AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Showing posts with label theory of permanent revolution. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

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

Wednesday, November 07, 2018

Happy Birthday -From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- Chapter 22 Of "1905"- Summing Up The Experiences Of The Russian Revolution Of 1905

Markin comment:

This chapter from Leon Trotsky's 1905 is a companion to today's entry on Lenin and the Vanguard Party.

Leon Trotsky
1905

CHAPTER 22
Summing Up
* * *
The history of the Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies is the history of fifty days. The constituent meeting of the Soviet was held on October 13. On December 3 a meeting of the Soviet was closed down by government troops.

The first meeting was attended by a few dozen persons; by the second half of November the number of deputies had grown to 562, including 6 women. These persons represented 147 factories and plants, 34 workshops and 16 trade unions. The main mass of the deputies – 351 persons – belonged to the metalworkers; these played the decisive role in the Soviet. There were deputies from the textile industry, 32 from the printing and paper industries, 12 from the shop-workers and from office workers and the pharmaceutical trade. The Executive Committee acted as the Soviet’s ministry. It was formed on October 17 and consisted of 31 persons – 22 deputies and 9 representatives of parties (6 from the two social-democrat factions and 3 from the socialist revolutionaries).

What was the essential nature of this institution which within a short time assumed such an important place within the revolution and marked the period of its maximum power?

The Soviet organized the working masses, directed the political strikes and demonstrations, armed the workers, and protected the population against pogroms. Similar work was also done by other revolutionary organizations before the Soviet came into existence, concurrently with it, and after it. Yet this did not endow them with the influence that was concentrated in the hands of the Soviet. The secret of this influence lay in the fact that the Soviet grew as the natural organ of the proletariat in its immediate struggle for power as determined by the actual course of events. The name of “workers’ government” which the workers themselves on the one hand, and the reactionary press on the other, gave to the Soviet was an expression of the fact that the Soviet really was a workers’ government in embryo. The Soviet represented power insofar as power was assured by the revolutionary strength of the working-class districts; it struggled for power insofar as power still remained in the hands of the military-political monarchy.

Prior to the Soviet we find among the industrial workers a multitude of revolutionary organizations directed, in the main, by the social-democratic party. But these were organizations within the proletariat, and their immediate aim was to achieve influence over the masses. The Soviet was, from the start, the organization of the proletariat, and its aim was the struggle for revolutionary power.

As it became the focus of all the country’s revolutionary forces, the Soviet did not allow its class nature to be dissolved in revolutionary democracy: it was and remained the organized expression of the class will of the proletariat. In the struggle for power it applied methods which were naturally determined by the nature of the proletariat as a class: its role in production, its vast numbers, its social homogeneity. More than that, the Soviet combined its struggle for power as the head of all the revolutionary forces with directing independent class activity by the working masses in many different ways; it not only encouraged the organization of trade unions, but actually intervened in disputes between individual workers and their employees. It was precisely because the Soviet, the democratic representative body of the proletariat at a time of revolution, stood at the meeting-point of all its class interests, that it immediately came under the all-determining influence of the social-democratic party. The party now had its chance to make use of all the tremendous advantages of its Marxist training, and because it was able to see its political way clear in the great “chaos,” it succeeded almost without effort in transforming the Soviet – formally a non-party organization – into the organizational instrument of its own influence.

The principal method of struggle used by the Soviet was the political general strike. The revolutionary strength of such strikes consists in the fact that, acting over the head of capital, they disorganize state power. The greater, the more complete the “anarchy” caused by a strike, the nearer the strike is to victory. But on one condition only: the anarchy must not be created by anarchic means. The class which, by simultaneous cessation of work, paralyzes the production apparatus and with it the centralized apparatus of power, isolating parts of the country from one another and sowing general confusion, must itself be sufficiently organized not to become the first victim of the anarchy it has created. The more completely a strike renders the state organization obsolete, the more the organization of the strike itself is obliged to assume state functions. These conditions for a general strike as a proletarian method of struggle were, at the same time, the conditions for the immense significance of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.

By the pressure of strikes, the Soviet won the freedom of the press. It organized regular street patrols to ensure the safety of citizens. To a greater or lesser extent, it took the postal and telegraph services and the railways into its hands. It intervened authoritatively in economic disputes between workers and capitalists. It made an attempt to introduce the eight-hour working day by direct revolutionary pressure. Paralyzing the activity of the autocratic state by means of the insurrectionary strike, it introduced its own free democratic order into the life of the laboring urban population.

After January 9 the revolution showed that it controlled the consciousness of the working masses. On June 14, by the rising on board the Potemkin Tavrichesky, the revolution showed that it could become a material force. By the October strike it showed that it could disorganize the enemy, paralyze his will, and reduce him to complete humiliation. Finally, by organizing workers’ Soviets throughout the country, the revolution showed that it was able to create organs of power. Revolutionary power can rest only on active revolutionary strength. Whatever one’s views on the further development of the Russian revolution may be, the fact is that no social class except the proletariat has hitherto shown itself capable and ready to support revolutionary power.

The revolution’s first act was the attempted dialogue between the proletariat and the monarchy in the city streets; the revolution’s first important victory was achieved by a purely class weapon of the proletariat, the political strike; finally, the representative body of the proletariat assumed the role of the first embryonic organ of revolutionary power. With the Soviet we have the first appearance of democratic power in modern Russian history. The Soviet is the organized power of the mass itself over its separate parts. It constitutes authentic democracy, without a lower and an upper chamber, without a professional bureaucracy, but with the voters’ right to recall their deputies at any moment. Through its members – deputies directly elected by the workers – the Soviet exercises direct leadership over all social manifestations of the proletariat as a whole and of its individual groups, organizes its actions and provides them with a slogan and a banner.

According to the census of 1897, there were approximately 820,000 “actively employed” persons living in Petersburg, including 433,000 workers and domestic servants. In other words, the proletarian population of the capital amounted to 53 per cent. If we include the non-employed population, we obtain a somewhat lower figure (50.8 per cent) owing to the relatively small size of proletarian families. But in any event the proletariat represented more than half the population of Petersburg.

The Soviet of Workers’ Deputies was not the official representative of the capital’s entire half-million-strong proletarian population; organizationally speaking, it represented approximately 200,000 persons, principally factory and plant workers, and although its political influence, both direct and indirect, extended to a wider circle, very important strata of the proletariat (building workers, domestic servants, unskilled laborers, cab drivers) were scarcely or not at all represented. It cannot be doubted, however, that the Soviet represented the interests of the whole proletarian mass. Even where so-called “Black Hundreds” groups existed in factories, their numbers shriveled day by day and hour by hour. Among the proletarian masses, the political dominance of the Soviet in Petersburg found no opponents but only supporters. The only exceptions might have been among the privileged domestic servants – lackeys of the high-ranking lackeys of the bureaucracy, of ministers, stock-exchange operators and high-class tarts, people with whom conservatism and monarchism is an occupational disease.

Among the intelligentsia, which is so numerous in Petersburg, the Soviet had many more friends than enemies. Thousands of students recognized the political leadership of the Soviet and ardently supported its measures. The professional and civil service intelligentsia, with the exception of those grown hopelessly fat at their desks, was on its side – at least for the time being.

The Soviet’s energetic support of the postal and telegraph strike attracted the sympathetic attention of the lower strata of the civil service. All who were oppressed, dispossessed, honest, life-affirming in the city were consciously or instinctively drawn towards the Soviet.

Who was against it? The representatives of predatory capitalism, stock-exchange operators speculating on rising prices, contractors, merchants, and exporters ruined by the strikes, suppliers of bullion, the gang ensconced in the Petersburg duma (that householders’ syndicate), the higher bureaucracy, poules de luxe whose keep formed part of the state budget, highly paid, highly decorated public men, the secret police – all that was coarse, dissolute, and doomed to death.

Between the Soviet’s supporters and its enemies stood the politically indeterminate, hesitant, or unreliable elements. The most backward groups of the petty bourgeoisie, not yet drawn into politics, had not had time to grasp the role and significance of the Soviet. The labor-employing craftsmen were frightened and alarmed: in them, the petty property-owner’s detestation of strikes fought with vague expectations of a better future.

The unsettled professional politicians from intellectual circles, radical journalists who did not know what they wanted, democrats riddled with skepticism, were peevishly condescending towards the Soviet, counted its mistakes on their fingers and generally made it understood that if only it was they who stood at the head of the Soviet, the proletariat’s happiness would be assured forevermore. Such gentlemen’s excuse is their impotence.

In any case the Soviet was, actually or potentially, the organ representing the overwhelming majority of the population. Its enemies among the population would have been no threat to its dominance had they not been supported by absolutism, still alive and supported in its turn by the most backward elements of the muzhik army. The Soviet’s weakness was not its own weakness but that of any purely urban revolution.

The period of the fifty days was the time of the revolution’s greatest power. The Soviet was its organ of struggle for power. The class character of the Soviet was determined by the sharp class division of the urban population and the profound political antagonism between the proletariat and the capitalist bourgeoisie, even within the historically limited framework of the struggle against absolutism. After the October strike the capitalist bourgeoisie consciously attempted to slow down the revolution; the petty bourgeoisie proved too weak to play an independent part; the proletariat had unchallenged hegemony over the urban revolution, and its own class organization was its weapon in the struggle for power.

The strength of the Soviet grew as the government became increasingly demoralized. Non-proletarian circles became more and more sympathetic towards it as the old state power showcd itself to be by comparison more and more helpless and confused.

The mass political strike was the Soviet’s principal weapon. Because it established direct revolutionary links between all groups of the proletariat and supported the workers of all enterprises with the authority and force of the entire working class, it gained the power of stopping the country’s economic life. Although ownership of the means of production continued to remain in the hands of the capitalists and the state, and although state power continued to remain in the hands of the bureaucracy, the actual running of the national means of production and communication – at least so far as the possibility to interrupt the regular functioning of economic and state life was concerned – lay in the hands of the Soviet. It was precisely this ability of the Soviet, an ability proved in practice, to paralyze the economy and to introduce anarchy into the life of the state, that made the Soviet what it was. Given these facts, to seek ways of ensuring the peaceful coexistence of the Soviet and the old regime would have been hopelessly utopian. Yet all criticisms of the Soviet’s tactics, if we lay bare their real content, proceed from just this fantastic idea: after October, the Soviet should have refrained from all offensive action and should have concentrated on organizing the masses on the ground won from absolutism.

But what was the nature of the October victory?

It cannot be disputed that as a result of the October campaign absolutism repudiated itself “in principle.” But it had not really lost the battle; it merely refused to engage. It made no serious attempt to use its rural army against the mutinous, striking towns. Naturally it was not for reasons of humanity that it refrained from making such an attempt; quite simply, it was deeply discouraged and robbed of its composure. The liberal elements in the bureaucracy, awaiting their chance, achieved preponderance at a moment when the strike was already on the wane, and published the manifesto of October 17, that abdication “in principle” of absolutism. But the whole material organization of the state – the civil service hierarchy, the police, the courts of law, the army – still remained the undivided property of the monarchy. What could, what should the Soviet’s tactics have been under such conditions? Its strength consisted in the fact that, supported by the productive proletariat, it was able (insofar as it was able) to deprive absolutism of the possibility of operating the material apparatus of its power. From this viewpoint the Soviet’s activity meant the organizing of “anarchy.” Its continuing existence and development meant the consolidating of “anarchy.” Prolonged coexistence was an impossibility. The future conflict was, from the very start, the material core of the half-victory of October.

What was there left for the Soviet to do? Pretend that it did not see the conflict as inevitable? Make believe that it was organizing the masses for the future joys of a constitutional regime? Who would have believed it? Certainly not absolutism, and certainly not the working class.

The example of the two Dumas was to show us later how useless outwardly correct conduct – empty forms of loyalty – are in the struggle against absolutism. In order to anticipate the tactics of “constitutional” hypocrisy in an autocratic country, the Soviet would have had to be made of different stuff. But where would that have led? To the same end as that of the two Dumas: to bankruptcy.

There was nothing left for the Soviet to do but recognize that a clash in the immediate future was inevitable; it could choose no other tactics but those of preparing for insurrection.

What could have been the nature of such preparations, if not to develop and consolidate precisely those of the Soviet’s qualities which enabled it to paralyze the life of the state and which made up its strength? Yet the Soviet’s natural efforts to strengthen and develop those qualities brought the conflict inevitably nearer.

The Soviet was increasingly concerned with extending its influence over the army and the peasantry. In November the Soviet called upon the workers to express actively their fraternal solidarity with the awakening army as personified by the Kronstadt sailors. Not to do this would have been to refuse to extend the Soviet’s strength. To do it was a step towards the coming conflict.

Or was there perhaps a third way? Perhaps the Soviet, together with the liberals, could have appealed to the so-called “statesmanship” of the authorities? Perhaps it could and should have found the line that divided the rights of the people from the prerogatives of the monarchy, and stopped this side of that sacred boundary? But who could have guaranteed that the monarchy, too, would stop on its side of the demarcation line? Who would have undertaken to organize peace, or even a temporary truce, between the two sides? Liberalism? On October 18 one of the Soviet’s deputations proposed to Count Witte that, as a sign of reconciliation with the people, the troops might be with drawn from the capital. “It is better to stay without electricity and water than without troops,” the Minister replied. Obviously the government had no intention of disarming.

What was the Soviet to do? Either it had to withdraw, leaving the matter in the hands of the chamber of conciliation, the future State Duma, which is what the liberals really wanted; or it had to prepare to hold on with armed power to everything that had been won in October, and, if possible, to launch a further offensive. We now know only too well that the chamber of conciliation was transformed into an arena of new revolutionary conflict. Consequently the objective role played by the first two Dumas only confirmed the truth of the political forecast on which the proletariat constructed its tactics. But we need not look so far ahead. We can ask: who or what was to guarantee the very coming into existence of that “chamber of conciliation,” whose destiny was never to conciliate anyone? The same “statesmanship” of the monarchy? Its solemn promises? Count Witte’s word of honor? The zemtsy’s visit to Peterhof, where they were received at the back door? The warning voice of Mr. Mendelssohn? Or, finally, the so-called “natural course of events” on whose shoulders liberalism piles all the tasks that history would impose on the initiative, intelligence, and strength of liberalism itself?

But if the December clash was inevitable, did not the reason for December’s defeat lie in the composition of the Soviet? It has been said that the Soviet’s fundamental flaw was its class nature. In order to become the organ of “national” revolution, the Soviet should have broadened its structure, so that representatives of all the strata of the population might find their place within it. This would have then stabilized the Soviet’s authority and increased its strength. But is that really so?

The Soviet’s strength was determined by the role of the proletariat in a capitalist society. The Soviet’s task was not to transform itself into a parody of parliament, not to organize equal representation of the interests of different social groups, but to give unity to the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. The principal weapon in the Soviet’s hands was the political strike – a method unique to the proletariat, which is the class of wage labor. The homogeneity of its class composition eliminated internal friction within the Soviet and rendered it capable of revolutionary initiative.

By what means could the Soviet’s composition have been broadened? The representatives of the liberal unions might have been invited to join; this would have enriched the Soviet with the presence of twenty or so intellectuals. Their influence in the Soviet would have been proportional to the role played by the Union of Unions in the revolution, that is, it would have been infinitely small.

What other social groups might have been represented in the Soviet? The zemstvo congress? The trade and industrial organizations?

The zemstvo congress met in Moscow in November; it discussed the question of its relations with Witte’s ministry, but the question of relations with the workers’ Soviet never even entered its head.

The Sevastopol rising occurred when the zemstvocongress was in session. As we have seen, this immediately caused the zemtsy to swerve to the right, so that Mr. Milyukov was obliged to reassure them with a speech roughly to the effect that the insurrection, God be thanked, had already been suppressed. What could have been the form of any revolutionary cooperation between these counter-revolutionary gentlemen and the workers’ deputies who saluted and supported the Sevastopol insurgents? No one has yet given an answer to this question. One of the half sincere, half-hypocritical tenets of liberalism is the demand that the army should remain outside politics. In contrast to this, the Soviet employed tremendous energy in trying to draw the army into revolutionary politics. Or should the Soviet perhaps have had such infinite trust in the Tsar’s manifesto that it left the army entirely in Trepov’s hands? And, if not, where was the program on whose basis cooperation with the liberals might have been conceivable in this vitally important field? What could have been these gentlemen’s contribution to the Soviet’s activities, if not one of systematic opposition, endless debate, and internal demoralization? What could they have given us other than their advice, which we knew anyway by reading the liberal press? It may be that “statesmanship” really was the prerogative of the Kadets and the Octobrists; nevertheless the Soviet could not transform itself into a club for political polemics and mutual indoctrination. It had to be, and remained, an organ of struggle.

What could the representatives of bourgeois liberalism and bourgeois democracy have added to the Soviet’s strength? How could they have enriched its methods of struggle? It is enough to recall the role they played in October, November, and December, enough to know how little resistance these elements were to offer to the dissolution of their own Duma, to understand that the Soviet was entitled to, that it was duty bound to remain a class organization, that is, an organ of struggle. Bourgeois deputies might have made the Soviet more numerous, but they were absolutely incapable of making it stronger.

By the same token we reject those purely rationalist, unhistorical accusations which argue that the Soviet’s irreconcilable class tactics hurled the bourgeoisie back into the camp of order. The labor strike, which showed itself to be a mighty weapon of revolution, also introduced “anarchy” into industry. This was enough in itself to make oppositional capital put the slogan of public order and continuing capitalist exploitation above all the slogans of liberalism.

The employers decided that the “glorious” (as they called it) October strike had to be the last – and organized the anti-revolutionary Union of October 17. They had sufficient reason for doing so. Each of them had ample opportunity to discover in his own factory that the political gains of the revolution go hand in hand with the consolidation of the workers’ stand against capital. Certain politicians think that the main trouble with the struggle for the eight-hour day was that it caused the final split in the opposition and turned capital into a counter-revolutionary force. These critics would like to put the class energy of the proletariat at the disposal of history without accepting the consequences of the class struggle. It goes without saying that the unilateral introduction of the eight-hour day was bound to produce a violent reaction on the part of the employers. But it is puerile to believe that without this particular campaign the capitalists’ rapprochement with Witte’s capitalist stock-exchange government would not have taken place. The unification of the proletariat as an independent revolutionary force placing itself at the head of the popular masses and offering a constant threat to “public order” was argument enough in favor of a coalition between capital and the authorities.

True, during the first phase of the revolution, when it manifested itself in spontaneous scattered outbursts, the liberals tolerated it. They clearly saw that the revolutionary movement shook the foundations of absolutism and forced it towards a constitutional agreement with the ruling classes. They put up with strikes and demonstrations, adopted a friendly attitude towards revolutionaries, and criticized them only mildly and cautiously. After October 17, when the conditions for the constitutional deal were already written down, and it seemed that all that was left was to put them into effect, the revolution’s further work obviously undermined the very possibility of such a deal between the liberals and the authorities. From then on the proletarian masses, united by the October strike and organized within themselves, put the liberals against the revolution by the very fact of their existence. The liberals felt that the Moor had done his work [1] and should now quietly go back to his lathe. The Soviet, on the contrary, believed that the main struggle lay ahead. Under such circumstances any revolutionary cooperation between the capitalist bourgeoisie and the proletariat was out of the question.

December follows from October as a conclusion follows from a premise. The outcome of the December clash is to be explained, not by isolated tactical errors, but by the decisive fact that the mechanical forces of reaction proved greater than that of the revolution. The proletariat was defeated in the insurrection of December and January, not by its own mistakes, but by a more real quantity: the bayonets of the peasant army.

Liberalism, it is true, is of the opinion that deficiency of fire power should in all circumstances be answered by speed of leg power: it regards retreat at the moment of decision as the most truly courageous, mature, pondered and effective tactic. This liberal philosophy of desertion made an impression on certain littérateurs in the ranks of social-democracy itself, who, in retrospect, posed the question: if the proletariat’s defeat in December was due to the insufficiency of its forces, did not its error consist precisely in the fact that, not being sufficiently strong for victory, it accepted battle? To this we can reply: if battles were engaged only in the certainty of victory, there would be no battles fought in this world. A preliminary calculation of forces cannot determine in advance the outcome of revolutionary conflicts. If it could, the class struggle should have long since been replaced by bookkeeping. That is what, a little while ago, the treasurers of certain trade unions were dreaming of. But it turned out that even with the most modern system of accounting it is impossible to convince capitalists by evidence extracted from a ledger, and that arguments based on figures must, in the end, be supported by the argument of a strike.

And however well everything is calculated in advance, every strike gives rise to a whole series of new facts, material and moral, which cannot be foreseen and which eventually decide the outcome of the struggle. Now imagine that such a trade union, with its precise accounting methods, has been swept aside; extend the strike over the entire country and give it a great political aim; put state power and the proletariat face to face as immediate enemies; surround both with allies – real, potential, or imaginary; add the indifferent strata of the population, ruthlessly fought for by both sides; add the army, whose revolutionary elements emerge only in the turmoil of events; add exaggerated hopes on the one hand and exaggerated fears on the other, both being very real factors; add the paroxysms of the stock exchange and all the complex effects of international relations – and you will obtain the climate of the revolution. Under such circumstances the subjective will of a party, even a “dominant” party, is only one of the factors involved, and not by any means the most important one.

In revolution, even more than in war, the moment of battle is determined less by calculations on either side than by the respective position of both the opposition armies. It is true that in war, owing to the mechanical discipline of armies, it is sometimes possible to lead an entire army away from the field of battle with out any engagement taking place; yet in such cases the military commander must still ask himself whether the strategy of retreat will not demoralize his troops and whether, by avoiding today’s battle, he is not preparing the ground for a more disastrous one tomorrow. General Kuropatkin might have a great deal to say on that point. But in a developing revolutionary situation a planned retreat is, from the start, unthinkable. A party may have the masses behind it while it is attacking, but that does not mean that it will be able to lead them away at will in the midst of the attack. It is not only the party that leads the masses: the masses, in turn, sweep the party forward. And this will happen in any revolution, however powerful its organization. Given such conditions, to retreat without battle may mean the party abandoning the masses under enemy fire.

Of course the social democrats, being the “dominant” party, might have refused to accept the reaction’s challenge in December and, to use the same Kuropatkin’s happy expression, might have “withdrawn to previously prepared positions,” that is, into clandestinity. But by doing so it would merely have enabled the government, in the absence of any generalized resistance, to smash the legal and semi-legal workers’ organizations (which the party itself had helped to create), one by one. That would have been the price paid by social democracy for the doubtful privilege of being able to stand aside from the revolution, philosophize about its mistakes, and work out faultless plans whose only disadvantage is that they are produced at a moment when no one any longer wants them. It is easy to imagine how this would have assisted the consolidation of links between the party and the masses!

No one can assert that the social democrats speeded up the conflict. On the contrary, it was on their initiative that the Petersburg Soviet, on October 22, canceled the funeral procession so as not to provoke a clash without first trying to make use of the confused and hesitant “new regime” for widespread agitational and organizational work among the masses. When the government made its over-hasty attempt to re-establish control over the country and, as a first step, proclaimed martial law in Poland, the Soviet maintained purely defensive tactics and did nothing to carry the November strike to the stage of open conflict; instead, it turned the strike into a protest movement and contented itself with the tremendous moral effect of this on the army and the Polish workers.

But if the party, because of its awareness of the need for organizational preparedness, evaded battle in October and November, in December this consideration no longer applied. Not (needless to say) because such preparedness had already been achieved, but because the government – which also had no choice – had opened the battle by destroying all the revolutionary organizations created in October and November. If, under those conditions, the party had decided to refuse to give battle once again, and even if it had been able to withdraw the revolutionary masses from the open arena, it would only have been preparing the ground for insurrection under still less favorable conditions: namely the absence of a sympathetic press and all mass organizations, and in the demoralized atmosphere which inevitably follows a retreat.

Marx wrote [2]:

In revolution as in war it is absolutely necessary at the decisive moment to stake everything, whatever the chances of the struggle. History does not know a single successful revolution that does not testify to the correctness of this proposition ... Defeat after persistent struggle is a fact of no less revolutionary significance than an easily snatched victory ... In any struggle it is absolutely inevitable that he who throws down the glove runs the risk of being defeated; but is that a reason to declare oneself defeated from the start and to submit without drawing the sword?

Anyone who commands a decisive position in a revolution and surrenders it instead of forcing the enemy to venture an attack deserves to be regarded as a traitor. (Karl Marx, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany.)

In his well-known Introduction to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, Engels left a way open for serious misunderstandings when he balanced the new possibilities of victory arising from the evolution of the class composition of the army against the military-technological difficulties of insurrection (rapid railway transport of troops, the destructive power of modern artillery, the broad streets of modern towns). On the one hand Engels made a very one-sided assessment of the significance of modern techniques in revolutionary risings and, on the other hand, he did not consider it necessary or convenient to explain that the evolution of the class composition of the army can become politically significant only when there is a direct confrontation between the army and the people.

A word on both sides of the question [3]. The decentralized nature of revolution necessitates the continual transfer of troops. Engels says that, thanks to the railways, garrisons can be more than doubled within twenty-four hours. But he overlooks the fact that a genuine mass rising inevitably presupposes a railway strike. Before the government can begin to transfer its armed forces, it must – in ruthless combat with the striking personnel – seize the railway line and rolling stock, organize traffic, and restore the destroyed track and blown-up bridges. The best rifles and sharpest bayonets are not enough for all this; and the experience of the Russian revolution shows that even minimal success in this direction requires incomparably more than twenty-four hours.

Further, before proceeding to the transfer of armed forces, the government must know the state of affairs in the country. Telegraph speeds up information to an even greater extent than the railways speed up transport. But, here again, a rising both presupposes and engenders a postal and telegraph strike. If the insurrection is unable to bring the postal and telegraph personnel over to its side – a fact that would bear witness to the weakness of the revolutionary movement! – it can still overturn the telegraph poles and cut the wires. Although this is detrimental to both sides, the revolution, whose principal strength by no means resides in an automatically functioning organization, stands to lose far less than the state.

The telegraph and the railways are, without any question, powerful weapons in the hands of the modern centralized state. But they are double-edged weapons. And while the existence of society and the state as a whole depend on the continuance of proletarian labor, this dependence is most obvious in the case of the railways and the postal and telegraph service. As soon as the rails and wires refuse to serve, the government apparatus is fragmented into separate parts without any means of transport or communication (not even the most primitive ones) between them. That being so, matters may go a very long way before the authorities succeed in “doubling” a local garrison.

Side by side with the transfer of troops, an insurrection confronts the government with the problem of transport for military supplies. We already know the difficulties which a general strike creates in this respect; but to these should be added the further risk that military supplies may be intercepted by the insurgents. This risk becomes the more real, the more decentralized the character of the revolution and the larger the masses drawn into it. We have seen workers at Moscow stations seize weapons being transported to some distant theater of operations. Similar actions occurred in many places. In the Kuban region insurgent cossacks intercepted a transport of rifles. Revolutionary soldiers handed ammunition over to insurgents, etc.

Of course, when all is said and done, there can be no question of a purely military victory by the insurgents over the government troops. The latter are bound to be physically stronger, and the problem must always be reduced to the mood and behavior of the troops. Without class kinship between the forces on both sides of the barricades, the triumph of the revolution, given the military technology of today, would be impossible indeed. But on the other hand it would be a most dangerous illusion to believe that the army’s “crossing over to the side of the people” can take the form of a peaceful, spontaneous manifestation. The ruling classes, confronted with the question of their own life or death, never willingly surrender their positions because of theoretical considerations concerning the class composition of the army.

The army’s political mood, that great unknown of every revolution, can be determined only in the process of a clash between the soldiers and the people. The army’s crossing over to the camp of the revolution is a moral process; but it cannot be brought about by moral means alone. Different motives and attitudes combine and intersect within the army; only a minority is consciously revolutionary, while the majority hesitates and awaits an impulse from outside. This majority is capable of laying down its arms or, eventually, of pointing its bayonets at the reaction only if it begins to believe in the possibility of a people’s victory. Such a belief is not created by political agitation alone. Only when the soldiers become convinced that the people have come out into the streets for a life-and-death struggle – not to demonstrate against the government but to overthrow it – does it become psychologically possible for them to “cross over to the side of the people.”

Thus an insurrection is, in essence, not so much a struggle against the army as a struggle for the army. The more stubborn, far-reaching, and successful the insurrection, the more probable – indeed inevitable – is a fundamental change in the attitude of the troops. Guerrilla fighting on the basis of a revolutionary strike cannot in itself, as we saw in Moscow, lead to victory. But it creates the possibility of sounding the mood of the army, and after a first important victory – that is, once a part of the garrison has joined the insurrection – the guerrilla struggle can be transformed into a mass struggle in which a part of the troops, supported by the armed and unarmed population, will fight another part, which will find itself in a ring of universal hatred. We have seen in the Black Sea Fleet, in Kronstadt, in Siberia, in the Kuban region, later in Sveaborg and in many other places that when the class, moral, and political heterogeneity of the army causes troops to cross over to the side of the people, this must, in the first instance, mean a struggle between two opposing camps within the army. In all these cases, the most modern weapons of militarism – rifles, machine guns, fortress and field artillery, battleships – were found not only in the hands of the government but also in the service of the revolution.

On the basis of the experience of Bloody Sunday, January 9, 2905, a certain English journalist, Mr. Arnold White, arrived at the brilliant conclusion that if Louis XVI had had a few batteries of Maxim guns at his disposal, the French Revolution would not have taken place. What pathetic superstition to believe that the historical chances of revolutions can be measured by the caliber of rifles or the diameter of guns! The Russian revolution showed once more that people are not ruled by rifles, guns, and battleships: in the final analysis, rifles, guns, and battleships are controlled by people.

On December 11, the Witte-Durnovo ministry, which by that time had become the Durnovo-Witte ministry, published an electoral law. At a time when Dubasov, the dry-land admiral, was restoring the honor of St. Andrew’s flag in the streets of Presnya, the government hastened to open up a legal path for reconciliation between the property-owning public on the one hand and the monarchy and bureaucracy on the other. From that moment on, the struggle for power, though revolutionary in essence, developed under the guise of constitutionalism.

In the first Duma the Kadets passed themselves off as the leaders of the people. Since the popular masses, with the exception of the urban proletariat, were still in a chaotically oppositional mood, and since the elections were boycotted by the parties of the extreme left, the Kadets found themselves masters of the situation in the Duma. They “represented” the whole of Russia: the liberal landowners, the liberal merchants, the lawyers, doctors, civil servants, shopkeepers, shop assistants, partly even the peasants. Although the Kadet leadership remained, as before, in the hands of landowners, professors, and lawyers, the party, under pressure from the interests and needs of the countryside which relegated all other problems to the background, turned to the left. Thus we come to the dissolution of the Duma and the Vyborg manifesto, which was later to cause so many sleepless nights to the liberal windbags.

The Kadets were returned to the second Duma in smaller numbers but, as Milyukov admitted, they now had the advantage of being backed, not merely by the discontented man-in-the-street, but by the voter who wanted to dissociate himself from the left, that is, to give his vote more consciously to the anti-revolutionary platform. Whereas the main mass of land owners and representatives of large capital had crossed over into the camp of active reaction, the urban petty bourgeoisie, the commercial proletariat, and the rank-and-file intelligentsia now voted for the left-wing parties. A part of the landowners and the middle layers of the urban population followed the Kadets. The representatives of the peasants and workers stood to the left of them.

The Kadets voted for the government plan for army recruitment, and promised to vote for the budget. In exactly the same way they would have voted for new loans to cover the state deficit and, without hesitation, would have assumed responsibility for the autocracy’s old debts. Golovin, that pathetic figure in the speaker’s chair, embodying all the impotence and insignificance of liberalism, said after the Duma had been dissolved that the government ought to interpret the Kadets’ behavior as its own victory over the opposition. He was perfectly right. Under such circumstances one might have thought there were no grounds for dissolving the Duma; yet it was dissolved. This proves that there exists a stronger force than the political arguments of liberalism. That force is the inner logic of revolution.

In the struggle with the Kadet-dominated Duma the government was filled more and more with a sense of its own power. It saw this pseudo-parliament, not as a historical challenge that demanded a solution, but as an assembly of political opponents who had to be rendered harmless. A handful of lawyers for whom politics was rather like making a plea before a high court appeared to be rivals of the government and claimants to power. Their political eloquence oscillated between legal syllogisms and pseudo-classical phrase-mongering. In the debate on the subject of courts-martial the two parties were brought face to face. The Moscow lawyer Maklakov, in whom the liberals saw the man of the future, applied annihilating legal criticism to martial justice and, with it, to the government’s entire policy. “But courts-martial are not a legal institution,” Stolypin replied. “They are a weapon of struggle. You want to prove that this weapon is not consistent with the law? Well, it is consistent with expediency. Law is not an aim in itself. When the existence of the state is threatened, the government is not only entitled but is duty bound to leave legal considerations aside and to make use of the material weapons of its power.”

This reply, which expresses not only the philosophy of the government coup but also that of the popular rising, caused extreme embarrassment to the liberals. “What an unheard-of admission!” cried the liberal journalists, vowing for the thousand and first time that right is stronger than might.

Yet their entire policy was designed to convince the government of the contrary. They retreated again and again. In order to save the Duma from dissolution they abdicated all their rights, thus proving beyond dispute that might is stronger than right. Under such conditions the government was bound to feel tempted to continue using its weapons of power to the end.

The second Duma was dissolved. Now conservative national-liberalism, personified by the Union of October 17, appears as the successor of the revolution. The Kadets see themselves as the heirs to the revolution’s tasks. The Octobrists were in actual fact the heirs of the Kadets’ appeasement tactics. However furtively contemptuous the Kadets were to the Octobrists, the latter drew the only logical conclusions from the Kadets’ own premise: if you do not get your support from the revolution, you have to get it from Stolypin’s constitutionalism.

The third Duma gave the Tsarist government 456,535 army recruits, although the promised reforms in Kuropatkin’s and Stessel’s Department of Defense amounted to no more than new epaulettes, collar-tabs, and shakos. It approved the budget of the Ministry of Home Affairs which handed 70 per cent of the country over to the satraps who used the emergency laws like a hangman’s noose, and left the remaining 30 per cent free to be hanged and garrotted on the basis of “normal” laws. It accepted all the basic provisions of the famous ukase of November 9, 1906, issued by the government on the basis of Paragraph 87. Its purpose was to skim off a layer of solid property owners from the peasantry, and to leave all the rest to the process of natural selection in the biological sense of that term. In place of the expropriation of landowners’ lands for the benefit of the peasantry, the reaction put the expropriation of community-owned peasant lands for the benefit of the kulaks. “The law of November 9,” said one of the extreme reactionaries of the third Duma, “has enough explosive gas in it to blow up the whole of Russia.”

Driven into a historical cul-de-sac by the irreconcilable attitudes of the nobility and the bureaucracy, who once more emerged as the unlimited masters of the situation, the bourgeois parties are looking for a way out of the economic and political contradictions of their position – in imperialism. They seek compensation for their domestic defeats in foreign affairs – in the Far East (the Amur railway), Persia, and the Balkans. The so-called “annexation” of Bosnia and Herzegovina was greeted in Petersburg and Moscow with the deafening clatter of all the old ironware of patriotism. And the Kadet party, which, of all the bourgeois parties, claimed to be the most opposed to the old order, now stands at the head of militant “neo-Slavism”; the Kadets are hoping that capitalist imperialism will solve the problems left unsolved by revolution. Driven to de facto abandonment of any idea of confiscating the landowners’ lands and of any democratization of the social system – which means the abandonment of any hope of creating, by means of a farming peasantry, a stable domestic market for capitalist development – the Kadets transfer their hopes to foreign markets. For success to be achieved in that direction, strong state power is needed; and the liberals find themselves compelled to give active support to Tsarism as the actual holder of such power. The oppositionally-tinted imperialism of the Milyukovs merely serves as a kind of ideological cosmetic for that revolting mixture of autocratic bureaucracy, brutal landlordism and parasitic capitalism that is at the very core of the third Duma.

The situation which has arisen as a result of all this may yet lead to the most unexpected consequences. The same government that buried the reputation of its strength in the waters of Tsushima and the battlefields of Mukden; the same government that suffered the terrible sequel of its adventurist policies, now unexpectedly finds itself patriotically trusted by the “nation’s” representatives. It acquires, without difficulty, half a million new soldiers and half a billion roubles for its current military expenditure; and, in addition, it receives the Duma’s support for its new adventures in the Far East. More than that: by right and left, by the Black Hundreds and the Kadets, it is actually reproached because its foreign policy is not active enough! The logic of events thus drives the government on to the hazardous path of fighting for the restoration of its world prestige. Who knows? Perhaps, before the fate of the autocracy is finally and irrevocably decided in the streets of Petersburg and Warsaw, it will be put to the test once more on the banks of the Amur or the coast of the Black Sea.

Footnotes
1. A reference to a line in Schiller’s play The Conspiracy of Fiesta in Genoa: “The Moor has done his work, the Moor may go.” (Trans.)

2. In point of fact this text was written by Engels in Marx’s name. (Author)

3. It should be stated very clearly, however, that Engels in his Introduction had in mind only German affairs, whereas our considerations are based on the experience of the Russian revolution. (This not very convincing note was inserted in the German text purely for censorship reasons. Author)

Happy Birthday-From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- The Dress Rehearsal To The Bolshevik-Led October 1917 Russian Revolution- “1905”- A Book Review-

From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- The Dress Rehearsal To The Bolshevik-Led October 1917 Russian Revolution- “1905”- A Book Review

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1907/1905/ch22.htm

Click on the headline to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive online copy of his CHAPTER 22-Summing Up from 1905 as background for the review below.
Book Review

1905, Leon Trotsky, translated by Anya Bostock, Random House, New York, 1971

The author of this book, a central Soviet leader of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and of the Bolshevik-led revolution in 1917 as well as one of the 20th century’s larger-than-life revolutionary figures, Leon Trotsky, noted, as have others, that the unsuccessful 1905 revolution acted as a “dress rehearsal” for the Bolshevik-led October 1917 revolution. And thus this book was intended to, and does, give a bird’s eye view from a key participant about the lessons to be drawn from the failure of that first revolution, both the strategic and tactical military and political lessons. And from reading many histories of the October 1917 revolution from all kinds of political perspectives, Trotsky and Lenin at least, learned those lessons very well.

The presentations in this book actually were written in several different periods, the central part was written while Trotsky was in European exile in 1908(after a harrowing escape from the hazards of a court-imposed internal Siberian exile). Trotsky first hones in on a sociological, political, economic and cultural overview of the trends leading up to the 1905 events. He also analyzes the key “sparking” event, the January 9th march (old calendar) by the hat-in-hand workers to petition the Tsar for the redress of pressing grievances that turned into a massacre, the subsequent months long waves of political and economic strikes that forced some timid Tsarist constitutional innovations in October, the creation of the soviets (workers councils) in that period and its subsequent arrest as a body, and the pivotal, although unsuccessful, Moscow insurrection that ended the period of active revolutionary upheaval.

Other parts of the book include polemics against various liberal and social democratic opponents (more on those below), the trial of the Soviet deputies, including Trotsky’s stellar use of the courtroom as a platform to defend the Soviet’s actions from strikes to insurrection. The very last part, which kind of puts paid to the period, is a detailed description of his Siberian escape, the stuff of legend.

A quick summary of the basic strategic concepts of the Russian revolution is in order here to make sense of what the various working class organizations (and others) were trying to achieve in the 1905 revolution. It comes down to three concepts: the Menshevik social-democratic view (also essentially shared by the liberal capitalists, the peasant-based social-revolutionaries, and most of the bourgeois radical intelligentsia) that economically backward (compared to European capitalist and imperialist development), peasant-dominated (including vast peasant-dominated national minorities), and autocratic Russia was ripe for a bourgeois revolution of the Western-type led by the bourgeois before any thought of socialism could be projected; the Bolshevik social-democratic view which also argued for a bourgeois revolution of a more or less short duration but with the understanding that the Russian bourgeois was too tied to world imperialism to lead such a movement and also argued that it would be led by an alliance of the urban workers carrying the bulk of the peasantry with them (especially on the long unresolved land question); and, the Trotsky radical social-democratic view that the urban workers (and urban allies) also including that Russia mandatory peasant alliance would not only fight for the historic gains associated with the bourgeois revolution (quench land hunger, create a unified nation-state, form some kind of popular government with wide representation) but, of necessity, also form a workers and peasants government to start on the road to socialist construction. That is the core of his theory of permanent revolution (later, in the late 1920s, extended to other countries of belated capitalist development) associated thereafter with his name.

This thumbnail sketch does not do justice to all the intricacies of each position but, after reading this book one should understand those positions better and note, at least in passing, that Trotsky seems even in 1908 to have the better of the argument after having seriously drawn the lesson of his own experience and observed that the Russian bourgeoisie, for many reasons, had no heart to lead a revolution and were quite comfortable making its peace with Tsarist society. He also noted that the peasantry was too amorphous, too driven by its land hunger, and too scattered in the countryside to lead a modern revolution. But that is music for the future. Certainly even in 1908 (or earlier) as he was fighting a rear-guard action against his various political opponent, including Lenin) to defend his political perspectives he earned the title bestowed on him by George Bernard Shaw as the “prince of pamphleteers.” Even one hundred years later I am glad, glad as hell, that I am not the one that he is polemizing against with his rapier-edged pen. The wounds would still not have healed.

Of course the theory of permanent revolution, recognized as such or codified in full or not later by the Bolsheviks, turned out to be the fighting formula for the Bolshevik-led October revolution. The liberal bourgeoisie (led by the Kadet Party) turned out to be even more venal that it had been in 1905; the Mensheviks tried to pass a camel through the eye of a needle to try to keep giving power to the bourgeoisie, including taking part in their provisional government; and the social revolutionary-led peasantry turned to the Bolsheviks (at least important elements, including the peasant soldiers) when the latter supported land seizures by the poorer peasants. An attentive reader will see that scenario develop in embryo after reading this important eye witness work.

Note: There is no where else that this observation fits comfortably above so I will place it here. Those familiar with Trotsky’s role in the Bolshevik revolution as the military organizer of the Petrograd insurrection and later, under conditions of civil war, as War Commissar, where he led the red armies against the whites will be surprised to find that he was very perspective about the military necessities of the class struggle even in 1905. If one looks at the fastidiously dressed Trotsky in the famous picture taken of him in his prison cell while awaiting trial along with the other 1905 Soviet deputies one would not take him for a future class struggle warrior. Make that fact an added factor in my characterization of him as one of the 20th century's larger-than-life revolutionary figures.

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons- When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973 -"Left in Form,Right in Essence"- A Critique of Contemporary Trotskyism by Carl Davidson

Markin comment on this series:

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

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

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

This pamphlet was originally published as a series of 12 articles in early 1973 in the Guardian newsweekly.
Second printing Spring 1974.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).

What is the role of Trotskyism in the people’s struggles today? What are its historical origins and what new forms has it taken in recent times? These are the questions addressed in this pamphlet, which first appeared as a 12-part series in the Guardian in the Spring of 1973.
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National and class struggle

The Trotskyist movement in the U.S. today finds itself organizationally isolated from the rising trend of workers’ struggles.

At the same time it is in the position of tailing after – alternately – the trade union bureaucracy and the petty bourgeois nationalist trends in the struggles of the oppressed nationalities.

As a result, the Trotskyists can only respond negatively to what must be the strategy for proletarian revolution in the U.S. – the united front against imperialism, the fundamental alliance of which is between the multi-national working class and the oppressed nationalities.

The ideological reasons for this were present from the beginnings of the American Trotskyist movement and its rejection of Marxism-Leninism, particularly on the national question and the attitude to the trade unions.

The Trotskyists’ last major involvement in a labor struggle was also their first: the five-week union recognition struggle of the Minneapolis Teamsters in 1934. A number of members of the Communist League of America (Opposition), the predecessor to the Socialist Workers party, were also members of the Teamsters Local 574. While they did not hold any official positions of leadership in the union, the Trotskyists were heavily represented in the strike’s organizing committee and generally played the role of activist trade union militants in the day-to-day leadership of the struggle.

The problem is that they did not go beyond the role of trade unionists and in fact at one point answered red-baiting charges by denying that their militants were communists. James P. Cannon describes the outlook of his organization in Minneapolis in his History of American Trotskyism with an almost classic portrayal of tailism and bowing to the spontaneity of the masses:

“Adapt to their trend”

“Following the general trend of the workers,” he writes, “we also realized that if we were to make the best of our opportunities, we should not put unnecessary difficulties in our path. We should not waste time and energy trying to sell the workers a new scheme of organization they did not want. It was far better to adapt ourselves to their trend and also to exploit the possibilities of getting assistance from the existing official labor movement.”

It would be a mistake, however, to view the trade union work of the Trotskyists as apolitical. One of its main ingredients was anti-communism in the guise, of course, of “anti-Stalinism.” In a 1940 discussion with Trotsky on whether or not to “critically support” Communist party candidates in the elections, Cannon claims “such a line would disrupt our work” in the “broad anti-Stalinist movement.”

We built our strength on opposition to Stalinist control of the union ... The Stalinists are the main obstacle. A policy of maneuver would be disastrous. What we gained from the Stalinists we would lose otherwise.
This policy was soon to bear its fruit. Tim Wohlforth, head of the Trotskyist Workers League, describes the period of the late 1940s in his own “left” history of the SWP, The Struggle for Marxism in the United States:

This was the period when the “progressive” caucuses, which had fought the Stalinists during the latter part of the war essentially on sound trade union lines, were now settling down to their bureaucratic control of the unions and establishing their relations with the capitalist government and its cold war drive. Faced with this situation the SWP trade unionists were in a very difficult situation. They could not support their allies of the previous period, they were wary of seeking any relationship with the Stalinist workers who were being witch-hunted in the unions and they did not have the strength to throw up independent third trade union caucuses ...
Wohlforth points out that the SWP now began losing many of the workers it had managed to recruit, especially black workers. He apologetically describes the SWP’s inability to deal with white supremacy:

This failure is understandable considering the short duration of the party’s direct experience in Negro work and considering that the overwhelming majority of the party came from a more privileged layer of the working class who in their daily lives had little contact with Negroes.
That the SWP “had little contact” with Afro-Americans was not surprising, since the U.S. “left opposition” ignored their existence for the first 10 years of its existence. Even Trotsky was moved to remark, in 1939: “It is very disquieting to find that until now the party has done almost nothing in this field. It has not published a book, a pamphlet, leaflets, nor even any articles in the New International.” Wohlforth even points out that in 1933 an SWP leader was unable to answer a question of Trotsky’s as to whether or not Black people in the South spoke a different language.

This can be contrasted with the work of the Communist party, which, together with the Comintern, had developed a revolutionary analysis of the Afro-American question from the perspective of viewing it as a national question. The Afro-American people in the “Black Belt” region of the South, they said, constituted an oppressed nation. Communists were duty-bound to support its struggle for national liberation, including the right to secede.

At the same time the CP saw the struggle for full democratic rights for black people throughout the country as part and parcel of the class struggle and a key component of the struggle against opportunism. As a result the CP made great gains in this area of work, as well as many worthy contributions to the struggle against national oppression in the U.S.

The Trotskyists have attacked this line as “imposed by orders from Moscow” and distorted it by claiming that the CP demanded a separate Black state (rather than the right of self- determination) without regard to the aspirations of the Black masses.

The Trotskyists were not helped out of their quandary by Trotsky. He responded to the SWP’s white blindspot by interpreting the Afro- American national question on a completely subjective basis. “We do, of course, not obligate the Negroes to become a nation,” said Trotsky in 1939, “if they are, then that is a question of their consciousness, that is, what they desire and what they strive for.”

This repudiates any scientific approach to the national question which takes into account such factors as common history, territory, economic life and culture. The Trotskyists are thus unable to distinguish an oppressed nation from an oppressed national minority, or between the progressive democratic content of nationalist struggles and the narrow reactionary views of “cultural-national autonomy.”

This has led to considerable vacillation among the various Trotskyist groups. The Worker’s League, for instance, holds the view that “all nationalism is reactionary,” while the SWP falls into the “all nationalism is revolutionary” swamp. What unites the two is tailism. The first tails after the chauvinism of the labor aristocracy while the latter tails after the nationalism of the petty bourgeoisie. Both oppose proletarian internationalism in practice. The SWP is most explicit on its tailist line on the demand for the right of self-determination. “It is not,” writes Tony Thomas in the October 1970 International Socialist Review, “up to the revolutionary party to raise that demand, but only to support it once raised by Blacks.”

The SWP is aware, of course, that there are moderate, conservative and reactionary trends among Black nationalists. In their view, however, these are not “real” or “consistent” nationalists, since “consistent” nationalism is proletarian internationalism.

“Neutral” consciousness

This is idealism and it is manifested continuously in the SWP’s outlook. On the question of trade unionism, for instance, Ernest Mandel states in the December 1970 ISR that “trade union consciousness is in and by itself socially neutral. It is neither reactionary nor revolutionary.” Mandel’s “in and by itself” stand takes him outside and “above” classes and class struggle and into the realm of pure thought. In the process he throws out the whole burden of Lenin’s What is to be Done, a work that insisted that trade union consciousness was bourgeois and had to be struggled against, whether it played a progressive or backward role in certain circumstances.

This method extends to the SWP’s overall view of Marxism-Leninism. “Marxism,” says SWP leader Joseph Hansen, amounts to “empiricism systematically carried out.” Here Hansen views dialectical materialism as simply a quantitative and evolutionary development of pragmatism, the world outlook of the imperialist bourgeoisie.

What it actually means, however, is that the Trotskyists have never broken with bourgeois ideology themselves, but jump back and forth between bourgeois rationalism and bourgeois empiricism. Both are forms of idealism and reflect their present-day petty bourgeois class character. One area in which this becomes most apparent is the SWP’s approach to the woman question.
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The woman question

The Trotskyist stand on the woman question, like their approach to politics in general, is “left” in form and right in essence.

The views on the women’s struggle of the two major Trotskyist groupings in the U.S. – the Socialist Workers party (SWP) and the Workers League – also express the vacillating character of their movement in tailing after the spontaneity of the masses.

The two organizations appear to be fundamentally opposed on the issue. The SWP, for instance, considers itself to be “revolutionary feminist.” “If you love revolution,” goes one of their slogans, “then you’ll love feminism.”

The Workers League heads in another direction. “The feminist movement,” says one of their polemics against the SWP, “plays a reactionary role, splitting the working class and sowing the illusion that the problems of working class women could be solved apart from the fight for socialism. The movement is directed against the working class and the revolutionary party.”

In essence the two positions are the same. Both abandon the struggle for proletarian leadership of the mass democratic struggle for the emancipation of women.

The SWP bows to the spontaneity of the just struggle waged by the women of the middle classes. The Workers League, for its part, liquidates even the pretense of a Marxist-Leninist approach to the woman question and tails after the spontaneous economic struggles of the workers at the point of production.

Both are similar in another respect. Both identify the entire women’s movement with the feminist trend. The Workers League does this in the guise of dismissing the movement as “middle class reformism.” The SWP view takes this form:

“Feminism,” writes Linda Jenness in the April 27, 1973 Militant, “is where women are out fighting for things that are in their interest. Feminism is wherever women are challenging the traditional roles assigned to them.”

The Workers League, of course, has no influence in the women’s movement, except as a negative example that strengthens conservative and anti-communist trends.

The SWP, however, plays a more pernicious role. It considers itself an uncompromising champion of women’s rights and by adapting itself to feminism, has gained a following for its ideas among a section of the middle class youth.

Main blow on the family

The SWP gives a “left” cover to its views by concentrating its attack on the family as the principal institution perpetuating the oppression of women. “The feminist movement today,” states the SWP’s 1971 convention resolution entitled Towards a Mass Feminist Movement, “started out by questioning the basic structure and institutions of this society, especially the family.” Caroline Lund, writing in the October 1970 International Socialist Review adds, “The oppression of women by other institutions has been directly related to their role in the family.”

In this, she follows the lead of Trotsky. While he gave the appearance of championing the cause of Soviet women and criticised some mistaken positions of the CPSU – e.g. banning abortions at one time – he too panicked over the tasks of socialist construction, and launched a utopian attack on the family.

Lund goes on to attack the idea of struggling for equality within the family: “Women have had enough of being so-called partners! We want to be whole individuals, with our own lives and aspirations. There should be no ‘head of the family,’ neither a man nor a woman, no domination of human beings over other human beings – including children.” As for the youth, they too should abandon the struggle in that arena. “Young people,” she says, “cannot as a rule work out their own lives satisfactorily until they break from their families.”

The Marxist-Leninist movement should have no illusions about the character of the family nor romanticize its traditional role, which Engels described as one of the pillars of class society. It is not the role of the proletarian movement, however, to center its attack on the family nor to call for its abolition. The imperialists themselves are causing its erosion, as the fact that one out of three marriages now ends in divorce shows at a glance.

The point is that there is no mass alternative to the nuclear family in capitalist society or even in the first stages of socialist construction. Without the family unit, working women with children would have to abandon even the minimal protections that it affords.

This is why the workers’ movement, in the course of the struggle for socialism, aims to win jobs for women, emphasizes the daycare struggle and raises the fight for equality within the family, for husbands to share equally in the responsibilities of the home.

As to what form the family will take under fully developed communism, Engels said there could only be speculation and that it was a task for future generations to decide. In the first stages of socialism, however, he said that the working-class family would probably take a purely monogamous form for the first time, since in capitalist society monogamy was, in practice, primarily for the woman.

Perhaps an analogy can be drawn with the state. In his polemics with the anarchists, Lenin agreed that the classless society would have no state. History and class struggle, however, have determined the need for a transitional proletarian state that would only wither away with the dying out of classes and class struggle. Thus it would be incorrect to call for the abolition of any type of state or the abolition of the workers’ state just after the seizure of power.

But to the Trotskyists the fact that the monogamous nuclear family continues to exist in socialist countries like China and to develop along lines of greater equality for women is not seen as a progressive step forward. Instead it is slandered as “a reformist policy continuing the subjugation of women and reinforcing a bureaucratic caste.”

The Trotskyists also capitulate to the feminist trend by raising the idea of “sisterhood” and placing it above the class struggle in practice.

“The truth is,” states the SWP’s 1971 document, “that women are at the same time united by sexual oppression and divided by class society.”

It is true that there are two aspects to the oppression of women by male supremacy. The principal aspect. is a class question, the antagonistic contradiction between the masses of women and the imperialists. The secondary aspect is a non-antagonistic contradiction among the people, the contradiction between men and women.

Broad unity possible

Thus even the women of the exploiting classes – to a certain extent and in a limited way – share in the general oppression of women and as a consequence can make a contribution to the united front. But this potential unity among primarily working-class and middle-class women can develop in a progressive way only through the struggle for leadership by the proletarian women and their class outlook within the united front against imperialism, one of the spearheads of which is the mass democratic women’s movement. If left to spontaneity, the class contradiction between the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie becomes primary and the movement remains fragmented.

This is exactly what the SWP does. In place of the leading role of the proletariat, it substitutes the idealist notion of “inherent logic.” In answering the question of which will become primary, the unity or division in the women’s movement, the SWP states: “Sisterhood is powerful because of this universal female oppression, and this is the basis for the existence of an independent, nonexclusive, mass feminist movement with an anti-capitalist logic.”

Thus “sisterhood” prevails over class struggle and the role of the working women is reduced to the obvious comment that they have “the most to gain” from democratic reforms.

The SWP likes to claim that it is building the women’s movement among the masses. In addition to the fact that it is raising a petty bourgeois line; this claim is not even true by their own admission. At a time when the rising trend in the women’s movement is developing among the working women, particularly in the daycare battles being led by third world working women, the SWP focuses its attention on the women students. “Building campus women’s liberation groups,” says the SWP, “is a key task, since the campus groups are the largest and fastest growing sector of the movement.”

Reflects SWP’s base

The particular concerns of this section of women, while part of the woman question in general, are reflected in the emphasis the SWP puts forward in its line and tactics. Most women students do not have children, family responsibilities or jobs. Many are still under the thumb of parental authority or in the process of rebelling against it, and this is manifested in the SWP’s concentrated fire on the family.

But the main reflection is in the Trotskyist’s approach to the struggle to repeal anti-abortion laws. Here the SWP has focused on the abortion question as the most important issue of the women’s movement, raised it in isolation and refused to raise other demands such as childcare and job equality together with it in united front coalitions. The result has been obvious. Now that the reform has been won, the “single-issue” coalitions have disintegrated and the Trotskyists are floundering in a quandary over what to do next.

But the SWP has had some success. Its single-issue approach made its contribution to increasing the divisions in the women’s movement. The refusal to unite the abortion struggle with the movement for daycare, for instance, has the consequence of failing to combat the prejudice among some sections of the masses that the women’s struggle is against children and aimed at destroying the family.

Reich’s idealism

At the same time that the SWP conducts a semi-anarchist attack on the family, emphasizing the neo-Freudian idealism of Wilhelm Reich, they draw back one step from the logical conclusion of demanding its abolition. Instead, in classic form, they switch over to reformism.

“The heart of the struggle for liberation,” states the SWP’s 1971 statement, “is not toward counter-institutionism, but fighting to wrest the vast resources ... away from the ruling classes.”

The difference between “wresting away resources” and expropriating the expropriators through the proletarian dictatorship is the difference between reform.and revolution, between revisionism and Marxism-Leninism.

“The inseparable connection between the social and human position of the woman, and private property in the means of production must be strongly brought out,” Lenin told Clara Zetkin in 1920. “That will draw a clear and ineradicable line of distinction between our policy and feminism. And it will also supply the basis for regarding the woman question as a part of the social question, of the workers’ problem, and so bind it firmly to the proletarian class struggle and the revolution.”

The SWP’s failure in this regard is followed by its general extension into the modern revisionist theory of “structural reform.”
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Reform or revolution?

The Trotskyists in this country are relatively well known for their ultra-left opposition to the strategy of revolution by stages in the colonial countries.

To the anti-imperialist united front, aimed at forming a transitional new democratic state and led by the proletariat, they counterpose the line of immediate transition to the proletarian dictatorship.

What is less apparent, however, is that the Socialist Workers party, the largest Trotskyist group in the U.S. and representing the main trend in Trotskyism internationally, puts forward just the opposite strategy for revolution in the advanced capitalist countries.

In fact, despite their fulminations against the revisionist Communist party, they go a long way toward advocating a two-stage “anti-monopoly coalition” strategy, flirt with the idea of “peaceful transition” and scrap the theory of the proletarian dictatorship.

But there is actually a unity between the SWP’s “two lines.” In both cases they set the democratic movement and the class struggle against each other by denying the leading role of the proletariat in the united front against imperialism.

The Trotskyist position raises the question: What is the fundamental contradiction in the U.S.? “The irrepressible antagonism,” writes SWP theoretician George Novack in his book, Democracy and Revolution, “between the dominant monopolists and the strivings for equality, social justice and even for life itself among the masses of the American population holds out two opposing lines of long-range development for American politics.”

Thus it is not the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie but the contradiction between the “masses” and the “dominant monopolists” that is the determining factor in the development of the proletarian revolution.

There is no doubt among Marxist-Leninists that the development of the democratic struggles of the masses can serve to advance the class struggle and even in certain periods play a leading role in raising mass anti-imperialist consciousness. This is the meaning, for instance, of Mao Tsetung’s statement that the Afro-American people’s struggle has served as a “clarion call” to all the oppressed and exploited to rise up against the imperialists.

But when all is said and done, it is also the “ABC” of Marxism-Leninism that it is the development and resolution of the class struggle that determines the development and resolution of She ~r democratic struggles, including the struggle against national oppression. This is the meaning of Mao’s statement that, in the final analysis, national struggle is a matter of class struggle and the reason why Marxist-Leninists place in the forefront the struggle for leadership by the proletariat in the national liberation movements and all other democratic anti-imperialist struggles.

The position of the SWP is completely opposed to this view. Their approach is to tail opportunistically each spontaneous development in the mass democratic movements. Each constituency, in succession, is then dubbed the “vanguard” leading the proletariat to socialism, with the added provision that the “vanguard of the vanguard” in each sector is presently made up of the student youth.

Another SWP theoretician, George Breitman, makes this subordination of class struggle to democratic struggle clear in his pamphlet, How a Minority Can Change Society. “The Negro people,” he writes, “although a minority, can, with consistent leadership, lead the American working class in the revolution that will abolish capitalism.”

Breitman then sums up the Marxist position that oppressed nationalities cannot win full democratic rights under capitalism, thus making their struggle a revolutionary question. Then he adds: “But that is not what I am discussing here. What I am talking about now is something else – the capacity of the Negro people to lead the working-class revolution to replace capitalism.”

Breitman’s shell game

This is backed up with a sleight of hand maneuver. Breitman first says Black people are a “racial minority” that is “overwhelmingly proletarian” in composition. Next he states, “Negroes are an important section of the working class as well as a racial minority.” Then he concludes that “unless we are blind” we can see that Black people are “the most radicalized section of the working class.”

But Breitman is the one who is blind. He has distorted the elementary truth that Black workers stand at the center and play a leading role in both the national and class struggles into the false claim that all Blacks are workers, thus liquidating the national question, the class divisions among the Black people and then demagogically topping it all off with an absurd analogy with the Russian revolution, where he casts the Black people in the role of the proletariat and the masses of the white workers as the peasantry.

That the SWP does not see this line as any special attribute of the national question is evident in their course since Breitman’s statement was first put forward in January 1964. Since then they have applied the same line of reasoning to the youth movement, the women’s movement, the Chicano movement and finally to the gay liberation movement.

How does the SWP propose to lead each of these “independent forces” to power? Again, the initial line is stated by Breitman in his attitude toward forming an all-Black political party with a “transitional” reformist program. “Without Negro votes, the present two-party system will pass from the scene and be replaced by something different, out of which Negroes may be able to acquire new and more reliable allies than up to now. And all of this can be accomplished by the simple device of forming a Negro party and running independent Negro candidates.”

“Something different”?

What is the “something different” that will so miraculously replace the two-party system? The next step would be the formation of a reformist parliamentary labor party, which the SWP would try to join as dual members. The labor party and the Black party would then form an alliance with a Chicano party and possibly, although this has only been raised in SWP internal bulletins, a women’s party.

All these together, of course, would make a bid for a parliamentary majority. The SWP’s role would be to make them “consistent” in their fight for reforms by pursuing the path of “anti-capitalist structural reform” put forward by the revisionist Italian Communist party. “The fundamental goal of these reforms,” writes Ernest Mandel in his Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory, “would be to take away the levels of command in the economy from the financial groups, trusts and monopolies and place them in the hands of the nation, to create a public sector of decisive weight in credit, industry and transportation and to base all of this on workers’ control.”

Mandel calls this “stage” where the “nation” has “taken command” of the monopolies through its governmental “public sector”, a period preceding the development of “dual power” which “could” precede socialist construction.

Even his slogan of “workers control” – to which the SWP would add their version of “community control” – is a reformist fraud, paralleling on the factory floor his approach on the floor of parliament.

Workers’ control, says Mandel, “is a refusal to enter discussions with the management or the government as a whole on the division of national income, so long as the workers have not acquired the ability to reveal the way the capitalists cook the books when they talk of prices and profits. In other words, it is the opening of the books and the calculation of the real production costs and the real profit margins by the workers.”

Why the importance of the calculations? So the workers can accurately determine their productivity and thus achieve a “socially just distribution” in wages.

Despite the obvious clash with Marx’s famous statement, “Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,’ let us emblazon our banners with the revolutionary watchword, abolition of the wage system,’ ” Mandel goes all the way and suggests to the capitalists that his proposals would help them run their system more rationally “... From the standpoint of anti-cyclical policy, it is more intelligent to reduce profits and increase wages. This would permit the demand from wage workers and consumers to come to the relief of investment in the interest of maintaining the conjuncture at the high level.”

Marxist-Leninists have long maintained that the dividing line between revolutionaries and reformists in the proletarian movement is on the question of the proletarian dictatorship, on the necessity to smash the bourgeois state apparatus and to create a new proletarian state in its place; a state that would insure democracy for the workers and their allies and dictatorship against he exploiters for the entire period of transition between capitalism and the classless society of communism.

Not only do Mandel and his SWP co-thinkers put forward in essence a reformist anti-monopoly coalition line for the first “stage” of their revolution in the capitalist countries, they also join with the modern revisionists in liquidating the proletarian dictatorship in the second stage.

George Novack managed to write an entire book on the subject of democracy and the various forms of state in slave, feudal, bourgeois and socialist society without even once using the term or explaining its essence in other words. Novack, in fact, claims the “dividing line” between reformists and revolutionaries is on the question of democracy, “the one viewing democracy as a means of disposing of capitalism, the other as an excuse for maintaining it indefinitely.”

Novack also joins the CP in putting forward the necessity of armed struggle as a hypothetical statement. “In order to protect all such – democratic institutions, Marxists are ready to fight, arms in hand if need be, against ultra-reactionary movements.”

Finally, Novack admits that during the Civil War following the October revolution, “dictatorial enactments were directed exclusively against the class enemies of the revolution” and that these were necessary at the time. But then he adds, “It was not to be considered the permanent and normal state of affairs throughout the period of the transition to a classless society, as Stalinism and Maoism later preached.”

Here Novack joins hands with the Khrushchev revisionists in asserting that while the proletarian dictatorship might have been necessary earlier, what is now required is a “state of the whole people.

What Novack is combating, of course, is not only Stalin and Mao, but also Lenin, thus joining the revisionists and social democrats in a common counter-revolutionary swamp. It is followed through in the Trotskyist view of the party.
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The vanguard party

Trotsky began his career as a disrupter of the revolutionary movement during a struggle with Lenin over the character of the proletarian vanguard party.

Today his followers have – in one form or another – continued this role of attacking Leninist parties wherever they actually exist by attempting to substitute petty bourgeois ideas on organization in their place.

In his struggle with the Mensheviks, Lenin put forward the position that the proletarian revolutionary party, in addition to being guided by the most advanced scientific theory, had to be an organization of professional revolutionaries, full-time and trained activists comprised of the best elements of the working class and the revolutionary intellectuals.

This “party of a new type” is seen as the proletariat’s “general staff” in the class struggle with the bourgeoisie. It is not a debating society but an instrument to prepare the masses for smashing the existing state power, establishing and leading the proletarian dictatorship and continuing to wage the class struggle throughout the entire transition period of socialist construction to the classless society of communism.

As a weapon of class struggle, the party requires an iron discipline, subordinating the individual to the collective, and the combination of secret and open work. Decisions and policies are developed and changed through democratic discussion, debate and the process of criticism and self-criticism. Once a majority in the party has agreed, however, any minority must set aside its opinions and act in carrying out the views of the entire party with a monolithic unity in the face of the class enemy.

The party represents the vanguard of the proletariat but not by self-proclamation. It must be thoroughly integrated with the masses, learn from them and win the role of leader, not only of the workers, but of the broad masses of various classes through its revolutionary practice in the actual course of struggle.

Trotsky’s opposition

Trotsky stood in open and hostile opposition to this view of the party almost to the eve of the October revolution in 1917. He took a centrist position, demanding that the Bolsheviks unite in the same party with the Mensheviks. The only way this could happen, of course, would be for Lenin to dissolve the type of organization he had constructed. Hence the term “liquidationist,” which Lenin applied to Trotsky with a vengeance, defining it as opportunism gone to the extreme of dissolving the proletariat’s key weapon – its organization.

Trotsky agreed with the Menshevik position on organization. He wanted a party without a strict discipline, with contending groups and factions that could be “broad” enough to contain those who proclaimed themselves members by simply stating agreement with general principles. He attacked Lenin viciously:

“Not an accident but a deep ‘omen,’ ” Trotsky wrote in 1904, “is the fact that the leader of the reactionary wing of our party, Comrade Lenin, who is defending the tactical methods of caricature Jacobinism. was psychologically forced to give such a definition of Social- Democracy which represents nothing but a theoretical attempt at destroying the class character of our party.”

This is Trotsky’s classic anti-communist summary of Lenin’s policy: “The barracks regime cannot be the regime of our party, just as the factory cannot be its example. These methods bring about a situation that the party organization will replace the party, the central committee will replace the party organization, and finally the ‘dictator’ will replace the central committee ... The committees will do all the ‘directing’ while ‘the people remain silent.’ ”

Despite the fact that Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks just before October, he never gave up the essence of these views. Although he formally stated he was wrong on the party, his view that it was his particular strategic line of “permanent revolution” that won out over Lenin’s has the clear implication that the issue was not all that important. As Michael Miller points out in the recently published pamphlet, From Trotskyism to Social-Imperialism:

From Trotsky’s paint of view a miracle happened at this propitious moment in history. The revolution joined Trotsky. Trotsky didn’t really join the Bolsheviks. They joined him! 40,000 Bolshevik workers joined Trotsky since he had foreseen everything! ... The problem with Trotsky’s theory is that it requires no party at all ... Trotsky’s theory of October is that the Bolsheviks, having finally come around to the “correct idea,” were able to lead the revolution despite having an incorrect line for 14 years prior to the event.

After Lenin’s death Trotsky reasserted his old ideas on the party in a new form. He now paid lip service to democratic centralism, but demanded “freedom of criticism” within the party in the form of the freedom to organize factional groupings, each with its own leadership structures, platforms, programs and press. As the history of Trotsky’s “left opposition” also demonstrated, in practice he wanted factions with their own internal discipline that could be exercised against the party’s, even to the extent of carrying out actions among the masses expressly forbidden by the party and in opposition to its line.

In 1904 Trotsky had attacked Lenin for “destroying the class character of our party.” In a sense, this was true, although it was not what Trotsky had in mind. Lenin clearly aimed at defeating the petty bourgeois character of the party and it is precisely the petty bourgeois view of both the party and state as an ideal form of radical democratic parliament that Trotsky was never able to abandon.

Trotsky’s perspective comes out most clearly in his 1935 articles, If America Should Go Communist. Despite the fact that the U.S. bourgeoisie is far more sophisticated in the practice of counter-revolution than their Russian counterparts, Trotsky thinks the revolution will be much easier here. Since the monopoly capitalists are in a minority and “everybody below this group is already economically prepared for communism,” Trotsky claims “there is no reason why these (non-monopoly) groups should oppose determined resistance.” As for the monopolists, “they will cease struggling as soon as they fail to find people to fight for them.”

The non-monopoly capitalists and petty bourgeoisie, inspired by the productivity of a planned economy after “a good long time to think things over,” could be “kept solvent until they were gradually and without compulsion sucked into the socialized business system. Without compulsion! The American soviets would not need to resort to the drastic measures which circumstances have often imposed on the Russians.”

Which drastic measures? While Trotsky admits the monopolists would find no place in U.S. soviets, he adds that “with us the soviets have been bureaucratized as a result of the political monopoly of a single party, which itself has become a bureaucracy.” In contrast, “The American soviets will be full-blooded and vigorous, without need or opportunity for such measures ... A wide struggle between interests, groups and ideas is not only conceivable – it is inevitable ... All of these will arouse controversy, vigorous electoral struggle, and passionate debate in the newspapers and at public meetings.”

In addition to asserting the need for a multiparty electoral system, another “drastic measure” to be thrown out is the proletarian control of the press. Instead, “it might be done on the basis of proportional representation for the votes in each soviet election. Thus the right of each group of citizens to use the power of the press will depend on their numerical strength.”

It is a basic principle of Marxism that different parties represent the interests of different classes and sections of classes. Commenting on this same article by Trotsky, M.J. Olgin wrote in his 1935 book, Trotskyism: Counter-Revolution in Disguise:

Soviet parliaments

If the Communist party represents the workers, then obviously the other parties must represent the rich farmers, the poor farmers, the middle bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, perhaps the intellectuals. How will these parties function? Naturally by struggle ... A soviet very much resembling a bourgeois parliament. Several parties represented in it with equal rights. Each party fighting the others. Several parties making a coalition to defeat the dangerous common rival. Why not a coalition of all the other parties against the party of the workers? This latter party, in Trotsky’s conception, should be split into a number of legalized groups and factions with their own separate platforms. The population will have its choice of parties, groups, programs. No special discipline is needed for any party; no monolithic unity for the communist party.

Olgin sums up: “How unity can be achieved under these conditions remains a secret of Trotsky’s. But then he does not worry much about unity because his slogan is, ‘Without compulsion!’ ”

In stark contrast stands Lenin’s view. “The dictatorship of the proletariat is the most stubborn, the most acute, the most merciless struggle of the pew class against the more powerful enemy, the bourgeoisie, whose resistance has grown tenfold after it has been overthrown. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a stubborn struggle, bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, pedagogical and administrative, against the powers and traditions of the old society.”

The Trotskyist parties today continue to repudiate this line and follow the bankrupt views of their mentor. One consequence, of course, is that they themselves are riddled with factions and comprise a galaxy of competing organizations, all claiming the label, “Trotskyist.”

The direction of some, like the Socialist Workers party, has been in the direction of the modern revisionists, liquidating the leading role of the party into a “revolutionary nucleus” that aims to become a mass party playing simply a “catalytic” role in forming an anti-monopoly coalition.

Rationalist deviation

Others, like the Workers League, emphasize Trotsky’s idealist rationalism and remain ensconsed firmly in “left” sectarianism. As their leader, Tim Wohlforth, put it, “At heart what the party is is its program. It is nothing else. The apparatus, the forces, the people, the equipment, the paper, are all expressions of what? A program ... and a program is an idea. So at its heart you could say that the party is an idea.”

In essence, however, they can all justly claim to be Trotskyists. They are united in their opposition to Marxism-Leninism.

Trotsky’s opposition, his sabotage of the proletarian movement and his wrecking activities in the period of the united front against fascism, eventually cost him his life.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that the danger of Trotskyism could be eliminated in such a manner. Trotskyism is an ideological trend within the petty bourgeoisie and as such a social basis for it exists and will continue to exist as long as there are middle classes.

The struggle against Trotskyism is also bound up with the struggle against modern revisionism, the existence and development of which has added new fuel and created new conditions for a revival of Trotskyism.

The decisive condition for a successful struggle against Trotskyism – and all forms of opportunism – is to be found in the growth of the Marxist-Leninist movement itself, in the development of the proletarian vanguard party and its winning of the masses in their millions to the banner of revolution.