Greece: The Challenge of Syriza and the Radical Left
Richard SeymourJune 8, 20120
This post originally appeared on the author’s blog, Lenin’s Tomb.
The question of a workers’ government arises in Greece only because it has been raised in a certain form by Syriza, and only because they have come to hegemonise the left workers’ vote. Current (unofficial) polling seems to indicate they have up to 35% of the vote, though there is still a great deal of volatility, and some recent polls have even given New Democracy a very narrow lead. Nonetheless, with anything close 35% of the vote, they would be in a position to lead a government of the left. So, a great deal rests on why Syriza are in the position they’re in.
Explanations for Syriza’s success built on the insight that reformism is a first port of call for workers in struggle aren’t wrong, but they are rather complacent and general. Apart from anything else, Syriza aren’t classical reformists. Syriza comprises a coalition between a Eurocommunist bloc, Synaspismos, which has roots in a breakaway from the Communist Party (KKE) in 1968, and various Maoist and Trotskyist groups.The Eurocommunists are by far the dominant force, having comprised about 85% of the members before a rightist split in 2010, which I’ll come back to. But of course, they have their own internal differentiations, as Eurocommunism has always had its left and right currents, historically oscillating between centrism and reformism. The Maoist group, the Communist Organization of Greece (KOE), is the second largest organisation in the coalition. Alongside them are the Trotskyist group, the International Workers Left, and the Communist Left for Ecology and Renewal.
The trajectory and composition of these hetroclite elements are discussed by Stathis Kouvelakis here (original here). Essentially, we are talking about divisions, redivisions, and realignments within the communist and non-communist left, with the leading role taken by a Eurocommunist organisation with an orientation toward what used to be called the ‘new social movements’. Not a typical reformism, then, and certainly more akin at an ideological level to Die Linke than to traditional social democracy. Moreover, they’re far from the only reformist option for workers, a point we will return to.
A refinement of the same argument is that since Greeks are overwhelmingly opposed to the Memorandum, yet simultaneously opposed to withdrawal from the euro, it is logical that Syriza, which favours continued membership of the Eurozone on a reformed basis, should have benefited from PASOK’s collapse. Hence, workers are gravitating to a reformist solution that matches their ‘level of consciousness’.
Again, though more specific, this explanation is inadequate to the complexity of reality. Polls show that about half of Greeks oppose remaining in the euro if it means sticking with the measures contained in the Memorandum, and these voters are overwhelmingly concentrated in the base of the left parties, including more than two thirds of Syriza voters. In other words, their attitude to the EU is context-driven.
Syriza itself is not that simple either. As Kouvelakis has pointed out: 1) its position is that the EU can be internally reformed “but on the basis of denouncing all the existing European Treaties (Maastricht, Lisbon etc)”; 2) it contains other currents hostile to the EU, including significant Trotskyist and Maoist groups who comprise about 15% of the membership; 3) most importantly, its position on austerity is inconsistent with its pro-European stance, an ambiguity whose resolution will depend significantly on the continuation and outcome of struggles in which Syriza is partially embedded.
Recall, moreover, that it looked for a while as if a right-wing breakaway from Syriza, the Democratic Left (DIMAR) would be the main beneficiary. DIMAR represented the ‘Europeanist’ Ananeotiki wing of Synaspismos, the dominant Eurocommunist component of Syriza. It departed amid some grievance over the leftist direction in which the leadership of Alexis Tsipras was taking the coalition, and took with it the former leader of Syriza, four sitting MPs, and hundreds of members. It selected Fotis Kouvelis as its leader, and lauded its attitude of “responsibility and accountability” before the press.
Strictly in terms of its programme and its attitude to austerity, it was somewhere between Syriza and PASOK, and slightly to the right of the Greens with whom it shared enough to cooperate in the 2010 regional elections. After the May elections, Kouvelis even indicated that he would be willing to join a coalition government with some of the austerity parties if Syriza could be persuaded to join.
So, having thus launched itself as both a critic of austerity and a ‘responsible party of government’, at one stage it had 15% in the polls. That is not far short of what Syriza actually received in the recent parliamentary elections. There was no necessary reason, if what mattered was a pro-European anti-austerity stance, why Syriza should have overtaken them. Syriza haven’t just won people on their main programmatic points; they’ve won the trust of millions of workers and, at that, the most radicalised workers.
It is also true, but inadequate, to say that Syriza is the beneficiary of militant struggles including 17 general strikes, several mass demonstrations, workplace occupations, and the spread of rank and file organisation. Syriza has benefited from this, but it has not been as important to these struggles as the KKE, so it was not inevitable that it should do so. Likewise, that Syriza’s claim on the majority of the left workers’ vote is only a recent development, following from the formation of a PASOK-led coalition government, is true, but doesn’t itself explain why Syriza should have benefited.
There are, of course, many determining factors, but I would suggest that a key determination was Syriza raising the slogan of a left government to stop austerity. This immediately distinguished it from its two main left electoral rivals – the respectability-hugging DIMAR, and the sectier-than-thou KKE. This is why Syriza could win the election with about a third of the vote, much of which it coming at the expense of other left parties. The Communists (KKE) have lost the most, with their vote pushed down to about 5%. The anticapitalist left coalition ANTARSYA have also been squeezed, from 1.2% to about 0.5%. DIMAR appears to be relatively steady on 7.5%.
Of course, the KKE remains a powerful force in the workers’ movement, but it is suffering from its appallingly sectarian position. Not only does it refuse to work with Syriza, but in true Third Period fashion it actually denounces them far more than it does the Nazis or the parties of the Memorandum. Its combination of militancy and sectarianism is partially rooted in the antiquated and mortified analysis of ‘monopoly capitalism’, and partially in its view of its role as the vanguard party uniquely tasked with taking on the EU and the ‘monopolists’. At any rate, the KKE have decided to make the EU the main point of division when it is clear that for most left-wing Greek workers, that is not the main antagonism.
Possibly, the KKE will comfort themselves with the idea that their electoral perdition is temporary, that soon the ideological and political vapours giving rise to Syrizismo will dispel as the KKE edge out their left rivals and take the leadership of the workers’ movement. But their strong industrial position is not written in stone, and this isn’t just another election. The choice is between a New Democracy-led austerity government, which would be immensely demoralising, and a Syriza-led anti-austerity government, which would give the whole continental left a massive shot in the arm and open up a host of new possibilities. This is a key moment in which a great deal is condensed, which will be formative of a great deal of the political and ideological terrain for some time, and any formation that appears to bring the latter possibility closer isn’t helping the industrial struggle.
The best hope is that the KKE’s delegates will be persuaded to give a vote of confidence in a Syriza-led minority government, and support its measures from the opposition benches, even if they refuse to join it. But one still can’t be sure that they aren’t waiting for the chance to say, “first the Golden Dawn, then us”.
As for ANTARSYA, they are standing without illusions, expecting to incur a humiliatingly low vote. They intend to use the electoral platform to organise around and push for a programme of anticapitalist transition. You may say that it is unlikely that this programme will benefit from an electoral drubbing. You may add that since the main locus of their leadership is in the industrial and social struggles, since that is where they are a most serious force, this is probably where such a programme could be raised most effectively. And, going further, you might assert that in this election, with the stakes this high, the presence of ANTARSYA candidates is unlikely to add any new dynamic to the electoral contest, thus actually increasing the turnout among left voters. You may say that say none of the usual reasons for the far left running no-hope election campaigns apply, while unusual ones why they shouldn’t, do.
You may say all that. I couldn’t possibly comment, except to nod vigorously and say ‘well, yes, of course’.
Nonetheless, the majority of Greece’s left-wing workers will support Syriza in their attempt to form a left government. And that may be enough to give them a parliamentary majority, or at least a working minority government, which can then revoke the laws implementing the Memorandum. No small thing, this, if it happens.
Now, judging from online conversations and opinion pieces, a large section of the far left is waiting for the other shoe to drop. The narratives of betrayal are already being readied, the old verities being ‘proved’ repeatedly. There are many variations, but the core of it is that: 1) Syriza are straightforwardly reformists, notwithstanding the substantial revolutionary fringe – the tail does not wag the dog; 2) reformists are apt to compromise with the forces of capitalism, and as such a sell-out of the working class cannot be long following Syriza’s election. In its latest instantiation, this is expressed in the tutting, sighing, and fanning of armpits over Tsipras chatting up the G20. There it is: the betrayal is already afoot, the reformists already making deals with the bosses. Perhaps so, but thus far Syriza have not withdrawn from their fundamental commitments, which are: abrogate the Memorandum, and stop austerity measures. They did not do so when there was pressure to do so after the last election, and are not doing so now.
I would advise caution on this line of critique, therefore: it is very well to criticise what Syriza has actually said and done, but it isn’t necessary to second guess what Syriza will do. The point will be to support the mass movements capable of pressuring a Syriza-led government from the left. No, they are not a revolutionary formation; no, they won’t overthrow capitalism; no, their manifesto is not a communist manifesto. Yet it is just possible that Syriza won’t betray workers in the interests of European capital, and that all the stern augury will have been displacement activity.
Of course there is an unresolved tension at the heart of Syriza’s agenda. Of course they can’t break the austerity deadlock within the EU. But it is not inevitable that they will resolve it by capitulation. For what it’s worth, I think they know very well that the their policy will not be tolerable to the EU’s masters. I think the talk of Europe’s leaders not being willing to see Greece exit is a knowing bluff. Of course, the Merkozy consensus is weaker than before, and may well be weakened still by Spain’s ongoing crisis, or by another plunge in Italy. But one can’t envision at any stage the EU’s leadership allowing themselves to give in to a junior, peripheral EU state. Tsipras talks about Greece joining Europe as an equal and a partner – that is exactly what the EU’s leadership will never allow.
So, I think the Syriza strategy is simply to avoid being blamed for Greece being forced out, in view of the potentially apocalyptic consequences of doing so. This is perfectly understandable, even if it is a position that one could not admit from a marxist perspective, since it means basically fudging the problem that the quasi-colonial, class-structured hierarchies of the EU can possibly be reformed, but they cannot be reformed away. The latter is a problem that will return, even if a Syriza success is followed by a graceful default, and a ‘Grexit’ under the most benign circumstances, and it has to be faced.
Moreover, the strongest likelihood for a Syriza-led government is that it will be in perpetual crisis. It would be a spot-lit enclave, under constant assault from capital and the media. One could well imagine that the severity of the social crisis, and the pressure from European capital, would force splits in such a government and bring about its early downfall. On the other hand, there would also be a pressure, which should be resisted, on the rank and file to temper its criticisms, and curtail its actions, in order to help ‘our’ government as it came under capitalist attack. The best way to ‘save’ such a government from capital would be to keep up the pressure and organisation, but not everyone would see it this way. And even if Syriza would lack a sufficient basis in the leadership of the workers’ movement to effect a quietening of class struggle, it would have undoubted authority within the movement.
So, these divisions would not merely be in the party of government, but would exert effects throughout the resistance. The election of a Syriza-led government will be a nodal point, not the end point, in the process of workers finding a solution to the problem.
However, I suggest you should compare those antagonisms to the sorts of demoralising splits and recriminations that would likely follow from a New Democracy victory and the prolonged imposition of austerity. Relatively speaking, the crisis of a Syriza government would be a benevolent crisis. This is Syriza’s challenge: the good crisis, or the bad crisis? The first radical left government in Europe for a generation, in a situation more serious than any radical movement has faced since the Carnation Revolution, the further exacerbation of divisions in the European bourgeoisie, a step forward for the Greek and all European workers’ movements, and possibly a new and uncertain terrain? Or, terra firma, in permanent opposition and division, with our weaknesses and hesitancy constantly making up for those of the bourgeoisie?
************
Monday, June 11, 2012
Sunday, June 10, 2012
From The HistoMat Blog-Revolutionary Socialists' statement on Egypt's presidential elections
Revolutionary Socialists' statement on Egypt's presidential elections
The Revolutionary Socialists Movement confirms its opposition on principle to the candidate of the Military Council, the dissolved National Democratic Party and the forces of the counter-revolution, Ahmad Shafiq.
Shafiq has managed to reach the second round of the presidential elections to face the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, Dr Mohammed Morsi.
This is thanks to a massive mobilisation by the counter-revolutionary camp, which deployed the full, organised force of the resources at its command – the repressive apparatus of the state, the media and the business interests standing behind Shafiq.
His success reflects the smear campaigns, systematic repression and intimidation of the social and popular forces which peaked before the election and were expressed in the dregs of the old regime daring to run in the election.
This combined with the inability of the reformist and revolutionary forces to unite in a political front to prevent their candidacy. Finally it also reflects the failure of the candidates affiliated with the revolution to unite behind a single candidate clearly expressing the programme of the revolution as we recently warned.
On the other hand, the Revolutionary Socialists Movement welcomes the accomplishment of the millions of voters from the poor, the workers, the peasants, employees, the Copts, the unemployed and the youth of the revolution who backed Hamdeen Sabbahi.
He competed strongly for second place with Shafiq, scoring 21.2 percent of the total votes cast and coming third by a narrow margin. This reflects the great weight of support among the popular forces, the forces supporting the project of the revolution and the those aligned with the Left for a programme which addresses both social issues and the question of civil democracy – thus allowing for the construction of a front of the militant left which has a wide popularity in the Egyptian street.
We stress our full support for all moves aimed at the verification of instances of fraud which were carried out against Sabbahi and for efforts to apply the law of political exclusion to the criminal Ahmad Shafiq.
We are deeply convinced of the role of the masses as the most effective and influential force and guarantor in all the battles of democracy, which they won the right to participate in through their great revolutionary struggle.
They offered martyrs and injured from the beginning of the revolution until today. We are also convinced that the victory of Shafiq in the second round of the elections will be a great loss to the revolution and a powerful blow against its democratic and social gains.
Brutal
It would give a golden opportunity to the preparations of the counter-revolution for a more brutal and extensive revenge attack under the slogan of “restore security to the street within days”.
We therefore call on all the reformist and revolutionary forces and the remainder of the revolutionary candidates to form a national front which stands against the candidate of counter-revolution, and demands that the Muslim Brotherhood declares its commitment to the following:
1. Formation of a presidential coalition which includes Hamdeen Sabbahi and Abd-al-Moneim Abu-al-Fotouh as Vice-Presidents.
2. The selection of a Prime Minister from outside the ranks of the Brotherhood and the Freedom and Justice Party and the formation of a government across the whole political spectrum in which the Copts are represented.
3. The approval of a law on trade union freedoms which clearly supports the pluralism and independence of the workers' movement in contrast to the draft law proposed by the Brotherhood to the People's Assembly.
4. The Brotherhood's agreement with other political forces on a civil constitution which guarantees social justice, the right to free, quality healthcare and education, the right to strike, demonstrate and organise peaceful sit-ins, the public and private rights of all citizens, and the genuinely representation of women, the Copts, working people and the youth in the Constituent Assembly. We cannot fail here to call on the Muslim Brotherhood and all the political forces to put the interests of the revolution before party-political interest and to unite against Shafiq so that we do not deliver our revolution to its enemies as easy prey.
Our position does not, of course, mean that we are dropping our criticism of the social and economic programme of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party and its “Renaissance Project” which is essentially biased towards the market economy and finance and business.
Nor do we weaken our criticism of the political performance of the leadership of the Brotherhood and the Freedom and Justice Party and of the trust of these leaders in the Military Council and their attacks on the revolutionaries during the battles of Mohammed Mahmoud Street and the Cabinet Offices and others.
These attacks included accusing the Revolutionary Socialists and other revolutionary forces of treason and the presentation of a legal complaint against us to the Attorney General.
However, what concerns us in the first place is the interest of the revolution, and its future. We have to defend the right of the masses to make choices and test those choices as a condition of the development of their consciousness and the development of their position in relation to different political forces.
We are also aware of the magnitude of the error in failure to discriminate between the reformism of the Muslim Brotherhood and the "fascism" of Shafiq. The Brotherhood is supported by millions in the elections who aspire to the redistribution of the revolution and genuine democracy. It depends on the grassroots of the unions and professional associations and other social and democratic organisations, and on an audience among poor peasants, workers and the unemployed.
The military's man Shafiq and the thugs of his campaign who are united in their desire to end the revolution and close the door on any democratic or economic struggle.
We pledge today to join in the widest possible struggle among the masses of our people against the candidate of the old regime. The election of Shafiq would cross a red line, as if Mubarak returned or he was found not guilty of his crimes. It would be exactly like rejecting the sacrifice of the martyrs and accepting the defeat of the revolution.
The conditions for the struggle, the battle for a decent life and the continuation of the political and social revolution will become extremely difficult with Shafiq installed in the presidential palace.
Turn the second round of the presidential elections into a blow against the old regime!
Fight to organise the popular forces against the slaveowners' revolt!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Revolutionary Socialists Movement confirms its opposition on principle to the candidate of the Military Council, the dissolved National Democratic Party and the forces of the counter-revolution, Ahmad Shafiq.
Shafiq has managed to reach the second round of the presidential elections to face the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, Dr Mohammed Morsi.
This is thanks to a massive mobilisation by the counter-revolutionary camp, which deployed the full, organised force of the resources at its command – the repressive apparatus of the state, the media and the business interests standing behind Shafiq.
His success reflects the smear campaigns, systematic repression and intimidation of the social and popular forces which peaked before the election and were expressed in the dregs of the old regime daring to run in the election.
This combined with the inability of the reformist and revolutionary forces to unite in a political front to prevent their candidacy. Finally it also reflects the failure of the candidates affiliated with the revolution to unite behind a single candidate clearly expressing the programme of the revolution as we recently warned.
On the other hand, the Revolutionary Socialists Movement welcomes the accomplishment of the millions of voters from the poor, the workers, the peasants, employees, the Copts, the unemployed and the youth of the revolution who backed Hamdeen Sabbahi.
He competed strongly for second place with Shafiq, scoring 21.2 percent of the total votes cast and coming third by a narrow margin. This reflects the great weight of support among the popular forces, the forces supporting the project of the revolution and the those aligned with the Left for a programme which addresses both social issues and the question of civil democracy – thus allowing for the construction of a front of the militant left which has a wide popularity in the Egyptian street.
We stress our full support for all moves aimed at the verification of instances of fraud which were carried out against Sabbahi and for efforts to apply the law of political exclusion to the criminal Ahmad Shafiq.
We are deeply convinced of the role of the masses as the most effective and influential force and guarantor in all the battles of democracy, which they won the right to participate in through their great revolutionary struggle.
They offered martyrs and injured from the beginning of the revolution until today. We are also convinced that the victory of Shafiq in the second round of the elections will be a great loss to the revolution and a powerful blow against its democratic and social gains.
Brutal
It would give a golden opportunity to the preparations of the counter-revolution for a more brutal and extensive revenge attack under the slogan of “restore security to the street within days”.
We therefore call on all the reformist and revolutionary forces and the remainder of the revolutionary candidates to form a national front which stands against the candidate of counter-revolution, and demands that the Muslim Brotherhood declares its commitment to the following:
1. Formation of a presidential coalition which includes Hamdeen Sabbahi and Abd-al-Moneim Abu-al-Fotouh as Vice-Presidents.
2. The selection of a Prime Minister from outside the ranks of the Brotherhood and the Freedom and Justice Party and the formation of a government across the whole political spectrum in which the Copts are represented.
3. The approval of a law on trade union freedoms which clearly supports the pluralism and independence of the workers' movement in contrast to the draft law proposed by the Brotherhood to the People's Assembly.
4. The Brotherhood's agreement with other political forces on a civil constitution which guarantees social justice, the right to free, quality healthcare and education, the right to strike, demonstrate and organise peaceful sit-ins, the public and private rights of all citizens, and the genuinely representation of women, the Copts, working people and the youth in the Constituent Assembly. We cannot fail here to call on the Muslim Brotherhood and all the political forces to put the interests of the revolution before party-political interest and to unite against Shafiq so that we do not deliver our revolution to its enemies as easy prey.
Our position does not, of course, mean that we are dropping our criticism of the social and economic programme of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party and its “Renaissance Project” which is essentially biased towards the market economy and finance and business.
Nor do we weaken our criticism of the political performance of the leadership of the Brotherhood and the Freedom and Justice Party and of the trust of these leaders in the Military Council and their attacks on the revolutionaries during the battles of Mohammed Mahmoud Street and the Cabinet Offices and others.
These attacks included accusing the Revolutionary Socialists and other revolutionary forces of treason and the presentation of a legal complaint against us to the Attorney General.
However, what concerns us in the first place is the interest of the revolution, and its future. We have to defend the right of the masses to make choices and test those choices as a condition of the development of their consciousness and the development of their position in relation to different political forces.
We are also aware of the magnitude of the error in failure to discriminate between the reformism of the Muslim Brotherhood and the "fascism" of Shafiq. The Brotherhood is supported by millions in the elections who aspire to the redistribution of the revolution and genuine democracy. It depends on the grassroots of the unions and professional associations and other social and democratic organisations, and on an audience among poor peasants, workers and the unemployed.
The military's man Shafiq and the thugs of his campaign who are united in their desire to end the revolution and close the door on any democratic or economic struggle.
We pledge today to join in the widest possible struggle among the masses of our people against the candidate of the old regime. The election of Shafiq would cross a red line, as if Mubarak returned or he was found not guilty of his crimes. It would be exactly like rejecting the sacrifice of the martyrs and accepting the defeat of the revolution.
The conditions for the struggle, the battle for a decent life and the continuation of the political and social revolution will become extremely difficult with Shafiq installed in the presidential palace.
Turn the second round of the presidential elections into a blow against the old regime!
Fight to organise the popular forces against the slaveowners' revolt!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From The SteveLendmanBlog-Stepped Up Media War on Syria
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Stepped Up Media War on Syria
by Stephen Lendman
When America goes to war or plans one, media scoundrels march in lockstep. Journalism is the first casualty. Managed news misinformation substitutes for truth and full disclosure.
Cheerleading propaganda is relentless. Readers and viewers are betrayed. Imperial wars are called liberating ones. Separating fact from fiction is challenging.
Only replacing independent regimes with pro-Western puppet ones matters. Media scoundrels support it. Blood on their hands doesn't deter them. Steady income eases conscience pangs. Soul selling pays well.
NYT and Washington Post editorials discussed below reflect the latest White House statement on Syria. It reads like bad fiction, saying:
"The United States strongly condemns the outrageous targeted killings of civilians including women and children in Al-Qubeir in Hama province as reported by multiple credible sources."
"This, coupled with the Syrian regime’s refusal to let UN observers into the area to verify these reports, is an affront to human dignity and justice."
"There is no justification for this regime’s continued defiance of its obligations under the Annan Plan, and Assad’s continued abdication of responsibility for these horrific acts has no credibility and only further underscores the illegitimate and immoral nature of his rule."
"The future of Syria will be determined by the Syrian people, and the international community must come together in support of their legitimate aspirations."
"We call once more on all nations to abandon support for this brutal and illegitimate regime, and to join together to support a political transition in Syria—one that upholds the promise of a future for which far too many have already died."
Fact check
Assad security forces and/or supporters had nothing to do with Houla and Qubeir village massacres. Western-recruited death squads bear full responsibility. Claiming otherwise won't change facts.
According to Reuters, UN monitors visited Qubeir. So did journalists accompanying them. Claiming otherwise ignores what some media sources reported.
"The smell of burnt flesh hung in the air and body parts lay scattered around the deserted" village, said Reuters.
UN spokeswoman Sausan Ghosheh said one house showed bullet and rocket fire damage. Another was burnt.
One home had "pieces of brains on the floor." Blood was everywhere. Around 78 people were shot at close range, stabbed, or "burned alive." Targeted Qubeir residents were pro-Assad loyalists.
They were murdered for supporting the wrong side. Pro-Gaddafi Libyans were killed the same way. Reuters may have inadvertently absolved Assad, saying:
Qubeir killings replicated Houla deaths two weeks earlier. "The conflict is becoming increasingly sectarian. (Pro-Assad) shabbiha militiamen from the Alawite community appear to be off the leash...."
UK journalist Alex Thomson said Syrian insurgents tried to get him killed. On June 8, his blog site headlined "Set up to be shot in Syria's no man's land?" saying:
Dead journalists are bad news for Assad. His Channel 4 News team travelled in UN vehicles. They were abandoned when surrounded by "shouting militia."
They were fired on. They had to take evasive action. The incident took place last weekend. Thomson and crew are back home.
Were they set up to be shot, he asked?
"Suddenly four men in a black car beckon us to follow. We move out behind."
"We are led another route. Led in fact, straight into a free-fire zone. Told by the Free Syrian Army to follow a road that was blocked off in the middle of no-man’s-land."
"At that point there was the crack of a bullet and one of the slower three-point turns I’ve experienced. We screamed off into the nearest side-street for cover. Another dead-end."
"Predictably the black car....led us to the trap....I'm quite clear the rebels deliberately set us up to be shot...."
"The UN duly drove back past us, witnessed us surrounded by shouting militia, and left town."
"Please, do not for one moment believe that my experience with the rebels....was a one-off."
Human rights lawyer Nawaf al Thani tweeted him. He was also set up. Thomson believes so have others getting too close to insurgents.
"In a war where they slit the throats of toddlers back to the spine, what's the big deal in sending a van full of journalist into the killing zone" to die?”
On June 8, a New York Times editorial headlined "Assad, the Butcher," saying:
Qubeir was "the fourth massacre in two weeks."
"Despite his claims that the violence is the work of 'terrorists,' (Assad) has a lot to hide. On Thursday, Syrian troops and pro-government supporters barred the monitors from Qubeir, and the monitors were fired upon."
Fact check
Insurgents fired on monitors, not Assad forces. It wasn't the first time and won't be the last. Earlier, observer head General Robert Mood had a close call.
He could have been killed but said little. The incident passed. It's forgotten. Maybe it warned him to support pro-Western forces, not Assad.
It happened again. On May 9, Reuters headlined "Syria rebels kill 7, bomb explodes near UN monitors," saying:
Eight Syrian soldiers were wounded. They were escorting UN monitors. Mood led them. He downplayed the incident, saying:
"The important thing is not speculating about who was the target, what was the target, but to make the point that this is what the Syrian people are seeing every day and it needs to stop."
Speaking forthrightly might help. Downplaying attacks that could have killed him betrays his mandate. So does not naming responsible parties.
Assad forces were protecting him. Insurgents attacked. Twice he escaped unharmed. Maybe next time he won't be as lucky.
As explained above, monitors went to Qubeir. They were delayed but not deterred. Neither were journalists accompanying them.
According to Times-think, Annan's peace plan "g(ave) Russia, China and some other" Security Council members "six more weeks to excuse their inaction."
Russia and China are "complicit in more than 12,000 Syrian deaths....A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman was still in a fantasy world on Friday, calling on both sides in the conflict to stop the fighting."
"....Washington needs to marshal all of the pressure and shaming it can find" to get both countries to bend.
Fact check
Moscow and Beijing reject foreign intervention. They understand Washington's regime change plans. They don't want Syria to replicate Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. They support conflict resolution, not more war.
They have no blood on their hands. Obama's are irreparably stained. Scoundrel media share guilt. Promoting bloodshed is unconscionable.
"With every new atrocity, calls for military action grow."
The Times effectively endorsed it. Imperial interests alone matter. Mass killing followed by more of it is a small price to pay. Who's keeping count?
A same day Washington Post editorial headlined "The UN's Syria disaster," saying:
"THIS MAY BE remembered as the week in which the illusion that the bloodshed in Syria could be stopped by United Nations diplomats was destroyed once and for all. Inside the country, the killing sharply and sickeningly accelerated."
These type comments come perilously close to endorsing war.
Regime change "in Syria" depends on "Assad (being) confronted with irresistible force."
This one crosses the line.
How long Russia and China can prevent what looks certain remains unclear. They're trying. On June 8, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said:
"There will not be a Security Council mandate for outside intervention, I guarantee you that."
"There are sides in the Syria conflict, especially the so called (opposition) Syrian National Council, who are saying no negotiations with the regime, only continued armed battle until the Security Council gives a mandate for outside intervention."
"Either we gather everyone with influence at the negotiating table or once again we depart into ideology... where it is declared shamelessly that everything is the fault of the regime, while everyone else are angels and therefore the regime should be changed."
On June 9, SANA state media reported Syrian UN envoy Bashar al-Jaafari saying Qubeir killings occurred hours before armed clashes happened. He added that Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabia, and other media aired fake videos.
"The Syrian TVs will air the true images of the massacre," he explained. "The instigative media channels have taken to airing such fabrications before the UN Security Council meetings."
Responsible gunmen came from Jreijes village. Residents called police for help.
"What is taking place in some parts of Syria is an unjustifiable heinous massacre, but some statements made during this session are part of the butchery, since the diagnosis of the situation is incorrect as it is based on political and media operation rooms that are detached from the situation on the ground."
"The Syrian government extends a hand of reconciliation with all political powers whose hands are clear of the Syrian blood to reach the shores of safety we all spire to."
"Are suicide bombings that targeted Syria acts in self-defense? Are attacks on hospitals, medical staffs and schools democratic (acts)?''
On June 9, Press TV reported that insurgents attacked Damascus infrastructure. A power station was shelled. Blackouts followed.
"Gunmen have also reportedly targeted military units charged with protecting an oilfield in" Dayr al-Zawr.
Car bombs killed police and civilians in Damascus. Another one killed police in Idlib.
Insurgents bear full responsibility for months of violence. Assad is right calling them "outlaws, saboteurs, and armed terrorist groups." He also said unrest is being orchestrated from abroad.
The buck stops in Washington. Media scoundrels share blame. Don't they always?
A Final Comment
On June 8, DEBKAfile said Moscow "flatly rejected (Obama's) proposal to post 5,000 armed UN monitors in Syria, most of them Russian troops, as the core of a new plan to resolve the Syrian crisis."
DF said Russia is getting more hardline. Talks aren't being held to replace Assad. Annan's peace plan failed. It wasn't designed to succeed.
Washington's mission to Moscow reached a "dead end." The "Syrian conflict and Iranian nuclear controversy are becoming inextricably intermeshed."
P5+1 countries are "seriously considering not turning up for their third round of nuclear talks in Moscow on June 18 - 19."
DF also says "Russia is prepared to use military power to defend Iran and Syria."
Last February, Russia Today interviewed Colonel-General (ret.) Leonid Ivashov. He's a former Russian Joint Chiefs of Staff member.
He said maneuvers conducted at the time were meant to "demonstrate Russia's readiness to use military power to defend its national interests and to bolster its political position."
Iran and Syria are allies, he said. They're "guaranteed partners of Russia."
"A strike against" either country "is an indirect strike against Russia and its interests. Russia would lose important positions and allies in the Arab world. Therefore, by defending Syria (and Iran), Russia is defending its own interests."
He added that Russia is "defending the entire world from Fascism. Everybody should acknowledge that Fascism is making strides on our planet. What they did in Libya is nearly identical to what Hitler and his armies did against Poland and then Russia. Today, therefore, Russia is defending the entire world from Fascism."
On June 4, DF said Obama this fall plans to implement "an embargo on aircraft and sea vessels visiting Iranian ports. Any national airline or international aircraft (entering) Iran will be barred from US and West European airports."
The same holds for "private and government-owned vessels, including oil tankers."
Obama keeps advancing the ball closer to war. First Syria, then Iran, then other targeted states.
Canadian psychiatrist Robert Hare describes psychopathic behavior clinically. He said 10% on Wall Street exhibit it. It holds for Obama, top administration officials, and congressional party leaders.
They're amoral, deceitful, manipulative, and completely self-interested. They breach social and legal standards. They suffer no guilt. They exhibit callous unconcern for others.
They disregard safety and can't maintain long-term relationships. They're anti-social and have no sense of moral responsibility. They're "without conscience." Clinically, they're psychopathic. "(T)heir game is self-gratification at" the expense of others.
They're all take and no give. They flagrantly violate societal rules. They're psychopathically vicious. They're indifferent to human suffering.
Hare stressed that "if we can't spot them, we are doomed to be their victims, both as individuals and as a society."
Perhaps he had George Bush, Dick Cheney, Obama, Romney, and other amoral hawks in mind.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@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
Stepped Up Media War on Syria
by Stephen Lendman
When America goes to war or plans one, media scoundrels march in lockstep. Journalism is the first casualty. Managed news misinformation substitutes for truth and full disclosure.
Cheerleading propaganda is relentless. Readers and viewers are betrayed. Imperial wars are called liberating ones. Separating fact from fiction is challenging.
Only replacing independent regimes with pro-Western puppet ones matters. Media scoundrels support it. Blood on their hands doesn't deter them. Steady income eases conscience pangs. Soul selling pays well.
NYT and Washington Post editorials discussed below reflect the latest White House statement on Syria. It reads like bad fiction, saying:
"The United States strongly condemns the outrageous targeted killings of civilians including women and children in Al-Qubeir in Hama province as reported by multiple credible sources."
"This, coupled with the Syrian regime’s refusal to let UN observers into the area to verify these reports, is an affront to human dignity and justice."
"There is no justification for this regime’s continued defiance of its obligations under the Annan Plan, and Assad’s continued abdication of responsibility for these horrific acts has no credibility and only further underscores the illegitimate and immoral nature of his rule."
"The future of Syria will be determined by the Syrian people, and the international community must come together in support of their legitimate aspirations."
"We call once more on all nations to abandon support for this brutal and illegitimate regime, and to join together to support a political transition in Syria—one that upholds the promise of a future for which far too many have already died."
Fact check
Assad security forces and/or supporters had nothing to do with Houla and Qubeir village massacres. Western-recruited death squads bear full responsibility. Claiming otherwise won't change facts.
According to Reuters, UN monitors visited Qubeir. So did journalists accompanying them. Claiming otherwise ignores what some media sources reported.
"The smell of burnt flesh hung in the air and body parts lay scattered around the deserted" village, said Reuters.
UN spokeswoman Sausan Ghosheh said one house showed bullet and rocket fire damage. Another was burnt.
One home had "pieces of brains on the floor." Blood was everywhere. Around 78 people were shot at close range, stabbed, or "burned alive." Targeted Qubeir residents were pro-Assad loyalists.
They were murdered for supporting the wrong side. Pro-Gaddafi Libyans were killed the same way. Reuters may have inadvertently absolved Assad, saying:
Qubeir killings replicated Houla deaths two weeks earlier. "The conflict is becoming increasingly sectarian. (Pro-Assad) shabbiha militiamen from the Alawite community appear to be off the leash...."
UK journalist Alex Thomson said Syrian insurgents tried to get him killed. On June 8, his blog site headlined "Set up to be shot in Syria's no man's land?" saying:
Dead journalists are bad news for Assad. His Channel 4 News team travelled in UN vehicles. They were abandoned when surrounded by "shouting militia."
They were fired on. They had to take evasive action. The incident took place last weekend. Thomson and crew are back home.
Were they set up to be shot, he asked?
"Suddenly four men in a black car beckon us to follow. We move out behind."
"We are led another route. Led in fact, straight into a free-fire zone. Told by the Free Syrian Army to follow a road that was blocked off in the middle of no-man’s-land."
"At that point there was the crack of a bullet and one of the slower three-point turns I’ve experienced. We screamed off into the nearest side-street for cover. Another dead-end."
"Predictably the black car....led us to the trap....I'm quite clear the rebels deliberately set us up to be shot...."
"The UN duly drove back past us, witnessed us surrounded by shouting militia, and left town."
"Please, do not for one moment believe that my experience with the rebels....was a one-off."
Human rights lawyer Nawaf al Thani tweeted him. He was also set up. Thomson believes so have others getting too close to insurgents.
"In a war where they slit the throats of toddlers back to the spine, what's the big deal in sending a van full of journalist into the killing zone" to die?”
On June 8, a New York Times editorial headlined "Assad, the Butcher," saying:
Qubeir was "the fourth massacre in two weeks."
"Despite his claims that the violence is the work of 'terrorists,' (Assad) has a lot to hide. On Thursday, Syrian troops and pro-government supporters barred the monitors from Qubeir, and the monitors were fired upon."
Fact check
Insurgents fired on monitors, not Assad forces. It wasn't the first time and won't be the last. Earlier, observer head General Robert Mood had a close call.
He could have been killed but said little. The incident passed. It's forgotten. Maybe it warned him to support pro-Western forces, not Assad.
It happened again. On May 9, Reuters headlined "Syria rebels kill 7, bomb explodes near UN monitors," saying:
Eight Syrian soldiers were wounded. They were escorting UN monitors. Mood led them. He downplayed the incident, saying:
"The important thing is not speculating about who was the target, what was the target, but to make the point that this is what the Syrian people are seeing every day and it needs to stop."
Speaking forthrightly might help. Downplaying attacks that could have killed him betrays his mandate. So does not naming responsible parties.
Assad forces were protecting him. Insurgents attacked. Twice he escaped unharmed. Maybe next time he won't be as lucky.
As explained above, monitors went to Qubeir. They were delayed but not deterred. Neither were journalists accompanying them.
According to Times-think, Annan's peace plan "g(ave) Russia, China and some other" Security Council members "six more weeks to excuse their inaction."
Russia and China are "complicit in more than 12,000 Syrian deaths....A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman was still in a fantasy world on Friday, calling on both sides in the conflict to stop the fighting."
"....Washington needs to marshal all of the pressure and shaming it can find" to get both countries to bend.
Fact check
Moscow and Beijing reject foreign intervention. They understand Washington's regime change plans. They don't want Syria to replicate Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. They support conflict resolution, not more war.
They have no blood on their hands. Obama's are irreparably stained. Scoundrel media share guilt. Promoting bloodshed is unconscionable.
"With every new atrocity, calls for military action grow."
The Times effectively endorsed it. Imperial interests alone matter. Mass killing followed by more of it is a small price to pay. Who's keeping count?
A same day Washington Post editorial headlined "The UN's Syria disaster," saying:
"THIS MAY BE remembered as the week in which the illusion that the bloodshed in Syria could be stopped by United Nations diplomats was destroyed once and for all. Inside the country, the killing sharply and sickeningly accelerated."
These type comments come perilously close to endorsing war.
Regime change "in Syria" depends on "Assad (being) confronted with irresistible force."
This one crosses the line.
How long Russia and China can prevent what looks certain remains unclear. They're trying. On June 8, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said:
"There will not be a Security Council mandate for outside intervention, I guarantee you that."
"There are sides in the Syria conflict, especially the so called (opposition) Syrian National Council, who are saying no negotiations with the regime, only continued armed battle until the Security Council gives a mandate for outside intervention."
"Either we gather everyone with influence at the negotiating table or once again we depart into ideology... where it is declared shamelessly that everything is the fault of the regime, while everyone else are angels and therefore the regime should be changed."
On June 9, SANA state media reported Syrian UN envoy Bashar al-Jaafari saying Qubeir killings occurred hours before armed clashes happened. He added that Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabia, and other media aired fake videos.
"The Syrian TVs will air the true images of the massacre," he explained. "The instigative media channels have taken to airing such fabrications before the UN Security Council meetings."
Responsible gunmen came from Jreijes village. Residents called police for help.
"What is taking place in some parts of Syria is an unjustifiable heinous massacre, but some statements made during this session are part of the butchery, since the diagnosis of the situation is incorrect as it is based on political and media operation rooms that are detached from the situation on the ground."
"The Syrian government extends a hand of reconciliation with all political powers whose hands are clear of the Syrian blood to reach the shores of safety we all spire to."
"Are suicide bombings that targeted Syria acts in self-defense? Are attacks on hospitals, medical staffs and schools democratic (acts)?''
On June 9, Press TV reported that insurgents attacked Damascus infrastructure. A power station was shelled. Blackouts followed.
"Gunmen have also reportedly targeted military units charged with protecting an oilfield in" Dayr al-Zawr.
Car bombs killed police and civilians in Damascus. Another one killed police in Idlib.
Insurgents bear full responsibility for months of violence. Assad is right calling them "outlaws, saboteurs, and armed terrorist groups." He also said unrest is being orchestrated from abroad.
The buck stops in Washington. Media scoundrels share blame. Don't they always?
A Final Comment
On June 8, DEBKAfile said Moscow "flatly rejected (Obama's) proposal to post 5,000 armed UN monitors in Syria, most of them Russian troops, as the core of a new plan to resolve the Syrian crisis."
DF said Russia is getting more hardline. Talks aren't being held to replace Assad. Annan's peace plan failed. It wasn't designed to succeed.
Washington's mission to Moscow reached a "dead end." The "Syrian conflict and Iranian nuclear controversy are becoming inextricably intermeshed."
P5+1 countries are "seriously considering not turning up for their third round of nuclear talks in Moscow on June 18 - 19."
DF also says "Russia is prepared to use military power to defend Iran and Syria."
Last February, Russia Today interviewed Colonel-General (ret.) Leonid Ivashov. He's a former Russian Joint Chiefs of Staff member.
He said maneuvers conducted at the time were meant to "demonstrate Russia's readiness to use military power to defend its national interests and to bolster its political position."
Iran and Syria are allies, he said. They're "guaranteed partners of Russia."
"A strike against" either country "is an indirect strike against Russia and its interests. Russia would lose important positions and allies in the Arab world. Therefore, by defending Syria (and Iran), Russia is defending its own interests."
He added that Russia is "defending the entire world from Fascism. Everybody should acknowledge that Fascism is making strides on our planet. What they did in Libya is nearly identical to what Hitler and his armies did against Poland and then Russia. Today, therefore, Russia is defending the entire world from Fascism."
On June 4, DF said Obama this fall plans to implement "an embargo on aircraft and sea vessels visiting Iranian ports. Any national airline or international aircraft (entering) Iran will be barred from US and West European airports."
The same holds for "private and government-owned vessels, including oil tankers."
Obama keeps advancing the ball closer to war. First Syria, then Iran, then other targeted states.
Canadian psychiatrist Robert Hare describes psychopathic behavior clinically. He said 10% on Wall Street exhibit it. It holds for Obama, top administration officials, and congressional party leaders.
They're amoral, deceitful, manipulative, and completely self-interested. They breach social and legal standards. They suffer no guilt. They exhibit callous unconcern for others.
They disregard safety and can't maintain long-term relationships. They're anti-social and have no sense of moral responsibility. They're "without conscience." Clinically, they're psychopathic. "(T)heir game is self-gratification at" the expense of others.
They're all take and no give. They flagrantly violate societal rules. They're psychopathically vicious. They're indifferent to human suffering.
Hare stressed that "if we can't spot them, we are doomed to be their victims, both as individuals and as a society."
Perhaps he had George Bush, Dick Cheney, Obama, Romney, and other amoral hawks in mind.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@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
From The Bob Feldman Blog-U.S. Political Prisoner David Gilbert's New Autobiography: A Review of `Love and Struggle'
Friday, April 27, 2012
U.S. Political Prisoner David Gilbert's New Autobiography: A Review of `Love and Struggle'
LOVE AND STRUGGLE:
My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond
by David Gilbert
Oakland : PM Press 2012
Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond is a well-written, intellectually and politically exciting, and emotionally moving autobiography. Published by the alternative non-commercial collective PM Press, it presents a more balanced picture of Gilbert than has been portrayed in the U.S. mass media since his arrest in 1981. Most people have previously had the chance to hear Gilbert speak for himself only in Sam Green and Bill Siegel’s 2003 Academy Award-nominated documentary film, The Weather Underground.
Love and Struggle provides its readers with a sweeping history of the growth and development of the Movement of the 1960s that reflects the historical perspective of politically radical anti-racist and anti-imperialist activist/organizers of the 1960s. Gilbert explains how he—the son of a toy company production manager and scoutmaster who grew up in upper middle-class Brookline, Massachusetts in the 1950s, “went on to become an Eagle Scout and also to win the highest religious medal for Jewish scouts” and graduated with a B.A. in philosophy from Columbia University in 1966—ended up, at the age of 37, “handcuffed and getting worked over in the back of a police car” on the night of October 20, 1981; before being, subsequently, indicted, tried and convicted of felony murder and sentenced to 75 years-to-life in prison. Like Dave Dellinger’s autobiography, From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of a Moral Dissenter, Gilbert’s Love and Struggle documents the sweeping life changes experienced by many radicals of the time.
He recalls how the impact of Martin Luther King and the late 1950s/early 1960s Civil Rights Movement led him to approach religious leaders in Greater Boston’s white community about allowing the local NAACP chapter to set up anti-racist education programs for white people. A friend’s acquaintance with a Vietnamese exchange student inspired him to write an article in his school’s student newspaper in 1961 “saying America was in danger of getting drawn into a major civil war in South Vietnam, and on the wrong side at that,” while still a liberal anti-communist high school senior.
Love and Struggle then revisits Gilbert’s political, academic and personal life and the history of the New Left Movement of the Sixties after his arrival on Columbia University’s campus in the Morningside Heights/West Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan . In one section, “The 1960s and The Making Of A Revolutionary,” Gilbert explains why he and other New Left anti-war and anti-racist activists, along with Black Liberation Movement activists, became more politically radicalized, anti-imperialist and militant in their political thinking and street actions during the decade; and he also describes how he went about organizing students into SDS chapters at Columbia, Barnard and the New School for Social Research prior to the historic Columbia Student Revolt that shut-down Columbia University in 1968. He recalls, for example, how, in the spring of 1965, anti-war student activists at Columbia “set-up literature tables on the main plaza on campus, and we’d be there all day discussing and debating with those who stopped by.” He incisively observes:
I don’t want to give the wrong impression that our great arguments immediately turned people around. It is rare indeed that someone will give up on presuppositions in the course of a discussion. Ideas don’t change that quickly, and ego makes it hard for most of us to readily admit we are wrong. Organizers who expect instant conversions will become overbearing. Instead, our educational work, planted seeds and helped people see there were alternative interpretations and sources of information, so that once events developed to create more stress—the war intensified and the military draft expanded—people had a way to see that something was wrong, instead of just becoming more fervent about escalations to `win.’”
Given the decisions of university administrations at Columbia, Harvard and Stanford in 2011 to bring ROTC back to U.S. elite university campuses that had terminated their campus programs in response to late 1960s anti-ROTC campaigns of campus SDS chapters, Gilbert’s timely reference to his participation in a May 1965 anti-ROTC protest on Columbia’s campus may also be of special interest to 21st-century anti-war student activists:
“…We carried out a valuable early example of civil disobedience against university complicity with the war machine. This action was initiated by the civil rights group CORE, which planned to repeat an action done the preceding year, when a few of them sat-in to disrupt a Naval ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) ceremony…The administration moved the ceremony inside and when we marched to the door we were locked out, so people jammed up in the doorway and refused to disperse. The university called in the police, who started to pull people away, one by one…The cops twisted the tie around my neck, choking me, until, fortunately, it broke. They dragged me away and threw me down, ripping my jacket almost in half…
“Afterward, Columbia threatened to suspend the `ringleaders,’ but we were able to rally a lot of support…Some liberals wanted to reduce all organizing to defense of the right to dissent; but we maintained a balance, building a coalition on those terms while continuing to speak out against having the military on campus. And there was a tendency for students to get pumped up about how they had been subject to `police brutality.’…But I knew from my civil rights work that our bruises were minor compared to what was done routinely in Harlem…”
In the following section, “The Most Sane/Insane of Times,” Gilbert looks back in a self-critical way at the 1969/1970 period of New Left Movement history. During this period, the Weatherman faction attempted to mobilize anti-war youth to “bring the war home” to Chicago in the October 1969 “Days of Rage” protests; the Chicago 8 Conspiracy Trial began; Black Panther Party organizers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were assassinated; and Gilbert’s best friend, former Columbia SDS Vice-Chairman Ted Gold, and two other members of the Weatherman faction were accidentally killed in a West Village townhouse explosion, while building bombs to target a military base, possibly including civilians. Living in a Weatherman collective in Denver at the time, Gilbert provides readers with an interesting sense of how members and leaders of the Weatherman faction reacted on a political and emotional level to the shock of hearing the news about the deaths of their three comrades.
Love and Struggle’s next section, “Underground,” provides an exciting and vivid recollection by Gilbert of what it was like to be a member of the Weather Underground Organization [WUO] whose members were being hunted by the FBI. He also discusses the internal political differences and divisive debates that contributed to the demise of the WUO by the late 1970s.
The last four sections of Gilbert’s autobiography tell of his life in the nearly 35 years since the collapse of the WUO. He recalls his aboveground life as a furniture mover and Men Against Sexism activist in Denver in the late 1970s; some of the political, emotional and psychological reasons that he chose to resume his underground lifestyle in 1979; his return East and involvement in underground activity in support of the Black Liberation Army [BLA]. Stating that “I deeply regret the loss of lives and the pain for those families caused by our actions on October 20, 1981,” Gilbert also engages in self-criticism and self-analysis about the political appropriateness of his decision in 1979 to begin working in a clandestine way as an ally of a BLA unit “on such a high-risk tactical level with so little knowledge of the political context.” He cites “my corruption of ego” as possibly influencing the political choices he made after the collapse of the WUO, when he “was anxious to reestablish myself as a `revolutionary on the highest level,’ and `as the most anti-racist white activist.’”
Gilbert also describes, in an emotionally open way, how he reunited underground with fellow WUO member Kathy Boudin and their decision to become parents while underground. His account of how they prepared for the birth of their son in August 1980, how he felt at the time of his son’s birth and during the first year of his life and the sadness of his separation from both after his and Boudin’s arrests (she was released in 2003 after serving 22 years) are some of his most moving passages.
Some readers who were politically active in the Movement of the 1960s and 1970s may have a different political view of U.S. white working-class people’s historical revolutionary potential or the primacy of internal national liberation struggles within the US than what Gilbert presents in Love and Struggle. But there’s so much great political and psychological analysis of both U.S. society and the inter-personal dynamics within the U.S. left movement in this fascinating book—which also resembles an exciting mystery novel in some parts—that Love and Struggle should be required reading for everyone interested in 1960s and 1970s U.S. Movement history and how this history relates to current struggles.
Since David Gilbert has already been a political prisoner for more than 30 years he (as well as over 60 other U.S. political prisoners) should finally be released by U.S. state and federal government officials in 2012. In the North of Ireland, Italy and Germany, most of the political activists of the 1970s and 1980s who were involved in armed actions similar in nature to the one Gilbert was involved in were generally released from prison by the early 21st century. So why shouldn’t Love and Struggle author Gilbert and the BLA members who are also still imprisoned now also be released by the government authorities in the United States? For as Gilbert concludes in Love and Struggle’s “Afterward” section: “The book ends here; the struggle of course continues…with love and for the unity of humankind.”
U.S. Political Prisoner David Gilbert's New Autobiography: A Review of `Love and Struggle'
LOVE AND STRUGGLE:
My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond
by David Gilbert
Oakland : PM Press 2012
Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond is a well-written, intellectually and politically exciting, and emotionally moving autobiography. Published by the alternative non-commercial collective PM Press, it presents a more balanced picture of Gilbert than has been portrayed in the U.S. mass media since his arrest in 1981. Most people have previously had the chance to hear Gilbert speak for himself only in Sam Green and Bill Siegel’s 2003 Academy Award-nominated documentary film, The Weather Underground.
Love and Struggle provides its readers with a sweeping history of the growth and development of the Movement of the 1960s that reflects the historical perspective of politically radical anti-racist and anti-imperialist activist/organizers of the 1960s. Gilbert explains how he—the son of a toy company production manager and scoutmaster who grew up in upper middle-class Brookline, Massachusetts in the 1950s, “went on to become an Eagle Scout and also to win the highest religious medal for Jewish scouts” and graduated with a B.A. in philosophy from Columbia University in 1966—ended up, at the age of 37, “handcuffed and getting worked over in the back of a police car” on the night of October 20, 1981; before being, subsequently, indicted, tried and convicted of felony murder and sentenced to 75 years-to-life in prison. Like Dave Dellinger’s autobiography, From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of a Moral Dissenter, Gilbert’s Love and Struggle documents the sweeping life changes experienced by many radicals of the time.
He recalls how the impact of Martin Luther King and the late 1950s/early 1960s Civil Rights Movement led him to approach religious leaders in Greater Boston’s white community about allowing the local NAACP chapter to set up anti-racist education programs for white people. A friend’s acquaintance with a Vietnamese exchange student inspired him to write an article in his school’s student newspaper in 1961 “saying America was in danger of getting drawn into a major civil war in South Vietnam, and on the wrong side at that,” while still a liberal anti-communist high school senior.
Love and Struggle then revisits Gilbert’s political, academic and personal life and the history of the New Left Movement of the Sixties after his arrival on Columbia University’s campus in the Morningside Heights/West Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan . In one section, “The 1960s and The Making Of A Revolutionary,” Gilbert explains why he and other New Left anti-war and anti-racist activists, along with Black Liberation Movement activists, became more politically radicalized, anti-imperialist and militant in their political thinking and street actions during the decade; and he also describes how he went about organizing students into SDS chapters at Columbia, Barnard and the New School for Social Research prior to the historic Columbia Student Revolt that shut-down Columbia University in 1968. He recalls, for example, how, in the spring of 1965, anti-war student activists at Columbia “set-up literature tables on the main plaza on campus, and we’d be there all day discussing and debating with those who stopped by.” He incisively observes:
I don’t want to give the wrong impression that our great arguments immediately turned people around. It is rare indeed that someone will give up on presuppositions in the course of a discussion. Ideas don’t change that quickly, and ego makes it hard for most of us to readily admit we are wrong. Organizers who expect instant conversions will become overbearing. Instead, our educational work, planted seeds and helped people see there were alternative interpretations and sources of information, so that once events developed to create more stress—the war intensified and the military draft expanded—people had a way to see that something was wrong, instead of just becoming more fervent about escalations to `win.’”
Given the decisions of university administrations at Columbia, Harvard and Stanford in 2011 to bring ROTC back to U.S. elite university campuses that had terminated their campus programs in response to late 1960s anti-ROTC campaigns of campus SDS chapters, Gilbert’s timely reference to his participation in a May 1965 anti-ROTC protest on Columbia’s campus may also be of special interest to 21st-century anti-war student activists:
“…We carried out a valuable early example of civil disobedience against university complicity with the war machine. This action was initiated by the civil rights group CORE, which planned to repeat an action done the preceding year, when a few of them sat-in to disrupt a Naval ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) ceremony…The administration moved the ceremony inside and when we marched to the door we were locked out, so people jammed up in the doorway and refused to disperse. The university called in the police, who started to pull people away, one by one…The cops twisted the tie around my neck, choking me, until, fortunately, it broke. They dragged me away and threw me down, ripping my jacket almost in half…
“Afterward, Columbia threatened to suspend the `ringleaders,’ but we were able to rally a lot of support…Some liberals wanted to reduce all organizing to defense of the right to dissent; but we maintained a balance, building a coalition on those terms while continuing to speak out against having the military on campus. And there was a tendency for students to get pumped up about how they had been subject to `police brutality.’…But I knew from my civil rights work that our bruises were minor compared to what was done routinely in Harlem…”
In the following section, “The Most Sane/Insane of Times,” Gilbert looks back in a self-critical way at the 1969/1970 period of New Left Movement history. During this period, the Weatherman faction attempted to mobilize anti-war youth to “bring the war home” to Chicago in the October 1969 “Days of Rage” protests; the Chicago 8 Conspiracy Trial began; Black Panther Party organizers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were assassinated; and Gilbert’s best friend, former Columbia SDS Vice-Chairman Ted Gold, and two other members of the Weatherman faction were accidentally killed in a West Village townhouse explosion, while building bombs to target a military base, possibly including civilians. Living in a Weatherman collective in Denver at the time, Gilbert provides readers with an interesting sense of how members and leaders of the Weatherman faction reacted on a political and emotional level to the shock of hearing the news about the deaths of their three comrades.
Love and Struggle’s next section, “Underground,” provides an exciting and vivid recollection by Gilbert of what it was like to be a member of the Weather Underground Organization [WUO] whose members were being hunted by the FBI. He also discusses the internal political differences and divisive debates that contributed to the demise of the WUO by the late 1970s.
The last four sections of Gilbert’s autobiography tell of his life in the nearly 35 years since the collapse of the WUO. He recalls his aboveground life as a furniture mover and Men Against Sexism activist in Denver in the late 1970s; some of the political, emotional and psychological reasons that he chose to resume his underground lifestyle in 1979; his return East and involvement in underground activity in support of the Black Liberation Army [BLA]. Stating that “I deeply regret the loss of lives and the pain for those families caused by our actions on October 20, 1981,” Gilbert also engages in self-criticism and self-analysis about the political appropriateness of his decision in 1979 to begin working in a clandestine way as an ally of a BLA unit “on such a high-risk tactical level with so little knowledge of the political context.” He cites “my corruption of ego” as possibly influencing the political choices he made after the collapse of the WUO, when he “was anxious to reestablish myself as a `revolutionary on the highest level,’ and `as the most anti-racist white activist.’”
Gilbert also describes, in an emotionally open way, how he reunited underground with fellow WUO member Kathy Boudin and their decision to become parents while underground. His account of how they prepared for the birth of their son in August 1980, how he felt at the time of his son’s birth and during the first year of his life and the sadness of his separation from both after his and Boudin’s arrests (she was released in 2003 after serving 22 years) are some of his most moving passages.
Some readers who were politically active in the Movement of the 1960s and 1970s may have a different political view of U.S. white working-class people’s historical revolutionary potential or the primacy of internal national liberation struggles within the US than what Gilbert presents in Love and Struggle. But there’s so much great political and psychological analysis of both U.S. society and the inter-personal dynamics within the U.S. left movement in this fascinating book—which also resembles an exciting mystery novel in some parts—that Love and Struggle should be required reading for everyone interested in 1960s and 1970s U.S. Movement history and how this history relates to current struggles.
Since David Gilbert has already been a political prisoner for more than 30 years he (as well as over 60 other U.S. political prisoners) should finally be released by U.S. state and federal government officials in 2012. In the North of Ireland, Italy and Germany, most of the political activists of the 1970s and 1980s who were involved in armed actions similar in nature to the one Gilbert was involved in were generally released from prison by the early 21st century. So why shouldn’t Love and Struggle author Gilbert and the BLA members who are also still imprisoned now also be released by the government authorities in the United States? For as Gilbert concludes in Love and Struggle’s “Afterward” section: “The book ends here; the struggle of course continues…with love and for the unity of humankind.”
From The Tarek Mehanna Defense Commitee Via Boston IndyMedia-Tarek Mehanna Moved to New Federal Holding Facility, Audio of Sentencing Statement Released
Tarek Mehanna Moved to New Federal Holding Facility, Audio of Sentencing Statement Released
by Boston IMC
(No verified email address)
12 May 2012
The following statement was released today by the Tarek Mehanna Support Committee.
1) Early this morning an anonymously leaked audio recording of Tarek giving his statement at the sentencing hearing was made public and is now being circulated!
http://boston.indymedia.org/usermedia/audio/4/tarek_sentencing.mp3
2) *Tarek has been transferred again. *Now he is in Manhattan at the MCC New York. We have no idea when he will be moved again. Chances are he will be placed in a federal prison, rather than these detention centers, very soon. Please pray for him and his family. Will keep you all posted.
Expect mail sent earlier this week (to the MDC Brooklyn) to be returned. If you would like to send him mail at his current location, please do, but expect that he could be moved at any moment.
Tarek Mehanna
ID # 05315748
MCC NEW YORK
METROPOLITAN CORRECTIONAL CENTER
150 PARK ROW
NEW YORK, NY 10007
The full text of Tarek's statement follows.
In the name of God, the most Gracious, the most Merciful.
Exactly four years ago this month, I was finishing my work shift at a local hospital. As I was walking to my car I was approached by two federal agents. They said that I had a choice to make: I could do things the easy way, or I could do them the hard way. The “easy “ way, as they explained, was that I become an informant for the government, and if I did so I would never see the inside of a courtroom or a prison cell. As for the hard way, this is it. Here I am, having spent the majority of the four years since then in a solitary cell the size of a small closet, in which I am locked down for 23 hours each day. The FBI and these prosecutors worked very hard – and the government spent millions of tax dollars – to put me in that cell, keep me there, put me on trial, and finally to have me stand here before you today to be sentenced to even more time in a cell.
In the weeks leading up to this moment, many people had offered suggestions as to what I should say to you. Some said I should plead for mercy in hopes of a light sentence, while others suggested I would be hit hard either way. But what I want to do is just talk about myself for a few minutes.
When I refused to become an informant, the government responded by charging me with the “crime” of supporting the mujahidin fighting the occupation of Muslim countries around the world. Or, as they like to call them, “the terrorists.” I wasn’t born in a Muslim country, though. I was born and raised right here in America and this is something which angers many people: how is it that I can be an American and believe the things I believe, take the positions I take? Everything a man is exposed to in his environment becomes an ingredient that shapes his outlook, and I’m no different. So, in more ways than one, it’s because of America that I am who I am.
When I was six, I began putting together a massive collection of comic books. Batman implanted a concept in my mind, introduced me to a paradigm as to how the world is set up: that there are oppressors, there are the oppressed, and there are those who step up to defend the oppressed. This resonated with me so much that throughout the rest of my childhood, I gravitated towards any book that reflected that paradigm – Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and I even saw an ethical dimension to The Catcher in the Rye.
By the time I began high school and took a real history class, I was learning just how real that paradigm is in the world. I learned about the Native Americans and what befell them at the hands of European settlers. I learned about how the descendents of those European settlers were in turn oppressed under the tyranny of King George III. I read about Paul Revere, Tom Paine, and how Americans began an armed insurgency against British forces – an insurgency we now celebrate as the American Revolutionary War. As a kid I even went on school field trips to the sites of its battlefields, some just blocks from this courthouse. I learned about Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, John Brown, and the fight against slavery in this country. I learned about Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, and the struggles of the labor unions, working class, and poor. I learned about Anne Frank, the Nazis, and how they persecuted minorities and imprisoned dissidents. I learned about Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the civil rights struggle. I learned about Ho Chi Minh, and how the Vietnamese fought for decades to liberate themselves from one invader after another. I learned about Nelson Mandela and the fight against apartheid in South Africa.
Everything I learned in those years confirmed what I was beginning to learn when I was six: that throughout history, there has been a constant struggle between the oppressed and their oppressors. With each struggle I learned about, I found myself consistently siding with the oppressed, and consistently respecting those who stepped up to defend them – regardless of nationality, regardless of religion. And I never threw my class notes away. As I stand here speaking, they are in a neat pile in my bedroom closet at home.
From all the historical figures I learned about, one stood out above the rest. I was impressed by many things about Malcolm X, but above all, I was fascinated by the idea of transformation, his transformation. I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie “X” by Spike Lee, it’s over three and a half hours long, and the Malcolm at the beginning is different from the Malcolm at the end. He starts off as an illiterate criminal, but ends up a husband, a father, a protective and eloquent leader for his people, a disciplined Muslim performing the Hajj in Makkah, and finally, a martyr. Malcolm’s life taught me that Islam is not something inherited; it’s not a culture or ethnicity. It’s a way of life, a state of mind anyone can choose no matter where they come from or how they were raised. This led me to look deeper into Islam, and I was hooked. I was just a teenager, but Islam answered the question that the greatest scientific minds were clueless about, the question that drives the rich & famous to depression and suicide from being unable to answer: what is the purpose of life? Why do we exist in this Universe? But it also answered the question of how we’re supposed to exist. And since there’s no hierarchy or priesthood, I could directly and immediately begin digging into the texts of the Qur’an and the teachings of Prophet Muhammad, to begin the journey of understanding what this was all about, the implications of Islam for me as a human being, as an individual, for the people around me, for the world. And the more I learned, the more I valued Islam like a piece of gold. This was when I was a teen, but even today, despite the pressures of the last few years, I stand here before you, and everyone else in this courtroom, as a very proud Muslim.
With that, my attention turned to what was happening to other Muslims in different parts of the world. And everywhere I looked, I saw the powers that be trying to destroy what I loved. I learned what the Soviets had done to the Muslims of Afghanistan. I learned what the Serbs had done to the Muslims of Bosnia. I learned what the Russians were doing to the Muslims of Chechnya. I learned what Israel had done in Lebanon – and what it continues to do in Palestine – with the full backing of the United States.
And I learned what America itself was doing to Muslims. I learned about the Gulf War, and the depleted uranium bombs that killed thousands and caused cancer rates to skyrocket across Iraq. I learned about the American-led sanctions that prevented food, medicine, and medical equipment from entering Iraq, and how – according to the United Nations – over half a million children perished as a result. I remember a clip from a ‘60 Minutes’ interview of Madeline Albright where she expressed her view that these dead children were “worth it.” I watched on September 11th as a group of people felt driven to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings from their outrage at the deaths of these children. I watched as America then attacked and invaded Iraq directly. I saw the effects of ‘Shock & Awe’ in the opening days of the invasion – the children in hospital wards with shrapnel from American missiles sticking out of their foreheads (of course, none of this was shown on CNN). I learned about the town of Haditha, where 24 Muslims – including a 76-year old man in a wheelchair, women, and even toddlers – were shot up and blown up in their bedclothes as they slept by US Marines. I learned about Abeer al-Janabi, a fourteen-year old Iraqi girl gang-raped by five American soldiers, who then shot her and her family in the head, then set fire to their corpses. I just want to point out, as you can see, Muslim women don’t even show their hair to unrelated men. So try to imagine this young girl from a conservative village with her dress torn off, as she is being sexually assaulted by not one, not two, not three, not four, but five soldiers. Even today, as I sit in my jail cell, I read about the drone strikes which continue to kill Muslims daily in places like Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Just last month, we all heard about the seventeen Afghan Muslims – mostly mothers and their kids – shot to death by an American soldier, who also set fire to their corpses. These are just the stories that make it to the headlines, but one of the first concepts I learned in Islam is that of loyalty, of brotherhood – that each Muslim woman in the world is my sister, each man is my brother, and together, we are one large body who must protect each other. In other words, I couldn’t witness these things beings done to my brothers & sisters – including by America – and remain neutral. My sympathy for the oppressed continued, but was now more personal, as was my respect for those defending them.
I mentioned Paul Revere – when he jumped on a horse and went on his midnight ride, it was for the purpose of warning the people that the British were marching to Lexington to arrest Sam Adams and John Hancock, then on to Concord to confiscate the weapons stored there by the Minutemen. By the time they got to Concord, they found the Minuteman waiting for them, weapons in hand. They fired at the British, fought them, and beat them. From that battle came the American Revolution. There’s an Arabic word to describe what those Minutemen did that day. It was a word repeated many times in this courtroom. That word is: JIHAD, and this is what my trial was about. All those videos and translations and childish bickering over ‘Oh, he translated this paragraph’ and ‘Oh, he edited that sentence,’ and all those exhibits revolved around a single issue: Muslims who were defending themselves against American soldiers doing to them exactly what the British did to America. It was made crystal clear at trial that I never, ever plotted to “kill Americans” at shopping malls or whatever the story was. The government’s own witnesses contradicted this claim, and we put expert after expert up on that stand, who spent hours dissecting my every written word, who explained my beliefs. Further, when I was free, the government sent an undercover agent to prod me into one of their little “terror plots,” but I refused to participate. Mysteriously, however, the jury never heard this.
So, this trial was not about my position on Muslims killing American civilians. It was about my position on Americans killing Muslim civilians, which is that Muslims should defend their lands from foreign invaders – whether they are Soviets, Americans, or Martians. This is what I believe. It’s what I’ve always believed, and what I will always believe. This is not terrorism, and it’s not extremism. It’s the simple logic of self-defense. It’s what the arrows on that seal above your head represent: defense of the homeland. So, I disagree with my lawyers when they say that you don’t have to agree with my beliefs – no. Anyone with common sense and humanity has no choice but to agree with me. If someone breaks into your home to rob you and harm your family, logic dictates that you do whatever it takes to expel that invader from your home. But when that home is a Muslim land, and that invader is the US military, for some reason the standards suddenly change. Common sense is renamed “terrorism” and the people defending themselves against those who came to kill them from across the ocean become “the terrorists” who are “killing Americans.” The mentality that America was victimized by when British soldiers walked these streets 2 ½ centuries ago is the same mentality Muslims are victimized by as American soldiers walk their streets today. It’s the mentality of colonialism. When Sgt. Bales shot those Afghans to death last month, I followed the discussion in the media just to see what people were saying and what I noticed was that all of the focus was on him – his life, his stress, his PTSD, the mortgage on his home – as if he was the victim. I didn’t see anyone talking about the people he actually killed, as if they’re not real, they’re not humans. Unfortunately, this mentality trickles down to everyone in society, whether they realize it or not. Even with my lawyers, it took nearly two years of discussing, explaining, and clarifying before they were finally able to think outside the box and at least ostensibly accept the logic in what I was saying. Two years! If it took that long for people so intelligent, whose job it is to defend me, to de-program themselves, then to throw me in front of a randomly selected jury under the premise that they’re my “impartial peers,” I mean, come on. I wasn’t tried before a jury of my peers because with the mentality gripping America today, I have no peers. Counting on this fact, the government prosecuted me – not because they needed to, but simply because they could.
I learned one more thing in history class: America has historically supported the most unjust policies against its minorities – practices that were even protected by the law – only to look back later and ask: ‘What were we thinking?’ Slavery, Jim Crow, the internment of the Japanese during World War II – each was widely accepted by American society, each was defended by the Supreme Court. But as time passed and America changed, both people and courts looked back and asked ‘What were we thinking?’ Nelson Mandela was considered a terrorist by the South African government, and given a life sentence. But time passed, the world changed, they realized how oppressive their policies were, that it was not he who was the terrorist, and they released him from prison. He even became president. So, everything is subjective – even this whole business of “terrorism” and who is a “terrorist.” It all depends on the time and place and who the superpower happens to be at the moment.
In your eyes, I’m a terrorist, I’m the only one standing here in an orange jumpsuit, and it’s perfectly reasonable that I be standing here in an orange jumpsuit. But history repeats itself. One day, America will change and people will recognize this day for what it is. They will look at how hundreds of thousands of Muslims were killed and maimed by the US military in foreign countries, yet somehow I’m the one going to prison for “conspiring to kill and maim” in those countries – because I support the Mujahidin defending those people. They will look back on how the government spent millions of dollars to imprison me as a “terrorist,” yet if we were to somehow bring Abeer al-Janabi back to life in the moments she was being gang-raped by your soldiers, to put her on that witness stand and ask her who the “terrorists” are, she sure wouldn’t be pointing at me.
The government says that I was obsessed with violence, obsessed with “killing Americans.” But, as a Muslim living in these times, I can think of a lie no more ironic.
-Tariq Mehanna
4/12/12
See also:
http://boston.indymedia.org/feature/display/214806/index.php
http://boston.indymedia.org/feature/display/214825/index.php
This work is in the public domain.
by Boston IMC
(No verified email address)
12 May 2012
The following statement was released today by the Tarek Mehanna Support Committee.
1) Early this morning an anonymously leaked audio recording of Tarek giving his statement at the sentencing hearing was made public and is now being circulated!
http://boston.indymedia.org/usermedia/audio/4/tarek_sentencing.mp3
2) *Tarek has been transferred again. *Now he is in Manhattan at the MCC New York. We have no idea when he will be moved again. Chances are he will be placed in a federal prison, rather than these detention centers, very soon. Please pray for him and his family. Will keep you all posted.
Expect mail sent earlier this week (to the MDC Brooklyn) to be returned. If you would like to send him mail at his current location, please do, but expect that he could be moved at any moment.
Tarek Mehanna
ID # 05315748
MCC NEW YORK
METROPOLITAN CORRECTIONAL CENTER
150 PARK ROW
NEW YORK, NY 10007
The full text of Tarek's statement follows.
In the name of God, the most Gracious, the most Merciful.
Exactly four years ago this month, I was finishing my work shift at a local hospital. As I was walking to my car I was approached by two federal agents. They said that I had a choice to make: I could do things the easy way, or I could do them the hard way. The “easy “ way, as they explained, was that I become an informant for the government, and if I did so I would never see the inside of a courtroom or a prison cell. As for the hard way, this is it. Here I am, having spent the majority of the four years since then in a solitary cell the size of a small closet, in which I am locked down for 23 hours each day. The FBI and these prosecutors worked very hard – and the government spent millions of tax dollars – to put me in that cell, keep me there, put me on trial, and finally to have me stand here before you today to be sentenced to even more time in a cell.
In the weeks leading up to this moment, many people had offered suggestions as to what I should say to you. Some said I should plead for mercy in hopes of a light sentence, while others suggested I would be hit hard either way. But what I want to do is just talk about myself for a few minutes.
When I refused to become an informant, the government responded by charging me with the “crime” of supporting the mujahidin fighting the occupation of Muslim countries around the world. Or, as they like to call them, “the terrorists.” I wasn’t born in a Muslim country, though. I was born and raised right here in America and this is something which angers many people: how is it that I can be an American and believe the things I believe, take the positions I take? Everything a man is exposed to in his environment becomes an ingredient that shapes his outlook, and I’m no different. So, in more ways than one, it’s because of America that I am who I am.
When I was six, I began putting together a massive collection of comic books. Batman implanted a concept in my mind, introduced me to a paradigm as to how the world is set up: that there are oppressors, there are the oppressed, and there are those who step up to defend the oppressed. This resonated with me so much that throughout the rest of my childhood, I gravitated towards any book that reflected that paradigm – Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and I even saw an ethical dimension to The Catcher in the Rye.
By the time I began high school and took a real history class, I was learning just how real that paradigm is in the world. I learned about the Native Americans and what befell them at the hands of European settlers. I learned about how the descendents of those European settlers were in turn oppressed under the tyranny of King George III. I read about Paul Revere, Tom Paine, and how Americans began an armed insurgency against British forces – an insurgency we now celebrate as the American Revolutionary War. As a kid I even went on school field trips to the sites of its battlefields, some just blocks from this courthouse. I learned about Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, John Brown, and the fight against slavery in this country. I learned about Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, and the struggles of the labor unions, working class, and poor. I learned about Anne Frank, the Nazis, and how they persecuted minorities and imprisoned dissidents. I learned about Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the civil rights struggle. I learned about Ho Chi Minh, and how the Vietnamese fought for decades to liberate themselves from one invader after another. I learned about Nelson Mandela and the fight against apartheid in South Africa.
Everything I learned in those years confirmed what I was beginning to learn when I was six: that throughout history, there has been a constant struggle between the oppressed and their oppressors. With each struggle I learned about, I found myself consistently siding with the oppressed, and consistently respecting those who stepped up to defend them – regardless of nationality, regardless of religion. And I never threw my class notes away. As I stand here speaking, they are in a neat pile in my bedroom closet at home.
From all the historical figures I learned about, one stood out above the rest. I was impressed by many things about Malcolm X, but above all, I was fascinated by the idea of transformation, his transformation. I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie “X” by Spike Lee, it’s over three and a half hours long, and the Malcolm at the beginning is different from the Malcolm at the end. He starts off as an illiterate criminal, but ends up a husband, a father, a protective and eloquent leader for his people, a disciplined Muslim performing the Hajj in Makkah, and finally, a martyr. Malcolm’s life taught me that Islam is not something inherited; it’s not a culture or ethnicity. It’s a way of life, a state of mind anyone can choose no matter where they come from or how they were raised. This led me to look deeper into Islam, and I was hooked. I was just a teenager, but Islam answered the question that the greatest scientific minds were clueless about, the question that drives the rich & famous to depression and suicide from being unable to answer: what is the purpose of life? Why do we exist in this Universe? But it also answered the question of how we’re supposed to exist. And since there’s no hierarchy or priesthood, I could directly and immediately begin digging into the texts of the Qur’an and the teachings of Prophet Muhammad, to begin the journey of understanding what this was all about, the implications of Islam for me as a human being, as an individual, for the people around me, for the world. And the more I learned, the more I valued Islam like a piece of gold. This was when I was a teen, but even today, despite the pressures of the last few years, I stand here before you, and everyone else in this courtroom, as a very proud Muslim.
With that, my attention turned to what was happening to other Muslims in different parts of the world. And everywhere I looked, I saw the powers that be trying to destroy what I loved. I learned what the Soviets had done to the Muslims of Afghanistan. I learned what the Serbs had done to the Muslims of Bosnia. I learned what the Russians were doing to the Muslims of Chechnya. I learned what Israel had done in Lebanon – and what it continues to do in Palestine – with the full backing of the United States.
And I learned what America itself was doing to Muslims. I learned about the Gulf War, and the depleted uranium bombs that killed thousands and caused cancer rates to skyrocket across Iraq. I learned about the American-led sanctions that prevented food, medicine, and medical equipment from entering Iraq, and how – according to the United Nations – over half a million children perished as a result. I remember a clip from a ‘60 Minutes’ interview of Madeline Albright where she expressed her view that these dead children were “worth it.” I watched on September 11th as a group of people felt driven to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings from their outrage at the deaths of these children. I watched as America then attacked and invaded Iraq directly. I saw the effects of ‘Shock & Awe’ in the opening days of the invasion – the children in hospital wards with shrapnel from American missiles sticking out of their foreheads (of course, none of this was shown on CNN). I learned about the town of Haditha, where 24 Muslims – including a 76-year old man in a wheelchair, women, and even toddlers – were shot up and blown up in their bedclothes as they slept by US Marines. I learned about Abeer al-Janabi, a fourteen-year old Iraqi girl gang-raped by five American soldiers, who then shot her and her family in the head, then set fire to their corpses. I just want to point out, as you can see, Muslim women don’t even show their hair to unrelated men. So try to imagine this young girl from a conservative village with her dress torn off, as she is being sexually assaulted by not one, not two, not three, not four, but five soldiers. Even today, as I sit in my jail cell, I read about the drone strikes which continue to kill Muslims daily in places like Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Just last month, we all heard about the seventeen Afghan Muslims – mostly mothers and their kids – shot to death by an American soldier, who also set fire to their corpses. These are just the stories that make it to the headlines, but one of the first concepts I learned in Islam is that of loyalty, of brotherhood – that each Muslim woman in the world is my sister, each man is my brother, and together, we are one large body who must protect each other. In other words, I couldn’t witness these things beings done to my brothers & sisters – including by America – and remain neutral. My sympathy for the oppressed continued, but was now more personal, as was my respect for those defending them.
I mentioned Paul Revere – when he jumped on a horse and went on his midnight ride, it was for the purpose of warning the people that the British were marching to Lexington to arrest Sam Adams and John Hancock, then on to Concord to confiscate the weapons stored there by the Minutemen. By the time they got to Concord, they found the Minuteman waiting for them, weapons in hand. They fired at the British, fought them, and beat them. From that battle came the American Revolution. There’s an Arabic word to describe what those Minutemen did that day. It was a word repeated many times in this courtroom. That word is: JIHAD, and this is what my trial was about. All those videos and translations and childish bickering over ‘Oh, he translated this paragraph’ and ‘Oh, he edited that sentence,’ and all those exhibits revolved around a single issue: Muslims who were defending themselves against American soldiers doing to them exactly what the British did to America. It was made crystal clear at trial that I never, ever plotted to “kill Americans” at shopping malls or whatever the story was. The government’s own witnesses contradicted this claim, and we put expert after expert up on that stand, who spent hours dissecting my every written word, who explained my beliefs. Further, when I was free, the government sent an undercover agent to prod me into one of their little “terror plots,” but I refused to participate. Mysteriously, however, the jury never heard this.
So, this trial was not about my position on Muslims killing American civilians. It was about my position on Americans killing Muslim civilians, which is that Muslims should defend their lands from foreign invaders – whether they are Soviets, Americans, or Martians. This is what I believe. It’s what I’ve always believed, and what I will always believe. This is not terrorism, and it’s not extremism. It’s the simple logic of self-defense. It’s what the arrows on that seal above your head represent: defense of the homeland. So, I disagree with my lawyers when they say that you don’t have to agree with my beliefs – no. Anyone with common sense and humanity has no choice but to agree with me. If someone breaks into your home to rob you and harm your family, logic dictates that you do whatever it takes to expel that invader from your home. But when that home is a Muslim land, and that invader is the US military, for some reason the standards suddenly change. Common sense is renamed “terrorism” and the people defending themselves against those who came to kill them from across the ocean become “the terrorists” who are “killing Americans.” The mentality that America was victimized by when British soldiers walked these streets 2 ½ centuries ago is the same mentality Muslims are victimized by as American soldiers walk their streets today. It’s the mentality of colonialism. When Sgt. Bales shot those Afghans to death last month, I followed the discussion in the media just to see what people were saying and what I noticed was that all of the focus was on him – his life, his stress, his PTSD, the mortgage on his home – as if he was the victim. I didn’t see anyone talking about the people he actually killed, as if they’re not real, they’re not humans. Unfortunately, this mentality trickles down to everyone in society, whether they realize it or not. Even with my lawyers, it took nearly two years of discussing, explaining, and clarifying before they were finally able to think outside the box and at least ostensibly accept the logic in what I was saying. Two years! If it took that long for people so intelligent, whose job it is to defend me, to de-program themselves, then to throw me in front of a randomly selected jury under the premise that they’re my “impartial peers,” I mean, come on. I wasn’t tried before a jury of my peers because with the mentality gripping America today, I have no peers. Counting on this fact, the government prosecuted me – not because they needed to, but simply because they could.
I learned one more thing in history class: America has historically supported the most unjust policies against its minorities – practices that were even protected by the law – only to look back later and ask: ‘What were we thinking?’ Slavery, Jim Crow, the internment of the Japanese during World War II – each was widely accepted by American society, each was defended by the Supreme Court. But as time passed and America changed, both people and courts looked back and asked ‘What were we thinking?’ Nelson Mandela was considered a terrorist by the South African government, and given a life sentence. But time passed, the world changed, they realized how oppressive their policies were, that it was not he who was the terrorist, and they released him from prison. He even became president. So, everything is subjective – even this whole business of “terrorism” and who is a “terrorist.” It all depends on the time and place and who the superpower happens to be at the moment.
In your eyes, I’m a terrorist, I’m the only one standing here in an orange jumpsuit, and it’s perfectly reasonable that I be standing here in an orange jumpsuit. But history repeats itself. One day, America will change and people will recognize this day for what it is. They will look at how hundreds of thousands of Muslims were killed and maimed by the US military in foreign countries, yet somehow I’m the one going to prison for “conspiring to kill and maim” in those countries – because I support the Mujahidin defending those people. They will look back on how the government spent millions of dollars to imprison me as a “terrorist,” yet if we were to somehow bring Abeer al-Janabi back to life in the moments she was being gang-raped by your soldiers, to put her on that witness stand and ask her who the “terrorists” are, she sure wouldn’t be pointing at me.
The government says that I was obsessed with violence, obsessed with “killing Americans.” But, as a Muslim living in these times, I can think of a lie no more ironic.
-Tariq Mehanna
4/12/12
See also:
http://boston.indymedia.org/feature/display/214806/index.php
http://boston.indymedia.org/feature/display/214825/index.php
This work is in the public domain.
From The International Marxist Tendency Website -Trotsky and the struggle for a Revolutionary International (1933-1946)
Click on headline
Trotsky and the struggle for a Revolutionary International (1933-1946) – Part One
Written by Patrick Larsen Tuesday, 22 November 2011
The figure of Leon Trotsky has created a new wave of interest among historians and writers of all types. Recently two new books about the Russian revolutionary have appeared; the first being the work of U.S. Professor Robert Service and the second of Bertrand M. Patenaude, a historian at California University. Both of them belong to that class of commercial literature typical of the bourgeoisie, full of factual errors, which tries to present Trotsky as an authoritarian politician who only lost to Stalin because he lacked tactical skills.
Introduction
Another work, much more sympathetic in its style and its content, is the new novel by Leonardo Padura, “The man who loved dogs”. It tells the stories of Trotsky and his assassin, Ramón Mercader, both stories projected on the life of Iván, a Cuban who represents the post-revolutionary generation on the island.
We have dealt with this important contribution elsewhere. But although it has great value in reclaiming the general legacy of Trotsky, it does indeed contain some mistakes in the appreciation that the author has of aspects of Trotsky's political activity.
The main reason is that the majority of facts about his life which are presented in the book have been taken by Padura from Isaac Deutscher's trilogy – The Prophet Unarmed, The Prophet Armed and The Prophet Outcast. This biography, although it contains some interesting facts, has the major disadvantage of having been written by a person who lacked a firm comprehension of the method of Trotsky. He therefore fell into a whole number of misinterpretations of key elements of his life, especially concerning the last phase of it.
What all these books have in common is the absence of a serious analysis of Trotsky's attempt to found a new revolutionary international, the Fourth International. All of them regard it with a certain suspicion, emphasizing its reduced numbers, its isolation from the working masses and the splits which took place in the movement.
While most of Trotsky's biographers were full of praise for his great literary works such as My life or the History of the Russian Revolution they never understood why the creator of the Red Army spent countless hours of his last years writing letters, critiques, manifestos and programmes which only reached a handful of people and in many cases dealt with practical questions in the day-to-day work.
In our opinion this great flaw was mainly due to the fact that all of these writers were intellectuals on the margins of the workers' movement. They did not have the knowledge or the experience of a participant and consequently their books were not written with the methodology of a revolutionary militant.
However, when one reads the hundreds of letters that Trotsky wrote to create and train a new Marxist leadership, and when one studies the activity of his followers during the Second World War, it is impossible not to be impressed, faced with the magnitude of the lessons that this epoch contains for the future.
The objective of this article is, on the one hand, to serve as an introduction to the reading of Trotsky's last writings, and on the other hand also to extract the principal lessons of the attempt to create a Fourth International. For reasons of space, we cannot go into a detailed analysis of the subsequent history of Trotskyism and we will therefore limit ourselves to give an overview of the main reasons for the decline of the Fourth International after the end of WW2. For a more complete history, we recommend the work of Ted Grant: History of British Trotskyism, The origins of the collapse of the Fourth International by Fred Weston and The theoretical origins of the degeneration of the Fourth - Interview with Ted Grant.
In the work of researching the material for this article, it has been necessary to reclaim the real Trotsky, buried under a mountain of distortions and manipulations. By saying this we are not only referring to the monstrous lies of Stalinism nor only to the caricature presented by the bourgeois historians. We also refer to the “theoreticians” of the small self-styled Trotskyist sects, who have hijacked the name of the great revolutionary.
Always fond of internal rows and personal antagonisms, these gentlemen always had a modus operandi, a style and a life completely separated from the real mass movement. Their hysterical denunciations and their schematic views never allowed them to enter into contact with the living workers' movement and consequently they gave a very bad name to Trotskyism; something which has alienated many workers and made them refuse to collaborate with the 4th International and its subsequent fractions.
Trotsky himself, who had a profound knowledge of the psychology of the masses, did everything to throw out sectarianism and educate the cadres in the Bolshevik method of winning the majority. In this article we will show how he made several attempts to push his followers towards the mass organizations, not only to influence them, but also to constantly renovate his own movement, give it new life blood and break with the vicious circle of the small-group environment.
“The most important work of my life”
It was in the year of 1933 that Trotsky came to the conclusion that a new revolutionary international was necessary. Before this, he had maintained the position of building an opposition within the official Communist Parties in order to fight for a genuine Marxist programme. But it was a huge political event which made Trotsky change his mind: the catastrophe in Germany, where the crazy “theory” of the Third Period and the consequent refusal to form a united front with the Social Democrats, whom they called “social-fascists”, which opened the gates for Hitler to come to power.
From that moment on, Trotsky came to the conclusion that the Party and the International not only had been incapable of taking a correct stance in the decisive moments. They had also been organically incapable of learning from their mistakes and they had proclaimed the big defeat of the German working class as if it was a victory (“After Hitler, our turn!”). He therefore thought that such an organization was doomed and could not be reconquered as an instrument for the proletarian revolution.
Contrary to his biographers, Lev Davidovich considered that the task of forging this new International was the “greatest work of his life”. In 1935, in one of his lesser-known works, Diary in Exile, he wrote the following:
"And still I think that 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’ (i.e., 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. And I am in a complete agreement with Lenin (or rather Turgenev) that the worst vice is to be more than 55 years old! I need at least about five more years of uninterrupted work to ensure the succession."[i]
The first steps: The bloc of the four
According to Trotsky, the new international would of course not fall from the sky from one day to another, but would be the result of a process of formation. It would include different sectors of the workers' movement who had arrived at the same conclusion or were drawing close to it. The degeneration of the Third (Communist) International and the bankruptcy of the Second International, in the context of the rise of fascism and the worst crisis in the history of capitalism created a vacuum on the political scene.
It was in such a situation that Trotsky received with great enthusiasm the news of the formation and the rapid turn to the left of the ILP, the Independent Labour Party of Great Britain. The leaders of the ILP were even for a short time flirting with the idea of setting up a new revolutionary international, although they subsequently abandoned that position. Other organizations, especially left-wing splits from the Socialist parties in Europe, were coming closer to the very same conclusion.
The followers of Trotsky, the Bolshevik-Leninists, participated in that debate and in the conference which was held by fourteen labour organizations and parties in Paris in August of 1933. This meeting had certain similarities with the conference of Zimmerwald in 1915, which, in spite of the enormous theoretical confusion, organized those who opposed the First World War. Just as in Zimmerwald, in the Paris conference a left and a rightwing appeared. The adherents of the left were four organizations who came out signing a declaration for a new International. These included, apart from the International Left Opposition, the SAP of Germany and two Dutch organizations, the RSP and the OSP.
This initiative, in spite of the programmatical limitations and the subsequent disagreements, showed how Trotsky was absolutely willing to collaborate with other groups, even with people who came from other traditions within the workers' movement. He was never afraid of an open and honest discussion with groups or individuals who were moving in the direction of Bolshevism. However, at the same time he insisted on transparency and honesty on the part of his allies and reserved the right to always put forward his own position:
“Revolutionary irreconcilability consists not in demanding our “leadership” be recognized a priori, not in presenting our allies at every occasion with ultimatums and threatening with a break, with the removal of signatures, etc. We leave such methods on one hand, to the Stalinist bureaucrats, on the other to some impatient allies. We realize full well that disagreements between us and our allies will arise more than once. But we hope, more than that, we are convinced, that the march of events will reveal in deeds the impossibility of participating simultaneously in the principled bloc of four and in the unprincipled bloc of the majority. Without resorting to any unbecoming “ultimatums”, we claim however our full right not only to raise our banners but also to state openly to our allies our opinions regarding what we consider to be their mistakes. We expect from them the same frankness. Our alliance will thus be strengthened."
The French Turn
Trotsky was completely conscious of the weakness of his forces, not only from a numerical point of view, but also from the point of view of the lack of political experience of his followers. In one of the discussions he had with a visitor in his house in April of 1939 he explained it in these terms:
“We have comrades who came to us, as Naville and others, 15 or 16 or more years ago when they were young boys. Now they are mature people and their whole conscious life they have had only blows, defeats and terrible defeats on an international scale and they are more or less acquainted with this situation. They appreciate very highly the correctness of their conceptions and they can analyze, but they never had the capacity to penetrate, to work with the masses and they have not acquired it.”[ii]
This was one of the main reasons why he began to recommend a sharp turn towards the Socialist parties, and especially their youth organizations, beginning in France. In his opinion, the Trotskyists should enter these organizations to win the best proletarian elements. This tactic, which was later referred to as “entryism”, was not only about getting a numerical growth in terms of militants, but also about giving new life to the internal regimes of the Trotskyist groups.
This was a vital point for the educating of Marxist cadres in the harsh school of the class struggle. From the Old Man's point of view, it was not sufficient merely to comment on the life of a party from the perspective of an external observer. On the contrary, it was crucial to converge with the masses in revolutionary action, fighting shoulder to shoulder with the left against the right:
“It is not enough for a revolutionist to have correct ideas. Let us not forget that correct ideas have already been set down in Capital and The Communist Manifesto. But that has not prevented false ideas from being broadcast. It is the task of the revolutionary party to weld together the ideas with the mass labour movement. Only in this manner can an idea become a driving force.
“A revolutionary organization does not mean a paper and its readers. One can write and read revolutionary articles day in and day out and still remain in reality outside of the revolutionary movement. One can give the labour organizations good advice from the sidelines. That is something. But that still does not make a revolutionary organization.(...)
“In relation to the Socialist Party, the League has shown not only insufficient initiative but also a hidebound sectarianism. Instead of taking for its task the creation of a faction inside the SFIO just as soon as the crisis in the latter became obvious, the League demanded that every Socialist become convinced of the correctness of our ideas and leave his mass organization to join the group of La Verite readers. In order to create an internal faction, it was necessary to pursue the mass movement, to adapt oneself to the environment, to carry on a menial daily work. Precisely in this very decisive field the League has not been able to make any progress up to the present – with very few exceptions. A great deal of valuable time was allowed to be lost. (...)
“The criticism, the ideas, the slogans of the League are in general correct, but in this present period particularly inadequate. The revolutionary ideas must be transformed into life itself every day through the experiences of the masses themselves. But how can the League explain this to them when it is itself cut off from the experience of the masses? It is necessary to add: several comrades do not even see the need of this experience. It seems to them to be sufficient to form an opinion on the basis of newspaper accounts they read and then give it expression in an article or in a talk. Yet if the most correct ideas do not reflect directly the ideas and actions of the mass, they will escape the attention of the masses altogether” (Trotsky, The League Faced with a Turn, June 1934[iii])
Afterwards, Trotsky made the same recommendations for his followers in England concerning the ILP and in the United States concerning the Socialist Party. In many cases his followers received the advice with a lot of conservatism and opposed entering the organizations in question, or in some cases only a handful entered and did so too late to influence the left-wing tendencies that were developing in the rank and file of the Socialist parties.
Trotsky and the Spanish Revolution
The country where this refusal on the part of Trotsky's comrades to accept his advice generated most controversy was Spain. The study of Trotsky's position in regard to the Spanish Revolution could merit a whole article or a book apart[iv], but in this occasion we will limit ourselves to the most important lessons.
Since the proclamation of the Second Republic in April of 1931, Spain had lived through a revolution of enormous dimensions in all spheres of social and political life. The subsequent incapacity of the republican-socialist government to keep its promises, especially the agrarian reform which would have benefitted the poor and exploited peasants, led to the electoral defeat of the left in the elections of November 1933. What followed afterwards is known as the “bienio negro” (the two black years).
The heroic resistance on the part of the workers, when faced with the entry of the ultra-right-wing CEDA party in 1934, represented the beginning of the armed insurrection and the proletarian commune in Asturias. This experiment was only cut across by the ferocious repression on the part of the army, led by general Franco. This was the very same officer who led a new coup d'etat in July of 1936 with the aim of destroying the revolution once and for all. But the brave workers of Catalonia and in other parts of Spain rose up and prevented a Fascist victory. In effect they made themselves the masters of Barcelona and other parts of Spain. Thus the Spanish civil war commenced in July 1936 and lasted for three years, up until Franco's final victory in April of 1939.
This was the context in which Trotsky tried to build a revolutionary party which could play the same role as the Bolshevik Party had played in Russia in 1917. A victory for the revolution in Spain would have acted as a real earthquake, which in turn would have changed the whole balance of forces internationally. That is why the amount of attention which Trotsky paid in dealing with the Spanish revolution, (something that the majority of his biographers ignore), is completely justified.
From 1930 onwards, one of his old friends, his former secretary, Andreu Nin, had been living in Spain. Nin was a relatively experienced cadre who had been many years in the Soviet Union, working as the President of the Profintern, the Federation of red trade-unions. From his arrival in Spain, he began to correspond with Trotsky about the problems of the revolution and the tasks of the Spanish communists. Nin began to develop more and more differences with the Old Man. While the former wanted a fusion with the right-wing-Communist group of JoaquÃn Maurin on an eclectic programme, Trotsky insisted on maintaining ideological clarity and discipline.
In the course of the year 1934, the same phenomenon of radicalization of the Socialist Youth which had been seen in France was repeated in Spain. The Spanish Socialist Youth even reached a point where they invited the Trotskyists to enter the Socialist Party in order to “bolshevize” it[v]. The main leader of the Socialist Party left, Largo Caballero, who organized his followers around the paper Claridad, spoke in favour of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and quoted the writings of Lenin on more than one occasion. But instead of grasping this historic opportunity, Nin and his friends opposed Trotsky's call to enter the PSOE and the FSJ. The Stalinists were more intelligent and they managed to make a fusion between their own miniscule youth organization and the Socialist Youth, thus conquering a solid base in the working class youth.
The fusion of Nin's group (Izquierda Comunista) with Maurin's Catalan group (The BOC), led to the formation of the POUM (The Workers' Party for Marxist Unification). Although it was very much accused of being Trotskyist by the Stalinists and although its members showed a lot of courage during the civil war (including Nin himself who was brutally tortured and murdered by the Stalinists), the POUM was never a Trotskyist party. Instead of carrying out the revolution from below, building the power of the workers' and peasant committees, it vacillated between reformism and revolution.
It recognized the legitimacy of the Catalan bourgeois government, the Generalitat, and even entered it with Nin as Minister of Justice. They accepted the dissolution of the militias and the disarmament, something which the government was promoting with the excuse of creating a single professional army. The leaders of the POUM also decided to call upon its militants to abandon the barricades during the famous May Days in Barcelona in 1937, when the Stalinists attempted to destroy workers’ control in the Telephone Exchange.
All these actions were severely condemned by Trotsky who in the last instance explained the defeat of the Spanish Revolution by the lack of a genuine revolutionary party. In his brilliant, unfinished article Class, Party and Leadership, he pointed out that the destruction of the Spanish Revolution was in no way due to a “low level of consciousness” on the part of the working class, but rather due to the betrayal of the leaders:
“The workers’ line of march at all times cut a certain angle to the line of the leadership. And at the most critical moments this angle became 180 degrees. The leadership then helped directly or indirectly to subdue the workers by armed force. In May 1937 the workers of Catalonia rose not only without their own leadership but against it(...)
“The proletariat may “tolerate” for a long time a leadership that has already suffered a complete inner degeneration but has not as yet had the opportunity to express this degeneration amid great events. A great historic shock is necessary to reveal sharply the contradiction between the leadership and the class. The mightiest historical shocks are wars and revolutions. Precisely for this reason the working class is often caught unawares by war and revolution. But even in cases where the old leadership has revealed its internal corruption, the class cannot improvise immediately a new leadership, especially if it has not inherited from the previous period strong revolutionary cadres capable of utilizing the collapse of the old leading party.(...)
“Victory is not at all the ripe fruit of the proletariat’s “maturity.” Victory is a strategical task. It is necessary to utilize the favourable conditions of a revolutionary crisis in order to mobilize the masses; taking as a starting point the given level of their ‘maturity’ it is necessary to propel them forward, teach them to understand that the enemy is by no means omnipotent, that it is torn asunder with contradictions, that behind the imposing facade panic prevails. Had the Bolshevik party failed to carry out this work, there couldn’t even be talk of the victory of the proletarian revolution. The Soviets would have been crushed by the counter-revolution and the little sages of all countries would have written articles and books on the keynote that only uprooted visionaries could dream in Russia of the dictatorship of the proletariat, so small numerically and so immature. [vi]
Incredibly, these very same arguments about a so-called “immaturity” and “low level of consciousness of the masses” are used by reformists in relation to the Venezuelan revolution today. Their aim is to hide their own incapability of completing the revolution by expropriating the capitalists, the bankers and the landlords.
Just as in Spain, in Venezuela the central problem is the lack of a real Marxist leadership which can guide the revolution. And as in Spain, the activity of the Venezuelan masses was also 180 degrees in contradiction with the activities of the reformist ministers during the 11, 12th and 13th of April 2002. While the latter were in hiding or fleeing from the coup d'etát, the masses courageously opposed the coup, taking the control of the streets and fraternizing with the revolutionary elements in the army.
But precisely as with the Spanish revolution, in Venezuela the revolution is running the risk of a defeat, because there is no mass Marxist leadership to drive all the energy of the masses towards the taking of power.
The debates with the leaders of the American SWP:The method of transitional demands
The largest party of Trotsky's movement was without doubt the American Socialist Workers' Party. Its leaders had followed his advice and in a short space of time they had managed to make a successful fusion with the centrist party of A.J. Muste (The American Workers' Party), in reality with the purpose of winning the followers of the AWP over to Trotskyism, without allowing any political concessions. Afterwards they had entered the Socialist Party and effectively won over its youth organization, the Young Peoples' Socialist League. They had also managed to conquer important positions, as the one in Minneapolis, where they led the famous Teamsters Strike in 1934. The SWP had a membership of around 2,000 towards the end of the 30s.
However, Trotsky was completely aware of the theoretical shortcomings of the SWP leaders. He tried to prepare them for the great events that lay ahead by providing them with an insight to the dialectical method of analysis and a militant attitude towards the intervention in the mass movement. During 1938 and 1939 he held various discussions, with Cannon, Shactmann, Vincent Dunne, Joseph Hansen and other leaders of the American party.
The debates lasted for whole days at a time and had a widespread character, not just dealing with the particular problems of the practical work in the United States, but also about general problems of revolutionary tactics and strategy. The notes taken from the discussions were subsequently published and they constitute a real goldmine of lessons for revolutionary work.
The main point which ran through all the discussions was the method with which one could connect with the most active layers of the masses and consequently, the transitional demands to win them over. At that time, there was an increasing mood in favour of united proletarian action, but the class lacked a party on a national level.
Reflecting this mood, the LNPL (Labour's Non-Partisan League) was launched as a political instrument of the workers. However, the LNPL was launched by trade union leaders who merely wanted it to restrict it as being an office under their bureaucratic control which would recommend the vote for the bourgeois candidate Roosevelt. The SWP leaders were doubtful as to whether they should participate in the LNPL but Trotsky insisted on the struggle for “a policy which enables the trade unions to put their weight on the balance”.
He explained that it was necessary to counter-pose revolutionary demands to those of the reformists within the LNPL, in a concrete and audacious manner which could be understood by the workers:
“We are for a party, for an independent party of the toiling masses who will take power in the state. We must concretize it—we are for the creation of factory committees, for workers’ control of industry through the factory committees. All these questions are now pending in the air. They speak of technocracy, and put forward the slogan of ‘production for use.’ We oppose this charlatan formula and advance the workers’ control of production through the factory committees. (...)
“We say, the factory committees should see the books. This program we must develop parallel with the idea of a labour party in the unions, and workers’ militia. Otherwise it is an abstraction and an abstraction is a weapon in the hands of the opposing class. (...)
“Naturally we must make our first step in such a way as to accumulate experience for practical work, not to engage in abstract formulas, but develop a concrete program of action and demands in the sense that this transitional program issues from the conditions of capitalist society today, but immediately leads over the limits of capitalism (...)
“Then we also have the possibility of spreading the slogans of our transitional program and see the reaction of the masses. We will see what slogans should be selected, what slogans abandoned, but if we give up our slogans before the experience, before seeing the reaction of the masses, then we can never advance. .”[vii]
Faced with the scepticism, especially on the part of Shactmann, Trotsky pointed out that the slogan for a workers' militia was a necessity inherent in the concrete situation of the United States, even though this country was very far away and the threat of fascism seemed quite distant. He underlined that on the one hand the events of Europe would have a huge impact on the consciousness of the North American workers and on the other hand that the workers' militia could be proposed in a concrete way to protect shop stewards and picket lines from scabs and the bosses’ armed gangs.
Another controversial point was about the Ludlow amendment, by a bourgeois member of congress proposing a referendum on the participation of the United States in the Second World War. The schematic and abstract way of thinking of the SWP leaders had led the party to reject every attempt of using this slogan in favour of the referendum.
Trotsky opposed himself directly to Cannon and his colleagues and gave them an important lesson on how to tackle the question of democratic demands and connect them with the struggle for socialism. In the first place he explained that, until you can overthrow the bourgeois democracy, you have to take advantage of the means that it gives to you (regardless of how limited these are), in order to mobilize the masses in favour of your programme.
Of course he did not for one instance believe that a referendum could stop the outbreak of the war, nor decide whether the United States would take part in it or not. But Trotsky maintained that “We cannot dissipate the illusions [of the masses] a priori, only in the course of the struggle”. He added that it was crucial to say openly to the masses that the revolutionaries would fight side by side with their class brothers and sisters in favour of this referendum proposed by Ludlow, showing in practice that he wasn't really interested in realizing it, and that the working class could only trust its own forces in order to achieve such a referendum.
The words of Trotsky about the Ludlow amendment could perfectly have been written yesterday about the democratic demands in Tunisia and Egypt, where millions are struggling against the remnants of the dictatorships of Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak. It is a good answer to all those sectarian elements who reject the necessity of giving support to democratic demands, among them for a Constituent Assembly.
In all these discussions we can observe the dialectical method of Trotsky in contrast with the mechanical ideas of sectarianism.
Part 2 ⇒
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[i] Trotsky, Diary In Exile, pp. 53-4
[ii] Writings of Leon Trotsky, : Fighting against the stream. 1939.
[iii] Writings of Leon Trotsky: The league faced with a turn, June 1934
[iv] Among the writings that analyze Trotsky's position on the Spanish Revolution, I would like to highlight the introduction written by Pierre Broué to the Spanish edition of his works on Spain and also the article by Juan Manuel Municio, “Trotsky, La izquierda comunista y el POUM” published in Marxismo Hoy No. 2, 1995.
[v] For a more detailed historical analysis of the development of the Spanish Socialist Youth, I recommend the following work: Pierre Broué: The Spanish Socialist Youth (When Carillo was a leftist), published in Revolutionary History, 2007.
[vi] Writings of Leon Trotsky: The class, the party and the leadership. 1940.
[vii] Writings of Leon Trotsky: On the Labor Party Question in the United States, 1938.
Trotsky and the struggle for a Revolutionary international (1933-1946) - Part three
Written by Patrick Larsen Monday, 19 December 2011
In the third part of our article on the method of Trotsky in his struggle for a Revolutionary international, we will analyze the significance of the Proletarian Military Policy and also the death of Lev Davidovich and its repercussions in the movement. Furthermore, we will make a short and precise balance sheet of the work of the Fourth International during the Second World War and the political mistakes of its leaders which later gave rise to its collapse. [part 1]
Trotsky and the Second World War: The Proletarian Military Policy
Leon Trotsky. Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R15068 / CC-BY-SAIn order to understand the line that Trotsky developed in his last writings, it is necessary to have a general idea of the historical situation that the revolutionaries faced at that time. After Hitler's victory in Germany, the eyes of all workers of Europe were fixed on the rising triumph of fascism in one country after the other. The installation of fascist regimes in Austria, Spain, part of Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc were an alarm signal for the world working class. Subsequently the German army also occupied Holland, France and Denmark.
The imperialist powers of Great Britain and the United States were of course not opposed to Hitler for moral reasons, although they later sold the idea of a “war against fascism”. As a matter of fact, the British Prime Minister Churchill had been a great admirer of fascism in its early phase, applauding racism and the “domination of the white man”.
What really concerned the allied powers was not “democracy”, nor “human rights”. During the war they showed their own cynical brutality with the completely unnecessary massacres in Dresden, Nagasaki and Hiroshima. No, what really mattered were their own imperialist interests, that is to say the markets, raw materials and zones of influence.
Trotsky did not have any illusions whatsoever in the propaganda of the western countries and defined from the very beginning WW2 as an imperialist war, a continuation of the First World War. However, he understood the completely healthy, instinctive rejection of fascism on part of the workers and their natural desire to fight it. In his opinion it was not sufficient to simply oppose the war. The workers had to develop their own policy in this terrain. In his last article he stressed the following:
“The present war, as we have stated on more than one occasion, is a continuation of the last war. But a continuation does not signify a repetition. As a general rule, a continuation signifies a development, a deepening, a sharpening. Our policy, the policy of the revolutionary proletariat toward the second imperialist war is a continuation of the policy elaborated during the last imperialist war, primarily under Lenin’s leadership. But a continuation does not signify a repetition. In this case too, continuation signifies a development, a deepening and a sharpening.
“During the last war not only the proletariat as a whole but also its vanguard and, in a certain sense, the vanguard of this vanguard was caught unaware. The elaboration of the principles of revolutionary policy toward the war began at a time when the war was already in full blaze and the military machine exercised unlimited rule. One year after the outbreak of the war, the small revolutionary minority was still compelled to accommodate itself to a centrist majority at the Zimmerwald Conference. Prior to the February revolution and even afterwards, the revolutionary elements felt themselves to be not contenders for power but the extreme left opposition.
“Even Lenin relegated the socialist revolution to a more or less distant future.... If that is how Lenin viewed the situation, then there is hardly any need of talking about the others.
“This political position of the extreme left wing expressed itself most graphically on the question of the defence of the fatherland.
“In 1915 Lenin referred in his writings to revolutionary wars which the victorious proletariat would have to wage. But it was a question of an indefinite historical perspective and not of tomorrow’s task. The attention of the revolutionary wing was centred on the question of the defence of the capitalist fatherland. The revolutionists naturally replied to this question in the negative. This was entirely correct. But this purely negative answer served as the basis for propaganda and for training the cadres but it could not win the masses who did not want a foreign conqueror. In Russia prior to the war the Bolsheviks constituted four-fifths of the proletarian vanguard, that is, of the workers participating in political life (newspapers, elections, etc.). Following the February revolution the unlimited rule passed into the hands of defencists, the Mensheviks and the SR’s. True enough, the Bolsheviks in the space of eight months conquered the overwhelming majority of the workers. But the decisive role in this conquest was played not by the refusal to defend the bourgeois fatherland but by the slogan: “All Power to the Soviets!” And only by this revolutionary slogan! The criticism of imperialism, its militarism, the renunciation of the defence of bourgeois democracy and so on could have never conquered the overwhelming majority of the people to the side of the Bolsheviks.”[i]
His instructions to the revolutionaries were very clear:
“The militarization of the masses is further intensified every day. We reject the grotesque pretension of doing away with this militarization through empty pacifist protests. All the great questions will be decided in the next epoch arms in hand. The workers should not fear arms; on the contrary they should learn to use them. Revolutionists no more separate themselves from the people during war than in peace. A Bolshevik strives to become not only the best trade unionist but also the best soldier.
“We do not wish to permit the bourgeoisie to drive untrained or half trained soldiers at the last hour onto the battlefield. We demand that the state immediately provide the workers and the unemployed with the possibility of learning how to handle the rifle, the hand grenade, the machine gun, the cannon, the airplane, the submarine, and the other tools of war. Special military schools are necessary in close connection with the trade unions so that the workers can become skilled specialists of the military art, able to hold posts as commanders.”[ii]
In June 1940, the French bourgeoisie capitulated to Hitler and surrendered Paris without putting up any resistance. Trotsky thought that this event confirmed that the national bourgeoisies of the allied block were not genuinely interested in defending the workers against fascism. For this reason he declared that the revolutionaries ought to agitate amongst the masses for the passing over of the military high command to the hands of the working class, the only class really capable of eradicating fascism:
“The Institute of Public Opinion established that over 70% of the workers are in favour of conscription. It is a fact of tremendous importance! Workers take every question seriously. If the Fatherland should be defended, then the defence cannot be abandoned to the arbitrary will of individuals. It should be a common attitude. This realistic conception shows how right we were in rejecting beforehand purely negative pacifist or semi-pacifist attitudes. We place ourselves on the same ground as the 70% of the workers; against Green and Lewis, and on this premise we begin to develop a campaign in order to oppose the workers to their exploiters in the military field. You, workers, wish to defend and improve democracy. We, of the Fourth International, wish to go further. However, we are ready to defend democracy with you, only on condition that it should be a real defence, and not a betrayal in the Petain manner. ”[iii]
In a discussion on “American problems”[iv], he repeated the same ideas in an even sharper way. In his opinion the revolutionaries ought to say the following:
“We will defend the United States with a workers’ army, with workers’ officers, with a workers’ government, etc. If we are not pacifists, who wait for a better future, and if we are active revolutionists, our job is to penetrate into the whole military machine.
(...)
“We must use the example of France to the very end. We must say, “I warn you, workers, that they (the bourgeoisie) will betray you! Look at Petain, who is a friend of Hitler. Shall we have the same thing happen in this country? We must create our own machine, under workers’ control.” We must be careful not to identify ourselves with the chauvinists, nor with the confused sentiments of self-preservation, but we must understand their feelings and adapt ourselves to these feelings critically, and prepare the masses for a better understanding of the situation, otherwise we will remain a sect, of which the pacifist variety is the most miserable. ”
The key point was to reveal the organic incapacity of the bourgeoisie to really put up a defence against Fascism and in that way adjust the revolutionary agitation to the thought and concerns of the masses. On the other hand, the emphasis on the militarization of the revolutionary organization signified that Trotsky advised his followers to search for all means to come closer to the working class and penetrate it in order to provide the revolutionary programme necessary for victory.
In this situation all the attention of the workers was principally on the war, in some armament factories they worked for 14 to 16 hours a day. Trotsky understood that every abstract slogan of opposition to the war would only reinforce the isolation of the forces of Bolshevik-Leninism from the masses. Without ceasing to explain the real character of the imperialist war, Lev Davidovich instructed the national sections to adapt the transitional slogans to the concrete stage in the development of the consciousness of the masses. It is no coincidence that the Old Man explained how Bolshevism essentially was the history of “sharp and sudden turns” in tactics and slogans in each given moment.
The Fourth International during WW2
Trotsky's death at the hands of the GPU agent Ramón Mercader del RÃo on the 20th of August of 1940 was a tremendous blow to the forces of the Fourth International. We have seen in the previous parts of this article how even the leaders of the American SWP lacked a sound theoretical capacity and the fundamental dialectical method with which Trotsky was able to understand the changing objective situation. To be honest, we would have to admit that the Fourth International was founded on very unstable organisational bases in most countries.
One of the worst examples was probably France, where the members of the official section, the POI (Workers' International Party), had split at the beginning of 1939 over the question of entry into the PSOP, a centrist split from the Socialist Party. The section was in a state of complete chaos when France was overrun by the Nazis in June 1940. Rapidly the main leaders (Jean Rous, Pierre Naville, Joannès Bardin [Boitel]), adapted to bourgeois nationalism and/or left the Trotskyist movement altogether. New forces, most of them very young people, had to rebuild the organization under very difficult conditions.
Of course, we do not want to discard the heroic work that hundreds of Trotsky's co-thinkers conducted in a Europe under the iron heel of fascism. Nor do we intend to forget the many martyrs of the Bolshevik-Leninist movement. It is appropriate to mention just a couple of the most important examples:
In spite of various waves of repression against its main cadres, the Trotskyist organization of France managed to publish 73 editions of its paper, La Verité, which circulated in 15,000 copies per issue. The Gestapo managed to find and assassinate dozens of Trotskyists, including the section's general secretary, Marcel Hic, who was deported to the concentration camp of Buchenwald and subsequently Dora where he was killed.[v]
The French Trotskyists even managed to publish a paper in German, called Arbeiter und Soldat (Worker and Soldier), which was specifically directed towards winning over the German troops to revolutionary positions. Its editor, Paul Widelin, was arrested in 1944 and murdered by the Gestapo.
In Belgium, one of the countries where the International had had a sizeable force, the repression also put its stamp: Well-known leaders such as León Lesoil and Abraham, among dozens of other Trotskyists, were arrested and executed. In spite of all this, they managed to publish a paper in French (Lenin's Voice) and another in Flemish (The Class Struggle) in 10,000 and 7,000 copies respectively.
In Greece, Pantelis Pouliopoulis, was murdered along with a group of seventeen Trotskyist at the hands of the Italian occupying force in June 1943. But before he died, he had the courage to give a revolutionary speech to the Italian soldiers in their own language, an act which provoked mutiny among the soldiers who afterwards refused to kill him. It was the officers who had to do the bloody work and execute them.
One of the most tragic losses for the movement was probably that of Pietro Tresso [Blasco], one of the first members of the Left Opposition of the Italian CP. Although he managed to escape from the prison in Marseilles in France, he was kidnapped by the Stalinists and murdered.
In this short summary, we cannot go into all the details, but it would be incorrect to forget mentioning the heroic work of the Trotskyists in Sri Lanka and Indochina (Vietnam). During the war, the followers of Trotsky in both countries opposed the bloody oppression of British Imperialism, while the Stalinists sacrificed any pretension of anti-imperialist struggle in the name of their “sacred alliance” with the allied powers.
Later on, this line made the CP of India accept the criminal 1947 division of the country on religious lines, which led to the creation of a Muslim state (Pakistan) and the abortion, through violence, of the revolution. In contrast the Trotskyists build a strong party in Vietnam which even won the local elections of Saigon in 1939. Tragically, the main figure in this group, the legendary Ta Thu Thau, was executed by the Stalinists in September 1945, probably on direct orders of Ho Chi Minh.[vi] In Sri Lanka the first nucleus of the LSSP (Lanka Sama Samaja Party), affiliated to the Fourth International, was formed and led huge general strike movements against the colonial powers. It quickly rose to be the second political party on the island.
The Trotskyists and the Proletarian Military Policy
Although these are all signs of great sacrifice and consistent work, we cannot avoid making a critical balance-sheet of the politics of the Bolshevik-Leninists during the war. Let us remember the central conception of Trotsky's Proletarian Military Policy: Connect with the anti-fascist sentiment of the masses and above all prove the organic inability of the bourgeoisie to organize the fight against fascism, showing that only the proletariat could destroy the roots of Hitler's and Mussolini's regimes.
But, with some important exceptions that we shall investigate later (especially the WIL/RCP of Great Britain), it can be said that the great majority of the Trotskyist groups and parties opposed the Military Policy, or at least did not understand it. Several national sections, including the Greek, the official British one (RSL) and the Spanish group led by Grandizo Munis, rejected the new policy because they regarded it as a concession to social-chauvinism. They therefore maintained the position of “revolutionary defeatism” which Lenin had held during WW1, but which the new situation rendered impractical and which condemned them to total isolation. The Belgian section even went to the extreme of censoring some parts of the May 1940 Emergency Conference Manifesto which Trotsky had written.
The other big problem was the incomprehension of the concept of “militarization”. The Proletarian Military Policy was not simply a propagandistic idea but above all a practical orientation of Trotsky to his followers. As he had explained in his History of the Russian Revolution “The majority is not to be counted, it is to be conquered”: The Trotskyists had to conquer the masses, beginning in the armed forces. We find very few examples of systematic work in this respect. Although the French Trotskyists had a few phrases in their document on the importance of the Partisan movement, there was no organic participation in it.
The French historian Pierre Broué made some valuable reflections on this question. In a critical article, published in his León Trotsky, he said the following:
“All the evidence shows that Trotsky’s appeal for the line of armed struggle and his proposal that revolutionary Socialists should become ‘militarists’ in order to play their rôle in a militarised world, are missing in this conception, or rather reduced to a secondary, ‘partisan’ level, entirely subordinated to ‘the struggle in the factories’. The discovery that ‘the armed struggle’ exerted an attractive force upon the masses must have presented many problems in the absence of the dimension which Trotsky contributed on ‘militarization’.
(...)
“In the same order of ideas, the hesitancy with which Trotskyists looked at armed resistance suggests that it would be interesting to study how the revolution was conceived within the Fourth International during the war. It seems sometimes to have been conceived as something apocalyptic, which would occur independently of what was going on, and not as a result of being worked for. Had their almost exclusively ‘propagandist’ education, involving the use of the weapons of denunciation and ‘explanation’ – which clearly were the essential activities of an organisation the leaders of which felt themselves to be “swimming against the stream” – prepared the cadres for such a belief? ”[vii]
A qualitatively different example: The WIL and the RCP
There were of course exceptions to this. Some groups and individuals tried to apply the Proletarian Military Policy to the day-to-day political work. The American SWP, pressurized by Trotsky until his death, had formally approved the policy and carried it out partially, defending it publicly and also in the court rooms when they were prosecuted by the state for “subversive activity” in the Minneapolis Trials of 1941[viii]. As a result, the SWP did experience a notable growth throughout that period, although it should be said that Cannon and the other American leaders put all the emphasis in the purely propaganda aspect of the work and not in the political work in the armed forces.
A group which did in fact carry out the Proletarian Militant Policy in an energetic fashion was the Workers International League of Great Britain – from 1944 known as the Revolutionary Communist Party. The first nucleus of this group was formed in 1937 with immigrants from South Africa such as Ralph Lee and Ted Grant.
The state of the different Trotskyist groups was particularly discomforting in Britain, where the majority had refused the advice of Trotsky to enter the Independent Labour Party in 1934 and afterwards his proposal to turn towards the Labour Party. The composition of the existing groups was very bad, most of the members came from petit-bourgeois circles and the internal environment was very closed. The militants spent more time on internal quarrels than on the real political work.
After an attempt at reforming the existing grouplets, Ralph Lee, Ted Grant, Jock Haston and a few others decided to leave them and form a new group on a healthy basis, orientated one hundred per cent towards the working class. They founded the WIL with only seven comrades in 1938.
In September of that year they rejected an attempt on the part of Cannon and other SWP representatives to make a unification of all groups on an unprincipled basis. The WIL comrades explained that they were in favour of unity but only on a firm political basis. They stressed the importance of Labour Party and youth work and also on the Proletarian Military Policy. When it was evident that the other groups were not in agreement, the WIL discarded the fusion and foresaw that the unity of three groups on a politically heterogeneous platform would lead to five or six divisions and splits in the near future.
That was exactly what happened. While the “unified” RSL distinguished itself with its constant fragmentations and passivity during almost all of the war, the WIL – which had only seven members in early 1938 – grew rapidly, transforming itself into an important political force with around five hundred members at the end of the war. If we analyze this carefully, we will notice that it was the successful application of Trotsky's policy which made the difference.
By accepting the Proletarian Military Policy, the WIL also adapted it to the concrete situation in Britain, formulating a programme which included demanding a Labour Party government to fight against fascism, the formation of a unified workers' army of trained battalions of the trade unions and with the election of the officers. Cutting across the monstrous lies of the British bourgeoisie, the WIL also agitated for the complete liberation of the Colonies, thus enabling a real fight against fascism on a world scale.
Rejecting every pretension of pacifism, the WIL ordered all its members to enter the armed forces if they were called up. Inside the army, they were instructed to carry out real revolutionary work together with their class brothers and sisters, gaining the respect as the best soldiers in the army. WIL members who were at the North African front of the British Army made use of the legal forums, the assemblies known as the “Army Bureau of Current Affairs – ABCA”, in order to patiently explain the real significance of the war. In several instances, they won the majority of the ABCAs, as in Benghazi in Libya and in Cairo in Egypt.
Even in the British air force, the RAF, the WIL managed to do important political work, through the pilot Frank Ward who gave classes to other pilots in the programme of the Fourth International. The mood among various sectors of the army was explosive, especially in the Eighth Army in the North African desert. Many soldiers confessed that they wanted to take the arms back to Britain, once the war was over, in order to ensure that things would change!
As the initial wave of war euphoria began to dissipate among the working masses, several struggles took place in industry, where the workers were working up to fourteen hours daily to produce the war supplies. At the same time, the Communist Party made a 180-degree summersault, from a position of opposition to the war, to blind support for the Churchill government. The reason was, evidently, Hitler's attack on Russia in 1941 which obliged Stalin to change policy in order to approach his “democratic allies”. This was why the British CP began to play a directly strike-breaking role after 1941, denouncing every labour conflict as a “sabotage against the anti-fascist war”.
This situation gave the WIL huge opportunities for intervening among the working masses and participating in the strikes that took place during the war. The year 1942 saw a big upturn in the number of strikes and WIL members intervened successfully in some of the most important ones, such as the apprentice strikes at Tyneside, Rolls Royce Aircraft Works, and Glasgow, in August of 1941 and again in July 1943, in the Barnbow Royal Ordnance Factory in June 1943, and in the transport strike in Yorkshire in May of 1943.
We have stressed the example of the WIL here because it shows that the Trotskyists were not automatically condemned to isolation because of the objective situation. On the contrary, we have seen how a small group armed with a correct programme, orientation and tactics can conduct very important work, while a larger organization which does not know how to adapt itself to a new situation is doomed to impotence.
If the Fourth International, as a world organization, had followed the policy of Trotsky with the same ability as the WIL, its subsequent development would probably have been very different. In the next part of this article, we shall see what possibilities and challenges the end of the Second World War put in front of the revolutionaries....
Part 4 ⇒
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Notes
[i] LDT: Bonapartism, Fascism and War. Published in October 1940.
[ii] LDT: Manifesto of the Fourth International on Imperialist War.
[iii] LDT: How to really defend democracy. 1940. My emphasis, PL
[iv] LDT: Some Questions on American Problems. August 1940
[v] See Rodolf Prager, “The Fourth International during the Second World War” in Revolutionary History: Vol.1 No.3, Autumn 1988. War and Revolution in Europe: 1939-1945
[vi] See Revolutionary History: Vol.3 No.2, Autumn 1990: Vietnam. Workers’ Revolution and National Independence
[vii] Pierre Broué: How Trotsky and the Trotskyists faced WWII.
[viii] Cannon's speech in the Minneapolis Trials was later published under the title “Socialism on Trial”.
Trotsky and the struggle for a Revolutionary International (1933-1946) - Part four
Written by Patrick Larsen Thursday, 01 March 2012
In this fourth and final part of Patrick Larsen’s account of the struggle of Trotsky and his followers for a genuine revolutionary international, he looks at the revolutionary situations that opened up in Europe between 1943 and 1945. He demonstrates how these were hijacked and diverted by the dominant forces within the labour movement, i.e. the Stalinists and the reformists. This historic betrayal in turn opened up a new situation on a world scale which the majority of Trotsky's followers were unable to understand. [part 1]
The central perspective of Trotsky was that the Second World War, just as the First, would end with a revolutionary wave in the main capitalist countries. Remembering that the Third International had been founded in practice on the basis of the revolutionary post-war movement in countries like Germany, France, Italy and so on, the Old Man anticipated that in the space of a decade, not one stone would be left upon another of the old Internationals (the Second, reformist, International and the Third, Stalinist, International), and that the Fourth International would be transformed into the dominant revolutionary force on the entire planet.
The events in Europe, and also in the colonial world, confirmed in part this perspective, although we also saw contradictory elements, rooted in the very outcome of the war, which rendered the work of the Bolshevik-Leninists extremely difficult.
Greece – the strangled revolution
The Greek Civil War was an event which totally unmasked the misleading propaganda of the imperialists about a so-called “war for democracy”. For years the Greek workers' movement had been severely oppressed by the Metaxas dictatorship. This repression was reinforced by the Italian-German occupation of Greece from 1940. But towards the end of 1941, several strikes and even workers' demonstrations began in the streets.
In the underground, the Greek resistance movement, the EAM, was founded, with ELAS (National Liberation Army) as its armed wing. The Greek Communist Party, the KKE, without regular contact with Moscow, played an enormous role in this movement and correctly raised the slogan of a Constituent Assembly to decide the future of the country without foreign intervention, be it German-Italian or British Imperialism. Nevertheless, the EAM was founded on a Popular-Front basis of “national unity”, rejecting any differentiation between the classes and any firm connection of democratic demands with the emancipation of the Greek working class.
Despite all this, the heroic resistance of the Greek workers and peasants began to make its voice heard throughout the country. The partisans of ELAS took over one city after another and when the British arrived in Greece the country had effectively been taken over by the resistance movement. The working class also played a decisive role in defeating the occupation; on July 25 of 1943 a huge general strike erupted in Athens which prevented the executions of the workers' leaders of the tram-system who had been jailed and condemned to death for organizing a previous strike.
In Moscow, Stalin was extremely worried about the situation. He wanted to avoid revolution in Greece at all costs, as it would not only put into danger his alliance with the British and American imperialists, but also because just one single successful revolution in a European country could trigger a powerful movement in the whole continent, destabilizing the entire situation. That was why he chose to send a special emissary, Popov, who arrived in Greece just before the end of the occupying regime in October 1944. His first act was to demand that the Communists abandon every pretension of class struggle and that they obey the new coalition government of Georgios Papandreou.
But on December 3, 1944, it came to direct confrontation between the British “liberators” and the followers of EAM, when the former attacked an unarmed demonstration of the latter in Athens, killing 28 protesters and wounding another 148. This represented the beginning of the events known as Dekemvriana. The key question in dispute was over the possession of arms. The members of ELAS refused to surrender their guns to the British forces and consequently the EAM ministers abandoned the coalition government.
Curiously, Churchill defined the EAM-ELAS rebels in Greece – who in their majority were members of the Greek CP – as “Trotskyists”. In a speech given to the House of Commons, he said the following:
“I think ‘Trotskyists' is a better definition of the Greek Communists and of certain other sects than the normal word, and it has the advantage of being equally hated in Russia. (Laughter and cheers).”[i]
The same Churchill, with the explicit acceptance of Stalin, travelled to Greece during Christmas of 1944, in order to lead the repression against the Greek revolution. In his memoirs, the British Prime Minister explained how he and Stalin cynically decided the division of Europe on a sheet of paper in the course of a few minutes[ii]. He also tells how the USSR maintained complete silence about the violent smashing of the Greek Revolution:
“Stalin, however, adhered strictly and faithfully to our agreement of October, and during all the long weeks of fighting the Communists in the streets of Athens, not one word of reproach came from Pravda or Izvestia”[iii]
The agreements of reconciliation that were signed in Varkiza on February the 15, 1945, with the support of the KKE, included the disarming of the ELAS. Although some sections refused, the bulk of the forces of ELAS disarmed. The counter-revolution, thus emboldened, went on the offensive, provoking another guerrilla war that ended with the victory of the counter-revolution in 1949.
Italy: The partisan movement and Stalinism
The fall of Fascist dictator Mussolini in 1943, when Marshall Badoglio ousted him in a coup following on from the mass strikes,opened a new phase in the Italian revolution. The partisan movement, in its majority led by the Italian Communist Party, consisted of more than 100,000 armed men and managed to take big parts of the country without the help of the Allied forces. Even CP leaders such as Luigi Longo admitted that a situation of dual power existed with entire cities controlled by the forces of the resistance movement.
Mass strikes took place in Milan, Genoa, Bologna, Turin and other big cities. The train system in the North was paralyzed for days because of the workers' strike action. The masses assaulted the fascist prisons and liberated the political prisoners by their own strength. The old fascist headquarters were looted and the big printing press was taken over by the workers in Milan and elsewhere. Every person who was seen with a fascist uniform or wearing such symbols was attacked in the streets.[iv]
The landing of Allied troops in Sicily was in reality another desperate measure to control the situation. The Allies tried to impose a coalition government, but at first they tried to do it under the Fascist Marshall Badoglio, and with the simultaneous reestablishment of the monarchy. This clearly exposes the lying propaganda about a “war for democracy”! But pressurized by the masses,within a year,they had to take a step back and propose a new government led by Bonomi with the direct participation of the Italian CP.
Although the fascist regime at that moment was clearly collapsing, the Allies began to bomb Milan between August 12 and 15. Why? Milan had been the centre of strikes and mass demonstrations and the working class was clearly striving for power. In this situation, the Allies wanted to weaken the militant mood of the proletariat with the destruction of the Milanese workers' neighbourhoods.
The situation had become serious for the Italian bourgeoisie, and it was only with the arrival of Togliatti, the CP General Secretary, that a more or less stable coalition government could be formed. The “Rome Protocol” was signed and the partisan movement agreed to obey the orders of the Anglo-American troops. In the British Stalinist paper Daily Worker, its North Italian correspondent, James S. Allen, called the armies of British and American Imperialism “friends of the Italian people”[v].
Years later, the same Togliatti explained the line of the Italian CP during the failed Italian Revolution:
“If anyone reproaches us for not having taken power or having let ourselves be excluded from government, I would say to them that we could not transform Italy into a new Greece; not only because of our own interest, but also because of the interest of the Soviets”[vi]
Denmark – The revolutionary general strike and the insurrection in Copenhagen
Largely unknown, but in reality very symptomatic of the situation which prevailed throughout Europe at that time, were the events in Denmark between 1943 and 1945. Located to the north of Germany, and with the effective control of the traffic between the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, the occupation of this small country became a necessity for Hitler.
From the beginning of the occupation, on April 9th 1940, the Social-Democrats made a pact with the German army, destroying its own defence and surrendering the country to the Nazis without firing a single shot. It was a repetition of Petain's cowardice in France, a development that Trotsky had brilliantly predicted. Just as in other occupied zones, the exploitation of the working class increased as the country functioned as the German rearguard, forced to provide food, arms and logistics to the army of the Wehrmacht.
In clandestine conditions, hundreds of resistance circles were formed, many of them organized by the Danish Communist Party, which had been illegalized and whose main leaders had been jailed from June 1941, except for a few who had been able to escape and go into hiding. During the four years of German occupation, 2,674 acts of industrial sabotage were committed (bombs against railroads and armament transport, etc). But much more important than that was the marvellous movement of the working class which began with the regional general strikes of July-August 1943 against the presence of a German war boat in the harbour of Odense. The movement was quickly extended to important cities such as Esbjerg, Kolding and Vejle and later on there were also demonstrations in the capital, Copenhagen.
Although the German Army, helped by the Social-Democrats, managed to put an end to this movement through repression, the anger of the working class did not cease. One year later, towards the end of July 1944, the famous “popular strikes” erupted, beginning as a protest of the workers at B&W in the port of Copenhagen, against the curfew imposed by the German invaders. Very rapidly this movement was transformed into a real insurrection in the workers' neighbourhoods, barricades were set up all over the city and bloody clashes took place for days. Only after having given concessions to all the demands of the protests, could a temporary cease-fire be established.
When the end of Hitler's occupation was imminent, towards March of 1945, a power vacuum emerged in Denmark. The resistance committees, most of them led by the Communist Party, were armed; it was only through their collaboration that it was possible for the British to control the situation. The most militant sectors of the Danish working class were breaking with the Social-Democratic Party and passing over en masse to the Communist Party, which before the occupation had been a miniscule group with just one Member of Parliament.
The slogans of the workers were not only of a democratic character, but had above all a social character: they demanded that all the purchasing-power of the workers lost during the occupation should be restored and also called for the expropriation of those capitalists who had collaborated with the invaders (including Mærsk, a huge Danish capital owner). These demands were present in the historic march of 4th of July 1945, with 100,000 workers in Christiansborg Square in front of the National Parliament. It was only after the appearance of the Communist Members of Parliament, who managed to convince the masses, that the workers abandoned the square. Stalinism had betrayed another revolution[vii].
Repercussions in the Colonial World
The same phenomena which we described in the cases of Italy, Greece and Denmark were reflected in countries like Finland, Belgium and also by the defeat of the conservative government of Great Britain in the polls and the huge electoral victory of the Labour Party. But the revolutionary wave that followed the end of the war was not limited to Europe. In the countries under the domination of imperialism a truly unprecedented movement took place.
As we mentioned in the previous part of this article, this was the case in India, where British Imperialism was confronted with the biggest mutiny in the history of its navy. On February 18th of 1946, the sailors of the huge warship HMS Talwaar, located in the harbour of Bombay, went on strike to protest the bad food conditions.
The strike quickly spread to the territorial patrols in Bombay and the soldiers took over various garrisons and raised red flags. Within 48 hours, this episode was repeated in one division after another in 74 warships, 20 fleets and 22 marine units, including the troops at Calcutta, Karachi, Madras, Cochin and Vishakapatam [viii].
However, the political collaboration with imperialism on the part of the Stalinists of the CP of India – and also on the part of Ghandi and the bourgeois nationalists – meant the isolation of the sailors' rebellion. The rebellion was therefore unable to connect with the great strikes that took place in the textile sector. Once the British imperialists began to repress the movement in cold blood, killing 228 sailors and leaving 1,046 wounded, the movement had no other alternative but to surrender.
In spite of all this, there were huge movements of India's workers, among those the strike of 60,000 railroad workers and later on 100,000 postal workers. There was also a big regional strike in Bombay, organized by the CPI.
British Imperialism was very worried and decided to send a special commission to try and exploit religious antagonisms with the purpose of avoiding a socialist revolution at all costs. This was the background to the criminal division of India, with the creation of a Muslim state (Pakistan) in August 1947 and the subsequent massacre which took place. In this way, the revolution was annihilated on the Indian sub-continent with the explicit acceptance of Stalinism.
In other parts of the Colonial World, the same ferment caused revolutionary upheavals. In Argentina, the workers of Buenos Aires defeated an attempted coup d'état against the Nationalist government of Juan Domingo Perón, thus radicalizing the class struggle in that country and seriously weakening British imperialism.
In China we saw the peasant war of the forces of Mao Zedong which put an end to the rule of Chang-Kai-Shek in 1949. The emancipation of China from the chains of imperialism, in spite of the Stalinist regime that Mao implemented, was an absolutely progressive event and must be considered part of the same revolutionary wave.
Africa was also affected by the revolutionary mood with a remarkable growth of the independence movement, among others in Algeria against the French and in Egypt where a nationalist-revolutionary wing within the army was organized around Nasser, preparing his way to power in 1952.
Stalinism and reformism – weakened or strengthened?
To sum up, we can say that the perspective of Trotsky of an enormous revolutionary wave after the war was confirmed by the development of events. But this did not result, except in very special cases, in an explosive growth of Trotskyism. The Fourth International did not become the “dominant force on the planet” and neither Stalinism nor social-democratic reformism collapsed as tendencies within the labour movement. Evidently, this requires some explanation.
It is important to remember that every perspective is conditional and that its prognosis depends on a whole series of factors. If these factors change, then the end result must inevitably also change. To understand this, it is necessary to analyze the military results of the war, which surprised everyone; even the most advanced military strategists and the president of the United States and rulers of Great Britain.
In reality, almost the entire war against Hitler took place on the Eastern front, on Russian soil. The British imperialists were struggling for their own interests in the North of Africa and the Americans for the control of the Pacific in their war against Japan. All the decisive battles took place in Russia and Germany, the most important ones being those of Stalingrad and Kursk in 1942-43. After that, the Red Army advanced and forced the Germans to retreat rapidly.
The imperialists had been waiting for Russia and Germany to mutually destroy each other and thus secure the conditions for a total domination of Europe on the part of the Allies. But the war developed differently, first and foremost because of the two great Soviet advantages: the planned economy and the heroic resistance of the masses. This enabled the Russians to regroup their forces and defeat the German invaders.
The so-called “D-Day” with the landing of Allied troops in Northern France in July 1944, was not an act to “liberate the people of Europe from fascism” but rather a desperate measure by the imperialists to avoid the whole of Europe falling into Soviet hands. Nevertheless, it was the Russians who entered Berlin first and gave the order to raise the red flag above the Reichstag.
Far from weakening Stalinism, the historic advance of the Red Army, liberating the whole of Eastern Europe from German occupation, reinforced it as a political tendency within the workers' movement. Many rank and file workers thought that the Red Army was sowing the seeds of socialism in each liberated country. The situation caused tremendous confusion, even in the ranks of Trotskyism, and gave many activists illusions in Stalinism.
On the other hand, the economic help of American imperialism, the so-called Marshall Plan, played a big role in reinforcing the authority of social-democratic reformism. The leaders of the Social-democracy promised huge reforms in Western Europe and in some countries, like Great Britain, the working masses swung towards them, hoping for a radical change in society.
It was in this way, on the basis of the strengthening of Stalinism and reformism and their capacity to betray the revolutions that Capitalism was able to consolidate itself for the time being. This was the political precondition for the great economic boom which followed the Second World War.
The catastrophist thesis of Cannon and co.
How did Trotsky's supporters, now without the presence of the Old Man, face up this new reality? Far from recognizing the changed situation and changing tactics accordingly, the main leaders of the Fourth International maintained their old perspective and repeated the old phrases.
In the first place, James Cannon, the main SWP leader, even denied that the war was over. In the second place, he insisted, together with Belgian leader Ernest Mandel, on the impossibility of a new boom of capitalism on a world scale. In his document “Perspectives for the American Revolution”, written in 1946, Cannon was predicting an immediate recession in the North American economy:
“US imperialism which proved incapable of recovering from its crisis and stabilising itself in the 10-year period preceding the outbreak of the Second World War is heading for an even more catastrophic explosion in the current postwar era. ”[ix].
The same ideas were repeated in the writings of the main leaders of the Fourth International, with very few exceptions. In the main resolution of the World Conference of the Fourth International, held in Paris in 1946, the same erroneous perspective was present.
Furthermore, that document contained other fundamental mistakes. In the original draft it said that the USSR had emerged weakened by the war and that it could be overthrown"in the near future, even without military intervention, through the sole fact of economic, political and diplomatic pressure of American and British imperialism, and its military threats"[x]
We believe that these lines speak for themselves! In a moment where the armed forces of the USSR had won what could be argued to be the biggest military victory in the history of war, these gentlemen thought that the Stalinist regime could fall by diplomatic pressure and military threats!
As if these errors were not enough, Cannon, Frank, Pablo, Mandel and the other main leaders also declared that the bourgeoisie was only capable of ruling in Europe through Bonapartist military dictatorships![xi] The only base for such an argument was that the Allied powers had tried to reach a deal to install a dictatorship headed by Badoglio in Italy in 1943-44 after the fall of Mussolini.
This conception clashed again with the reality that existed in Europe. Far from being able to install dictatorships, the bourgeoisie was in fact in a position where it had to govern through bourgeois democracy, for the simple reason that it did not have the strength to destroy the powerful organizations of the working class. In this situation it decided to use another tactic, the old method of class collaboration in the form of Popular Front governments.
Counter-revolution in a democratic form
All those questions did not have a mere academic meaning but were of great importance at the time, for elaborating the correct revolutionary slogans and tactics. As Ted Grant explained on numerous occasions, in times of advance the quality of the generals is essential in a war. But in times of difficulty and retreat, the role of the leadership becomes even more decisive. With good generals it is possible to make a successful retreat in order to reorganize the soldiers and prepare the next battle. But with bad soldiers, a temporary retreat is transformed into a defeat.
There were of course some people in the Fourth International who drew a much more sober-minded balance-sheet of the correlation of forces and who opposed the ultra-left tendencies of the majority. In the United States, a minority of the SWP, led by Albert Goldman (Trotsky's lawyer), Felix Morrow (the author of the famous book on the Spanish Revolution) and Jean Van Heijenoort (Trotsky's personal secretary for seven years), began in 1943 to analyze the changes taking place, starting with Italy[xii]. They drew a whole number of correct conclusions, especially on the need to connect the democratic struggles with the social struggle, on the need to participate actively in the armed resistance movements, the impossibility of military dictatorships in Europe in the near future, etc. However, they also made a number of mistakes, including a failed attempt at unity with Max Shactmann's Workers' Party. Subsequently, almost all of the members of the Morrow-Goldman group became disillusioned and abandoned politics.
The most consistent opposition, and politically the most far-sighted, came from the RCP, the British section led by Jock Haston and Ted Grant. In their documents we see a careful defence of Trotsky's method applied to the new reality in post-war Europe. In a March 1945 document, they explained that Europe was passing through a period of counter-revolution in a democratic form[xiii]. They emphasized that historically, the bourgeoisie had not only been able to liquidate revolutions with the installation of dictatorial regimes but also through bourgeois democracy. With crushing clarity they made an analogy with the abortion of the first German revolution of 1918-19 and the regime of Noske-Sheidemann.
Another great sign of political wisdom contained in the document was how the RCP understood the “dual and contradictory nature” of the advance of the USSR. They stressed that, on the one hand the victory of the Red Army made the masses remember the Russian October Revolution, but at the same time, the military triumph allowed the Soviet bureaucracy to strangle the proletarian revolution in Europe. They concluded that it was perfectly possible that Stalinism could survive for a substantial period of time. They even managed to anticipate how Stalin, three years afterwards, in 1948, would implement planned economies in Eastern Europe, controlled from above, Bonapartist-style.[xiv]
Although Ted Grant and the RCP could not foresee the magnitude of the post-war boom (a phenomenon that would influence all of politics in Europe until 1973), they did understand that there would not be an immediate recession but rather an economic upturn of capitalism. In the pre-conference of the Fourth International in April of 1946, they presented a whole number of amendments to the majority document. They speak for themselves:
“In opposition to the reformists and Stalinists, who seek to lull the masses with a perspective of a new renaissance of capitalism and a great future for democracy, the resolution of the International Pre-Conference is one hundred per cent correct in emphasizing the epoch of decline and collapse of world capitalist economy. But in a resolution that seeks to orientate our own cadres on immediate economic perspectives – from which the next stage of the class struggle will largely flow, and thus our immediate propaganda and tactics – the perspective is clearly false.(...)
“The theory of spontaneous collapse of capitalism is entirely alien to the conceptions of Bolshevism. Lenin and Trotsky emphasized again and again that capitalism will always find a way out if it is not destroyed by the conscious intervention of the revolutionary party which, at the head of the masses, takes advantage of the difficulties and crises of capitalism to overthrow it. The experience of World War II emphasizes the profound correctness of these conceptions of Lenin and Trotsky.
“Given the prostration of the proletariat through the betrayal of its mass organisations, the cyclical upswing of the productive forces, the wearing out of machinery, the slashing of wages, leads to an absorption of surplus stocks and the restoration, or partial restoration of the rate of profit. Thus, the way is prepared for a new cyclical upswing which in its turn lays the basis for an even greater slump. (...)
“No matter how devastating the slump, if the workers fail, capitalism will always find a way out of its economic impasse at the cost of the toilers and the preparation of new contradictions. The world crisis of the capitalist system does not end the economic cycle but gives it a different character. The theory of the Stalinists put forward in the last world crisis that this was the last crisis of capitalism from which it would never recover, has been revealed to have been entirely unMarxian. There is a grave danger that this theory will be revived in our own ranks today. .”[xv]
The majority of the leaders of the Fourth International did not listen to the arguments of the RCP. Their lack of understanding caused an incredible amount of confusion in the Trotskyist movement and the whole subsequent history and evolution of the Fourth International was marked by this fact. The destructive line of subordination to petit-bourgeois movements – the adaptation to guerillaism and its tragic consequences in Argentina and Peru, its flirting with Stalinism in Yugoslavia and China, the “invention” of the students as “a new revolutionary factor”, the fatal approving of the POR's adaptation to nationalism during the Bolivian revolution of 1952 – all this was the result of an inability to understand the period that opened up after WW2 and as a consequence, they began the “search” for magic solutions to the real problems in the building of the revolutionary party.
The legacy of Trotsky
The Old Man could not have anticipated in a detailed manner all the events or the way in which the Second World War would end. However, his writings do provide the key, the dialectical method, to understanding, not only the new situation, but also the tasks of the revolutionaries. Despite the historical failure of the leaders of the Fourth International, which effectively destroyed the organization founded by Trotsky, his struggle for a revolutionary International was not in vain.
Although the Marxist movement went through a major setback after the war, especially after the dissolution of the RCP in 1949, the unbroken thread was maintained through the tireless work of Ted Grant. The writings of Ted are the direct continuation of Trotsky and his continued analysis of the world situation helped a new generation understand a complex reality and keep up the struggle against all odds. The unbroken thread between Ted (who died only five years ago, 2006) and Trotsky is what unites the cadres of the International Marxist Tendency with the best traditions of Trotsky.
Seventy-one years after his death, many of Lev Davidovich's perspectives are being vindicated by events. The fall of the USSR, the possibility of which was denied for decades by the Stalinists, revealed the impossibility of building Socialism in one country. Today, many communists, among them Cubans, are reading the writings of Trotsky for the first time, discovering how he anticipated the collapse of “real socialism” almost sixty years ago.
The ideas of Trotsky are also being debated in Venezuela, where president Chávez has quoted him on several occasions and has recommended the reading of the Transitional Programme. The Venezuelan Revolution, which has not been completed, is in itself a brilliant confirmation of his Theory of the Permanent Revolution, i.e. the impossibility of the national bourgeoisie carrying through an agrarian reform and an industrialization of the country. This task falls upon the shoulders of the Venezuelan proletariat, which is currently organizing a big movement for workers' control in the basic industries and the state oil company.
In this article we have tried to show Trotsky's method in the building of the revolutionary party. We think that the struggle for a revolutionary international was neither a waste of time nor a utopian project, but an audacious and courageous attempt to arm a new generation with the theoretical tools that can provide the final victory. The present crisis of capitalism, described even by the bourgeois commentators as the worst recession since the Great Depression of 1929, compels us to re-study the method of Trotsky. If this article has served to assist in this respect, it has been worthwhile.
[End]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[i] Quoted in “Guerra y revolución. Una interpretación alternativa de la Segunda Guerra Mundial”, CEIP, Buenos Aires, 2004. page 24.
[ii] Winston S. Churchill: “Triumph and Tragedy”, page.228-29
[iii] Ibid. page. 262
[iv] Information taken from: Ted Grant: The Italian revolution and the tasks of the British workers, Workers’ International News, Vol.5 No.12, August 1943:
[v] Quoted in Felix Morrow: The Italian Revolution, Fourth International, New York, September 1943, Vol.4 No.9, pp.263-73.
[vi] Quoted in “Guerra y revolución. Una interpretación alternativa de la Segunda Guerra Mundial”, CEIP, Buenos Aires, 2004. Page 28.
[vii] In spite of the treacherous policy of its leaders, the Danish CP grew from 4,000 to 60,000 members just after the end of the war. On the electoral plane it went from 2.4% to 12.5% of the vote in October 1945. But once the party had revealed its reformist intentions it was abandoned and lost nine MPs in the October 1947 elections.
[viii] For a detailed analysis: Lal Khan: Pakistan's Other Story, Aakar Books, Delhi, 2009. page. 72-83
[ix] James P. Cannon: Theses on the American Revolution
[x] Quoted in Ted Grant: History of British Trotskyism, Wellred, London, 2002, page. 130
[xi] The position of the Majority on the inevitability of a period of Bonapartism in Europe is reflected in many of their, writings, among others the articles of Pierre Frank: Democracy or Bonapartism in Europe? and Bonapartism in Europe
[xii] The documents oft the Morrow-Goldman fraction can be found in the following archives: Félix Morrow, Albert Goldman, Jean Van Heijenoort:
[xiii] “The changed relation of forces in Europe and the role of the Fourth International”, published in: Ted Grant: The Unbroken Thread, Fortress Books, London, 1989, page.83-110.
[xiv] Ibid. page, 92-93
[xv] Proposed line of amendment to International Conference Resolution “New Imperialist Peace and the Building of the Parties of the Fourth International”. Workers’ International News, November-December 1946:
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Trotsky and the struggle for a Revolutionary International (1933-1946) – Part One
Written by Patrick Larsen Tuesday, 22 November 2011
The figure of Leon Trotsky has created a new wave of interest among historians and writers of all types. Recently two new books about the Russian revolutionary have appeared; the first being the work of U.S. Professor Robert Service and the second of Bertrand M. Patenaude, a historian at California University. Both of them belong to that class of commercial literature typical of the bourgeoisie, full of factual errors, which tries to present Trotsky as an authoritarian politician who only lost to Stalin because he lacked tactical skills.
Introduction
Another work, much more sympathetic in its style and its content, is the new novel by Leonardo Padura, “The man who loved dogs”. It tells the stories of Trotsky and his assassin, Ramón Mercader, both stories projected on the life of Iván, a Cuban who represents the post-revolutionary generation on the island.
We have dealt with this important contribution elsewhere. But although it has great value in reclaiming the general legacy of Trotsky, it does indeed contain some mistakes in the appreciation that the author has of aspects of Trotsky's political activity.
The main reason is that the majority of facts about his life which are presented in the book have been taken by Padura from Isaac Deutscher's trilogy – The Prophet Unarmed, The Prophet Armed and The Prophet Outcast. This biography, although it contains some interesting facts, has the major disadvantage of having been written by a person who lacked a firm comprehension of the method of Trotsky. He therefore fell into a whole number of misinterpretations of key elements of his life, especially concerning the last phase of it.
What all these books have in common is the absence of a serious analysis of Trotsky's attempt to found a new revolutionary international, the Fourth International. All of them regard it with a certain suspicion, emphasizing its reduced numbers, its isolation from the working masses and the splits which took place in the movement.
While most of Trotsky's biographers were full of praise for his great literary works such as My life or the History of the Russian Revolution they never understood why the creator of the Red Army spent countless hours of his last years writing letters, critiques, manifestos and programmes which only reached a handful of people and in many cases dealt with practical questions in the day-to-day work.
In our opinion this great flaw was mainly due to the fact that all of these writers were intellectuals on the margins of the workers' movement. They did not have the knowledge or the experience of a participant and consequently their books were not written with the methodology of a revolutionary militant.
However, when one reads the hundreds of letters that Trotsky wrote to create and train a new Marxist leadership, and when one studies the activity of his followers during the Second World War, it is impossible not to be impressed, faced with the magnitude of the lessons that this epoch contains for the future.
The objective of this article is, on the one hand, to serve as an introduction to the reading of Trotsky's last writings, and on the other hand also to extract the principal lessons of the attempt to create a Fourth International. For reasons of space, we cannot go into a detailed analysis of the subsequent history of Trotskyism and we will therefore limit ourselves to give an overview of the main reasons for the decline of the Fourth International after the end of WW2. For a more complete history, we recommend the work of Ted Grant: History of British Trotskyism, The origins of the collapse of the Fourth International by Fred Weston and The theoretical origins of the degeneration of the Fourth - Interview with Ted Grant.
In the work of researching the material for this article, it has been necessary to reclaim the real Trotsky, buried under a mountain of distortions and manipulations. By saying this we are not only referring to the monstrous lies of Stalinism nor only to the caricature presented by the bourgeois historians. We also refer to the “theoreticians” of the small self-styled Trotskyist sects, who have hijacked the name of the great revolutionary.
Always fond of internal rows and personal antagonisms, these gentlemen always had a modus operandi, a style and a life completely separated from the real mass movement. Their hysterical denunciations and their schematic views never allowed them to enter into contact with the living workers' movement and consequently they gave a very bad name to Trotskyism; something which has alienated many workers and made them refuse to collaborate with the 4th International and its subsequent fractions.
Trotsky himself, who had a profound knowledge of the psychology of the masses, did everything to throw out sectarianism and educate the cadres in the Bolshevik method of winning the majority. In this article we will show how he made several attempts to push his followers towards the mass organizations, not only to influence them, but also to constantly renovate his own movement, give it new life blood and break with the vicious circle of the small-group environment.
“The most important work of my life”
It was in the year of 1933 that Trotsky came to the conclusion that a new revolutionary international was necessary. Before this, he had maintained the position of building an opposition within the official Communist Parties in order to fight for a genuine Marxist programme. But it was a huge political event which made Trotsky change his mind: the catastrophe in Germany, where the crazy “theory” of the Third Period and the consequent refusal to form a united front with the Social Democrats, whom they called “social-fascists”, which opened the gates for Hitler to come to power.
From that moment on, Trotsky came to the conclusion that the Party and the International not only had been incapable of taking a correct stance in the decisive moments. They had also been organically incapable of learning from their mistakes and they had proclaimed the big defeat of the German working class as if it was a victory (“After Hitler, our turn!”). He therefore thought that such an organization was doomed and could not be reconquered as an instrument for the proletarian revolution.
Contrary to his biographers, Lev Davidovich considered that the task of forging this new International was the “greatest work of his life”. In 1935, in one of his lesser-known works, Diary in Exile, he wrote the following:
"And still I think that 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’ (i.e., 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. And I am in a complete agreement with Lenin (or rather Turgenev) that the worst vice is to be more than 55 years old! I need at least about five more years of uninterrupted work to ensure the succession."[i]
The first steps: The bloc of the four
According to Trotsky, the new international would of course not fall from the sky from one day to another, but would be the result of a process of formation. It would include different sectors of the workers' movement who had arrived at the same conclusion or were drawing close to it. The degeneration of the Third (Communist) International and the bankruptcy of the Second International, in the context of the rise of fascism and the worst crisis in the history of capitalism created a vacuum on the political scene.
It was in such a situation that Trotsky received with great enthusiasm the news of the formation and the rapid turn to the left of the ILP, the Independent Labour Party of Great Britain. The leaders of the ILP were even for a short time flirting with the idea of setting up a new revolutionary international, although they subsequently abandoned that position. Other organizations, especially left-wing splits from the Socialist parties in Europe, were coming closer to the very same conclusion.
The followers of Trotsky, the Bolshevik-Leninists, participated in that debate and in the conference which was held by fourteen labour organizations and parties in Paris in August of 1933. This meeting had certain similarities with the conference of Zimmerwald in 1915, which, in spite of the enormous theoretical confusion, organized those who opposed the First World War. Just as in Zimmerwald, in the Paris conference a left and a rightwing appeared. The adherents of the left were four organizations who came out signing a declaration for a new International. These included, apart from the International Left Opposition, the SAP of Germany and two Dutch organizations, the RSP and the OSP.
This initiative, in spite of the programmatical limitations and the subsequent disagreements, showed how Trotsky was absolutely willing to collaborate with other groups, even with people who came from other traditions within the workers' movement. He was never afraid of an open and honest discussion with groups or individuals who were moving in the direction of Bolshevism. However, at the same time he insisted on transparency and honesty on the part of his allies and reserved the right to always put forward his own position:
“Revolutionary irreconcilability consists not in demanding our “leadership” be recognized a priori, not in presenting our allies at every occasion with ultimatums and threatening with a break, with the removal of signatures, etc. We leave such methods on one hand, to the Stalinist bureaucrats, on the other to some impatient allies. We realize full well that disagreements between us and our allies will arise more than once. But we hope, more than that, we are convinced, that the march of events will reveal in deeds the impossibility of participating simultaneously in the principled bloc of four and in the unprincipled bloc of the majority. Without resorting to any unbecoming “ultimatums”, we claim however our full right not only to raise our banners but also to state openly to our allies our opinions regarding what we consider to be their mistakes. We expect from them the same frankness. Our alliance will thus be strengthened."
The French Turn
Trotsky was completely conscious of the weakness of his forces, not only from a numerical point of view, but also from the point of view of the lack of political experience of his followers. In one of the discussions he had with a visitor in his house in April of 1939 he explained it in these terms:
“We have comrades who came to us, as Naville and others, 15 or 16 or more years ago when they were young boys. Now they are mature people and their whole conscious life they have had only blows, defeats and terrible defeats on an international scale and they are more or less acquainted with this situation. They appreciate very highly the correctness of their conceptions and they can analyze, but they never had the capacity to penetrate, to work with the masses and they have not acquired it.”[ii]
This was one of the main reasons why he began to recommend a sharp turn towards the Socialist parties, and especially their youth organizations, beginning in France. In his opinion, the Trotskyists should enter these organizations to win the best proletarian elements. This tactic, which was later referred to as “entryism”, was not only about getting a numerical growth in terms of militants, but also about giving new life to the internal regimes of the Trotskyist groups.
This was a vital point for the educating of Marxist cadres in the harsh school of the class struggle. From the Old Man's point of view, it was not sufficient merely to comment on the life of a party from the perspective of an external observer. On the contrary, it was crucial to converge with the masses in revolutionary action, fighting shoulder to shoulder with the left against the right:
“It is not enough for a revolutionist to have correct ideas. Let us not forget that correct ideas have already been set down in Capital and The Communist Manifesto. But that has not prevented false ideas from being broadcast. It is the task of the revolutionary party to weld together the ideas with the mass labour movement. Only in this manner can an idea become a driving force.
“A revolutionary organization does not mean a paper and its readers. One can write and read revolutionary articles day in and day out and still remain in reality outside of the revolutionary movement. One can give the labour organizations good advice from the sidelines. That is something. But that still does not make a revolutionary organization.(...)
“In relation to the Socialist Party, the League has shown not only insufficient initiative but also a hidebound sectarianism. Instead of taking for its task the creation of a faction inside the SFIO just as soon as the crisis in the latter became obvious, the League demanded that every Socialist become convinced of the correctness of our ideas and leave his mass organization to join the group of La Verite readers. In order to create an internal faction, it was necessary to pursue the mass movement, to adapt oneself to the environment, to carry on a menial daily work. Precisely in this very decisive field the League has not been able to make any progress up to the present – with very few exceptions. A great deal of valuable time was allowed to be lost. (...)
“The criticism, the ideas, the slogans of the League are in general correct, but in this present period particularly inadequate. The revolutionary ideas must be transformed into life itself every day through the experiences of the masses themselves. But how can the League explain this to them when it is itself cut off from the experience of the masses? It is necessary to add: several comrades do not even see the need of this experience. It seems to them to be sufficient to form an opinion on the basis of newspaper accounts they read and then give it expression in an article or in a talk. Yet if the most correct ideas do not reflect directly the ideas and actions of the mass, they will escape the attention of the masses altogether” (Trotsky, The League Faced with a Turn, June 1934[iii])
Afterwards, Trotsky made the same recommendations for his followers in England concerning the ILP and in the United States concerning the Socialist Party. In many cases his followers received the advice with a lot of conservatism and opposed entering the organizations in question, or in some cases only a handful entered and did so too late to influence the left-wing tendencies that were developing in the rank and file of the Socialist parties.
Trotsky and the Spanish Revolution
The country where this refusal on the part of Trotsky's comrades to accept his advice generated most controversy was Spain. The study of Trotsky's position in regard to the Spanish Revolution could merit a whole article or a book apart[iv], but in this occasion we will limit ourselves to the most important lessons.
Since the proclamation of the Second Republic in April of 1931, Spain had lived through a revolution of enormous dimensions in all spheres of social and political life. The subsequent incapacity of the republican-socialist government to keep its promises, especially the agrarian reform which would have benefitted the poor and exploited peasants, led to the electoral defeat of the left in the elections of November 1933. What followed afterwards is known as the “bienio negro” (the two black years).
The heroic resistance on the part of the workers, when faced with the entry of the ultra-right-wing CEDA party in 1934, represented the beginning of the armed insurrection and the proletarian commune in Asturias. This experiment was only cut across by the ferocious repression on the part of the army, led by general Franco. This was the very same officer who led a new coup d'etat in July of 1936 with the aim of destroying the revolution once and for all. But the brave workers of Catalonia and in other parts of Spain rose up and prevented a Fascist victory. In effect they made themselves the masters of Barcelona and other parts of Spain. Thus the Spanish civil war commenced in July 1936 and lasted for three years, up until Franco's final victory in April of 1939.
This was the context in which Trotsky tried to build a revolutionary party which could play the same role as the Bolshevik Party had played in Russia in 1917. A victory for the revolution in Spain would have acted as a real earthquake, which in turn would have changed the whole balance of forces internationally. That is why the amount of attention which Trotsky paid in dealing with the Spanish revolution, (something that the majority of his biographers ignore), is completely justified.
From 1930 onwards, one of his old friends, his former secretary, Andreu Nin, had been living in Spain. Nin was a relatively experienced cadre who had been many years in the Soviet Union, working as the President of the Profintern, the Federation of red trade-unions. From his arrival in Spain, he began to correspond with Trotsky about the problems of the revolution and the tasks of the Spanish communists. Nin began to develop more and more differences with the Old Man. While the former wanted a fusion with the right-wing-Communist group of JoaquÃn Maurin on an eclectic programme, Trotsky insisted on maintaining ideological clarity and discipline.
In the course of the year 1934, the same phenomenon of radicalization of the Socialist Youth which had been seen in France was repeated in Spain. The Spanish Socialist Youth even reached a point where they invited the Trotskyists to enter the Socialist Party in order to “bolshevize” it[v]. The main leader of the Socialist Party left, Largo Caballero, who organized his followers around the paper Claridad, spoke in favour of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and quoted the writings of Lenin on more than one occasion. But instead of grasping this historic opportunity, Nin and his friends opposed Trotsky's call to enter the PSOE and the FSJ. The Stalinists were more intelligent and they managed to make a fusion between their own miniscule youth organization and the Socialist Youth, thus conquering a solid base in the working class youth.
The fusion of Nin's group (Izquierda Comunista) with Maurin's Catalan group (The BOC), led to the formation of the POUM (The Workers' Party for Marxist Unification). Although it was very much accused of being Trotskyist by the Stalinists and although its members showed a lot of courage during the civil war (including Nin himself who was brutally tortured and murdered by the Stalinists), the POUM was never a Trotskyist party. Instead of carrying out the revolution from below, building the power of the workers' and peasant committees, it vacillated between reformism and revolution.
It recognized the legitimacy of the Catalan bourgeois government, the Generalitat, and even entered it with Nin as Minister of Justice. They accepted the dissolution of the militias and the disarmament, something which the government was promoting with the excuse of creating a single professional army. The leaders of the POUM also decided to call upon its militants to abandon the barricades during the famous May Days in Barcelona in 1937, when the Stalinists attempted to destroy workers’ control in the Telephone Exchange.
All these actions were severely condemned by Trotsky who in the last instance explained the defeat of the Spanish Revolution by the lack of a genuine revolutionary party. In his brilliant, unfinished article Class, Party and Leadership, he pointed out that the destruction of the Spanish Revolution was in no way due to a “low level of consciousness” on the part of the working class, but rather due to the betrayal of the leaders:
“The workers’ line of march at all times cut a certain angle to the line of the leadership. And at the most critical moments this angle became 180 degrees. The leadership then helped directly or indirectly to subdue the workers by armed force. In May 1937 the workers of Catalonia rose not only without their own leadership but against it(...)
“The proletariat may “tolerate” for a long time a leadership that has already suffered a complete inner degeneration but has not as yet had the opportunity to express this degeneration amid great events. A great historic shock is necessary to reveal sharply the contradiction between the leadership and the class. The mightiest historical shocks are wars and revolutions. Precisely for this reason the working class is often caught unawares by war and revolution. But even in cases where the old leadership has revealed its internal corruption, the class cannot improvise immediately a new leadership, especially if it has not inherited from the previous period strong revolutionary cadres capable of utilizing the collapse of the old leading party.(...)
“Victory is not at all the ripe fruit of the proletariat’s “maturity.” Victory is a strategical task. It is necessary to utilize the favourable conditions of a revolutionary crisis in order to mobilize the masses; taking as a starting point the given level of their ‘maturity’ it is necessary to propel them forward, teach them to understand that the enemy is by no means omnipotent, that it is torn asunder with contradictions, that behind the imposing facade panic prevails. Had the Bolshevik party failed to carry out this work, there couldn’t even be talk of the victory of the proletarian revolution. The Soviets would have been crushed by the counter-revolution and the little sages of all countries would have written articles and books on the keynote that only uprooted visionaries could dream in Russia of the dictatorship of the proletariat, so small numerically and so immature. [vi]
Incredibly, these very same arguments about a so-called “immaturity” and “low level of consciousness of the masses” are used by reformists in relation to the Venezuelan revolution today. Their aim is to hide their own incapability of completing the revolution by expropriating the capitalists, the bankers and the landlords.
Just as in Spain, in Venezuela the central problem is the lack of a real Marxist leadership which can guide the revolution. And as in Spain, the activity of the Venezuelan masses was also 180 degrees in contradiction with the activities of the reformist ministers during the 11, 12th and 13th of April 2002. While the latter were in hiding or fleeing from the coup d'etát, the masses courageously opposed the coup, taking the control of the streets and fraternizing with the revolutionary elements in the army.
But precisely as with the Spanish revolution, in Venezuela the revolution is running the risk of a defeat, because there is no mass Marxist leadership to drive all the energy of the masses towards the taking of power.
The debates with the leaders of the American SWP:The method of transitional demands
The largest party of Trotsky's movement was without doubt the American Socialist Workers' Party. Its leaders had followed his advice and in a short space of time they had managed to make a successful fusion with the centrist party of A.J. Muste (The American Workers' Party), in reality with the purpose of winning the followers of the AWP over to Trotskyism, without allowing any political concessions. Afterwards they had entered the Socialist Party and effectively won over its youth organization, the Young Peoples' Socialist League. They had also managed to conquer important positions, as the one in Minneapolis, where they led the famous Teamsters Strike in 1934. The SWP had a membership of around 2,000 towards the end of the 30s.
However, Trotsky was completely aware of the theoretical shortcomings of the SWP leaders. He tried to prepare them for the great events that lay ahead by providing them with an insight to the dialectical method of analysis and a militant attitude towards the intervention in the mass movement. During 1938 and 1939 he held various discussions, with Cannon, Shactmann, Vincent Dunne, Joseph Hansen and other leaders of the American party.
The debates lasted for whole days at a time and had a widespread character, not just dealing with the particular problems of the practical work in the United States, but also about general problems of revolutionary tactics and strategy. The notes taken from the discussions were subsequently published and they constitute a real goldmine of lessons for revolutionary work.
The main point which ran through all the discussions was the method with which one could connect with the most active layers of the masses and consequently, the transitional demands to win them over. At that time, there was an increasing mood in favour of united proletarian action, but the class lacked a party on a national level.
Reflecting this mood, the LNPL (Labour's Non-Partisan League) was launched as a political instrument of the workers. However, the LNPL was launched by trade union leaders who merely wanted it to restrict it as being an office under their bureaucratic control which would recommend the vote for the bourgeois candidate Roosevelt. The SWP leaders were doubtful as to whether they should participate in the LNPL but Trotsky insisted on the struggle for “a policy which enables the trade unions to put their weight on the balance”.
He explained that it was necessary to counter-pose revolutionary demands to those of the reformists within the LNPL, in a concrete and audacious manner which could be understood by the workers:
“We are for a party, for an independent party of the toiling masses who will take power in the state. We must concretize it—we are for the creation of factory committees, for workers’ control of industry through the factory committees. All these questions are now pending in the air. They speak of technocracy, and put forward the slogan of ‘production for use.’ We oppose this charlatan formula and advance the workers’ control of production through the factory committees. (...)
“We say, the factory committees should see the books. This program we must develop parallel with the idea of a labour party in the unions, and workers’ militia. Otherwise it is an abstraction and an abstraction is a weapon in the hands of the opposing class. (...)
“Naturally we must make our first step in such a way as to accumulate experience for practical work, not to engage in abstract formulas, but develop a concrete program of action and demands in the sense that this transitional program issues from the conditions of capitalist society today, but immediately leads over the limits of capitalism (...)
“Then we also have the possibility of spreading the slogans of our transitional program and see the reaction of the masses. We will see what slogans should be selected, what slogans abandoned, but if we give up our slogans before the experience, before seeing the reaction of the masses, then we can never advance. .”[vii]
Faced with the scepticism, especially on the part of Shactmann, Trotsky pointed out that the slogan for a workers' militia was a necessity inherent in the concrete situation of the United States, even though this country was very far away and the threat of fascism seemed quite distant. He underlined that on the one hand the events of Europe would have a huge impact on the consciousness of the North American workers and on the other hand that the workers' militia could be proposed in a concrete way to protect shop stewards and picket lines from scabs and the bosses’ armed gangs.
Another controversial point was about the Ludlow amendment, by a bourgeois member of congress proposing a referendum on the participation of the United States in the Second World War. The schematic and abstract way of thinking of the SWP leaders had led the party to reject every attempt of using this slogan in favour of the referendum.
Trotsky opposed himself directly to Cannon and his colleagues and gave them an important lesson on how to tackle the question of democratic demands and connect them with the struggle for socialism. In the first place he explained that, until you can overthrow the bourgeois democracy, you have to take advantage of the means that it gives to you (regardless of how limited these are), in order to mobilize the masses in favour of your programme.
Of course he did not for one instance believe that a referendum could stop the outbreak of the war, nor decide whether the United States would take part in it or not. But Trotsky maintained that “We cannot dissipate the illusions [of the masses] a priori, only in the course of the struggle”. He added that it was crucial to say openly to the masses that the revolutionaries would fight side by side with their class brothers and sisters in favour of this referendum proposed by Ludlow, showing in practice that he wasn't really interested in realizing it, and that the working class could only trust its own forces in order to achieve such a referendum.
The words of Trotsky about the Ludlow amendment could perfectly have been written yesterday about the democratic demands in Tunisia and Egypt, where millions are struggling against the remnants of the dictatorships of Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak. It is a good answer to all those sectarian elements who reject the necessity of giving support to democratic demands, among them for a Constituent Assembly.
In all these discussions we can observe the dialectical method of Trotsky in contrast with the mechanical ideas of sectarianism.
Part 2 ⇒
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[i] Trotsky, Diary In Exile, pp. 53-4
[ii] Writings of Leon Trotsky, : Fighting against the stream. 1939.
[iii] Writings of Leon Trotsky: The league faced with a turn, June 1934
[iv] Among the writings that analyze Trotsky's position on the Spanish Revolution, I would like to highlight the introduction written by Pierre Broué to the Spanish edition of his works on Spain and also the article by Juan Manuel Municio, “Trotsky, La izquierda comunista y el POUM” published in Marxismo Hoy No. 2, 1995.
[v] For a more detailed historical analysis of the development of the Spanish Socialist Youth, I recommend the following work: Pierre Broué: The Spanish Socialist Youth (When Carillo was a leftist), published in Revolutionary History, 2007.
[vi] Writings of Leon Trotsky: The class, the party and the leadership. 1940.
[vii] Writings of Leon Trotsky: On the Labor Party Question in the United States, 1938.
Trotsky and the struggle for a Revolutionary international (1933-1946) - Part three
Written by Patrick Larsen Monday, 19 December 2011
In the third part of our article on the method of Trotsky in his struggle for a Revolutionary international, we will analyze the significance of the Proletarian Military Policy and also the death of Lev Davidovich and its repercussions in the movement. Furthermore, we will make a short and precise balance sheet of the work of the Fourth International during the Second World War and the political mistakes of its leaders which later gave rise to its collapse. [part 1]
Trotsky and the Second World War: The Proletarian Military Policy
Leon Trotsky. Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R15068 / CC-BY-SAIn order to understand the line that Trotsky developed in his last writings, it is necessary to have a general idea of the historical situation that the revolutionaries faced at that time. After Hitler's victory in Germany, the eyes of all workers of Europe were fixed on the rising triumph of fascism in one country after the other. The installation of fascist regimes in Austria, Spain, part of Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc were an alarm signal for the world working class. Subsequently the German army also occupied Holland, France and Denmark.
The imperialist powers of Great Britain and the United States were of course not opposed to Hitler for moral reasons, although they later sold the idea of a “war against fascism”. As a matter of fact, the British Prime Minister Churchill had been a great admirer of fascism in its early phase, applauding racism and the “domination of the white man”.
What really concerned the allied powers was not “democracy”, nor “human rights”. During the war they showed their own cynical brutality with the completely unnecessary massacres in Dresden, Nagasaki and Hiroshima. No, what really mattered were their own imperialist interests, that is to say the markets, raw materials and zones of influence.
Trotsky did not have any illusions whatsoever in the propaganda of the western countries and defined from the very beginning WW2 as an imperialist war, a continuation of the First World War. However, he understood the completely healthy, instinctive rejection of fascism on part of the workers and their natural desire to fight it. In his opinion it was not sufficient to simply oppose the war. The workers had to develop their own policy in this terrain. In his last article he stressed the following:
“The present war, as we have stated on more than one occasion, is a continuation of the last war. But a continuation does not signify a repetition. As a general rule, a continuation signifies a development, a deepening, a sharpening. Our policy, the policy of the revolutionary proletariat toward the second imperialist war is a continuation of the policy elaborated during the last imperialist war, primarily under Lenin’s leadership. But a continuation does not signify a repetition. In this case too, continuation signifies a development, a deepening and a sharpening.
“During the last war not only the proletariat as a whole but also its vanguard and, in a certain sense, the vanguard of this vanguard was caught unaware. The elaboration of the principles of revolutionary policy toward the war began at a time when the war was already in full blaze and the military machine exercised unlimited rule. One year after the outbreak of the war, the small revolutionary minority was still compelled to accommodate itself to a centrist majority at the Zimmerwald Conference. Prior to the February revolution and even afterwards, the revolutionary elements felt themselves to be not contenders for power but the extreme left opposition.
“Even Lenin relegated the socialist revolution to a more or less distant future.... If that is how Lenin viewed the situation, then there is hardly any need of talking about the others.
“This political position of the extreme left wing expressed itself most graphically on the question of the defence of the fatherland.
“In 1915 Lenin referred in his writings to revolutionary wars which the victorious proletariat would have to wage. But it was a question of an indefinite historical perspective and not of tomorrow’s task. The attention of the revolutionary wing was centred on the question of the defence of the capitalist fatherland. The revolutionists naturally replied to this question in the negative. This was entirely correct. But this purely negative answer served as the basis for propaganda and for training the cadres but it could not win the masses who did not want a foreign conqueror. In Russia prior to the war the Bolsheviks constituted four-fifths of the proletarian vanguard, that is, of the workers participating in political life (newspapers, elections, etc.). Following the February revolution the unlimited rule passed into the hands of defencists, the Mensheviks and the SR’s. True enough, the Bolsheviks in the space of eight months conquered the overwhelming majority of the workers. But the decisive role in this conquest was played not by the refusal to defend the bourgeois fatherland but by the slogan: “All Power to the Soviets!” And only by this revolutionary slogan! The criticism of imperialism, its militarism, the renunciation of the defence of bourgeois democracy and so on could have never conquered the overwhelming majority of the people to the side of the Bolsheviks.”[i]
His instructions to the revolutionaries were very clear:
“The militarization of the masses is further intensified every day. We reject the grotesque pretension of doing away with this militarization through empty pacifist protests. All the great questions will be decided in the next epoch arms in hand. The workers should not fear arms; on the contrary they should learn to use them. Revolutionists no more separate themselves from the people during war than in peace. A Bolshevik strives to become not only the best trade unionist but also the best soldier.
“We do not wish to permit the bourgeoisie to drive untrained or half trained soldiers at the last hour onto the battlefield. We demand that the state immediately provide the workers and the unemployed with the possibility of learning how to handle the rifle, the hand grenade, the machine gun, the cannon, the airplane, the submarine, and the other tools of war. Special military schools are necessary in close connection with the trade unions so that the workers can become skilled specialists of the military art, able to hold posts as commanders.”[ii]
In June 1940, the French bourgeoisie capitulated to Hitler and surrendered Paris without putting up any resistance. Trotsky thought that this event confirmed that the national bourgeoisies of the allied block were not genuinely interested in defending the workers against fascism. For this reason he declared that the revolutionaries ought to agitate amongst the masses for the passing over of the military high command to the hands of the working class, the only class really capable of eradicating fascism:
“The Institute of Public Opinion established that over 70% of the workers are in favour of conscription. It is a fact of tremendous importance! Workers take every question seriously. If the Fatherland should be defended, then the defence cannot be abandoned to the arbitrary will of individuals. It should be a common attitude. This realistic conception shows how right we were in rejecting beforehand purely negative pacifist or semi-pacifist attitudes. We place ourselves on the same ground as the 70% of the workers; against Green and Lewis, and on this premise we begin to develop a campaign in order to oppose the workers to their exploiters in the military field. You, workers, wish to defend and improve democracy. We, of the Fourth International, wish to go further. However, we are ready to defend democracy with you, only on condition that it should be a real defence, and not a betrayal in the Petain manner. ”[iii]
In a discussion on “American problems”[iv], he repeated the same ideas in an even sharper way. In his opinion the revolutionaries ought to say the following:
“We will defend the United States with a workers’ army, with workers’ officers, with a workers’ government, etc. If we are not pacifists, who wait for a better future, and if we are active revolutionists, our job is to penetrate into the whole military machine.
(...)
“We must use the example of France to the very end. We must say, “I warn you, workers, that they (the bourgeoisie) will betray you! Look at Petain, who is a friend of Hitler. Shall we have the same thing happen in this country? We must create our own machine, under workers’ control.” We must be careful not to identify ourselves with the chauvinists, nor with the confused sentiments of self-preservation, but we must understand their feelings and adapt ourselves to these feelings critically, and prepare the masses for a better understanding of the situation, otherwise we will remain a sect, of which the pacifist variety is the most miserable. ”
The key point was to reveal the organic incapacity of the bourgeoisie to really put up a defence against Fascism and in that way adjust the revolutionary agitation to the thought and concerns of the masses. On the other hand, the emphasis on the militarization of the revolutionary organization signified that Trotsky advised his followers to search for all means to come closer to the working class and penetrate it in order to provide the revolutionary programme necessary for victory.
In this situation all the attention of the workers was principally on the war, in some armament factories they worked for 14 to 16 hours a day. Trotsky understood that every abstract slogan of opposition to the war would only reinforce the isolation of the forces of Bolshevik-Leninism from the masses. Without ceasing to explain the real character of the imperialist war, Lev Davidovich instructed the national sections to adapt the transitional slogans to the concrete stage in the development of the consciousness of the masses. It is no coincidence that the Old Man explained how Bolshevism essentially was the history of “sharp and sudden turns” in tactics and slogans in each given moment.
The Fourth International during WW2
Trotsky's death at the hands of the GPU agent Ramón Mercader del RÃo on the 20th of August of 1940 was a tremendous blow to the forces of the Fourth International. We have seen in the previous parts of this article how even the leaders of the American SWP lacked a sound theoretical capacity and the fundamental dialectical method with which Trotsky was able to understand the changing objective situation. To be honest, we would have to admit that the Fourth International was founded on very unstable organisational bases in most countries.
One of the worst examples was probably France, where the members of the official section, the POI (Workers' International Party), had split at the beginning of 1939 over the question of entry into the PSOP, a centrist split from the Socialist Party. The section was in a state of complete chaos when France was overrun by the Nazis in June 1940. Rapidly the main leaders (Jean Rous, Pierre Naville, Joannès Bardin [Boitel]), adapted to bourgeois nationalism and/or left the Trotskyist movement altogether. New forces, most of them very young people, had to rebuild the organization under very difficult conditions.
Of course, we do not want to discard the heroic work that hundreds of Trotsky's co-thinkers conducted in a Europe under the iron heel of fascism. Nor do we intend to forget the many martyrs of the Bolshevik-Leninist movement. It is appropriate to mention just a couple of the most important examples:
In spite of various waves of repression against its main cadres, the Trotskyist organization of France managed to publish 73 editions of its paper, La Verité, which circulated in 15,000 copies per issue. The Gestapo managed to find and assassinate dozens of Trotskyists, including the section's general secretary, Marcel Hic, who was deported to the concentration camp of Buchenwald and subsequently Dora where he was killed.[v]
The French Trotskyists even managed to publish a paper in German, called Arbeiter und Soldat (Worker and Soldier), which was specifically directed towards winning over the German troops to revolutionary positions. Its editor, Paul Widelin, was arrested in 1944 and murdered by the Gestapo.
In Belgium, one of the countries where the International had had a sizeable force, the repression also put its stamp: Well-known leaders such as León Lesoil and Abraham, among dozens of other Trotskyists, were arrested and executed. In spite of all this, they managed to publish a paper in French (Lenin's Voice) and another in Flemish (The Class Struggle) in 10,000 and 7,000 copies respectively.
In Greece, Pantelis Pouliopoulis, was murdered along with a group of seventeen Trotskyist at the hands of the Italian occupying force in June 1943. But before he died, he had the courage to give a revolutionary speech to the Italian soldiers in their own language, an act which provoked mutiny among the soldiers who afterwards refused to kill him. It was the officers who had to do the bloody work and execute them.
One of the most tragic losses for the movement was probably that of Pietro Tresso [Blasco], one of the first members of the Left Opposition of the Italian CP. Although he managed to escape from the prison in Marseilles in France, he was kidnapped by the Stalinists and murdered.
In this short summary, we cannot go into all the details, but it would be incorrect to forget mentioning the heroic work of the Trotskyists in Sri Lanka and Indochina (Vietnam). During the war, the followers of Trotsky in both countries opposed the bloody oppression of British Imperialism, while the Stalinists sacrificed any pretension of anti-imperialist struggle in the name of their “sacred alliance” with the allied powers.
Later on, this line made the CP of India accept the criminal 1947 division of the country on religious lines, which led to the creation of a Muslim state (Pakistan) and the abortion, through violence, of the revolution. In contrast the Trotskyists build a strong party in Vietnam which even won the local elections of Saigon in 1939. Tragically, the main figure in this group, the legendary Ta Thu Thau, was executed by the Stalinists in September 1945, probably on direct orders of Ho Chi Minh.[vi] In Sri Lanka the first nucleus of the LSSP (Lanka Sama Samaja Party), affiliated to the Fourth International, was formed and led huge general strike movements against the colonial powers. It quickly rose to be the second political party on the island.
The Trotskyists and the Proletarian Military Policy
Although these are all signs of great sacrifice and consistent work, we cannot avoid making a critical balance-sheet of the politics of the Bolshevik-Leninists during the war. Let us remember the central conception of Trotsky's Proletarian Military Policy: Connect with the anti-fascist sentiment of the masses and above all prove the organic inability of the bourgeoisie to organize the fight against fascism, showing that only the proletariat could destroy the roots of Hitler's and Mussolini's regimes.
But, with some important exceptions that we shall investigate later (especially the WIL/RCP of Great Britain), it can be said that the great majority of the Trotskyist groups and parties opposed the Military Policy, or at least did not understand it. Several national sections, including the Greek, the official British one (RSL) and the Spanish group led by Grandizo Munis, rejected the new policy because they regarded it as a concession to social-chauvinism. They therefore maintained the position of “revolutionary defeatism” which Lenin had held during WW1, but which the new situation rendered impractical and which condemned them to total isolation. The Belgian section even went to the extreme of censoring some parts of the May 1940 Emergency Conference Manifesto which Trotsky had written.
The other big problem was the incomprehension of the concept of “militarization”. The Proletarian Military Policy was not simply a propagandistic idea but above all a practical orientation of Trotsky to his followers. As he had explained in his History of the Russian Revolution “The majority is not to be counted, it is to be conquered”: The Trotskyists had to conquer the masses, beginning in the armed forces. We find very few examples of systematic work in this respect. Although the French Trotskyists had a few phrases in their document on the importance of the Partisan movement, there was no organic participation in it.
The French historian Pierre Broué made some valuable reflections on this question. In a critical article, published in his León Trotsky, he said the following:
“All the evidence shows that Trotsky’s appeal for the line of armed struggle and his proposal that revolutionary Socialists should become ‘militarists’ in order to play their rôle in a militarised world, are missing in this conception, or rather reduced to a secondary, ‘partisan’ level, entirely subordinated to ‘the struggle in the factories’. The discovery that ‘the armed struggle’ exerted an attractive force upon the masses must have presented many problems in the absence of the dimension which Trotsky contributed on ‘militarization’.
(...)
“In the same order of ideas, the hesitancy with which Trotskyists looked at armed resistance suggests that it would be interesting to study how the revolution was conceived within the Fourth International during the war. It seems sometimes to have been conceived as something apocalyptic, which would occur independently of what was going on, and not as a result of being worked for. Had their almost exclusively ‘propagandist’ education, involving the use of the weapons of denunciation and ‘explanation’ – which clearly were the essential activities of an organisation the leaders of which felt themselves to be “swimming against the stream” – prepared the cadres for such a belief? ”[vii]
A qualitatively different example: The WIL and the RCP
There were of course exceptions to this. Some groups and individuals tried to apply the Proletarian Military Policy to the day-to-day political work. The American SWP, pressurized by Trotsky until his death, had formally approved the policy and carried it out partially, defending it publicly and also in the court rooms when they were prosecuted by the state for “subversive activity” in the Minneapolis Trials of 1941[viii]. As a result, the SWP did experience a notable growth throughout that period, although it should be said that Cannon and the other American leaders put all the emphasis in the purely propaganda aspect of the work and not in the political work in the armed forces.
A group which did in fact carry out the Proletarian Militant Policy in an energetic fashion was the Workers International League of Great Britain – from 1944 known as the Revolutionary Communist Party. The first nucleus of this group was formed in 1937 with immigrants from South Africa such as Ralph Lee and Ted Grant.
The state of the different Trotskyist groups was particularly discomforting in Britain, where the majority had refused the advice of Trotsky to enter the Independent Labour Party in 1934 and afterwards his proposal to turn towards the Labour Party. The composition of the existing groups was very bad, most of the members came from petit-bourgeois circles and the internal environment was very closed. The militants spent more time on internal quarrels than on the real political work.
After an attempt at reforming the existing grouplets, Ralph Lee, Ted Grant, Jock Haston and a few others decided to leave them and form a new group on a healthy basis, orientated one hundred per cent towards the working class. They founded the WIL with only seven comrades in 1938.
In September of that year they rejected an attempt on the part of Cannon and other SWP representatives to make a unification of all groups on an unprincipled basis. The WIL comrades explained that they were in favour of unity but only on a firm political basis. They stressed the importance of Labour Party and youth work and also on the Proletarian Military Policy. When it was evident that the other groups were not in agreement, the WIL discarded the fusion and foresaw that the unity of three groups on a politically heterogeneous platform would lead to five or six divisions and splits in the near future.
That was exactly what happened. While the “unified” RSL distinguished itself with its constant fragmentations and passivity during almost all of the war, the WIL – which had only seven members in early 1938 – grew rapidly, transforming itself into an important political force with around five hundred members at the end of the war. If we analyze this carefully, we will notice that it was the successful application of Trotsky's policy which made the difference.
By accepting the Proletarian Military Policy, the WIL also adapted it to the concrete situation in Britain, formulating a programme which included demanding a Labour Party government to fight against fascism, the formation of a unified workers' army of trained battalions of the trade unions and with the election of the officers. Cutting across the monstrous lies of the British bourgeoisie, the WIL also agitated for the complete liberation of the Colonies, thus enabling a real fight against fascism on a world scale.
Rejecting every pretension of pacifism, the WIL ordered all its members to enter the armed forces if they were called up. Inside the army, they were instructed to carry out real revolutionary work together with their class brothers and sisters, gaining the respect as the best soldiers in the army. WIL members who were at the North African front of the British Army made use of the legal forums, the assemblies known as the “Army Bureau of Current Affairs – ABCA”, in order to patiently explain the real significance of the war. In several instances, they won the majority of the ABCAs, as in Benghazi in Libya and in Cairo in Egypt.
Even in the British air force, the RAF, the WIL managed to do important political work, through the pilot Frank Ward who gave classes to other pilots in the programme of the Fourth International. The mood among various sectors of the army was explosive, especially in the Eighth Army in the North African desert. Many soldiers confessed that they wanted to take the arms back to Britain, once the war was over, in order to ensure that things would change!
As the initial wave of war euphoria began to dissipate among the working masses, several struggles took place in industry, where the workers were working up to fourteen hours daily to produce the war supplies. At the same time, the Communist Party made a 180-degree summersault, from a position of opposition to the war, to blind support for the Churchill government. The reason was, evidently, Hitler's attack on Russia in 1941 which obliged Stalin to change policy in order to approach his “democratic allies”. This was why the British CP began to play a directly strike-breaking role after 1941, denouncing every labour conflict as a “sabotage against the anti-fascist war”.
This situation gave the WIL huge opportunities for intervening among the working masses and participating in the strikes that took place during the war. The year 1942 saw a big upturn in the number of strikes and WIL members intervened successfully in some of the most important ones, such as the apprentice strikes at Tyneside, Rolls Royce Aircraft Works, and Glasgow, in August of 1941 and again in July 1943, in the Barnbow Royal Ordnance Factory in June 1943, and in the transport strike in Yorkshire in May of 1943.
We have stressed the example of the WIL here because it shows that the Trotskyists were not automatically condemned to isolation because of the objective situation. On the contrary, we have seen how a small group armed with a correct programme, orientation and tactics can conduct very important work, while a larger organization which does not know how to adapt itself to a new situation is doomed to impotence.
If the Fourth International, as a world organization, had followed the policy of Trotsky with the same ability as the WIL, its subsequent development would probably have been very different. In the next part of this article, we shall see what possibilities and challenges the end of the Second World War put in front of the revolutionaries....
Part 4 ⇒
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Notes
[i] LDT: Bonapartism, Fascism and War. Published in October 1940.
[ii] LDT: Manifesto of the Fourth International on Imperialist War.
[iii] LDT: How to really defend democracy. 1940. My emphasis, PL
[iv] LDT: Some Questions on American Problems. August 1940
[v] See Rodolf Prager, “The Fourth International during the Second World War” in Revolutionary History: Vol.1 No.3, Autumn 1988. War and Revolution in Europe: 1939-1945
[vi] See Revolutionary History: Vol.3 No.2, Autumn 1990: Vietnam. Workers’ Revolution and National Independence
[vii] Pierre Broué: How Trotsky and the Trotskyists faced WWII.
[viii] Cannon's speech in the Minneapolis Trials was later published under the title “Socialism on Trial”.
Trotsky and the struggle for a Revolutionary International (1933-1946) - Part four
Written by Patrick Larsen Thursday, 01 March 2012
In this fourth and final part of Patrick Larsen’s account of the struggle of Trotsky and his followers for a genuine revolutionary international, he looks at the revolutionary situations that opened up in Europe between 1943 and 1945. He demonstrates how these were hijacked and diverted by the dominant forces within the labour movement, i.e. the Stalinists and the reformists. This historic betrayal in turn opened up a new situation on a world scale which the majority of Trotsky's followers were unable to understand. [part 1]
The central perspective of Trotsky was that the Second World War, just as the First, would end with a revolutionary wave in the main capitalist countries. Remembering that the Third International had been founded in practice on the basis of the revolutionary post-war movement in countries like Germany, France, Italy and so on, the Old Man anticipated that in the space of a decade, not one stone would be left upon another of the old Internationals (the Second, reformist, International and the Third, Stalinist, International), and that the Fourth International would be transformed into the dominant revolutionary force on the entire planet.
The events in Europe, and also in the colonial world, confirmed in part this perspective, although we also saw contradictory elements, rooted in the very outcome of the war, which rendered the work of the Bolshevik-Leninists extremely difficult.
Greece – the strangled revolution
The Greek Civil War was an event which totally unmasked the misleading propaganda of the imperialists about a so-called “war for democracy”. For years the Greek workers' movement had been severely oppressed by the Metaxas dictatorship. This repression was reinforced by the Italian-German occupation of Greece from 1940. But towards the end of 1941, several strikes and even workers' demonstrations began in the streets.
In the underground, the Greek resistance movement, the EAM, was founded, with ELAS (National Liberation Army) as its armed wing. The Greek Communist Party, the KKE, without regular contact with Moscow, played an enormous role in this movement and correctly raised the slogan of a Constituent Assembly to decide the future of the country without foreign intervention, be it German-Italian or British Imperialism. Nevertheless, the EAM was founded on a Popular-Front basis of “national unity”, rejecting any differentiation between the classes and any firm connection of democratic demands with the emancipation of the Greek working class.
Despite all this, the heroic resistance of the Greek workers and peasants began to make its voice heard throughout the country. The partisans of ELAS took over one city after another and when the British arrived in Greece the country had effectively been taken over by the resistance movement. The working class also played a decisive role in defeating the occupation; on July 25 of 1943 a huge general strike erupted in Athens which prevented the executions of the workers' leaders of the tram-system who had been jailed and condemned to death for organizing a previous strike.
In Moscow, Stalin was extremely worried about the situation. He wanted to avoid revolution in Greece at all costs, as it would not only put into danger his alliance with the British and American imperialists, but also because just one single successful revolution in a European country could trigger a powerful movement in the whole continent, destabilizing the entire situation. That was why he chose to send a special emissary, Popov, who arrived in Greece just before the end of the occupying regime in October 1944. His first act was to demand that the Communists abandon every pretension of class struggle and that they obey the new coalition government of Georgios Papandreou.
But on December 3, 1944, it came to direct confrontation between the British “liberators” and the followers of EAM, when the former attacked an unarmed demonstration of the latter in Athens, killing 28 protesters and wounding another 148. This represented the beginning of the events known as Dekemvriana. The key question in dispute was over the possession of arms. The members of ELAS refused to surrender their guns to the British forces and consequently the EAM ministers abandoned the coalition government.
Curiously, Churchill defined the EAM-ELAS rebels in Greece – who in their majority were members of the Greek CP – as “Trotskyists”. In a speech given to the House of Commons, he said the following:
“I think ‘Trotskyists' is a better definition of the Greek Communists and of certain other sects than the normal word, and it has the advantage of being equally hated in Russia. (Laughter and cheers).”[i]
The same Churchill, with the explicit acceptance of Stalin, travelled to Greece during Christmas of 1944, in order to lead the repression against the Greek revolution. In his memoirs, the British Prime Minister explained how he and Stalin cynically decided the division of Europe on a sheet of paper in the course of a few minutes[ii]. He also tells how the USSR maintained complete silence about the violent smashing of the Greek Revolution:
“Stalin, however, adhered strictly and faithfully to our agreement of October, and during all the long weeks of fighting the Communists in the streets of Athens, not one word of reproach came from Pravda or Izvestia”[iii]
The agreements of reconciliation that were signed in Varkiza on February the 15, 1945, with the support of the KKE, included the disarming of the ELAS. Although some sections refused, the bulk of the forces of ELAS disarmed. The counter-revolution, thus emboldened, went on the offensive, provoking another guerrilla war that ended with the victory of the counter-revolution in 1949.
Italy: The partisan movement and Stalinism
The fall of Fascist dictator Mussolini in 1943, when Marshall Badoglio ousted him in a coup following on from the mass strikes,opened a new phase in the Italian revolution. The partisan movement, in its majority led by the Italian Communist Party, consisted of more than 100,000 armed men and managed to take big parts of the country without the help of the Allied forces. Even CP leaders such as Luigi Longo admitted that a situation of dual power existed with entire cities controlled by the forces of the resistance movement.
Mass strikes took place in Milan, Genoa, Bologna, Turin and other big cities. The train system in the North was paralyzed for days because of the workers' strike action. The masses assaulted the fascist prisons and liberated the political prisoners by their own strength. The old fascist headquarters were looted and the big printing press was taken over by the workers in Milan and elsewhere. Every person who was seen with a fascist uniform or wearing such symbols was attacked in the streets.[iv]
The landing of Allied troops in Sicily was in reality another desperate measure to control the situation. The Allies tried to impose a coalition government, but at first they tried to do it under the Fascist Marshall Badoglio, and with the simultaneous reestablishment of the monarchy. This clearly exposes the lying propaganda about a “war for democracy”! But pressurized by the masses,within a year,they had to take a step back and propose a new government led by Bonomi with the direct participation of the Italian CP.
Although the fascist regime at that moment was clearly collapsing, the Allies began to bomb Milan between August 12 and 15. Why? Milan had been the centre of strikes and mass demonstrations and the working class was clearly striving for power. In this situation, the Allies wanted to weaken the militant mood of the proletariat with the destruction of the Milanese workers' neighbourhoods.
The situation had become serious for the Italian bourgeoisie, and it was only with the arrival of Togliatti, the CP General Secretary, that a more or less stable coalition government could be formed. The “Rome Protocol” was signed and the partisan movement agreed to obey the orders of the Anglo-American troops. In the British Stalinist paper Daily Worker, its North Italian correspondent, James S. Allen, called the armies of British and American Imperialism “friends of the Italian people”[v].
Years later, the same Togliatti explained the line of the Italian CP during the failed Italian Revolution:
“If anyone reproaches us for not having taken power or having let ourselves be excluded from government, I would say to them that we could not transform Italy into a new Greece; not only because of our own interest, but also because of the interest of the Soviets”[vi]
Denmark – The revolutionary general strike and the insurrection in Copenhagen
Largely unknown, but in reality very symptomatic of the situation which prevailed throughout Europe at that time, were the events in Denmark between 1943 and 1945. Located to the north of Germany, and with the effective control of the traffic between the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, the occupation of this small country became a necessity for Hitler.
From the beginning of the occupation, on April 9th 1940, the Social-Democrats made a pact with the German army, destroying its own defence and surrendering the country to the Nazis without firing a single shot. It was a repetition of Petain's cowardice in France, a development that Trotsky had brilliantly predicted. Just as in other occupied zones, the exploitation of the working class increased as the country functioned as the German rearguard, forced to provide food, arms and logistics to the army of the Wehrmacht.
In clandestine conditions, hundreds of resistance circles were formed, many of them organized by the Danish Communist Party, which had been illegalized and whose main leaders had been jailed from June 1941, except for a few who had been able to escape and go into hiding. During the four years of German occupation, 2,674 acts of industrial sabotage were committed (bombs against railroads and armament transport, etc). But much more important than that was the marvellous movement of the working class which began with the regional general strikes of July-August 1943 against the presence of a German war boat in the harbour of Odense. The movement was quickly extended to important cities such as Esbjerg, Kolding and Vejle and later on there were also demonstrations in the capital, Copenhagen.
Although the German Army, helped by the Social-Democrats, managed to put an end to this movement through repression, the anger of the working class did not cease. One year later, towards the end of July 1944, the famous “popular strikes” erupted, beginning as a protest of the workers at B&W in the port of Copenhagen, against the curfew imposed by the German invaders. Very rapidly this movement was transformed into a real insurrection in the workers' neighbourhoods, barricades were set up all over the city and bloody clashes took place for days. Only after having given concessions to all the demands of the protests, could a temporary cease-fire be established.
When the end of Hitler's occupation was imminent, towards March of 1945, a power vacuum emerged in Denmark. The resistance committees, most of them led by the Communist Party, were armed; it was only through their collaboration that it was possible for the British to control the situation. The most militant sectors of the Danish working class were breaking with the Social-Democratic Party and passing over en masse to the Communist Party, which before the occupation had been a miniscule group with just one Member of Parliament.
The slogans of the workers were not only of a democratic character, but had above all a social character: they demanded that all the purchasing-power of the workers lost during the occupation should be restored and also called for the expropriation of those capitalists who had collaborated with the invaders (including Mærsk, a huge Danish capital owner). These demands were present in the historic march of 4th of July 1945, with 100,000 workers in Christiansborg Square in front of the National Parliament. It was only after the appearance of the Communist Members of Parliament, who managed to convince the masses, that the workers abandoned the square. Stalinism had betrayed another revolution[vii].
Repercussions in the Colonial World
The same phenomena which we described in the cases of Italy, Greece and Denmark were reflected in countries like Finland, Belgium and also by the defeat of the conservative government of Great Britain in the polls and the huge electoral victory of the Labour Party. But the revolutionary wave that followed the end of the war was not limited to Europe. In the countries under the domination of imperialism a truly unprecedented movement took place.
As we mentioned in the previous part of this article, this was the case in India, where British Imperialism was confronted with the biggest mutiny in the history of its navy. On February 18th of 1946, the sailors of the huge warship HMS Talwaar, located in the harbour of Bombay, went on strike to protest the bad food conditions.
The strike quickly spread to the territorial patrols in Bombay and the soldiers took over various garrisons and raised red flags. Within 48 hours, this episode was repeated in one division after another in 74 warships, 20 fleets and 22 marine units, including the troops at Calcutta, Karachi, Madras, Cochin and Vishakapatam [viii].
However, the political collaboration with imperialism on the part of the Stalinists of the CP of India – and also on the part of Ghandi and the bourgeois nationalists – meant the isolation of the sailors' rebellion. The rebellion was therefore unable to connect with the great strikes that took place in the textile sector. Once the British imperialists began to repress the movement in cold blood, killing 228 sailors and leaving 1,046 wounded, the movement had no other alternative but to surrender.
In spite of all this, there were huge movements of India's workers, among those the strike of 60,000 railroad workers and later on 100,000 postal workers. There was also a big regional strike in Bombay, organized by the CPI.
British Imperialism was very worried and decided to send a special commission to try and exploit religious antagonisms with the purpose of avoiding a socialist revolution at all costs. This was the background to the criminal division of India, with the creation of a Muslim state (Pakistan) in August 1947 and the subsequent massacre which took place. In this way, the revolution was annihilated on the Indian sub-continent with the explicit acceptance of Stalinism.
In other parts of the Colonial World, the same ferment caused revolutionary upheavals. In Argentina, the workers of Buenos Aires defeated an attempted coup d'état against the Nationalist government of Juan Domingo Perón, thus radicalizing the class struggle in that country and seriously weakening British imperialism.
In China we saw the peasant war of the forces of Mao Zedong which put an end to the rule of Chang-Kai-Shek in 1949. The emancipation of China from the chains of imperialism, in spite of the Stalinist regime that Mao implemented, was an absolutely progressive event and must be considered part of the same revolutionary wave.
Africa was also affected by the revolutionary mood with a remarkable growth of the independence movement, among others in Algeria against the French and in Egypt where a nationalist-revolutionary wing within the army was organized around Nasser, preparing his way to power in 1952.
Stalinism and reformism – weakened or strengthened?
To sum up, we can say that the perspective of Trotsky of an enormous revolutionary wave after the war was confirmed by the development of events. But this did not result, except in very special cases, in an explosive growth of Trotskyism. The Fourth International did not become the “dominant force on the planet” and neither Stalinism nor social-democratic reformism collapsed as tendencies within the labour movement. Evidently, this requires some explanation.
It is important to remember that every perspective is conditional and that its prognosis depends on a whole series of factors. If these factors change, then the end result must inevitably also change. To understand this, it is necessary to analyze the military results of the war, which surprised everyone; even the most advanced military strategists and the president of the United States and rulers of Great Britain.
In reality, almost the entire war against Hitler took place on the Eastern front, on Russian soil. The British imperialists were struggling for their own interests in the North of Africa and the Americans for the control of the Pacific in their war against Japan. All the decisive battles took place in Russia and Germany, the most important ones being those of Stalingrad and Kursk in 1942-43. After that, the Red Army advanced and forced the Germans to retreat rapidly.
The imperialists had been waiting for Russia and Germany to mutually destroy each other and thus secure the conditions for a total domination of Europe on the part of the Allies. But the war developed differently, first and foremost because of the two great Soviet advantages: the planned economy and the heroic resistance of the masses. This enabled the Russians to regroup their forces and defeat the German invaders.
The so-called “D-Day” with the landing of Allied troops in Northern France in July 1944, was not an act to “liberate the people of Europe from fascism” but rather a desperate measure by the imperialists to avoid the whole of Europe falling into Soviet hands. Nevertheless, it was the Russians who entered Berlin first and gave the order to raise the red flag above the Reichstag.
Far from weakening Stalinism, the historic advance of the Red Army, liberating the whole of Eastern Europe from German occupation, reinforced it as a political tendency within the workers' movement. Many rank and file workers thought that the Red Army was sowing the seeds of socialism in each liberated country. The situation caused tremendous confusion, even in the ranks of Trotskyism, and gave many activists illusions in Stalinism.
On the other hand, the economic help of American imperialism, the so-called Marshall Plan, played a big role in reinforcing the authority of social-democratic reformism. The leaders of the Social-democracy promised huge reforms in Western Europe and in some countries, like Great Britain, the working masses swung towards them, hoping for a radical change in society.
It was in this way, on the basis of the strengthening of Stalinism and reformism and their capacity to betray the revolutions that Capitalism was able to consolidate itself for the time being. This was the political precondition for the great economic boom which followed the Second World War.
The catastrophist thesis of Cannon and co.
How did Trotsky's supporters, now without the presence of the Old Man, face up this new reality? Far from recognizing the changed situation and changing tactics accordingly, the main leaders of the Fourth International maintained their old perspective and repeated the old phrases.
In the first place, James Cannon, the main SWP leader, even denied that the war was over. In the second place, he insisted, together with Belgian leader Ernest Mandel, on the impossibility of a new boom of capitalism on a world scale. In his document “Perspectives for the American Revolution”, written in 1946, Cannon was predicting an immediate recession in the North American economy:
“US imperialism which proved incapable of recovering from its crisis and stabilising itself in the 10-year period preceding the outbreak of the Second World War is heading for an even more catastrophic explosion in the current postwar era. ”[ix].
The same ideas were repeated in the writings of the main leaders of the Fourth International, with very few exceptions. In the main resolution of the World Conference of the Fourth International, held in Paris in 1946, the same erroneous perspective was present.
Furthermore, that document contained other fundamental mistakes. In the original draft it said that the USSR had emerged weakened by the war and that it could be overthrown"in the near future, even without military intervention, through the sole fact of economic, political and diplomatic pressure of American and British imperialism, and its military threats"[x]
We believe that these lines speak for themselves! In a moment where the armed forces of the USSR had won what could be argued to be the biggest military victory in the history of war, these gentlemen thought that the Stalinist regime could fall by diplomatic pressure and military threats!
As if these errors were not enough, Cannon, Frank, Pablo, Mandel and the other main leaders also declared that the bourgeoisie was only capable of ruling in Europe through Bonapartist military dictatorships![xi] The only base for such an argument was that the Allied powers had tried to reach a deal to install a dictatorship headed by Badoglio in Italy in 1943-44 after the fall of Mussolini.
This conception clashed again with the reality that existed in Europe. Far from being able to install dictatorships, the bourgeoisie was in fact in a position where it had to govern through bourgeois democracy, for the simple reason that it did not have the strength to destroy the powerful organizations of the working class. In this situation it decided to use another tactic, the old method of class collaboration in the form of Popular Front governments.
Counter-revolution in a democratic form
All those questions did not have a mere academic meaning but were of great importance at the time, for elaborating the correct revolutionary slogans and tactics. As Ted Grant explained on numerous occasions, in times of advance the quality of the generals is essential in a war. But in times of difficulty and retreat, the role of the leadership becomes even more decisive. With good generals it is possible to make a successful retreat in order to reorganize the soldiers and prepare the next battle. But with bad soldiers, a temporary retreat is transformed into a defeat.
There were of course some people in the Fourth International who drew a much more sober-minded balance-sheet of the correlation of forces and who opposed the ultra-left tendencies of the majority. In the United States, a minority of the SWP, led by Albert Goldman (Trotsky's lawyer), Felix Morrow (the author of the famous book on the Spanish Revolution) and Jean Van Heijenoort (Trotsky's personal secretary for seven years), began in 1943 to analyze the changes taking place, starting with Italy[xii]. They drew a whole number of correct conclusions, especially on the need to connect the democratic struggles with the social struggle, on the need to participate actively in the armed resistance movements, the impossibility of military dictatorships in Europe in the near future, etc. However, they also made a number of mistakes, including a failed attempt at unity with Max Shactmann's Workers' Party. Subsequently, almost all of the members of the Morrow-Goldman group became disillusioned and abandoned politics.
The most consistent opposition, and politically the most far-sighted, came from the RCP, the British section led by Jock Haston and Ted Grant. In their documents we see a careful defence of Trotsky's method applied to the new reality in post-war Europe. In a March 1945 document, they explained that Europe was passing through a period of counter-revolution in a democratic form[xiii]. They emphasized that historically, the bourgeoisie had not only been able to liquidate revolutions with the installation of dictatorial regimes but also through bourgeois democracy. With crushing clarity they made an analogy with the abortion of the first German revolution of 1918-19 and the regime of Noske-Sheidemann.
Another great sign of political wisdom contained in the document was how the RCP understood the “dual and contradictory nature” of the advance of the USSR. They stressed that, on the one hand the victory of the Red Army made the masses remember the Russian October Revolution, but at the same time, the military triumph allowed the Soviet bureaucracy to strangle the proletarian revolution in Europe. They concluded that it was perfectly possible that Stalinism could survive for a substantial period of time. They even managed to anticipate how Stalin, three years afterwards, in 1948, would implement planned economies in Eastern Europe, controlled from above, Bonapartist-style.[xiv]
Although Ted Grant and the RCP could not foresee the magnitude of the post-war boom (a phenomenon that would influence all of politics in Europe until 1973), they did understand that there would not be an immediate recession but rather an economic upturn of capitalism. In the pre-conference of the Fourth International in April of 1946, they presented a whole number of amendments to the majority document. They speak for themselves:
“In opposition to the reformists and Stalinists, who seek to lull the masses with a perspective of a new renaissance of capitalism and a great future for democracy, the resolution of the International Pre-Conference is one hundred per cent correct in emphasizing the epoch of decline and collapse of world capitalist economy. But in a resolution that seeks to orientate our own cadres on immediate economic perspectives – from which the next stage of the class struggle will largely flow, and thus our immediate propaganda and tactics – the perspective is clearly false.(...)
“The theory of spontaneous collapse of capitalism is entirely alien to the conceptions of Bolshevism. Lenin and Trotsky emphasized again and again that capitalism will always find a way out if it is not destroyed by the conscious intervention of the revolutionary party which, at the head of the masses, takes advantage of the difficulties and crises of capitalism to overthrow it. The experience of World War II emphasizes the profound correctness of these conceptions of Lenin and Trotsky.
“Given the prostration of the proletariat through the betrayal of its mass organisations, the cyclical upswing of the productive forces, the wearing out of machinery, the slashing of wages, leads to an absorption of surplus stocks and the restoration, or partial restoration of the rate of profit. Thus, the way is prepared for a new cyclical upswing which in its turn lays the basis for an even greater slump. (...)
“No matter how devastating the slump, if the workers fail, capitalism will always find a way out of its economic impasse at the cost of the toilers and the preparation of new contradictions. The world crisis of the capitalist system does not end the economic cycle but gives it a different character. The theory of the Stalinists put forward in the last world crisis that this was the last crisis of capitalism from which it would never recover, has been revealed to have been entirely unMarxian. There is a grave danger that this theory will be revived in our own ranks today. .”[xv]
The majority of the leaders of the Fourth International did not listen to the arguments of the RCP. Their lack of understanding caused an incredible amount of confusion in the Trotskyist movement and the whole subsequent history and evolution of the Fourth International was marked by this fact. The destructive line of subordination to petit-bourgeois movements – the adaptation to guerillaism and its tragic consequences in Argentina and Peru, its flirting with Stalinism in Yugoslavia and China, the “invention” of the students as “a new revolutionary factor”, the fatal approving of the POR's adaptation to nationalism during the Bolivian revolution of 1952 – all this was the result of an inability to understand the period that opened up after WW2 and as a consequence, they began the “search” for magic solutions to the real problems in the building of the revolutionary party.
The legacy of Trotsky
The Old Man could not have anticipated in a detailed manner all the events or the way in which the Second World War would end. However, his writings do provide the key, the dialectical method, to understanding, not only the new situation, but also the tasks of the revolutionaries. Despite the historical failure of the leaders of the Fourth International, which effectively destroyed the organization founded by Trotsky, his struggle for a revolutionary International was not in vain.
Although the Marxist movement went through a major setback after the war, especially after the dissolution of the RCP in 1949, the unbroken thread was maintained through the tireless work of Ted Grant. The writings of Ted are the direct continuation of Trotsky and his continued analysis of the world situation helped a new generation understand a complex reality and keep up the struggle against all odds. The unbroken thread between Ted (who died only five years ago, 2006) and Trotsky is what unites the cadres of the International Marxist Tendency with the best traditions of Trotsky.
Seventy-one years after his death, many of Lev Davidovich's perspectives are being vindicated by events. The fall of the USSR, the possibility of which was denied for decades by the Stalinists, revealed the impossibility of building Socialism in one country. Today, many communists, among them Cubans, are reading the writings of Trotsky for the first time, discovering how he anticipated the collapse of “real socialism” almost sixty years ago.
The ideas of Trotsky are also being debated in Venezuela, where president Chávez has quoted him on several occasions and has recommended the reading of the Transitional Programme. The Venezuelan Revolution, which has not been completed, is in itself a brilliant confirmation of his Theory of the Permanent Revolution, i.e. the impossibility of the national bourgeoisie carrying through an agrarian reform and an industrialization of the country. This task falls upon the shoulders of the Venezuelan proletariat, which is currently organizing a big movement for workers' control in the basic industries and the state oil company.
In this article we have tried to show Trotsky's method in the building of the revolutionary party. We think that the struggle for a revolutionary international was neither a waste of time nor a utopian project, but an audacious and courageous attempt to arm a new generation with the theoretical tools that can provide the final victory. The present crisis of capitalism, described even by the bourgeois commentators as the worst recession since the Great Depression of 1929, compels us to re-study the method of Trotsky. If this article has served to assist in this respect, it has been worthwhile.
[End]
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[i] Quoted in “Guerra y revolución. Una interpretación alternativa de la Segunda Guerra Mundial”, CEIP, Buenos Aires, 2004. page 24.
[ii] Winston S. Churchill: “Triumph and Tragedy”, page.228-29
[iii] Ibid. page. 262
[iv] Information taken from: Ted Grant: The Italian revolution and the tasks of the British workers, Workers’ International News, Vol.5 No.12, August 1943:
[v] Quoted in Felix Morrow: The Italian Revolution, Fourth International, New York, September 1943, Vol.4 No.9, pp.263-73.
[vi] Quoted in “Guerra y revolución. Una interpretación alternativa de la Segunda Guerra Mundial”, CEIP, Buenos Aires, 2004. Page 28.
[vii] In spite of the treacherous policy of its leaders, the Danish CP grew from 4,000 to 60,000 members just after the end of the war. On the electoral plane it went from 2.4% to 12.5% of the vote in October 1945. But once the party had revealed its reformist intentions it was abandoned and lost nine MPs in the October 1947 elections.
[viii] For a detailed analysis: Lal Khan: Pakistan's Other Story, Aakar Books, Delhi, 2009. page. 72-83
[ix] James P. Cannon: Theses on the American Revolution
[x] Quoted in Ted Grant: History of British Trotskyism, Wellred, London, 2002, page. 130
[xi] The position of the Majority on the inevitability of a period of Bonapartism in Europe is reflected in many of their, writings, among others the articles of Pierre Frank: Democracy or Bonapartism in Europe? and Bonapartism in Europe
[xii] The documents oft the Morrow-Goldman fraction can be found in the following archives: Félix Morrow, Albert Goldman, Jean Van Heijenoort:
[xiii] “The changed relation of forces in Europe and the role of the Fourth International”, published in: Ted Grant: The Unbroken Thread, Fortress Books, London, 1989, page.83-110.
[xiv] Ibid. page, 92-93
[xv] Proposed line of amendment to International Conference Resolution “New Imperialist Peace and the Building of the Parties of the Fourth International”. Workers’ International News, November-December 1946:
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