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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"Left in Form,Right in Essence A Critique of Contemporary Trotskyism
(1973)", Carl Davidson
This pamphlet was originally published as a series of 12 articles in early 1973 in the Guardian newsweekly.
Second printing Spring 1974.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
What is the role of Trotskyism in the people’s struggles today? What are its historical origins and what new forms has it taken in recent times? These are the questions addressed in this pamphlet, which first appeared as a 12-part series in the Guardian in the Spring of 1973.
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National and class struggle
The Trotskyist movement in the U.S. today finds itself organizationally isolated from the rising trend of workers’ struggles.
At the same time it is in the position of tailing after – alternately – the trade union bureaucracy and the petty bourgeois nationalist trends in the struggles of the oppressed nationalities.
As a result, the Trotskyists can only respond negatively to what must be the strategy for proletarian revolution in the U.S. – the united front against imperialism, the fundamental alliance of which is between the multi-national working class and the oppressed nationalities.
The ideological reasons for this were present from the beginnings of the American Trotskyist movement and its rejection of Marxism-Leninism, particularly on the national question and the attitude to the trade unions.
The Trotskyists’ last major involvement in a labor struggle was also their first: the five-week union recognition struggle of the Minneapolis Teamsters in 1934. A number of members of the Communist League of America (Opposition), the predecessor to the Socialist Workers party, were also members of the Teamsters Local 574. While they did not hold any official positions of leadership in the union, the Trotskyists were heavily represented in the strike’s organizing committee and generally played the role of activist trade union militants in the day-to-day leadership of the struggle.
The problem is that they did not go beyond the role of trade unionists and in fact at one point answered red-baiting charges by denying that their militants were communists. James P. Cannon describes the outlook of his organization in Minneapolis in his History of American Trotskyism with an almost classic portrayal of tailism and bowing to the spontaneity of the masses:
“Adapt to their trend”
“Following the general trend of the workers,” he writes, “we also realized that if we were to make the best of our opportunities, we should not put unnecessary difficulties in our path. We should not waste time and energy trying to sell the workers a new scheme of organization they did not want. It was far better to adapt ourselves to their trend and also to exploit the possibilities of getting assistance from the existing official labor movement.”
It would be a mistake, however, to view the trade union work of the Trotskyists as apolitical. One of its main ingredients was anti-communism in the guise, of course, of “anti-Stalinism.” In a 1940 discussion with Trotsky on whether or not to “critically support” Communist party candidates in the elections, Cannon claims “such a line would disrupt our work” in the “broad anti-Stalinist movement.”
We built our strength on opposition to Stalinist control of the union ... The Stalinists are the main obstacle. A policy of maneuver would be disastrous. What we gained from the Stalinists we would lose otherwise.
This policy was soon to bear its fruit. Tim Wohlforth, head of the Trotskyist Workers League, describes the period of the late 1940s in his own “left” history of the SWP, The Struggle for Marxism in the United States:
This was the period when the “progressive” caucuses, which had fought the Stalinists during the latter part of the war essentially on sound trade union lines, were now settling down to their bureaucratic control of the unions and establishing their relations with the capitalist government and its cold war drive. Faced with this situation the SWP trade unionists were in a very difficult situation. They could not support their allies of the previous period, they were wary of seeking any relationship with the Stalinist workers who were being witch-hunted in the unions and they did not have the strength to throw up independent third trade union caucuses ...
Wohlforth points out that the SWP now began losing many of the workers it had managed to recruit, especially black workers. He apologetically describes the SWP’s inability to deal with white supremacy:
This failure is understandable considering the short duration of the party’s direct experience in Negro work and considering that the overwhelming majority of the party came from a more privileged layer of the working class who in their daily lives had little contact with Negroes.
That the SWP “had little contact” with Afro-Americans was not surprising, since the U.S. “left opposition” ignored their existence for the first 10 years of its existence. Even Trotsky was moved to remark, in 1939: “It is very disquieting to find that until now the party has done almost nothing in this field. It has not published a book, a pamphlet, leaflets, nor even any articles in the New International.” Wohlforth even points out that in 1933 an SWP leader was unable to answer a question of Trotsky’s as to whether or not Black people in the South spoke a different language.
This can be contrasted with the work of the Communist party, which, together with the Comintern, had developed a revolutionary analysis of the Afro-American question from the perspective of viewing it as a national question. The Afro-American people in the “Black Belt” region of the South, they said, constituted an oppressed nation. Communists were duty-bound to support its struggle for national liberation, including the right to secede.
At the same time the CP saw the struggle for full democratic rights for black people throughout the country as part and parcel of the class struggle and a key component of the struggle against opportunism. As a result the CP made great gains in this area of work, as well as many worthy contributions to the struggle against national oppression in the U.S.
The Trotskyists have attacked this line as “imposed by orders from Moscow” and distorted it by claiming that the CP demanded a separate Black state (rather than the right of self- determination) without regard to the aspirations of the Black masses.
The Trotskyists were not helped out of their quandary by Trotsky. He responded to the SWP’s white blindspot by interpreting the Afro- American national question on a completely subjective basis. “We do, of course, not obligate the Negroes to become a nation,” said Trotsky in 1939, “if they are, then that is a question of their consciousness, that is, what they desire and what they strive for.”
This repudiates any scientific approach to the national question which takes into account such factors as common history, territory, economic life and culture. The Trotskyists are thus unable to distinguish an oppressed nation from an oppressed national minority, or between the progressive democratic content of nationalist struggles and the narrow reactionary views of “cultural-national autonomy.”
This has led to considerable vacillation among the various Trotskyist groups. The Worker’s League, for instance, holds the view that “all nationalism is reactionary,” while the SWP falls into the “all nationalism is revolutionary” swamp. What unites the two is tailism. The first tails after the chauvinism of the labor aristocracy while the latter tails after the nationalism of the petty bourgeoisie. Both oppose proletarian internationalism in practice. The SWP is most explicit on its tailist line on the demand for the right of self-determination. “It is not,” writes Tony Thomas in the October 1970 International Socialist Review, “up to the revolutionary party to raise that demand, but only to support it once raised by Blacks.”
The SWP is aware, of course, that there are moderate, conservative and reactionary trends among Black nationalists. In their view, however, these are not “real” or “consistent” nationalists, since “consistent” nationalism is proletarian internationalism.
“Neutral” consciousness
This is idealism and it is manifested continuously in the SWP’s outlook. On the question of trade unionism, for instance, Ernest Mandel states in the December 1970 ISR that “trade union consciousness is in and by itself socially neutral. It is neither reactionary nor revolutionary.” Mandel’s “in and by itself” stand takes him outside and “above” classes and class struggle and into the realm of pure thought. In the process he throws out the whole burden of Lenin’s What is to be Done, a work that insisted that trade union consciousness was bourgeois and had to be struggled against, whether it played a progressive or backward role in certain circumstances.
This method extends to the SWP’s overall view of Marxism-Leninism. “Marxism,” says SWP leader Joseph Hansen, amounts to “empiricism systematically carried out.” Here Hansen views dialectical materialism as simply a quantitative and evolutionary development of pragmatism, the world outlook of the imperialist bourgeoisie.
What it actually means, however, is that the Trotskyists have never broken with bourgeois ideology themselves, but jump back and forth between bourgeois rationalism and bourgeois empiricism. Both are forms of idealism and reflect their present-day petty bourgeois class character. One area in which this becomes most apparent is the SWP’s approach to the woman question.
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The woman question
The Trotskyist stand on the woman question, like their approach to politics in general, is “left” in form and right in essence.
The views on the women’s struggle of the two major Trotskyist groupings in the U.S. – the Socialist Workers party (SWP) and the Workers League – also express the vacillating character of their movement in tailing after the spontaneity of the masses.
The two organizations appear to be fundamentally opposed on the issue. The SWP, for instance, considers itself to be “revolutionary feminist.” “If you love revolution,” goes one of their slogans, “then you’ll love feminism.”
The Workers League heads in another direction. “The feminist movement,” says one of their polemics against the SWP, “plays a reactionary role, splitting the working class and sowing the illusion that the problems of working class women could be solved apart from the fight for socialism. The movement is directed against the working class and the revolutionary party.”
In essence the two positions are the same. Both abandon the struggle for proletarian leadership of the mass democratic struggle for the emancipation of women.
The SWP bows to the spontaneity of the just struggle waged by the women of the middle classes. The Workers League, for its part, liquidates even the pretense of a Marxist-Leninist approach to the woman question and tails after the spontaneous economic struggles of the workers at the point of production.
Both are similar in another respect. Both identify the entire women’s movement with the feminist trend. The Workers League does this in the guise of dismissing the movement as “middle class reformism.” The SWP view takes this form:
“Feminism,” writes Linda Jenness in the April 27, 1973 Militant, “is where women are out fighting for things that are in their interest. Feminism is wherever women are challenging the traditional roles assigned to them.”
The Workers League, of course, has no influence in the women’s movement, except as a negative example that strengthens conservative and anti-communist trends.
The SWP, however, plays a more pernicious role. It considers itself an uncompromising champion of women’s rights and by adapting itself to feminism, has gained a following for its ideas among a section of the middle class youth.
Main blow on the family
The SWP gives a “left” cover to its views by concentrating its attack on the family as the principal institution perpetuating the oppression of women. “The feminist movement today,” states the SWP’s 1971 convention resolution entitled Towards a Mass Feminist Movement, “started out by questioning the basic structure and institutions of this society, especially the family.” Caroline Lund, writing in the October 1970 International Socialist Review adds, “The oppression of women by other institutions has been directly related to their role in the family.”
In this, she follows the lead of Trotsky. While he gave the appearance of championing the cause of Soviet women and criticised some mistaken positions of the CPSU – e.g. banning abortions at one time – he too panicked over the tasks of socialist construction, and launched a utopian attack on the family.
Lund goes on to attack the idea of struggling for equality within the family: “Women have had enough of being so-called partners! We want to be whole individuals, with our own lives and aspirations. There should be no ‘head of the family,’ neither a man nor a woman, no domination of human beings over other human beings – including children.” As for the youth, they too should abandon the struggle in that arena. “Young people,” she says, “cannot as a rule work out their own lives satisfactorily until they break from their families.”
The Marxist-Leninist movement should have no illusions about the character of the family nor romanticize its traditional role, which Engels described as one of the pillars of class society. It is not the role of the proletarian movement, however, to center its attack on the family nor to call for its abolition. The imperialists themselves are causing its erosion, as the fact that one out of three marriages now ends in divorce shows at a glance.
The point is that there is no mass alternative to the nuclear family in capitalist society or even in the first stages of socialist construction. Without the family unit, working women with children would have to abandon even the minimal protections that it affords.
This is why the workers’ movement, in the course of the struggle for socialism, aims to win jobs for women, emphasizes the daycare struggle and raises the fight for equality within the family, for husbands to share equally in the responsibilities of the home.
As to what form the family will take under fully developed communism, Engels said there could only be speculation and that it was a task for future generations to decide. In the first stages of socialism, however, he said that the working-class family would probably take a purely monogamous form for the first time, since in capitalist society monogamy was, in practice, primarily for the woman.
Perhaps an analogy can be drawn with the state. In his polemics with the anarchists, Lenin agreed that the classless society would have no state. History and class struggle, however, have determined the need for a transitional proletarian state that would only wither away with the dying out of classes and class struggle. Thus it would be incorrect to call for the abolition of any type of state or the abolition of the workers’ state just after the seizure of power.
But to the Trotskyists the fact that the monogamous nuclear family continues to exist in socialist countries like China and to develop along lines of greater equality for women is not seen as a progressive step forward. Instead it is slandered as “a reformist policy continuing the subjugation of women and reinforcing a bureaucratic caste.”
The Trotskyists also capitulate to the feminist trend by raising the idea of “sisterhood” and placing it above the class struggle in practice.
“The truth is,” states the SWP’s 1971 document, “that women are at the same time united by sexual oppression and divided by class society.”
It is true that there are two aspects to the oppression of women by male supremacy. The principal aspect. is a class question, the antagonistic contradiction between the masses of women and the imperialists. The secondary aspect is a non-antagonistic contradiction among the people, the contradiction between men and women.
Broad unity possible
Thus even the women of the exploiting classes – to a certain extent and in a limited way – share in the general oppression of women and as a consequence can make a contribution to the united front. But this potential unity among primarily working-class and middle-class women can develop in a progressive way only through the struggle for leadership by the proletarian women and their class outlook within the united front against imperialism, one of the spearheads of which is the mass democratic women’s movement. If left to spontaneity, the class contradiction between the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie becomes primary and the movement remains fragmented.
This is exactly what the SWP does. In place of the leading role of the proletariat, it substitutes the idealist notion of “inherent logic.” In answering the question of which will become primary, the unity or division in the women’s movement, the SWP states: “Sisterhood is powerful because of this universal female oppression, and this is the basis for the existence of an independent, nonexclusive, mass feminist movement with an anti-capitalist logic.”
Thus “sisterhood” prevails over class struggle and the role of the working women is reduced to the obvious comment that they have “the most to gain” from democratic reforms.
The SWP likes to claim that it is building the women’s movement among the masses. In addition to the fact that it is raising a petty bourgeois line; this claim is not even true by their own admission. At a time when the rising trend in the women’s movement is developing among the working women, particularly in the daycare battles being led by third world working women, the SWP focuses its attention on the women students. “Building campus women’s liberation groups,” says the SWP, “is a key task, since the campus groups are the largest and fastest growing sector of the movement.”
Reflects SWP’s base
The particular concerns of this section of women, while part of the woman question in general, are reflected in the emphasis the SWP puts forward in its line and tactics. Most women students do not have children, family responsibilities or jobs. Many are still under the thumb of parental authority or in the process of rebelling against it, and this is manifested in the SWP’s concentrated fire on the family.
But the main reflection is in the Trotskyist’s approach to the struggle to repeal anti-abortion laws. Here the SWP has focused on the abortion question as the most important issue of the women’s movement, raised it in isolation and refused to raise other demands such as childcare and job equality together with it in united front coalitions. The result has been obvious. Now that the reform has been won, the “single-issue” coalitions have disintegrated and the Trotskyists are floundering in a quandary over what to do next.
But the SWP has had some success. Its single-issue approach made its contribution to increasing the divisions in the women’s movement. The refusal to unite the abortion struggle with the movement for daycare, for instance, has the consequence of failing to combat the prejudice among some sections of the masses that the women’s struggle is against children and aimed at destroying the family.
Reich’s idealism
At the same time that the SWP conducts a semi-anarchist attack on the family, emphasizing the neo-Freudian idealism of Wilhelm Reich, they draw back one step from the logical conclusion of demanding its abolition. Instead, in classic form, they switch over to reformism.
“The heart of the struggle for liberation,” states the SWP’s 1971 statement, “is not toward counter-institutionism, but fighting to wrest the vast resources ... away from the ruling classes.”
The difference between “wresting away resources” and expropriating the expropriators through the proletarian dictatorship is the difference between reform.and revolution, between revisionism and Marxism-Leninism.
“The inseparable connection between the social and human position of the woman, and private property in the means of production must be strongly brought out,” Lenin told Clara Zetkin in 1920. “That will draw a clear and ineradicable line of distinction between our policy and feminism. And it will also supply the basis for regarding the woman question as a part of the social question, of the workers’ problem, and so bind it firmly to the proletarian class struggle and the revolution.”
The SWP’s failure in this regard is followed by its general extension into the modern revisionist theory of “structural reform.”
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Reform or revolution?
The Trotskyists in this country are relatively well known for their ultra-left opposition to the strategy of revolution by stages in the colonial countries.
To the anti-imperialist united front, aimed at forming a transitional new democratic state and led by the proletariat, they counterpose the line of immediate transition to the proletarian dictatorship.
What is less apparent, however, is that the Socialist Workers party, the largest Trotskyist group in the U.S. and representing the main trend in Trotskyism internationally, puts forward just the opposite strategy for revolution in the advanced capitalist countries.
In fact, despite their fulminations against the revisionist Communist party, they go a long way toward advocating a two-stage “anti-monopoly coalition” strategy, flirt with the idea of “peaceful transition” and scrap the theory of the proletarian dictatorship.
But there is actually a unity between the SWP’s “two lines.” In both cases they set the democratic movement and the class struggle against each other by denying the leading role of the proletariat in the united front against imperialism.
The Trotskyist position raises the question: What is the fundamental contradiction in the U.S.? “The irrepressible antagonism,” writes SWP theoretician George Novack in his book, Democracy and Revolution, “between the dominant monopolists and the strivings for equality, social justice and even for life itself among the masses of the American population holds out two opposing lines of long-range development for American politics.”
Thus it is not the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie but the contradiction between the “masses” and the “dominant monopolists” that is the determining factor in the development of the proletarian revolution.
There is no doubt among Marxist-Leninists that the development of the democratic struggles of the masses can serve to advance the class struggle and even in certain periods play a leading role in raising mass anti-imperialist consciousness. This is the meaning, for instance, of Mao Tsetung’s statement that the Afro-American people’s struggle has served as a “clarion call” to all the oppressed and exploited to rise up against the imperialists.
But when all is said and done, it is also the “ABC” of Marxism-Leninism that it is the development and resolution of the class struggle that determines the development and resolution of She ~r democratic struggles, including the struggle against national oppression. This is the meaning of Mao’s statement that, in the final analysis, national struggle is a matter of class struggle and the reason why Marxist-Leninists place in the forefront the struggle for leadership by the proletariat in the national liberation movements and all other democratic anti-imperialist struggles.
The position of the SWP is completely opposed to this view. Their approach is to tail opportunistically each spontaneous development in the mass democratic movements. Each constituency, in succession, is then dubbed the “vanguard” leading the proletariat to socialism, with the added provision that the “vanguard of the vanguard” in each sector is presently made up of the student youth.
Another SWP theoretician, George Breitman, makes this subordination of class struggle to democratic struggle clear in his pamphlet, How a Minority Can Change Society. “The Negro people,” he writes, “although a minority, can, with consistent leadership, lead the American working class in the revolution that will abolish capitalism.”
Breitman then sums up the Marxist position that oppressed nationalities cannot win full democratic rights under capitalism, thus making their struggle a revolutionary question. Then he adds: “But that is not what I am discussing here. What I am talking about now is something else – the capacity of the Negro people to lead the working-class revolution to replace capitalism.”
Breitman’s shell game
This is backed up with a sleight of hand maneuver. Breitman first says Black people are a “racial minority” that is “overwhelmingly proletarian” in composition. Next he states, “Negroes are an important section of the working class as well as a racial minority.” Then he concludes that “unless we are blind” we can see that Black people are “the most radicalized section of the working class.”
But Breitman is the one who is blind. He has distorted the elementary truth that Black workers stand at the center and play a leading role in both the national and class struggles into the false claim that all Blacks are workers, thus liquidating the national question, the class divisions among the Black people and then demagogically topping it all off with an absurd analogy with the Russian revolution, where he casts the Black people in the role of the proletariat and the masses of the white workers as the peasantry.
That the SWP does not see this line as any special attribute of the national question is evident in their course since Breitman’s statement was first put forward in January 1964. Since then they have applied the same line of reasoning to the youth movement, the women’s movement, the Chicano movement and finally to the gay liberation movement.
How does the SWP propose to lead each of these “independent forces” to power? Again, the initial line is stated by Breitman in his attitude toward forming an all-Black political party with a “transitional” reformist program. “Without Negro votes, the present two-party system will pass from the scene and be replaced by something different, out of which Negroes may be able to acquire new and more reliable allies than up to now. And all of this can be accomplished by the simple device of forming a Negro party and running independent Negro candidates.”
“Something different”?
What is the “something different” that will so miraculously replace the two-party system? The next step would be the formation of a reformist parliamentary labor party, which the SWP would try to join as dual members. The labor party and the Black party would then form an alliance with a Chicano party and possibly, although this has only been raised in SWP internal bulletins, a women’s party.
All these together, of course, would make a bid for a parliamentary majority. The SWP’s role would be to make them “consistent” in their fight for reforms by pursuing the path of “anti-capitalist structural reform” put forward by the revisionist Italian Communist party. “The fundamental goal of these reforms,” writes Ernest Mandel in his Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory, “would be to take away the levels of command in the economy from the financial groups, trusts and monopolies and place them in the hands of the nation, to create a public sector of decisive weight in credit, industry and transportation and to base all of this on workers’ control.”
Mandel calls this “stage” where the “nation” has “taken command” of the monopolies through its governmental “public sector”, a period preceding the development of “dual power” which “could” precede socialist construction.
Even his slogan of “workers control” – to which the SWP would add their version of “community control” – is a reformist fraud, paralleling on the factory floor his approach on the floor of parliament.
Workers’ control, says Mandel, “is a refusal to enter discussions with the management or the government as a whole on the division of national income, so long as the workers have not acquired the ability to reveal the way the capitalists cook the books when they talk of prices and profits. In other words, it is the opening of the books and the calculation of the real production costs and the real profit margins by the workers.”
Why the importance of the calculations? So the workers can accurately determine their productivity and thus achieve a “socially just distribution” in wages.
Despite the obvious clash with Marx’s famous statement, “Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,’ let us emblazon our banners with the revolutionary watchword, abolition of the wage system,’ ” Mandel goes all the way and suggests to the capitalists that his proposals would help them run their system more rationally “... From the standpoint of anti-cyclical policy, it is more intelligent to reduce profits and increase wages. This would permit the demand from wage workers and consumers to come to the relief of investment in the interest of maintaining the conjuncture at the high level.”
Marxist-Leninists have long maintained that the dividing line between revolutionaries and reformists in the proletarian movement is on the question of the proletarian dictatorship, on the necessity to smash the bourgeois state apparatus and to create a new proletarian state in its place; a state that would insure democracy for the workers and their allies and dictatorship against he exploiters for the entire period of transition between capitalism and the classless society of communism.
Not only do Mandel and his SWP co-thinkers put forward in essence a reformist anti-monopoly coalition line for the first “stage” of their revolution in the capitalist countries, they also join with the modern revisionists in liquidating the proletarian dictatorship in the second stage.
George Novack managed to write an entire book on the subject of democracy and the various forms of state in slave, feudal, bourgeois and socialist society without even once using the term or explaining its essence in other words. Novack, in fact, claims the “dividing line” between reformists and revolutionaries is on the question of democracy, “the one viewing democracy as a means of disposing of capitalism, the other as an excuse for maintaining it indefinitely.”
Novack also joins the CP in putting forward the necessity of armed struggle as a hypothetical statement. “In order to protect all such – democratic institutions, Marxists are ready to fight, arms in hand if need be, against ultra-reactionary movements.”
Finally, Novack admits that during the Civil War following the October revolution, “dictatorial enactments were directed exclusively against the class enemies of the revolution” and that these were necessary at the time. But then he adds, “It was not to be considered the permanent and normal state of affairs throughout the period of the transition to a classless society, as Stalinism and Maoism later preached.”
Here Novack joins hands with the Khrushchev revisionists in asserting that while the proletarian dictatorship might have been necessary earlier, what is now required is a “state of the whole people.
What Novack is combating, of course, is not only Stalin and Mao, but also Lenin, thus joining the revisionists and social democrats in a common counter-revolutionary swamp. It is followed through in the Trotskyist view of the party.
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The vanguard party
Trotsky began his career as a disrupter of the revolutionary movement during a struggle with Lenin over the character of the proletarian vanguard party.
Today his followers have – in one form or another – continued this role of attacking Leninist parties wherever they actually exist by attempting to substitute petty bourgeois ideas on organization in their place.
In his struggle with the Mensheviks, Lenin put forward the position that the proletarian revolutionary party, in addition to being guided by the most advanced scientific theory, had to be an organization of professional revolutionaries, full-time and trained activists comprised of the best elements of the working class and the revolutionary intellectuals.
This “party of a new type” is seen as the proletariat’s “general staff” in the class struggle with the bourgeoisie. It is not a debating society but an instrument to prepare the masses for smashing the existing state power, establishing and leading the proletarian dictatorship and continuing to wage the class struggle throughout the entire transition period of socialist construction to the classless society of communism.
As a weapon of class struggle, the party requires an iron discipline, subordinating the individual to the collective, and the combination of secret and open work. Decisions and policies are developed and changed through democratic discussion, debate and the process of criticism and self-criticism. Once a majority in the party has agreed, however, any minority must set aside its opinions and act in carrying out the views of the entire party with a monolithic unity in the face of the class enemy.
The party represents the vanguard of the proletariat but not by self-proclamation. It must be thoroughly integrated with the masses, learn from them and win the role of leader, not only of the workers, but of the broad masses of various classes through its revolutionary practice in the actual course of struggle.
Trotsky’s opposition
Trotsky stood in open and hostile opposition to this view of the party almost to the eve of the October revolution in 1917. He took a centrist position, demanding that the Bolsheviks unite in the same party with the Mensheviks. The only way this could happen, of course, would be for Lenin to dissolve the type of organization he had constructed. Hence the term “liquidationist,” which Lenin applied to Trotsky with a vengeance, defining it as opportunism gone to the extreme of dissolving the proletariat’s key weapon – its organization.
Trotsky agreed with the Menshevik position on organization. He wanted a party without a strict discipline, with contending groups and factions that could be “broad” enough to contain those who proclaimed themselves members by simply stating agreement with general principles. He attacked Lenin viciously:
“Not an accident but a deep ‘omen,’ ” Trotsky wrote in 1904, “is the fact that the leader of the reactionary wing of our party, Comrade Lenin, who is defending the tactical methods of caricature Jacobinism. was psychologically forced to give such a definition of Social- Democracy which represents nothing but a theoretical attempt at destroying the class character of our party.”
This is Trotsky’s classic anti-communist summary of Lenin’s policy: “The barracks regime cannot be the regime of our party, just as the factory cannot be its example. These methods bring about a situation that the party organization will replace the party, the central committee will replace the party organization, and finally the ‘dictator’ will replace the central committee ... The committees will do all the ‘directing’ while ‘the people remain silent.’ ”
Despite the fact that Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks just before October, he never gave up the essence of these views. Although he formally stated he was wrong on the party, his view that it was his particular strategic line of “permanent revolution” that won out over Lenin’s has the clear implication that the issue was not all that important. As Michael Miller points out in the recently published pamphlet, From Trotskyism to Social-Imperialism:
From Trotsky’s paint of view a miracle happened at this propitious moment in history. The revolution joined Trotsky. Trotsky didn’t really join the Bolsheviks. They joined him! 40,000 Bolshevik workers joined Trotsky since he had foreseen everything! ... The problem with Trotsky’s theory is that it requires no party at all ... Trotsky’s theory of October is that the Bolsheviks, having finally come around to the “correct idea,” were able to lead the revolution despite having an incorrect line for 14 years prior to the event.
After Lenin’s death Trotsky reasserted his old ideas on the party in a new form. He now paid lip service to democratic centralism, but demanded “freedom of criticism” within the party in the form of the freedom to organize factional groupings, each with its own leadership structures, platforms, programs and press. As the history of Trotsky’s “left opposition” also demonstrated, in practice he wanted factions with their own internal discipline that could be exercised against the party’s, even to the extent of carrying out actions among the masses expressly forbidden by the party and in opposition to its line.
In 1904 Trotsky had attacked Lenin for “destroying the class character of our party.” In a sense, this was true, although it was not what Trotsky had in mind. Lenin clearly aimed at defeating the petty bourgeois character of the party and it is precisely the petty bourgeois view of both the party and state as an ideal form of radical democratic parliament that Trotsky was never able to abandon.
Trotsky’s perspective comes out most clearly in his 1935 articles, If America Should Go Communist. Despite the fact that the U.S. bourgeoisie is far more sophisticated in the practice of counter-revolution than their Russian counterparts, Trotsky thinks the revolution will be much easier here. Since the monopoly capitalists are in a minority and “everybody below this group is already economically prepared for communism,” Trotsky claims “there is no reason why these (non-monopoly) groups should oppose determined resistance.” As for the monopolists, “they will cease struggling as soon as they fail to find people to fight for them.”
The non-monopoly capitalists and petty bourgeoisie, inspired by the productivity of a planned economy after “a good long time to think things over,” could be “kept solvent until they were gradually and without compulsion sucked into the socialized business system. Without compulsion! The American soviets would not need to resort to the drastic measures which circumstances have often imposed on the Russians.”
Which drastic measures? While Trotsky admits the monopolists would find no place in U.S. soviets, he adds that “with us the soviets have been bureaucratized as a result of the political monopoly of a single party, which itself has become a bureaucracy.” In contrast, “The American soviets will be full-blooded and vigorous, without need or opportunity for such measures ... A wide struggle between interests, groups and ideas is not only conceivable – it is inevitable ... All of these will arouse controversy, vigorous electoral struggle, and passionate debate in the newspapers and at public meetings.”
In addition to asserting the need for a multiparty electoral system, another “drastic measure” to be thrown out is the proletarian control of the press. Instead, “it might be done on the basis of proportional representation for the votes in each soviet election. Thus the right of each group of citizens to use the power of the press will depend on their numerical strength.”
It is a basic principle of Marxism that different parties represent the interests of different classes and sections of classes. Commenting on this same article by Trotsky, M.J. Olgin wrote in his 1935 book, Trotskyism: Counter-Revolution in Disguise:
Soviet parliaments
If the Communist party represents the workers, then obviously the other parties must represent the rich farmers, the poor farmers, the middle bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, perhaps the intellectuals. How will these parties function? Naturally by struggle ... A soviet very much resembling a bourgeois parliament. Several parties represented in it with equal rights. Each party fighting the others. Several parties making a coalition to defeat the dangerous common rival. Why not a coalition of all the other parties against the party of the workers? This latter party, in Trotsky’s conception, should be split into a number of legalized groups and factions with their own separate platforms. The population will have its choice of parties, groups, programs. No special discipline is needed for any party; no monolithic unity for the communist party.
Olgin sums up: “How unity can be achieved under these conditions remains a secret of Trotsky’s. But then he does not worry much about unity because his slogan is, ‘Without compulsion!’ ”
In stark contrast stands Lenin’s view. “The dictatorship of the proletariat is the most stubborn, the most acute, the most merciless struggle of the pew class against the more powerful enemy, the bourgeoisie, whose resistance has grown tenfold after it has been overthrown. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a stubborn struggle, bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, pedagogical and administrative, against the powers and traditions of the old society.”
The Trotskyist parties today continue to repudiate this line and follow the bankrupt views of their mentor. One consequence, of course, is that they themselves are riddled with factions and comprise a galaxy of competing organizations, all claiming the label, “Trotskyist.”
The direction of some, like the Socialist Workers party, has been in the direction of the modern revisionists, liquidating the leading role of the party into a “revolutionary nucleus” that aims to become a mass party playing simply a “catalytic” role in forming an anti-monopoly coalition.
Rationalist deviation
Others, like the Workers League, emphasize Trotsky’s idealist rationalism and remain ensconsed firmly in “left” sectarianism. As their leader, Tim Wohlforth, put it, “At heart what the party is is its program. It is nothing else. The apparatus, the forces, the people, the equipment, the paper, are all expressions of what? A program ... and a program is an idea. So at its heart you could say that the party is an idea.”
In essence, however, they can all justly claim to be Trotskyists. They are united in their opposition to Marxism-Leninism.
Trotsky’s opposition, his sabotage of the proletarian movement and his wrecking activities in the period of the united front against fascism, eventually cost him his life.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that the danger of Trotskyism could be eliminated in such a manner. Trotskyism is an ideological trend within the petty bourgeoisie and as such a social basis for it exists and will continue to exist as long as there are middle classes.
The struggle against Trotskyism is also bound up with the struggle against modern revisionism, the existence and development of which has added new fuel and created new conditions for a revival of Trotskyism.
The decisive condition for a successful struggle against Trotskyism – and all forms of opportunism – is to be found in the growth of the Marxist-Leninist movement itself, in the development of the proletarian vanguard party and its winning of the masses in their millions to the banner of revolution.
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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"Left in Form,Right in Essence A Critique of Contemporary Trotskyism
(1973)", Carl Davidson
This pamphlet was originally published as a series of 12 articles in early 1973 in the Guardian newsweekly.
Second printing Spring 1974.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
What is the role of Trotskyism in the people’s struggles today? What are its historical origins and what new forms has it taken in recent times? These are the questions addressed in this pamphlet, which first appeared as a 12-part series in the Guardian in the Spring of 1973.
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National and class struggle
The Trotskyist movement in the U.S. today finds itself organizationally isolated from the rising trend of workers’ struggles.
At the same time it is in the position of tailing after – alternately – the trade union bureaucracy and the petty bourgeois nationalist trends in the struggles of the oppressed nationalities.
As a result, the Trotskyists can only respond negatively to what must be the strategy for proletarian revolution in the U.S. – the united front against imperialism, the fundamental alliance of which is between the multi-national working class and the oppressed nationalities.
The ideological reasons for this were present from the beginnings of the American Trotskyist movement and its rejection of Marxism-Leninism, particularly on the national question and the attitude to the trade unions.
The Trotskyists’ last major involvement in a labor struggle was also their first: the five-week union recognition struggle of the Minneapolis Teamsters in 1934. A number of members of the Communist League of America (Opposition), the predecessor to the Socialist Workers party, were also members of the Teamsters Local 574. While they did not hold any official positions of leadership in the union, the Trotskyists were heavily represented in the strike’s organizing committee and generally played the role of activist trade union militants in the day-to-day leadership of the struggle.
The problem is that they did not go beyond the role of trade unionists and in fact at one point answered red-baiting charges by denying that their militants were communists. James P. Cannon describes the outlook of his organization in Minneapolis in his History of American Trotskyism with an almost classic portrayal of tailism and bowing to the spontaneity of the masses:
“Adapt to their trend”
“Following the general trend of the workers,” he writes, “we also realized that if we were to make the best of our opportunities, we should not put unnecessary difficulties in our path. We should not waste time and energy trying to sell the workers a new scheme of organization they did not want. It was far better to adapt ourselves to their trend and also to exploit the possibilities of getting assistance from the existing official labor movement.”
It would be a mistake, however, to view the trade union work of the Trotskyists as apolitical. One of its main ingredients was anti-communism in the guise, of course, of “anti-Stalinism.” In a 1940 discussion with Trotsky on whether or not to “critically support” Communist party candidates in the elections, Cannon claims “such a line would disrupt our work” in the “broad anti-Stalinist movement.”
We built our strength on opposition to Stalinist control of the union ... The Stalinists are the main obstacle. A policy of maneuver would be disastrous. What we gained from the Stalinists we would lose otherwise.
This policy was soon to bear its fruit. Tim Wohlforth, head of the Trotskyist Workers League, describes the period of the late 1940s in his own “left” history of the SWP, The Struggle for Marxism in the United States:
This was the period when the “progressive” caucuses, which had fought the Stalinists during the latter part of the war essentially on sound trade union lines, were now settling down to their bureaucratic control of the unions and establishing their relations with the capitalist government and its cold war drive. Faced with this situation the SWP trade unionists were in a very difficult situation. They could not support their allies of the previous period, they were wary of seeking any relationship with the Stalinist workers who were being witch-hunted in the unions and they did not have the strength to throw up independent third trade union caucuses ...
Wohlforth points out that the SWP now began losing many of the workers it had managed to recruit, especially black workers. He apologetically describes the SWP’s inability to deal with white supremacy:
This failure is understandable considering the short duration of the party’s direct experience in Negro work and considering that the overwhelming majority of the party came from a more privileged layer of the working class who in their daily lives had little contact with Negroes.
That the SWP “had little contact” with Afro-Americans was not surprising, since the U.S. “left opposition” ignored their existence for the first 10 years of its existence. Even Trotsky was moved to remark, in 1939: “It is very disquieting to find that until now the party has done almost nothing in this field. It has not published a book, a pamphlet, leaflets, nor even any articles in the New International.” Wohlforth even points out that in 1933 an SWP leader was unable to answer a question of Trotsky’s as to whether or not Black people in the South spoke a different language.
This can be contrasted with the work of the Communist party, which, together with the Comintern, had developed a revolutionary analysis of the Afro-American question from the perspective of viewing it as a national question. The Afro-American people in the “Black Belt” region of the South, they said, constituted an oppressed nation. Communists were duty-bound to support its struggle for national liberation, including the right to secede.
At the same time the CP saw the struggle for full democratic rights for black people throughout the country as part and parcel of the class struggle and a key component of the struggle against opportunism. As a result the CP made great gains in this area of work, as well as many worthy contributions to the struggle against national oppression in the U.S.
The Trotskyists have attacked this line as “imposed by orders from Moscow” and distorted it by claiming that the CP demanded a separate Black state (rather than the right of self- determination) without regard to the aspirations of the Black masses.
The Trotskyists were not helped out of their quandary by Trotsky. He responded to the SWP’s white blindspot by interpreting the Afro- American national question on a completely subjective basis. “We do, of course, not obligate the Negroes to become a nation,” said Trotsky in 1939, “if they are, then that is a question of their consciousness, that is, what they desire and what they strive for.”
This repudiates any scientific approach to the national question which takes into account such factors as common history, territory, economic life and culture. The Trotskyists are thus unable to distinguish an oppressed nation from an oppressed national minority, or between the progressive democratic content of nationalist struggles and the narrow reactionary views of “cultural-national autonomy.”
This has led to considerable vacillation among the various Trotskyist groups. The Worker’s League, for instance, holds the view that “all nationalism is reactionary,” while the SWP falls into the “all nationalism is revolutionary” swamp. What unites the two is tailism. The first tails after the chauvinism of the labor aristocracy while the latter tails after the nationalism of the petty bourgeoisie. Both oppose proletarian internationalism in practice. The SWP is most explicit on its tailist line on the demand for the right of self-determination. “It is not,” writes Tony Thomas in the October 1970 International Socialist Review, “up to the revolutionary party to raise that demand, but only to support it once raised by Blacks.”
The SWP is aware, of course, that there are moderate, conservative and reactionary trends among Black nationalists. In their view, however, these are not “real” or “consistent” nationalists, since “consistent” nationalism is proletarian internationalism.
“Neutral” consciousness
This is idealism and it is manifested continuously in the SWP’s outlook. On the question of trade unionism, for instance, Ernest Mandel states in the December 1970 ISR that “trade union consciousness is in and by itself socially neutral. It is neither reactionary nor revolutionary.” Mandel’s “in and by itself” stand takes him outside and “above” classes and class struggle and into the realm of pure thought. In the process he throws out the whole burden of Lenin’s What is to be Done, a work that insisted that trade union consciousness was bourgeois and had to be struggled against, whether it played a progressive or backward role in certain circumstances.
This method extends to the SWP’s overall view of Marxism-Leninism. “Marxism,” says SWP leader Joseph Hansen, amounts to “empiricism systematically carried out.” Here Hansen views dialectical materialism as simply a quantitative and evolutionary development of pragmatism, the world outlook of the imperialist bourgeoisie.
What it actually means, however, is that the Trotskyists have never broken with bourgeois ideology themselves, but jump back and forth between bourgeois rationalism and bourgeois empiricism. Both are forms of idealism and reflect their present-day petty bourgeois class character. One area in which this becomes most apparent is the SWP’s approach to the woman question.
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The woman question
The Trotskyist stand on the woman question, like their approach to politics in general, is “left” in form and right in essence.
The views on the women’s struggle of the two major Trotskyist groupings in the U.S. – the Socialist Workers party (SWP) and the Workers League – also express the vacillating character of their movement in tailing after the spontaneity of the masses.
The two organizations appear to be fundamentally opposed on the issue. The SWP, for instance, considers itself to be “revolutionary feminist.” “If you love revolution,” goes one of their slogans, “then you’ll love feminism.”
The Workers League heads in another direction. “The feminist movement,” says one of their polemics against the SWP, “plays a reactionary role, splitting the working class and sowing the illusion that the problems of working class women could be solved apart from the fight for socialism. The movement is directed against the working class and the revolutionary party.”
In essence the two positions are the same. Both abandon the struggle for proletarian leadership of the mass democratic struggle for the emancipation of women.
The SWP bows to the spontaneity of the just struggle waged by the women of the middle classes. The Workers League, for its part, liquidates even the pretense of a Marxist-Leninist approach to the woman question and tails after the spontaneous economic struggles of the workers at the point of production.
Both are similar in another respect. Both identify the entire women’s movement with the feminist trend. The Workers League does this in the guise of dismissing the movement as “middle class reformism.” The SWP view takes this form:
“Feminism,” writes Linda Jenness in the April 27, 1973 Militant, “is where women are out fighting for things that are in their interest. Feminism is wherever women are challenging the traditional roles assigned to them.”
The Workers League, of course, has no influence in the women’s movement, except as a negative example that strengthens conservative and anti-communist trends.
The SWP, however, plays a more pernicious role. It considers itself an uncompromising champion of women’s rights and by adapting itself to feminism, has gained a following for its ideas among a section of the middle class youth.
Main blow on the family
The SWP gives a “left” cover to its views by concentrating its attack on the family as the principal institution perpetuating the oppression of women. “The feminist movement today,” states the SWP’s 1971 convention resolution entitled Towards a Mass Feminist Movement, “started out by questioning the basic structure and institutions of this society, especially the family.” Caroline Lund, writing in the October 1970 International Socialist Review adds, “The oppression of women by other institutions has been directly related to their role in the family.”
In this, she follows the lead of Trotsky. While he gave the appearance of championing the cause of Soviet women and criticised some mistaken positions of the CPSU – e.g. banning abortions at one time – he too panicked over the tasks of socialist construction, and launched a utopian attack on the family.
Lund goes on to attack the idea of struggling for equality within the family: “Women have had enough of being so-called partners! We want to be whole individuals, with our own lives and aspirations. There should be no ‘head of the family,’ neither a man nor a woman, no domination of human beings over other human beings – including children.” As for the youth, they too should abandon the struggle in that arena. “Young people,” she says, “cannot as a rule work out their own lives satisfactorily until they break from their families.”
The Marxist-Leninist movement should have no illusions about the character of the family nor romanticize its traditional role, which Engels described as one of the pillars of class society. It is not the role of the proletarian movement, however, to center its attack on the family nor to call for its abolition. The imperialists themselves are causing its erosion, as the fact that one out of three marriages now ends in divorce shows at a glance.
The point is that there is no mass alternative to the nuclear family in capitalist society or even in the first stages of socialist construction. Without the family unit, working women with children would have to abandon even the minimal protections that it affords.
This is why the workers’ movement, in the course of the struggle for socialism, aims to win jobs for women, emphasizes the daycare struggle and raises the fight for equality within the family, for husbands to share equally in the responsibilities of the home.
As to what form the family will take under fully developed communism, Engels said there could only be speculation and that it was a task for future generations to decide. In the first stages of socialism, however, he said that the working-class family would probably take a purely monogamous form for the first time, since in capitalist society monogamy was, in practice, primarily for the woman.
Perhaps an analogy can be drawn with the state. In his polemics with the anarchists, Lenin agreed that the classless society would have no state. History and class struggle, however, have determined the need for a transitional proletarian state that would only wither away with the dying out of classes and class struggle. Thus it would be incorrect to call for the abolition of any type of state or the abolition of the workers’ state just after the seizure of power.
But to the Trotskyists the fact that the monogamous nuclear family continues to exist in socialist countries like China and to develop along lines of greater equality for women is not seen as a progressive step forward. Instead it is slandered as “a reformist policy continuing the subjugation of women and reinforcing a bureaucratic caste.”
The Trotskyists also capitulate to the feminist trend by raising the idea of “sisterhood” and placing it above the class struggle in practice.
“The truth is,” states the SWP’s 1971 document, “that women are at the same time united by sexual oppression and divided by class society.”
It is true that there are two aspects to the oppression of women by male supremacy. The principal aspect. is a class question, the antagonistic contradiction between the masses of women and the imperialists. The secondary aspect is a non-antagonistic contradiction among the people, the contradiction between men and women.
Broad unity possible
Thus even the women of the exploiting classes – to a certain extent and in a limited way – share in the general oppression of women and as a consequence can make a contribution to the united front. But this potential unity among primarily working-class and middle-class women can develop in a progressive way only through the struggle for leadership by the proletarian women and their class outlook within the united front against imperialism, one of the spearheads of which is the mass democratic women’s movement. If left to spontaneity, the class contradiction between the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie becomes primary and the movement remains fragmented.
This is exactly what the SWP does. In place of the leading role of the proletariat, it substitutes the idealist notion of “inherent logic.” In answering the question of which will become primary, the unity or division in the women’s movement, the SWP states: “Sisterhood is powerful because of this universal female oppression, and this is the basis for the existence of an independent, nonexclusive, mass feminist movement with an anti-capitalist logic.”
Thus “sisterhood” prevails over class struggle and the role of the working women is reduced to the obvious comment that they have “the most to gain” from democratic reforms.
The SWP likes to claim that it is building the women’s movement among the masses. In addition to the fact that it is raising a petty bourgeois line; this claim is not even true by their own admission. At a time when the rising trend in the women’s movement is developing among the working women, particularly in the daycare battles being led by third world working women, the SWP focuses its attention on the women students. “Building campus women’s liberation groups,” says the SWP, “is a key task, since the campus groups are the largest and fastest growing sector of the movement.”
Reflects SWP’s base
The particular concerns of this section of women, while part of the woman question in general, are reflected in the emphasis the SWP puts forward in its line and tactics. Most women students do not have children, family responsibilities or jobs. Many are still under the thumb of parental authority or in the process of rebelling against it, and this is manifested in the SWP’s concentrated fire on the family.
But the main reflection is in the Trotskyist’s approach to the struggle to repeal anti-abortion laws. Here the SWP has focused on the abortion question as the most important issue of the women’s movement, raised it in isolation and refused to raise other demands such as childcare and job equality together with it in united front coalitions. The result has been obvious. Now that the reform has been won, the “single-issue” coalitions have disintegrated and the Trotskyists are floundering in a quandary over what to do next.
But the SWP has had some success. Its single-issue approach made its contribution to increasing the divisions in the women’s movement. The refusal to unite the abortion struggle with the movement for daycare, for instance, has the consequence of failing to combat the prejudice among some sections of the masses that the women’s struggle is against children and aimed at destroying the family.
Reich’s idealism
At the same time that the SWP conducts a semi-anarchist attack on the family, emphasizing the neo-Freudian idealism of Wilhelm Reich, they draw back one step from the logical conclusion of demanding its abolition. Instead, in classic form, they switch over to reformism.
“The heart of the struggle for liberation,” states the SWP’s 1971 statement, “is not toward counter-institutionism, but fighting to wrest the vast resources ... away from the ruling classes.”
The difference between “wresting away resources” and expropriating the expropriators through the proletarian dictatorship is the difference between reform.and revolution, between revisionism and Marxism-Leninism.
“The inseparable connection between the social and human position of the woman, and private property in the means of production must be strongly brought out,” Lenin told Clara Zetkin in 1920. “That will draw a clear and ineradicable line of distinction between our policy and feminism. And it will also supply the basis for regarding the woman question as a part of the social question, of the workers’ problem, and so bind it firmly to the proletarian class struggle and the revolution.”
The SWP’s failure in this regard is followed by its general extension into the modern revisionist theory of “structural reform.”
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Reform or revolution?
The Trotskyists in this country are relatively well known for their ultra-left opposition to the strategy of revolution by stages in the colonial countries.
To the anti-imperialist united front, aimed at forming a transitional new democratic state and led by the proletariat, they counterpose the line of immediate transition to the proletarian dictatorship.
What is less apparent, however, is that the Socialist Workers party, the largest Trotskyist group in the U.S. and representing the main trend in Trotskyism internationally, puts forward just the opposite strategy for revolution in the advanced capitalist countries.
In fact, despite their fulminations against the revisionist Communist party, they go a long way toward advocating a two-stage “anti-monopoly coalition” strategy, flirt with the idea of “peaceful transition” and scrap the theory of the proletarian dictatorship.
But there is actually a unity between the SWP’s “two lines.” In both cases they set the democratic movement and the class struggle against each other by denying the leading role of the proletariat in the united front against imperialism.
The Trotskyist position raises the question: What is the fundamental contradiction in the U.S.? “The irrepressible antagonism,” writes SWP theoretician George Novack in his book, Democracy and Revolution, “between the dominant monopolists and the strivings for equality, social justice and even for life itself among the masses of the American population holds out two opposing lines of long-range development for American politics.”
Thus it is not the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie but the contradiction between the “masses” and the “dominant monopolists” that is the determining factor in the development of the proletarian revolution.
There is no doubt among Marxist-Leninists that the development of the democratic struggles of the masses can serve to advance the class struggle and even in certain periods play a leading role in raising mass anti-imperialist consciousness. This is the meaning, for instance, of Mao Tsetung’s statement that the Afro-American people’s struggle has served as a “clarion call” to all the oppressed and exploited to rise up against the imperialists.
But when all is said and done, it is also the “ABC” of Marxism-Leninism that it is the development and resolution of the class struggle that determines the development and resolution of She ~r democratic struggles, including the struggle against national oppression. This is the meaning of Mao’s statement that, in the final analysis, national struggle is a matter of class struggle and the reason why Marxist-Leninists place in the forefront the struggle for leadership by the proletariat in the national liberation movements and all other democratic anti-imperialist struggles.
The position of the SWP is completely opposed to this view. Their approach is to tail opportunistically each spontaneous development in the mass democratic movements. Each constituency, in succession, is then dubbed the “vanguard” leading the proletariat to socialism, with the added provision that the “vanguard of the vanguard” in each sector is presently made up of the student youth.
Another SWP theoretician, George Breitman, makes this subordination of class struggle to democratic struggle clear in his pamphlet, How a Minority Can Change Society. “The Negro people,” he writes, “although a minority, can, with consistent leadership, lead the American working class in the revolution that will abolish capitalism.”
Breitman then sums up the Marxist position that oppressed nationalities cannot win full democratic rights under capitalism, thus making their struggle a revolutionary question. Then he adds: “But that is not what I am discussing here. What I am talking about now is something else – the capacity of the Negro people to lead the working-class revolution to replace capitalism.”
Breitman’s shell game
This is backed up with a sleight of hand maneuver. Breitman first says Black people are a “racial minority” that is “overwhelmingly proletarian” in composition. Next he states, “Negroes are an important section of the working class as well as a racial minority.” Then he concludes that “unless we are blind” we can see that Black people are “the most radicalized section of the working class.”
But Breitman is the one who is blind. He has distorted the elementary truth that Black workers stand at the center and play a leading role in both the national and class struggles into the false claim that all Blacks are workers, thus liquidating the national question, the class divisions among the Black people and then demagogically topping it all off with an absurd analogy with the Russian revolution, where he casts the Black people in the role of the proletariat and the masses of the white workers as the peasantry.
That the SWP does not see this line as any special attribute of the national question is evident in their course since Breitman’s statement was first put forward in January 1964. Since then they have applied the same line of reasoning to the youth movement, the women’s movement, the Chicano movement and finally to the gay liberation movement.
How does the SWP propose to lead each of these “independent forces” to power? Again, the initial line is stated by Breitman in his attitude toward forming an all-Black political party with a “transitional” reformist program. “Without Negro votes, the present two-party system will pass from the scene and be replaced by something different, out of which Negroes may be able to acquire new and more reliable allies than up to now. And all of this can be accomplished by the simple device of forming a Negro party and running independent Negro candidates.”
“Something different”?
What is the “something different” that will so miraculously replace the two-party system? The next step would be the formation of a reformist parliamentary labor party, which the SWP would try to join as dual members. The labor party and the Black party would then form an alliance with a Chicano party and possibly, although this has only been raised in SWP internal bulletins, a women’s party.
All these together, of course, would make a bid for a parliamentary majority. The SWP’s role would be to make them “consistent” in their fight for reforms by pursuing the path of “anti-capitalist structural reform” put forward by the revisionist Italian Communist party. “The fundamental goal of these reforms,” writes Ernest Mandel in his Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory, “would be to take away the levels of command in the economy from the financial groups, trusts and monopolies and place them in the hands of the nation, to create a public sector of decisive weight in credit, industry and transportation and to base all of this on workers’ control.”
Mandel calls this “stage” where the “nation” has “taken command” of the monopolies through its governmental “public sector”, a period preceding the development of “dual power” which “could” precede socialist construction.
Even his slogan of “workers control” – to which the SWP would add their version of “community control” – is a reformist fraud, paralleling on the factory floor his approach on the floor of parliament.
Workers’ control, says Mandel, “is a refusal to enter discussions with the management or the government as a whole on the division of national income, so long as the workers have not acquired the ability to reveal the way the capitalists cook the books when they talk of prices and profits. In other words, it is the opening of the books and the calculation of the real production costs and the real profit margins by the workers.”
Why the importance of the calculations? So the workers can accurately determine their productivity and thus achieve a “socially just distribution” in wages.
Despite the obvious clash with Marx’s famous statement, “Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,’ let us emblazon our banners with the revolutionary watchword, abolition of the wage system,’ ” Mandel goes all the way and suggests to the capitalists that his proposals would help them run their system more rationally “... From the standpoint of anti-cyclical policy, it is more intelligent to reduce profits and increase wages. This would permit the demand from wage workers and consumers to come to the relief of investment in the interest of maintaining the conjuncture at the high level.”
Marxist-Leninists have long maintained that the dividing line between revolutionaries and reformists in the proletarian movement is on the question of the proletarian dictatorship, on the necessity to smash the bourgeois state apparatus and to create a new proletarian state in its place; a state that would insure democracy for the workers and their allies and dictatorship against he exploiters for the entire period of transition between capitalism and the classless society of communism.
Not only do Mandel and his SWP co-thinkers put forward in essence a reformist anti-monopoly coalition line for the first “stage” of their revolution in the capitalist countries, they also join with the modern revisionists in liquidating the proletarian dictatorship in the second stage.
George Novack managed to write an entire book on the subject of democracy and the various forms of state in slave, feudal, bourgeois and socialist society without even once using the term or explaining its essence in other words. Novack, in fact, claims the “dividing line” between reformists and revolutionaries is on the question of democracy, “the one viewing democracy as a means of disposing of capitalism, the other as an excuse for maintaining it indefinitely.”
Novack also joins the CP in putting forward the necessity of armed struggle as a hypothetical statement. “In order to protect all such – democratic institutions, Marxists are ready to fight, arms in hand if need be, against ultra-reactionary movements.”
Finally, Novack admits that during the Civil War following the October revolution, “dictatorial enactments were directed exclusively against the class enemies of the revolution” and that these were necessary at the time. But then he adds, “It was not to be considered the permanent and normal state of affairs throughout the period of the transition to a classless society, as Stalinism and Maoism later preached.”
Here Novack joins hands with the Khrushchev revisionists in asserting that while the proletarian dictatorship might have been necessary earlier, what is now required is a “state of the whole people.
What Novack is combating, of course, is not only Stalin and Mao, but also Lenin, thus joining the revisionists and social democrats in a common counter-revolutionary swamp. It is followed through in the Trotskyist view of the party.
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The vanguard party
Trotsky began his career as a disrupter of the revolutionary movement during a struggle with Lenin over the character of the proletarian vanguard party.
Today his followers have – in one form or another – continued this role of attacking Leninist parties wherever they actually exist by attempting to substitute petty bourgeois ideas on organization in their place.
In his struggle with the Mensheviks, Lenin put forward the position that the proletarian revolutionary party, in addition to being guided by the most advanced scientific theory, had to be an organization of professional revolutionaries, full-time and trained activists comprised of the best elements of the working class and the revolutionary intellectuals.
This “party of a new type” is seen as the proletariat’s “general staff” in the class struggle with the bourgeoisie. It is not a debating society but an instrument to prepare the masses for smashing the existing state power, establishing and leading the proletarian dictatorship and continuing to wage the class struggle throughout the entire transition period of socialist construction to the classless society of communism.
As a weapon of class struggle, the party requires an iron discipline, subordinating the individual to the collective, and the combination of secret and open work. Decisions and policies are developed and changed through democratic discussion, debate and the process of criticism and self-criticism. Once a majority in the party has agreed, however, any minority must set aside its opinions and act in carrying out the views of the entire party with a monolithic unity in the face of the class enemy.
The party represents the vanguard of the proletariat but not by self-proclamation. It must be thoroughly integrated with the masses, learn from them and win the role of leader, not only of the workers, but of the broad masses of various classes through its revolutionary practice in the actual course of struggle.
Trotsky’s opposition
Trotsky stood in open and hostile opposition to this view of the party almost to the eve of the October revolution in 1917. He took a centrist position, demanding that the Bolsheviks unite in the same party with the Mensheviks. The only way this could happen, of course, would be for Lenin to dissolve the type of organization he had constructed. Hence the term “liquidationist,” which Lenin applied to Trotsky with a vengeance, defining it as opportunism gone to the extreme of dissolving the proletariat’s key weapon – its organization.
Trotsky agreed with the Menshevik position on organization. He wanted a party without a strict discipline, with contending groups and factions that could be “broad” enough to contain those who proclaimed themselves members by simply stating agreement with general principles. He attacked Lenin viciously:
“Not an accident but a deep ‘omen,’ ” Trotsky wrote in 1904, “is the fact that the leader of the reactionary wing of our party, Comrade Lenin, who is defending the tactical methods of caricature Jacobinism. was psychologically forced to give such a definition of Social- Democracy which represents nothing but a theoretical attempt at destroying the class character of our party.”
This is Trotsky’s classic anti-communist summary of Lenin’s policy: “The barracks regime cannot be the regime of our party, just as the factory cannot be its example. These methods bring about a situation that the party organization will replace the party, the central committee will replace the party organization, and finally the ‘dictator’ will replace the central committee ... The committees will do all the ‘directing’ while ‘the people remain silent.’ ”
Despite the fact that Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks just before October, he never gave up the essence of these views. Although he formally stated he was wrong on the party, his view that it was his particular strategic line of “permanent revolution” that won out over Lenin’s has the clear implication that the issue was not all that important. As Michael Miller points out in the recently published pamphlet, From Trotskyism to Social-Imperialism:
From Trotsky’s paint of view a miracle happened at this propitious moment in history. The revolution joined Trotsky. Trotsky didn’t really join the Bolsheviks. They joined him! 40,000 Bolshevik workers joined Trotsky since he had foreseen everything! ... The problem with Trotsky’s theory is that it requires no party at all ... Trotsky’s theory of October is that the Bolsheviks, having finally come around to the “correct idea,” were able to lead the revolution despite having an incorrect line for 14 years prior to the event.
After Lenin’s death Trotsky reasserted his old ideas on the party in a new form. He now paid lip service to democratic centralism, but demanded “freedom of criticism” within the party in the form of the freedom to organize factional groupings, each with its own leadership structures, platforms, programs and press. As the history of Trotsky’s “left opposition” also demonstrated, in practice he wanted factions with their own internal discipline that could be exercised against the party’s, even to the extent of carrying out actions among the masses expressly forbidden by the party and in opposition to its line.
In 1904 Trotsky had attacked Lenin for “destroying the class character of our party.” In a sense, this was true, although it was not what Trotsky had in mind. Lenin clearly aimed at defeating the petty bourgeois character of the party and it is precisely the petty bourgeois view of both the party and state as an ideal form of radical democratic parliament that Trotsky was never able to abandon.
Trotsky’s perspective comes out most clearly in his 1935 articles, If America Should Go Communist. Despite the fact that the U.S. bourgeoisie is far more sophisticated in the practice of counter-revolution than their Russian counterparts, Trotsky thinks the revolution will be much easier here. Since the monopoly capitalists are in a minority and “everybody below this group is already economically prepared for communism,” Trotsky claims “there is no reason why these (non-monopoly) groups should oppose determined resistance.” As for the monopolists, “they will cease struggling as soon as they fail to find people to fight for them.”
The non-monopoly capitalists and petty bourgeoisie, inspired by the productivity of a planned economy after “a good long time to think things over,” could be “kept solvent until they were gradually and without compulsion sucked into the socialized business system. Without compulsion! The American soviets would not need to resort to the drastic measures which circumstances have often imposed on the Russians.”
Which drastic measures? While Trotsky admits the monopolists would find no place in U.S. soviets, he adds that “with us the soviets have been bureaucratized as a result of the political monopoly of a single party, which itself has become a bureaucracy.” In contrast, “The American soviets will be full-blooded and vigorous, without need or opportunity for such measures ... A wide struggle between interests, groups and ideas is not only conceivable – it is inevitable ... All of these will arouse controversy, vigorous electoral struggle, and passionate debate in the newspapers and at public meetings.”
In addition to asserting the need for a multiparty electoral system, another “drastic measure” to be thrown out is the proletarian control of the press. Instead, “it might be done on the basis of proportional representation for the votes in each soviet election. Thus the right of each group of citizens to use the power of the press will depend on their numerical strength.”
It is a basic principle of Marxism that different parties represent the interests of different classes and sections of classes. Commenting on this same article by Trotsky, M.J. Olgin wrote in his 1935 book, Trotskyism: Counter-Revolution in Disguise:
Soviet parliaments
If the Communist party represents the workers, then obviously the other parties must represent the rich farmers, the poor farmers, the middle bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, perhaps the intellectuals. How will these parties function? Naturally by struggle ... A soviet very much resembling a bourgeois parliament. Several parties represented in it with equal rights. Each party fighting the others. Several parties making a coalition to defeat the dangerous common rival. Why not a coalition of all the other parties against the party of the workers? This latter party, in Trotsky’s conception, should be split into a number of legalized groups and factions with their own separate platforms. The population will have its choice of parties, groups, programs. No special discipline is needed for any party; no monolithic unity for the communist party.
Olgin sums up: “How unity can be achieved under these conditions remains a secret of Trotsky’s. But then he does not worry much about unity because his slogan is, ‘Without compulsion!’ ”
In stark contrast stands Lenin’s view. “The dictatorship of the proletariat is the most stubborn, the most acute, the most merciless struggle of the pew class against the more powerful enemy, the bourgeoisie, whose resistance has grown tenfold after it has been overthrown. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a stubborn struggle, bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, pedagogical and administrative, against the powers and traditions of the old society.”
The Trotskyist parties today continue to repudiate this line and follow the bankrupt views of their mentor. One consequence, of course, is that they themselves are riddled with factions and comprise a galaxy of competing organizations, all claiming the label, “Trotskyist.”
The direction of some, like the Socialist Workers party, has been in the direction of the modern revisionists, liquidating the leading role of the party into a “revolutionary nucleus” that aims to become a mass party playing simply a “catalytic” role in forming an anti-monopoly coalition.
Rationalist deviation
Others, like the Workers League, emphasize Trotsky’s idealist rationalism and remain ensconsed firmly in “left” sectarianism. As their leader, Tim Wohlforth, put it, “At heart what the party is is its program. It is nothing else. The apparatus, the forces, the people, the equipment, the paper, are all expressions of what? A program ... and a program is an idea. So at its heart you could say that the party is an idea.”
In essence, however, they can all justly claim to be Trotskyists. They are united in their opposition to Marxism-Leninism.
Trotsky’s opposition, his sabotage of the proletarian movement and his wrecking activities in the period of the united front against fascism, eventually cost him his life.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that the danger of Trotskyism could be eliminated in such a manner. Trotskyism is an ideological trend within the petty bourgeoisie and as such a social basis for it exists and will continue to exist as long as there are middle classes.
The struggle against Trotskyism is also bound up with the struggle against modern revisionism, the existence and development of which has added new fuel and created new conditions for a revival of Trotskyism.
The decisive condition for a successful struggle against Trotskyism – and all forms of opportunism – is to be found in the growth of the Marxist-Leninist movement itself, in the development of the proletarian vanguard party and its winning of the masses in their millions to the banner of revolution.
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