Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
*********
U.S. Socialist Stewart Alexander Leaves the PFP
by Stewart Alexander
08 Aug 2012
Open Letter to the Peace and Freedom Party State Executive Committee
I am formally resigning my position of State Central Committee member with the Peace and Freedom Party.
I have met many wonderful and dedicated activists throughout my experience with the Peace and Freedom Party, and hope to maintain many of those friendships in the upcoming years.
While my position with regard to this past weekend's PFP Convention may be unpopular, I feel obliged to express the motivation behind my resignation. My commitment to the Peace and Freedom Party extends as far as the Party's commitment to socialism.
While the Nader nomination of 2008 may have been difficult to accept considering the fact that Nader was not a socialist candidate, I was willing to reconcile the choice believing that the nomination would heavily contribute to a substantial increase in new registered Peace and Freedom Party voters. When the registrations failed to meet what I considered to be a worthwhile sacrifice after the Nader nomination, I began to place a progressively greater hope that in 2012, the Party would make the nomination of a socialist candidate a priority.
Some might say if that was a priority, why didn't you do more to secure delegates to win the nomination, therefore ensuring the nomination of a socialist candidate? That's a valid question that I am happy to address.
We began the effort to reorganize the Socialist Party in California, which had been dormant for roughly a decade, in December of 2010. At the time, we had a very small handful of youngsters tasked with the challenge. The group marched forward, eventually establishing a Local in Los Angeles in February of 2011. Finally, on June 25th of 2011, the Socialist Party USA chartered the state of California, and we began to put our focus on the next year's election. The reality for me was, the overwhelming majority of the SPUSA membership in California had only joined the Party subsequent to February 2011, and very few had registered to the Peace and Freedom Party at the time.
This group in California, largely youngsters, fresh out of high school (and some still in high school) were just beginning their foray into the fight for socialism. Do I criticize them for not having been registered to vote Peace and Freedom Party prior to February of 2011? I do not. Was there encouragement provided to register Peace and Freedom Party after joining the Socialist Party USA? You bet, and many have, believing that Peace and Freedom Party was a party committed to socialism. Do I criticize them for their place on the learning curve with regard to electoral politics? No. I have tried to provide support and encouragement and assistance in their path toward establishing an active Socialist Party USA presence in California.
Knowing that I was able to play a vital role in where the SPUSA now stands in CA is something that I take great pride. (And for the record and for those who like to compare the number of registered Peace and Freedom Party voters versus the number of Socialist Party USA members, the SPUSA is a membership organization and does not measure its success in terms of registered voters. In 2010, Dan LaBotz of the Socialist Party USA ran for Senate in Ohio and received over 25,000 votes. Are all of those voters dues-paying members of the SPUSA? They are not.
In addition, a spirited effort was made to run a small slate of write-in candidates to serve as delegates for my campaign during the PFP Convention. Ultimately, that effort was unsuccessful, but I admired the effort and sacrifice made to go through the process required to run as write-ins during the California primary.
So I just want to clear the air on the issue of effort with regard to delegates. Had the SPUSA been one year earlier in reorganizing California, the situation may have been a bit different. Levying blame at the feet of those in California working on my campaign is not only inappropriate, in my opinion, but irresponsible if we place any premium on encouraging our youth to carry the torch in the fight for socialism.
Considering what we had to work with in California and the commitment to the Peace and Freedom Party over the years, the Alexander/Mendoza Campaign thought that making an appeal to the undecided Peace and Freedom Party delegates was a reasonable direction to travel. I am hopeful that many were aware of the fact that, in the numerous media opportunities I have had during my campaign; I have always done whatever I could to promote the Peace and Freedom Party, regardless of where my interview was being held.
I recently took a trip to the Socialist Party USA's National Organizing Conference (NOC) in Memphis, TN, where I explained my history with both Peace and Freedom Party and the Socialist Party USA to a group of nearly 100 activists who convened for the session. I felt some confidence that my history and loyalty to the Peace and Freedom Party, coupled with my commitment to socialism, would yield some measure of support to fill the gap created by the youth of the SPUSA. Never in a million years would I have expected what I witnessed during the Peace and Freedom Convention. To be frank, I am sorry that the youngsters, Alex Mendoza and the FSP Campaign endured the actions of a Party I so proudly supported for the last 14 years.
I have had time to reflect since the Convention, and while I have many questions: Where was the Q&A period for Roseanne Barr? Where was the skepticism that putting our faith that Barr would be able to deliver the voter registrations that Nader wasn't able to accomplish? Where was the concern that a Party that labels itself a socialist party on its website might nominate a candidate who just months ago claimed that she favored Regulated Capitalism? My prevailing feelings are of sorrow. Sorrow for those within and without the Peace and Freedom Party who put their trust and faith into those who could contribute to providing a socialist alternative in California, many of who have reached out to the campaign in the past few days; sorrow and frustration when I think about my loyalty to the Peace and Freedom Party. Sorrow and frustration at the complete lack of support that the socialist candidates received in the way of delegate votes at the Convention.
As I always have, I will continue my fight to build a better future for the working class. I will continue to cherish the time I spend educating young people on the value of socialism. I can only hope to inspire them as they inspire me.
Comradely,
Stewart Alexander
Socialist Party USA Presidential Candidate
Response to Stewart Alexander
by Cat Woods
10 Aug 2012
This letter is a response to Stewart Alexander's resignation letter posted here:
http://boston.indymedia.org/newswire/display/215652/index.php
Stewart,
Are we supposed to feel sorry for you? You basically call Roseanne Barr a liar -- assuming that she is not really a socialist because she hasn't publicly called herself that as long as you. You talk as if you're being so noble in not blaming your *supporters* for not getting you the nomination, because of course you must have deserved it -- after all, you met Kevin Akin a long time ago.
Stewart, I never had anything against you (until now), but you lost this nomination *yourself*. If *any* of the other candidates had talked up the Peace & Freedom Party and pledged to make the CA voter registration drive a priority, Roseanne Barr & Cindy Sheehan would not have had a chance of winning the nomination. They ran ZERO people for delegate. You guys had committed delegates. Roseanne knew no one in the party; you had the long-time loyalty of many party members.
But none of you did. You took that loyalty for granted. You say yourself that the Socialist Party doesn't care that much about voter registration. Well, members of the PFP *care* whether we fall off the ballot in 2014.
Before Roseanne came along, I was just *bored* with the Presidential race. I even wondered whether I could get myself to attend the convention; what was the point? None of you were saying anything about the PFP or saving our ballot line. Every time I've heard you speak, you ramble on and on about how you met Kevin at a cafe years ago, blah blah blah. Occasional passion, but no focus, no preparation. This is supposed to convince us to nominate you for President? I'm sure you're capable of better, but you don't bring it when you speak publicly. Or at least none of the times I've heard you. From what I've heard from others, your "I've known Kevin a long time" speech has been a standard of yours for quite a while now.
About Nader in 2008, no he does not call himself a socialist, but he *did* help the party. He campaigned with our candidates so that they spoke about socialism to audiences of many hundreds instead of a couple dozen. (I was one of those whose path to socialism began with hearing Marsha Feinland's speech about nationalizing the banks since we already paid for them with the Wall Street bailout -- at a Nader event.) He had the Peace & Freedom Party logo on campaign literature which *actually* reached lots of *actual* people. He provided offices from which the PFP ran all its campaigns. The voter registration issue was not the same in 2008. The Top Two primary didn't pass until 2010. *That* is why we're in danger of falling off the ballot. You didn't know that? Do you care about *this* party (the PFP) or not?
Face it, Stewart: you thought you had this nomination in the bag and took your support for granted. I'm not sure why you were so surprised. If you'd called delegates, you'd have known you didn't have it in the bag. I certainly knew you weren't going to win it, and I only called a fraction of the delegates. My main fear was a complete breakdown where Roseanne got eliminated early and no one got a majority. I knew she was the "consensus" candidate if she could make it to the later rounds. I knew she had tons of later round support from your and Durham's supporters. You apparently didn't even bother to find that out.
Yeah, you shouldn't blame your own supporters. And it's completely pathetic that you're trying to blame the party for nominating someone who immediately grasped that this party was in danger and offered to help us, who immediately started putting the Peace & Freedom Party name into the *national* media, and who jumped at the opportunity to "come out" as a socialist and promote socialism. Almost as if she believed in socialism *more* than these people whining about not getting a nomination that they didn't bother to win.
The PFP is a multi-tendency party. You therefore do not get to define Roseanne and Cindy's socialism out of existence simply because you've called yourself a socialist longer and met Kevin Akin so many years ago.
The SP attends meetings of the National Organizing Committee. The hopes behind that committee include a strong hope among many of creating a *JOINT* national nominating process by 2016. My passion is to create a truly democratic process -- a direct national primary with ranked voting and one person one vote. But really it's no hope at all if the SP can't even accept when it loses the CA ballot line fair and square. An essential requirement of democracy is being willing to accept loss in order to have a fair process.
The person at a disadvantage here was Roseanne -- she didn't know the party's culture or the inner workings of our nomination process, she had no delegates, her celebrity was counted as a strike *against* her by a lot of party members, and she only had 3 weeks to win them over. But she brought it big time and won. Man up and deal with it.
-Cat Woods
Tell the Truth Stewart
by Marilyn Peters
sewing (nospam) marilynpeters.com (unverified)
10 Aug 2012
Tell the truth Stewart. I joined your campaign and ran the operations (successfully) for 6 weeks at the end of 2011. You allowed your campaign manager Mimi Soltysik (who did nothing to progress the campaign) to fire me when he became jealous of the work I was doing and the advances I was making in your campaign.
In early December I sent a letter signed by you to all SPUSA CA registrants asking for their help in joining the State Central Committee (SCC) of the Peace and Freedom Party. Both Cindy Henderson and Frank Boeheim of P&F attended an SPUSA meeting to teach Soltysik and others the importance of, and how to become SCC members. Frank even left one page of easy instructions for members to follow.
When I learned from Cindy that the deadline for potention SCC members to register P&F was coming in the next few days, I phoned the 100 SPUSA members who had received the letter and urged them to go to the post office and re-register P&F. Many said they would support you in this way. Soltysik was also given this information several days before the deadline.
Then Soltysik and his girlfriend Lynn had a drunken tyrade at one of our meetings, yelling and screaming abuse at you and at me and then Soltysik dumped me. Everything I was working on came to a grinding halt, including ballot access and the P&F nomination. After all the hard work I had done for you, you did nothing to protect me from your bullying campaign manager.
You attempt to blame the “youth” who are running your campaign for your failure to get the P&F nomination. I am 56 years of age. Obviously your “youth” needed help from someone like me who has years of experience in building successful entities but you allowed them to dump me. The truth is that your campaign manager, his girlfriend and everyone else on your campaign are just plain lazy. Your treasurer has missed 2 deadlines for filing legally required reports with the FEC. They didn’t even bother to get on the P&F SCC so they could vote for you. Yet, here I am a non-citizen who managed to became a voting delegate.
Good luck Stewart.
We both the truth.
Response to Marilyn Peters
by Mimi Soltysik
(No verified email address)
12 Aug 2012
Generally we spend some time and effort in responding to feedback like Marilyn's to ensure that perception does not create reality. Given the tone that Marilyn has taken, we feel that readers will reasonably be able to see motive in her response.
One thing we would like to establish. Marilyn mentions that she had successfully run the Campaign for a small period of time. What she fails to mention is that she was somehow, perhaps remarkably, to create an environment where nearly every member of the Alexander/Mendoza 2012 Campaign had considered quitting had she continued in her position.
In addition, the Alexander/Mendoza Campaign was able to run and eventually see the appointment of a Central Committee member under the same bylaws that allowed Marilyn the appointment. (A bylaw allowing non-citizens and those under 18 to run for Central Committee.)
Marilyn and others may have attended SP of CA meetings outlining the requirements necessary to run for Peace and Freedom Central Committee. What she does not mention is the fact that, in order to run for Peace and Freedom Party Central Committee, one needed to be a registered Peace and Freedom Party voter no later than February 2011. The Socialist Party USA's CA chapter was established on June 25th of 2011, and the overwhelming majority of Socialist Party USA members had not been registered Peace and Freedom prior to February 2011. Much effort was placed in the early part of 2011 to establish 1. a Los Angeles and Riverside Local of the Socialist Party in CA and 2. creating a foundation for growth in CA. We achieved those objectives and have since seen the addition of a Bay Area Local with Ventura and Orange Counties at the ready to charter.
Marilyn can choose to present herself publicly any way she sees fit. If that happens to include insults (as inane and untrue as they might be), that's her choice. Anyone who has worked closely with the folks in the SPUSA affiliated with the Alexander/Mendoza Campaign knows that malaise has not been a problem.
As stated from the beginning, this would be a Campaign intended to spread the message of socialism. This is a Campaign that enjoys working with another, and despite its lack of experience, is doing its best to provide the SPUSA with an effort that Party members will be pleased with.
All the best,
Mimi Soltysik
Response to Mimi Soltysik
by Dave Kadlecek
dkadlecek (nospam) igc.org (verified)
13 Aug 2012
Modified: 03:51:13 PM
Mimi Soltysik is wrong in his claim that California election laws prevented the Socialist Party USA from running candidates for Peace and Freedom Party Central Committees to vote for Stewart Alexander.
I wasn't involved in any of the discussions last year among Marilyn Peters, Mimi Soltysik, Frank Boeheim and others in the Peace and Freedom Party and/or the Socialist Party USA, so I can't say who knew what when and who was told what.
However, I can say that the restrictions in the California Elections Code would not have prevented supporters of the Socialist Party USA who weren't already Peace and Freedom Party registrants before June 2011 from running for P&F Central Committees to be able to vote for Stewart Alexander at the August 2012 convention.
There are two restrictions on candidates for P&F Central Committees whose names are to appear on the primary election ballot (or be declared elected by county election officials without the race actually being on the ballot). One is that the candidate can't have been registered in another ballot-qualified party in California for 12 months before filing a declaration of candidacy, and the candidate must have been registered in the Peace and Freedom Party for 3 months before filing a declaration of candidacy. The deadline for filing the declaration of candidacy (at the end, not the beginning, of the filing process, with a deadline this year of March 9th). Thus prospective candidates for P&F Central Committees had to have been registered P&F by 9 December 2011 and not have been registered Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian, American Independent or Americans Elect at any time on or after 9 March 2011. They did not have to have been registered Peace and Freedom since February of 2011.
Further, even if a prospective Central Committees candidate had been ineligible to appear on the ballot, he or she could have run as a write-in simply by getting 25 signatures of P&F registrants in the relevant jurisdiction (county, county supervisorial district, or Assembly district, depending on the county) asking that the primary election for Central Committees not be cancelled to allow for write-in candidates (and then getting nominated as a write-in by getting nominating signatures during an eight-week period in the spring).
Getting the needed signatures wouldn't have been a trivial task, but it wasn't something that would have been horrendously difficult for anyone who had more than half a clue regarding election procedures.
To Dave
by Mimi Soltysik
(No verified email address)
13 Aug 2012
Modified: 07:23:46 PM
Dave,
We took a stack of forms from SPUSA members to the voter registration office, and of that stack, very few (perhaps 2) met the requirements you outlined. We also ran a few candidates as write-ins, collecting the requisite signatures necessary for ballot eligibility.
I will repeat once more as I have many times elsewhere. We entered the Peace and Freedom Party Convention on the back of a newly formed chapter of the SPUSA, one that we worked very hard to build. Our expectations on winning the nomination were minimal. I do not believe that Stewart's decision is based at all in the fact that he and Alex did not win the nomination, nor have I seen him state as much.
Our focus in early 2011 throughout the bulk of the 2011 year was on chartering a CA chapter of the SPUSA, establishing locals, hosting the the SPUSA National Convention (which we did), and providing resources for those interested in building the Party throughout the state. Regardless what anyone might believe, there was also a considerable effort to run delegates for the PFP Convention. As I mentioned in my earlier paragraph, that did not happen, and with the rebuilding of the SPUSA in CA as context, we were simply not at a position at the moment where winning the Convention on the basis of delegate count was a remote possibility at best.
In any case, Stewart has made a personal choice and we will continue our efforts to spread the message of socialism.
Mimi
Friday, August 24, 2012
Paul Ryan's Socially Destructive Agenda by Stephen Lendman
13 Aug 2012
Paul Ryan's Socially Destructive Agenda by Stephen Lendman
Ryan and other Republican House Budget Committee members call it "The Path to Prosperity: A Blueprint for American Renewal."
Key is gutting vital programs millions of Americans rely on. Ryan wants Medicare privatized as well as Medicaid, food stamps, and and other entitlement programs ended.
Later, he wants Social Security privatized en route to ending it altogether.
Medicaid is welfare for low-income beneficiaries. Washington and states co-fund it. It's managed at the state level.
Social Security and Medicare are insurance programs, not entitlements. Worker-employer payroll tax deductions fund them. They're contractual federal obligations to eligible recipients. Gutting them is irresponsible and socially destructive. Like Republicans, Obama and most Democrats are committed to doing it.
Social security provides vital retirement, disability, survivorship, and death benefits. It's America's most effective poverty reduction program. It's worked remarkably well since inception.
It's the debt, stupid, America's "fiscal cliff," they claim. Gutting social programs assures unrestricted military spending, maintaining tax cuts for rich elites, cutting amounts corporations pay, and sustaining handouts to bankers and other corporate favorites.
It's not going bankrupt. When properly administered, it's sound and secure. It needs only modest adjustments at times to assure it.
Medicare is America's largest health insurance program. Millions of seniors, disabled people under age 65, and other eligible recipients rely on it.
Ryan wants social spending cut to 1949 levels. Around $5 trillion is proposed for starters over the next decade. Doing so will create jobs and promote growth, he claims. His budget balancing plan falls on the backs of ordinary people.
His program assures America's resources go to rich elites, bankers, war profiteers, and other corporate favorites.
"Prioritize national security by preventing deep, indiscriminate cuts to defense," he says.
Repeal Obamacare. "Advance bipartisan solutions that take power away from government bureaucrats and put patients in control."
Last March, the House adopted a budget resolution. It adopted much of what Ryan proposed. Ten Republicans opposed him. They want bigger cuts. Democrats endorse slightly less austere ones than Ryan. America's poor, disadvantaged, and moderate income earners are largely shut out of his plan.
In 2011, he proposed eliminating Medicare altogether. It passed the House but not the Senate.
Ryan claims his plan is responsible deficit cutting. The late Bob Chapman disagreed. He envisioned no change in out-of-control spending. The deficit will accelerate, not shrink, he explained.
Ryan's plan reshuffles the deck chairs. Most of what's cut is redirected to America's wealthy and corporate favorites. Lawmakers know exactly what they're doing, said Chapman. The nation is headed for Banana Republic status, he explained.
He saw no reality checking, no restraint, no attempt to stop deficit hemorrhaging, and no control over America's war machine. He called forced austerity a formula for "economic chaos."
Criminals are running the country. Annual $1 - 2 trillion deficits will persist for years. Debt amounts are so great, they won't be paid. Limits will be raised. Social spending cuts will grow until America's safety net is entirely gutted.
Gradualism is how he'll do it. A bipartisan majority agrees. Ryan's plan follows recommendations from Obama's two deficit cutting commissions. Simpson/Bowles and Dominici/Rivlin proposed "restoring America's future" by destroying it for ordinary households hit hardest.
Instead of stimulus when it's most needed, they want America's poor, disadvantaged, and others of limited means bearing the burden of America's war machine and letting super-rich elites get richer. Greater inequality and poverty are assured.
Their ideal society is no fit place to live in. Ryan's "Path to Prosperity" wants America returned to 19th century harshness. His entire agenda reflects reactionary extremism. Legislation he proposes is corporate friendly.
Agribusiness is favored over small farmers. Free trade is unfair. Education plans want public schools privatized. Everything government does, business does better, he believes. Energy policy supports dangerous nuclear technology and drill baby drill.
Environmental concerns are subordinated to profits. Healthcare proposals favor the best money can buy for those who can afford it. Homeland Security is about keeping America safe by militarizing it. War on terror strategy hypes fear to enlist support for Pentagon and homeland priorities.
Immigration plans call for keeping out and removing millions not wanted. Tax policy makes ordinary people bear the burden for maximum business and super-rich benefits.
Ryan's position on these and other issues cynically supports the top 1% at the expense of everyone else. He represents Wisconsin's 1st congressional district. Elected in November 1998, he's in his 7th term in Congress.
He chairs the House Budget Committee. He's one of three Young Guns Program co-founders. It recruits hardline candidates for Congress. Romney chose Ryan as his running mate partner. They call themselves "America's Comeback Team."
"Paul is a man of tremendous character," Romney said. He's "the right man to lead America back to prosperity and greatness." He manipulated Tea Party anger into budget priorities.
He's wealthy and doesn't care. He's ranked America's 124th richest House representative. He's worth an estimated $3.2 million.
He's ideologically far-right. He's an economic warrior representing wealth and power. He and Romney are two sides of the same coin. Democrats hardly differ. They're in lockstep on issues mattering most.
Ryan is more hard right than most ideological extremists. He favors two tax brackets - 25 and 10%. He wants corporate taxes cut from 35 - 25% or lower. Ideally he'd like them eliminated altogether along with others on capital gains, dividends, interest, and estates.
He deplores social spending. He calls Social Security a Ponzi scheme. His job creation ideas assures destroying millions of them. He supports socialism for the rich and free market capitalism for working folks.
No corporation left behind is policy. No social program too many destroyed permits it. Bankers and other other business predators love Ryan. He's their kind of guy. Romney/Ryan is their ticket.
They're as comfortable with Obama. He gave them everything they want and then some. Everything isn't enough. They want more. Stealing it from ordinary folks is how. Romney's on board to do it. So is Ryan.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net.
His new book is titled "How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War"
http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com
Paul Ryan's Socially Destructive Agenda by Stephen Lendman
Ryan and other Republican House Budget Committee members call it "The Path to Prosperity: A Blueprint for American Renewal."
Key is gutting vital programs millions of Americans rely on. Ryan wants Medicare privatized as well as Medicaid, food stamps, and and other entitlement programs ended.
Later, he wants Social Security privatized en route to ending it altogether.
Medicaid is welfare for low-income beneficiaries. Washington and states co-fund it. It's managed at the state level.
Social Security and Medicare are insurance programs, not entitlements. Worker-employer payroll tax deductions fund them. They're contractual federal obligations to eligible recipients. Gutting them is irresponsible and socially destructive. Like Republicans, Obama and most Democrats are committed to doing it.
Social security provides vital retirement, disability, survivorship, and death benefits. It's America's most effective poverty reduction program. It's worked remarkably well since inception.
It's the debt, stupid, America's "fiscal cliff," they claim. Gutting social programs assures unrestricted military spending, maintaining tax cuts for rich elites, cutting amounts corporations pay, and sustaining handouts to bankers and other corporate favorites.
It's not going bankrupt. When properly administered, it's sound and secure. It needs only modest adjustments at times to assure it.
Medicare is America's largest health insurance program. Millions of seniors, disabled people under age 65, and other eligible recipients rely on it.
Ryan wants social spending cut to 1949 levels. Around $5 trillion is proposed for starters over the next decade. Doing so will create jobs and promote growth, he claims. His budget balancing plan falls on the backs of ordinary people.
His program assures America's resources go to rich elites, bankers, war profiteers, and other corporate favorites.
"Prioritize national security by preventing deep, indiscriminate cuts to defense," he says.
Repeal Obamacare. "Advance bipartisan solutions that take power away from government bureaucrats and put patients in control."
Last March, the House adopted a budget resolution. It adopted much of what Ryan proposed. Ten Republicans opposed him. They want bigger cuts. Democrats endorse slightly less austere ones than Ryan. America's poor, disadvantaged, and moderate income earners are largely shut out of his plan.
In 2011, he proposed eliminating Medicare altogether. It passed the House but not the Senate.
Ryan claims his plan is responsible deficit cutting. The late Bob Chapman disagreed. He envisioned no change in out-of-control spending. The deficit will accelerate, not shrink, he explained.
Ryan's plan reshuffles the deck chairs. Most of what's cut is redirected to America's wealthy and corporate favorites. Lawmakers know exactly what they're doing, said Chapman. The nation is headed for Banana Republic status, he explained.
He saw no reality checking, no restraint, no attempt to stop deficit hemorrhaging, and no control over America's war machine. He called forced austerity a formula for "economic chaos."
Criminals are running the country. Annual $1 - 2 trillion deficits will persist for years. Debt amounts are so great, they won't be paid. Limits will be raised. Social spending cuts will grow until America's safety net is entirely gutted.
Gradualism is how he'll do it. A bipartisan majority agrees. Ryan's plan follows recommendations from Obama's two deficit cutting commissions. Simpson/Bowles and Dominici/Rivlin proposed "restoring America's future" by destroying it for ordinary households hit hardest.
Instead of stimulus when it's most needed, they want America's poor, disadvantaged, and others of limited means bearing the burden of America's war machine and letting super-rich elites get richer. Greater inequality and poverty are assured.
Their ideal society is no fit place to live in. Ryan's "Path to Prosperity" wants America returned to 19th century harshness. His entire agenda reflects reactionary extremism. Legislation he proposes is corporate friendly.
Agribusiness is favored over small farmers. Free trade is unfair. Education plans want public schools privatized. Everything government does, business does better, he believes. Energy policy supports dangerous nuclear technology and drill baby drill.
Environmental concerns are subordinated to profits. Healthcare proposals favor the best money can buy for those who can afford it. Homeland Security is about keeping America safe by militarizing it. War on terror strategy hypes fear to enlist support for Pentagon and homeland priorities.
Immigration plans call for keeping out and removing millions not wanted. Tax policy makes ordinary people bear the burden for maximum business and super-rich benefits.
Ryan's position on these and other issues cynically supports the top 1% at the expense of everyone else. He represents Wisconsin's 1st congressional district. Elected in November 1998, he's in his 7th term in Congress.
He chairs the House Budget Committee. He's one of three Young Guns Program co-founders. It recruits hardline candidates for Congress. Romney chose Ryan as his running mate partner. They call themselves "America's Comeback Team."
"Paul is a man of tremendous character," Romney said. He's "the right man to lead America back to prosperity and greatness." He manipulated Tea Party anger into budget priorities.
He's wealthy and doesn't care. He's ranked America's 124th richest House representative. He's worth an estimated $3.2 million.
He's ideologically far-right. He's an economic warrior representing wealth and power. He and Romney are two sides of the same coin. Democrats hardly differ. They're in lockstep on issues mattering most.
Ryan is more hard right than most ideological extremists. He favors two tax brackets - 25 and 10%. He wants corporate taxes cut from 35 - 25% or lower. Ideally he'd like them eliminated altogether along with others on capital gains, dividends, interest, and estates.
He deplores social spending. He calls Social Security a Ponzi scheme. His job creation ideas assures destroying millions of them. He supports socialism for the rich and free market capitalism for working folks.
No corporation left behind is policy. No social program too many destroyed permits it. Bankers and other other business predators love Ryan. He's their kind of guy. Romney/Ryan is their ticket.
They're as comfortable with Obama. He gave them everything they want and then some. Everything isn't enough. They want more. Stealing it from ordinary folks is how. Romney's on board to do it. So is Ryan.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net.
His new book is titled "How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War"
http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin- Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ Any Night- The Songs of Tom Waits
From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin- Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ Any Night- The Songs of Tom Waits
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVE72Ae82Tw
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Tom Waits performing Yap Harburg’s Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?
If, as I do, every once in a while as least from a comfortable from a distance you need to hear about boozers, losers, dopesters, hipsters, fallen sisters, midnight sifters, grifters, drifters, the driftless, small-time grafters, hoboes, bums, tramps, the fallen, those who want to fall, Spanish Johnnies, stale cigarette butts, whiskey-soaked barroom floors, loners, the lonely, sad sacks, the sad and others at the margins of society then this is your stop. Tom Waitsis an acquired taste, but one well worth acquiring as he storms heaven looking for busted black-hearted angels, for girls with Monroe hips, for the desperate out in forsaken woods who need to hold to something, and for all the misbegotten.
Tom Waits gives voice in song, a big task, to the characters that peopled Nelson Algren’s novels (The Last Carousel, Neon Wilderness, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Man with the Golden Arm). In short, these are the people who do not make revolutions, far from it, but they surely desperately could use one. If, additionally, you need a primordial voice and occasional dissonant instrumentation to round out the picture go no further. Finally, if you need someone who “feels your pain” for his characters you are home. And that, my friends, is definitely a political statement. Keep looking for the heart of Saturday night, Brother.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVE72Ae82Tw
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Tom Waits performing Yap Harburg’s Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?
If, as I do, every once in a while as least from a comfortable from a distance you need to hear about boozers, losers, dopesters, hipsters, fallen sisters, midnight sifters, grifters, drifters, the driftless, small-time grafters, hoboes, bums, tramps, the fallen, those who want to fall, Spanish Johnnies, stale cigarette butts, whiskey-soaked barroom floors, loners, the lonely, sad sacks, the sad and others at the margins of society then this is your stop. Tom Waitsis an acquired taste, but one well worth acquiring as he storms heaven looking for busted black-hearted angels, for girls with Monroe hips, for the desperate out in forsaken woods who need to hold to something, and for all the misbegotten.
Tom Waits gives voice in song, a big task, to the characters that peopled Nelson Algren’s novels (The Last Carousel, Neon Wilderness, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Man with the Golden Arm). In short, these are the people who do not make revolutions, far from it, but they surely desperately could use one. If, additionally, you need a primordial voice and occasional dissonant instrumentation to round out the picture go no further. Finally, if you need someone who “feels your pain” for his characters you are home. And that, my friends, is definitely a political statement. Keep looking for the heart of Saturday night, Brother.
In Boston-Black August-SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE THE STRUGGLE AGAINST WAR AND RACISM
In Boston-Black August-SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE THE STRUGGLE AGAINST WAR AND RACISM
August 23rd, 6:3O-8pm
Grove Hall Library
Jazz Lounge
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, CHILD CARE PROVIDED
With the recent police violence in Anaheim, the murder of Trayvon Martin, mass unemployment and the continued existence of a racist criminal justice system, we are calling on the community to come together to discuss a socialist alternative to this system of violence. Malcolm X once said that "you can't have capitalism without racism"; this meeting, free and open to the public, will explore this theme and much more.
Eljeer Hawkins is an author who has covered various topics, from the legacy of the Black Freedom Movement to last year's Georgia prisoners' strike. Eljeer has spoken at many colleges and community centers throughout the country about the necessity of building a movement that unites working people to challenge the capitalist system and all its ills. Eljeer is a founding member of Youth Against Poverty and Racism in Harlem and Socialist Alternative.
For more Information call: 774 454 9060 or email: Boston@socialistalternative.org
August 23rd, 6:3O-8pm
Grove Hall Library
Jazz Lounge
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, CHILD CARE PROVIDED
With the recent police violence in Anaheim, the murder of Trayvon Martin, mass unemployment and the continued existence of a racist criminal justice system, we are calling on the community to come together to discuss a socialist alternative to this system of violence. Malcolm X once said that "you can't have capitalism without racism"; this meeting, free and open to the public, will explore this theme and much more.
Eljeer Hawkins is an author who has covered various topics, from the legacy of the Black Freedom Movement to last year's Georgia prisoners' strike. Eljeer has spoken at many colleges and community centers throughout the country about the necessity of building a movement that unites working people to challenge the capitalist system and all its ills. Eljeer is a founding member of Youth Against Poverty and Racism in Harlem and Socialist Alternative.
For more Information call: 774 454 9060 or email: Boston@socialistalternative.org
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
In Honor Of The “Old Man”- On The 72nd Anniversary Of The Death Of Leon Trotsky
Markin comment:
Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!
Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
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Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!
Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
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From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-On The Anniversary Of His Death-From The "Socialist Alternative (CWI)" Press Trotsky's Relevance Today-The Most Modern Ideas – Peter Taaffe
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Trotsky's Relevance Today-The Most Modern Ideas – Peter Taaffe
Sixty years ago this August, Stalin's hit man, Raymond Mercader, murdered the greatest living revolutionary of that time, Leon Trotsky. It was not just the Trotskyists who felt the terrible blow of his death but the working class and labour movement of the whole world. This brain - in a sense, the brain of the working class at that stage - would no longer illuminate and clarify the problems confronting working class movements internationally.
Just to list Trotsky's 'practical achievements' would in itself justify commemorating this anniversary. He was the chairman of the first ever soviet - committee of workers' representatives - in the first Russian revolution between 1905-1906. In 1917 he was the organiser of the October Russian revolution, the greatest single event in human history. He then created and led the Red Army which defeated the twenty-one counter-revolutionary armies of imperialism that attempted to crush the revolution.
But above all, Leon Trotsky was one of the greatest theoreticians of the workers' movement. If Karl Marx was the man of the millennium, then Leon Trotsky was undoubtedly, with Lenin, Friedrich Engels and Rosa Luxemburg, also one of the greatest figures of the millennium, and certainly of the 20th century. His ideas, his method of analysis, and the conclusions drawn from this, are as relevant today as in the past.
The Permanent Revolution
Take Trotsky's famous theory of the permanent revolution, which brilliantly anticipated the class forces involved in the outcome of the Russian revolution. Russia prior to 1917 was a feudal or semi-feudal system which meant virtual slavery for the population. Like India today, the majority of the population were peasants who eked out an existence on narrow parcels of land while the urban working class had no rights and were ruthlessly exploited in rapidly developing industry. Russia had not completed the capitalist democratic revolution as had England, for instance, in the 16th century, and France in the 18th century. The main tasks of this revolution were the elimination of feudal and semi-feudal relations in the land, unification of the country, and the solution of the national question.
It also involved the introduction of democracy, the right to vote, the election of a democratic parliament, a free press, and trade union rights for the working class. Last but not least, the completion of this revolution would free the economy from the domination of imperialism, particularly of Anglo-French imperialism which saw Russia as a virtual colony.
All trends of opinion within the Russian workers' movement saw as the main task the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. However, Lenin and Trotsky differed from the Mensheviks (minority members of the Russian Social Democratic Labour movement) who believed that the task of the working class was to play second fiddle to the so-called liberal capitalists. The Mensheviks considered that the latter were the main agents of the capitalist democratic revolution. Socialism for them was the music of the distant future.
At the same time, the Mensheviks saw the Russian revolution as a purely national event with a limited echo internationally. Yet the late development of the capitalists as a class in Russia, and with it a delay in the capitalist democratic revolution, meant that the weak and feeble Russian capitalists were no longer capable of completing this historic task. As we see in the neo-colonial world today, the capitalists invested in land and the landlords invested in industry. Therefore, any serious attempt at a thoroughgoing land reform challenging the power of the landlords would also come up against the opposition of the capitalists and their political representatives, the liberal capitalist parties. This has been shown not just in Russia but in Germany in the 19th century and very graphically in our time in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
A newly-arisen force in Russia, not present in the English and French revolutions, was the working class, which had developed into a powerful force and, at that time, in a unique fashion. Trotsky pointed out that the liberal bourgeoisie were terrified, quite correctly as events demonstrated, that a struggle against Tsarism and the social foundations upon which it rested, would open the floodgates through which the working class would pour, together with the peasantry, and place on the agenda its own demands. Both Trotsky and Lenin, therefore, argued that it was an alliance of the working class and peasantry which alone could carry through the capitalist democratic revolution.
Lenin expressed this in his formula of the 'democratic dictatorship of the working class and peasantry'. Trotsky, however, in his theory of the permanent revolution, pointed out that the peasantry historically had never played an independent role. It must be led by one or other of the two great classes in society, the bourgeoisie or the working class. Lenin and Trotsky agreed that the capitalists could not carry through their own revolution. Therefore, Trotsky argued, the working class must assume the leadership of the revolution, drawing behind it the masses in the countryside. Lenin, on the other hand, left open the exact relationship between the peasantry and the working class, in his 'algebraic formula'.
Trotsky argued that because history had shown that the peasantry can never play an independent role the alliance, therefore, must be led by the working class. The combined movement of the working class in the cities, and a mass peasant uprising in the countryside, was envisaged by Trotsky in his theory of permanent revolution as the way the revolution was likely to develop in Russia.
This was confirmed in October 1917. Moreover, there was a complete agreement in the approach of Lenin and Trotsky between February and October 1917 as to how the revolution would be successful. Despite all the attempts of latter day 'Leninists' to dispute this - from the remnants of Stalinised 'Communist' parties in the neo-colonial world to ex-Trotskyists - Lenin himself in 1917 pointed out that his previous formula of the 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry' had been filled with a 'negative content'. With Trotsky he indicated that the task was now for the proletariat to seize power, supported by the peasantry.
Once having come to power, argued Trotsky, and carried through the main tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the revolutionary power would proceed to the socialist tasks within Russia and also act as a spark to the world revolution itself. And this is how events actually worked out with a mass revolutionary wave in Western Europe - in Germany in 1918-19, Hungary 1919, Italy in the sit-down strikes and occupations of 1920, etc. These revolutions were only defeated because of the perfidious role of the leaders of the mass social democratic organisations at the time.
Marxists do not idolise 'ancient texts' no matter how brilliant they might be. However, if a theory is very 'old' and yet it correctly foresees events and processes, it is the most modern of theories. And Trotsky's ideas are as applicable today for most of Africa, and for huge parts of Asia and Latin America, as they were for Russia more than 80 years ago. The capitalist democratic revolution has not been completed in big parts of the neo-colonial world. The landlords and capitalists are incapable of solving the even greater accumulation of problems which exist today compared with 1917.
Earlier we drew a comparison between India today and the pre-1917 position in Russia. Despite significant growth in industry in the urban areas, the great majority of the population find their lives blighted by the maintenance of feudal and semi-feudal land relations and the monstrous regime which goes with this.
Take another example, the Congo, a former colony of Belgium. After the murder of Patrice Lumumba in 1961 this 'country' was ruled by the gangster capitalist regime of Sese Seko Mobutu. A complete disintegration ensued with the reinforcement of tribalism, and the monumental corruption of Mobutu and his coterie, which stole most of the assets of the country. The hopes of the impoverished masses were raised, however, with the triumph of Laurent Kabila in 1997. He was a former collaborator of Che Guevara when the latter participated in a guerrilla insurgency in 1965.
Yet Kabila has accepted, in the context of the world-wide triumph of the 'market', the perpetuation of all the diseases of Mobutuism which went before. Tribalism and corruption not only still exist but have been reinforced. There is now the prospect of a terrible Rwanda-type genocide developing from the internecine tribalism in the next period. Sierra Leone also indicates that where no class exists or possesses the necessary consciousness to take society forward, a terrible relapse and regression can follow.
Yet, as Lenin pointed out, Africa, on the basis of communism, could move within a generation from tribalism to communism. Only the African working class, however, linked to the world workers' movement, can achieve this. Once having come to power the working class will complete the bourgeois democratic revolution and carry through the socialist regeneration of Africa through a continent-wide socialist federation.
The Struggle Against Neo-Colonialism
Even during the world boom of 1950-75 the permanent revolution operated, but not in a classical form. In a whole series of countries, China, Vietnam and Cuba, society faced an impasse on the basis of landlordism and capitalism. On the other hand, the working class was weak or restricted by false leadership, usually the Stalinists. When for instance the Red Army of Mao Zedong entered the cities, they found a vacuum. There was no way forward on the basis of landlordism and capitalism. This had been underlined by the situation following the defeat of the Chinese revolution of 1925-27, which had resulted in the complete dismemberment of China, its division amongst various warlords, and the intervention of imperialism.
Mao Zedong balanced between different sections of society, the peasantry, the working class, and sections of the capitalists, and gradually expropriated landlordism and capitalism. The land was nationalised and most of industry was taken over. But workers' democracy as in 1917 in Russia did not exist. Instead from the beginning a deformed workers' state was established.
Thus the main lines of Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution were vindicated here, although in a caricatured form. It is true that the conscious role of the working class as the leader of the revolution was a vital ingredient of Trotsky's theory and this was absent in China and in the Cuban revolution. Nevertheless, a social revolution had been carried through, the elimination of landlordism and capitalism had taken place, but without the working class playing the directly leading role. This was only possible because of the peculiar relationship of world forces both within China and internationally. A bonapartist elite resting on a peasant army was able to balance between the classes and preside over a social revolution. However, what emerged was a deformed workers' state rather than a state in which the working class and poor peasantry exercised direct control on management of industry and society through democratically elected soviets or councils.
In Cuba the revolution developed in a somewhat different form with mass popular support for the government of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. However, even here there was not the workers' democracy of the Russian revolution and, therefore, inevitably, almost from the beginning, a bureaucratic layer began to crystallise which concentrated power in its own hands.
A similar situation followed the victory of the Vietnamese revolution, whose main motive force was not the organised urban working class but the peasantry, the majority of the population. The guerrilla war conducted by the National Liberation Front was able to defeat the mightiest military power on the globe, which represented a victory for the peoples not only of Vietnam but of the neo-colonial world. But, because of the class forces involved, the regime which ushered from the Vietnamese revolution, based upon the peasantry and with nationalist limitations, could not be a healthy workers' state.
Without an understanding of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, of his method of analysis, present-day Marxists would be completely at a loss to understand how events have developed in the post-1945 situation in the underdeveloped world. But it is not sufficient merely to repeat the formulas of Trotsky, applied to the Russian revolution. We also need to recognise the changes in the objective situation which have developed since. A new situation has now opened up following the collapse of Stalinism. It is now possible for the classical ideas of permanent revolution, with the working class playing the main role, to materialise. The catastrophic situation in the neo-colonial world is shown, for instance, by the situation in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia in Latin America. In Venezuela a middle-class army officer, Hugo Chávez, has been pushed into introducing radical measures and even more radical phraseology. How far Chávez will go depends upon a number of factors, not least the world economic situation and the social effects in Venezuela and throughout Latin America.
Could Chývez take to the road trod by Castro 41 years ago and break with landlordism and capitalism? This is an open question with the absence of a mighty Stalinist regime in Russia, which acted both as a reservoir of support and as a model for the deformed workers' states which developed in the neo-colonial world. On the other hand, the working class is held back by an insufficient consciousness of the objective reality of societies like Venezuela, or is in a straitjacket provided by ex-workers' parties which have gone over to the 'market'. It will take time and experience for the working class to reassemble its forces and reach a full understanding of the situation which it faces. But it is clear that Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution offers a vital tool for understanding the situation and politically rearming the working class in these societies.
The Revolution Betrayed
Trotsky's analysis of the rise of the bureaucracy and the victory of the Stalinist counter-revolution is one of the treasures of humankind. Without this Marxists would have been groping in the dark to find a way forward. In his Diary In Exile, Trotsky summed up his contribution in the following fashion:
"The work in which I am engaged now, despite its extremely insufficient and fragmentary nature, is the most important work of my life - more important than 1917, more important than the period of the civil war or any other.
"For the sake of clarity I would put it this way. Had I not been present in 1917 in Petersburg, the October revolution would still have taken place - on the condition that Lenin was present and in command. If neither Lenin nor I had been present in Petersburg, there would have been no October revolution: the leadership of the Bolshevik Party would have prevented it from occurring - of this I have not the slightest doubt! If Lenin had not been in Petersburg, I doubt whether I could have managed to conquer the resistance of the Bolshevik leaders. The struggle with 'Trotskyism' (ie with the proletarian revolution) would have commenced in May 1917, and the outcome of the revolution would have been in question. But I repeat, granted the presence of Lenin, the October revolution would have been victorious anyway. The same could by and large be said of the civil war, although in its first period, especially at the time of the fall of Simbirsk and Kazan, Lenin wavered and was beset by doubts. But this was undoubtedly a passing mood which he probably never even admitted to anyone but me.
"Thus I cannot speak of the 'indispensability' of my work, even about the period from 1917 to 1921. But now my work is 'indispensable' in the full sense of the word. There is no arrogance in this claim at all. The collapse of the two Internationals has posed a problem which none of the leaders of these Internationals is at all equipped to solve. The vicissitudes of my personal fate have confronted me with this problem and armed me with important experience in dealing with it. There is now no one except me to carry out the mission of arming a new generation with the revolutionary method over the heads of the leaders of the Second and Third International". (Diary in Exile, pp53-54)
There is not an atom of personal arrogance let alone 'pessimism' in these lines. Trotsky was the first real dissident, together with the rest of the Left Opposition, to oppose Stalinism. They were the staunch defenders of workers' democracy against the Stalinist counter-revolution.
The struggle between Trotsky and Stalin was not at all 'personal'. In 1937, before the Dewey Commission inquiry into the Moscow Trials, Trotsky explained his and Stalin's role: "Neither Stalin nor I find ourselves in our present position by accident. We did not create these positions. Each of us is drawn into this drama as a representative of definite ideas and principles. In their turn, the ideas and principles did not fall from the sky but have profound social roots. That is why one must take, not the psychological abstraction of Stalin as a 'man', but his concrete historical personality as leader of the Soviet bureaucracy. One can understand the acts of Stalin only by starting from the conditions of existence of the new privileged stratum, greedy for material comforts, apprehensive for its position, fearing the masses, and mortally hating all opposition". (From Trotsky's incomplete biography of Stalin.)
The rise of Stalin to power was not at all due to any superior personal qualities but was with "the aid of an impersonal machine. And it was not he who created the machine, but the machine that created him".
The Russian revolution was seen by the Bolsheviks as a prelude to the world revolution. The international defeats and setbacks, however, resulted in its isolation. In isolation Russia was never ready for socialism. Karl Marx emphasised that the beginning of socialism involves a higher technique than the highest level reached by capitalism (in the modern era that means higher than the US today).
The isolation of the revolution led to the beginning of a crystallisation of a bureaucratic elite. This isolation, in the first instance, arose from the role of the social democracy in betraying the revolution in Western Europe. But following Lenin's death, Stalin, Zinoviev and Bukharin, in opposition to Trotsky, replaced reliance on the independent movement of the working class and a patient building of strong independent communist parties and leaders, with a policy of diplomatic pressure and the courting of left leaders. This resulted in defeats which in turn reinforced the position of the bureaucracy, which gradually elbowed the working class aside.
This was a process and not one act. There was a dialectical interrelationship between the rise of the conservative strata in the USSR, which acted as a brake on the workers' movement internationally and led to defeats, and the ever-tightening grip of the privileged officialdom within the Soviet Union itself. Initially, Stalin wished the success of the revolution. However, his own conservative bureaucratic methods, both politically and the organisationally within the communist parties outside Russia, promoted the defeats of the working class.
'Isolated' and vilified by the enormous resources of the Stalinised Comintern, Trotsky nevertheless provided brilliant and timely advice which, if followed, would have avoided in Germany, for instance, the catastrophic victory of the Nazis in 1933. Trotsky's writings on fascism, particularly his advocacy of the united front of the workers' organisations to stop the rise of Hitler, is one of his greatest contributions. The study of his writings of this period provides the key to an understanding of the phenomenon of Haiderism and neo-fascism, including the dangers and its weaknesses at the present time.
But with the victory of Hitler, the consolidation of the bureaucracy as a conservative strata (with interests separate and apart from the mass of the working class in the USSR and internationally) developed apace. From a wish to see the revolution succeed internationally, by the time of the Spanish revolution of 1936 the ruling strata had developed an obsessive and mortal fear of the triumph of revolution anywhere.
The bureaucracy understood that the victory of the social revolution in the West would trigger an uprising of the masses in the Soviet Union, not against the gains of the revolution, the planned economy, but against the usurping privileged elite represented by Stalin. Therefore, a one-sided civil war was carried out in the form of the purge trials. This has been graphically described in the books of the late Vadim Rogovin, particularly in 1937, Stalin's Year of Terror.
The main defendant in the Moscow Trials was the absent Leon Trotsky. Yet to read the books of the 'experts' of this period of history, you would have no inkling of this. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for instance, in his so-called 'history' of the 'gulag', only grudgingly mentions the Trotskyists and never indicates that it was Trotsky and his ideas that were feared by Stalin and the bureaucracy. It was these ideas which were on trial in Moscow.
Trotsky and those close to him suffered the most ferocious persecution at the hands of the Stalin murder machine. Yet in the teeth of all this, Trotsky produced his brilliant analysis of Stalinism which, better than anything else, foretold the future of the 'USSR' under this totalitarian system. In 1936 he foreshadowed two possibilities for the USSR: "A successful uprising of the Russian working class, a political revolution and the restoration of democracy, or the return of capitalism with calamitous consequences for the mass of the population".
This is what he wrote in The Revolution Betrayed: "A collapse of the Soviet regime would lead immediately to the collapse of the planned economy, and thus to the abolition of state property. The bond of compulsion between the trusts and the factories would then fall away. The more successful enterprises would succeed in coming out on the road of independence. They might convert themselves into stock companies, or they might find some other transitional form of property - one, for example, in which the workers would participate in the profits. The collective farms would disintegrate at the same time, and far more easily".
He then writes: "The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship, if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture". Forty-four years later, in an almost chemically pure form, is this not what happened as a result of the collapse of Stalinism?
Because of this analysis it was the Trotskyists alone - particularly the adherents to the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI) - who fully understood the consequences of the collapse of Stalinism, not only for the former Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe, but for world relations as well. When the capitalists were projecting living standards for the masses of these countries comparable to Germany or the USA, we pointed out they would be lucky to enjoy Latin American living standards. In truth, even this perspective was proved to be optimistic as the living standards of the masses have plunged to that on a par with the worst parts of the neo-colonial world. The expected life span of the average male in Russia is just about higher than Nigeria but lower than the Philippines and on the level of India.
Marxism in Our Time
A vital ingredient for the return to capitalism in the former USSR and Eastern Europe was the world 'boom' of the 1980s. This was a very lopsided economic process with the development of the productive forces, science, technique and the organisation of labour not assuming the forms that it did in the 'long boom' of 1950-75. It was accompanied by a huge polarisation of wealth and the stubborn maintenance of unemployment which signified the incapacity of capitalism to fully utilise the productive forces, particularly the labour of the working class, the most important productive force.
Nevertheless, the capitalist ideologists were mesmerised by the combination of the collapse in Eastern Europe and the economic 'fireworks' which followed the recession in the early 1990s. A new 'paradigm', a 'new economy', a new and lasting era of prosperity which would overcome all the problems of their system: this was the watchword of the majority of capitalist economists right up to the beginning of the new century.
It is not the first time that we have witnessed the spokespersons and strategists of capital demonstrating their empiricism and illusions about their system. Indeed, it is an inevitable feature of any boom or upswing in production. And we are not the first in history to have answered these arguments by relating the basic propositions of Marx's analysis of the functioning of the capitalist system to the new features and new developments which exist under capitalism. Marx himself pointed out that capitalism is incapable of harnessing the full potential because of the limitations of private ownership of the means of production and the narrow limits of the nation state. It was and is a system of booms and slumps.
Trotsky, in a period that has some parallels to the situation that we will be facing in the next era, defended Marx's basic economic analysis in the context of the 1930s. This was summed up in his brilliant little pamphlet, Marxism In Our Time. Originally conceived as an introduction to Otto Ruhle's abridgement of the first volume of Capital, The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx, it provides a most modern understanding of the processes developing in world capitalism today and, particularly, those processes which will develop following the coming world recession or slump.
Trotsky points out that the basic contradiction of capitalism is that the working class cannot buy back the full product of their labour, because they only receive a portion of this in the form of wages. However, capitalism overcomes this contradiction by ploughing the surplus back into industry. But this, in turn, leads to an even greater production of goods which the working class at a certain stage is incapable of buying back. The capitalist economists dispute this even, as Trotsky pointed out, in short-lived booms, such as the 1924-29 boom in Germany, when Werner Sombat proclaimed that capitalism had overcome its contradictions (on the eve of the 1929 Wall Street Crash).
The modern Sombats are those like Hamish McCrae, the economics correspondent of The Independent. He oscillates between fear of the coming recession and whistling in the dark to keep up his spirits by proclaiming that capitalism's 'just-in-time' methods have eliminated stocks and, therefore, the problem of a future 'glut' of goods which we saw as recently as the crisis in South-East Asia. Even if McCrae is right, however, instead of massive overproduction, excess 'capacity' will grow. Thus capitalism is only able to continue functioning on the basis of leaving 10% or 20% of its production idle. It is a system based upon production for profit and not for social need. The growth cycle of the 1990s is the weakest since 1945.
Moreover, in this boom capitalism has not overcome class contradictions but has, in fact, intensified them, as daily reports in the capitalist press underline. There are at least one billion poor people on the planet who receive each year as much as 600 men and women who rule Western monopoly capitalist firms. The division between rich and poor has increased exponentially, not just between the advanced industrial world and the neo-colonial world but also within the so-called 'rich' countries themselves. Half-a-percent of the population of the USA own as much as the bottom 90%. In the US, the model of the new so-called 'economic paradigm', 50 million workers are worse off than 20 years ago while the living standards of 80% have stood still. Colossal wealth is being creamed off by the capitalists while, in cities like Minneapolis, there is the 'undying shame' (The Mirror) of 10,000 free meals a week being served on the streets.
But this boom is going to come juddering to a halt in the next period. And when it does the consequence of the parasitic role of modern capitalism will be laid bare. In anticipation of this Alan Kennedy, a capitalist management consultant, has issued a wake-up call to the US capitalists in a new book, The End of Shareholder Value. He points out that US companies "have mortgaged the future in pursuit of short-term financial gain for shareholders".
The use of stock options, huge management greed by top executives, is one of the scandals of the last decade. This has been accompanied by massive downsizing and restructuring and what is euphemistically called 'financial engineering'. When challenged about the long-term consequences of their financial gangsterism a representative of the new breed of capitalist executives declared to Kennedy: 'Why... should I care, I'll be long gone before anyone finds out'.
And this financial plundering is not restricted to executives but goes to the heart of the methods of modern monopoly capitalism. For instance, General Electric is one of the biggest manufacturing firms in the US. Yet $30bn has been used by this company in 'share buy-backs'. The parasitism of capitalism, Kennedy believes, is deep-rooted. What is his solution? "In an ideal world, we'd correct the abuses through regulation. Unfortunately, I don't think anything less than a major crash will make people step back and look clearly at where it's all gone wrong".
But it will be the working class of the US and world-wide who will pay for the crimes of modern capitalism. In the recession or slump that looms, all the myths about the role of modern 'technology' guaranteeing a world free from recession or slump will be revealed. Marxists, of course, have recognised that technology has played a role in certain industries. But its effect has been intensive in information technology and a few industries and not at all, as in previous periods, extensive in furthering a broad-based development of the productive forces.
Moreover, one of the paradoxes of this society, again analysed by Trotsky, is the greater the technological advance the greater the intensification of work for the working class, the bigger the exploitation, the greater the stress, suffering and depression, which is a world malady at the present time.
Tony Blair wants to impose the US 'Anglo-Saxon model' on Europe and the world. This will make the working class into helots (work slaves) whose sole raison d'?tre is to produce profit, surplus value, for the capitalists. However, like conditions will produce like results. The Observer newspaper, in commentating on the new millennium, warned the capitalists that the conditions which exist today are similar to those in the late 19th century or at the beginning of the 20th century. It is no accident that the powerful socialist and communist movements arose in this period.
So also the working class will reawaken and move into action in the next period. But they will confront not just capitalism and its parties but the leaders of organisations, the trade unions and ex-workers parties which, in the past, purported to represent them. Now we are confronted with massive pressure from below for action amongst teachers in Britain, France and Spain, which is thwarted by a self-satisfied and cosseted trade union leadership. This has resulted in teachers in Spain marching in anger against sell-outs by the leaders of the Workers' Commissions (ex-Communist Party) trade union, shouting in anger: 'We want our own unions'.
The capitalists pretend that the working class is powerless against globalisation. But as the anti-World Trade Organisation demonstrations, the so-called 'riot' in London in June 1999, and the new protests this year show, this is not the case. At this stage, these demonstrations involve new layers of youth as well as sections of the working class. Up to now the heavy battalions of the proletariat have not moved. But events, and mighty events, impend and will move them into action. A serious recession or slump will result in furious defensive battles of the working class.
Preparing for a New Era
The most important effect of a new recession or slump will be political. A new ferocious outbreak of the class struggle will mean leaps in consciousness. One consequence of the collapse of Stalinism and the massive ideological offensive which followed in its wake, was the disheartening and falling away of the more developed layers of the working class. However, one of the consequences of the coming economic convulsions which faces world capitalism will be the emergence of a new generation, particularly of this more developed layer, which will not be satisfied with a diet of agitation or propaganda alone. They will be seeking an explanation, historical generalisations, and the summing up of the experience of the working class, to forge new weapons for the coming struggle. They will find enormous help in this task in the writings and speeches of Leon Trotsky.
Of course, Trotsky wrote and worked in a different historical era to ourselves. Some of the issues he was compelled to deal with are no longer as burning for the working class. You will find in his writings this or that antiquated expression or an idea which does not appear immediately relevant to our world today. However, an amazing amount of what Trotsky wrote is extremely pertinent, a thousand times more relevant to serious workers looking for an explanation of economic, political and even historical phenomena, than anything else on offer.
His book, Where Is Britain Going?, has not been equalled for its broad historical analysis and of its description of the labour movement of the time. The characters have changed, the strength and weaknesses of the labour movement have also changed. But in one line or paragraph of this book is more truth about the realities of Britain today than the millions of words which have come from the mouths of Labour leaders, historians and so-called 'experts' in the labour movement. Take, for instance, the chapter dealing with the English civil war. Contained here in this kernel is virtually a complete outline of the processes of the English civil war and their connections to modern Britain.
The marvellous lines of Trotsky on Chartism also say virtually everything that needs to be said, and would provide a rich vein upon which serious socialist and Marxist scholars could write a worthy history of our revolutionary forebears which would prepare us for the struggles to come. After all, in the experience of roughly ten years of Chartism were all the elements, from peaceful petitions to the revolutionary general strike, which have been discussed in the last 50 years in the British labour movement. Moreover, these are themes that will be returned to in the convulsive events that loom.
Trotsky never had any fetish about organisational forms. He also opposed both ultra-leftism and opportunism. His ideas were never for the meeting room alone but were preparation to intervene wherever the working class is and win them to socialist and Marxist ideas. Following Trotsky's advice, members and supporters of Militant (now the Socialist Party) patiently worked within the Labour Party in Britain. The Labour Party, as with its cousins internationally, had a dual character. Sectarians of all stripes disputed this. They took the phrase of Lenin that the Labour Party was a 'bourgeois workers' party' and turned their backs on the Labour Party and the support it then enjoyed at bottom from the working class. There was not an atom of dialectical analysis in their approach. Right from the outset, the Labour Party had 'bourgeois' leaders in the sense that even those who claimed to be 'socialist' ultimately were not prepared to go beyond the framework of capitalism. Nevertheless, at its base the Labour Party was perceived by workers as 'their' party and its creation was a step forward from a class point of view of the proletariat in Britain. Moreover, it possessed democratic features which allowed Marxists to intervene, in the case of Militant, with great success. We were able to connect the ideas of Trotsky to youth and workers.
Militant was the most successful Trotskyist organisation since the Left Opposition in the whole of Western Europe. Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of workers were introduced to the basic ideas of Trotsky through the work of our organisation (now the Socialist Party). In Liverpool between 1983-87 we created a mass movement which shook the ruling class. We initiated and led the mighty anti-poll tax battle, with 34 of our comrades jailed, which ended in the defeat of the tax and the consignment of Thatcher to the rubbish heap of history. No other Trotskyist party in the advanced industrial world could claim such a record.
But the test of all ideas, as with Trotsky himself in the 1930s, is not just how to take advantage of an upswing in the class struggle but how to preserve the ideas and the forces of Marxism in a period of stagnation and retreat. The CWI, with 34 sections under its banner world-wide, has managed to achieve this difficult task in the decade that followed the collapse of Stalinism. No other organisation can rival the analysis that we have made of the causes of the collapse of the planned economies of Eastern Europe, of Stalinism, and of the new relationship of world forces.
While tenaciously defending and developing the ideas of Trotsky, we also in this period initiated the mass movement around Youth against Racism in Europe, against fascism in the early 1990s right up to today. We successfully intervened and led the movement in Austria against Haider. In 1997 we also saw the election of Joe Higgins as a member of the Irish parliament (TD), following the mass struggle against water charges which we pioneered.
While others are, in reality, abandoning Trotsky as no longer relevant to 'the modern world', we perceive that his ideas and methods are as vital, indeed more vital, to the struggles that are opening up.
Trotsky himself once commented that in a new socialist world, the average intelligence would be of a 'Beethoven, a Van Gogh, a Marx or Lenin' and, beyond this, new peaks of human greatness would arise. We would have to say today that in the pantheon of the 'greats' of the world labour movement, Leon Trotsky stands alongside Marx, Engels and Lenin. A new generation of workers who will be moving into struggle will build a monument to Trotsky, not of stone but a mass socialist and revolutionary movement.
The new changed period will allow Marxism to reconnect to the working class, in the first instance, to its more developed layer, which will provide the backbone for the creation of new mass forces. The working class in Britain, for the first time in 100 years, in a mass sense has been politically beheaded by New Labour's move to a position analogous to that of the Democratic Party in the USA. This is why the Socialist Party in Britain calls for the creation of a new mass workers' party, while at the same time seeking to build its own forces within the working-class movement. We hail Trotsky as a great theoretician and leader of the working class but we do not merely acclaim past leaders. It is necessary for us, particularly the new generation of workers, to study the writings of Leon Trotsky alongside of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg but, above all, to seek to acquire his method which will allow us to create a mass Marxist force that will eradicate from the planet the scourge of capitalism and all that goes with it.
Socialism Today # 49, July 2000
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Trotsky's Relevance Today-The Most Modern Ideas – Peter Taaffe
Sixty years ago this August, Stalin's hit man, Raymond Mercader, murdered the greatest living revolutionary of that time, Leon Trotsky. It was not just the Trotskyists who felt the terrible blow of his death but the working class and labour movement of the whole world. This brain - in a sense, the brain of the working class at that stage - would no longer illuminate and clarify the problems confronting working class movements internationally.
Just to list Trotsky's 'practical achievements' would in itself justify commemorating this anniversary. He was the chairman of the first ever soviet - committee of workers' representatives - in the first Russian revolution between 1905-1906. In 1917 he was the organiser of the October Russian revolution, the greatest single event in human history. He then created and led the Red Army which defeated the twenty-one counter-revolutionary armies of imperialism that attempted to crush the revolution.
But above all, Leon Trotsky was one of the greatest theoreticians of the workers' movement. If Karl Marx was the man of the millennium, then Leon Trotsky was undoubtedly, with Lenin, Friedrich Engels and Rosa Luxemburg, also one of the greatest figures of the millennium, and certainly of the 20th century. His ideas, his method of analysis, and the conclusions drawn from this, are as relevant today as in the past.
The Permanent Revolution
Take Trotsky's famous theory of the permanent revolution, which brilliantly anticipated the class forces involved in the outcome of the Russian revolution. Russia prior to 1917 was a feudal or semi-feudal system which meant virtual slavery for the population. Like India today, the majority of the population were peasants who eked out an existence on narrow parcels of land while the urban working class had no rights and were ruthlessly exploited in rapidly developing industry. Russia had not completed the capitalist democratic revolution as had England, for instance, in the 16th century, and France in the 18th century. The main tasks of this revolution were the elimination of feudal and semi-feudal relations in the land, unification of the country, and the solution of the national question.
It also involved the introduction of democracy, the right to vote, the election of a democratic parliament, a free press, and trade union rights for the working class. Last but not least, the completion of this revolution would free the economy from the domination of imperialism, particularly of Anglo-French imperialism which saw Russia as a virtual colony.
All trends of opinion within the Russian workers' movement saw as the main task the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. However, Lenin and Trotsky differed from the Mensheviks (minority members of the Russian Social Democratic Labour movement) who believed that the task of the working class was to play second fiddle to the so-called liberal capitalists. The Mensheviks considered that the latter were the main agents of the capitalist democratic revolution. Socialism for them was the music of the distant future.
At the same time, the Mensheviks saw the Russian revolution as a purely national event with a limited echo internationally. Yet the late development of the capitalists as a class in Russia, and with it a delay in the capitalist democratic revolution, meant that the weak and feeble Russian capitalists were no longer capable of completing this historic task. As we see in the neo-colonial world today, the capitalists invested in land and the landlords invested in industry. Therefore, any serious attempt at a thoroughgoing land reform challenging the power of the landlords would also come up against the opposition of the capitalists and their political representatives, the liberal capitalist parties. This has been shown not just in Russia but in Germany in the 19th century and very graphically in our time in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
A newly-arisen force in Russia, not present in the English and French revolutions, was the working class, which had developed into a powerful force and, at that time, in a unique fashion. Trotsky pointed out that the liberal bourgeoisie were terrified, quite correctly as events demonstrated, that a struggle against Tsarism and the social foundations upon which it rested, would open the floodgates through which the working class would pour, together with the peasantry, and place on the agenda its own demands. Both Trotsky and Lenin, therefore, argued that it was an alliance of the working class and peasantry which alone could carry through the capitalist democratic revolution.
Lenin expressed this in his formula of the 'democratic dictatorship of the working class and peasantry'. Trotsky, however, in his theory of the permanent revolution, pointed out that the peasantry historically had never played an independent role. It must be led by one or other of the two great classes in society, the bourgeoisie or the working class. Lenin and Trotsky agreed that the capitalists could not carry through their own revolution. Therefore, Trotsky argued, the working class must assume the leadership of the revolution, drawing behind it the masses in the countryside. Lenin, on the other hand, left open the exact relationship between the peasantry and the working class, in his 'algebraic formula'.
Trotsky argued that because history had shown that the peasantry can never play an independent role the alliance, therefore, must be led by the working class. The combined movement of the working class in the cities, and a mass peasant uprising in the countryside, was envisaged by Trotsky in his theory of permanent revolution as the way the revolution was likely to develop in Russia.
This was confirmed in October 1917. Moreover, there was a complete agreement in the approach of Lenin and Trotsky between February and October 1917 as to how the revolution would be successful. Despite all the attempts of latter day 'Leninists' to dispute this - from the remnants of Stalinised 'Communist' parties in the neo-colonial world to ex-Trotskyists - Lenin himself in 1917 pointed out that his previous formula of the 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry' had been filled with a 'negative content'. With Trotsky he indicated that the task was now for the proletariat to seize power, supported by the peasantry.
Once having come to power, argued Trotsky, and carried through the main tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the revolutionary power would proceed to the socialist tasks within Russia and also act as a spark to the world revolution itself. And this is how events actually worked out with a mass revolutionary wave in Western Europe - in Germany in 1918-19, Hungary 1919, Italy in the sit-down strikes and occupations of 1920, etc. These revolutions were only defeated because of the perfidious role of the leaders of the mass social democratic organisations at the time.
Marxists do not idolise 'ancient texts' no matter how brilliant they might be. However, if a theory is very 'old' and yet it correctly foresees events and processes, it is the most modern of theories. And Trotsky's ideas are as applicable today for most of Africa, and for huge parts of Asia and Latin America, as they were for Russia more than 80 years ago. The capitalist democratic revolution has not been completed in big parts of the neo-colonial world. The landlords and capitalists are incapable of solving the even greater accumulation of problems which exist today compared with 1917.
Earlier we drew a comparison between India today and the pre-1917 position in Russia. Despite significant growth in industry in the urban areas, the great majority of the population find their lives blighted by the maintenance of feudal and semi-feudal land relations and the monstrous regime which goes with this.
Take another example, the Congo, a former colony of Belgium. After the murder of Patrice Lumumba in 1961 this 'country' was ruled by the gangster capitalist regime of Sese Seko Mobutu. A complete disintegration ensued with the reinforcement of tribalism, and the monumental corruption of Mobutu and his coterie, which stole most of the assets of the country. The hopes of the impoverished masses were raised, however, with the triumph of Laurent Kabila in 1997. He was a former collaborator of Che Guevara when the latter participated in a guerrilla insurgency in 1965.
Yet Kabila has accepted, in the context of the world-wide triumph of the 'market', the perpetuation of all the diseases of Mobutuism which went before. Tribalism and corruption not only still exist but have been reinforced. There is now the prospect of a terrible Rwanda-type genocide developing from the internecine tribalism in the next period. Sierra Leone also indicates that where no class exists or possesses the necessary consciousness to take society forward, a terrible relapse and regression can follow.
Yet, as Lenin pointed out, Africa, on the basis of communism, could move within a generation from tribalism to communism. Only the African working class, however, linked to the world workers' movement, can achieve this. Once having come to power the working class will complete the bourgeois democratic revolution and carry through the socialist regeneration of Africa through a continent-wide socialist federation.
The Struggle Against Neo-Colonialism
Even during the world boom of 1950-75 the permanent revolution operated, but not in a classical form. In a whole series of countries, China, Vietnam and Cuba, society faced an impasse on the basis of landlordism and capitalism. On the other hand, the working class was weak or restricted by false leadership, usually the Stalinists. When for instance the Red Army of Mao Zedong entered the cities, they found a vacuum. There was no way forward on the basis of landlordism and capitalism. This had been underlined by the situation following the defeat of the Chinese revolution of 1925-27, which had resulted in the complete dismemberment of China, its division amongst various warlords, and the intervention of imperialism.
Mao Zedong balanced between different sections of society, the peasantry, the working class, and sections of the capitalists, and gradually expropriated landlordism and capitalism. The land was nationalised and most of industry was taken over. But workers' democracy as in 1917 in Russia did not exist. Instead from the beginning a deformed workers' state was established.
Thus the main lines of Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution were vindicated here, although in a caricatured form. It is true that the conscious role of the working class as the leader of the revolution was a vital ingredient of Trotsky's theory and this was absent in China and in the Cuban revolution. Nevertheless, a social revolution had been carried through, the elimination of landlordism and capitalism had taken place, but without the working class playing the directly leading role. This was only possible because of the peculiar relationship of world forces both within China and internationally. A bonapartist elite resting on a peasant army was able to balance between the classes and preside over a social revolution. However, what emerged was a deformed workers' state rather than a state in which the working class and poor peasantry exercised direct control on management of industry and society through democratically elected soviets or councils.
In Cuba the revolution developed in a somewhat different form with mass popular support for the government of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. However, even here there was not the workers' democracy of the Russian revolution and, therefore, inevitably, almost from the beginning, a bureaucratic layer began to crystallise which concentrated power in its own hands.
A similar situation followed the victory of the Vietnamese revolution, whose main motive force was not the organised urban working class but the peasantry, the majority of the population. The guerrilla war conducted by the National Liberation Front was able to defeat the mightiest military power on the globe, which represented a victory for the peoples not only of Vietnam but of the neo-colonial world. But, because of the class forces involved, the regime which ushered from the Vietnamese revolution, based upon the peasantry and with nationalist limitations, could not be a healthy workers' state.
Without an understanding of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, of his method of analysis, present-day Marxists would be completely at a loss to understand how events have developed in the post-1945 situation in the underdeveloped world. But it is not sufficient merely to repeat the formulas of Trotsky, applied to the Russian revolution. We also need to recognise the changes in the objective situation which have developed since. A new situation has now opened up following the collapse of Stalinism. It is now possible for the classical ideas of permanent revolution, with the working class playing the main role, to materialise. The catastrophic situation in the neo-colonial world is shown, for instance, by the situation in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia in Latin America. In Venezuela a middle-class army officer, Hugo Chávez, has been pushed into introducing radical measures and even more radical phraseology. How far Chávez will go depends upon a number of factors, not least the world economic situation and the social effects in Venezuela and throughout Latin America.
Could Chývez take to the road trod by Castro 41 years ago and break with landlordism and capitalism? This is an open question with the absence of a mighty Stalinist regime in Russia, which acted both as a reservoir of support and as a model for the deformed workers' states which developed in the neo-colonial world. On the other hand, the working class is held back by an insufficient consciousness of the objective reality of societies like Venezuela, or is in a straitjacket provided by ex-workers' parties which have gone over to the 'market'. It will take time and experience for the working class to reassemble its forces and reach a full understanding of the situation which it faces. But it is clear that Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution offers a vital tool for understanding the situation and politically rearming the working class in these societies.
The Revolution Betrayed
Trotsky's analysis of the rise of the bureaucracy and the victory of the Stalinist counter-revolution is one of the treasures of humankind. Without this Marxists would have been groping in the dark to find a way forward. In his Diary In Exile, Trotsky summed up his contribution in the following fashion:
"The work in which I am engaged now, despite its extremely insufficient and fragmentary nature, is the most important work of my life - more important than 1917, more important than the period of the civil war or any other.
"For the sake of clarity I would put it this way. Had I not been present in 1917 in Petersburg, the October revolution would still have taken place - on the condition that Lenin was present and in command. If neither Lenin nor I had been present in Petersburg, there would have been no October revolution: the leadership of the Bolshevik Party would have prevented it from occurring - of this I have not the slightest doubt! If Lenin had not been in Petersburg, I doubt whether I could have managed to conquer the resistance of the Bolshevik leaders. The struggle with 'Trotskyism' (ie with the proletarian revolution) would have commenced in May 1917, and the outcome of the revolution would have been in question. But I repeat, granted the presence of Lenin, the October revolution would have been victorious anyway. The same could by and large be said of the civil war, although in its first period, especially at the time of the fall of Simbirsk and Kazan, Lenin wavered and was beset by doubts. But this was undoubtedly a passing mood which he probably never even admitted to anyone but me.
"Thus I cannot speak of the 'indispensability' of my work, even about the period from 1917 to 1921. But now my work is 'indispensable' in the full sense of the word. There is no arrogance in this claim at all. The collapse of the two Internationals has posed a problem which none of the leaders of these Internationals is at all equipped to solve. The vicissitudes of my personal fate have confronted me with this problem and armed me with important experience in dealing with it. There is now no one except me to carry out the mission of arming a new generation with the revolutionary method over the heads of the leaders of the Second and Third International". (Diary in Exile, pp53-54)
There is not an atom of personal arrogance let alone 'pessimism' in these lines. Trotsky was the first real dissident, together with the rest of the Left Opposition, to oppose Stalinism. They were the staunch defenders of workers' democracy against the Stalinist counter-revolution.
The struggle between Trotsky and Stalin was not at all 'personal'. In 1937, before the Dewey Commission inquiry into the Moscow Trials, Trotsky explained his and Stalin's role: "Neither Stalin nor I find ourselves in our present position by accident. We did not create these positions. Each of us is drawn into this drama as a representative of definite ideas and principles. In their turn, the ideas and principles did not fall from the sky but have profound social roots. That is why one must take, not the psychological abstraction of Stalin as a 'man', but his concrete historical personality as leader of the Soviet bureaucracy. One can understand the acts of Stalin only by starting from the conditions of existence of the new privileged stratum, greedy for material comforts, apprehensive for its position, fearing the masses, and mortally hating all opposition". (From Trotsky's incomplete biography of Stalin.)
The rise of Stalin to power was not at all due to any superior personal qualities but was with "the aid of an impersonal machine. And it was not he who created the machine, but the machine that created him".
The Russian revolution was seen by the Bolsheviks as a prelude to the world revolution. The international defeats and setbacks, however, resulted in its isolation. In isolation Russia was never ready for socialism. Karl Marx emphasised that the beginning of socialism involves a higher technique than the highest level reached by capitalism (in the modern era that means higher than the US today).
The isolation of the revolution led to the beginning of a crystallisation of a bureaucratic elite. This isolation, in the first instance, arose from the role of the social democracy in betraying the revolution in Western Europe. But following Lenin's death, Stalin, Zinoviev and Bukharin, in opposition to Trotsky, replaced reliance on the independent movement of the working class and a patient building of strong independent communist parties and leaders, with a policy of diplomatic pressure and the courting of left leaders. This resulted in defeats which in turn reinforced the position of the bureaucracy, which gradually elbowed the working class aside.
This was a process and not one act. There was a dialectical interrelationship between the rise of the conservative strata in the USSR, which acted as a brake on the workers' movement internationally and led to defeats, and the ever-tightening grip of the privileged officialdom within the Soviet Union itself. Initially, Stalin wished the success of the revolution. However, his own conservative bureaucratic methods, both politically and the organisationally within the communist parties outside Russia, promoted the defeats of the working class.
'Isolated' and vilified by the enormous resources of the Stalinised Comintern, Trotsky nevertheless provided brilliant and timely advice which, if followed, would have avoided in Germany, for instance, the catastrophic victory of the Nazis in 1933. Trotsky's writings on fascism, particularly his advocacy of the united front of the workers' organisations to stop the rise of Hitler, is one of his greatest contributions. The study of his writings of this period provides the key to an understanding of the phenomenon of Haiderism and neo-fascism, including the dangers and its weaknesses at the present time.
But with the victory of Hitler, the consolidation of the bureaucracy as a conservative strata (with interests separate and apart from the mass of the working class in the USSR and internationally) developed apace. From a wish to see the revolution succeed internationally, by the time of the Spanish revolution of 1936 the ruling strata had developed an obsessive and mortal fear of the triumph of revolution anywhere.
The bureaucracy understood that the victory of the social revolution in the West would trigger an uprising of the masses in the Soviet Union, not against the gains of the revolution, the planned economy, but against the usurping privileged elite represented by Stalin. Therefore, a one-sided civil war was carried out in the form of the purge trials. This has been graphically described in the books of the late Vadim Rogovin, particularly in 1937, Stalin's Year of Terror.
The main defendant in the Moscow Trials was the absent Leon Trotsky. Yet to read the books of the 'experts' of this period of history, you would have no inkling of this. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for instance, in his so-called 'history' of the 'gulag', only grudgingly mentions the Trotskyists and never indicates that it was Trotsky and his ideas that were feared by Stalin and the bureaucracy. It was these ideas which were on trial in Moscow.
Trotsky and those close to him suffered the most ferocious persecution at the hands of the Stalin murder machine. Yet in the teeth of all this, Trotsky produced his brilliant analysis of Stalinism which, better than anything else, foretold the future of the 'USSR' under this totalitarian system. In 1936 he foreshadowed two possibilities for the USSR: "A successful uprising of the Russian working class, a political revolution and the restoration of democracy, or the return of capitalism with calamitous consequences for the mass of the population".
This is what he wrote in The Revolution Betrayed: "A collapse of the Soviet regime would lead immediately to the collapse of the planned economy, and thus to the abolition of state property. The bond of compulsion between the trusts and the factories would then fall away. The more successful enterprises would succeed in coming out on the road of independence. They might convert themselves into stock companies, or they might find some other transitional form of property - one, for example, in which the workers would participate in the profits. The collective farms would disintegrate at the same time, and far more easily".
He then writes: "The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship, if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture". Forty-four years later, in an almost chemically pure form, is this not what happened as a result of the collapse of Stalinism?
Because of this analysis it was the Trotskyists alone - particularly the adherents to the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI) - who fully understood the consequences of the collapse of Stalinism, not only for the former Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe, but for world relations as well. When the capitalists were projecting living standards for the masses of these countries comparable to Germany or the USA, we pointed out they would be lucky to enjoy Latin American living standards. In truth, even this perspective was proved to be optimistic as the living standards of the masses have plunged to that on a par with the worst parts of the neo-colonial world. The expected life span of the average male in Russia is just about higher than Nigeria but lower than the Philippines and on the level of India.
Marxism in Our Time
A vital ingredient for the return to capitalism in the former USSR and Eastern Europe was the world 'boom' of the 1980s. This was a very lopsided economic process with the development of the productive forces, science, technique and the organisation of labour not assuming the forms that it did in the 'long boom' of 1950-75. It was accompanied by a huge polarisation of wealth and the stubborn maintenance of unemployment which signified the incapacity of capitalism to fully utilise the productive forces, particularly the labour of the working class, the most important productive force.
Nevertheless, the capitalist ideologists were mesmerised by the combination of the collapse in Eastern Europe and the economic 'fireworks' which followed the recession in the early 1990s. A new 'paradigm', a 'new economy', a new and lasting era of prosperity which would overcome all the problems of their system: this was the watchword of the majority of capitalist economists right up to the beginning of the new century.
It is not the first time that we have witnessed the spokespersons and strategists of capital demonstrating their empiricism and illusions about their system. Indeed, it is an inevitable feature of any boom or upswing in production. And we are not the first in history to have answered these arguments by relating the basic propositions of Marx's analysis of the functioning of the capitalist system to the new features and new developments which exist under capitalism. Marx himself pointed out that capitalism is incapable of harnessing the full potential because of the limitations of private ownership of the means of production and the narrow limits of the nation state. It was and is a system of booms and slumps.
Trotsky, in a period that has some parallels to the situation that we will be facing in the next era, defended Marx's basic economic analysis in the context of the 1930s. This was summed up in his brilliant little pamphlet, Marxism In Our Time. Originally conceived as an introduction to Otto Ruhle's abridgement of the first volume of Capital, The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx, it provides a most modern understanding of the processes developing in world capitalism today and, particularly, those processes which will develop following the coming world recession or slump.
Trotsky points out that the basic contradiction of capitalism is that the working class cannot buy back the full product of their labour, because they only receive a portion of this in the form of wages. However, capitalism overcomes this contradiction by ploughing the surplus back into industry. But this, in turn, leads to an even greater production of goods which the working class at a certain stage is incapable of buying back. The capitalist economists dispute this even, as Trotsky pointed out, in short-lived booms, such as the 1924-29 boom in Germany, when Werner Sombat proclaimed that capitalism had overcome its contradictions (on the eve of the 1929 Wall Street Crash).
The modern Sombats are those like Hamish McCrae, the economics correspondent of The Independent. He oscillates between fear of the coming recession and whistling in the dark to keep up his spirits by proclaiming that capitalism's 'just-in-time' methods have eliminated stocks and, therefore, the problem of a future 'glut' of goods which we saw as recently as the crisis in South-East Asia. Even if McCrae is right, however, instead of massive overproduction, excess 'capacity' will grow. Thus capitalism is only able to continue functioning on the basis of leaving 10% or 20% of its production idle. It is a system based upon production for profit and not for social need. The growth cycle of the 1990s is the weakest since 1945.
Moreover, in this boom capitalism has not overcome class contradictions but has, in fact, intensified them, as daily reports in the capitalist press underline. There are at least one billion poor people on the planet who receive each year as much as 600 men and women who rule Western monopoly capitalist firms. The division between rich and poor has increased exponentially, not just between the advanced industrial world and the neo-colonial world but also within the so-called 'rich' countries themselves. Half-a-percent of the population of the USA own as much as the bottom 90%. In the US, the model of the new so-called 'economic paradigm', 50 million workers are worse off than 20 years ago while the living standards of 80% have stood still. Colossal wealth is being creamed off by the capitalists while, in cities like Minneapolis, there is the 'undying shame' (The Mirror) of 10,000 free meals a week being served on the streets.
But this boom is going to come juddering to a halt in the next period. And when it does the consequence of the parasitic role of modern capitalism will be laid bare. In anticipation of this Alan Kennedy, a capitalist management consultant, has issued a wake-up call to the US capitalists in a new book, The End of Shareholder Value. He points out that US companies "have mortgaged the future in pursuit of short-term financial gain for shareholders".
The use of stock options, huge management greed by top executives, is one of the scandals of the last decade. This has been accompanied by massive downsizing and restructuring and what is euphemistically called 'financial engineering'. When challenged about the long-term consequences of their financial gangsterism a representative of the new breed of capitalist executives declared to Kennedy: 'Why... should I care, I'll be long gone before anyone finds out'.
And this financial plundering is not restricted to executives but goes to the heart of the methods of modern monopoly capitalism. For instance, General Electric is one of the biggest manufacturing firms in the US. Yet $30bn has been used by this company in 'share buy-backs'. The parasitism of capitalism, Kennedy believes, is deep-rooted. What is his solution? "In an ideal world, we'd correct the abuses through regulation. Unfortunately, I don't think anything less than a major crash will make people step back and look clearly at where it's all gone wrong".
But it will be the working class of the US and world-wide who will pay for the crimes of modern capitalism. In the recession or slump that looms, all the myths about the role of modern 'technology' guaranteeing a world free from recession or slump will be revealed. Marxists, of course, have recognised that technology has played a role in certain industries. But its effect has been intensive in information technology and a few industries and not at all, as in previous periods, extensive in furthering a broad-based development of the productive forces.
Moreover, one of the paradoxes of this society, again analysed by Trotsky, is the greater the technological advance the greater the intensification of work for the working class, the bigger the exploitation, the greater the stress, suffering and depression, which is a world malady at the present time.
Tony Blair wants to impose the US 'Anglo-Saxon model' on Europe and the world. This will make the working class into helots (work slaves) whose sole raison d'?tre is to produce profit, surplus value, for the capitalists. However, like conditions will produce like results. The Observer newspaper, in commentating on the new millennium, warned the capitalists that the conditions which exist today are similar to those in the late 19th century or at the beginning of the 20th century. It is no accident that the powerful socialist and communist movements arose in this period.
So also the working class will reawaken and move into action in the next period. But they will confront not just capitalism and its parties but the leaders of organisations, the trade unions and ex-workers parties which, in the past, purported to represent them. Now we are confronted with massive pressure from below for action amongst teachers in Britain, France and Spain, which is thwarted by a self-satisfied and cosseted trade union leadership. This has resulted in teachers in Spain marching in anger against sell-outs by the leaders of the Workers' Commissions (ex-Communist Party) trade union, shouting in anger: 'We want our own unions'.
The capitalists pretend that the working class is powerless against globalisation. But as the anti-World Trade Organisation demonstrations, the so-called 'riot' in London in June 1999, and the new protests this year show, this is not the case. At this stage, these demonstrations involve new layers of youth as well as sections of the working class. Up to now the heavy battalions of the proletariat have not moved. But events, and mighty events, impend and will move them into action. A serious recession or slump will result in furious defensive battles of the working class.
Preparing for a New Era
The most important effect of a new recession or slump will be political. A new ferocious outbreak of the class struggle will mean leaps in consciousness. One consequence of the collapse of Stalinism and the massive ideological offensive which followed in its wake, was the disheartening and falling away of the more developed layers of the working class. However, one of the consequences of the coming economic convulsions which faces world capitalism will be the emergence of a new generation, particularly of this more developed layer, which will not be satisfied with a diet of agitation or propaganda alone. They will be seeking an explanation, historical generalisations, and the summing up of the experience of the working class, to forge new weapons for the coming struggle. They will find enormous help in this task in the writings and speeches of Leon Trotsky.
Of course, Trotsky wrote and worked in a different historical era to ourselves. Some of the issues he was compelled to deal with are no longer as burning for the working class. You will find in his writings this or that antiquated expression or an idea which does not appear immediately relevant to our world today. However, an amazing amount of what Trotsky wrote is extremely pertinent, a thousand times more relevant to serious workers looking for an explanation of economic, political and even historical phenomena, than anything else on offer.
His book, Where Is Britain Going?, has not been equalled for its broad historical analysis and of its description of the labour movement of the time. The characters have changed, the strength and weaknesses of the labour movement have also changed. But in one line or paragraph of this book is more truth about the realities of Britain today than the millions of words which have come from the mouths of Labour leaders, historians and so-called 'experts' in the labour movement. Take, for instance, the chapter dealing with the English civil war. Contained here in this kernel is virtually a complete outline of the processes of the English civil war and their connections to modern Britain.
The marvellous lines of Trotsky on Chartism also say virtually everything that needs to be said, and would provide a rich vein upon which serious socialist and Marxist scholars could write a worthy history of our revolutionary forebears which would prepare us for the struggles to come. After all, in the experience of roughly ten years of Chartism were all the elements, from peaceful petitions to the revolutionary general strike, which have been discussed in the last 50 years in the British labour movement. Moreover, these are themes that will be returned to in the convulsive events that loom.
Trotsky never had any fetish about organisational forms. He also opposed both ultra-leftism and opportunism. His ideas were never for the meeting room alone but were preparation to intervene wherever the working class is and win them to socialist and Marxist ideas. Following Trotsky's advice, members and supporters of Militant (now the Socialist Party) patiently worked within the Labour Party in Britain. The Labour Party, as with its cousins internationally, had a dual character. Sectarians of all stripes disputed this. They took the phrase of Lenin that the Labour Party was a 'bourgeois workers' party' and turned their backs on the Labour Party and the support it then enjoyed at bottom from the working class. There was not an atom of dialectical analysis in their approach. Right from the outset, the Labour Party had 'bourgeois' leaders in the sense that even those who claimed to be 'socialist' ultimately were not prepared to go beyond the framework of capitalism. Nevertheless, at its base the Labour Party was perceived by workers as 'their' party and its creation was a step forward from a class point of view of the proletariat in Britain. Moreover, it possessed democratic features which allowed Marxists to intervene, in the case of Militant, with great success. We were able to connect the ideas of Trotsky to youth and workers.
Militant was the most successful Trotskyist organisation since the Left Opposition in the whole of Western Europe. Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of workers were introduced to the basic ideas of Trotsky through the work of our organisation (now the Socialist Party). In Liverpool between 1983-87 we created a mass movement which shook the ruling class. We initiated and led the mighty anti-poll tax battle, with 34 of our comrades jailed, which ended in the defeat of the tax and the consignment of Thatcher to the rubbish heap of history. No other Trotskyist party in the advanced industrial world could claim such a record.
But the test of all ideas, as with Trotsky himself in the 1930s, is not just how to take advantage of an upswing in the class struggle but how to preserve the ideas and the forces of Marxism in a period of stagnation and retreat. The CWI, with 34 sections under its banner world-wide, has managed to achieve this difficult task in the decade that followed the collapse of Stalinism. No other organisation can rival the analysis that we have made of the causes of the collapse of the planned economies of Eastern Europe, of Stalinism, and of the new relationship of world forces.
While tenaciously defending and developing the ideas of Trotsky, we also in this period initiated the mass movement around Youth against Racism in Europe, against fascism in the early 1990s right up to today. We successfully intervened and led the movement in Austria against Haider. In 1997 we also saw the election of Joe Higgins as a member of the Irish parliament (TD), following the mass struggle against water charges which we pioneered.
While others are, in reality, abandoning Trotsky as no longer relevant to 'the modern world', we perceive that his ideas and methods are as vital, indeed more vital, to the struggles that are opening up.
Trotsky himself once commented that in a new socialist world, the average intelligence would be of a 'Beethoven, a Van Gogh, a Marx or Lenin' and, beyond this, new peaks of human greatness would arise. We would have to say today that in the pantheon of the 'greats' of the world labour movement, Leon Trotsky stands alongside Marx, Engels and Lenin. A new generation of workers who will be moving into struggle will build a monument to Trotsky, not of stone but a mass socialist and revolutionary movement.
The new changed period will allow Marxism to reconnect to the working class, in the first instance, to its more developed layer, which will provide the backbone for the creation of new mass forces. The working class in Britain, for the first time in 100 years, in a mass sense has been politically beheaded by New Labour's move to a position analogous to that of the Democratic Party in the USA. This is why the Socialist Party in Britain calls for the creation of a new mass workers' party, while at the same time seeking to build its own forces within the working-class movement. We hail Trotsky as a great theoretician and leader of the working class but we do not merely acclaim past leaders. It is necessary for us, particularly the new generation of workers, to study the writings of Leon Trotsky alongside of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg but, above all, to seek to acquire his method which will allow us to create a mass Marxist force that will eradicate from the planet the scourge of capitalism and all that goes with it.
Socialism Today # 49, July 2000
In Honor Of The “Old Man”- On The 72nd Anniversary Of The Death Of Leon Trotsky-Lev Davidovich By Jean van Heijenoort
Click on the headline to link to a review of the early life of Leon Trotsky in his political memoir, My Life.
Markin comment:
Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!
Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
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Markin comment:
As I never tire of saying even seventy-odd years later I would not want to be on the pen/sword edge of one of Leon Trotsky's polemics. I would still be bleeding profusely from every pore.
******
Jean van Heijenoort
Lev Davidovich
Published: Fourth International, Winter 1959
When Engels, revered patriarch of international social-democracy, passed away peacefully in London, burdened with years, the end of the century was approaching which separated the revolutions of the bourgeoisie from those of the proletariat, Jacobinism from Bolshevism. The transformation of the world, announced by Marx, was to become the immediate task, and revolutionists were to know unparallelled vicissitudes. And in fact the heads of the three greatest revolutionary leaders since Engels sustained the blows of reaction. The historian of the future will not fail to see in this one of the characteristic marks of our epoch. Nor should he fail to note the source of these blows. Lenin's head was pierced by a bullet from the "Socialist Revolutionary" Fanny Kaplan. Rosa Luxemburg's head was shattered by the butt-ends of the guns of the "Social Democrat" Noske's soldiery. Trotsky's head was laid open by the pick-axe of one of the "Communist" Stalin's mercenaries.
Our epoch of crisis, with its abrupt jumps and feverish tempo, devours men and parties more and more rapidly. Those who only yesterday represented the revolution become the Instruments of the darkest reaction. This struggle between the head of the historic process and its leaden, dragging rump assumed its most dramatic form in the duel between Trotsky and Stalin, precisely because this struggle unfolded against the background of a workers' state already established. Trotsky, borne to the summits of power by the revolutionary explosion of the masses, persecuted and harassed when the defeats of the proletariat succeeded each other, became the very incarnation of the revolution.
He was aided by an astonishing physique. What struck you first was his forehead--phenomenally lofty, vertical, and not heightened by baldness. After that his eyes, blue and deep, with a gaze powerful and sure of its power. During his stay in France Lev Davidovich very often had to travel incognito in order to simplify the problem of guarding him. Then he would shave off his goatee and brush his hair to one side dividing it by a part. But when it came to his leaving the house and mingling with the public I was always worried: "No it's really impossible ... the first one to pass by will recognize him, he can't change that gaze of his ... " Then, when Lev Davidovich began to speak, what attracted attention was his mouth. Whether he spoke in Russian or a foreign language his lips constrained themselves to shape words distinctly. He was irritated at hearing confused and precipitate speech from others, and always compelled himself to enunciate with complete distinctness. It was only in addressing Natalia Ivanovna in Russian that on occasion his enunciation became more hurried and less articulate, descending sometimes into a whisper. In conversations with visitors in his study his hands, resting on the edge of his work-table at first, would soon begin moving with large, firm gestures, as though aiding his lips in molding the expression of his thought. His face with its halo of hair, the set of his head, and the whole carriage of his body were always proud and stately. His stature was above medium, with a powerful chest and a broad, stalwart back, and in comparison his legs appeared somewhat slender. it is undoubtedly easier for someone who paid him one visit to say what he saw in Trotsky's face than for one who was at his side for many years in the most variegated circumstances.
The one thing I never saw was the faintest expression of vulgarity. Nor was there any greater likelihood of finding what is called bonhomie. But a certain sweetness was not lacking, which no doubt originated in the formidable intelligence of whose readiness to understand everything you were always aware. What you usually saw was a youthful enthusiasm which joyously undertook everything, and at the same time was strong enough to induce others to cooperate in the undertaking. When it was a question of cudgeling an opponent this sort of gaiety swiftly changed into irony, biting and malicious, alternating with an expression of contempt, and when the enemy was particularly swinish, you would, for a moment, almost find a hint of malevolence. But his vivacity returned quickly. "We'll fix 'em!" he would say then with animation. In the isolation of exile the most dramatic circumstances where I could see Lev Davidovich were his conflicts with the police, or incidents with adversaries of bad faith. At these times his face would harden, and his eyes would flash, as though in them had suddenly been concentrated that vast will-power which ordinarily could be measured only by the labors of his entire life. Then it was obvious to everyone that nothing, nothing in the world could make him budge an inch.
How Trotsky Worked
In daily life this will-power expended itself in strictly organized labor. Any unmotivated disturbance irritated him extremely: he hated pointless conversations, unannounced visits, disappointments or delays in keeping engagements. To be sure there was nothing pedantic in any of this. If an important question turned up he would not hesitate a moment in upsetting all his plans, but it had to be worth it. If it had the slightest interest for the movement he would heedlessly give his time and energy, but he showed himself all the more miserly of them when the carelessness, lightmindedness, or bad organization of others threatened to waste them. He bearded the smallest particles of time, the most precious material of which life is made. His whole personal life was rigidly organized by the quality called singleness of purpose. He set up a hierarchy of duties, and brought to a conclusion whatever he undertook.
As a rule he did not work less than twelve hours a day, and sometimes, when it was necessary, much more. He remained at table as briefly as possible, and after sharing his meals for many years I could not say that I ever noticed on his face any mark of enjoyment for what he ate or drank. 'Eating, dressing, all these miserable little things that have to be repeated every day ... " he once said to me.
He could find his only diversion in great physical activity. Merely walking was scarcely a relaxation. He walked actively and in silence, and you could see that his mind was always at work. Now and then he would ask a question: "When did you answer that letter?" "Can you find me that quotation?" Only violent exercise gave him repose. In Turkey this consisted of hunting, and especially fishing, deep-sea fishing, complicated and agitated, where the body had to spend itself recklessly. When the fishing had been good, that is, very fatiguing, he began work on his return with redoubled enthusiasm. In Mexico, where fishing was impossible, he invented the gathering of cacti, of enormous weight, under a blazing sun.
Of course the necessity for security created certain obligations. During the eleven and a half years of his third emigration it was only for a few months, at certain times during his stay in France and in Norway, that Lev Davidovich could walk about freely, that is, unguarded, in the countryside around his house. As a rule each one of his excursions constituted a minor military operation. It was necessary to make all arrangements in advance, and fix his route carefully. "You treat me as though I were an object," he sometimes said, jokingly dissimulating whatever impatience there might have been in this remark.
He demanded the same methodical spirit he observed in his own work from the comrades who assisted him. The closer they were to him, the more did he demand of them and the less did he trouble himself with formalities. He desired precision in everything: an undated letter, an unsigned document always irritated him, as did in general anything easygoing, slipshod, or happy-go-lucky. Do whatever you're doing well, and do it till you finish. And in this rule he made no distinction between petty day-to-day chores and intellectual work: conduct your thoughts to their conclusion, is an expression that often sprang from his pen. He always displayed great solicitude for the health of those around him. Health is revolutionary capital that must not be wasted. He grew angry at seeing someone read in a bad light. It's necessary to risk your life for the revolution without hesitating, but why ruin your eyes when you can read comfortably and intelligently?
Trotsky's Conversations
In conversations with Lev Davidovich what visitors were struck by chiefly was his capacity to find his bearings in a novel situation. He was able to integrate it in his general perspective, and at the same time always give immediate and concrete advice. During his third emigration he often had the opportunity of conversing with visitors from countries he was not acquainted with directly, perhaps from the Balkans or Latin America. He did not always know the language, did not follow their press and had never had any particular interest in their specific problems. First of all he would allow his interrogator to speak, occasionally jotting down a few brief notes on a sliP of paper in front of him, sometimes asking for a few details: "How many members has this party?" "Isn't this politician a lawyer?"
Then he would speak, and the mass of information that had been given him would be organized. Soon one could distinguish the movements of different classes and of different layers within these classes, and then, bound up with these movements, there would be revealed the play of parties, groups and organizations, and then the place and the activities of various political figures, down to their profession and personal traits, would be logically fitted into the picture. The French naturalist Cuvier used to boast of his ability to reconstruct an entire animal from a single bone. With his vast knowledge of social and political realities Trotsky could devote himself to a similar work. His interrogator was always astounded at seeing how deeply he had been able to penetrate the reality of the particular problem, and would leave Trotsky's study knowing his own country a little better.
At every moment you felt in Trotsky a huge fund of experience, not merely engraved in his memory but organized and reflected on lengthily and profoundly· You could also see that the organization of this experience had taken place around indestructible principles. Though Lev Davidovich hated routine, though he was always anxious to discover new trends, the least attempt at innovation in the realm of principles made him prick up his ears. "Trimming Marx's beard," was his expression for all these attempts to put Marxism in line with the current fashion, and he did not dissimulate his contempt for them.
Trotsky's Style and Writing Methods
Trotsky's style is universally admired. It is undoubtedly to be best compared with that of Marx. However, Trotsky's sentences are less spacious than those of Marx, in whom one is aware of a wealth of scholarly resources, especially in the youthful works. Trotsky's style achieves its effects by extremely simple means. His vocabulary, especially in his more properly political writings, is always rather limited. The sentences are short, with few subordinate clauses. Their power arises from a sturdy articulation, most often with strongly marked but always well balanced oppositions. This temperance of means gives his style a great freshness and, one might say, youthfulness. In his writing Trotsky is considerably more youthful than Marx.
Trotsky knew how to take advantage of that Russian syntax whose inflections permit the word-order within a sentence to be upset, giving the expression of the thought a force and emphasis difficult to attain with the limited means of modern western languages. And also difficult to translate. Lev Davidovich demanded a mathematical fidelity from his translators, and at the same time kicked against the rules of grammar in the foreign language which forbade a similarly concise and direct rendition of his thought. Compared to that of Lenin, Trotsky's style is superior, by a large margin, in its lucidity and elegance, without any loss of power. Lenin's sentences occasionally become cumbrous, too heavy, disorganized. It seems as though the thought sometimes cripples its expression. Trotsky once said that in Lenin you could discover a Russian mushik, but one raised to the level of genius. Even though Lenin's father was a provincial functionary and Trotsky's a farmer, it is Trotsky who is the city-dweller, as opposed to Lenin, doubtless because of his race. This may be seen at once in the difference of styles, without any attempt being made here to uncover this opposition in other aspects of these two giant personalities.
When Trotsky was deported to Turkey, the passport the Soviet authorities gave him put down his profession as writer. And in truth he was a great, an exceedingly great writer. If the bureaucrats's inscription causes a smile it is because Trotsky was so much more than a writer. He wrote with ease, being able to dictate several hours at a sitting. But then he would go over the manuscript and correct it carefully. For some of these great writings, such as the History of the Russian Revolution, there are two successive drafts behind the definitive text, but in the majority of cases there is only one. His enormous literary production, in which are to be found books, pamphlets, innumerable articles, letters, hurried statements to the press, and notes of all sorts is, needless to say, uneven. Some parts are more worked over than others, but not a sentence in any of them has been neglected. You can take any five lines in this ponderous accumulation of writing and you will always recognize the inimitable Trotsky.
Their volume is also impressive, and would alone bear testimony to a very rare will and capacity for labor. Thirty volumes of Lenin's complete works have been collected, in addition to thirty-five volumes of correspondence and odd notes. Trotsky lived seven years longer than Lenin, but his writings, from his long books to his brief personal notes, would undoubtedly come to triple that amount. In the eleven and a half years of his third emigration he amassed a labor which would honorably fill an entire lifetime. It may be said that the pen never abandoned his hand, and what a hand it was!
He Lives in His Books
Trotsky has put all of himself into his books. personal contact with the man himself did not modify the portrait that emerged from a reading of his works, but deepened it and made it more precise: passion and reason, intelligence and will, all carried to an extreme degree, but at the same time blending into one another. In everything Lev Davidovich did one had the feeling that he had given his whole being. He often repeated Hegel's words: Nothing great is done in this world without passion; and he had nothing but contempt for the philistines who object to the "fanaticism" of the revolutionaries. But intelligence was always present, in miraculous harmony with the fire. Nor could one dream of discovering a conflict: the will was indomitable because the mind saw very far. Hegel would have to be quoted once again: Der Wille ist eine besondere Weise des Denkens. Will is a specific function of thought.
Markin comment:
Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!
Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
*******
Markin comment:
As I never tire of saying even seventy-odd years later I would not want to be on the pen/sword edge of one of Leon Trotsky's polemics. I would still be bleeding profusely from every pore.
******
Jean van Heijenoort
Lev Davidovich
Published: Fourth International, Winter 1959
When Engels, revered patriarch of international social-democracy, passed away peacefully in London, burdened with years, the end of the century was approaching which separated the revolutions of the bourgeoisie from those of the proletariat, Jacobinism from Bolshevism. The transformation of the world, announced by Marx, was to become the immediate task, and revolutionists were to know unparallelled vicissitudes. And in fact the heads of the three greatest revolutionary leaders since Engels sustained the blows of reaction. The historian of the future will not fail to see in this one of the characteristic marks of our epoch. Nor should he fail to note the source of these blows. Lenin's head was pierced by a bullet from the "Socialist Revolutionary" Fanny Kaplan. Rosa Luxemburg's head was shattered by the butt-ends of the guns of the "Social Democrat" Noske's soldiery. Trotsky's head was laid open by the pick-axe of one of the "Communist" Stalin's mercenaries.
Our epoch of crisis, with its abrupt jumps and feverish tempo, devours men and parties more and more rapidly. Those who only yesterday represented the revolution become the Instruments of the darkest reaction. This struggle between the head of the historic process and its leaden, dragging rump assumed its most dramatic form in the duel between Trotsky and Stalin, precisely because this struggle unfolded against the background of a workers' state already established. Trotsky, borne to the summits of power by the revolutionary explosion of the masses, persecuted and harassed when the defeats of the proletariat succeeded each other, became the very incarnation of the revolution.
He was aided by an astonishing physique. What struck you first was his forehead--phenomenally lofty, vertical, and not heightened by baldness. After that his eyes, blue and deep, with a gaze powerful and sure of its power. During his stay in France Lev Davidovich very often had to travel incognito in order to simplify the problem of guarding him. Then he would shave off his goatee and brush his hair to one side dividing it by a part. But when it came to his leaving the house and mingling with the public I was always worried: "No it's really impossible ... the first one to pass by will recognize him, he can't change that gaze of his ... " Then, when Lev Davidovich began to speak, what attracted attention was his mouth. Whether he spoke in Russian or a foreign language his lips constrained themselves to shape words distinctly. He was irritated at hearing confused and precipitate speech from others, and always compelled himself to enunciate with complete distinctness. It was only in addressing Natalia Ivanovna in Russian that on occasion his enunciation became more hurried and less articulate, descending sometimes into a whisper. In conversations with visitors in his study his hands, resting on the edge of his work-table at first, would soon begin moving with large, firm gestures, as though aiding his lips in molding the expression of his thought. His face with its halo of hair, the set of his head, and the whole carriage of his body were always proud and stately. His stature was above medium, with a powerful chest and a broad, stalwart back, and in comparison his legs appeared somewhat slender. it is undoubtedly easier for someone who paid him one visit to say what he saw in Trotsky's face than for one who was at his side for many years in the most variegated circumstances.
The one thing I never saw was the faintest expression of vulgarity. Nor was there any greater likelihood of finding what is called bonhomie. But a certain sweetness was not lacking, which no doubt originated in the formidable intelligence of whose readiness to understand everything you were always aware. What you usually saw was a youthful enthusiasm which joyously undertook everything, and at the same time was strong enough to induce others to cooperate in the undertaking. When it was a question of cudgeling an opponent this sort of gaiety swiftly changed into irony, biting and malicious, alternating with an expression of contempt, and when the enemy was particularly swinish, you would, for a moment, almost find a hint of malevolence. But his vivacity returned quickly. "We'll fix 'em!" he would say then with animation. In the isolation of exile the most dramatic circumstances where I could see Lev Davidovich were his conflicts with the police, or incidents with adversaries of bad faith. At these times his face would harden, and his eyes would flash, as though in them had suddenly been concentrated that vast will-power which ordinarily could be measured only by the labors of his entire life. Then it was obvious to everyone that nothing, nothing in the world could make him budge an inch.
How Trotsky Worked
In daily life this will-power expended itself in strictly organized labor. Any unmotivated disturbance irritated him extremely: he hated pointless conversations, unannounced visits, disappointments or delays in keeping engagements. To be sure there was nothing pedantic in any of this. If an important question turned up he would not hesitate a moment in upsetting all his plans, but it had to be worth it. If it had the slightest interest for the movement he would heedlessly give his time and energy, but he showed himself all the more miserly of them when the carelessness, lightmindedness, or bad organization of others threatened to waste them. He bearded the smallest particles of time, the most precious material of which life is made. His whole personal life was rigidly organized by the quality called singleness of purpose. He set up a hierarchy of duties, and brought to a conclusion whatever he undertook.
As a rule he did not work less than twelve hours a day, and sometimes, when it was necessary, much more. He remained at table as briefly as possible, and after sharing his meals for many years I could not say that I ever noticed on his face any mark of enjoyment for what he ate or drank. 'Eating, dressing, all these miserable little things that have to be repeated every day ... " he once said to me.
He could find his only diversion in great physical activity. Merely walking was scarcely a relaxation. He walked actively and in silence, and you could see that his mind was always at work. Now and then he would ask a question: "When did you answer that letter?" "Can you find me that quotation?" Only violent exercise gave him repose. In Turkey this consisted of hunting, and especially fishing, deep-sea fishing, complicated and agitated, where the body had to spend itself recklessly. When the fishing had been good, that is, very fatiguing, he began work on his return with redoubled enthusiasm. In Mexico, where fishing was impossible, he invented the gathering of cacti, of enormous weight, under a blazing sun.
Of course the necessity for security created certain obligations. During the eleven and a half years of his third emigration it was only for a few months, at certain times during his stay in France and in Norway, that Lev Davidovich could walk about freely, that is, unguarded, in the countryside around his house. As a rule each one of his excursions constituted a minor military operation. It was necessary to make all arrangements in advance, and fix his route carefully. "You treat me as though I were an object," he sometimes said, jokingly dissimulating whatever impatience there might have been in this remark.
He demanded the same methodical spirit he observed in his own work from the comrades who assisted him. The closer they were to him, the more did he demand of them and the less did he trouble himself with formalities. He desired precision in everything: an undated letter, an unsigned document always irritated him, as did in general anything easygoing, slipshod, or happy-go-lucky. Do whatever you're doing well, and do it till you finish. And in this rule he made no distinction between petty day-to-day chores and intellectual work: conduct your thoughts to their conclusion, is an expression that often sprang from his pen. He always displayed great solicitude for the health of those around him. Health is revolutionary capital that must not be wasted. He grew angry at seeing someone read in a bad light. It's necessary to risk your life for the revolution without hesitating, but why ruin your eyes when you can read comfortably and intelligently?
Trotsky's Conversations
In conversations with Lev Davidovich what visitors were struck by chiefly was his capacity to find his bearings in a novel situation. He was able to integrate it in his general perspective, and at the same time always give immediate and concrete advice. During his third emigration he often had the opportunity of conversing with visitors from countries he was not acquainted with directly, perhaps from the Balkans or Latin America. He did not always know the language, did not follow their press and had never had any particular interest in their specific problems. First of all he would allow his interrogator to speak, occasionally jotting down a few brief notes on a sliP of paper in front of him, sometimes asking for a few details: "How many members has this party?" "Isn't this politician a lawyer?"
Then he would speak, and the mass of information that had been given him would be organized. Soon one could distinguish the movements of different classes and of different layers within these classes, and then, bound up with these movements, there would be revealed the play of parties, groups and organizations, and then the place and the activities of various political figures, down to their profession and personal traits, would be logically fitted into the picture. The French naturalist Cuvier used to boast of his ability to reconstruct an entire animal from a single bone. With his vast knowledge of social and political realities Trotsky could devote himself to a similar work. His interrogator was always astounded at seeing how deeply he had been able to penetrate the reality of the particular problem, and would leave Trotsky's study knowing his own country a little better.
At every moment you felt in Trotsky a huge fund of experience, not merely engraved in his memory but organized and reflected on lengthily and profoundly· You could also see that the organization of this experience had taken place around indestructible principles. Though Lev Davidovich hated routine, though he was always anxious to discover new trends, the least attempt at innovation in the realm of principles made him prick up his ears. "Trimming Marx's beard," was his expression for all these attempts to put Marxism in line with the current fashion, and he did not dissimulate his contempt for them.
Trotsky's Style and Writing Methods
Trotsky's style is universally admired. It is undoubtedly to be best compared with that of Marx. However, Trotsky's sentences are less spacious than those of Marx, in whom one is aware of a wealth of scholarly resources, especially in the youthful works. Trotsky's style achieves its effects by extremely simple means. His vocabulary, especially in his more properly political writings, is always rather limited. The sentences are short, with few subordinate clauses. Their power arises from a sturdy articulation, most often with strongly marked but always well balanced oppositions. This temperance of means gives his style a great freshness and, one might say, youthfulness. In his writing Trotsky is considerably more youthful than Marx.
Trotsky knew how to take advantage of that Russian syntax whose inflections permit the word-order within a sentence to be upset, giving the expression of the thought a force and emphasis difficult to attain with the limited means of modern western languages. And also difficult to translate. Lev Davidovich demanded a mathematical fidelity from his translators, and at the same time kicked against the rules of grammar in the foreign language which forbade a similarly concise and direct rendition of his thought. Compared to that of Lenin, Trotsky's style is superior, by a large margin, in its lucidity and elegance, without any loss of power. Lenin's sentences occasionally become cumbrous, too heavy, disorganized. It seems as though the thought sometimes cripples its expression. Trotsky once said that in Lenin you could discover a Russian mushik, but one raised to the level of genius. Even though Lenin's father was a provincial functionary and Trotsky's a farmer, it is Trotsky who is the city-dweller, as opposed to Lenin, doubtless because of his race. This may be seen at once in the difference of styles, without any attempt being made here to uncover this opposition in other aspects of these two giant personalities.
When Trotsky was deported to Turkey, the passport the Soviet authorities gave him put down his profession as writer. And in truth he was a great, an exceedingly great writer. If the bureaucrats's inscription causes a smile it is because Trotsky was so much more than a writer. He wrote with ease, being able to dictate several hours at a sitting. But then he would go over the manuscript and correct it carefully. For some of these great writings, such as the History of the Russian Revolution, there are two successive drafts behind the definitive text, but in the majority of cases there is only one. His enormous literary production, in which are to be found books, pamphlets, innumerable articles, letters, hurried statements to the press, and notes of all sorts is, needless to say, uneven. Some parts are more worked over than others, but not a sentence in any of them has been neglected. You can take any five lines in this ponderous accumulation of writing and you will always recognize the inimitable Trotsky.
Their volume is also impressive, and would alone bear testimony to a very rare will and capacity for labor. Thirty volumes of Lenin's complete works have been collected, in addition to thirty-five volumes of correspondence and odd notes. Trotsky lived seven years longer than Lenin, but his writings, from his long books to his brief personal notes, would undoubtedly come to triple that amount. In the eleven and a half years of his third emigration he amassed a labor which would honorably fill an entire lifetime. It may be said that the pen never abandoned his hand, and what a hand it was!
He Lives in His Books
Trotsky has put all of himself into his books. personal contact with the man himself did not modify the portrait that emerged from a reading of his works, but deepened it and made it more precise: passion and reason, intelligence and will, all carried to an extreme degree, but at the same time blending into one another. In everything Lev Davidovich did one had the feeling that he had given his whole being. He often repeated Hegel's words: Nothing great is done in this world without passion; and he had nothing but contempt for the philistines who object to the "fanaticism" of the revolutionaries. But intelligence was always present, in miraculous harmony with the fire. Nor could one dream of discovering a conflict: the will was indomitable because the mind saw very far. Hegel would have to be quoted once again: Der Wille ist eine besondere Weise des Denkens. Will is a specific function of thought.
From QuebecThe Strike is Ending, But the Movement Will Continue
The Strike is Ending, But the Movement Will Continue
Ethan Cox August 20, 20120
This originally appeared over at rabble.ca.
Over the past few days students at eight of fourteen CEGEPs (junior colleges which provide both pre-university and professional degrees) have voted in general assemblies to end their strike and return to class. Students at the two CEGEPs who did vote to continue the strike, Vieux-Montreal and St. Laurent, will reconvene general assemblies on Friday morning to reconsider their decision.
It appears as if the strike is winding down, or at least going dormant, with many schools promising to revisit the issue after the election. It would, however, be a mistake to assume that the resumption of classes means an end to the broader social movement born out of the longest student strike in Quebec history.
Anecdotal evidence from students voting this week seems to show that while most continue to support the aims of the strike, and remain committed to the goal of broad social change, they fear the power of Quebec’s Bill 78, now known as Law 12, to erase their semester and impose hefty fines on individuals and student associations who support the strike.
In fact, in the mother of all poison pills, Bill 78 allows the government to prevent a student union from collecting dues from its members if it supports a strike which impedes the return to classes, at a rate of one semester for each day that the strike continues.
This controversial clause, one of many in a law condemned as a violation of basic human rights by everyone from the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights to the Quebec Bar Association, would allow Jean Charest’s Liberal government to simply eliminate pesky student unions who continue to strike, and leave students at affected schools without representation for a decade or longer.
Bill 78 also mandated the early return to classes, with striking schools set to complete the interrupted spring semester over the next few weeks. The threat that a continued strike could simply eradicate that semester, and leave students as much as a year behind in their education, was also clearly a factor as students voted this week.
Add to these concerns the oft-repeated, but only somewhat accurate, idea that a continued strike would play into Jean Charest’s hands as he seeks another mandate in the provincial election set for September 4th, and it’s not hard to understand why students chose to put at least a temporary end to their strike.
In lieu of a continued strike, many student associations are focusing on ramping up their political presence in the election campaign, and in the streets. Many schools will hold a one day strike on August 22nd, the latest in a series of monthly demonstrations on that date which have attracted hundreds of thousands of Quebeckers. Organizers have called for a half million people to take to the streets in defiance of Premier Charest and his Liberal government, a number they last flirted with on May 22nd, when an estimated three to four hundred thousand took to the streets.
The three main student groups are also targeting vulnerable Liberal ridings, where student volunteers will use traditional electoral tactics like door knocking to convince voters to turn their back on the government. FEUQ President Martine Desjardins told rabble.ca that an appeal for election volunteers posted on their website received over a thousand sign-ups in its first twenty-four hours. In a close race like this one, a strong student campaign could tip the balance in enough ridings to determine the victor.
On this note, it will be fascinating to see the campaign unfold in Sherbrooke, the home riding of embattled Premier Charest, and a riding the student federations have confirmed they will target. A rare riding level poll was released over the weekend showing Charest trailing his Parti Quebecois challenger by fifteen points. It would be foolhardy to write off an experienced campaigner like Charest, but his seeming vulnerability has already forced him to take a break from the provincial campaign to pound the pavement in his own riding. The question of what happens if voters return his government to power, but he is defeated, will no doubt continue to hang over him as this campaign progresses.
In addition to a targeted riding level campaign, student federations will be pushing their members to vote, and increase an abysmal youth participation rate in Quebec elections. While many students rightly point out that replacing Charest with PQ leader Pauline Marois will not bring about the type of broad social change they are seeking, and that democracy does not mean simply voting every four years, students would be foolhardy not to exercise their power to bring down a government which has essentially accused them of being terrorists for exercising their right to strike and demonstrate.
So as the strike hits the pause button, and students focus on defeating the Liberals and mobilizing their supporters for a series of demonstrations which will culminate on the 22nd, don’t be fooled into thinking the broader movement they represent has been defeated.
The issue of governmental priorities, and how a government which has reduced its revenue by over ten billion dollars in the past decade, mostly in tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy, can claim poverty when it comes to funding social priorities like education and healthcare, has never been more prominent on the political scene.
The students put it there. They moved close to forty percent of Quebeckers to support the cause of accessible education, and forced many more to question why we can’t follow the European model of free, or nearly free, post-secondary education.
They have already taken down two education ministers, and seem likely to be able to claim credit for taking down a premier, and perhaps even his entire government. As the strike winds down students have much to feel proud about, not least their ability to mobilize global sentiment around the now universally relevant issue of austerity and neo-liberalism.
In Egypt they have a saying I find particularly appropriate now. “The people know the way back to the square”.
If the next government, regardless of political stripe, continues Charest’s contemptuous and dismissive treatment of our society’s youth, the students will return to the streets with a vengeance.
Ethan Cox August 20, 20120
This originally appeared over at rabble.ca.
Over the past few days students at eight of fourteen CEGEPs (junior colleges which provide both pre-university and professional degrees) have voted in general assemblies to end their strike and return to class. Students at the two CEGEPs who did vote to continue the strike, Vieux-Montreal and St. Laurent, will reconvene general assemblies on Friday morning to reconsider their decision.
It appears as if the strike is winding down, or at least going dormant, with many schools promising to revisit the issue after the election. It would, however, be a mistake to assume that the resumption of classes means an end to the broader social movement born out of the longest student strike in Quebec history.
Anecdotal evidence from students voting this week seems to show that while most continue to support the aims of the strike, and remain committed to the goal of broad social change, they fear the power of Quebec’s Bill 78, now known as Law 12, to erase their semester and impose hefty fines on individuals and student associations who support the strike.
In fact, in the mother of all poison pills, Bill 78 allows the government to prevent a student union from collecting dues from its members if it supports a strike which impedes the return to classes, at a rate of one semester for each day that the strike continues.
This controversial clause, one of many in a law condemned as a violation of basic human rights by everyone from the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights to the Quebec Bar Association, would allow Jean Charest’s Liberal government to simply eliminate pesky student unions who continue to strike, and leave students at affected schools without representation for a decade or longer.
Bill 78 also mandated the early return to classes, with striking schools set to complete the interrupted spring semester over the next few weeks. The threat that a continued strike could simply eradicate that semester, and leave students as much as a year behind in their education, was also clearly a factor as students voted this week.
Add to these concerns the oft-repeated, but only somewhat accurate, idea that a continued strike would play into Jean Charest’s hands as he seeks another mandate in the provincial election set for September 4th, and it’s not hard to understand why students chose to put at least a temporary end to their strike.
In lieu of a continued strike, many student associations are focusing on ramping up their political presence in the election campaign, and in the streets. Many schools will hold a one day strike on August 22nd, the latest in a series of monthly demonstrations on that date which have attracted hundreds of thousands of Quebeckers. Organizers have called for a half million people to take to the streets in defiance of Premier Charest and his Liberal government, a number they last flirted with on May 22nd, when an estimated three to four hundred thousand took to the streets.
The three main student groups are also targeting vulnerable Liberal ridings, where student volunteers will use traditional electoral tactics like door knocking to convince voters to turn their back on the government. FEUQ President Martine Desjardins told rabble.ca that an appeal for election volunteers posted on their website received over a thousand sign-ups in its first twenty-four hours. In a close race like this one, a strong student campaign could tip the balance in enough ridings to determine the victor.
On this note, it will be fascinating to see the campaign unfold in Sherbrooke, the home riding of embattled Premier Charest, and a riding the student federations have confirmed they will target. A rare riding level poll was released over the weekend showing Charest trailing his Parti Quebecois challenger by fifteen points. It would be foolhardy to write off an experienced campaigner like Charest, but his seeming vulnerability has already forced him to take a break from the provincial campaign to pound the pavement in his own riding. The question of what happens if voters return his government to power, but he is defeated, will no doubt continue to hang over him as this campaign progresses.
In addition to a targeted riding level campaign, student federations will be pushing their members to vote, and increase an abysmal youth participation rate in Quebec elections. While many students rightly point out that replacing Charest with PQ leader Pauline Marois will not bring about the type of broad social change they are seeking, and that democracy does not mean simply voting every four years, students would be foolhardy not to exercise their power to bring down a government which has essentially accused them of being terrorists for exercising their right to strike and demonstrate.
So as the strike hits the pause button, and students focus on defeating the Liberals and mobilizing their supporters for a series of demonstrations which will culminate on the 22nd, don’t be fooled into thinking the broader movement they represent has been defeated.
The issue of governmental priorities, and how a government which has reduced its revenue by over ten billion dollars in the past decade, mostly in tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy, can claim poverty when it comes to funding social priorities like education and healthcare, has never been more prominent on the political scene.
The students put it there. They moved close to forty percent of Quebeckers to support the cause of accessible education, and forced many more to question why we can’t follow the European model of free, or nearly free, post-secondary education.
They have already taken down two education ministers, and seem likely to be able to claim credit for taking down a premier, and perhaps even his entire government. As the strike winds down students have much to feel proud about, not least their ability to mobilize global sentiment around the now universally relevant issue of austerity and neo-liberalism.
In Egypt they have a saying I find particularly appropriate now. “The people know the way back to the square”.
If the next government, regardless of political stripe, continues Charest’s contemptuous and dismissive treatment of our society’s youth, the students will return to the streets with a vengeance.
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