principles of Communism," 1847

In a certain sense, this statement was too categorical; history has shown that it is possible for the revolution to be victorious, for the dictatorship of the proletariat to be established, in a single state. But the fundamental proposition continues to hold, that socialism cannot be constructed in a single nation.

Lenin recognized this and, as early as 1906, wrote:

"The Russian revolution has enough forces of its own to conquer. But it has not enough forces to retain the fruits of its victory...for in a country with an enormous development of small-scale industry, the small-scale commodity producers, among them the peasants, will inevitably turn against the proletarian when he goes from freedom toward socialism....In order to prevent a restoration, the Russian revolution has need, not of a Russian reserve; it has need of help from the outside. Is there such a reserve in the world? There is: the socialist proletariat in the West."

It was not until early 1917 that Lenin wrote of the possibility of the realization of the dictatorship of the proletariat first in backward Russia, but in no way did this imply an isolated penurious "socialist" society. For the Bolsheviks the dictatorship of the proletariat meant a bridge to revolution in the West. The conditions for the socialist revolution (creating the dictatorship of the proletariat) and for socialism (the abolition of classes) are not identical. That the dictatorship of the proletariat came first to Russia by no means implied that it would be the first to arrive at socialism.

This distinction was so clear that Stalin himself, in early 1924, wrote:

"But the overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of the power of the proletariat in one country does not yet mean that the complete victory of socialism has been ensured. The principal task of socialism--the organization of socialist production--has still to be fulfilled. Can this task be fulfilled, can the final victory of socialism be achieved in one country, without the joint efforts of the proletarians in several advanced countries? No, it cannot. To overthrow the bourgeoisie the efforts of one country are sufficient; this is proved by the history of our revolution. For the final victory of socialism, for the organization of socialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of a peasant country like Russia, are insufficient; for that the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries are required."
--J. V. Stalin, "Foundations of Leninism," May 1924

In subsequent editions this was replaced by the opposite thesis, namely that "we have all that is necessary for building a complete socialist society".,

It could not be more clear that the Bolshevik perspective was one of proletarian internationalism, completely and unalterably opposed to the doctrine of socialism in one country. The Stalinists search through volumes of Lenin's writings to pick out isolated quotations which will "prove" that Lenin, too, believed in the doctrine of socialism in one country. But if that were true, even ignoring the many times Lenin denied this, why did Stalin write in May 1924 the exact opposite? If "socialism in one country" were orthodox Bolshevism why didn't anyone discover this until late 1924?

The Stalinists' favorite "proof," quoted by Davidson, is from Lenin's 1915 article "On the Slogan for a United States of Europe":

"As a separate slogan, however, the slogan of a United States of the World would hardly be a correct one, first, because it merges with socialism; second, because it may be wrongly interpreted to mean that the victory of socialism in a single country is impossible, and it may also create misconceptions as to the relations of such a country to the others.

"Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone. After expropriating the capitalists and organizing their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that country will arise against the rest of the world--the capitalist world--attracting to its cause the oppressed classes of other countries, stirring uprisings in those countries against the capitalists, and in the case of need using even armed force against the exploiting classes and their states."

Taken in the context of all his other writings from this period, it is absolutely clear that Lenin is referring here not to a "socialist society" but to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Moreover, he was obviously referring to Europe, since in 1915 Lenin did not even admit the possibility of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia before a socialist revolution in the West!

The other main Stalinist "proof" is a quote from Lenin's 1923 article "On Cooperation":

"Indeed, the power of the state over all large-scale means of production, political power in the hands of the proletariat, the alliance of this proletariat with the many millions of small and very small peasants, the assured proletarian leadership of the peasantry, etc.--is this not all that is necessary to build a complete socialist society...?"

This article is limited to the political and legal prerequisites for socialism. Elsewhere ("Our Revolution," 1923) Lenin referred to the statement that "the development of the productive forces of Russia has not attained the level that makes socialism possible" as "incontrovertible," while polemicizing against the Mensheviks who concluded from this that a revolution was worthless.

The Productive Forces

During the 1930's, in a setting of high inflation, a reign of terror inside the Communist Party and a civil war with the peasants caused by Stalin's program of forced collectivization, the "complete victory of socialism" was announced. A resolution of the seventh congress of the Communist International (1935) declared that with the nationalization of industry, collectivization and liquidation of the kulaks as a class, "the final and irrevocable triumph of socialism and the all-sided reinforcement of the state of the proletarian dictatorship is achieved in the Soviet Union." In 1936 the program of the Communist Youth declared: "The whole national economy of the country has become socialist." A speaker favoring the new program argued:

"The old program contains a deeply mistaken anti-Leninist assertion to the effect that Russia can arrive at socialism only through a world proletarian revolution.' This point of the program is basically wrong. It reflects Trotskyist views."

The old program, written in 1921 by Bukharin, was approved by the Politburo with the participation of Lenin!

In his article, Davidson tries to maintain a pretense of orthodoxy by stating that "Marxist-Leninists, of course, have never held that the final victory of socialism--the classless society--is possible in one country." By his own admission then, the Russian Communist Party of the 1930's, under Stalin, was not Marxist-Leninist!

Davidson also accuses Trotsky of holding a "right opportunist 'theory of productive forces'" as the basis for opposition to the slogan of socialism in one country. But this "theory of productive forces" is the very basis of Marxist materialist analysis of history! It was Marx himself who wrote:

"this development of productive forces...is absolutely necessary as a practical premise [for socialism]: firstly for the reason that without it only want is made general, and with want the struggle for necessities and all the old crap would necessarily be reproduced; and, secondly, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established....Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable, powers...;and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples 'all at once' or simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with them."
--K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, 1847

Davidson ridicules these basic Marxist propositions (ascribing them instead to Khrushchev and Liu Shao-chi!), claiming:

"Most socialist construction that has taken place in the world has been in relatively backward countries. But to call it 'socialism,' in Trotsky's view, would only 'hopelessly discredit the idea of socialist society in the eyes of the toiling masses.'"

This view, according to Davidson, is "patently ridiculous."

Just how "socialist" was the Soviet Union in the 1930's? While Russia had made great strides in industrialization, definitively proving the superiority of socialist organization of production even with the terrible restrictions imposed by Stalin's bureaucratic rule, it was still far behind the advanced capitalist countries. The most basic necessities--decent housing, adequate food and clothing--were still unavailable to the masses of the population. Inflation was rampant and a black market continued to exist. Meanwhile the bureaucracy used its power to secure its own well-being, which concretely meant high salaries, special shops, automobiles, country houses and many other privileges. Lenin had said that the dying away of the state would begin on the very day of the seizure of power. The proletarian state, which was still an organ of class rule, would cease to be a separate power above society but the instrument of the vast majority, carrying out their will and basing itself on their active participation. In the Soviet Union of 1935 the state had not begun to wither away, but had grown instead into a gigantic apparatus of suppression and compulsion.

This, Brother Davidson, is socialism? Even after Stalin's political counterrevolution the Soviet Union was still a great advance over the conditions of czarism and capitalism. It remained a workers state, in the sense of preserving socialist property forms, though badly degenerated. But the classless society (announced by Stalin's 1936 Constitution of the USSR) it was not.

Betrayal of the 1926 British General Strike

The most damning proof of the counterrevolutionary meaning of the doctrine of "socialism in one country" was in the field of Stalin's foreign policy and his systematic downplaying, and finally abolition (1943), of the Communist International in favor of blocs with the bourgeoisies of the various countries where revolution threatened. An immediate and graphic illustration of the real content of Stalinist "internationalism" was provided by the 1926 British general strike.

In 1925 British coal operators sought to terminate the 1924 contract and replace it with anew agreement which would reduce miners to a below-subsistence standard of living. After an official inquiry into the industry the government returned a report which would have placed the main burden of modernizing the coal industry on the miners. Their answer was a strike beginning on 3 May 1926. The next day the whole country was in the throes of a general strike. Councils of action were set up in the workers' districts to keep up morale and control the issuing of permits for emergency work or special transport. This was not simply an industrial dispute but a direct attack on the bosses' state.

The General Council of the Trades Union Congress, which had been entrusted with the conduct of the strike, called it off after nine days and at the height of its effectiveness, frightened by its revolutionary implications. Men going back to work found themselves blacklisted or accepted back only on terms including reduction in wages, loss of seniority or leaving the unions. On 13 May a second general strike occurred over the victimizations, but after conciliatory speeches from the TUC leaders--and having no alternative leadership--the men again returned to work. The miners stayed out until a series of separate agreements made between 23 and 29 December, but they were forced by the treachery of the trade-union tops to fight alone. The owners won on all counts: the national contract was lost and miners had to work longer hours for lower wages.

During the temporary retreat of the class struggle in Europe during 1924-25 Stalin decided to try and make peace with the reformist trade-union leaders, possibly abandoning the Red International of Labor Unions. The keystone to this policy was the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee, a bloc between the Soviet trade unions and the General Council of the British TUC, formed in May 1925. After the General Council betrayed the 1926 general strike, Trotsky demanded an immediate rupture with these strikebreakers. Stalin and Bukharin refused. (Zinoviev had at this point joined the Opposition, though he was to capitulate to Stalin two years later.) In 1926 the General Council supported British imperialism's repression of the Chinese revolution. Trotsky again demanded the denunciation of the Anglo-Russian Committee. Again Stalin refused.

When it finally succumbed in 1927 it was the British leaders who dumped the Committee. Its principal aim had supposedly been to oppose British intervention in Russia. As a logical extension of the doctrine of socialism in one country, this mythical aid from the labor fakers was sufficient grounds for sacrificing the 1926 general strike.

Stalin Orders Chinese Communists to Their Graves

Another even more horrifying example of the meaning of socialism in one country was Stalin's policy in the Chinese revolution of 1925-27. As early as 1924 the Chinese Communist Party had entered the populist bourgeois Kuomintang party of Sun Yat-sen on orders from Moscow. Trotsky objected when the matter was discussed then at the Politburo. The Chinese CP leadership under Chen Tu-hsiu likewise repeatedly objected. In October 1925 they proposed preparing to leave the Kuomintang; the plan was turned down by the Comintern Executive on Stalin's instructions. Stalin's line was that the revolution must be restricted to a bourgeois-democratic stage, under the leadership of a "bloc of four classes" including the national bourgeoisie, urban petty bourgeoisie, workers and peasants. The political expression of this bloc was the Kuomintang, to which the Chinese Communists were to subordinate themselves. They were directed to hold down the class struggle against the "anti-imperialist bourgeoisie" in the cities and seek a balance between them and the peasant movement in the countryside, above all maintaining the unity of all anti-imperialist forces.

Stalin's main interest in China at the time was not to foster revolution but to achieve a diplomatic bloc with the Kuomintang government. In early 1926 this bourgeois party was admitted to the Communist International as an associate party, and the Cl Executive Committee, the "General Staff of World Revolution," elected Sun's successor General Chiang Kai-shek an honorary member! Only a few weeks later, on 20 March, Chiang carried out his first anti-communist coup, barring CP members from all leadership posts in the Kuomintang and demanding a list of all CP members who had joined the Kuomintang. Under orders from CI representatives, the Chinese party leadership agreed! In October 1926 Stalin actually sent a telegram urging the Chinese CP to call off a peasant revolt in Kuangtung province. Trotsky commented on this:

"The official subordination of the Communist Party to the bourgeois leadership, and the official prohibition of forming soviets (Stalin and Bukharin taught that the Kuomintang 'took the place of, soviets) was a grosser and more glaring betrayal of Marxism than all the deeds of the Mensheviks in the years 1905-1917."
--L. D. Trotsky, "Permanent Revolution," 1928

This was bad enough, but after a challenge from the Left Opposition headed by Trotsky and Zinoviev, and during the crucial days of the Shanghai insurrection which began in March 1927, Stalin again and again reaffirmed the policy of capitulating to the nationalists while the latter were preparing to liquidate the communists. A March 1927 editorial in the Communist International said the main task in China was "the further development of the Kuomintang." On 5 April Trotsky warned that Chiang Kai-shek was preparing a quasi-bonapartist coup against the workers and called for the formation of workers councils to frustrate this aim. At the same time Stalin boasted at a party meeting in Moscow that "we would use the Chinese bourgeoisie and then throw it away like a squeezed lemon." Also at this time the Chinese CP leadership was appealing to Moscow, trying to impress the CI with the significance of the Shanghai events, the greatest workers' rising in Asia, and with the need to break with the Kuomintang. They were ordered to surrender Shanghai to Chiang's armies, and on 12 April the Kuomintang army carried out a massacre which cost the lives of tens of thousands of Communists and militant workers who had laid down their arms at Stalin's orders. This was "socialism in one country in practice!

But still Stalin would not abandon his policy and, declaring that the alliance with Chiang had now lapsed (!), he now ordered a bloc with the left-Kuomintang which had set up a government in Wuhan. Again Chinese Communists were ordered to hold back the peasant movement in order not to antagonize the "anti-imperialist" bourgeoisie. And again the bourgeois nationalists turned on the CP. At the end of the year Stalin moved to head off criticism of his Chinese policy from the Left Opposition by ordering an uprising in Canton by telegraph in a tactical situation where it was bound to suffer defeat, which it did despite the heroic defense of the "soviet government" by the Canton workers.

According to Davidson, "the Comintern advocated a policy put into practice independently by Mao and ignored or opposed by both Chen Tu-hsiu and Chang Kuo-tao." In actual fact Mao did not criticize the line followed by Chen in this period. At one point (fall 1924) he was expelled from the CP Central Committee for his too-close cooperation with the right-wing Kuomintang leaders!

While the Opposition's line on China had been firmly defeated in the thoroughly bureaucratized Russian Communist Party and the Comintern, it was still dangerous to Stalin to have Trotsky at freedom in the Soviet capital. In consequence he ordered the arrest of the organizer of the October Revolution and founder of the Red Army, exiling him to Alma Ata in Central Asia and deporting him from the USSR two years later. The Bolshevik party had been transformed from the leading revolutionary force in the world into a mere appendage of Stalin's bureaucracy. When Davidson and the Maoists today support the doctrine of socialism in one country, it is this history of betrayals that they are defending.

When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973 -Carl Davidson's Left in Form, Right in Essence-Socialism in one country

Markin comment on this series:

No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.

When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.

So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
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Carl Davidson's Left in Form, Right in Essence-Socialism in one country

It is an historical fact that Trotsky stood together with Lenin and the, Bolshevik party during the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia.

But it is also true that in February 1917 Lenin termed Trotsky a “swine” and “scoundrel” and in March of 1918 declared his views on the most crucial issue to the survival of the revolution – the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty – to be “absolutely wrong.”

Why were Trotsky and the Leninists able to find a temporary unity during the October period? Why did that unity succumb to a series of “tactical differences” which eventually developed into two opposing lines on the question of building “socialism in one country?”

The answer lies in the internal contradiction in Trotsky’s views and his failure to take into account the changing national and international objective conditions determining the course of the revolutionary struggle.

On one hand, Trotsky stood in opposition to the bourgeoisie and called for the immediate transition to the proletarian dictatorship. In spite of the fact that this was an ultra-leftist position prior to the first stage of the revolution in February, Trotsky’s opposition to the Provisional Government and his call for the assumption of all power to the Soviets during the transition to the second stage placed him objectively in the same position as the Bolsheviks.

On the other hand, Trotsky stood in opposition to the Bolsheviks in claiming that the proletariat was bound to come into “hostile collision” with the broad masses of peasants during socialist construction and that “without direct state support from the European proletariat, the working class of Russia cannot maintain itself in power and transform its temporary rule into a durable socialist dictatorship. This we cannot doubt for an instant.”

These differences between Trotsky and the Leninists did not immediately become paramount for two reasons, both related to objective conditions. First, internally, Trotsky’s views on the peasantry did not immediately come to the foreground because the Soviet power’s first tasks in the countryside were not socialist construction but the completion of the democratic revolution against the big landlords.

With this much Trotsky agreed. But he did not believe it could go much further without socialism in power in Western Europe. After victory in the Civil War and the successful conclusion of the temporary retreat during the period of the New Economic Program (NEP), the objective conditions changed. Trotsky’s underlying views on the peasant masses did not change, however, which led him to vacillate on agrarian policy and finally to term the actual rural collectivization an “economic adventure.”

Second, on external questions concerning the “direct state support” of the European workers, Trotsky’s disagreements were seen as “tactical” because the immediate postwar period was viewed as one of acute crisis for the capitalists and direct revolutionary offensive by the revolutionary proletariat. Despite the emergence of Soviets in Hungary and Germany, however, the offensive failed to bring about another proletarian state power. After its peak in 1921, the offensive slacked off and by 1923 had turned into a proletarian defensive and a new period of temporary stabilization and offensive by capital.

Why were the proletarian forces unable to go further and take power in Europe? “It could have taken place,” said Lenin, “but for the fact that the split within the proletariat of Western Europe was deeper, and the treachery of the former socialist leaders greater, than had been imagined.” Trotsky, on the other hand, laid the main blame not on the social-democratic opportunists, but on “the weaknesses, unpreparedness and irresolution of the communist parties and the vicious errors of their leadership ...”

But what did this turn of events mean for the new Soviet power?

Although Lenin had proclaimed in March 1918 “that without a revolution in Germany, we shall perish,” he also made the point even earlier, in 1915, that “uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country taken separately.”

“It has turned out,” said Lenin later, after the Civil War, “that while our forecasts did not materialize simply, rapidly and directly, they were fulfilled insofar as we achieved the main thing. The possibility has been maintained of the existence of proletarian rule and the Soviet Republic even in the event of the world socialist revolution being delayed.”

“But is the existence of a socialist republic in a capitalist environment at all conceivable?” Lenin asked again. “From the political and military aspects it seemed inconceivable. That it is possible, both politically and militarily, has now been proved. It is a fact.”

By ignoring the changed objective conditions, Trotsky arrived at the opposite conclusion: “The organic interdependence of the several countries, developing toward an international division of labor, excludes the possibility of building socialism in one country. This means that the Marxist doctrine, which posits that the socialist revolution can begin only on a national basis, while the building of socialism in one country is impossible, has been rendered doubly and trebly true, all the more so now, in the modern epoch ...”

Final victory is worldwide

Marxist-Leninists, of course, have never held that the final victory of socialism – the classless society – is possible in one country. “According to the Leninist viewpoint,” states Mao Tsetung, “the final victory of a socialist country not only requires the efforts of the proletariat and the broad masses of the people at home, but also involves the victory of the world revolution and the abolition of the system of exploitation of man by man over the whole globe, upon which all mankind will be emancipated.”

The Trotskyists consider this distinction between the final aims and the present tasks of socialist construction to be so much sand thrown in the face of the masses. “The lowest stage of communism,” said Trotsky, referring to Marx’s term describing the initial period of socialist construction, “begins at that level to which the most advanced capitalism has drawn near.”

Most socialist construction that has taken place in the world has been in relatively backward countries. But to call it “socialism,” in Trotsky s view, would only “hopelessly discredit the idea of socialist society in the eyes of the toiling masses.” (If this position were not patently ridiculous, one would be led to the conclusion that the deepest and broadest hatred of socialism in the world today would be permeated among the masses of the Chinese people.)

Idealism versus materialism

How can Trotsky arrive at such a conclusion? By adopting an idealist rather than a materialist world outlook: “The Soviet proletariat has achieved grandiose successes,” writes Trotsky in 1928, “if we take into consideration the conditions under which they have been attained and the low cultural level inherited from the past. But these achievements constitute an extremely small magnitude on the scales of the socialist ideal.”

What is Trotsky’s “socialist ideal?” Writing in 1936, after the successful conclusion of the first five-year plan and the collectivization of agriculture, Trotsky still says “there is not yet, in this fundamental sense, a hint of socialism in the Soviet Union.” Why? Because “socialism, if it is worthy of the name, means human relations without greed, friendship without envy and intrigue, love without base calculation.”

Proletarian revolutionaries, of course, must never forget the final aims of their movement and always fight to implement them in the fullest way possible in the present day struggle. But Trotsky’s use of these standards to measure the advances of socialism under conditions of class domination and class struggle reduces the role of the Marxist-Leninist vanguard to that of a Sunday-school parson prattling moralistic aphorisms.

This utopianism, however, is only the veneer on the Trotskyist attack on socialist construction “in one country.” Its essence is what has led many revolutionaries to attack Trotskyists for “supporting socialism everywhere in the world except where it exists,” that is, anti-communism.

“The Soviet government,” writes Trotsky in 1936, “had become totalitarian in character several years before this word arrived from Germany”. What are the roots of fascism? “Japanese militarism” and the “triumph of Hitler,” says Trotsky, “are alike the fruits of the policy of the Communist International.” To make sure the point gets across, he adds, “Stalinism and fascism, in spite of a deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena. In many of their features they show a deadly similarity.”

That Trotsky’s position would lead him into this camp of the social-democratic renegades became clear to the leadership of the Bolshevik party by 1924. At that time Trotsky’s initial unity with the Leninists had been transformed into its opposite. There were now two lines-the proletarian and the urban petty bourgeois-on almost every question. The ensuing struggle between them and their practical ramifications manifested itself in a debate conducted within the party over three years and led finally to the expulsion of Trotsky and his “left” opposition in 1927.

What were the strategic questions involved? In a 1925 speech Stalin focused the question again on the role of the peasantry and asked why it assumed exceptional importance in the Soviet Union at that time:

The ... reason why the peasant question has assumed exceptional importance for us at the present moment is that, of the allies of the Soviet power, of all the proletariat’s principal allies – of whom there are four, in my opinion – the peasantry is the only ally that can be of direct assistance to our revolution at this very moment.

The four allies were: the proletariat in the developed countries, the oppressed people in the underdeveloped countries, the conflicts and contradictions between the capitalist countries and, lastly, the peasantry.

The proletariat in the West, Stalin believed, was the principal ally. But due to its defensive position in the temporary stabilization it was “unable to render us direct and decisive assistance at the present moment.” The oppressed peoples, he said, were “coming directly to our help, but it is evident that they will not arrive quickly.” The contradictions among the capitalists had several aspects and could not be relied upon.

“There remains the fourth ally-the peasantry,” he said. “It is by our side, we are living together, together we are building the new life ... The peasantry is not as reliable an ally as the proletariat in the developed countries. But, for all that, it is an ally, and of all our existing allies it is the only one that can render us, and is rendering us, direct assistance at this very moment, receiving our assistance in exchange.”

Two lines on allies

Stalin then pointed to the two lines within the party: “Has this question – the question of the peasantry – any connection with the question of Trotskyism, which you have discussed here? Undoubtedly it has.”

... Can the bond, the alliance between the workers and peasants, be established if the theory which involves disbelief in that alliance. i.e., the theory of Trotskyism, is not smashed? No, it cannot. The conclusion is obvious: whoever wants to emerge from NEP as the victor must bury Trotskyism as an ideological trend.

Thus Trotsky’s position on the impossibility of “socialism in one country” led him and his followers into a blind alley. The path there was paved by a dogmatic and subjective world view that denied the law of uneven development in the imperialist epoch. Its fruit had two aspects: an infantile “leftism” that led to a line of “skipping stages” and the “export” of revolution and a right opportunist “theory of productive forces” similar to those held in the 1960s by Khrushchev and Liu Shao-chi. This became most apparent in the Trotskyist view of the Chinese revolution and the national liberation movements in general.