In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding of The Communist International-From The Archives- *A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Lev Kamenev

Click on title to link to the Lev Kamenev Internet Archive's copy of his 1924'contribution' to the Soviet Communist Party's intra-party political struggle over the course the revolution should take and the struggle of personal power against the Trotsky-led Left Opposition, "Leninism Or Trotskyism".

Markin comment:

Before everyone starts yelling and screaming I know that Kamenev's, like Zinoviev's, role in the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power was ugly ("strikebreaker" being the kindest way to express his position). I also know that he, again like Zinoviev his political bloc partner, was less, far less than brave in his opposition to Stalin and was wobbly at the end. But remember this- he was Lenin's man in Russia while he was in exile and in the key period before 1917 when World War I was going full blast and when revolutionary internationalists were scarce as hen's teeth he stood his ground. It is for that and his agitation during the months before the revolution that he gets a nod here.

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding of The Communist International-From The Archives- *Labor's Untold Story- "The Rebel Girl"- Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

Click on to link to Wikipedia's entry for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Joe Hill's "The Rebel Girl", who wound up her career as an abject Stalinist apologist, no question about that. We honor her for her work in the Lawrence strike of 1912 and here work with the International Labor Defense, especially on the Sacco and Vanzetti case. As for the rest, read (and read more than the Wikipedia entry on this one)and decide for yourself. Not everyone who starts out as a young rebel winds up on the side of the "angels"

Every Month Is Labor History Month

This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!

As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Lev Kamenev

Click on title to link to the Lev Kamenev Internet Archive's copy of his 1924'contribution' to the Soviet Communist Party's intra-party political struggle over the course the revolution should take and the struggle of personal power against the Trotsky-led Left Opposition, "Leninism Or Trotskyism".

Markin comment:

Before everyone starts yelling and screaming I know that Kamenev's, like Zinoviev's, role in the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power was ugly ("strikebreaker" being the kindest way to express his position). I also know that he, again like Zinoviev his political bloc partner, was less, far less than brave in his opposition to Stalin and was wobbly at the end. But remember this- he was Lenin's man in Russia while he was in exile and in the key period before 1917 when World War I was going full blast and when revolutionary internationalists were scarce as hen's teeth he stood his ground. It is for that and his agitation during the months before the revolution that he gets a nod here.

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Lev Kamenev

Click on title to link to the Lev Kamenev Internet Archive's copy of his 1924'contribution' to the Soviet Communist Party's intra-party political struggle over the course the revolution should take and the struggle of personal power against the Trotsky-led Left Opposition, "Leninism Or Trotskyism".

Markin comment:

Before everyone starts yelling and screaming I know that Kamenev's, like Zinoviev's, role in the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power was ugly ("strikebreaker" being the kindest way to express his position). I also know that he, again like Zinoviev his political bloc partner, was less, far less than brave in his opposition to Stalin and was wobbly at the end. But remember this- he was Lenin's man in Russia while he was in exile and in the key period before 1917 when World War I was going full blast and when revolutionary internationalists were scarce as hen's teeth he stood his ground. It is for that and his agitation during the months before the revolution that he gets a nod here.

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Lev Kamenev

Click on title to link to the Lev Kamenev Internet Archive's copy of his 1924'contribution' to the Soviet Communist Party's intra-party political struggle over the course the revolution should take and the struggle of personal power against the Trotsky-led Left Opposition, "Leninism Or Trotskyism".

Markin comment:

Before everyone starts yelling and screaming I know that Kamenev's, like Zinoviev's, role in the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power was ugly ("strikebreaker" being the kindest way to express his position). I also know that he, again like Zinoviev his political bloc partner, was less, far less than brave in his opposition to Stalin and was wobbly at the end. But remember this- he was Lenin's man in Russia while he was in exile and in the key period before 1917 when World War I was going full blast and when revolutionary internationalists were scarce as hen's teeth he stood his ground. It is for that and his agitation during the months before the revolution that he gets a nod here.

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Lev Kamenev

Click on title to link to the Lev Kamenev Internet Archive's copy of his 1924'contribution' to the Soviet Communist Party's intra-party political struggle over the course the revolution should take and the struggle of personal power against the Trotsky-led Left Opposition, "Leninism Or Trotskyism".

Markin comment:

Before everyone starts yelling and screaming I know that Kamenev's, like Zinoviev's, role in the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power was ugly ("strikebreaker" being the kindest way to express his position). I also know that he, again like Zinoviev his political bloc partner, was less, far less than brave in his opposition to Stalin and was wobbly at the end. But remember this- he was Lenin's man in Russia while he was in exile and in the key period before 1917 when World War I was going full blast and when revolutionary internationalists were scarce as hen's teeth he stood his ground. It is for that and his agitation during the months before the revolution that he gets a nod here.

***"THE CASE OF COMRADE TULAYEV" by Victor Serge

Click on title to link to Victor Serge's Internet Archives. Serge was an important addition to the international communist movement coming over from the pre-World War I anarchist movement. His political fate at the end is murky, to say the least. What is not murky is his defense of the non-revolutionary actions of Andreas Nin and the POUM in Spain in the course of the revolution there in the 1930's. More later.

BOOK REVIEW


THE REVOLUTION DEVOURS ITS OWN

Generally, historical novels leave me dissatisfied as real history provides enough dramatic tension. However, every once in a while a novel comes along that illuminates a historical situation better than a history and begs for some attention. Victor Serge’s political parable falls in that category. His subject is a fictional treatment of the Great Terror, highlighted by the Moscow Trials, in the Soviet Union of the 1930’s. This Great Terror liquidated almost the whole generation of those who made the October Revolution of 1917 and administered the early Soviet state as well as countless other victims.

Adding a personal touch, as an official journalist of the Communist International Serge knew many of that generation. The political and psychological devastation created by this catastrophe is certainly worthy of novelistic treatment. In fact it may be the only way to truly comprehend its effects. Serge is particularly well placed to tell this story since he was a long time member of the Trotsky-led Left Opposition in the Soviet Union and barely got out of there at the height of the Terror as a result of an international campaign of fellow writers to gain his freedom. The insights painfully learned from Serge's experiences in the Soviet Union place his book in the first rank.


The plot line is rather simple- a disaffected Russian youth of indeterminate politics, as an act of hubris, kills a high level Soviet official in the then Stalinized Soviet Union and sets in motion a whirlwind of governmental reaction. As if to mock everything the Russian Revolution had stood until that time this youth ultimately goes free while a whole series of oppositionists of various tendencies, officials investigating the crime and other innocent, accidental figures are made to ‘confess’ or accept responsibility for the crime with their lives in the name of defending the Revolution (read: Stalinist rule).


While the plot line is simple the political and personal consequences are not, especially for anyone interested in drawing the lessons of what went wrong with the Russian Revolution. The central question Serge poses is this- How can one set of Communists persecute and ultimately kill another set of Communists who it is understood by all parties stand for the defense of the same revolution? Others such as Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon, Andre Malraux in Man’s Fate and George Orwell in several of his books have taken up this same theme of political destruction with mixed success and ambiguous conclusions. In any case, aside from the tales of bureaucratic obfuscation in turning a simple criminal matter into a political vendetta which Serge treats masterfully the answer does not resolve itself easily.


What Serge concludes, based I believe on his own personal trial of fire in that same period, and makes his novel more valuable than the others listed above is that one must defend ones revolutionary integrity at all costs. His personal conduct bears this out. The history of the period also bears this out not only in the Soviet Union but in Spain and elsewhere. For every Bukharin, Zinoviev or out of favor Stalinist factionalist who compromised himself or herself there were many, mainly anonymous Left Oppositionists and other such political people who did not confess, who did not abandon their political program and went to exile and death rather than capitulate. History being a cruel and, at times, arbitrary master may have not honored them yet. However, those courageous fighters need no revolutionary good conduct certificates before history, the reader of these lines or me.

*****************





Victor Serge
Secrecy and Revolution

A Reply to Trotsky
(1938)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

First published in Peace News, 27 December 1963. [1]
Translated by Peter Sedgwick.
Reprinted in What Next, No.9, 1998.
Downloaded from the What Next? Website.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In no.77-78 of the Russian-language Bulletin of the Opposition, which is his personal organ, Trotsky once more takes me to task with an extraordinary bitterness, using a technique which it is hard to know how to classify. The Trotskyist press of more or less everywhere will doubtless be reproducing this article of his; and I know from experience that they will refuse to publish my replies, denials and corrections.

Such indeed, is their idea of discussion – an approach which is not new to me, having been a Left Opposition militant for so long within Russia. On the first occasion, Trotsky objected to an article I published in the United States and France, under the title Marxism in Our Time. [4] Strangely enough, he criticised it to all appearances without having read it, imputing to me propositions which are directly opposite to my own. This time his polemical fervour and waspish intolerance have led him even further. Almost the whole of his article (The Moralists and Sycophants Against Marxism) rests upon charges of crying inaccuracy, which I am bound to take up despite the repugnance I feel towards debasing an argument which could be both straightforward and fascinating.

Trotsky reproaches me with being the “severest critic” of his little book Their Morals and Ours, which I translated into French for Éditions du Sagittaire. However, I have never published a single line concerning that work of his, in any publication or in any shape or form.

Trotsky credits me with the authorship of the publicity copy accompanying the distribution of his booklet to the press. On this matter, too, much to my own vexation, I must reply to him with a categoric denial. I am not the author of this prospectus; I have had no part, direct or indirect, in composing it; I have no idea who its author is; and I do not care either. Is that clear enough? Before running these false imputations to the length of five columns of argument, Trotsky would have been wise to make enquiries from the publishers, from myself or from other competent persons. The most elementary accuracy would have demanded this.

Having in this manner ascribed to me a piece of writing with which I have had nothing to do, Trotsky spends a long time refuting ideas which he fathers on to me, whilst systematically ignoring those ideas which I have frequently published on the very same subject. Once again, and sadly, I recognise here an approach which has so often been used in Russia against him and against us; a bad approach, one of small intellectual worth, stemming from a profoundly sick Bolshevik mentality.

On the theme of the civil war in the Russian revolution, Trotsky credits me with heaven knows what high-flown nonsense; although on these very issues I have written a work of nearly 500 pages, which is fairly well known: L’An I de la Révolution Russe. [5] It would have been enough for Trotsky to have opened it, and he would have seen what I say and what I do not say. But that would have been too simple. Did they ever open his books in Russia before accusing him of every crime under the sun? All the same, it is a remarkable fact that in the six columns of his “refutation” of me, he does not quote a single line of mine. Which is exactly the way Pravda used to treat him once upon a time.

I will pass over incidental charges, couched as they are in a style which, alas, could well be called “Muscovite”; as for instance that of having, along with X, who is indeed some old friend or comrade of mine, and with Y, whom I have never met, conspired against the “Fourth International”. As for these quarrels of sects and sub-sects, I am and always have been a complete stranger to them. Possibly X or Y, or even Z, has made use of my writing: I cannot help that – writings are produced with the intention of circulation, ideas belong to everybody.

In this remarkable article by Trotsky there is only one short passage which actually replies to me. Here it is: “... still another of V. Serge’s discoveries, namely, that the degeneration of the Bolsheviks dates from the moment when the Cheka was given the right of deciding behind closed doors the fate of people. Serge plays with the concept of revolution, writes poems about it, but is incapable of understanding it as it is. Public trials are possible only in conditions of a stable regime. Civil war is a condition of the extreme instability of society and the state. Just as it is impossible to publish in newspapers the plans of the general staff, so it is impossible to reveal in public trials the conditions and circumstances of conspiracies, for the latter are intimately linked with the course of the civil war.” [6]

Since the majority of regimes at the present time can scarcely be classed as stable, Trotsky is in this passage supplying all reactionaries with an excellent argument for replacing normal courts of justice by secret courts-martial. However, we shall soon see that his argument is strictly worthless. (A personal aside: Trotsky could well have recalled that between 1919 and 1936, or rather since 1906, I have not confined myself to “writing poems” about revolution. But the little device of only mentioning poems, and thereby making a passing sneer at a long and rich record of activity which has included ten years of varied persecutions in the USSR – this little business has not a great deal to do with the matter under discussion.)

Trotsky makes use of a euphemism which is so excessive that I could justifiably charge him with making light of a concept that, despite everything, has its own social and human importance: I mean the death penalty. The Cheka, he writes coolly, received the right “of deciding behind closed doors the fate of people”: whereas what the Cheka was in fact given was the right to apply the death penalty on a mass scale and in secret, without hearing the accused, who were unable to defend themselves and whom in most cases their judges did not even see! By comparison with this inquisitorial process, the “closed door” status of any court in which the judges and the defendants are face to face, and to which defence counsel are admitted, appears to overflow with safeguards. Either here Trotsky is gerrymandering the historical facts and the whole basic problem, or else the verb “to gerrymander” has lost all its meaning in this or any language.

One would gather from him that it was simply a matter of repressing conspiracies; however, the Cheka’s full title was “Extraordinary Commission for the repression of counter-revolution, sabotage, speculation and desertion”. If the necessity for secret procedures could reasonably be invoked in the case of conspiracy, is it proper to invoke it for the housewife who sells a pound of sugar that she has bought (speculation), the electrician whose fuses blow (sabotage), the poor lad who gets fed up with the front line and takes a trip to the rear (desertion), the socialist or the anarchist who has passed some remark or other in the street, or has some comrades together at home (agitation and illegal assembly)? Cases of this sort literally swamped those of conspiracy, whether genuine or non-existent; of this Trotsky cannot be unaware. Nor, at this stage, can he fail to be aware how favourable to the manufacture of non-existent conspiracies was the darkness which he champions; there were just as many of this kind of plot as of the real variety. He cannot be unaware that in all the different kinds of case that it dealt with, the Cheka made a frightful abuse of the death penalty. Why then is he so eager to defend the indefensible, and with such poor arguments?

During the civil war there was perfect order behind the front itself, in the interior of Soviet territory. Travellers to these parts have described this plainly enough. There was nothing to prevent the functioning of regular courts, which might in certain cases have sat in camera, before which the accused could have been able to defend themselves, have their own counsel present, and show themselves in the light of day. Would not the revolution have enhanced its own popularity by unmasking its true enemies for all to see? And, correspondingly, the abuses which arose inevitably from the darkness would have been avoided.

But the party’s central committee was bent on maintaining its monopoly of power, and so on confounding its too troublesome critics with spies, traitors and reactionary plotters; it would often have found itself embarrassed before the criticisms of Menshevik socialists, anarchists, maximalists, syndicalists or even Communists and spirited non-party citizens, whom the courts would not have been able to convict without discrediting themselves. In other words, the consequences of the secrecy in the Cheka’s methods lay as much in attacking and destroying working class and revolutionary democracy as in cutting off the heads of the counter-revolution. (This, even though the early Cheka only very rarely used the death penalty against members of working class organisations.)

On such questions of history (which are also, since moral reality is inseparable from social reality, questions of socialist morals) the working class movement’s whole interest is to shed light everywhere, and to make its views known without any passion beyond that of serving man and the future. Whether Trotsky wills it or not, no limit has been set to the analysis of the Russian revolution, which he has served so outstandingly, so tremendously – despite the measure of responsibility which must be laid to his name for certain tragic errors. And no amount of ponderous irony, no broadsides of discredit, directed against men who dare to think and sometimes to pronounce according to their conscience, will render him free to substitute mischievous polemic for the necessary debate to which, with a little less pretension to infallibility, he could bring the most precious contributions of all.



Notes
1. This article was written during a dispute over Trotsky’s pamphlet Their Morals and Ours, the French edition of which, translated by Serge, was accompanied by a publisher’s prospectus attacking Trotsky’s class-based conception of morality. In reply, Trotsky wrote an article entitled The Moralists and Sycophants Against Marxism, in which he suggested that the prospectus was written “naturally, not by Victor Serge but by one of his disciples, who imitates both his master’s ideas and his style. But, maybe after all, it is the master himself, that is, Victor Serge in his capacity of ‘friend’ of the author?” [2]

Serge responded by writing the piece reprinted here, which was intended for publication in the French syndicalist journal La Révolution prolétarienne. However, he decided to withdraw the article because, as he later explained, he preferred “to suffer this unjust attack in silence. And I still think I was quite right: truth can work its way out in different ways than by offensive polemics”. [3] The original manuscript was found among Serge’s papers by Peter Sedgwick while he was preparing the English edition of Serge’s book Memoirs of a Revolutionary. The article was translated by Sedgwick and published in the 27 December 1963 issue of Peace News.

2. Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours, 1973, p.54.

3. Victor Serge, letter to Angelica Balabanova, 23 October 1941, in David Cotterill, (ed.), The Serge-Trotsky Papers, 1994, p.189.

4. The article was published in 1938 in Partisan Review, and is reprinted in The Serge-Trotsky Papers, pp.176-83.

5. Published in an English translation by Bookmarks, as Year One of the Revolution, 1992.

6. Their Morals and Ours, p.58.

On The 100th Anniversary Of The Great IWW-led Lawrence (Ma) Textile Strike Of 1912-Labor's Untold Story- "The Rebel Girl"- Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

Click on to link to Wikipedia's entry for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Joe Hill's "The Rebel Girl", who wound up her career as an abject Stalinist apologist, no question about that. We honor her for her work in the Lawrence strike of 1912 and here work with the International Labor Defense, especially on the Sacco and Vanzetti case. As for the rest, read (and read more than the Wikipedia entry on this one)and decide for yourself. Not everyone who starts out as a young rebel winds up on the side of the "angels"

Every Month Is Labor History Month

This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!

As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.

*On Historical Rehabitations- The Case of India's Old Time Cominternist-M.N. Roy (And Myriad Others Incuding Andreas Nin)

Markin comment:

Normally I would not comment on, or post an entry on, such exotic material as an interchange of letters between others over the political rehabilitation of old time Communist International functionaries (read: hack) like M. N. Roy. However not the least effect of the decline in socialist-oriented political consciousness since the demise of the Soviet Union has been an onslaught of, mainly, academic special pleadings for old time communist officials. And a strange lot indeed have been “resurrected.”

This blizzard started, most dramatically, with Princeton Professor Stephen Cohen’s attempts to rehabilitate Moscow Trial victim and Old Bolshevik Nicolas Bukharin in the 1980s. Then the British journal, Revolutionary History, apparently made its reason for existence the rehabilitation of Spanish POUM leader Andreas Nin, 1920s German Communist party leaders Brandler and Thalheimer, and a slew of others who were once out in the political wilderness, including a kind word or three for early German Communist Party leader, Paul Levi. Christ.

What all these figures seemingly have in common is that they were “right” communists; organically linked by numerous ties to European social democracy and its methodologies in the World War I period. In short the perfect candidates for a post-Soviet world in order to show that communists could be reasonable unlike those “crazies” Lenin ad Trotsky. While the apologists all pay lip service to Lenin and Trotsky, as they must, this slippery left (and sometimes not so left) social democratic mismash is what they crave.


Look, Leon Trotsky (and the same is true for Lenin as well but Trotsky serves better here as the example) over a long career made many mistakes, personal and political. But mark this; when the revolutionary clarions calls sounded for his revolutions (1905 and 1917) he was on the right side of the angels. These others, with the partial exception of Bukharin, were clueless, or worst. And these are the exemplars their respective apologists want to impress today’s youth with. I think not. Hell, if you want tot rehabilitate an old revolutionary, pick Gregory Zinoviev. Warts and all he stood way above this tribe. Better yet though read the guys who knew how to make a revolution when the deal went down, not how to blow it or make apologies for not making it, Lenin and Trotsky.
*********
Workers Vanguard No. 969
19 November 2010

An Exchange on M.N. Roy

(Letters)

August 23, 2010

To the editor of Workers Vanguard:

In your article on India, in the July 30th issue of Workers Vanguard [No. 962], you label the pioneer Indian Communist, M.N. Roy, a “pseudo-Marxist adventurer.” That is one-sided, to say the least.

As a young man, Roy joined a group of brave Bengali revolutionaries who were willing to sacrifice their lives to drive the British from India through force of bombs and bullets. Inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution, Roy became a Communist and made his way to Moscow in 1920 for the Second Comintern Congress, where he changed Lenin’s thinking in the debate on the national-colonial question. As his contemporary, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, noted at that time, “Roy had the support of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek.”

Right after the congress, Lenin dispatched his new protege, with two trainloads of weapons, to remote Tashkent, then a dangerous wilderness, to set up a Communist academy to train cadres for future operations inside British India. It was none other than Trotsky, the commander of the Red Army, who had first proposed this “adventure” a year earlier. After his return to Russia, Roy established his credentials as a first-class Marxist theoretician with his book, India in Transition, which Lenin praised as the first Marxist analysis of India.

Having earned the trust and admiration of the top Bolshevik leaders, Roy rose quickly in the Comintern apparatus. He was regarded as a “leftist” in the political spectrum of the Comintern. If you read his writings in the early ’twenties, you’ll be surprised at how “Trotskyist” they sound.

You denounce Roy for advocating the formation of nationalist “Peoples’ Parties” in the colonies in 1926. In fact, Roy first mooted this policy at the Fourth Comintern Congress in 1922. Neither Lenin nor Trotsky objected. Roy developed this thesis jointly with Karl Radek, the secretary of the Comintern who was allied with Trotsky.

As your tendency has pointed out before, there were weaknesses in some of the experimental Comintern policies in the early 1920s. The whole motivation and purpose of the “workers-peasants party” changed qualitatively between 1922 and 1927.

Let me remind you what James P. Cannon, the leader of the American Trotskyist party, once said about flippant denunciations of Grigory Zinoviev, the Soviet leader who led the vicious, self-serving demagogic attack on Leon Trotsky after Lenin’s death: “I have always been outraged by the impudent pretensions of so many little people to deprecate Zinoviev, and I feel that he deserves justification before history. I have no doubt whatever that in all his big actions, including his most terrible errors, he was motivated fundamentally by devotion to the higher interests of the working class of the whole world…In spite of all, Zinoviev deserves restoration as one of the great hero-martyrs of the revolution.”

And so does Manabendra Nath Roy.

Charles Wesley Ervin

WV replies:

M.N. Roy, whom Ervin so rhapsodizes, was briefly a prominent figure in the early Communist movement, having been recruited from the Indian nationalist movement. After falling out of favor in the Stalinized Communist International (CI), he aligned himself with the Right Opposition led by Nikolai Bukharin and was expelled from the CI in 1929. (As Leon Trotsky asserted, the victory of the program of the Right Opposition would have led to capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union in short order.) Roy rapidly reverted to his roots by becoming an increasingly open apologist for bourgeois nationalism, notably as an advocate of class collaboration with the bourgeois Indian National Congress, later the Congress Party. Revolutionary Marxists fight for national liberation of the colonies and neocolonies of imperialism, but we do not support nationalism, a bourgeois ideology which is an obstacle to social revolution.

Charles Wesley Ervin is the author of a recent book on the history of Trotskyism in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and India, Tomorrow Is Ours (2006). Particularly useful from Ervin’s book is the powerful 1942 program of the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India. While Ervin has cast himself as an apologist for Roy, the BLPI (like us) had a few choice words concerning Roy’s pernicious role. Ervin’s own text is also informative. He quotes Roy as coming out for “a political party representing the workers and peasants” at the Fourth CI Congress in 1922. Ervin adds: “After the Fourth Congress Roy pursued the People’s Party strategy for India. He wrote article after article, and ultimately a whole book, on how to transform the Congress [Party] into ‘a democratic party of the people with a programme of Revolutionary Nationalism’.” To be accurate, even prior to the Fourth Congress Roy was already arguing that workers and peasants have the same class interests.

Contrary to Ervin’s imputations, Trotsky from the start gave no quarter to the notion of a revolutionary party simultaneously representing the class interests of workers and peasants, as we will see. The peasantry consists of petty-bourgeois layers; the poor peasants can be won to following the lead of the revolutionary proletariat, but such an outcome is by no means the only possibility. As an intermediate social layer, the peasantry can also support outright reactionary forces, or it can serve as a cover for the interests of the big bourgeoisie itself.

A major factor propelling Trotsky to found the International Left Opposition and later the Fourth International, which carried forward the struggle for the authentic internationalist program of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, was the betrayal of the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27 by Stalin and his allies in the CI. At the core of Stalin’s policy was looking to the Guomindang, the party of the Chinese bourgeoisie, as the leader of the Chinese national revolutionary struggle, and the complete liquidation of the young Chinese Communist Party (CCP) into the Guomindang. The “workers and peasants party” theory blossomed as the “bloc of four classes,” as the Guomindang was dubbed.

Stalin made use of the opportunism and adventurism of his operatives in China, principally Mikhail Borodin and later M.N. Roy. (This of course does not excuse his making his minions scapegoats after the fact.) Thousands of Communists and pro-Communist workers paid with their lives for Stalin’s criminal opportunism. In April 1927, Guomindang head Chiang Kai-shek, turning on his CP allies, carried out a bloody coup in Shanghai, murdering thousands of Communist cadres and trade unionists; the catastrophe was then repeated in other cities. To conceal the hideous results of his policy of liquidating the CCP into the Guomindang, Stalin launched a series of cynical ultraleft, adventurist uprisings in China that added greatly to the death toll of Communist comrades, pro-Communist workers and revolutionary peasants, completing the beheading of the Chinese proletariat.

History’s verdict on the Chinese debacle was rendered by Trotsky in his 1928 critique, “The Draft Program of the Communist International: A Criticism of Fundamentals” (printed in The Third International After Lenin). In this crucial indictment of the Stalinized CI, Trotsky quoted from Lenin in 1909 concerning the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs): “The fundamental idea of their program was not at all that ‘an alliance of the forces’ of the proletariat and the peasantry is necessary, but that there is no class abyss between the former and the latter and that there is no need to draw a line of class demarcation between them, and that the social democratic idea of the petty bourgeois nature of the peasantry that distinguishes it from the proletariat is fundamentally false.” Trotsky added:

“In other words, the two-class workers’ and peasants’ party is the central idea of the Russian Narodniks [populists]. Only in the struggle against this idea could the party of the proletarian vanguard in peasant Russia develop. Lenin persistently and untiringly repeated in the epoch of the 1905 revolution that ‘Our attitude towards the peasantry must be distrustful, we must organize separately from it, be ready for a struggle against it, to the extent that the peasantry comes forward as a reactionary or anti-proletarian force’.” [emphasis added by Trotsky]

Trotsky devoted several pages of the section of Third International After Lenin on “Summary and Perspectives of the Chinese Revolution” to the nature of the peasantry. Quoting from Lenin against the anti-Bolshevik idea of workers and peasants parties, he concludes: “This idea reappears in hundreds of Lenin’s major and minor works. In 1908, he explained: ‘The alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry must in no case be interpreted to mean a fusion of the different classes or parties of the proletariat and the peasantry’” (emphasis added by Trotsky).

Trotsky wrote in the same work: “In the West the idea of a workers’ and peasants’ party is simply ridiculous. In the East it is fatal. In China, India, and Japan this idea is mortally hostile not only to the hegemony of the proletariat in the revolution but also to the most elementary independence of the proletarian vanguard. The workers’ and peasants’ party can only serve as a base, a screen, and a springboard for the bourgeoisie.”

Summarizing Roy’s role in the Indian communist movement, Trotsky wrote in “Who Is Leading the Comintern Today?” (September 1928):

“It is doubtful if greater harm could be done to the Indian proletariat than was done by Zinoviev, Stalin, and Bukharin through the medium of Roy. In India, as in China, the work has been and is oriented almost totally toward bourgeois nationalism…. Through the medium of Roy, the leadership of the International is holding the stirrup for the future Indian Chiang Kai-sheks.... In India the catastrophe is being prepared just as methodically as it was in China. Roy has taken the Chinese example as a model.”

In an article on “Trotskyism in India” in Revolutionary History (Winter 1988-89), Ervin fantasized, “Had Roy gone over to the Left Opposition, rather than to the Right, the whole story of Indian Trotskyism might have been quite different.” Trotsky offered a rather different judgment on Roy, writing in his September 1928 essay: “It is not necessary to say that this national democrat, poisoned by an adulterated ‘Marxism,’ is an implacable foe of ‘Trotskyism’.”

M.N. Roy’s most lasting contribution to “Communism” was his attempt to reconcile it with bourgeois nationalism. His “non-doctrinaire” approach to communist theory, so admired by many academic pseudo-Marxists today, consisted in pushing proletarian subordination to the bourgeoisie in the colonial world. As noted above, this was anything but a new approach, owing much to the Narodniks and SRs. Its results in China in 1925-27 were horrific and counterrevolutionary. And we also note, with the benefit of more hindsight than Lenin and Trotsky had, that the results of bourgeois nationalism in power in the former colonies in the last half of the 20th century and today have similarly been horrific and counterrevolutionary.

Throughout the Indian subcontinent, from Kashmir to Jaffna, the imperialist-dependent capitalist rulers have built upon the fratricidal divisions inherited from imperialism, promoting social backwardness of every kind and practicing state-sponsored communalist slaughter of minority peoples. Real national and social liberation of the working class and oppressed Third World masses cannot be accomplished under the rule of the neocolonial bourgeoisie, as Trotsky explained in putting forward the program of permanent revolution. The first condition for the proletariat being able to carry out its revolutionary role is the scrupulous safeguarding of its class independence from the bourgeoisie.

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Lev Kamenev

Click on title to link to the Lev Kamenev Internet Archive's copy of his 1924'contribution' to the Soviet Communist Party's intra-party political struggle over the course the revolution should take and the struggle of personal power against the Trotsky-led Left Opposition. "Leninism Or Trotskyism".

Markin comment:

Before everyone starts yelling and screaming I know that Kamenev's, like Zinoviev's, role in the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power was ugly ("strikebreaker" being the kindest way to express his position). I also know that he, again like Zinoviev his political bloc partner, was less, far less than brave in his opposition to Stalin and was wobbly at the end. But remember this- he was Lenin's man in Russia while he was in exile and in the key period before 1917 when World War I was going full blast and when revolutionary internationalists were scarce as hen's teeth he stood his ground. It is for that and his agitation during the months before the revolution that he gets a nod here.

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- The case of Fenner Brockway (later Lord Brockway)

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

************
 
The case of Fenner Brockway


Fifty years ago the third and most grotesque of the Moscow trials was staged. Once again the small forces of the Trotskyist movement were mobilised against the mighty propaganda machine of the Kremlin, the communist parties and their venal fellow travellers.


This was to be expected. But to make matters worse, the attempts to refute the allegations made against Trotsky in all of the trials were hampered by those who, whatever their political differences with Trotsky, may have been expected to have defended him against the Stalinists’ slanders. One such character was Fenner (now Lord) Brockway, a leading member of the Independent Labour Party, who refused either to support the Dewey Commission in Mexico or the British Committee for the Defence of Leon Trotsky. His refusal to take a firm stand against the slanders did not, however, spare the ILP’s co-thinkers in Spain, the POUM, from being massacred by the GPU.



The following critique of Brockway’s evasions was written by Hilary Sumner-Boyd under the pen-name of Charles Sumner, and appeared in the July 1937 edition of the British Committee for the Defence of Leon Trotsky’s Information Bulletin. Sumner-Boyd was secretary of the Committee and a leading member of the Marxist League.



At its annual conference in March, the Independent Labour Party passed a resolution on the Moscow trials which stated that “It is imperative that there should be an impartial investigation by representative socialists who have the confidence of the working class”, and that the investigation “should analyse both the detailed evidence given at the trials and the full reply which it is understood Leon Trotsky intends to publish shortly”. It is greatly to be feared that one member of the national council of the ILP at least – Fenner Brockway – has not been loyally carrying out this resolution. The subject at issue, which in the last analysis involves the character of the present government of the Soviet Union and the prospects of the world revolution, is so important, and the instructions of the annual conference of the ILP so clear, that it is necessary to establish the facts definitely in order that the members of the ILP may judge the matter for themselves.



Fenner Brockway’s connection with the proposed enquiry into the Moscow trials has all along been extremely ambiguous. In August, directly after the Zinoviev trial, the New Leader (28 August 1936), of which Brockway is the responsible editor, wrote: “We think it is the duty of the International Working Class Movement to appoint a Commission of Investigation. It should visit Trotsky in Norway, and also ask permission to visit Moscow and examine the evidence given at the trial.” A few months later, however, Brockway refused to sign the Open Letter (Manchester Guardian, Herald, etc., 1 December) appealing for such a Commission of Enquiry, although it bore the signatures of Brailsford, Horrabin and other working class leaders. Brockway has, moreover, consistently refused to have anything to do with the British Trotsky Defence Committee, which exists for the purpose of furthering an investigation of this kind. Apparently Brockway recoiled before the virulent campaign of slander carried on by the Communist Party against all who dared to question the evidence presented at the trials.



Then came the United Front Agreement, the programme of which expressly forbade all criticism of the Soviet Union and the policy of its Government. At this point Brockway's conduct, as it appears, became positively disingenuous. It seemed likely by this time that the efforts of the Committees in various countries, and especially in America, for an investigation into the trials, would be rewarded by the establishment of an International Commission of Enquiry. Brockway hastened to write to Norman Thomas, leader of the Socialist Party of the United States and a member of the American Trotsky Defence Committee, urging that a Commission of Enquiry be established, not to investigate the Moscow trials, but to examine “the role of Trotskyism in the working class movement”. An investigation of the Moscow trials, according to Brockway, would “merely arouse prejudice in Russia and Communist circles”!!! Now at the same time that he was making this preposterous proposal to Thomas, he also wrote to George Novack, secretary of the American Committee, proposing a Commission to enquire “into the charges against Trotsky”. Thus to the Committee officially Brockway makes one proposal, while to Thomas privately he makes a quite different and incompatible one. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that in this case Brockway was playing a double game. (The implications of Brockway’s proposal to Thomas are fully examined in Trotsky’s article which appears in this Bulletin.)



In spite of Brockway’s efforts to draw a red herring across the path, an International Commission of Enquiry was shortly afterwards established. Towards this Commission of Enquiry Brockway has consistently taken up an equivocal and dishonest attitude. He has himself perfectly expressed this in a letter of 9 April to the British Committee, in which he says: “We are prepared to collaborate with the Enquiry, but don’t use the word ‘endorse’ as that would be going too far”. Thus he does not “endorse” the Commission with which he is “collaborating”! This is the most frivolous temporising, unworthy of any serious revolutionary. It is cleat that Brockway is once again taking shelter behind his well-known opportunism: if in the future he thinks it advantageous to come out strongly against the Moscow trials, he can always point to his “collaboration” with the Commission; if, on the other hand, he continues to flirt with the Communist Party, he can declare that he never “endorsed” the Enquiry.



In order to elucidate the position as far as possible, the British Committee on 1 May addressed to Brockway the following questions:



1. Is the ILP and the International Bureau prepared to send a delegate to the Commission? If not, in what concrete forms do these organisations envisage their ‘collaboration’. 2. Are the ILP and the International Bureau prepared to accept the verdict of the Dewey Commission? (An impartial enquiry whose verdict is not unequivocally accepted by the organisations which ‘collaborate’ with it, is of course completely useless.) 3. As part of its ‘collaboration’ is the ILP prepared to give the widest publicity within its power … to the proceedings and the report of the Commission?



For nearly a month no reply was forthcoming. Then on 28 May, Brockway wrote and answered the first two questions in the negative, the third not at all – and at the same time doing his best to maintain his opportunist position by offering to “provide evidence” to the Commission. Except for the testimony of a few individuals like Maxton, Paton and Smith, which has already been given, it is difficult to see what “evidence” the parties adhering to the International Bureau could give. This offer is clearly a sop.



One reason only is offered why the International Bureau is unwilling to support the Commission of Enquiry (which Brockway persists in calling “American” as contrasted with “International”, presumably in order to make it appear less representative, although its personnel is in fact international). The reason given is that ”a disastrous mistake has been made in initiating the enquiry through a committee which describes itself as a ‘Committee for the Defence of Trotsky’” since this will present an “argument to those who condemn Trotsky which it will be impossible effectively to meet”. This contention is at once specious and disingenuous. To begin with, it is untrue that the Commission was initiated by the American Trotsky Defence Committee. The Commission was organised by the co-operative action of all the national Committees for an enquiry into the trials. Such committees exist not only in New York and London, but also in Paris, Antwerp, Prague and other European capitals. Since Brockway attaches so great an importance to the name, we ask him to note that the French Committee is called the Committee for an Enquiry into the Moscow, Trials, while those in Prague and Antwerp are known as Committees for Justice and Truth. In addition to these special committees, the American Socialist Party – affiliated to the Second International – and the Italian-American Anarchists also took an active part in setting up the Commission. When it had been agreed that the enquiry should be held in New York – in order to be within easy reach of the chief witness, Trotsky – the major part of the work of organising the Commission inevitably fell upon the American Committee, aided by the Socialist Party and the Anarchists. The fact that the enquiry is being held in the USA also explains the great preponderance of Americans serving on it, just as the personnel of its sub-commissions in Europe is largely composed of European representatives of working class organisations. Thus Brockway’s assertion that the Commission was initiated by the American Committee is simply false



Even supposing, however, that it were true, the contention that because it is called a committee for the defence of Trotsky it would provide “an argument to those who condemn Trotsky which it would be impossible effectively to meet” is utterly dishonest. In the first place, any commission of enquiry into the Moscow trials, as Brockway himself has pointed out, “will merely arouse prejudice in Russia and Communist circles” – and in all other circles which are willing to condemn Trotsky unheard. Secondly, how could this argument be more effectively met than by the International Bureau and its affiliated parties officially taking part in the enquiry, and thus giving it a still broader and less “partisan” basis? If Brockway and the Executive Committees which he represents were sincere in their desire to “collaborate” with the Commission and to get at the facts behind the trials, this is clearly the course they would have pursued. Thirdly, it is surely irrelevant by whom the Commission is initiated. The guarantee of its impartiality, and the criterion by which the working class movement will judge it, are to be found, first, it its own personnel – and Brockway himself was compelled in the New Leader for 9 April to pay the highest tribute to the unchallengeable probity and passion for justice of the members who had so far been decided upon – second, in the full reports of its public proceedings and examination of evidence, and third in its final summing up and verdict. To judge it on any other grounds is the part of the enemies and not the friends of truth. Finally, the verbal objection to the name “Committee for the Defence of Trotsky” is sheer casuistry. Neither logically nor psychologically does it imply a conviction of Trotsky’s innocence, but only a conviction that he may be innocent – and this is obviously required of any impartial committee. It is an age-old principle of civilised justice that no one is to be adjudged guilty until he has been given the opportunity to state his case before a properly qualified body, that is, before he has had a chance to present his defence. Even those who plead guilty are in civilised countries allowed defending counsel. But Trotsky has pleaded not guilty; and there are those – though apparently Mr Brockway is not one of them – who are not convinced that the case against him was proved beyond reasonable doubt at the Moscow trials, and who are therefore anxious to hear him state his case and to act in his “defence” in order to arrive at whatever may ultimately prove to be the truth.



These considerations are so clear that they cannot have escaped the subtle mind of Fenner Brockway. It is greatly to be regretted that he chose to disregard them and to act in a way that is at best cowardly and at worst dishonest. Now the GPU has transferred its activities to Spain and threatens the life of Brockway’s political allies in the POUM, Brockway has gone to their defence. But if he had come out courageously in support of the investigation into the Moscow trials, and had used his influence to secure for the Commission of Enquiry the support of the ILP and the International Bureau, it is more than possible that the GPU would not have dared, in the face of the indignation of the revolutionary working class, to use in Spain the methods which have brought about the Russian Thermidor.



Charles Sumner

From The Archives Of The “ Revolutionary History” Journal-The Case Of Fenner Brockway-On Those Who Who Didn't Fight For Our Communist Future

Click on the headline to link to the “Revolutionary History” Journal entry listed in the title.

Markin comment:

This entry speaks for itself.

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Lev Kamenev

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for the 1917 Bolshevik revolutionary leader Lev Kamenev.

Markin comment:

Before everyone starts yelling and screaming I know that Kamenev's, like Zinoviev's, role in the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power was ugly ("strikebreaker" being the kindest way to express his position). I also know that he, again like Zinoviev his political bloc partner, was less, far less than brave in his opposition to Stalin and was wobbly at the end. But remember this- he was Lenin's man in Russia while he was in exile and in the key period before 1917 when World War I was going full blast and when revolutionary internationalists were scarce as hen's teeth he stood his ground. It is for that and his agitation during the months before the revolution that he gets a nod here.

*Writer's Corner- "Studs Lonigan's" James T. Farrell

Click On Title To Link To Wikipedia's Entry For Politics Of The Writer (Most Famously The "Studs Lonigan" Trilogy)And Left-Wing Political Activist. More, Much More Will Appear On This Writer At A Later Time, Including His Political Disputes With Various American Followers Of Leon Trotsky And His Contributions To The Socialist Workers Party's Political Defense Work(Especially, The Defense Of Leon Trotsky, During The Heart Of The Moscow Trials- When It Counted).