Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series,
From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from
Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973
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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The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited
These articles were originally serialized in Workers Vanguard, in 1973, starting in the 22 June issue [No.23] and concluding in the 10 October issue [No. 30]
Reply to the Guardian
THE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION REVISITED
3. THE "THIRD PERIOD"
Stalin's consistent rightist course during 1926-27 led him to capitulate to the kulaks (rich peasants) at home, to the trade-union bureaucrats during the British general strike, to Chiang Kai-shek in China. He backed up this policy by a bloc in the Politburo with Bukharin, who had called on the peasants to "enrich yourselves" and projected the building of socialism "at a snail Is pace." The Left Opposition led by Trotsky opposed this line, warning that it not only meant the massacre of thousands of foreign Communists but ultimately threatened the very foundations of the Soviet state itself. Stalin "answered" at the 15th party congress (December 1927) by summarily expelling the Opposition and formally declaring that "adherence to the opposition and propaganda of its views [is] incompatible with membership in the party."
Trotsky's predictions were dramatically confirmed by the kulak rebellion of 1927-28. The state granaries were half empty and starvation threatened the cities; grain collections produced riots in the villages, as the peasants (who could obtain little in the way of manufactured goods in return for the inflated currency) refused to sell at state-regulated prices. Suddenly in January 1928 Stalin switched to a tougher line, ordering armed expeditions to requisition grain stocks. But even this was not enough. In May he was still declaring that "expropriation of kulaks would be folly" (Problems of Leninism, p. 221), but by the end of the year he argued: "Can we permit the expropriation of kulaks...? A ridiculous question....We must breakdown the resistance of that class in open battle" (Problems of Leninism, p. 325). Such dramatic reversals of policy were a constant for Stalin.
Since 1924 Trotsky had been campaigning for industrialization and collectivization and was branded by Stalin as an "enemy of the peasant" and "super-industrializer." But faced with an anti-Soviet peasant revolt in 1928, Stalin recoiled in utter panic, switching from blind conservatism to blind adventurism. In the 1927 Platform of the Joint Opposition, Trotsky and Zinoviev called for doubling the growth rate of the first five-year plan; Stalin now tripled it, at the price of tremendous suffering for the workers. The Opposition called for voluntary collectivization aided by state credits for cooperatives and a struggle against the influence of the kulak; Stalin now accomplished the forced collectivization in half of all farms in the Soviet Union in the space of four months! The peasants responded by sabotage, killing off more than 50 percent of the horses in the country, and a civil war which during the next several years cost more than three million lives.
Trotsky opposed the collectivization-at-machine-gun-point as a monstrosity. Marxists had always called for the gradual winning over of the petty bourgeoisie by persuasion and a voluntary transition to socialism through cooperative production. The industrialization, however, despite the incredible disorganization and unnecessary hardships caused by bureaucratic planning, he praised:
"The success of the Soviet Union in industrial development is acquiring global historical significance....That tempo is neither stable nor secure...but it provides practical proof of the immense possibilities inherent in socialist economic methods."
--L. D. Trotsky, "Economic Recklessness and its Perils," 1930
Both the collectivization and industrialization fully vindicated the policies of the Opposition. To represent a return to Leninism, however, they required the complement of re-establishment of Soviet and party democracy. The bankruptcy of his previous policies sharply revealed by the crisis, Stalin took the opposite course, reinforcing his bureaucratic dictatorship and expelling Trotsky from the Soviet Union.
Stalin Discovers a "Third Period"
Stalin's policies in the Communist International (CI) were a duplicate of his domestic zigzags. After the disaster of the Shanghai insurrection of 1927, in which he ordered the Chinese Communists to lay down their arms to the butcher Chiang Kai-shek, he sharply reversed course and ordered, the adventuristic Canton Commune which ended in a similar massacre of the workers. In the summer of 1928 Stalin generalized this pattern of reckless ultra-leftism into the doctrine of a "third period" of imperialism.
According to this "theory" there was a post-war revolutionary wave ending in 1923, a period of stabilization until 1928 and then a new period of the imminent and final collapse of capitalism. Like the catastrophists of today, Stalin reasoned that economic crisis would automatically create a revolutionary situation. In fact the early stages of a crisis are frequently accompanied by sharp demoralization in the working class. And it is noteworthy that at no time during 1928-32 did any Communist party in the world attempt to seize power! (Subsequently Stalin quietly abandoned his bombastic theory as he made a sharp turn to the right.)
The onset of the depression and the Comintern's ultra-left policies wreaked havoc in the Communist parties. In the key country of Western Europe, Germany, a combination of mass layoffs and the CP's policy of abandoning the trade unions resulted in the percentage of factory workers in the party falling from 62 percent in 1928 to only 20 percent in 1931, effectively turning the Communists into the vanguard of the unemployed rather than the workers. Typical for the pathetic results of "Third Period" adventurism were the May Day demonstrations of 1929 which had been prohibited by the capitalist governments: in Paris the police simply arrested all active CP members on 30 April (releasing them three days later). In Berlin the social-democratic police chief Zoergiebel brutally attacked the Communists, whose call for a general strike fizzled.
Another aspect of the "Third Period" policies was the practice of setting up small "revolutionary unions," counterposed to the reformist-led mass organizations. Communists favor trade-union unity, but do not oppose every split. It may be necessary to break with the restrictive craft unions in order to organize mass-production workers. Also, when a left-wing upsurge is prevented from taking power solely by bureaucratic and gangster methods, a break with the old organization may be the only alternative to defeat. The key is support of the overwhelming majority of the workers, enabling the union to survive as a mass organization.
The "Third Period" dual unionism, considered a matter of principle, was quite different. It led to the formation of separate trade-union federations (the Trade Union Unity League [TUUL] in the U.S. and the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition [RGO] in Germany), and countless tiny "red unions" with a few score members, which never had any chance of success. The "red union" policy is directly opposed to the Leninist policy of struggling for Communist leadership of the existing mass workers, organizations, and with the exception of a few isolated situations it was doomed to defeat.
"Social-Fascism"
A generalization of this policy was Stalin's discovery that the reformist social-democratic parties were "social-fascist," i.e., "socialist in words, fascist in deeds." Since they were therefore no longer part of the workers movement (like the social-democratic-led unions'), the tactic of united front was not applicable and Communists could at most offer a "united front from below," that is simply calling on rank-and-file Social Democrats and trade unionists to desert their leaders.
The social-democratic leaders prepared the way for fascism--about this there can be no doubt. In January 1919 the Social Democrat Noske personally organized the massacre of hundreds of German revolutionary workers in repressing the "Spartacus Uprising" in Berlin; among the martyrs were Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the top leaders of the German CP. In 1929 the Social Democrat Zoergiebel drowned the CP May Day march in blood. At every step on Hitler's road to power the reformists capitulated rather than fight. And even after Hitler had already taken power, instead of organizing the massive resistance they had promised, social-democratic leaders offered to support the Nazi government's foreign policy in the vain hope of thereby saving their party from destruction! They never fought until it was too late, and in the last analysis they preferred Hitler to revolution.
But this is not at all the same as saying, as did Stalin, that the Social Democracy was only the "left wing of fascism." This philistine statement ignored the fact that the organizations of Social Democracy and the unions themselves would be destroyed as the result of a fascist victory. As
Trotsky wrote:
"Fascism is not merely a system of reprisals, of brutal force, and of police terror. Fascism is a particular governmental system based on the uprooting of all elements of proletarian democracy within bourgeois society. The task of fascism lies not only in destroying the Communist vanguard....It is also necessary to smash all independent and voluntary organizations, to demolish all the defensive bulwarks of the proletariat, and to uproot whatever has been achieved during three-quarters of a century by the Social Democracy and the trade unions."
--"What Next?," January 1932
Here was a situation that cried out for the policy of the united front. The leaders did not want to fight but to retreat. The rank and file, however, could not retreat--they had to fight or face annihilation. Call on the social-democratic leadership to mount a united offensive against the Nazis! If they accept, the fascist menace could be destroyed and the road opened to revolution. If they refuse, their treachery is clearly exposed before the workers and the revolutionary mobilization of the working class is aided by demonstrating in struggle that the communists are the only consistent proletarian leadership. In Trotsky's words:
"Worker-Communists, you are hundreds of thousands, millions; you cannot leave for anyplace; there are not enough passports for you. Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank. Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can bring victory."
--"For a Workers' United Front Against Fascism," December 1931
"After Hitler--Us"
Right up to Hitler's seizure of power Stalin continued to follow out the sectarian-defeatist logic of the "Third Period." After the September 1930 elections, in which the Nazis' vote jumped from 800,000 to more than six million, the head of the German CP, Ernest Thaelmann, told the Comintern Executive, "...14 September was in a sense Hitler's best day after which there would be no better but only worse days." The CI endorsed this view and called on the CP to "concentrate fire on the Social-Fascists "! The Stalinists ridiculed Trotsky's analysis of fascism, and claimed there was no difference between the Brüning regime and the Nazis. In other words, they were entirely indifferent whether the workers' organizations existed or not! Remmele, a CP leader, declared in the Reichstag (parliament), "Let Hitler take office--he will soon go bankrupt, and then it will be our day." Consistent with this criminal and utterly cowardly policy, the CP joined together with the Nazis in an (unsuccessful) attempt to unseat the social-democratic Prussian state government (the "Red Plebiscite" of 1931)!
In response to the wide support Trotsky's call for a united front found among German workers, Thaelmann replied in September 1932:
"In his pamphlet on how National Socialism is to be defeated, Trotsky gives one answer only, and it is this: the German Communist Party must join hands with the Social Democratic Party....Either, says he, the Communist party makes common cause with the Social Democrats, or the German working class is lost for ten or twenty years. This is the theory of an utterly bankrupt Fascist and counter-revolutionary....Germany will of course not go fascist--our electoral victories are a guarantee of this. [!]"
Nine months later Thaelmann was sitting in Hitler's jails. He was later executed by the Nazis, as were thousands of Communist and Social-Democratic militants, and the workers parties and trade unions were crushed by the iron heel of fascism. Trotsky's analyses and policies were fully confirmed--and the German proletariat paid the price of Stalin's criminal blindness.
But this did not put an end to Stalin's betrayals. Trotsky had earlier warned, "We must tell the advanced workers as loudly as we can: after the 'third period' of recklessness and boasting the fourth period of panic and capitulation has set in" ("Germany, The Key to the International Situation," November 1931). The tragedy continued to unfold with clockwork precision. Following Hitler's assumption of power, the Comintern, seized with panic, forbade any discussion of the German events in the Communist parties and dropped all mention of social-fascism. Instead, in a manifesto "To the Workers of All Countries" (5 March 1933) the Executive called for a united front with the social-democratic leaders (which they had rejected for the past five years), and for the CPs to "abandon all attacks against the Social Democratic organizations during the joint action"!
The United Front
Carl Davidson's series on "Trotsky's Heritage" in the Guardian is a
consistent whitewash of Stalin's crimes against the workers movement in an attempt to make a case for the Stalinist policies of "socialism in one country," "peaceful coexistence," "two-stage revolution," etc. In dealing with the events around Hitler's rise to power Davidson claims "the Trotskyists cover up for the political force that actually paved the way to power for the fascists--the German Social-Democrats" (Guardian, 9 May 1973). The reader can judge for himself from the above just who paved the way for fascism! Davidson goes on to remark, "This is not to say that the German Communist party made no mistakes or that their errors were insignificant....They also made a number of ultra-'left' errors, including a one-sided emphasis on the 'united front from below,' rather than a more persistent effort at unity with the Social-Democratic leaders as well, even if this was turned down." Davidson neglects to point out that at every point the policy of the German CP was dictated by Stalin himself, and repeatedly confirmed by Comintern meetings!
The Stalinists consistently try to blur the working-class content of Lenin's united-front policy (whose main slogan was "class against class") in order to confuse it with Stalin's "popular front" with the "democratic" bourgeoisie. They seek to portray the united front as a tactic of class collaboration and capitulation to the social-democratic leadership. This has led some groups, such as the Progressive Labor Party (PL), to reject the tactic of united front altogether:
"As we have repeatedly pointed out, we reject the concept of a united front with bosses. We reject the concept of a united front with Trotskyists and the herd of various fakes on the left....
"We believe in a united front from below that takes the form of a left-center coalition."
--"Road to Revolution III," PL, November 1973
The united front from below, i.e., calling on the ranks to desert the reformist leaders, is always in order. But we cannot simply ignore these misleaders without resigning the vanguard to sterile isolation. Replying to opponents of the united front during the early years of the Communist International, Trotsky wrote:
"Does the united front extend only to the working masses or doesn't it also include the opportunist leaders?
"The very posing of this question is a product of misunderstanding.
"If we were able simply to unite the working masses around our own banner or around our practical immediate slogans, and skip over reformist organizations, whether party or trade union, that would of course be the best thing in the world....
"...in order not to lose their influence over the workers reformists are compelled, against the innermost desires of their own leaders, to support the partial movements of the exploited against the exploiters....
"...we are, apart from all other considerations, interested in dragging the reformists from their asylums and placing them alongside ourselves before the eyes of the struggling masses."
--"On the United Front,' 1922
These theses were approved by the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and by the Executive Committee of the CI. In his polemic against the ultra-lefts (Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder) Lenin called for using "every opportunity to gain a mass ally, no matter how temporary, vacillating, unreliable, and adventitious. Whoever hasn't been able to get that into his head doesn't understand an iota of Marxism, and of contemporary scientific socialism in general."
After refusing for five years to unite with the social-democratic leaders, Stalin in March 1933 flip-flopped completely and agreed to a "united front" which prohibited the freedom of criticism. This meant the Communists pledged themselves in advance to remain silent in the face of the inevitable betrayals by the reformists, just as Stalin refused to criticize and break with the British trade-union leaders when they smashed the 1926 general strike. How little this has to do with Bolshevism can be appreciated by reading the original Comintern resolution on the united front:
"Imposing on themselves a discipline of action, it is obligatory that Communists should preserve for themselves, not only up to and after action, but if necessary even during action, the right and possibility of expressing their opinion on the policy of all working-class organizations without exception. The rejection of this condition is not permissible under any circumstances."
--"Theses on the United Front," 1922
The Soviet Union--A Degenerated Workers State
The definitive betrayal by Stalin in Germany, and the necessary conclusion of calling for new communist parties and a new international, led to the question of a new party inside the Soviet Union itself. This, in turn, brought up again the question of the class character of the Soviet state and the nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy which ruled it. Trotsky refused to consider the USSR "state capitalist" as did many former Communists who had been expelled by Stalin. To do so would imply that there could be a peaceful counterrevolution, "running the film of reformism in reverse," so to speak. Fundamentally the state is based on the property forms, which represent the interests of particular classes. The socialist property relations in the Soviet Union remained intact, and this colossal conquest of the October Revolution must not be lightly abandoned. While opposing the bureaucratic Stalinist leadership, Bolshevik-Leninists must unconditionally defend the USSR from imperialist attack.
At the same time, this was no healthy workers state. The proletariat had been politically expropriated. The soviets were simply administrative bodies to rubber-stamp the decisions of the General Secretary. The Bolshevik party was a creature of the bureaucracy, with the entire leadership of 1917 expelled or in disfavor, with the sole exception of Stalin. Given the events of recent years--the expulsions, the arrests and exiling of every oppositionist--it was criminal lightmindedness to believe that this parasitic bureaucracy could be eliminated without revolution. This would not be a social revolution, resulting in new property forms but a political revolution. The USSR was a degenerated workers state:
"...the privileges of the bureaucracy by themselves do not change the bases of the Soviet society, because the bureaucracy derives its privileges not from any special property relations peculiar to it as a 'class,' but from those property relations that have been .created by the October Revolution and that are fundamentally adequate for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
"To put it plainly, insofar as the bureaucracy robs the people (arid this is done in various ways by every bureaucracy), we have to deal not with class exploitation, in the scientific sense of the word, but with social parasitism, although on a very large scale....
"Finally, we may add for the sake of complete clarity: if in the USSR today the Marxist party were in power, it would renovate the entire political regime; it would shuffle and purge the bureaucracy and place it under the control of the masses--it would transform all of the administrative practices and inaugurate a series of capital reforms in the management of economy; but in no case would it have to undertake an overturn in the property relations, i.e., a new social revolution."
--"The Class Nature of the Soviet State," October 1933
The Stalinists immediately screamed "counterrevolution." Trotsky was an agent of Chamberlain, Hitler, the Mikado, etc., and was out to re-establish capitalism, they claimed. But the Stalinists were never able to point to a single instance in which Trotsky refused to support the USSR against imperialism or called for abandoning the socialist property forms. In 1939 on the eve of the Second World War he led a bitter struggle against a group in the American Socialist Workers Party, led by Max Shachtman, which refused to defend Russia against Hitler. Trotsky repeatedly emphasized that as long as the Soviet Union remained a workers state, however badly degenerated, it was a matter of principle to defend it. In the hour of need the Bolshevik-Leninists would stand ready at their battle posts.
In the early 1960's Mao Tse-tung announced that the Khrushchev-Brezhnev leadership of the Soviet Union since 1956 was "social-imperialist," and that the USSR is no longer a workers state but a new imperialism presided over by a "red bourgeoisie." In a recent attack on Trotskyism from a Maoist viewpoint, the pamphlet entitled "From Trotskyism to Social-Imperialism" by Michael Miller of the League for Proletarian Revolution, this position stands in contrast to Trotsky's position:
"In 1956 Khrushchev came on the scene, launching an attack on the dictatorship of the proletariat and spreading petty- bourgeois ideology and culture everywhere....
"Trotskyism has never understood in theory and never learned from practice the class character of the Soviet and Chinese states. During the period of Soviet history when the economic base was being transformed from private to social ownership of the means of production, the Trotskyites always stressed the political structure--the superstructure....The economic base can never be considered apart from the political structure. In the Soviet Union, the Communist Party, which is the heart of the political structure, was taken over by a clique of bourgeois-type politicians and transformed into a variant of a big bourgeois political party. Now they are busy implementing economic policies which reverse the socialist economic base, which restore private ownership, private production for the market, and which reproduce on an enormous scale all the corresponding capitalist social relationships."
This passage demonstrates the Maoists' rejection of elementary Marxism. If, as they hold, a peaceful social counterrevolution took place in Russia, then logically a peaceful socialist revolution against capitalism is also possible--a classical social-democratic position which Lenin refuted in State and Revolution. Further, to maintain that such a revolution was accomplished by the appearance of a ruling group with "petty-bourgeois ideology" is idealism, completely counterposed to the Marxist materialist understanding that a social revolution can be accomplished only by an overturn in property relations.
Most important of all are the practical consequences of this policy. Since the USSR is an "imperialist" state according to Mao, it is not necessary to defend it against other capitalist states. In fact, Mao has gone so far as to press for a Sino-Japanese alliance against the Soviet Union and to encourage the retention of NATO as a bulwark against "Soviet imperialism" in Europe! These are the counterrevolutionary implications of the "state capitalist" position put into practice. They raise the specter of an inter-imperialist war with the USSR and China aligned with opposing capitalist powers--an eventuality which would place the socialist property forms of the deformed workers states in immediate danger. Though the Brezhnev clique in Moscow is not so explicit in blocking with capitalist states against China, its willingness to abandon the defense of the workers states in the hopes of achieving an alliance with U.S. imperialism was clearly revealed last year when Nixon was invited to sign a declaration of "peaceful coexistence" in Moscow at the very moment that American planes were carrying out saturation bombing over North Vietnam!
The Trotskyists, in contrast, call for Sino-Soviet unity against imperialism, for unconditional defense of the deformed workers states. At the same time we mercilessly criticize the parasitic bureaucracies who are sabotaging that defense. The advanced workers will recognize the justice of this principled, class position, and reject those such as the Maoists and pro-Moscow Stalinists who criminally abandon the defense of the workers' conquests.
