Important information: General Strike Occupy Boston meets every Thursday from 5:15-6:45 PM at Encuentro 5, 33 Harrison Avenue, Boston (Chinatown). April 26 th meetings of GSOB and the Boston May Day Committee. Check our Facebook event page- Occupy May 1st-Boston at http://www.facebook.com/#!/Occupy.May1.Boston. Join us!
Thanks to all those who helped organize, marched in, donated funds to, donated time to, helped spread the word about, or just gave us their good wishes in the just concluded 2nd Annual Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade through the streets of South Boston on Sunday March 18th. Many of us have been through lots of protests and other street actions in the struggle against war, against inequality, and against injustice but our well-received march through the working-class neighborhoods of Southie ranks very high, very high indeed, in the annals of those struggles.
Of course no one event, even a parade of the army of the righteous to spread the word to the kindred, will turn the swords into plowshares, right the incredible disparity between the rich and poor, or give indignant voice to the oppressed and voiceless so the struggle continues. And continues in other forms on other days. So we throw our very pleasant memories in the back of our minds and roll up our sleeves for the next struggle. And I just happen to have an event for you to focus on- May Day 2012
May Day 2012 is a day, as we have dubbed it, when we want to show a different face of the struggle- the struggle against social and political inequality to the bosses. A day when the 99% shows the 1% that we created the wealth and we are ready to take it. It’s ours. A day when we say no work, no school, no shopping, no banking, and no chores (nobody will have a problem with that last one). More later. For now though-All Out On May Day
*************
From the General Strike Working Group of Occupy Boston:
Occupy May Day- A Day Without the 99%
On May 1st Occupy Boston calls on the 99% to strike, skip work, walk
out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business for a
day without the 99%.
NO WORK.
Request the day off. Call out sick. Small businesses are encouraged to
close for the day and join the rest of the 99% in the streets. If you
must work, don’t worry - there will be actions planned for all
hours of the day.
NO SCHOOL.
Walk out of class. Occupy the universities. Kick out the
administration. Participate in student strike actions or plan your
own. It’s your future. Own it.
BLOCK THE FLOW.
In the early hours on May 1st the 99% will converge on the Boston
Financial district for a day of direct action to demand an
end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The
Financial District Block Party will start at 7:00 AM on the corner of
Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and
corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.
There will be a May Day rally at Boston City Hall Plaza at noon followed by
solidarity marches and other creative actions throughout the day.
EVERYONE TO THE STREETS!
We call upon all of the 99% to join in this day of action to demand an
end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. No work. No
school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the 1% that we
have the power. Let’s show the world a day without the 99%.
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
The Struggle To Create The Modern World- Professor Laslett’s “The World We Have Lost: England Before The Industrial Age”-A Book Review
Click on the headline to link to Wikipedia entry for Professor Peter Laslett
Book Review
The World We Have Lost: England Before The Industrial Age, Professor Peter Laslett, Scribners, New York, Second Edition, 1972
No question that the precursor events of the 19th century industrial revolution in the 17th century transformation of England from an agrarian society, the first major country of that revolution, are of more than curious interest to modern readers (and radicals). While, as is to be expected, the focus of 17th century interest is the struggle between the monarchy and parliament in the middle decades of that century the ground underneath that struggle gets full exposition in this nice little academic book under review, The World We Have Lost: England before the Industrial Age, by the prominent English professor, Peter Laslett.
While there is plenty to disagree with about Professor Laslett’s personal political perspective on the mid-century “disturbance,” the English Revolution (so-called English Revolution by him which gives a timely clue to his sympathies), there is no denying that he provided (for the time, 1972) an exceptional amount of interesting material about marriage, life-spans, eating habits, physical size, sexual habits of some segments of 17th century English society. Using a mass of data (a 17th century-sized mass of data which is undoubtedly skimpy by modern standards) from church, town and court records he was able to bring some startling facts about our forebears (for those of us from that corner of Europe). For example, the smaller size than one would expect of the average peasant family (and larger size, including servants , of gentry families), the late age of marriage, the pushing of children out of the family household into their own (or into the burgeoning towns) as soon as possible and much other sociological data.
Professor Laslett, naturally, as a social historian working during the heyday of fierce interest in the English Revolution with such heavyweight names as Christopher Hill. R.W. Tawney and Huge Trevor-Roper leading the way has to weigh in on the various academic controversies of the day. For example, the rising or falling gentry as a factor in the revolution, the role of neutrals, clubmen, in local disputes during the period and other localist factors between competing gentry families). His work provides extensive footnotes and commentaries at the back amounting to about one hundred pages so be prepared for some very arcane material to work through. Not every book one reads needs to be in the same political universe as one’s own, and this one isn’t. What it does is give plenty of good information for further study and that is a virtue in itself.
Book Review
The World We Have Lost: England Before The Industrial Age, Professor Peter Laslett, Scribners, New York, Second Edition, 1972
No question that the precursor events of the 19th century industrial revolution in the 17th century transformation of England from an agrarian society, the first major country of that revolution, are of more than curious interest to modern readers (and radicals). While, as is to be expected, the focus of 17th century interest is the struggle between the monarchy and parliament in the middle decades of that century the ground underneath that struggle gets full exposition in this nice little academic book under review, The World We Have Lost: England before the Industrial Age, by the prominent English professor, Peter Laslett.
While there is plenty to disagree with about Professor Laslett’s personal political perspective on the mid-century “disturbance,” the English Revolution (so-called English Revolution by him which gives a timely clue to his sympathies), there is no denying that he provided (for the time, 1972) an exceptional amount of interesting material about marriage, life-spans, eating habits, physical size, sexual habits of some segments of 17th century English society. Using a mass of data (a 17th century-sized mass of data which is undoubtedly skimpy by modern standards) from church, town and court records he was able to bring some startling facts about our forebears (for those of us from that corner of Europe). For example, the smaller size than one would expect of the average peasant family (and larger size, including servants , of gentry families), the late age of marriage, the pushing of children out of the family household into their own (or into the burgeoning towns) as soon as possible and much other sociological data.
Professor Laslett, naturally, as a social historian working during the heyday of fierce interest in the English Revolution with such heavyweight names as Christopher Hill. R.W. Tawney and Huge Trevor-Roper leading the way has to weigh in on the various academic controversies of the day. For example, the rising or falling gentry as a factor in the revolution, the role of neutrals, clubmen, in local disputes during the period and other localist factors between competing gentry families). His work provides extensive footnotes and commentaries at the back amounting to about one hundred pages so be prepared for some very arcane material to work through. Not every book one reads needs to be in the same political universe as one’s own, and this one isn’t. What it does is give plenty of good information for further study and that is a virtue in itself.
Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 Actions -This Is Class War-We Say No More-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The Working Class-Take The Offensive!-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website to find out about actions planned in the Greater Boston area.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists back on December 12, 2011and the subsequent defense of the longshoremen’s union at Longview, Washington and the beating back of the anti-union drives by the bosses there. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on December 12th this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society.
Not everything has gone as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the struggle against the bosses, including plenty of illusions or misunderstandings about who our friends, and our enemies, are. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as we get a better grip of the importance of the labor movement in winning victories in our overall social struggles. May Day can be the start of that new offensive in order to gain our demands
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Labor Movement And Its Allies! Defend All Those Who Defend The Labor Movement! Defend All May Day Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
OB Endorses Call for General Strike Call-Labor And Its Allies Should As Well
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
***********
Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 Actions In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream”.
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, ouch for some of us, great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling class of that day by their front man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.
The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under. All Out On May Day 2012.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free quality public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing ,where a strike is not possible, to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.
*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to graduate school and the off-hand think tank to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Agree or disagree with the Wobblies and their political concepts for class struggle but read their very early statement about the nature of class warfare. “Big Bill” Haywood and his crowd got it right then and have useful words to say now. Read on.
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out on May Day 2012.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists back on December 12, 2011and the subsequent defense of the longshoremen’s union at Longview, Washington and the beating back of the anti-union drives by the bosses there. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on December 12th this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society.
Not everything has gone as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the struggle against the bosses, including plenty of illusions or misunderstandings about who our friends, and our enemies, are. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as we get a better grip of the importance of the labor movement in winning victories in our overall social struggles. May Day can be the start of that new offensive in order to gain our demands
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Labor Movement And Its Allies! Defend All Those Who Defend The Labor Movement! Defend All May Day Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
OB Endorses Call for General Strike Call-Labor And Its Allies Should As Well
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
***********
Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 Actions In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream”.
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, ouch for some of us, great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling class of that day by their front man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.
The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under. All Out On May Day 2012.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free quality public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing ,where a strike is not possible, to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.
*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to graduate school and the off-hand think tank to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Agree or disagree with the Wobblies and their political concepts for class struggle but read their very early statement about the nature of class warfare. “Big Bill” Haywood and his crowd got it right then and have useful words to say now. Read on.
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out on May Day 2012.
All Out April Fourth For Free Public Transportation (MBTA) In Boston-The People's Assembly At The State House
Click on the headline to link to April Fourth For Free Public Transportation (MBTA) In Boston-The People's Assembly At The State House
From The "Boston Occupier"-Photos Of The April First "Return To Dewey" Action
Click on the headline to link to the Boston Occupier website for Photos Of The April First "Return To Dewey" Action.
Via The "Occupy Boston" Website- Photos and Video Of The April First "Return To Dewey Square" Actions
Click on the headline to link via the Occupy Boston website to Photos and Video Of The April First "Return To Dewey Square" Actions
Via "The Boston Phoenix"-April First At Dewey Square-A Commentary
Click on the headline to link to a report via The Boston Phoenix-April First At Dewey Square-A Commentary
From The Boston May Day Coalition-All Out For May-Day International Workers Day 2012!
Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website.
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Boston May Day 2012 at City Hall Plaza!
Join us on Tuesday May 1st to celebrate International Workers Day this year with a rally at 12 noon at City Hall Plaza!
This year, there will be a full schedule of events throughout the day - truly making this 'A Day Without the 99%!"
WE demand:
• Stop the attacks on workers!
• Stop the detention and deportation of migrant workers and their families!
• Immediate permanent residency for all undocumented workers!
• Say NO to racial profiling and police brutality!
• Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!
• Unity of all workers to defend our rights!
Say it loud, say it proud! We are workers, we have rights!
Sponsored by the Boston May Day Committee (Mass. Global Action, ANSWER Coalition, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Party, July 26 Coalition, Tecschange, Latinos for Social Change).
(Endorsers list in formation)
http://www.bostonmayday.org
Greater Boston Area May 1st Activities
Chelsea:
Chelsea City Hall
500 Broadway (& Hawthorne St.)
Gather at 12:noon march at 2:pm
For More information please contact
La Colaborativa (617) 889-6097
East Boston:
LoPresti Park
Summer & New Streets (Maverick Square )
Gather at 12:noon begin march at 2:30pm
For more information please contact
Dominic at City life/Vida Urbana
(617) 710-7176
Everett:
Glendale Park
Ferry & Elm Streets
Gathering and rally at 4:pm
For more information please contact
La Comunidad (617) 387-9996
Block Party
In the Boston Financial District:
(corner of Federal and Franklin Streets)
Gather at 7:AM
For more information please go to www.occupymay1st.org
Boston evening Funeral March:
Copley Square Park (steps of Trinity Church)
Gather at 7:pm begin march at 8:pm
For more information please go to
www.occupymay1st.org
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Boston May Day 2012 at City Hall Plaza!
Join us on Tuesday May 1st to celebrate International Workers Day this year with a rally at 12 noon at City Hall Plaza!
This year, there will be a full schedule of events throughout the day - truly making this 'A Day Without the 99%!"
WE demand:
• Stop the attacks on workers!
• Stop the detention and deportation of migrant workers and their families!
• Immediate permanent residency for all undocumented workers!
• Say NO to racial profiling and police brutality!
• Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!
• Unity of all workers to defend our rights!
Say it loud, say it proud! We are workers, we have rights!
Sponsored by the Boston May Day Committee (Mass. Global Action, ANSWER Coalition, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Party, July 26 Coalition, Tecschange, Latinos for Social Change).
(Endorsers list in formation)
http://www.bostonmayday.org
Greater Boston Area May 1st Activities
Chelsea:
Chelsea City Hall
500 Broadway (& Hawthorne St.)
Gather at 12:noon march at 2:pm
For More information please contact
La Colaborativa (617) 889-6097
East Boston:
LoPresti Park
Summer & New Streets (Maverick Square )
Gather at 12:noon begin march at 2:30pm
For more information please contact
Dominic at City life/Vida Urbana
(617) 710-7176
Everett:
Glendale Park
Ferry & Elm Streets
Gathering and rally at 4:pm
For more information please contact
La Comunidad (617) 387-9996
Block Party
In the Boston Financial District:
(corner of Federal and Franklin Streets)
Gather at 7:AM
For more information please go to www.occupymay1st.org
Boston evening Funeral March:
Copley Square Park (steps of Trinity Church)
Gather at 7:pm begin march at 8:pm
For more information please go to
www.occupymay1st.org
All Out On May Day 2012: A Day Of International Working Class Solidarity Actions- A Call To Action In Boston
Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website.
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Markin comment:
In late December 2011 the General Assembly (GA) of Occupy Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the stirring and mostly successful November 2nd Oakland General Strike and December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown, issued a call for a national and international general strike centered on immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. These and other political issues such as supporting union organizing, building rank and file committees in the unions, and defending union rights that have long been associated with the labor movement internationally are to be featured in the actions set for May Day 2012.
May Day is the historic international working class holiday that has been celebrated each year in many parts of the world since the time of the Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago in 1886 and the struggle for the eight-hour work day. More recently it has been a day when the hard-pressed immigrant communities here in America join together in the fight against deportations and other discriminatory aspects of governmental immigration policy. Given May Day’s origins I believe it is high time that the multi-layered American working class begin to link up with its historic past and make this day its day.
Political activists here in Boston, some connected with Occupy Boston (OB) and others who are independent or organized radicals, decided just after the new year to support that general strike call and formed the General Strike Occupy Boston working group (GSOB). GSOB has met, more or less weekly, since then to plan local May Day actions. The first step in that process was to bring a resolution incorporating the Occupy Los Angeles issues before the GA of Occupy Boston for approval. That resolution was approved by GA OB on January 7, 2012.
********
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
Passed Resolutions No comments The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
********
Early discussions within GSOB centered on drawing the lessons of the West Coast actions last fall. Above all what is and what isn’t a general strike. Traditionally a general strike, as witness the recent actions in Greece and other countries, is called by workers’ organizations and/or parties for a specified period of time in order to shut down substantial parts of the capitalist economy over some set of immediate demands. A close analysis of the West Coast actions showed a slightly different model: one based on community pickets of specified industrial targets, downtown mass street actions, and scattered individual and collective acts of solidarity like student support strikes and sick-outs. Additionally, small businesses and other allies were asked to close and did close in solidarity.
That latter model seemed more appropriate to the tasks at hand in Boston given its sparse recent militant labor history and that it is a regional financial, technological and educational hub rather than an industrial center. Thus successful actions in Boston on May Day 2012 will not necessarily exactly follow the long established radical and labor traditions of the West Coast. Discussions have since then reflected that understanding. The focus will be on actions and activities that respond to and reflect the Boston political situation as attempts are made to create, re-create really, an on-going May Day tradition beyond the observance of the day by labor radicals and the immigrant communities.
Over the past several years, starting with the nation-wide actions in 2006, the Latin and other immigrant communities in and around Boston have been celebrating May Day as a day of action on the very pressing problem of immigration status as well as the traditional working-class solidarity holiday. It was no accident that Los Angeles, scene of massive immigration rallies in the past and currently one of the areas facing the brunt of the deportation drives by the Obama administration, would be in the lead to call for national and international actions this year. One of the first necessary steps therefore was to try to reach out to the already existing Boston May Day Coalition (BMDC), which has spearheaded the annual marches and rallies in the immigrant communities, in order to learn of their experiences and to coordinate actions. That was done as well in order to better coordinate this year’s more extensive over-all May Day actions.
Taking a cue from the developing May Day movement in this country, especially the broader and more inclusive messages coming out of some of the more vocal Occupy working groups a consensus has formed around the theme of “May 1st- A Day Without The Working Class And Its Allies” in order to highlight the fact that in the capitalist system labor, of one kind or another, has created all the wealth but has not shared in the accumulated profits. Highlighting the increasing economic gap, the endemic political voiceless-ness, and social issues related to race, class, sexual inequality, gender and the myriad other oppressions the vast majority face under capitalism is in keeping with the efforts initiated long ago by those who fought for the eight hour day in the late 1800s and later with the rise of the anarchist, socialist, communist and trade union movements.
On May Day working people and their allies are called to strike, skip work, walk out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business in order to implement that general slogan. Working people are encouraged to request the day off, or to call in sick. Small businesses are encouraged to close for the day and join the rest of the working class and its allies in the streets.
For students at all levels the call is for a walk-out of classes. Further college students are urged to occupy the universities. With a huge student population of over 250,000 in the Boston area no-one-size-fits- all strategy seems appropriate. Each kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school and wayward think tank should plan its own strike actions and, at some point in the day all meet at a central location in downtown Boston.
Also tentatively planned for the early hours on May 1st working people, students, oppressed minorities and their supporters will converge on the Boston Financial District for a day of direct action to demand an end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The Financial District Block Party will start at 7:00 AM on the corner of Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.
At noon there will be a permit-approved May Day rally to be addressed by a variety of speakers at Boston City Hall Plaza. Following the rally participants are encouraged to head to East Boston for solidarity marches centered on the immigrant communities that will start at approximately 2:00 PM and move from East Boston, Chelsea, and Revere to Everett for a rally at 4:00 PM. Other activities that afternoon for those who chose not to go to East Boston will be scheduled in and around the downtown area.
That evening, for those who cannot for whatever reasons participate in the daytime actions and for any others who wish to do, there will be a “Funeral March” for the banks forming at 7:00 PM at Copley Square that steps off at 8:00 PM and will march throughout the downtown area.
The following are general slogans for May 1st- No work. No school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the rulers that we have the power. Let’s show the world what a day without working people and their allies really means. And let’s return to the old traditions of May Day as a day of international solidarity with our working and oppressed sisters and brothers around the world. All Out For May Day 2012 in Boston!
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Markin comment:
In late December 2011 the General Assembly (GA) of Occupy Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the stirring and mostly successful November 2nd Oakland General Strike and December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown, issued a call for a national and international general strike centered on immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. These and other political issues such as supporting union organizing, building rank and file committees in the unions, and defending union rights that have long been associated with the labor movement internationally are to be featured in the actions set for May Day 2012.
May Day is the historic international working class holiday that has been celebrated each year in many parts of the world since the time of the Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago in 1886 and the struggle for the eight-hour work day. More recently it has been a day when the hard-pressed immigrant communities here in America join together in the fight against deportations and other discriminatory aspects of governmental immigration policy. Given May Day’s origins I believe it is high time that the multi-layered American working class begin to link up with its historic past and make this day its day.
Political activists here in Boston, some connected with Occupy Boston (OB) and others who are independent or organized radicals, decided just after the new year to support that general strike call and formed the General Strike Occupy Boston working group (GSOB). GSOB has met, more or less weekly, since then to plan local May Day actions. The first step in that process was to bring a resolution incorporating the Occupy Los Angeles issues before the GA of Occupy Boston for approval. That resolution was approved by GA OB on January 7, 2012.
********
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
Passed Resolutions No comments The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
********
Early discussions within GSOB centered on drawing the lessons of the West Coast actions last fall. Above all what is and what isn’t a general strike. Traditionally a general strike, as witness the recent actions in Greece and other countries, is called by workers’ organizations and/or parties for a specified period of time in order to shut down substantial parts of the capitalist economy over some set of immediate demands. A close analysis of the West Coast actions showed a slightly different model: one based on community pickets of specified industrial targets, downtown mass street actions, and scattered individual and collective acts of solidarity like student support strikes and sick-outs. Additionally, small businesses and other allies were asked to close and did close in solidarity.
That latter model seemed more appropriate to the tasks at hand in Boston given its sparse recent militant labor history and that it is a regional financial, technological and educational hub rather than an industrial center. Thus successful actions in Boston on May Day 2012 will not necessarily exactly follow the long established radical and labor traditions of the West Coast. Discussions have since then reflected that understanding. The focus will be on actions and activities that respond to and reflect the Boston political situation as attempts are made to create, re-create really, an on-going May Day tradition beyond the observance of the day by labor radicals and the immigrant communities.
Over the past several years, starting with the nation-wide actions in 2006, the Latin and other immigrant communities in and around Boston have been celebrating May Day as a day of action on the very pressing problem of immigration status as well as the traditional working-class solidarity holiday. It was no accident that Los Angeles, scene of massive immigration rallies in the past and currently one of the areas facing the brunt of the deportation drives by the Obama administration, would be in the lead to call for national and international actions this year. One of the first necessary steps therefore was to try to reach out to the already existing Boston May Day Coalition (BMDC), which has spearheaded the annual marches and rallies in the immigrant communities, in order to learn of their experiences and to coordinate actions. That was done as well in order to better coordinate this year’s more extensive over-all May Day actions.
Taking a cue from the developing May Day movement in this country, especially the broader and more inclusive messages coming out of some of the more vocal Occupy working groups a consensus has formed around the theme of “May 1st- A Day Without The Working Class And Its Allies” in order to highlight the fact that in the capitalist system labor, of one kind or another, has created all the wealth but has not shared in the accumulated profits. Highlighting the increasing economic gap, the endemic political voiceless-ness, and social issues related to race, class, sexual inequality, gender and the myriad other oppressions the vast majority face under capitalism is in keeping with the efforts initiated long ago by those who fought for the eight hour day in the late 1800s and later with the rise of the anarchist, socialist, communist and trade union movements.
On May Day working people and their allies are called to strike, skip work, walk out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business in order to implement that general slogan. Working people are encouraged to request the day off, or to call in sick. Small businesses are encouraged to close for the day and join the rest of the working class and its allies in the streets.
For students at all levels the call is for a walk-out of classes. Further college students are urged to occupy the universities. With a huge student population of over 250,000 in the Boston area no-one-size-fits- all strategy seems appropriate. Each kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school and wayward think tank should plan its own strike actions and, at some point in the day all meet at a central location in downtown Boston.
Also tentatively planned for the early hours on May 1st working people, students, oppressed minorities and their supporters will converge on the Boston Financial District for a day of direct action to demand an end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The Financial District Block Party will start at 7:00 AM on the corner of Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.
At noon there will be a permit-approved May Day rally to be addressed by a variety of speakers at Boston City Hall Plaza. Following the rally participants are encouraged to head to East Boston for solidarity marches centered on the immigrant communities that will start at approximately 2:00 PM and move from East Boston, Chelsea, and Revere to Everett for a rally at 4:00 PM. Other activities that afternoon for those who chose not to go to East Boston will be scheduled in and around the downtown area.
That evening, for those who cannot for whatever reasons participate in the daytime actions and for any others who wish to do, there will be a “Funeral March” for the banks forming at 7:00 PM at Copley Square that steps off at 8:00 PM and will march throughout the downtown area.
The following are general slogans for May 1st- No work. No school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the rulers that we have the power. Let’s show the world what a day without working people and their allies really means. And let’s return to the old traditions of May Day as a day of international solidarity with our working and oppressed sisters and brothers around the world. All Out For May Day 2012 in Boston!
From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Revolutionary Policy and Falsification- Trotsky And World War II
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
**************
3. Revolutionary Policy and Falsification
From Informations Ouvrières, no.485, 29 July-5 August 1970
Without any doubt – and we are not the only ones to stress it – one of the characteristics of the political period in which we have entered is the interest shown in Trotsky’s writings, and everything that concerns him. As a consequence of the search for a revolutionary Socialist programme and of the wish to understand the experience of Bolshevism, which inspires thousands of young people, we have seen many reissued or original works of Trotsky.
But at the same time it is a general phenomenon that introducers are not content to ‘introduce’ and to place such and such a work in the context of the development of the thought and actions of Trotsky, but to inflict a long exposition of their own views on the reader.
The selection of writings on the Second World War, collected and prefaced by Daniel Guérin, does not escape this rule. [1]
And – whatever the reservations which one would have about the way in which certain articles have been mutilated – the texts collected in this volume on the thirtieth anniversary of Trotsky’s assassination are a tribute to the clarity and relentless fight of an activist, and a magisterial example of the theoretical capabilities of a great Marxist.
The texts offered by Guérin extend from an article in August 1937 On the Threshold of a New World War to unfinished note left by Trotsky in his desk after the GPU agent Mercader had smashed his skull.
The Method of D Guérin
Daniel Guérin could only publish a certain number of documents within the limits of this book, and this was a difficult choice. But he is up to a riskier operation: in a number of cases he is happy to give us extracts from a text. Well now, Guérin uses a method which is the opposite of Trotsky’s: he explains in his Preface that he deliberately left out passages which had no connection with the question. But to be precise, for Trotsky the war was not a phenomenon in itself but “the continuation of politics by other means”, and as a result his explanation does not take on its full significance except in the context of elements apparently irrelevant to the “question discussed”. Worse still, certain cuts seem opportunistically to favour Guérin’s theories in his Preface, not an understanding of the thought of Trotsky. We will return to this point.
What Guérin stresses most is the fact that Trotsky’s articles on the war consist of “a series of extraordinary prophecies”, for example the fact that in 1937, before Munich, he had fixed very precisely a delay of two years before the outbreak of war, and had analysed the basic trends in the future conflict from the point of view of international alliances and the general line of military strategy.
Though that is correct, the insistence on presenting Trotsky as an inspired and solitary genius masks the essential point. Indeed, Trotsky did have genius, and he joined to his mastery of Marxism a profound knowledge of international phenomena and the social factors which were to be found behind military or diplomatic combinations. In other words, his astonishing understanding of the dynamics of international developments found its roots, not in his gifts of ‘superlucidity’ but in his unequalled capacity – an expression of his prodigious intellectual gifts indeed – to apply the Marxist method. The forecasts that he fires off start from the decisive facts of the class struggle. In 1937 it was not enough to say that the working class, demoralised by the successive defeats caused by its leaderships, was not capable of stopping the race to war, and with a sure hand to trace on the blackboard the world’s evolution and to calculate in some way the date of the conflict, even if that is the starting point.
In other words, contrary to Guérin’s assertions, it is because Trotsky was not an “attentive and passionate observer” of a “succession of changing scenes” but a revolutionary leader who struggled so that he could attain such precision and rigour in his analyses. Of all the conclusions which Trotsky drew from the inevitability and proximity of the Second World War, the most important is the one that Guérin forgets: the proclamation of the Fourth International, the historic justification for whose foundation is found in the Transitional Programme, which theoretically generalises the experience of class struggle in our epoch in which the concrete conditions of theoretical and political disaster in the working class movement obliged to carry out the essential task of maintaining the organisational cadre and preserving the historical continuation of the movement with a proletarian internationalism that is still alive.
Guérin does not speak about that, but the texts that he himself has chosen justify without contradiction the method which led to the proclamation of the Fourth International in 1938, as they do the role played in the war by that International.
The masterly text – The Manifesto of the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International, dated 26 May 1940 – happily reproduced as a whole, alone would justify every militant worker getting this book without delay. Guérin writes that it “saved the honour of the world working class”. But he does not seem to understand that this document is only conceivable on the basis of the Transitional Programme and that what has given it this meaning is the activity of the sections of the Fourth International saving, not “the honour of the world working class”, but internationalism as a strategy, the struggle for the Socialist revolution, even if these sections which formed the “vanguard of the vanguard”, though not exempt from weakness, yet resisted the ordeal, “these precious cadres”, who as Trotsky had foreseen, “will not be swerved from their road by any wave of chauvinism, nor intimidated by Stalinist Mausers and knives.” [2]
Was Trotsky Divided Against Himself?
But there is something worse. Guérin, not content with omitting what is essential in Trotsky’s activities at the start of the second imperialist conflict, goes on to pure and simple falsifications. Thus we learn that “Trotsky was two men, on the one hand a revolutionary internationalist, the spokesman of the Fourth International, and on the other a leader who was still very much a Soviet militant”.
Divided against himself Trotsky then combines an internationalist Dr Jekyll and a Mr Hyde, who leans towards social patriotism, so that, according to Guérin:
This second Trotsky allows himself to be led into taking up positions that seem to contradict those of the first Trotsky – the internationalist. It is thus that, foreseeing or even calling for the entry of the United States into the war on the side of the Western Allies, Trotsky was led into lambasting the American pacifists, considered as ‘Enemy No.1’ by him, and of encouraging the United States to accelerate its military preparations.”
We know how Trotsky posed the question of the defence of the conquests of October. We can find an example elsewhere on page 120 in the book introduced by Guérin:
To renounce defeatism in relation to that imperialist camp to which the USSR adheres today, or might adhere tomorrow, is to push the workers of the enemy camp to the side of their government: it means to renounce defeatism in general. The renunciation of defeatism under the conditions of imperialist war, which is tantamount to the rejection of the Socialist revolution – rejection of the revolution in the name of the ‘defence of the USSR’ – would sentence the USSR to final decomposition and doom. [3]
Guérin then adds:
Trotsky did not hesitate to proclaim that America must not stay neutral. According to him it was necessary to give Hitler such a decisive blow that Stalin would cease to fear him. And he encouraged the American workers to engage in intense military preparation.
In other words, Trotsky gives a progressive rôle to American imperialism, and invites workers in the United States to put themselves behind it! By assembling extracts of the discussions by Trotsky with the leaders of the SWP (the American section of the Fourth International), Guérin seeks a shadowy existence to his thesis. He alternately denounces petit-bourgeois pacifism with passages of analyses of the world situation (it is inevitable that the United States would enter the war) and extracts the pieces of the discussion which bear on the opportunity of voting for the Stalinist candidate at the election.
Marxism and the War
The falsehood is quite apparent. Taken together the discussions on the international situation have the object of showing that the Stalinists would ‘turn’, that is to say, abandon their conjectural position of defeatism vis-a-vis their own imperialism as a result of the Hitler-Stalin pact. The discussion on the presidential electoral campaign combines two aspects: firstly, the necessity of opposing Roosevelt (whose programme was the preparation of an imperialist war) with a working class candidate; and, secondly, in the absence of a working class candidate from the trade unions or the SWP, Trotsky advised a call to vote for the candidate of the American Communist Party, a worker candidate who opposed (even if from a Stalinist position) the war preparations of its imperialism. The question is not to support the Stalinists because they were less ‘militarist’ than the others, or that they annoyed American imperialism on its road to war, but to use the electoral campaign to fight it, and among its cadre to work to prepare the workers duped by the temporary defeatism of the American CP and to reject its inevitable turn to social-patriotism.
It is indeed correct to say that Trotsky lambasted the pacifists for their sermons, for if they failed to disarm imperialism they did disarm the workers politically. “War is the continuation of politics by other means”, and this formulation also has value for the workers’ movement. The inevitable war will be the terrain on which the independence and the interests of the working class must be defended. Trotsky suggests some transitional demands to develop the proletariat’s struggle against its own imperialism so that it would not be handed over to bourgeois militarists. It was the later development of this policy which the leaders of American Trotskyism carried on from prison.
Whichever way we look at it, Guérin’s method is far from being that of a historian. We often see notices that it is forbidden to throw filth over a wall. Over some works one should not throw certain introductions. But we must not be discouraged. We must carry on. We must read and study the writings on the Second World War, for they constitute an indispensable weapon to maintain their line in the continuing struggle about which Trotsky in the Manifesto of the Emergency Conference went on:
The capitalist world has no way out, unless a prolonged death agony is so considered. It is necessary to prepare for long years, if not decades, of war, uprisings, brief interludes of truce, new wars and new uprisings. A young revolutionary party must base itself on this perspective. History will provide it with enough opportunities and possibilities to test itself, to accumulate experience, and to mature. The swifter the ranks of the vanguard are fused, the more the epoch of bloody convulsions will be cut short and the less destruction will our planet suffer. But the great historical problem will not be solved in any case until a revolutionary party stands at the head of the proletariat. The question of tempos and time intervals is of enormous importance; but it alters neither the general historical perspective nor the direction of our policy. The conclusion is a simple one: it is necessary to carry out the work of educating and organising the proletarian vanguard with tenfold energy. Precisely in this lies the task of the Fourth International. [4]
Notes
1. Leon Trotsky, Sur la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, Textes rassemblés et prefacés par Daniel Guérin, Editions La Taupe.
2. L.D. Trotsky, A Fresh Lesson: After the Imperialist Peace at Munich, 10 October 1938, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-39, New York 1974, p.78.
3. L.D. Trotsky, The USSR in War, 25 September 1939, In Defence of Marxism, New Park, London 1966, p.20.
4. L.D. Trotsky, Imperialist War and the World Proletarian Revolution, Manifesto of the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International, May 1940, Documents of the Fourth International: The Formative Years 1933-40, New York 1973, p.346.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
**************
3. Revolutionary Policy and Falsification
From Informations Ouvrières, no.485, 29 July-5 August 1970
Without any doubt – and we are not the only ones to stress it – one of the characteristics of the political period in which we have entered is the interest shown in Trotsky’s writings, and everything that concerns him. As a consequence of the search for a revolutionary Socialist programme and of the wish to understand the experience of Bolshevism, which inspires thousands of young people, we have seen many reissued or original works of Trotsky.
But at the same time it is a general phenomenon that introducers are not content to ‘introduce’ and to place such and such a work in the context of the development of the thought and actions of Trotsky, but to inflict a long exposition of their own views on the reader.
The selection of writings on the Second World War, collected and prefaced by Daniel Guérin, does not escape this rule. [1]
And – whatever the reservations which one would have about the way in which certain articles have been mutilated – the texts collected in this volume on the thirtieth anniversary of Trotsky’s assassination are a tribute to the clarity and relentless fight of an activist, and a magisterial example of the theoretical capabilities of a great Marxist.
The texts offered by Guérin extend from an article in August 1937 On the Threshold of a New World War to unfinished note left by Trotsky in his desk after the GPU agent Mercader had smashed his skull.
The Method of D Guérin
Daniel Guérin could only publish a certain number of documents within the limits of this book, and this was a difficult choice. But he is up to a riskier operation: in a number of cases he is happy to give us extracts from a text. Well now, Guérin uses a method which is the opposite of Trotsky’s: he explains in his Preface that he deliberately left out passages which had no connection with the question. But to be precise, for Trotsky the war was not a phenomenon in itself but “the continuation of politics by other means”, and as a result his explanation does not take on its full significance except in the context of elements apparently irrelevant to the “question discussed”. Worse still, certain cuts seem opportunistically to favour Guérin’s theories in his Preface, not an understanding of the thought of Trotsky. We will return to this point.
What Guérin stresses most is the fact that Trotsky’s articles on the war consist of “a series of extraordinary prophecies”, for example the fact that in 1937, before Munich, he had fixed very precisely a delay of two years before the outbreak of war, and had analysed the basic trends in the future conflict from the point of view of international alliances and the general line of military strategy.
Though that is correct, the insistence on presenting Trotsky as an inspired and solitary genius masks the essential point. Indeed, Trotsky did have genius, and he joined to his mastery of Marxism a profound knowledge of international phenomena and the social factors which were to be found behind military or diplomatic combinations. In other words, his astonishing understanding of the dynamics of international developments found its roots, not in his gifts of ‘superlucidity’ but in his unequalled capacity – an expression of his prodigious intellectual gifts indeed – to apply the Marxist method. The forecasts that he fires off start from the decisive facts of the class struggle. In 1937 it was not enough to say that the working class, demoralised by the successive defeats caused by its leaderships, was not capable of stopping the race to war, and with a sure hand to trace on the blackboard the world’s evolution and to calculate in some way the date of the conflict, even if that is the starting point.
In other words, contrary to Guérin’s assertions, it is because Trotsky was not an “attentive and passionate observer” of a “succession of changing scenes” but a revolutionary leader who struggled so that he could attain such precision and rigour in his analyses. Of all the conclusions which Trotsky drew from the inevitability and proximity of the Second World War, the most important is the one that Guérin forgets: the proclamation of the Fourth International, the historic justification for whose foundation is found in the Transitional Programme, which theoretically generalises the experience of class struggle in our epoch in which the concrete conditions of theoretical and political disaster in the working class movement obliged to carry out the essential task of maintaining the organisational cadre and preserving the historical continuation of the movement with a proletarian internationalism that is still alive.
Guérin does not speak about that, but the texts that he himself has chosen justify without contradiction the method which led to the proclamation of the Fourth International in 1938, as they do the role played in the war by that International.
The masterly text – The Manifesto of the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International, dated 26 May 1940 – happily reproduced as a whole, alone would justify every militant worker getting this book without delay. Guérin writes that it “saved the honour of the world working class”. But he does not seem to understand that this document is only conceivable on the basis of the Transitional Programme and that what has given it this meaning is the activity of the sections of the Fourth International saving, not “the honour of the world working class”, but internationalism as a strategy, the struggle for the Socialist revolution, even if these sections which formed the “vanguard of the vanguard”, though not exempt from weakness, yet resisted the ordeal, “these precious cadres”, who as Trotsky had foreseen, “will not be swerved from their road by any wave of chauvinism, nor intimidated by Stalinist Mausers and knives.” [2]
Was Trotsky Divided Against Himself?
But there is something worse. Guérin, not content with omitting what is essential in Trotsky’s activities at the start of the second imperialist conflict, goes on to pure and simple falsifications. Thus we learn that “Trotsky was two men, on the one hand a revolutionary internationalist, the spokesman of the Fourth International, and on the other a leader who was still very much a Soviet militant”.
Divided against himself Trotsky then combines an internationalist Dr Jekyll and a Mr Hyde, who leans towards social patriotism, so that, according to Guérin:
This second Trotsky allows himself to be led into taking up positions that seem to contradict those of the first Trotsky – the internationalist. It is thus that, foreseeing or even calling for the entry of the United States into the war on the side of the Western Allies, Trotsky was led into lambasting the American pacifists, considered as ‘Enemy No.1’ by him, and of encouraging the United States to accelerate its military preparations.”
We know how Trotsky posed the question of the defence of the conquests of October. We can find an example elsewhere on page 120 in the book introduced by Guérin:
To renounce defeatism in relation to that imperialist camp to which the USSR adheres today, or might adhere tomorrow, is to push the workers of the enemy camp to the side of their government: it means to renounce defeatism in general. The renunciation of defeatism under the conditions of imperialist war, which is tantamount to the rejection of the Socialist revolution – rejection of the revolution in the name of the ‘defence of the USSR’ – would sentence the USSR to final decomposition and doom. [3]
Guérin then adds:
Trotsky did not hesitate to proclaim that America must not stay neutral. According to him it was necessary to give Hitler such a decisive blow that Stalin would cease to fear him. And he encouraged the American workers to engage in intense military preparation.
In other words, Trotsky gives a progressive rôle to American imperialism, and invites workers in the United States to put themselves behind it! By assembling extracts of the discussions by Trotsky with the leaders of the SWP (the American section of the Fourth International), Guérin seeks a shadowy existence to his thesis. He alternately denounces petit-bourgeois pacifism with passages of analyses of the world situation (it is inevitable that the United States would enter the war) and extracts the pieces of the discussion which bear on the opportunity of voting for the Stalinist candidate at the election.
Marxism and the War
The falsehood is quite apparent. Taken together the discussions on the international situation have the object of showing that the Stalinists would ‘turn’, that is to say, abandon their conjectural position of defeatism vis-a-vis their own imperialism as a result of the Hitler-Stalin pact. The discussion on the presidential electoral campaign combines two aspects: firstly, the necessity of opposing Roosevelt (whose programme was the preparation of an imperialist war) with a working class candidate; and, secondly, in the absence of a working class candidate from the trade unions or the SWP, Trotsky advised a call to vote for the candidate of the American Communist Party, a worker candidate who opposed (even if from a Stalinist position) the war preparations of its imperialism. The question is not to support the Stalinists because they were less ‘militarist’ than the others, or that they annoyed American imperialism on its road to war, but to use the electoral campaign to fight it, and among its cadre to work to prepare the workers duped by the temporary defeatism of the American CP and to reject its inevitable turn to social-patriotism.
It is indeed correct to say that Trotsky lambasted the pacifists for their sermons, for if they failed to disarm imperialism they did disarm the workers politically. “War is the continuation of politics by other means”, and this formulation also has value for the workers’ movement. The inevitable war will be the terrain on which the independence and the interests of the working class must be defended. Trotsky suggests some transitional demands to develop the proletariat’s struggle against its own imperialism so that it would not be handed over to bourgeois militarists. It was the later development of this policy which the leaders of American Trotskyism carried on from prison.
Whichever way we look at it, Guérin’s method is far from being that of a historian. We often see notices that it is forbidden to throw filth over a wall. Over some works one should not throw certain introductions. But we must not be discouraged. We must carry on. We must read and study the writings on the Second World War, for they constitute an indispensable weapon to maintain their line in the continuing struggle about which Trotsky in the Manifesto of the Emergency Conference went on:
The capitalist world has no way out, unless a prolonged death agony is so considered. It is necessary to prepare for long years, if not decades, of war, uprisings, brief interludes of truce, new wars and new uprisings. A young revolutionary party must base itself on this perspective. History will provide it with enough opportunities and possibilities to test itself, to accumulate experience, and to mature. The swifter the ranks of the vanguard are fused, the more the epoch of bloody convulsions will be cut short and the less destruction will our planet suffer. But the great historical problem will not be solved in any case until a revolutionary party stands at the head of the proletariat. The question of tempos and time intervals is of enormous importance; but it alters neither the general historical perspective nor the direction of our policy. The conclusion is a simple one: it is necessary to carry out the work of educating and organising the proletarian vanguard with tenfold energy. Precisely in this lies the task of the Fourth International. [4]
Notes
1. Leon Trotsky, Sur la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, Textes rassemblés et prefacés par Daniel Guérin, Editions La Taupe.
2. L.D. Trotsky, A Fresh Lesson: After the Imperialist Peace at Munich, 10 October 1938, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-39, New York 1974, p.78.
3. L.D. Trotsky, The USSR in War, 25 September 1939, In Defence of Marxism, New Park, London 1966, p.20.
4. L.D. Trotsky, Imperialist War and the World Proletarian Revolution, Manifesto of the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International, May 1940, Documents of the Fourth International: The Formative Years 1933-40, New York 1973, p.346.
Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning On Wednesday April 25th - A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner
Click on the headline to link to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network for the latest information in his case and the April 24th and 25th support rallies on his behalf.
Markin comment:
Last year I wrote a little entry in this space in order to motivate my reasons for standing in solidarity with a March 20th rally in support of Private Bradley Manning at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia where he was then being held. I have subsequently repeatedly used that entry, Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner, as a I have tried to publicize his case in blogs and other Internet sources, at various rallies, and at marches, most recently at the Veterans For Peace Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade in South Boston on March 18th.
After I received information from the Bradley Manning Support Network about the latest efforts on Private Manning’s behalf scheduled for April 24th and 25th in Washington and Fort Meade respectively I decided that I would travel south to stand once again in proximate solidarity with Brother Manning at Fort Meade on April 25th. In that spirit I have updated, a little, that earlier entry to reflect the changed circumstances over the past year. As one would expect when the cause is still the same, Bradley Manning's freedom, unfortunately most of the entry is still in the same key. And will be until the day he is freed by his jailers. And I will continue to stand in proud solidarity with Brother Manning until that great day.
*****
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Fort Meade , Maryland on April 25th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts they are no crime. No crime at all in my eyes or in the eyes of the vast majority of people who know of the case and of its importance as an individual act of resistance to the unjust and barbaric American-led war in Iraq. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of cards. American imperialism’s gun-toting house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
Of course I will also be standing at the front gate of Fort Meade, Maryland on April 25th because I am outraged by the treatment meted out to Private Manning, presumably an innocent man, by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. Bradley Manning had been held in solidarity at Quantico and other locales for over 500 days, and has been held without trial for much longer, as the government and its military try to glue a case together. The military, and its henchmen in the Justice Department, have gotten more devious although not smarter since I was a soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago.
Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient for my standing at the front gate at Fort Meade on April 25th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an additional reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a citizen-soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this comment after all is about brother soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came”.
Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me get through the tough days inside. So on April 25th I will be just, once again, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, Brother Manning, are a true winter soldier. We were not able to do much about the course of the Iraq War (and little thus far on Afghanistan) but we can move might and main to save the one real hero of that whole mess.
Private Manning I hope that you will hear us and hear about our rally in your defense outside the gates. Better yet, everybody who reads this piece join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to high heaven against this gross injustice-Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
Markin comment:
Last year I wrote a little entry in this space in order to motivate my reasons for standing in solidarity with a March 20th rally in support of Private Bradley Manning at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia where he was then being held. I have subsequently repeatedly used that entry, Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner, as a I have tried to publicize his case in blogs and other Internet sources, at various rallies, and at marches, most recently at the Veterans For Peace Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade in South Boston on March 18th.
After I received information from the Bradley Manning Support Network about the latest efforts on Private Manning’s behalf scheduled for April 24th and 25th in Washington and Fort Meade respectively I decided that I would travel south to stand once again in proximate solidarity with Brother Manning at Fort Meade on April 25th. In that spirit I have updated, a little, that earlier entry to reflect the changed circumstances over the past year. As one would expect when the cause is still the same, Bradley Manning's freedom, unfortunately most of the entry is still in the same key. And will be until the day he is freed by his jailers. And I will continue to stand in proud solidarity with Brother Manning until that great day.
*****
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Fort Meade , Maryland on April 25th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts they are no crime. No crime at all in my eyes or in the eyes of the vast majority of people who know of the case and of its importance as an individual act of resistance to the unjust and barbaric American-led war in Iraq. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of cards. American imperialism’s gun-toting house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
Of course I will also be standing at the front gate of Fort Meade, Maryland on April 25th because I am outraged by the treatment meted out to Private Manning, presumably an innocent man, by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. Bradley Manning had been held in solidarity at Quantico and other locales for over 500 days, and has been held without trial for much longer, as the government and its military try to glue a case together. The military, and its henchmen in the Justice Department, have gotten more devious although not smarter since I was a soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago.
Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient for my standing at the front gate at Fort Meade on April 25th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an additional reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a citizen-soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this comment after all is about brother soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came”.
Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me get through the tough days inside. So on April 25th I will be just, once again, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, Brother Manning, are a true winter soldier. We were not able to do much about the course of the Iraq War (and little thus far on Afghanistan) but we can move might and main to save the one real hero of that whole mess.
Private Manning I hope that you will hear us and hear about our rally in your defense outside the gates. Better yet, everybody who reads this piece join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to high heaven against this gross injustice-Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
Tuesday, April 03, 2012
Out In The Train Smoke And Dreams 2000s Night – Denzel Washington’ “Unstoppable”-A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film Unstoppable.
DVD Review
Unstoppable, starring Denzel Washington, Telecinco Cinema.2010
Usually when I think about trains I think of my childhood (and on) love affair with that then vanishing way of getting around. Simple enough when the local commuter train, then soon to be abandoned in the 1950s golden age of the automobile, the highway and the Howrad Johnson’s (and subsequently McDonald’s) pit stop night, came tooting its lonesome whistle in the high North Adamsville night. Or that same fascination held up later when I took my first baby steps on the endless search for the great blue-pink American West night and wound up a few time travelling in some desolate empty box car pushing the Southern Pacific high desert night. And no question, even now I have very strong memories of what Tom Waits called in one of his mule variation day dreams- “living on train smoke and dreams.”
But enough of nostalgia, earned or not. For the film under review, Unstoppable, is a very different cinematic look at the modern day train experience on the American tracks. Trains and disaster, or the threat of disaster, are no strangers today, and have not been since the beginning of the railroads. The runaway train that stars in this film, the old 777 running highly dangerous cargo through rural Pennsylvania in this case, is just a continuation of the danger associated with tangling with the train smoke (from whatever fossil fuel used). And this saga is based on a real incident too boot.
Through carelessness (and corporate speed-up policies) a railroad man makes a series of wrong decisions about how to fix a problem on his long-line freight train. And the thing takes off-ummanned. Naturally all hell breaks loose as everyone from the yard master to corporate headquarters tries to figure out how to stop the thing short of shooting it (although that thought I am sure crossed somebody’s mind). No problem though because old railroad man Denzel Washington, ready to be tossed on the washed-out heap and training his “new boy replacement,” just happens to be on that same track coming the other way. Now once Denzel Washington is on the case, any cinematic case, from cop to Malcolm X to washed-out train engineer, one can rest easy. Sure there will be a couple of close calls, quite a few actually, in the hour and one half of the film but at the end of the day no highly explosive cargo is going to harm urban areas. No way. Now we can all go back to thinking about train smoke and dreams.
DVD Review
Unstoppable, starring Denzel Washington, Telecinco Cinema.2010
Usually when I think about trains I think of my childhood (and on) love affair with that then vanishing way of getting around. Simple enough when the local commuter train, then soon to be abandoned in the 1950s golden age of the automobile, the highway and the Howrad Johnson’s (and subsequently McDonald’s) pit stop night, came tooting its lonesome whistle in the high North Adamsville night. Or that same fascination held up later when I took my first baby steps on the endless search for the great blue-pink American West night and wound up a few time travelling in some desolate empty box car pushing the Southern Pacific high desert night. And no question, even now I have very strong memories of what Tom Waits called in one of his mule variation day dreams- “living on train smoke and dreams.”
But enough of nostalgia, earned or not. For the film under review, Unstoppable, is a very different cinematic look at the modern day train experience on the American tracks. Trains and disaster, or the threat of disaster, are no strangers today, and have not been since the beginning of the railroads. The runaway train that stars in this film, the old 777 running highly dangerous cargo through rural Pennsylvania in this case, is just a continuation of the danger associated with tangling with the train smoke (from whatever fossil fuel used). And this saga is based on a real incident too boot.
Through carelessness (and corporate speed-up policies) a railroad man makes a series of wrong decisions about how to fix a problem on his long-line freight train. And the thing takes off-ummanned. Naturally all hell breaks loose as everyone from the yard master to corporate headquarters tries to figure out how to stop the thing short of shooting it (although that thought I am sure crossed somebody’s mind). No problem though because old railroad man Denzel Washington, ready to be tossed on the washed-out heap and training his “new boy replacement,” just happens to be on that same track coming the other way. Now once Denzel Washington is on the case, any cinematic case, from cop to Malcolm X to washed-out train engineer, one can rest easy. Sure there will be a couple of close calls, quite a few actually, in the hour and one half of the film but at the end of the day no highly explosive cargo is going to harm urban areas. No way. Now we can all go back to thinking about train smoke and dreams.
From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Leon Trotsky on the Second World War-A Review
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
2. Leon Trotsky on the Second World War
From La Gauche (socialiste et révolutionnaire) 28 March 1970
Collected and introduced by Daniel Guérin, this choice of articles by Leon Trotsky illustrates in a masterly way the power of analysis and lucidity of a man who, in spite of the fact that he was practically cut off from the world, observed the frightful reality of where the world was going for three long years. These writings, which run from August 1937 until the assassination of the leader of the Fourth International in August 1940, astonish us, not only because of the depth and clarity of their argument – the perfect mastery of the dialectical method in politics – but above all they astound the reader with the incomparable gift which Trotsky had of ‘predicting’ developments for a number of years, which his contemporaries, starting with the leading politicians, did not in any way suspect.
Recalling briefly the material in these articles, which for a long time were confidential or only read by the censor, Guérin sets out the favourable balance-sheet of the analyses of this man isolated in Mexico:
•From the time of Munich Trotsky understood that war was inevitable, and in August 1937 he fixed the date in two years’ time;
•Trotsky, in denouncing the bankruptcy of the Popular Fronts so dear to the Stalinists, had seen very well that while mobilising the masses against Hitler in the name of ‘democracy’, Stalin was carefully arranging a deal with the German dictator ... inasmuch as he feared war as a mortal danger to the Soviet bureaucracy;
•On 3 August 1939 Stalin’s double game led to the reversal of his foreign policy and gave the green light to the Nazi dictator;
•The fact that Stalin had decapitated the Soviet army, party and the Bolshevik state apparatus in the purges of 1936-38, for a long time prevented him from facing up to the threat from Hitler, of which Hitler was aware when pushing Stalin into the laughable adventure of the Finnish war, a fiasco which destroyed the prestige of the Red Army ... while conceding compensation to Stalin (such as the partition of Poland and the invasion of the Baltic states);
•Trotsky foresaw that at first the Germans would gain striking successes in the West (he always pointed out that Britain would maintain its independence) before turning East and attacking the USSR.
•It was not in order to provoke a world war that Stalin allied himself with Hitler, but because he, being a short-term tactician, thought that he himself could escape war and revolution;
•In spite of Stalinism Trotsky never doubted that the Socialist system would survive the war. This was the position that Mao Zedong took in the course of his quarrel and clash with the Soviet bureaucracy;
•Any attack on the USSR would temporarily strengthen the power of the bureaucracy, and Trotsky did not hide this, but thought that this was preferable to a defeat of the USSR, which would wipe out the gains of October;
•From 11 September 1939 he announced that, in the case of a prolonged war (and that is what would happen if the United States joined the dance) Hitler would march to the abyss with the `infallibility of a sleep-walker; [1]
•In May 1940 he compared the occupied countries of Europe with powder barrels where revolutionary defeatism would develop. At Teheran and Yalta we know that Stalin focused on the partition of the world, which would demobilise the masses educated in the Western European Resistance;
•Trotsky never ceased to assert that the real war was between Germany and the USA for a new partition of the world. According to him, the USA could not long remain neutral, because it was a question of their supremacy, and in their intervention he saw an effective way of persuading Stalin to lose his fear of Hitler;
•On 4 December 1939 Trotsky foresaw that Japan, rather than attack the USSR, would throw itself into the conquest of East Asia and dispute the supremacy of the Pacific with the USA; but he added that, even if Japan succeeded in conquering large territories at the start, it was incapable of supporting a long war;
•At the end of the Second World War, wrote Trotsky, supremacy would fall to the United States, not without noting that war would hasten movements for national liberation in the colonies of the imperialist European countries;
•Connecting the facts of a new imperialist explosion with the behaviour of the USA, Trotsky dared to conceive of a Third World War “which this time would pitch entire continents against one another and which would be the tomb of civilisation”;
•Finally, Trotsky stayed faithful to proletarian internationalism. In Guérin’s words: “He cried out that in aiding the democracies against the Fascists, the workers in the Western countries could only assist and accelerate the victory of Fascism inside their own countries. The war between the two adversaries could bring nothing but oppression and reaction in both camps.”
Such a balance sheet leaves us speechless. In three short years Trotsky, an infallible observer, had foreseen not only the course of the war, but the situation which would result from it, and in which we still live today ... These two points culminated in the Manifesto of May 1940 which Trotsky drafted in his own hand, and which constitutes the cornerstone of the book (pp.187-245). Haunted by the position of Lenin during the First World War, Trotsky reckoned up the situation: “State power and domination of the economy can be torn from the hands of these rapacious imperialist cliques only by the revolutionary working class. That is the meaning of Lenin’s warning that ‘without a series of successful revolutions’ a new imperialist war would inevitable follow.” [2] Simultaneously fighting the innocent choir boys of pacifism, the cynical partisans of isolationism and the masses deceived by the charlatan Stalinists, at that decisive moment Trotsky embodied the unhappy consciousness of the world proletariat. Guérin is mistaken when he states that Trotsky was torn between his old role as a Soviet leader and the fact that he led the Fourth International. When Trotsky writes: “The USSR’s defeat in the world war would signify not merely the overthrow of the totalitarian bureaucracy but the liquidation of the new forms of property, the collapse of the first experiment in planned economy, and the transformation of the entire country into a colony; that is the handing over to imperialism of colossal natural resources which would give it a respite until the Third World War” [3], it is clear that Trotsky is behaving as both the last representative of Bolshevik power and the founder and theoretician of the Fourth International.
These articles frequently emphasise that it must not be left to Hitler to overthrow Stalin: that task must be done by the Soviet workers and peasants. He recalls also that “taken on an historic scale the antagonism between world imperialism and the Soviet Union is infinitely deeper than the antagonisms that set the individual capitalist countries in opposition to one another”. [4] Twelve years before Stalin announced his opposing thesis on inter-capitalist economic rivalry Trotsky had already destroyed it, as he had already deflated the petit-bourgeois windbags for whom support for imperialism against Stalinism would aid the former to defeat the bureaucratic caste: in fact this had and continues to have the opposite effect (in particular when that great friend of Khrushchev’s, Averell Harriman, signed the non-proliferation treaty on nuclear arms). [5] On this matter Trotsky’s strategy not only appreciated the role of the colonial peoples, but emphasised the importance of the Chinese Revolution “on which the proletariat will have to trace a strong line of orientation”. [6] Finally, let us remember this prophesy which takes on its full meaning today: “The trade unions can escape burial beneath the ruins of war only if they take the road of Socialist revolution.” [7] As Trotsky predicted, the disasters of war have integrated the trade unions into capitalism during the greatest expansion of imperialism ever seen.
André Frankin
Notes
1. “The fall of Stalin will not, however, save Hitler, who with the infallibility of a sleepwalker is being drawn towards the greatest catastrophe in history.” The Riddle of the USSR, 21 June 1939, in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-39, New York 1974, p.360.
2. L. Trotsky, Imperialist War and the World Proletarian Revolution, Manifesto of the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International, May 1940, in Documents of the Fourth International: The Formative Years 1933-40, New York 1973, p.313.
3. Op. cit., pp.325-6.
4. Op. cit., p.327.
5. Presumably these are references to Stalin’s statement of 1 February 1952 (“Consequently, the struggle of the capitalist countries for markets and their desire to crush their competitors proved in practice to be stronger than the contradictions between the capitalist camp and the Socialist camp.” (Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, Works, Volume 16, London 1986, p.331)); and to the later trajectory of Max Shachtman.
6. Nothing exactly parallels this at the position in the text cited. But then we have: “The Chinese people will be able to reach independence only under the leadership of the youthful and self-sacrificing proletariat, in whom the indispensable self-confidence will be rekindled by the rebirth of the world revolution. They will indicate a firm line of march.” Op. cit., pp.331-2. If this is really the original, the French version hardly amounts to a paraphrase.
7. Op. cit., p.342.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
2. Leon Trotsky on the Second World War
From La Gauche (socialiste et révolutionnaire) 28 March 1970
Collected and introduced by Daniel Guérin, this choice of articles by Leon Trotsky illustrates in a masterly way the power of analysis and lucidity of a man who, in spite of the fact that he was practically cut off from the world, observed the frightful reality of where the world was going for three long years. These writings, which run from August 1937 until the assassination of the leader of the Fourth International in August 1940, astonish us, not only because of the depth and clarity of their argument – the perfect mastery of the dialectical method in politics – but above all they astound the reader with the incomparable gift which Trotsky had of ‘predicting’ developments for a number of years, which his contemporaries, starting with the leading politicians, did not in any way suspect.
Recalling briefly the material in these articles, which for a long time were confidential or only read by the censor, Guérin sets out the favourable balance-sheet of the analyses of this man isolated in Mexico:
•From the time of Munich Trotsky understood that war was inevitable, and in August 1937 he fixed the date in two years’ time;
•Trotsky, in denouncing the bankruptcy of the Popular Fronts so dear to the Stalinists, had seen very well that while mobilising the masses against Hitler in the name of ‘democracy’, Stalin was carefully arranging a deal with the German dictator ... inasmuch as he feared war as a mortal danger to the Soviet bureaucracy;
•On 3 August 1939 Stalin’s double game led to the reversal of his foreign policy and gave the green light to the Nazi dictator;
•The fact that Stalin had decapitated the Soviet army, party and the Bolshevik state apparatus in the purges of 1936-38, for a long time prevented him from facing up to the threat from Hitler, of which Hitler was aware when pushing Stalin into the laughable adventure of the Finnish war, a fiasco which destroyed the prestige of the Red Army ... while conceding compensation to Stalin (such as the partition of Poland and the invasion of the Baltic states);
•Trotsky foresaw that at first the Germans would gain striking successes in the West (he always pointed out that Britain would maintain its independence) before turning East and attacking the USSR.
•It was not in order to provoke a world war that Stalin allied himself with Hitler, but because he, being a short-term tactician, thought that he himself could escape war and revolution;
•In spite of Stalinism Trotsky never doubted that the Socialist system would survive the war. This was the position that Mao Zedong took in the course of his quarrel and clash with the Soviet bureaucracy;
•Any attack on the USSR would temporarily strengthen the power of the bureaucracy, and Trotsky did not hide this, but thought that this was preferable to a defeat of the USSR, which would wipe out the gains of October;
•From 11 September 1939 he announced that, in the case of a prolonged war (and that is what would happen if the United States joined the dance) Hitler would march to the abyss with the `infallibility of a sleep-walker; [1]
•In May 1940 he compared the occupied countries of Europe with powder barrels where revolutionary defeatism would develop. At Teheran and Yalta we know that Stalin focused on the partition of the world, which would demobilise the masses educated in the Western European Resistance;
•Trotsky never ceased to assert that the real war was between Germany and the USA for a new partition of the world. According to him, the USA could not long remain neutral, because it was a question of their supremacy, and in their intervention he saw an effective way of persuading Stalin to lose his fear of Hitler;
•On 4 December 1939 Trotsky foresaw that Japan, rather than attack the USSR, would throw itself into the conquest of East Asia and dispute the supremacy of the Pacific with the USA; but he added that, even if Japan succeeded in conquering large territories at the start, it was incapable of supporting a long war;
•At the end of the Second World War, wrote Trotsky, supremacy would fall to the United States, not without noting that war would hasten movements for national liberation in the colonies of the imperialist European countries;
•Connecting the facts of a new imperialist explosion with the behaviour of the USA, Trotsky dared to conceive of a Third World War “which this time would pitch entire continents against one another and which would be the tomb of civilisation”;
•Finally, Trotsky stayed faithful to proletarian internationalism. In Guérin’s words: “He cried out that in aiding the democracies against the Fascists, the workers in the Western countries could only assist and accelerate the victory of Fascism inside their own countries. The war between the two adversaries could bring nothing but oppression and reaction in both camps.”
Such a balance sheet leaves us speechless. In three short years Trotsky, an infallible observer, had foreseen not only the course of the war, but the situation which would result from it, and in which we still live today ... These two points culminated in the Manifesto of May 1940 which Trotsky drafted in his own hand, and which constitutes the cornerstone of the book (pp.187-245). Haunted by the position of Lenin during the First World War, Trotsky reckoned up the situation: “State power and domination of the economy can be torn from the hands of these rapacious imperialist cliques only by the revolutionary working class. That is the meaning of Lenin’s warning that ‘without a series of successful revolutions’ a new imperialist war would inevitable follow.” [2] Simultaneously fighting the innocent choir boys of pacifism, the cynical partisans of isolationism and the masses deceived by the charlatan Stalinists, at that decisive moment Trotsky embodied the unhappy consciousness of the world proletariat. Guérin is mistaken when he states that Trotsky was torn between his old role as a Soviet leader and the fact that he led the Fourth International. When Trotsky writes: “The USSR’s defeat in the world war would signify not merely the overthrow of the totalitarian bureaucracy but the liquidation of the new forms of property, the collapse of the first experiment in planned economy, and the transformation of the entire country into a colony; that is the handing over to imperialism of colossal natural resources which would give it a respite until the Third World War” [3], it is clear that Trotsky is behaving as both the last representative of Bolshevik power and the founder and theoretician of the Fourth International.
These articles frequently emphasise that it must not be left to Hitler to overthrow Stalin: that task must be done by the Soviet workers and peasants. He recalls also that “taken on an historic scale the antagonism between world imperialism and the Soviet Union is infinitely deeper than the antagonisms that set the individual capitalist countries in opposition to one another”. [4] Twelve years before Stalin announced his opposing thesis on inter-capitalist economic rivalry Trotsky had already destroyed it, as he had already deflated the petit-bourgeois windbags for whom support for imperialism against Stalinism would aid the former to defeat the bureaucratic caste: in fact this had and continues to have the opposite effect (in particular when that great friend of Khrushchev’s, Averell Harriman, signed the non-proliferation treaty on nuclear arms). [5] On this matter Trotsky’s strategy not only appreciated the role of the colonial peoples, but emphasised the importance of the Chinese Revolution “on which the proletariat will have to trace a strong line of orientation”. [6] Finally, let us remember this prophesy which takes on its full meaning today: “The trade unions can escape burial beneath the ruins of war only if they take the road of Socialist revolution.” [7] As Trotsky predicted, the disasters of war have integrated the trade unions into capitalism during the greatest expansion of imperialism ever seen.
André Frankin
Notes
1. “The fall of Stalin will not, however, save Hitler, who with the infallibility of a sleepwalker is being drawn towards the greatest catastrophe in history.” The Riddle of the USSR, 21 June 1939, in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-39, New York 1974, p.360.
2. L. Trotsky, Imperialist War and the World Proletarian Revolution, Manifesto of the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International, May 1940, in Documents of the Fourth International: The Formative Years 1933-40, New York 1973, p.313.
3. Op. cit., pp.325-6.
4. Op. cit., p.327.
5. Presumably these are references to Stalin’s statement of 1 February 1952 (“Consequently, the struggle of the capitalist countries for markets and their desire to crush their competitors proved in practice to be stronger than the contradictions between the capitalist camp and the Socialist camp.” (Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, Works, Volume 16, London 1986, p.331)); and to the later trajectory of Max Shachtman.
6. Nothing exactly parallels this at the position in the text cited. But then we have: “The Chinese people will be able to reach independence only under the leadership of the youthful and self-sacrificing proletariat, in whom the indispensable self-confidence will be rekindled by the rebirth of the world revolution. They will indicate a firm line of march.” Op. cit., pp.331-2. If this is really the original, the French version hardly amounts to a paraphrase.
7. Op. cit., p.342.
Monday, April 02, 2012
From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Trotsky and the Second World War
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***********
Trotsky and the Second World War
(Part 2)
What appears below for the first time in English is the second instalment, much delayed, of a controversy carried on in the French language press about the attitude of Leon Trotsky to the Second World War. Chronologically it takes in the first and final contributions, the part we selected for publishing two years ago (Lutte Ouvrière/Daniel Guérin, Trotsky and the Second World War, Revolutionary History, Volume 1 no.3, Autumn 1988, pp.38-40) making up the central part of it.
Our initial item, which sparked off the discussion in the first place, is Daniel Guérin’s preface to Léon Trotsky – Sur la deuxième guerre mondiale, a collection of Trotsky’s writings on the war first published by Éditions la Taupe in Brussels in 1970. The second and third pieces are reviews of this work, by André Frankin in the Belgian Socialist weekly La Gauche, 28 March 1970, and by an anonymous reviewer in the French weekly Informations Ouvrières, no.485, 29 July-5 August 1970, the journal of the OCI. The final document is Guérin’s reply to his critics, which took the form of a postscript added to the French edition of Trotsky’s writings on the war, publish by Seuil (Bibliothèque politique) in 1974.
They have all been rendered into English by Ted Crawford. All emphasis is as in the original, but citations of Trotsky’s writing have been altered from the French texts to the standard English ones, generally those of the Pathfinder corpus.
1. Daniel Guérin’s Preface
The articles reprinted here consist of pieces by Trotsky and interviews which he gave to a number of publications in the last years of his life from August 1937 to August 1940, when he was murdered by an assassin on the orders of Stalin. These articles are exclusively concerned with the forecasts, the outbreak and the first year of the Second World War. In order to provide them with more homogeneity and to concentrate the thought of Leon Davidovich better on one and the same subject, we have deliberately left passages out of certain texts that have no connection with the question.
These writings deal with a particularly dramatic slice of history. They start with the period of agonising international tension which culminated in the Munich agreement of 30 September 1938, signed by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini for the Axis, and Neville Chamberlain and Eduard Daladier for the so-called Western ‘democracies’. This agreement, which anxious peoples believed had really given them peace, was only a short respite, as we now know, and what is more it helped to isolate dangerously the USSR by creating the possibility of a future coalition of these four great powers against the Socialist state.
The following sequence helps us understand the period which preceded the start of the war, after Munich, and despite Munich. It is then marked by the dramatic German-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939, which was a complete reversal of previous Stalinist foreign policy, which had been more or less aligned with the Western ‘democracies’ until then, in a common defence against the menace of Hitler. The prolonged negotiations which had taken place with them until then collapsed at the last moment as the Western powers dragged things out while Poland opposed the passage of the Red Armies across its territory.
The unnatural alliance between ‘Bolshevism’ (or what was left of it) and National Socialism simultaneously struck a heavy moral blow against the revolutionary movements in many countries, while leaving Hitler’s hands free for warlike enterprises. Then came the lightning aggression against the reactionary Poland of the colonels, the pretext invoked by Hitler being the Danzig corridor, which had, in fact, scandalously cut Germany into two since the Treaty of Versailles. In a few weeks, because of his superior military might and crushing technical superiority, Hitler finished with Poland, which was then divided between the two German and Russian gangsters.
Then there was that strange period called the ‘Phoney War’, where the Western powers, who had done nothing, or hardly anything, to help their ally Poland, passively faced the Wehrmacht, itself immobilised behind the Siegfried line.
But Stalin was not content with absorbing that portion of Poland and the Baltic states that Hitler was happy to leave him. His appetite whetted, he suddenly demanded a cession of territory from Finland and, being refused, just as Hitler had smashed down Poland, his armed forces fell on Finland, but with much less success. Thus started the particularly stressful Winter War, in the course of which, to the surprise of the whole world, and of Hitler in particular, the giant Red Army, weakened and demoralised by a previous series of purges of its generals and officer corps, did not succeed in finishing off the Finnish dwarf for several months. The soldiers on the Soviet side did not understand the legitimacy of an aggressive war waged by a Socialist country against a small people. In this situation the Finns fought with the energy of despair to preserve their national independence. Finally, in March 1940, a sort of compromise peace put an end to this disastrous adventure.
The World War had still not really started. Hitler, with economic help from Stalin, finally decided to commit himself. On 11 May 1940 the Wehrmacht first invaded Holland and then Belgium: by the beginning of June, after a shattering armoured breakthrough, France was routed and, on 2 June, Marshal Petain, the new head of state, signed the surrender.
As we shall see, Trotsky was an attentive and passionate observer of this succession of changing scenes. Unhappily, was not able to see how things finally turned out, because the blow of the pick which penetrated his skull on August 1940 put an end to the activity of his brain. The present compilation therefore, has the appearance of an unfinished work.
But his material is so rich and so powerful, and his predictions as to the eventual evolution of the war are always so lucid, that the writings of Trotsky on the Second World War go further than the moment when their author was forced to put down his pen on his blood-stained desk. While they interpreted the warlike events of which Leon Davidovich, in a masterly fashion, did not lose the thread for an instant, they throw no less light on the of the world conflict – which the author did not live to see – and by that they help us to understand it better.
For today’s reader the collection has a double interest:
1.We all know the lively curiosity that is growing about every aspect of the Second World War. Trotsky’s analyses, unknown in France until today, are even more precious since they emanate from a man who was not only a great Marxist theoretician, but a leading governmental and military figure in his own country. What is more, he had been able to follow the Balkan Wars as a journalist, and he had observed the First World War as a perceptive witness before creating the Red Army during the Civil War. He was therefore better able than most others to understand what lay behind the start of the Second World War.
2.In addition these writings will not fail to arouse great interest amongst those who are familiar with the rest of Trotsky’s written work from the period just before his tragic death. The reader will note that until the very last moment, Trotsky, the multinational specialist, followed the internal evolution of the belligerent countries in a manner that was both incisive and detailed, as can be seen in the two short fragments, which were left unfinished by his death, on France, Pétain and the foreseeable moral deterioration of the occupying forces.
No-one can predict the future. It is therefore not surprising to find some anticipated events which failed to happen in the articles and interviews with Trotsky; but these errors are more than compensated by a series of extraordinary prophecies. If we balance the errors of prediction with visions of the future that did occur, we are led to conclude that he was more often right than wrong.
A unique occurence in the war of 1914-18, which has never happened since, was surely the presence of Lenin, a superhuman and supernational mind, placed above the conflict in a neutral country both as an observer and interpreter, who watched the unfolding of the conflict, whereas those who managed it were as blind as they were deaf. Trotsky, in the same way, did not allow himself to give advice to governments, however useful he might have been to the leaders of the countries at war, who, if they had wished, could well have betaken themselves to the new Delphi at Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico, to listen to the oracle whose eye pierced the shadows of world politics, and who so clearly read the contradictions which made up the diplomatic alliances and conduct of the war.
Private
In fact, the articles by Trotsky on the Second World War were only read by a small minority of initiates, and their private character is accentuated by the war censorship and counter-revolutionary prejudice towards a man like him, which were international obstacles to the spread of his written thought, along with the call-up of so many revolutionary activists into the imperialist armies. An exception must be made for the articles and interviews that Leon Davidovich gave to the American press. One cannot exclude the fact – what a paradox! – that, against his wishes and though he would not have counselled them, the only great power which was to some extent able to use the profound analyses and audacious anticipations of Trotsky, was American imperialism.
It is true that the United States was still then ‘neutral’, that is to say, less caught up in the conflagration, and was thus less blinded by it, while the President, Franklin Roosevelt, had an infinitely more subtle and astute mind than the wild men urging their people on at the head of the belligerents.
Leon Davidovich was all the time aware of his vocation as a professional soothsayer. The word ‘prediction’ appears more than once in these articles. However, he has the modesty and honesty to doubt the accuracy of his forecasts himself. “Reality”, he wrote, “is worse than all the predictions that I have made.” “It would be hopeless to foresee the result of the War.”
Before allowing Trotsky himself to speak, we would like to make a short list of his numerous predictions for the benefit of the reader.
•Trotsky immediately understood, 10 days after the event, that the Munich Quadrumvirate was incapable of maintaining peace and that war was inevitable, after a more or less brief delay. With great precision he fixed a delay of two years in August 1937.
•Trotsky guessed that the Second World War would be a total one, and that only a very few small countries would be able to avoid the fighting.
•Trotsky denounced the misdeeds of the Stalinist Popular Front policy, which deluded the masses by mobilising them merely against Hitler and diverting them from opposing their own imperialist war. Furthermore, he saw that the seizure of power in France by Marshal Pétain was a direct consequence of the bankruptcy of the Popular Front in that country.
•Trotsky saw that the negotiations undertaken by the Kremlin with the Western powers in the spring of 1939 had an element of sincerity: because of the possible alternatives, Stalin was obliged to put forward the proposal of a ‘United Front of the Democracies’ in good faith. But in the opposite sense Leon Davidovich was right, on the one hand, to think that the negotiations gave Stalin a most important source of information on the military potential of the Allies, and, on the other, that they camouflaged the secret negotiations in which he was already engaged with Hitler.
•Trotsky thought that it was Hitler’s Germany which had treacherously pushed the USSR into attacking Finland. In his opinion it was the Franco-British threats that finally forced Stalin, as a result of his military reverses at the beginning of the campaign, to give up the idea of annexing Finland. In his opinion the humiliating check inflicted by this Nordic country was the start of the fall of Stalin.
•From 9 August 1937 Trotsky predicted that the German army would start by gaining great victories in the West, but correctly excluded the possibility of a complete victory over Britain. He saw France cut up, partitioned and reduced to the rank of a second-rate power, even to that of an oppressed nation. In September 1939 he foresaw the possibility that the French government, together with the governments of Belgium, Holland, Poland and Czechoslovakia, would have to take refuge in Great Britain. From 1937-38 he waited for the growth of French Fascism, which would be capable of replacing democracy. He foresaw Vichy.
•On 1 October 1939 Trotsky clearly saw the reason for the ‘Phoney War’ on the Western front: he knew that France and Britain hesitated to start a real war without an assurance of American help.
•On the morrow of Munich Trotsky predicted the Hitler-Stalin pact, a shameful collusion which arose out of a double fear, of a German attack on Russia and of a revolution. He reminded us that from the seizure of power by National Socialism Stalin went on his hands and knees to become Hitler’s ally. But at first he had been rebuffed. Trotsky reckoned that the Moscow Trials, among other things, had been a cover for the preparation of the Russo-German pact. Unlike others, however, he did not think that Stalin deliberately wished to provoke a world war by his alliance with Hitler, the outcome of which he, above all, doubted.
•Trotsky insisted on pointing to the considerable economic aid that Stalin gave to Hitler up to the moment of the break between the two countries in June 1941. He estimated that this made the Western blockade of Hitler’s Germany at least 25 per cent less effective.
Test
From 1937, in spite of his hatred of Stalin, Trotsky had an unshakeable confidence in the future of collective property in the USSR. For him the social basis of the Soviet regime (the new forms of property and the planned economy) would pass the test of war and would come out of it strengthened. In his opinion it would take merely a dozen or so years for Soviet industry to catch up with that of the capitalists.
However, Leon Davidovich did not hide the fact that if the USSR were attacked, the war against the foreigner would undoubtedly strengthen the position of the bureaucracy. That happened.
Once more, in spite of his savage struggle against Stalinism, Trotsky affirmed his unconditional defence of the Soviet Union. If the country was invaded, he stated that his supporters would fight against Hitler’s troops, and he congratulated the Russian people on their understanding that a defeat of the USSR would signify the destruction of the nationalised and planned economy.
Trotsky was full of optimism for the future of the Germany that had been subjugated by Hitler. If National Socialism had been able to triumph, it was only because the working class no longer had any confidence in its old parties and its old slogans, and it had not yet found a new way out. But on 11 September 1939 Leon Davidovich was convinced that Hitler would continue to slide into catastrophe. He saw that Hitler was walking to the abyss with the infallibility of a sleep-walker. He thought that Nazi rule, proclaimed as lasting for a thousand years, was not likely to last for even 10.
Shortly before his death, Trotsky had not the slightest doubt as to the resistance of the occupied peoples conquered by German imperialism, and he compared the occupied countries to powder-barrels.
Trotsky did not hesitate to proclaim that America must not stay neutral. According to him, it was necessary to give Hitler such a decisive blow that Stalin would cease to fear him. And he encouraged the American workers to engage in intensive military preparation. For him, at any rate, American intervention was absolutely inevitable. The real war would be between Germany and the USA.
From the beginning of September 1939, Trotsky never ceased to warn the Soviet Union against future German aggression. For him the Russo-German pact was only a “scrap of paper”. If Hitler was unfortunately victorious on the Western front, he would then turn his arms against the USSR.
As a corollary Trotsky predicted an alliance between the USSR and the imperialist ‘democracies’.
From 4 September 1939 onwards Trotsky said that Japan would launch an offensive towards the south in the direction of the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Borneo, French Indochina and Burma, rather than attack the USSR. But while he foresaw the extension of Japanese rule over the greater part of the Asiatic continent, he reckoned that Japan was incapable of maintaining a war of great intensity.
From the years 1937-38, at the start of the coming world conflict, it is clear that for Trotsky, domination of our planet would fall to the United States, which would proceed into an explosion of imperialism, the like of which the world had never seen before.
Finally, Trotsky envisaged the perspective of a Third World War which would be waged by entire continents against one another, and which would become the tomb of civilisation.
Whatever happened, Trotsky kept an intransigent faith in proletarian internationalism. He cried out that in aiding the democracies against the Fascists, the workers in the western countries could only assist and accelerate the victory of Fascism inside their own countries. The war between the two adversaries could bring nothing but oppression and reaction in both camps.
However, one point on which his perspicacious mind was mistaken was his scepticism about the possibility of an eventual outcome by a secret weapon held in reserve by one of the combatants. He said that no army could hold chemical or electronic miracles in reserve. In August 1937 Leon Davidovich was unable to guess at the military use of nuclear physics.
Another erroneous point was his ardent conviction that the Second World War would end in the victory of the world revolution, and in consequence, in the triumph of the Fourth International, in which he showed the utmost confidence. But is it possible to be a revolutionary and a guide to other revolutionaries unless, in addition to an incisive Marxist analysis, there is faith and fire in one’s belly?
The reader can perceive from the foregoing that Trotsky was two men, on the one hand a revolutionary internationalist, the spokesman of the Fourth International, and on the other, a leader who was still very much a Soviet militant, staying faithful to the revolution he had himself led and the military power that he had created.
It is natural that in Against the Stream, the first Trotsky looked at the Second Imperialist War with similar eyes to those of Lenin, that is to say a totally revolutionary point of view demanding the defeat of all the imperialist countries. But the other Trotsky, the Soviet Trotsky, we repeat, is above all concerned with the unconditional defence of the USSR, a position from which he never deviated. The result is an alternating series of texts, the one inspired by the most burning Soviet patriotism, while in others he shows himself implacably opposed to the Stalinist bureaucracy, which he accuses of inadequately defending the Soviet homeland. This second Trotsky allows himself to be led into taking up positions that seem to contradict those of the first Trotsky – the internationalist.
It is thus that, foreseeing or even calling for the entry of the United States into the war on the side of the Western Allies, Trotsky was led into lambasting the American pacifists, considered as ‘Enemy No.1’ by him, and to encouraging the United States to accelerate its military preparations. He insisted on several occasions that Stalin had cooperated with Hitler, above all out of fear of him, and that the only way to help him out of the clutches of the Nazi dictator was for the Allies to show themselves strong.
One might think that day-to-day articles about events of long ago, now 30 years, would lose something of their immediacy. This is by no means the case for the articles that we publish. To us they do not appear to have aged. They keep their freshness and sharpness. No doubt this is because each of them raises itself above the situation of the moment to exhibit an interpretation, a philosophy, a global orientation, which is based on a coherent and durable system of thought, that of revolutionary Marxism.
The central piece in this collection, both by length and by content, is the admirable Manifesto of the Fourth International of May 1940 which was written in Trotsky's own hand. If he needs to, the reader can verify this with his own eyes, since, thanks to the Houghton Library of Harvard, we reproduce the handwritten manuscript. I do not believe that anyone else has dared to publish a text of such quality on the Second World War, which expresses with so much force and conviction the fundamentals of proletarian internationalism. I am the better able to judge since I myself inserted, as an appendix to my book, Front Populaire: la Révolution Perdu, the appeals published during the war by the Front Ouvrier International contre La Guerre, the international rival to the Fourth International, and by the French Parti Socialist Ouvrier et Paysan, both inspired by Marceau Pivert.
Far be it for me to belittle the value of texts from the organisations of which I have just spoken and about which, in my opinion, Trotsky was rather too severe. For Marceau Pivert also had the great virtue that he stayed faithful above all to proletarian internationalism throughout the war. But I believe Trotsky expresses far better than he does, with much greater sharpness, greater weight, and a greater genius, an obstinately internationalist position which left him, like Marceau Pivert and we, his friends, isolated souls preaching to the desert, submerged by the depth of the wave of the world conflagration in which, in one way or another, all the nationalist passions were unleashed.
Trotsky’s Manifesto, which would also be his testament, saved the honour of the world working class in these accursed years.
Daniel Guérin
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***********
Trotsky and the Second World War
(Part 2)
What appears below for the first time in English is the second instalment, much delayed, of a controversy carried on in the French language press about the attitude of Leon Trotsky to the Second World War. Chronologically it takes in the first and final contributions, the part we selected for publishing two years ago (Lutte Ouvrière/Daniel Guérin, Trotsky and the Second World War, Revolutionary History, Volume 1 no.3, Autumn 1988, pp.38-40) making up the central part of it.
Our initial item, which sparked off the discussion in the first place, is Daniel Guérin’s preface to Léon Trotsky – Sur la deuxième guerre mondiale, a collection of Trotsky’s writings on the war first published by Éditions la Taupe in Brussels in 1970. The second and third pieces are reviews of this work, by André Frankin in the Belgian Socialist weekly La Gauche, 28 March 1970, and by an anonymous reviewer in the French weekly Informations Ouvrières, no.485, 29 July-5 August 1970, the journal of the OCI. The final document is Guérin’s reply to his critics, which took the form of a postscript added to the French edition of Trotsky’s writings on the war, publish by Seuil (Bibliothèque politique) in 1974.
They have all been rendered into English by Ted Crawford. All emphasis is as in the original, but citations of Trotsky’s writing have been altered from the French texts to the standard English ones, generally those of the Pathfinder corpus.
1. Daniel Guérin’s Preface
The articles reprinted here consist of pieces by Trotsky and interviews which he gave to a number of publications in the last years of his life from August 1937 to August 1940, when he was murdered by an assassin on the orders of Stalin. These articles are exclusively concerned with the forecasts, the outbreak and the first year of the Second World War. In order to provide them with more homogeneity and to concentrate the thought of Leon Davidovich better on one and the same subject, we have deliberately left passages out of certain texts that have no connection with the question.
These writings deal with a particularly dramatic slice of history. They start with the period of agonising international tension which culminated in the Munich agreement of 30 September 1938, signed by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini for the Axis, and Neville Chamberlain and Eduard Daladier for the so-called Western ‘democracies’. This agreement, which anxious peoples believed had really given them peace, was only a short respite, as we now know, and what is more it helped to isolate dangerously the USSR by creating the possibility of a future coalition of these four great powers against the Socialist state.
The following sequence helps us understand the period which preceded the start of the war, after Munich, and despite Munich. It is then marked by the dramatic German-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939, which was a complete reversal of previous Stalinist foreign policy, which had been more or less aligned with the Western ‘democracies’ until then, in a common defence against the menace of Hitler. The prolonged negotiations which had taken place with them until then collapsed at the last moment as the Western powers dragged things out while Poland opposed the passage of the Red Armies across its territory.
The unnatural alliance between ‘Bolshevism’ (or what was left of it) and National Socialism simultaneously struck a heavy moral blow against the revolutionary movements in many countries, while leaving Hitler’s hands free for warlike enterprises. Then came the lightning aggression against the reactionary Poland of the colonels, the pretext invoked by Hitler being the Danzig corridor, which had, in fact, scandalously cut Germany into two since the Treaty of Versailles. In a few weeks, because of his superior military might and crushing technical superiority, Hitler finished with Poland, which was then divided between the two German and Russian gangsters.
Then there was that strange period called the ‘Phoney War’, where the Western powers, who had done nothing, or hardly anything, to help their ally Poland, passively faced the Wehrmacht, itself immobilised behind the Siegfried line.
But Stalin was not content with absorbing that portion of Poland and the Baltic states that Hitler was happy to leave him. His appetite whetted, he suddenly demanded a cession of territory from Finland and, being refused, just as Hitler had smashed down Poland, his armed forces fell on Finland, but with much less success. Thus started the particularly stressful Winter War, in the course of which, to the surprise of the whole world, and of Hitler in particular, the giant Red Army, weakened and demoralised by a previous series of purges of its generals and officer corps, did not succeed in finishing off the Finnish dwarf for several months. The soldiers on the Soviet side did not understand the legitimacy of an aggressive war waged by a Socialist country against a small people. In this situation the Finns fought with the energy of despair to preserve their national independence. Finally, in March 1940, a sort of compromise peace put an end to this disastrous adventure.
The World War had still not really started. Hitler, with economic help from Stalin, finally decided to commit himself. On 11 May 1940 the Wehrmacht first invaded Holland and then Belgium: by the beginning of June, after a shattering armoured breakthrough, France was routed and, on 2 June, Marshal Petain, the new head of state, signed the surrender.
As we shall see, Trotsky was an attentive and passionate observer of this succession of changing scenes. Unhappily, was not able to see how things finally turned out, because the blow of the pick which penetrated his skull on August 1940 put an end to the activity of his brain. The present compilation therefore, has the appearance of an unfinished work.
But his material is so rich and so powerful, and his predictions as to the eventual evolution of the war are always so lucid, that the writings of Trotsky on the Second World War go further than the moment when their author was forced to put down his pen on his blood-stained desk. While they interpreted the warlike events of which Leon Davidovich, in a masterly fashion, did not lose the thread for an instant, they throw no less light on the of the world conflict – which the author did not live to see – and by that they help us to understand it better.
For today’s reader the collection has a double interest:
1.We all know the lively curiosity that is growing about every aspect of the Second World War. Trotsky’s analyses, unknown in France until today, are even more precious since they emanate from a man who was not only a great Marxist theoretician, but a leading governmental and military figure in his own country. What is more, he had been able to follow the Balkan Wars as a journalist, and he had observed the First World War as a perceptive witness before creating the Red Army during the Civil War. He was therefore better able than most others to understand what lay behind the start of the Second World War.
2.In addition these writings will not fail to arouse great interest amongst those who are familiar with the rest of Trotsky’s written work from the period just before his tragic death. The reader will note that until the very last moment, Trotsky, the multinational specialist, followed the internal evolution of the belligerent countries in a manner that was both incisive and detailed, as can be seen in the two short fragments, which were left unfinished by his death, on France, Pétain and the foreseeable moral deterioration of the occupying forces.
No-one can predict the future. It is therefore not surprising to find some anticipated events which failed to happen in the articles and interviews with Trotsky; but these errors are more than compensated by a series of extraordinary prophecies. If we balance the errors of prediction with visions of the future that did occur, we are led to conclude that he was more often right than wrong.
A unique occurence in the war of 1914-18, which has never happened since, was surely the presence of Lenin, a superhuman and supernational mind, placed above the conflict in a neutral country both as an observer and interpreter, who watched the unfolding of the conflict, whereas those who managed it were as blind as they were deaf. Trotsky, in the same way, did not allow himself to give advice to governments, however useful he might have been to the leaders of the countries at war, who, if they had wished, could well have betaken themselves to the new Delphi at Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico, to listen to the oracle whose eye pierced the shadows of world politics, and who so clearly read the contradictions which made up the diplomatic alliances and conduct of the war.
Private
In fact, the articles by Trotsky on the Second World War were only read by a small minority of initiates, and their private character is accentuated by the war censorship and counter-revolutionary prejudice towards a man like him, which were international obstacles to the spread of his written thought, along with the call-up of so many revolutionary activists into the imperialist armies. An exception must be made for the articles and interviews that Leon Davidovich gave to the American press. One cannot exclude the fact – what a paradox! – that, against his wishes and though he would not have counselled them, the only great power which was to some extent able to use the profound analyses and audacious anticipations of Trotsky, was American imperialism.
It is true that the United States was still then ‘neutral’, that is to say, less caught up in the conflagration, and was thus less blinded by it, while the President, Franklin Roosevelt, had an infinitely more subtle and astute mind than the wild men urging their people on at the head of the belligerents.
Leon Davidovich was all the time aware of his vocation as a professional soothsayer. The word ‘prediction’ appears more than once in these articles. However, he has the modesty and honesty to doubt the accuracy of his forecasts himself. “Reality”, he wrote, “is worse than all the predictions that I have made.” “It would be hopeless to foresee the result of the War.”
Before allowing Trotsky himself to speak, we would like to make a short list of his numerous predictions for the benefit of the reader.
•Trotsky immediately understood, 10 days after the event, that the Munich Quadrumvirate was incapable of maintaining peace and that war was inevitable, after a more or less brief delay. With great precision he fixed a delay of two years in August 1937.
•Trotsky guessed that the Second World War would be a total one, and that only a very few small countries would be able to avoid the fighting.
•Trotsky denounced the misdeeds of the Stalinist Popular Front policy, which deluded the masses by mobilising them merely against Hitler and diverting them from opposing their own imperialist war. Furthermore, he saw that the seizure of power in France by Marshal Pétain was a direct consequence of the bankruptcy of the Popular Front in that country.
•Trotsky saw that the negotiations undertaken by the Kremlin with the Western powers in the spring of 1939 had an element of sincerity: because of the possible alternatives, Stalin was obliged to put forward the proposal of a ‘United Front of the Democracies’ in good faith. But in the opposite sense Leon Davidovich was right, on the one hand, to think that the negotiations gave Stalin a most important source of information on the military potential of the Allies, and, on the other, that they camouflaged the secret negotiations in which he was already engaged with Hitler.
•Trotsky thought that it was Hitler’s Germany which had treacherously pushed the USSR into attacking Finland. In his opinion it was the Franco-British threats that finally forced Stalin, as a result of his military reverses at the beginning of the campaign, to give up the idea of annexing Finland. In his opinion the humiliating check inflicted by this Nordic country was the start of the fall of Stalin.
•From 9 August 1937 Trotsky predicted that the German army would start by gaining great victories in the West, but correctly excluded the possibility of a complete victory over Britain. He saw France cut up, partitioned and reduced to the rank of a second-rate power, even to that of an oppressed nation. In September 1939 he foresaw the possibility that the French government, together with the governments of Belgium, Holland, Poland and Czechoslovakia, would have to take refuge in Great Britain. From 1937-38 he waited for the growth of French Fascism, which would be capable of replacing democracy. He foresaw Vichy.
•On 1 October 1939 Trotsky clearly saw the reason for the ‘Phoney War’ on the Western front: he knew that France and Britain hesitated to start a real war without an assurance of American help.
•On the morrow of Munich Trotsky predicted the Hitler-Stalin pact, a shameful collusion which arose out of a double fear, of a German attack on Russia and of a revolution. He reminded us that from the seizure of power by National Socialism Stalin went on his hands and knees to become Hitler’s ally. But at first he had been rebuffed. Trotsky reckoned that the Moscow Trials, among other things, had been a cover for the preparation of the Russo-German pact. Unlike others, however, he did not think that Stalin deliberately wished to provoke a world war by his alliance with Hitler, the outcome of which he, above all, doubted.
•Trotsky insisted on pointing to the considerable economic aid that Stalin gave to Hitler up to the moment of the break between the two countries in June 1941. He estimated that this made the Western blockade of Hitler’s Germany at least 25 per cent less effective.
Test
From 1937, in spite of his hatred of Stalin, Trotsky had an unshakeable confidence in the future of collective property in the USSR. For him the social basis of the Soviet regime (the new forms of property and the planned economy) would pass the test of war and would come out of it strengthened. In his opinion it would take merely a dozen or so years for Soviet industry to catch up with that of the capitalists.
However, Leon Davidovich did not hide the fact that if the USSR were attacked, the war against the foreigner would undoubtedly strengthen the position of the bureaucracy. That happened.
Once more, in spite of his savage struggle against Stalinism, Trotsky affirmed his unconditional defence of the Soviet Union. If the country was invaded, he stated that his supporters would fight against Hitler’s troops, and he congratulated the Russian people on their understanding that a defeat of the USSR would signify the destruction of the nationalised and planned economy.
Trotsky was full of optimism for the future of the Germany that had been subjugated by Hitler. If National Socialism had been able to triumph, it was only because the working class no longer had any confidence in its old parties and its old slogans, and it had not yet found a new way out. But on 11 September 1939 Leon Davidovich was convinced that Hitler would continue to slide into catastrophe. He saw that Hitler was walking to the abyss with the infallibility of a sleep-walker. He thought that Nazi rule, proclaimed as lasting for a thousand years, was not likely to last for even 10.
Shortly before his death, Trotsky had not the slightest doubt as to the resistance of the occupied peoples conquered by German imperialism, and he compared the occupied countries to powder-barrels.
Trotsky did not hesitate to proclaim that America must not stay neutral. According to him, it was necessary to give Hitler such a decisive blow that Stalin would cease to fear him. And he encouraged the American workers to engage in intensive military preparation. For him, at any rate, American intervention was absolutely inevitable. The real war would be between Germany and the USA.
From the beginning of September 1939, Trotsky never ceased to warn the Soviet Union against future German aggression. For him the Russo-German pact was only a “scrap of paper”. If Hitler was unfortunately victorious on the Western front, he would then turn his arms against the USSR.
As a corollary Trotsky predicted an alliance between the USSR and the imperialist ‘democracies’.
From 4 September 1939 onwards Trotsky said that Japan would launch an offensive towards the south in the direction of the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Borneo, French Indochina and Burma, rather than attack the USSR. But while he foresaw the extension of Japanese rule over the greater part of the Asiatic continent, he reckoned that Japan was incapable of maintaining a war of great intensity.
From the years 1937-38, at the start of the coming world conflict, it is clear that for Trotsky, domination of our planet would fall to the United States, which would proceed into an explosion of imperialism, the like of which the world had never seen before.
Finally, Trotsky envisaged the perspective of a Third World War which would be waged by entire continents against one another, and which would become the tomb of civilisation.
Whatever happened, Trotsky kept an intransigent faith in proletarian internationalism. He cried out that in aiding the democracies against the Fascists, the workers in the western countries could only assist and accelerate the victory of Fascism inside their own countries. The war between the two adversaries could bring nothing but oppression and reaction in both camps.
However, one point on which his perspicacious mind was mistaken was his scepticism about the possibility of an eventual outcome by a secret weapon held in reserve by one of the combatants. He said that no army could hold chemical or electronic miracles in reserve. In August 1937 Leon Davidovich was unable to guess at the military use of nuclear physics.
Another erroneous point was his ardent conviction that the Second World War would end in the victory of the world revolution, and in consequence, in the triumph of the Fourth International, in which he showed the utmost confidence. But is it possible to be a revolutionary and a guide to other revolutionaries unless, in addition to an incisive Marxist analysis, there is faith and fire in one’s belly?
The reader can perceive from the foregoing that Trotsky was two men, on the one hand a revolutionary internationalist, the spokesman of the Fourth International, and on the other, a leader who was still very much a Soviet militant, staying faithful to the revolution he had himself led and the military power that he had created.
It is natural that in Against the Stream, the first Trotsky looked at the Second Imperialist War with similar eyes to those of Lenin, that is to say a totally revolutionary point of view demanding the defeat of all the imperialist countries. But the other Trotsky, the Soviet Trotsky, we repeat, is above all concerned with the unconditional defence of the USSR, a position from which he never deviated. The result is an alternating series of texts, the one inspired by the most burning Soviet patriotism, while in others he shows himself implacably opposed to the Stalinist bureaucracy, which he accuses of inadequately defending the Soviet homeland. This second Trotsky allows himself to be led into taking up positions that seem to contradict those of the first Trotsky – the internationalist.
It is thus that, foreseeing or even calling for the entry of the United States into the war on the side of the Western Allies, Trotsky was led into lambasting the American pacifists, considered as ‘Enemy No.1’ by him, and to encouraging the United States to accelerate its military preparations. He insisted on several occasions that Stalin had cooperated with Hitler, above all out of fear of him, and that the only way to help him out of the clutches of the Nazi dictator was for the Allies to show themselves strong.
One might think that day-to-day articles about events of long ago, now 30 years, would lose something of their immediacy. This is by no means the case for the articles that we publish. To us they do not appear to have aged. They keep their freshness and sharpness. No doubt this is because each of them raises itself above the situation of the moment to exhibit an interpretation, a philosophy, a global orientation, which is based on a coherent and durable system of thought, that of revolutionary Marxism.
The central piece in this collection, both by length and by content, is the admirable Manifesto of the Fourth International of May 1940 which was written in Trotsky's own hand. If he needs to, the reader can verify this with his own eyes, since, thanks to the Houghton Library of Harvard, we reproduce the handwritten manuscript. I do not believe that anyone else has dared to publish a text of such quality on the Second World War, which expresses with so much force and conviction the fundamentals of proletarian internationalism. I am the better able to judge since I myself inserted, as an appendix to my book, Front Populaire: la Révolution Perdu, the appeals published during the war by the Front Ouvrier International contre La Guerre, the international rival to the Fourth International, and by the French Parti Socialist Ouvrier et Paysan, both inspired by Marceau Pivert.
Far be it for me to belittle the value of texts from the organisations of which I have just spoken and about which, in my opinion, Trotsky was rather too severe. For Marceau Pivert also had the great virtue that he stayed faithful above all to proletarian internationalism throughout the war. But I believe Trotsky expresses far better than he does, with much greater sharpness, greater weight, and a greater genius, an obstinately internationalist position which left him, like Marceau Pivert and we, his friends, isolated souls preaching to the desert, submerged by the depth of the wave of the world conflagration in which, in one way or another, all the nationalist passions were unleashed.
Trotsky’s Manifesto, which would also be his testament, saved the honour of the world working class in these accursed years.
Daniel Guérin
Sunday, April 01, 2012
From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-How Trotsky and the Trotskyists confronted the Second World War
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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How Trotsky and the Trotskyists confronted the Second World War
This article links the subject matter of our previous issue on the history of the revolutionary movement in Greece to the general theme of this magazine, that of the attitude to be taken up by revolutionaries towards the Second World War. It first appeared under the title Trotsky et les Trotskystes face à la deuxieme guerre mondiale, in Cahiers Léon Trotsky, no.23, September 1985, pp.35-60. Yet again we must offer our thanks to Professor Broué and his conscientious translator John Archer for permission to publish this thought-provoking contribution. It drew a sharp criticism at the time from Pierre Vert, Trotskyists in World War Two, Spartacist, nos.38-39, Summer 1986, pp.46-8, to which Broué addressed a curt rejoinder, Broué Replies in Spartacist, no.40, Summer 1987, and then a more extensive reply, La deuxième guerre mondiale: question de method in Cahiers Léon Trotsky, no.39, September 1989, pp.5-21.
The debate was extended by the publication of the Documents on the Proletarian Military Policy, the second of the Prometheus Research Series, in February 1989. The implications of the documents were further commented upon in World War II and the Proletarian Military Policy in Workers Vanguard, 17 March 1989, and Workers Hammer, April 1989.
Three issues of the Cahiers Léon Trotsky have so far been devoted to this historical problem (nos.23, 39 and 43, September 1985, September 1989 and September 1990), and we have been able to publish two of our own, Revolutionary History, Volume I nos.3 and 4, Autumn and Winter 1988. In the first of these appears Jean-Paul Joubert’s essay on revolutionary defeatism (from the Cahiers, no.23) along with an essay written for us by Sam Levy, The Proletarian Military Policy Revisited, which now appears in the Cahiers, no.43. Those who are anxious to explore this theme in more detail are referred to the introductions to the different articles in these two previous issues of our journal, where numerous other references can be gleaned.
The dilemma of the European Trotskyists at the time is explored in Le Trotskysme et l’Europe pendant la deuxieme guerre mondiale by Gerd Rainer-Horn, a young man who does not always see fit to acknowledge the sources of his material, in Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no.9, pp.49-75, and by Al Richardson, Fourth International? What Fourth International? in Workers News, October-November 1990. Other documentation on the collapse of the leading organs of the movement at the start of the war occurs in Trotsky in 1939-1940: The IEC Does Not Exist, in Spartacist, nos.43-44, Summer 1989, pp.28-31. The politics of the French Trotskyists during the resistance struggle are now becoming more clearly known, both through their propaganda, more of which is now available in Documents sur la politique du Front Ouvrier (POI 1943) et sommaires des numeros du journal Front ouvrier (1944-48), which appeared in Les Cahiers du CERMTRI, no.48, March 1988, and by their courageous activity on the spot as remembered by Andre Calves, Sans bottes ni medailles: Un trotskyste breton dans la guerre, which can be obtained from La Breche at 2 rue Richard Lenoir 93100, Montreuil, France, at a cost of 60 francs plus postage.
Opinions regarding the American (or Proletarian) Military Policy among the Trotskyists were sharply divided at the time, and remain so today. Readers of the former issue of our journal will gather that the majority of Greek Trotskyists were opposed to it. Stinas expressed himself most bitterly on the politics of the American, British and French Trotskyists during the Second World War (Memoires, Paris, 1989, p.273), and an equally forthright condemnation by Karliaftis takes up the Minneapolis case in particular, in Cannon and the SWP: On the Track of the Social Betrayers in Front of the Second World War: Documents of the Workers Vanguard (Greece), in Internationalist, no.5. January 1983. His criticism is derived from that made at the time by the veteran Spanish revolutionary Grandizo Munis, in Defense Policy in the Minneapolis Trial in International Bulletin, Volume 2 no.4, and afterwards in El SWP y la guerro imperialista (1945) and Le Trotskysme et la Defaitisme Revolutionnaire (both of them still obtainable from Alarma, BP 329, 7564 Paris Cedex I 3). Similar criticisms were made at the time by the Indian Trotskyists (cf. Charles Wesley Ervin, Trotskyism in India, in Revolutionary History, Volume 1 no.4, pp.312). In Britain opinion was divided, the Revolutionary Socialist League itself being torn between outright rejection of the Military Policy by the Militant Centre Group of D.D. Harber and John Archer, together with the Left Fraction led by John Robinson and Tom Mercer, as against enthusiastic support from the Trotskyist Opposition of John Lawrence and Hilda Lane. The other group, the Workers International League, moved from a guarded response to a more whole-hearted agreement with the American SWP as the war went on (cf. S. Bornstein and A Richardson, War and the International, London 1986, pp.12-5, 34-5, 40-2), to the extent of publishing Cannon’s courtroom testimony as a general educational pamphlet on Socialism in three separate editions. And there were still those associated with the WIL, like Fred Kissin, the leader of the Danzig Trotskyists, who felt that it did not go far enough, submitting a contribution of this own to the internal bulletin, The Present War and Socialist Internationalism in April 1943. (Cf. S.F. Kissin, War and the Marxists, Volume 2, London. 1989, pp203-3, which shows that this was still his opinion just before his death.) The agitation of the WIL inside the armed forces has also been touched on by Tony Aitman, 'The War Within the War' in the British Militant, 15 September 1989.
General Marxist analyses of the Second World War should be consulted by those who do not have the time to subject the various problems to closer scrutiny. Among the shorter of these we might mention Phil Frampton, Why the World Went to War, Militant, 8 September 1989, and Marxism and the Second World War, Workers Power, no.122, September 1989. A good overall guide remains Ernest Mandel’s The Meaning of the Second World War, Verso, London 1986) which was sharply criticised by Gemma Forest in Marxism and the Mid-Century (Confrontation, no.3, Summer 1988, pp.147-55) and in her review in this magazine (Volume 1 no.4, Winter 1988-89, pp.45-8; cf. the correspondence upon this in Volume 2 no.2, pp.65-6, no.3, p.50, and Volume 3 no.1, pp.48-9).
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1. Little-Known Documents
Some years ago Daniel Guérin published some texts which Trotsky wrote on the Second World War. [1] His preface caused him to be subjected to some heavy fire from different groups claiming to be Trotskyist. He was accused, in particular, of having distorted Trotsky’s thinking by arbitrarily mutilating what he had written, and of having misrepresented Trotsky’s ideas, if not in the direction of social-patriotism, at any rate in that of narrow anti-Fascism, and of taking the liberty of presenting Trotsky as a “Soviet patriot”, for whom the necessity of “defending the Soviet Union” took precedence over every other consideration in the war. [2]
The preparation of Volumes 22 to 24 of the Oeuvres led me to work on the complete texts of the documents which Guérin published. Moreover, the opening of the closed section of the archives at Harvard has given us access to many documents, which, taken as a whole, enable us today to present an interpretation of Trotsky’s thought, one which agrees neither with Guérin’s version nor with that of the militants who have defended against him an ‘orthodoxy’ based upon the attitude of the Bolsheviks during the First World War – one war behind, and far behind the thinking of Trotsky as it leapt forward after Hitler’s great advances in 1940. [3] Trotsky, of course, understood what the war and the destruction which accompanied it meant for human civilisation. But in the spring of 1940, as the proverb says, “the wine was drawn and it had to be drunk”. Trotsky was no longer prepared merely to pose the revolution as the means to escape the war. The war had begun, and nothing could save humanity from it. Trotsky discerned in the war the gigantic crucible in which, amid unspeakable suffering, the revolutionary wave was to gather itself together, and within which the new phases of the world revolution would take shape. Trotsky expressed this very clearly in a fragment of an article which was cut short on 20 August 1940. Guérin knew of this article, but preferred to ignore it, no doubt because he did not understand its drift:
The present war, as we have stated more than once, is a continuation of the last war. But a continuation does not imply a repetition. As a general rule, a continuation implies a development, a deepening, a sharpening. Our policy, the policy of the revolutionary proletariat towards the second imperialist world war, is a continuation of the policy elaborated during the last imperialist war, primarily under the leadership of Lenin. But a continuation does not imply a repetition. In this case, too, a continuation means a development, a deepening and a sharpening. [4]
He then developed what he regarded as constituting the difference – a difference of development, quantitative and qualitative, between the policies of revolutionaries in the First and Second World Wars:
During the last war, not only the proletariat as a whole, but also its vanguard, and, in a certain sense, the vanguard of the vanguard, were caught unawares. The elaboration of the principles of revolutionary policy towards the war began at a time when the war was already in full blaze and when the military machine exercised unlimited rule. [5]
During the First World War the perspective of revolution seemed remote even to Lenin. He wrote that only future generations would see it. Trotsky recalled:
Prior to the February Revolution and even afterwards, the revolutionary elements felt themselves to be not so much contenders for power as the extreme left opposition. [6]
Therefore, the struggle for the independence of the proletariat, the rejection of ‘civil peace’, and the necessity for the class struggle of the proletariat, were the primary tasks in 1914-18, as defensive measures:
The attention of the revolutionary wing was centred on the question of the defence of the fatherland. The revolutionaries naturally replied in the negative to this question. This was entirely correct. This purely negative reply served as the basis for propaganda and for training the cadres. But it could not win the masses, who did not want a foreign conqueror. [7]
Trotsky recalled that the Bolsheviks succeeded in Russia in winning the proletariat and the majority of the people, in the space of eight months, and that this success was not in response to a negative refusal to defend the bourgeois fatherland, but to the aspirations of the masses, to which the Bolsheviks knew how to give positive answers:
The decisive rôle in this conquest was played, not by the refusal to defend the bourgeois fatherland, but by the slogan “All power to the soviets”. And only by this revolutionary slogan! The criticism of imperialism and of its militarism, like the renunciation of defence of bourgeois democracy and so on, could never have won the overwhelming majority of the people to the side of the Bolsheviks. [8]
The difference between the First and Second World Wars was to be found, in Trotsky’s opinion, at one and the same time, in the objective situation, the deepening impasse of imperialism, and in the worldwide experience which the working class had accumulated. Through the suffering and impoverishment due to the war, these factors imperiously demanded the seizure of power by the proletariat. Trotsky was categorical:
This perspective must be made the basis of our agitation. It is not merely a question of a position on capitalist militarism and of renouncing the defence of the bourgeois state, but of directly preparing for the conquest of power and the defence of the proletarian fatherland. [9]
In reality, when Trotsky was struck down on 20 August 1940, the essential elements of the second phase of the Second World War had only just emerged after the collapse of the French army. He wrote that this was “not just an episode, but an integral part of the ‘catastrophe of Europe’”. The materials which enable us to grasp the outlines of the conception which Trotsky was forming of the war, which he began to form at the same time as he outlined the direction of the revolutionary forces which could not fail to emerge from it, are to be found in the notes on the war and on the Soviet Union which he drafted in the spring of 1940. [10]
Daniel Guérin has vigorously emphasised that Trotsky had formed a remarkably exact and precise idea of the coming war in 1940. When men who had been close to him seemed resigned to decades of ‘Brown Europe’ under Nazi rule, Trotsky simply and confidently forecast the war between Germany and the USA for world hegemony, and, in addition, foresaw the ephemeral character of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the future alliance of the Soviet Union and the bourgeois democracies, the orientation of Japanese imperialism which was to avoid a collision with the Soviet Union, and many other features, which eminent strategists and commentators failed to foresee.
Guérin did not fail to notice all that. However, he made it impossible for himself to penetrate to what was at the centre of Trotsky’s thinking. Guérin reduced the analyses, which had only been sketched, and especially Trotsky’s expectations of the revolutionary movement during the war, to what he calls “his ardent conviction that the Second World War would end in the victory of the world revolution”. Guérin wrote that this was an “erroneous point” in which Trotsky “showed the utmost confidence’.
In this way, the insights which Guérin provided led him to deny Trotsky’s revolutionary perspective. No doubt this is not what Guérin intended, but some of his citations had the effect of clothing Trotsky in the mantle of a prophet, even in military matters. This is a distorted image of Trotsky. Indeed, Guérin himself reproduced many of Trotsky’s forecasts about the approach of the revolution! But we must be fair. Trotsky did no more than glimpse the future and give indications in these matters. He neither explained nor developed. The defenders of the ‘archaic’ conception, conceived as an orthodoxy, have generally ignored these indications. As some of the reactions to Guérin’s analyses show, they continue to ignore them when they look back at the solid mass of history which the war now appears to them to be.
For these reasons I wish to try in this article to show what were the main lines of Trotsky’s vision of the Second World War. I emphasise that his vision includes not merely essential aspects of the conflict, but also certain aspects of the period immediately following the war. We shall ignore some questions here, for example his analyses of the changes effected in 1939 in Poland by the Soviet bureaucracy, and those which it dreamed of making in Finland. These were the foundations of a theory of satellite bureaucratic states within the sphere of interest of the Soviet Union, which later became known as the buffer zone countries. This is to be found in the documents of the internal discussion in the Socialist Workers Party in 1939-40 on the nature of the Soviet Union.
Trotsky recognised that ‘Brown Europe’ under the Nazi jackboot would not last for a thousand years. He confidently gave it 10 years at most. He especially pointed out what the formidable conquests of the German army under Nazi leadership would mean for the working masses of Europe: “They bear a sentimental hatred against Hitler mixed with confused class sentiments.” [11]
According to Trotsky, we have here the positive aspect on which the work of revolutionary preparation in the USA was to rely. This was the starting point from which he developed (before his somewhat disconcerted comrades of the SWP) the idea that they must demand worker-officers in the army and the military training of every worker under trade union control, in anticipation of new forms of political work in a militarised society. These demands for militarisation and control – political independence by means of arms – went alongside agitational slogans, “to explain to the millions of American workers that the defence of their ‘democracy’ cannot be delivered over to an American Marshal Pétain”:
You, workers, wish to defend and improve democracy. We, of the Fourth International, wish to go further. However, we are ready to defend democracy with you, only on condition that it should be a real defence, and not a betrayal in the Pétain manner. [12]
The ‘orthodox’ interpreters of Trotsky’s thoughts have often seen this as nothing more than a tactical device, a ruse, a trick intended to have made the bourgeoisie reveal its true self, to show that it really feared the working class more than the Fascists at home and abroad. This argument cannot stand up to serious examination. How is it possible to reconcile, even at the most abstract level, the formula “not ... in the Pétain manner” with a certain vulgar conception of ‘defeatism’ which was never that of Trotsky?
That is not all. In Trotsky’s discussions with his SWP comrades, he did not hesitate to pose the question of ‘militarising’ the party, of its distancing of itself from pacifist attitudes, which he forcefully condemned. He proceeded to proclaim that his comrades, and every revolutionary, must become ‘militarists’ ’ the expression he used was “proletarian Socialist revolutionary militarists”. [13] They had to turn themselves into ‘militarists’ because of the prospects for humanity were of a militarised society and armed struggle. The proletarian revolutionary Socialists had to become militarists because the fate of humanity was to be decided arms in hand. The Second World War had started. Revolutionaries had to prepare themselves for a rapidly approaching armed struggle for power against the class enemy. They could only prepare themselves for that fight by being where the masses were. Such was Trotsky’s conviction.
This conviction rested on a concrete forecast about the movement of the masses, especially in Europe. In an article of 30 June 1940, Trotsky outlined a perspective of European development, which he expected to pass through the mass uprising against foreign occupation:
In the defeated countries the position of the masses will immediately become worsened in the extreme. Added to social oppression is national oppression, the main burden of which is likewise borne by the workers. Of all the forms of dictatorship, the totalitarian dictatorship of a foreign conqueror is the most intolerable. [14]
Can we doubt that Trotsky located the revolutionaries on the same side as those who were socially and nationally oppressed, who felt the “totalitarian dictatorship” of a “foreign conqueror” to be “intolerable”?
He knew the Nazis would try and exploit the industries and natural resources of the countries which they conquered and occupied. He knew that this super-exploitation would reduce them to pauperism. He foresaw a workers’ and peasants’ resistance: “It is impossible to attach a soldier with a rifle to each Polish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Belgian, French worker and peasant.” [15] He believed that the Hitlerite domination of Europe would provoke the general uprising of the peoples:
One can expect with assurance the rapid transformation of all the conquered countries into powder magazines. The danger is rather this, that the explosions may occur too soon without sufficient preparation and lead to isolated defeats. It is in general impossible, however, to speak of the European and the world revolution without taking into account partial defeats. [16]
The threat which hung over Hitler was that of the proletarian revolution in every part of Europe. He forecast “attempts at resistance and protest” by the masses, “at first muffled and then more and more open and bold”, against which the armies of occupation would have to act as pacifiers and oppressors. [17]
Addressing the Dewey Commission, Trotsky had distinguished the attitude to adopt in an imperialist country at war with the Soviet Union from that towards an imperialist country allied to it. In the former case, the immediate aim was to disorganise the whole machine, and in the military machine in the first place. In the latter case, the immediate aim was political opposition to the bourgeoisie and preparation for proletarian revolution. [18] It was clear, likewise, when the Wehrmacht attacked the Soviet Union, that throughout all occupied Europe the necessity to disorganise and to strike at the German military machine would be added to that of armed resistance, and this implied armed struggle.
However, to understand at least some of the aspects of the criticism which we have called ‘orthodox’, we may recall that Vereeken and some of his political friends had accused Trotsky of denying his principles by abandoning ‘defeatism’ in a country allied to the Soviet Union, in the event of war, on the pretext of the defence of the Soviet Union. We find a little of that manner of thinking in the criticism made by the Spaniard Grandizo Munis of the policy followed by James P. Cannon and the SWP in their defence at the time of the Minneapolis Trial. The political history of the Fourth International during the Second World War certainly demonstrates the strength of the current, which, under the flag of ‘orthodoxy’, often confined itself to pacifist positions, considering armed struggle to be participation in the war and in the union sacrée, and an acceptance of the war, purely because it was armed struggle. This current was simultaneously sectarian and conservative.
Of course, the belief that the policy which Trotsky advocated betrayed the influence of his ‘Soviet patriotism’ is completely out of the question. He explained the basis for his defence of the Soviet Union often enough to preclude anybody taking this belief seriously. Nor is there in his analyses or slogans the slightest concession to social-patriotism or to national defence in an imperialist country. Simply, as he forcefully declared: “ny confusion with the pacifists is a hundred times more dangerous than temporary confusion with the bourgeois militarists.” [19]
Guérin considers that the Manifesto of the International Conference of May 1940 is “the central piece” in his compilation, “both by length and by content”, and that it “expresses with so much force and conviction the fundamentals of proletarian internationalism”. Trotsky’s conclusion, which follows the call for workers to “become skilled specialists of the military art”, leaves no doubt on the matter:
At the same time, we do not forget for a moment that this war is not our war... The Fourth International builds its policy not on the military fortunes of the capitalist states but on the transformation of the imperialist war into a war of the workers against the capitalists, on the overthrow of the ruling classes of all countries, on the world Socialist revolution. [20]
The question for Trotsky, therefore, was indeed that of the revolution, of the form which the revolutionary movement was to adopt, as it was developed by the war and the crisis of the capitalist world, which the war both expresses and exacerbates, and which creates the conditions for the working class to struggle for power. This struggle during the war and within the framework of the militarisation of society could not be imagined if it did not have a practical link with political struggle in a form which was not, in the main, armed class struggle or class war. Only incorrigible dreamers or sectarians could imagine anything else. The new arena, in which it would be necessary to smash the militarists, demanded that revolutionaries and the working class themselves be militarised.
There are certain observations which must be made by anybody wishing to test the validity during the war of the perspective which Trotsky sketched out in 1940. In the first place, the various Communist parties have often succeeded in giving the illusion that they held the monopoly over the armed struggle, with which they identify with their politics after the events. This is due to them propounding the ‘defence’ of the Soviet Union, which from June 1941 transformed them into ‘Resistance activists’. However, on the basis of a certain development of the armed struggle, what this ‘defence’ of the Soviet Union actually meant, as it was conceived in Moscow, no longer consisted of sabotage or partisan operations against the German military machine. It became a direct or indirect political struggle and, where necessary, a police-style repression aimed at the mass movement itself, whenever, as it nearly always happened, the latter threatened to disrupt the agreements between the Soviet Union and its allies, to call into question the arrangement of spheres of influence, or, still more seriously, to unleash a revolution, which Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill desired as little as Hitler, and who were, in any case, determined to crush any uprisings if Hitler failed previously to do so.
In fact, the whole of Europe underwent German occupation, and suffered in varying degrees not merely the national oppression which every country undergoes when it is occupied by a foreign army, but also the systematic looting which plunged several of these countries into famine, and all into poverty. In this way the conditions for a revolutionary upsurge were created. This revealed itself first and with the greatest force in the weakest links of the imperialist chain in Europe. In the face of this danger, the safety valves provided by the Stalinist apparatus no longer had the same effectiveness in relation to the former relations between the parties and the masses, and even to historical circumstances of an accidental kind. Nonetheless, the movement did advance through its contradictions.
We shall attempt here to ascertain which general verifications of Trotsky’s perspectives can be found in the cases in which a revolution occurred, and which, with its own momentum and as far as it could by its own efforts, broke out of the hold of the official Communist movement, but which lacked an alternative leadership to that which handed them over to Allied repression once German imperialism fell. From this viewpoint, the Greek example appears to be the most instructive.
2. The Greek Resistance
We shall attempt to test Trotsky’s conceptions about the Second World War by studying two aspects of it: firstly, the revolt of the soldiers and sailors of the Greek armed forces in the Middle East, and secondly, the armed resistance in Greece, which was crushed by the British army in December 1944 on the personal orders of Winston Churchill, who denounced the armed resistance as “triumphant Trotskyism”.
One of the peculiar features of Greece, which we find also in its neighbouring countries, Italy and Yugoslavia, is that it had been subjected to a bloody military/Fascist regime, in this instance the 4 August regime of General Metaxas and King George II. It had very severely repressed the workers’ movement, imprisoning or interning in dungeons on the islands the leaders and cadres of the workers’ movement.
This drove the Greek Communist Party (KKE) into precarious clandestinity, which made its communications with Moscow intermittent and fragile. Like their comrades in neighbouring Yugoslavia, what the Greek Communists failed to understand about their international movement was that, after the death of Metaxas, his successors and executioners would become the ‘democratic allies’, and the restoration of the king would become a positive factor in the liberation of humanity!
Immediately after the German attack, the KKE issued the slogan of a constituent assembly. This automatically opened up the ‘royal question’. The king was in exile, under the protection of Churchill. This demand placed an obstacle between the internal resistance and the exiled monarch, and was an obstacle to the adoption of the policies which the Communist International was to dictate to the KKE. From 1942 communications became difficult not only between Moscow and the KKE, but also between the party leadership and the leaders of the partisan fighters. The KKE had attempted to start to control and centralise the activities of the partisans, who were growing stronger, arms in hand, in the mountains and in the workers’ quarters in the cities. The fighters were led by the andartes, the kapetanios, who had gained popularity by acceding to the demands of the poor peasants.
The Greek resistance, like that of the proletariat, the petit-bourgeoisie and the peasantry, did not emerge from any organisational decision. Likewise, it was outside any organisational framework that on the night of 30-31 May 1941 two students scaled the Acropolis and tore down the swastika from it. André Kedros describes this as “a madly daring and splendidly gratuitous act”, for him it became “the symbol of the Greek refusal to submit”. [21] Around that time, army officers often organised or provoked the disbandment of the defeated Greek army. The first guerrilla bands appeared in the countryside, armed with rifles and ammunition which they collected almost without resistance on the battlefields and alongside the roads where the army had been defeated.
There was a tradition of agrarian struggle in Greece. The ‘bandit’ had long been regarded as the liberator and defender, beloved by the poor. Kedros relates how the villagers “bred armed bands as an antidote to poverty and oppression” that was caused or exacerbated by the occupation. We know that tiny groups were formed more or less everywhere. They sported a variety of names, ranging from “mixed companies” to “assault groups”. They were formed spontaneously and developed their own leaderships. Some of their leaders were young men of militant temper, others had won their spurs by escaping from Metaxas’ concentration camps during the retreat of the army.
However, at first the KKE did not apply itself to the organisation, centralisation and development of these groups. It remained obedient to the orders of Moscow. It considered its first task to be the formation of a ‘national front’ against the occupation, which meant a bloc for a certain period with other Greek political formations. It did not, however, succeed in doing so, mainly because, despite its efforts, it could not formulate a consistent policy towards the restoration of the monarchy. This was a very sensitive point with its own supporters. It was also a very sensitive point with the forces linked to the bourgeoisie and the landlords. They did not wish to break from the monarchy and their British ‘protectors’ – nor could they.
The EAM (National Liberation Front) was founded in September 1941, but it was no more than one organisation which bore this name. It was not the hoped-for national front. Alongside the KKE there were only the very small Socialist formations, two equally small ‘democratic’ organisations, and the trade unions. However, the EAM only accepted a ‘national’ basis for struggle. It refused to consider social liberation, and addressed the ‘nation’ regardless of classes. It concentrated on attempting to attract support from the upper strata of society, and kept silent on the demands of the workers.
This desire to maintain a ‘united nation’ against the invader – when it was not united – and to ignore in silence the class sources of the popular opposition to the occupiers and to the members of the Greek bourgeoisie who collaborated with them, did not, however, succeed in preventing the workers and the poorest strata of the people from laying hold of the framework of organisation which the KKE offered. They instinctively used it to fight for their demands. The influx of fighters gave a working class character to the EAM, which was doing so much to reject it.
The workers demonstrated in their thousands on 18 October 1941, the first anniversary of the Italian invasion. Then in December 1941 the students took up the fight. On 26 January and 17 March 1942 the wounded war veterans, a particularly downtrodden section of the poor, took to the streets, supported by militants of the clandestine EAM clad in hospital nurses’ uniforms. The organisation spread and was elaborated. On 15 March 1942 there were strikes in support of economic demands in several cities, including Athens. Other strikes followed, including, for example, those by 40,000 civil servants, in whose leadership were Trotskyist militants. Then there was the fertiliser workers’ strike in the Piraeus in August 1942. Meanwhile, the peasants of the Peloponnese had successfully mounted a series of demonstrations. The KKE decided to send a handful of its militants to organise the partisans, the andartes, within the framework of the People’s National Liberation Army (ELAS), the armed wing of the EAM.
A report by the German Abwehr in November 1942 mentioned that whole districts of Greece were in the hands of the guerrillas, who executed traitors, distributed the corn which they collected by forced levies, and who called upon the villagers freely to elect their representative leaders and to discuss all their problems in a democratic manner. The struggle of the andartes became a factor in the rural class war, by the force of events and against the desire of their political leaders, even when the partisan group led by the celebrated Aris Velouchiotis took part in spectacular acts of sabotage of communications and transport which disorganised the German military machine.
We cannot detail here the history of the mass movement in Greece. On 22 December 1942 there were 40 000 people on strike. The demonstrations and strikes which followed the announcement of compulsory labour service in Germany, and which developed from 24 February to 5 March 1943, resulted in the only occasion when the occupying power backed down on this issue. By 1943 the armed struggle was no longer the work of small groups but that of real military units. When they arrived in a region with the intention of extending the liberated zones, there would be an immediate mass uprising of the armed people. Kedros declared that “the entire population was involved in the armed resistance”. The mass movements in the cities were irrepressible. There was a general strike in Athens on 25 June 1943 against the execution of hostages by the occupying power. The tram drivers’ strike, which began on 12 June, had led to 50 tramway workers being sentenced to death. They were saved by the general strike. By 1944 not only were wide rural areas liberated, but the German troops lived under siege in the cities, which they could only leave in guarded convoys. The ‘Red Belt’, the workers’ quarters around Athens, were nothing less than fortresses of the armed people.
During all this the KKE leaders, who controlled the EAM and ELAS, continued to insist that they were waging a purely national struggle, and denied that it had any class character. This was by no means the opinion of the Greek Government in Exile, under the protection of Winston Churchill. In 1942 elements in the officer corps – that “ultimate rampart of the state”, as Churchill said at the time of Franco – grouped in Grivas’ Khi organisation, the Pan organisation, the military hierarchy, the Zervasites and Dentirisites, attached to Metaxas’ secret services, organised a counter-attack.
They tried to organise –national guerrillas’ with the intention of fighting the –Communist guerrillas’ rather than the occupying invaders. Here we had exactly the Greek equivalent of Mihailovic in Yugoslavia, the Serbian colonel who led the Chetniks, who was a minister in the king’s government in exile, and who fought arms in hand against Tito’s partisans. There was no shortage of money or equipment. They wanted to create new formations, but they also hoped to undermine the ELAS militants, who were deprived of equipment now that their operations seemed certain to succeed. One of the leaders of the British Special Operations Executive, Eddie Myers, quoted a document on this subject in his memoirs. It corroborates Trotsky’s analysis, and demonstrates how lucid was Churchill, that champion of the existing order, the strategist of the opposite side of the class war. Myers’ superiors informed him in April 1943 that “the Cairo authorities consider that after the liberation of Greece, civil war is almost inevitable”. [22]
The mass movement swelled the ranks of the EAM and ELAS, which grew from strength to strength, sweeping these diversions aside, and never ceasing to assert its mastery. Colonel Saraphis, the ‘democratic’ officer chosen to be the Mihailovic of Greece, decided to join the ELAS because he recognised how efficient and representative it was! The Italian capitulation placed more weapons in the hands of the andartes and their civilian allies than all that the Allies provided by parachute drops.
The crucial year was 1943. Ioannis Rallis, a politician whom even the Germans knew was in contact with the British secret service, became Prime Minister of occupied Greece. [23] The ruling classes actively and consciously prepared to transform the national war into a civil war. In Athens there were Security Battalions, a militia with a sinister reputation. In Cairo there was the Mountain Brigade. Both were intended to crush the popular movement. The KKE announced that more than ever it sought collaboration with the ‘national guerrillas’ and desired ‘toleration’, which meant renouncing a class approach, whilst at the same time it prepared to launch attacks upon the left. In March 1943 Aris Velouchiotis was summoned to Athens from his mountain base, despite the dangers posed by such a journey, to receive a severe reprimand. That May, when the Communist International was dissolved, the KKE adopted an orientation from which it would not thereafter deviate:
The KKE supports by all possible means the struggle for national liberation, and will do all in its power to help gather all the patriotic forces into one unbreakable national front, which will unite the whole people to shake off the foreign yoke and to win national liberation at the side of our great Allies. [24]
At the same time it developed its own political police, the OPLA, recruited from reliable killers, and used them more against ‘Trotskyists’ and leftists in its own ranks, than against real collaborators.
The policies of all these tendencies underwent their first test when the Greek army in Egypt mutinied. The history of this episode is still fairly obscure, and seems to this writer to be a fruitful contribution to the discussion about the Proletarian Military Policy. The affair occurred in what, by analogy with France, could be called ‘Free Greece’; this consisted, after the defeat of the Greek forces in April 1941, of the remnants of the Greek army and fleet, with senior civil servants and ministers of King George II’s government in exile.
These worthies, especially the military chiefs, were evidently important figures in the Fascist dictatorship of Metaxas. Many people believed that this was the reason for their ‘treachery’ in the face of the Nazi invasion. Nonetheless, as Dominic Eudes says: “Alongside the royal clique of officers and politicians, however, the embryo of a new Greek army was formed in Egypt.” [25] This was composed of people who had escaped by sea from military units, volunteers who had endured tremendous hardships travelling individually to Egypt, and merchant and naval seamen. They were obviously people who wanted to “fight against Fascism for freedom and democracy”, as the new ‘liberal’ head of the government put it. A collision was inevitable between the bulk of the 20,000 men who had arrived in Egypt to fight Fascism, and the monarchist camarilla which, like Churchill, was concerned above all to “save Greece from Communism”.
In October 1941 a secret organisation, the Military Organisation for Liberation (ASO), was formed within the Greek army in the Middle East. Its aims were simple, even over-simple. They were to send Greek units to the front, to fight in Greece alongside the Resistance, and to oppose the infiltration into the army in Egypt of those sympathetic to Metaxas, who wanted to restore their regime in Greece at the end of the war. The Metaxist cadres demanded that cadres sympathetic to the ASO be removed by large-scale discharges from the army. The officers due to be dismissed from the Second Brigade were arrested and replaced. The mutineers stood firm in the face of threats. The First Brigade supported them. The government submitted and accepted that the Metaxist officers should be isolated, on the one hand to prevent events from running out of control, and on the other hand to prepare a fresh attack. Over the next few months military directives caused the units to be dispersed, the rebels were punished by disciplinary training, and finally the subversive elements were weeded out and the officers who had been isolated were brought back into key positions.
The second mutiny was more serious and significant. The demands of the officers under the influence of the ASO were evidently more political than before. Under the pressure of the men, the Committee for Armed Coordination presented a petition, signed by the majority of the Greek soldiers, as soon as the real provisional government of the Greek resistance, the PEEA, was formed in Greece. It demanded that a real government of ‘national unity’ be formed on the basis of the proposals of the PEEA. The initiative came neither from the EAM and ELAS nor from Greece, but quite simply from the ideas which the soldiers formed of the situation in their country and the conditions in which they could really ‘fight Fascism’.
On the same day, 31 March 1944, the delegates of the soldiers and the mixed committee demanded to be received with their petition at the Soviet Embassy. The ambassador closed the doors on them. They found no echo or promise of support except from the left wing of the British Labour Party. In Egypt, however, they enjoyed the sympathy of the Egyptian population, who were always close to the Greek workers. There was a series of meetings and demonstrations in Alexandria and Cairo. On 4 April the Egyptian police intervened on the side of the Greek Government in Exile and the British, and arrested some 50 militant workers and trade union leaders, in particular the leaders of the Greek dockers. The British High Command, for its part, disarmed two regiments and sent 280 ‘ringleaders’ to concentration camps. Then on 5 April it disarmed the unit attached to the High Command of the Greek army and interned the mutineers. By now the mutineers had their backs to the wall. The First Brigade arrested its Metaxist officers, reorganised its command, and refused to hand over its arms as a prelude to internment. The movement spread to the navy, to the destroyer Pindos, the cruiser Averoff, the Ajax and several more. The crews elected a mixed committee of men and officers to take conunand. The British Ambassador to the Greek Government in Cairo, Reginald Leeper, telegraphed to Churchill: “What is happening here among the Greeks is nothing less than a revolution.” [26]
Churchill directly and personally took control of the repression. The arrival of King George II was a symbol as well as a provocation. The support of the Egyptian youth for the mutineers was a promise. On 13 April Admiral Cunningham announced that he had decided to put down the rebellion by force, and if necessary to sink the Greek ships in the very roadstead of Alexandria. The mutinous land formations were surrounded, deprived of water and starved out. On 22 April a successful raid was made on the Ajax by the leading Metaxist, Admiral Voulgaris. The other ships lay under British guns and surrendered. General Paget launched his tanks against the First Brigade, and it also surrendered. Within a few days, some 20,000 Greek volunteers on the Army of the Middle East found themselves in concentration camps in Libya and Eritrea. [27]
The Greek army in the Middle East no longer existed, and its place was now free for the formation of specially prepared shock troops, technically equipped and politically trained for the civil war following the ‘liberation’.
We must note that British censorship suppressed reports of this episode in the press. It was not a minor episode, in fact it was very significant, which no doubt explains the violent response of the British authorities. It exposed the myth about ‘national defence’ and ‘national unity’. The 20,000 volunteers wanted ‘defence’ and ‘unity’, but their leaders did not, and they crushed them. The incident exposed the lie about the “war against Fascism and for freedom and democracy”. The Greeks considered Metaxas to be a detested Fascist dictator. Churchill’s policy aimed at restoring the rule of the forces upon which Metaxas had been based.
Trotsky’s remarks in 1940 about the war became concrete. The Greek soldiers in the Middle East wanted to fight, arms in hand, against Fascism. They therefore demanded officers whom they could trust, allied themselves with.the labour movement, and formed their own soviet-style organisations. This was precisely along the lines which Trotsky had developed when he wrote that the defence of their ‘democracy’ could not be delivered over to the likes of a Marshal Pétain. The mass movement born out of the war expressed itself along these lines, and did so, as Trotsky had forecast, in the army, that central section of militarised society, no less important than in the factories.
The talks in Moscow and the bargaining which followed them led to the agreement with Stalin that Churchill would have a free hand in Greece. The KKE and through it the EAM were ultimately to place the noose around the neck of the extraordinary mass movement in Greece itself, after contributing politically to the repression of the mutineers.
After the April 1944 crisis, the Government in Exile in Cairo was entrusted to George Papandreou, who helped to develop the anti-Communist movement. Under his pressure the leaders of the EAM and ELAS signed on 30 May 1944 the Lebanon Charter, which denounced ELAS ‘terrorism’, the indiscipline of the mutineers (many of whom served sentences for it), left open the question of the monarchy, and agreed to a single command of the Greek armed forces and to the re-establishment of order “alongside the Allied troops” at the Liberation. The EAM and ELAS were unhappy at this, and for several weeks bargained and demanded ministerial posts and a change of prime minister.
However, a Soviet mission, led by Colonel Popov, arrived and put an end to these ill-tempered grumblings. The KKE and the EAM unconditionally entered the government. When the German forces left Athens on 12 October 1944, the KKE called on the Greek people to “ensure public order”. It also ensured that Papandreou came to power. He arrived with the British forces, at a time when the ELAS exercised real power all across the country.
Churchill was to provoke the Resistance when he ordered that General Scobie, the commander of the Allied forces, to maintain the military formations of the collaborators as ‘security battalions’ and to forbid them to be purged, and to ensure that on 2 December the Papandreou government could disarm the ELAS forces. A demonstration against the disarmament of the ELAS in Athens on 3 December was fired upon by the police. This assault in Syntagmata Square upon the biggest demonstration in Greek history left dozens dead and hundreds wounded. Thirty-three days of armed fighting followed in Athens between the forces of order grouped around Scobie and those of the local Resistance.
At last Churchill carried through his plan to crush the Greek revolution. He announced that he was intervening to prevent a “hideous massacre”, and to stop what he called the victory of “triumphant Trotskyism” – with a grin of complicity in the direction of Stalin. [28] From 3 December onwards those ELAS units whose leaders had decided not to surrender their arms were paralysed by the orders not to fire on British forces, who, as Churchill put it, were there by the “goodwill” of Roosevelt and Stalin. The andartes in Macedonia, the shock troops and the forces in the mountains were ordered to stay put and let the fighters in Athens be exterminated. The heroism with which they fought could not prevail against the policies of leaders who had made up their minds to lead these fighters into the surrender that was demanded by Moscow.
The Varkiza agreement of 15 February 1945 provided for all Resistance forces to be disarmed, but the ELAS forces in Athens had not submitted to this. The forces in the countryside had not moved to support them. This time Aris Velouchiotis understood the magnitude of the KKE’s betrayal. He was attacked in the KKE’s journal Rizospastis on 12 June. On 16 June he was assassinated, and his head was publicly exhibited in the villages on 18 June. How many other Resistance fighters fell at tha time under the fire of the British and of the counter-revolutionary formations which the Germans had created in Athens and the British in Cairo? Nonetheless, several more years of Stalinist treachery were required to exhaust the fighting potential of the Greek revolution.
3. The Trotskyists in the War
We cannot undertake here a wide-ranging study of the policies of the Trotskyists during the war, or compare them with the policies which Trotsky outlined on the eve of his death and of which his comrades were generally unaware at the time. This will be the objective of larger works. My ignorance of the Greek language prevents me from making use of the solid researches into the activities of the Trotskyists during the war which exist in Greek. Let us hope that this gap will be closed.
But in the meantime, let us be careful not to make over-hasty judgements. From 4 August 1936 onwards the Trotskyists were subjected to ferocious repression. The great majority of Trotskyist militants were arrested and thrown into prisons from which many did not emerge. Several leading cadres, including Pantelis Pouliopoulos, the former General Secretary of the KKE, were killed during the occupation. The conditions of illegality appear to have been particularly difficult for them because they were unable to participate even in the unification of the three organisations on which the leaders had agreed in 1938.
At best, any known Trotskyist militants who actually managed to join ELAS units were closely observed and carefully isolated. The Stalinists removed in one way or another any Trotskyists who managed to win responsible positions in the ELAS or in the People’s Army. Furthermore, between October and December 1944, the OPLA, which was really a Greek GPU, mounted a campaign of extermination against the Trotskyists. Throughout the country OPLA agents abducted, tortured and murdered such militants as Stavros Veroukhis, the Secretary of the Association of the War Wounded, and Thanassis Ikonomou, former Secretary of the Communist Youth at Ghazi. Workers, dockers, metal workers and teachers all suffered alike. “We killed more than 800 Trotskyists” boasted Barzotas, a member of the KKE Political Bureau, in 1947.
We do not have the means here to discover the truth about the policies of the Greek Trotskyists and how they could have escaped the dreadful fate that awaited them. Rene Dazy quotes from a document of 1943 in a Greek Trotskyist publication: “The Anglo-Americans will come to restore state power to the bourgeoisie. The exploited will only have changed one yoke for another.” [29] If that really was the case, then it is clear that the Greek Trotskyists sentenced themselves to death by confining themselves to negative perspectives and not taking their place in the mass movement.
Michel Raptis, at that time European Secretary of the Fourth International, and writing under the pseudonym of M. Spiro, recalled just after the events of December 1944 what Trotsky had written about the era of armed struggle. He paid tribute to the activity of the Greek masses when “a wind of revolution blew through the workers’ districts and suburbs of Athens”, declaring that their activity would “stand among the finest examples of the proletarian movement”. But he said nothing about what the Greek Trotskyists were doing. He also stated that “despite the official ideology of its Popular Frontist democratic and petit-bourgeois leadership”, the EAM “retained considerable class independence in action”. [30] There is nothing more, and often much less, to be found in the documents of the Fourth International.
André Kedros, the historian of the Greek Resistance, whose ideas about Stalinism are far from clear, stresses the international impact and effect of the ‘Athens coup’ as a “rebuke to all the resistance movements heavily influenced by the Communist parties”. Does this mean, as he declares, that the British repression in Greece “weighed heavily upon the decisions and tactics of Thorez, Togliatti and other such leaders”? [31] That view cannot be accepted. Their decisions and tactics were determined by the same factors that had determined the tactics of the KKE – and they had been determined in Moscow. But it is highly probable that the Greek defeat strengthened the Stalinist policy of capitulation and of restoring the capitalist order in Western Europe, and that it weighed heavily and negatively upon those who throughout Europe had identified the national struggle with the social struggle, and had believed that they had found the road to revolution when they joined the Resistance. We need to do what we cannot do here: to analyse concretely the developments in each of the countries of Europe.
However, an examination of the documents which Prager has assembled in Les congrès de la Quatrième Internationale provides what is essential for the study of the Fourth International during the war. He has omitted little but the initial positions of the former PCI and its sister-tendency led by Vereeken in Belgium. In the introduction to the second volume, he writes:
The war sharply corrected those who had doubted the timeliness of founding the Fourth International in a period of downturn and with weak forces. The Fourth International bravely confronted the violence and persecution of ‘democratic’ and Fascist regimes, plus the Stalinist thugs who attacked our organisations. Despite heavy losses to be mourned, and despite some inevitable individual collapses, it is remarkable that it not only maintained its forces, but notably strengthened and rejuvenated them in the USA, Britain and other countries. Even though it could not break through into the masses as it had hoped, because of the limits of revolutionary situations and of the rise of Stalinism, nonetheless it saw new sections come into existence. [32]
This was undoubtedly a remarkable result, but it was in stark contrast with what Trotsky had written at the beginning of the war, for example about the USA:
The American working class is still without a mass labour party even today. But the objective situation and the experience accumulated by the American workers can pose within a very brief period of time on the order of the day the question of the conquest of power. This perspective must be made the basis of our agitation. It is not merely a question of a position on capitalist militarism and of renouncing the defence of the bourgeois state, but of directly preparing for the conquest of power and the defence of the proletarian fatherland. [33]
Furthermore:
Ahead lies a favourable perspective, providing all the justification for revolutionary activism. It is necessary to utilise the opportunities which are opening up and to build the revolutionary party. [34]
In the face of these absolutely clear statements, the historian cannot restrict himself to mentioning the “limits of revolutionary situations”, or “the rise of Stalinism”, or to suggesting that we have “here elements which Trotsky could not foresee”. We must, at least, recognise the contradiction, even if we do not explain it, or even consider whether it was Trotsky or the Trotskyists who were wrong.
Moreover, Prager indicates that the Proletarian Military Policy, which the SWP (US) adopted at Trotsky’s suggestion, provoked widespread opposition within the Fourth International. He notes that the Belgian section excised several paragraphs on this question from the clandestine version of the May 1940 Manifesto. He also refers to the ‘reservations’ of the French section and of the European Secretariat. [35]
In 1940 the French Trotskyists were divided into two tendencies over perspectives which were ultimately as far away from each other as they both were from that of Trotsky. Beginning from the conception that the defeat of French imperialism and the occupation of French territory were leading, not only to national oppression, but to the rebirth of a genuine ‘national question’ in which all classes were interested, as in a colonial country, the majority of the POI, organised around the committees which published La Verité, outlined a strategy according to which the bourgeoisie of an occupied country becomes the natural ally of the workers’ movement, and the latter devotes itself completely to “national resistance”. Conversely, the La Seule Voie (The Only Road) group, which had emerged from the PCI, and subsequently became the CCI, denied that an imperialist nation could ever become an oppressed nation following a military defeat, and considered that national demands were “the importation of bourgeois ideology into the proletariat in order to demoralise it”.
These two positions, remote from each other, were both in a way the result of isolation. Under the pressure of the European Secretariat, they were gradually abandoned. The European Secretariat, led first by Marcel Hic and, after his arrest, by Raptis, was formed in the village of St Hubert in the Belgian Ardennes. This was a remarkable political and organisational feat in itself, and it also signified a return to an organisation which planned and functioned on an international scale. In 1944 the two viewpoints were rapidly converging, whilst the CCI continued to assert that the elementary duty of revolutionaries at the time was ferociously to denounce the union sacrée, to explain to the working class that it had to prepare for another ‘June 1936’ on a world scale, and at the same to carry out intense agitation for fraternisation with the German workers. Prager adequately summarises the consensus on the question of armed struggle:
Relations with the official Resistance could take on no forms other than independence, without agreeing to the ‘Front of Frenchmen’. But this structure should not be confused with the mass movements, nor include the latter in the same condemnation. Nor did these relations exclude individual participation in these movements in order to influence some of its members ... This work no doubt did not develop sufficiently, due to lack of forces and because the Trotskyists gave priority to the struggle in the factories. It certainly did not noticeably change the balance of forces or the course of events. The lack of success of the Trotskyists was not essentially the result of tactical or other faults, but to their situation, swimming against the stream, and to the grip of Stalinism on the masses. [36]
All the evidence shows that Trotsky’s appeal for the line of armed struggle and his proposal that revolutionary Socialists should become ‘militarists’ in order to play their rôle in a militarised world, are missing in this conception, or rather reduced to a secondary, ‘partisan’ level, entirely subordinated to ‘the struggle in the factories’. The discovery that ‘the armed struggle’ exerted an attractive force upon the masses must have presented many problems in the absence of the dimension which Trotsky contributed on ‘militarisation’.
Thus the resolution of the Provisional European Secretariat in 1943 on the partisan movement – which was adopted in full by the 1944 European Conference – recognised the “partly spontaneous character” of the partisan movement, and declared that Bolshevik-Leninists were now “obliged to take this form of struggle into account”. The resolution stated that “the guerrilla movements” were “military organisations in the tow of Anglo-Saxon imperialism”, but it noted that “the participation of the masses in the Balkans and in the West since the large-scale deportations of workers to Germany, though they had not changed the character of these movements”, obliged revolutionaries to advance a programme for them, in order to “make them understand that they must play the part of armed detachments in the service of the proletarian revolution”. [37] The resolution undoubtedly had left it rather late.
One could suggest that there was a wide gap between the positions of the Europeans, as Prager had summarised them, and those of the Americans, who systematically applied in their 1940s meetings and statements the Military Policy as advocated by Trotsky. Indeed, a completely exceptional kinship revealed itself on this level as well as on that of general principles. James P. Cannon came under attack from Munis for the ‘opportunist’ manner in which he presented the attitude of the SWP towards the war at the trial of its Minneapolis leaders which commenced on 27 October 1941. Cannon replied in May 1942:
The masses today, thanks to all kinds of compulsions and deceptions, and the perfidious role of the labour bureaucracy and the renegade Socialists and Stalinists, are accepting and supporting the war, that is, they are acting with the bourgeoisie and not with us. The problem for our party is, first, to understand this primary fact; second, to take up a position of ‘political opposition’; and then, on that basis, to seek an approach to the honestly patriotic workers and try to win them away from the bourgeoisie and over to our side by means of propaganda. That is the only ‘action’ that is open to us, as a small minority, at the present time. [38]
If we leave aside two documents which were published at that time by Jean Van Heijenoort under the pseudonym of Marc Loris [39], who was then Secretary of the Fourth International, we could conclude that apart from him, who had been in contact with Trotsky’s undogmatic thinking for years, nobody in or on the fringe of the Fourth International had understood the question of militarisation. Jean Rous, with his National Revolutionary Movement [40], and Marcel Hic with his theses on the national question in the Committees for the Fourth International [41], each in his own way missed the mark.
Meanwhile, the other tendencies locked themselves in a paralysing orthodoxy, and were running the risks arising from the ‘pacifist’ tendencies against which Trotsky had warned so vigorously. Apart from the veteran of the Russian Left Opposition, Tarov (A.A. Davtian), who under the false identity of Manouchian individually joined the FTP/MOI and was executed with other members of the group that was named after him, we meet only one contrary example.
This is Chen Duxiu, whose foresight led him, soon after he emerged from jail, to intervene in the political department of a division of the army, the head of which understood how military effectiveness depends upon political clarity. [42] This enterprise was nipped in the bud. The Guomindang police understood the danger better than Chen’s own comrades did.
In the same order of ideas, the hesitancy with which Trotskyists looked at armed resistance suggests that it would be interesting to study how the revolution was conceived within the Fourth International during the war. It seems sometimes to have been conceived as something apocalyptic, which would occur independently of what was going on, and not as a result of being worked for. Had their almost exclusively ‘propagandist’ education, involving the use of the weapons of denunciation and ‘explanation’ – which clearly were the essential activities of an organisation the leaders of which felt themselves to be “swimming against the stream” – prepared the cadres for such a belief?
Did not the extraordinary weakness of the SWP’s resolution of November 1943 result in part from this same ‘propagandist’ isolation? [43] How could people – who declared that the Kremlin was unable to play a counter-revolutionary rôle on a large scale, that American imperialism would play in Europe in the immediate future the same plundering rôle as German imperialism, that the only alternatives in Europe were a workers’ government or a brutal dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, without any prospect of a parliamentary regime, and which rejected democratic demands with the declaration that the European working class had no ‘democratic illusions’ – place themselves in the stream of development after the objective turn in the situation?
We can go even further and say that if the Trotskyists, after pushing that line for years, had found themselves placed, if not at the head of such a revolutionary movement, but actually within it, they would have been obliged to revise the ABC of teachings of Marxism and Bolshevism. They would have had to admit the correctness of a point of view which sectarians always defend, according to which the role of revolutionaries consists in confining themselves to propaganda in periods of reaction, whilst they wait for the swing of the pendulum to bring the masses back to them.
What lay beneath this discussion – or rather this absence of discussion – on the most vital issues is not merely the question of the role of Stalinism, but that of the orientation towards the construction of the revolutionary party, as Trotsky had defended it in 1940. Our feeling, after treading the documents of the war period, is that there were often references that more resembled incantations than reflections on what had been gained and on working out a method by which to construct parties. It seems to me – and there is no ill-will here, because I was one of them – that during this period the Trotskyists at least learned how not to build a revolutionary party.
Serge Lambert has shown in a recent work, Revolutionary Tradition and a ‘New Party’ in Italy 1942-45, that, contrary to a certain legend, the Italian revolution was not decisively defeated at the moment when the short-lived dual power was set up in 1945 between the Allied administration and the Committees of the Republican Partisans, but from 1943 when the apparatus of Togliatti’s ‘new party’, which the men from Moscow established, broke the resistance of the scattered Communist oppositional groups.
When every chance of establishing a revolutionary party had been destroyed, the game was played out in which the leaders of the Italian Communist Party could without risk give the signal for what they called “the insurrection against the revolution”. [44] Moreover, Lambert shows very well that the decisive political weakness of many of these groups – some of which here and there developed considerably more powerful armed forces than those of the PCI – lay in the illusion which they held that the Soviet Union possessed some kind of “objectively revolutionary” character. They thought that the revolution was spreading along with every advance of the Red Army. We meet this conception not only in the well-known article in La Verité in February 1944, but throughout the world press of the Trotskyist movement. [45]
The question which we have tried to raise here is by no means academic. During the Second World War were the Trotskyist organisations, leaders and members alike, victims of an objective situation that was beyond them? Could they have done no more than what they did, that is to survive by drawing in more members and saving the honour of the internationalists, by maintaining against wind and tide the militant work of fraternising with German workers in uniform?
If that is the case, it would be necessary to recognise that Trotsky, with his analysis of the militarisation which had to be carried out, and his perspective that the revolutionary party could be constructed and the struggle for power begun in a short time, was completely isolated in 1940, not only from what was really happening politically in the world, but also from the political reality of his own organisation. He was, therefore, entertaining illusions and perceiving possibilities of breakthroughs when the Fourth International was in fact doomed to impotence, forced for a long time to swim against the current, and confronted with “the grip of Stalinism on the masses”.
But we may suppose, on the contrary, that the Trotskyist organisations, their members and their leaders, were involved, and that they have at least some responsibility for their own setbacks. In that case, we may think, if we start from the premises of Trotsky’s analysis of 1940, that the Second World War did see the development of a mass movement based upon a national and social resistance, which the Stalinists did their utmost to divert, and which, in the case of Greece, they led to its destruction – a resistance which the Trotskyists could neither support nor utilise, because they did not know how to locate themselves in it and even, perhaps, because they could not understand the concrete character of the moment in history in which they were living.
We believe that this question deserves to be asked.
Pierre Broué
Notes
1. These documents are in L. Trotsky, Sur la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, originally published by La Taupe in Belgium, and republished by Seuil in Paris in 1974. The articles and interviews by Trotsky were sometimes mutilated by the removal of passages which do not bear directly upon the Second World War, but were generally concerned with the Spanish Civil War and the Fourth International.
2. The preface and postscript are printed below. pp.12-14, 18-19 – Editors.
Some of these documents were published in 1945 in the European Secretariat’s Internal Bulletin (No.5). Some members reacted strongly against Trotsky. One of them, ‘Am’, French or Belgian, sent to the International Secretariat an article entitled On the Subject of the Proletarian Military Policy: Did the Old Man Kill Trotskyism?. This article characterised Trotsky’s position as “pure and simple chauvinism”, speaking of the “importance of his errors”, and attributing to him “willingness to defend the fatherland without first overthrowing the bourgeoisie, while at the same time using in agitation the danger from its imperialist opponent”.
He went as far as to ask: “We must openly and frankly pose the question whether we can continue to bear the name of ‘Trotskyists’, when the leader of the Fourth International has dragged it into the mire of social-chauvinism.” This article is in the Archive of the International Secretariat, in the possession of the Institut Léon Trotsky.
3. L.D. Trotsky, Bonapartism, Fascism and War, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, New York 1977, pp.410ff. This version has been slightly edited. Another version, with editorial interpolations, appears in L.D. Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, New York 1971, pp.444ff. It first appeared in the October 1940 issue of Fourth International in the incomplete state in which Trotsky left it on his death – Editors.
4. L.D. Trotsky, Bonapartism, Fascism and War, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, op. cit., p.411.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid. The translator of Trotsky’s article added: “Several citations from Lenin during that period fit Trotsky’s description”, and gives two: “It is possible, however, that five, 10 or even more years will elapse before the Socialist revolution begins.” (V.I. Lenin, The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination, Collected Works, Volume 22, Moscow 1977, p.153), and: “We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution.” (V.I. Lenin, Lecture on the 1905 Revolution, Collected Works, Volume 23, Moscow 1974, p.253).
7. Trotsky, op. cit., p.411.
8. Op. cit., p.412.
9. Op. cit., p.414.
10. These will be published in Volume 23 of the Oeuvres, and the articles and interviews, including Bonapartism, Fascism and War, will be found in Volume 26. [Cf. L.D. Trotsky, On the Future of Hitler’s Armies, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, op. cit., p.406, Fragments from the First Seven Months of the War, Fragments on the USSR, Preface to a Book on War and Peace, Writings of Leon Trotsky: Supplement 1934-40, New York 1979, pp.72ff. – Editors]
11. L.D. Trotsky, Discussions with Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, op. cit., p.253.
12. L.D. Trotsky, How to Really Defend Democracy, op. cit., pp.344-5.
13. L.D. Trotsky, Discussions with Trotsky, op. cit., p.257.
14. L.D. Trotsky, We Do Not Change Our Course, op. cit., p.297.
15. Op. cit., p298
16. ibid.
17. L.D. Trotsky, On the Future of Hitler’s Armies, op. cit., p.406.
18. The Case of Leon Trotsky, New York 1969, pp.289-90
19. L.D. Trotsky, Discussions with Trotsky, op. cit., p.256.
20. L.D. Trotsky, Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution, op. cit., p.222.
21. A. Kedros, La Resistance Grèque: 1940-44, p.174.
22. E. Myers, The Great Entanglement, p.189.
23. A. Kedros, op. cit., p.199, mentions a report by the German police when Ioannis Rallis came to power: “He passes for the confidential adviser of Pangalos, who is on the side of the English.” Kedros also refers to the semi-Fascist military hierarchy, General Papagos and Rallis: “All these men and formations were to be headed in a certain direction by a secret adviser of the king, who was also a prince of the church, the Metropolitan of Athens, Chrisanthios.” (p.179)
24. Svetozar Vukmanovic-Tempo, How and Why the People’s Liberation Struggle of Greece Met With Defeat, London 1985, cited in Kedros, op. cit., p.409.
25. D. Eudes, The Kapetanios, New Left Books, 1972, p.75.
26. W. Churchill, The Second World War, Volume 5, London 1952, p.479. Churchill’s account clearly shows how much he was worried about the mutiny, and how anxious he was to see it crushed.
27. The official sources of the Government in Exile placed this figure at 10,000.
28. Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons on 19 December 1944, defended his use of the term ‘Trotskyism’, saying:
I think that ‘Trotskyism’ is a better definition of Greek Communism and certain other sects than the usual term. It has the advantage of being equally hated in Russia.
This was followed by “prolonged laughter”. On 13 December Churchill had invited Communist MP William Gallacher not to get too excited over the subject of the situation in Greece, if he didn’t want to be accused of ‘Trotskyism’. Interestingly, Churchill noted that Archbishop Damaskinos, who was more or less imposed by the British authorities as regent, “greatly feared the Communist, or Trotskyite as he put it, combination in Greek affairs” (W. Churchill, The Second World War, Volume 6, London 1954, p.272).
Churchill noted that the British massacres in Athens were widely and strongly criticised in the US press and by the US State Department, and also in The Times and the Manchester Guardian in Britain, but added:
Stalin, however, adhered strictly and faithfully to our agreement of October, and during all the long weeks of fighting the Communists in the streets of Athens, not one word of reproach came from Pravda or Izvestia. (Ibid., p.255) [Editors’ note]
29. R. Dazy, Fusillez les chiens enragés, p.266.
30. M. Spiro, The Greek Revolution, Quatrième Internationale, no.14-15, January-February 1945. On the same subject, the special International Internal Bulletin (January 1945) does not even mention the existence of Trotskyist organisations in Greece. The organ of the US Socialist Workers Party, Fourth International (February 1945) contains a documented article, Civil War in Greece, and the paragraph headed Trotskyism in Greece confines itself to generalities:
ELAS is ‘Trotskyist’ in one sense only – in the revolutionary instincts of its indomitable fighters, in their great capacity for struggle and sacrifice. But its programme and leadership has no resemblance to Trotskyism.
Further on it declares: “The Trotskyists will team to connect themselves with the masses and their struggles.” It adds that under the reign of terror unleashed by the Stalinists, this would take some time. Quatrième Internationale (no.22-24, September-November 1945) contains a note headed Greece which calls for the exposure of the murder of revolutionary militants in Greece by the Stalinists, and is followed by a preliminary list of names. Fourth International (October 1945), 39. reported in the Inside the Fourth International column that:
Papers of the International Communist Party (Fourth International), the only revolutionary party in Greece, are illegal. Members of that party are persecuted, hounded and quite frequently killed by both the government and the Stalinists.
In fact there were serious divergences between the International Secretariat and the Greek Trotskyists. On 25 November 1946 Michel Raptis (Pablo) wrote under the name of ‘Pilar’ to the Greek section:
`It is not a matter of conforming to the letter of every political resolution of the International. But it is not a matter, either, of taking a diametrically opposite line on such important questions as your attitude to the movement of the EAM and ELAS and to the events of December 1944.
Quatrième Internationale (October-November 1946) reported on the Unification Congress of July 1946, which produced the KDKE, and published the Congress manifesto:
Despite itself, despite its nationalist pronouncements, despite its policy of conciliation and class collaboration, the Greek Communist Party grouped around itself the forces which history set in motion and which, in the last analysis, were the forces of the proletarian revolution.
Rodolphe Prager stated that the Greek Trotskyists held a “generally dismissive attitude to the national movement”, that they distanced themselves from it, and held a neutralist position “hostile equally to the two factions in struggle” during the civil war:
The principle mistake was an inability to discern the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist character which was powerfully germinating in this mass movement, and its revolutionary dynamic, behind the bourgeois and Stalinist leaderships. Ignorance of this reality prevented the Trotskyists from understanding that in December 1944 the conflict could not be reduced to a confrontation between British imperialism on the one side and the Soviet bureaucracy and its supporters on the other. (R. Prager, Les congres de la Quatrième Internationale, Volume 2, pp.348-9, cf. R. Prager, The Fourth International During the Second World War, Revolutionary History, Volume 1 no.3, Autumn 1988, p.33)
It is not an easy question to answer. We have found in the archives of the International Secretariat a letter from George Vitsoris in which he protests against the omission from the manifesto of the Unification Congress of the slogan “Withdraw the British troops”, and considers “unacceptable” the fact that the manifesto does not say a word about the murder of the Trotskyists by the Stalinists.
31. A. Kedros, op. cit., p.512.
32. R. Prager, op. cit., p.2. This introduction does not appear in the English translation.
33. L.D. Trotsky, Bonapartism, Fascism and War, op. cit., p.414.
34. Op. cit., p.413.
35. Prager, op. cit., pp.13-4.
36. Op. cit., p.12.
37. Op. cit., p.221-3.
38. J.P. Cannon, Socialism on Trial, New York 1970, p.167.
39. One article by Van Heijenoort appeared in the September and November 1942 issues of Fourth International, with an editorial note in the October issue describing it as “a discussion article”. In an article dated June 1941, entitled Where is Europe Going?, Loris stated that the working class would lead the struggle against the Hitlerite occupation. He then emphasised the dialectical link between ‘national’ and ‘social’ liberation, in fact proletarian revolution, whilst he criticised the illusions that could arise from the national liberation movement. This article appeared in the October 1942 issue of La Verité. Loris wrote:
It is not the task of Marxists to impose this or that form of struggle which they themselves may prefer. The task is really to deepen, widen and make more systematic all the manifestations of resistance, to bring to them the spirit of organisation, and to open a broad perspective before them.
The article seems to criticise the European ‘revisionists’ on the national question. The 1942 article seems rather to be a polemic against the position of the SWP. One of the documents that Loris wrote in 1944 stresses as “one of the teachings of Bolshevism” its contempt for simple propaganda that merely tries to shed light on the virtues of Socialism, its “capacity to sense the aspirations of the masses and to take advantage of their progressive aspects”, and in knowing “how to conduct activities which can win the masses away from their conservative parties and leaders”. Much of the original documentation in the discussion was devoted to the Three Theses of the IKD, and to their position on the national question. We have not dealt with this question here, which involves open revisionism that conceals other divergences. In any case, the essential documents are in the second volume of Prager’s collection.
40. Compare La Révolution Française, 1/1940, and the different comments of J. Rabaut in Tout est Possible, pp.343-4, and J.P. Joubert in Revolutionaires dans la SFIO, pp.224-6.
41. Prager, op. cit., pp.92-101, and M. Dreyfus, Les Trotskystes pendant la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, Le Mouvement Sociale, pp.20-2.
42. P Broué, Chen Duxiu and the Fourth International, 1938-42, Revolutionary History, Volume 2 no.4, Spring 1990, pp.16-21.
43.The text of this resolution of the SWP’s National Committee appeared in Quatrième Internationale, no.11-12-13, September-November 1944, under the title of Perspectives and Tasks of the European Revolution. It was accompanied by an introduction which emphasised “the remarkable agreement between the general line of this document and that of the resolution of the European Conference of February 1944”.
44. Serge Lambert, Tradition Revolutionaire et ‘Parti Nouveau’ Communiste en Italie, 1942-45, thesis in political science, Grenoble 1985.
45. The clandestine issue of La Verité (10 February 1944) carried a front-page headline, The Banners of the Red Army will Join with Our Red Banners. Felix Morrow in the SWP Internal Bulletin (Volume 8, no 8) quotes this article and mentions analogous positions adopted by the Bolshevik-Leninist Party in India, La Voix de Lenin in Belgium, El Militante in Chile, etc. Of course, the fact that they all reacted in the same way is not necessarily a sign that they agreed on principle. It may also express conservative responses or overriding pressures upon them.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
************
How Trotsky and the Trotskyists confronted the Second World War
This article links the subject matter of our previous issue on the history of the revolutionary movement in Greece to the general theme of this magazine, that of the attitude to be taken up by revolutionaries towards the Second World War. It first appeared under the title Trotsky et les Trotskystes face à la deuxieme guerre mondiale, in Cahiers Léon Trotsky, no.23, September 1985, pp.35-60. Yet again we must offer our thanks to Professor Broué and his conscientious translator John Archer for permission to publish this thought-provoking contribution. It drew a sharp criticism at the time from Pierre Vert, Trotskyists in World War Two, Spartacist, nos.38-39, Summer 1986, pp.46-8, to which Broué addressed a curt rejoinder, Broué Replies in Spartacist, no.40, Summer 1987, and then a more extensive reply, La deuxième guerre mondiale: question de method in Cahiers Léon Trotsky, no.39, September 1989, pp.5-21.
The debate was extended by the publication of the Documents on the Proletarian Military Policy, the second of the Prometheus Research Series, in February 1989. The implications of the documents were further commented upon in World War II and the Proletarian Military Policy in Workers Vanguard, 17 March 1989, and Workers Hammer, April 1989.
Three issues of the Cahiers Léon Trotsky have so far been devoted to this historical problem (nos.23, 39 and 43, September 1985, September 1989 and September 1990), and we have been able to publish two of our own, Revolutionary History, Volume I nos.3 and 4, Autumn and Winter 1988. In the first of these appears Jean-Paul Joubert’s essay on revolutionary defeatism (from the Cahiers, no.23) along with an essay written for us by Sam Levy, The Proletarian Military Policy Revisited, which now appears in the Cahiers, no.43. Those who are anxious to explore this theme in more detail are referred to the introductions to the different articles in these two previous issues of our journal, where numerous other references can be gleaned.
The dilemma of the European Trotskyists at the time is explored in Le Trotskysme et l’Europe pendant la deuxieme guerre mondiale by Gerd Rainer-Horn, a young man who does not always see fit to acknowledge the sources of his material, in Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no.9, pp.49-75, and by Al Richardson, Fourth International? What Fourth International? in Workers News, October-November 1990. Other documentation on the collapse of the leading organs of the movement at the start of the war occurs in Trotsky in 1939-1940: The IEC Does Not Exist, in Spartacist, nos.43-44, Summer 1989, pp.28-31. The politics of the French Trotskyists during the resistance struggle are now becoming more clearly known, both through their propaganda, more of which is now available in Documents sur la politique du Front Ouvrier (POI 1943) et sommaires des numeros du journal Front ouvrier (1944-48), which appeared in Les Cahiers du CERMTRI, no.48, March 1988, and by their courageous activity on the spot as remembered by Andre Calves, Sans bottes ni medailles: Un trotskyste breton dans la guerre, which can be obtained from La Breche at 2 rue Richard Lenoir 93100, Montreuil, France, at a cost of 60 francs plus postage.
Opinions regarding the American (or Proletarian) Military Policy among the Trotskyists were sharply divided at the time, and remain so today. Readers of the former issue of our journal will gather that the majority of Greek Trotskyists were opposed to it. Stinas expressed himself most bitterly on the politics of the American, British and French Trotskyists during the Second World War (Memoires, Paris, 1989, p.273), and an equally forthright condemnation by Karliaftis takes up the Minneapolis case in particular, in Cannon and the SWP: On the Track of the Social Betrayers in Front of the Second World War: Documents of the Workers Vanguard (Greece), in Internationalist, no.5. January 1983. His criticism is derived from that made at the time by the veteran Spanish revolutionary Grandizo Munis, in Defense Policy in the Minneapolis Trial in International Bulletin, Volume 2 no.4, and afterwards in El SWP y la guerro imperialista (1945) and Le Trotskysme et la Defaitisme Revolutionnaire (both of them still obtainable from Alarma, BP 329, 7564 Paris Cedex I 3). Similar criticisms were made at the time by the Indian Trotskyists (cf. Charles Wesley Ervin, Trotskyism in India, in Revolutionary History, Volume 1 no.4, pp.312). In Britain opinion was divided, the Revolutionary Socialist League itself being torn between outright rejection of the Military Policy by the Militant Centre Group of D.D. Harber and John Archer, together with the Left Fraction led by John Robinson and Tom Mercer, as against enthusiastic support from the Trotskyist Opposition of John Lawrence and Hilda Lane. The other group, the Workers International League, moved from a guarded response to a more whole-hearted agreement with the American SWP as the war went on (cf. S. Bornstein and A Richardson, War and the International, London 1986, pp.12-5, 34-5, 40-2), to the extent of publishing Cannon’s courtroom testimony as a general educational pamphlet on Socialism in three separate editions. And there were still those associated with the WIL, like Fred Kissin, the leader of the Danzig Trotskyists, who felt that it did not go far enough, submitting a contribution of this own to the internal bulletin, The Present War and Socialist Internationalism in April 1943. (Cf. S.F. Kissin, War and the Marxists, Volume 2, London. 1989, pp203-3, which shows that this was still his opinion just before his death.) The agitation of the WIL inside the armed forces has also been touched on by Tony Aitman, 'The War Within the War' in the British Militant, 15 September 1989.
General Marxist analyses of the Second World War should be consulted by those who do not have the time to subject the various problems to closer scrutiny. Among the shorter of these we might mention Phil Frampton, Why the World Went to War, Militant, 8 September 1989, and Marxism and the Second World War, Workers Power, no.122, September 1989. A good overall guide remains Ernest Mandel’s The Meaning of the Second World War, Verso, London 1986) which was sharply criticised by Gemma Forest in Marxism and the Mid-Century (Confrontation, no.3, Summer 1988, pp.147-55) and in her review in this magazine (Volume 1 no.4, Winter 1988-89, pp.45-8; cf. the correspondence upon this in Volume 2 no.2, pp.65-6, no.3, p.50, and Volume 3 no.1, pp.48-9).
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1. Little-Known Documents
Some years ago Daniel Guérin published some texts which Trotsky wrote on the Second World War. [1] His preface caused him to be subjected to some heavy fire from different groups claiming to be Trotskyist. He was accused, in particular, of having distorted Trotsky’s thinking by arbitrarily mutilating what he had written, and of having misrepresented Trotsky’s ideas, if not in the direction of social-patriotism, at any rate in that of narrow anti-Fascism, and of taking the liberty of presenting Trotsky as a “Soviet patriot”, for whom the necessity of “defending the Soviet Union” took precedence over every other consideration in the war. [2]
The preparation of Volumes 22 to 24 of the Oeuvres led me to work on the complete texts of the documents which Guérin published. Moreover, the opening of the closed section of the archives at Harvard has given us access to many documents, which, taken as a whole, enable us today to present an interpretation of Trotsky’s thought, one which agrees neither with Guérin’s version nor with that of the militants who have defended against him an ‘orthodoxy’ based upon the attitude of the Bolsheviks during the First World War – one war behind, and far behind the thinking of Trotsky as it leapt forward after Hitler’s great advances in 1940. [3] Trotsky, of course, understood what the war and the destruction which accompanied it meant for human civilisation. But in the spring of 1940, as the proverb says, “the wine was drawn and it had to be drunk”. Trotsky was no longer prepared merely to pose the revolution as the means to escape the war. The war had begun, and nothing could save humanity from it. Trotsky discerned in the war the gigantic crucible in which, amid unspeakable suffering, the revolutionary wave was to gather itself together, and within which the new phases of the world revolution would take shape. Trotsky expressed this very clearly in a fragment of an article which was cut short on 20 August 1940. Guérin knew of this article, but preferred to ignore it, no doubt because he did not understand its drift:
The present war, as we have stated more than once, is a continuation of the last war. But a continuation does not imply a repetition. As a general rule, a continuation implies a development, a deepening, a sharpening. Our policy, the policy of the revolutionary proletariat towards the second imperialist world war, is a continuation of the policy elaborated during the last imperialist war, primarily under the leadership of Lenin. But a continuation does not imply a repetition. In this case, too, a continuation means a development, a deepening and a sharpening. [4]
He then developed what he regarded as constituting the difference – a difference of development, quantitative and qualitative, between the policies of revolutionaries in the First and Second World Wars:
During the last war, not only the proletariat as a whole, but also its vanguard, and, in a certain sense, the vanguard of the vanguard, were caught unawares. The elaboration of the principles of revolutionary policy towards the war began at a time when the war was already in full blaze and when the military machine exercised unlimited rule. [5]
During the First World War the perspective of revolution seemed remote even to Lenin. He wrote that only future generations would see it. Trotsky recalled:
Prior to the February Revolution and even afterwards, the revolutionary elements felt themselves to be not so much contenders for power as the extreme left opposition. [6]
Therefore, the struggle for the independence of the proletariat, the rejection of ‘civil peace’, and the necessity for the class struggle of the proletariat, were the primary tasks in 1914-18, as defensive measures:
The attention of the revolutionary wing was centred on the question of the defence of the fatherland. The revolutionaries naturally replied in the negative to this question. This was entirely correct. This purely negative reply served as the basis for propaganda and for training the cadres. But it could not win the masses, who did not want a foreign conqueror. [7]
Trotsky recalled that the Bolsheviks succeeded in Russia in winning the proletariat and the majority of the people, in the space of eight months, and that this success was not in response to a negative refusal to defend the bourgeois fatherland, but to the aspirations of the masses, to which the Bolsheviks knew how to give positive answers:
The decisive rôle in this conquest was played, not by the refusal to defend the bourgeois fatherland, but by the slogan “All power to the soviets”. And only by this revolutionary slogan! The criticism of imperialism and of its militarism, like the renunciation of defence of bourgeois democracy and so on, could never have won the overwhelming majority of the people to the side of the Bolsheviks. [8]
The difference between the First and Second World Wars was to be found, in Trotsky’s opinion, at one and the same time, in the objective situation, the deepening impasse of imperialism, and in the worldwide experience which the working class had accumulated. Through the suffering and impoverishment due to the war, these factors imperiously demanded the seizure of power by the proletariat. Trotsky was categorical:
This perspective must be made the basis of our agitation. It is not merely a question of a position on capitalist militarism and of renouncing the defence of the bourgeois state, but of directly preparing for the conquest of power and the defence of the proletarian fatherland. [9]
In reality, when Trotsky was struck down on 20 August 1940, the essential elements of the second phase of the Second World War had only just emerged after the collapse of the French army. He wrote that this was “not just an episode, but an integral part of the ‘catastrophe of Europe’”. The materials which enable us to grasp the outlines of the conception which Trotsky was forming of the war, which he began to form at the same time as he outlined the direction of the revolutionary forces which could not fail to emerge from it, are to be found in the notes on the war and on the Soviet Union which he drafted in the spring of 1940. [10]
Daniel Guérin has vigorously emphasised that Trotsky had formed a remarkably exact and precise idea of the coming war in 1940. When men who had been close to him seemed resigned to decades of ‘Brown Europe’ under Nazi rule, Trotsky simply and confidently forecast the war between Germany and the USA for world hegemony, and, in addition, foresaw the ephemeral character of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the future alliance of the Soviet Union and the bourgeois democracies, the orientation of Japanese imperialism which was to avoid a collision with the Soviet Union, and many other features, which eminent strategists and commentators failed to foresee.
Guérin did not fail to notice all that. However, he made it impossible for himself to penetrate to what was at the centre of Trotsky’s thinking. Guérin reduced the analyses, which had only been sketched, and especially Trotsky’s expectations of the revolutionary movement during the war, to what he calls “his ardent conviction that the Second World War would end in the victory of the world revolution”. Guérin wrote that this was an “erroneous point” in which Trotsky “showed the utmost confidence’.
In this way, the insights which Guérin provided led him to deny Trotsky’s revolutionary perspective. No doubt this is not what Guérin intended, but some of his citations had the effect of clothing Trotsky in the mantle of a prophet, even in military matters. This is a distorted image of Trotsky. Indeed, Guérin himself reproduced many of Trotsky’s forecasts about the approach of the revolution! But we must be fair. Trotsky did no more than glimpse the future and give indications in these matters. He neither explained nor developed. The defenders of the ‘archaic’ conception, conceived as an orthodoxy, have generally ignored these indications. As some of the reactions to Guérin’s analyses show, they continue to ignore them when they look back at the solid mass of history which the war now appears to them to be.
For these reasons I wish to try in this article to show what were the main lines of Trotsky’s vision of the Second World War. I emphasise that his vision includes not merely essential aspects of the conflict, but also certain aspects of the period immediately following the war. We shall ignore some questions here, for example his analyses of the changes effected in 1939 in Poland by the Soviet bureaucracy, and those which it dreamed of making in Finland. These were the foundations of a theory of satellite bureaucratic states within the sphere of interest of the Soviet Union, which later became known as the buffer zone countries. This is to be found in the documents of the internal discussion in the Socialist Workers Party in 1939-40 on the nature of the Soviet Union.
Trotsky recognised that ‘Brown Europe’ under the Nazi jackboot would not last for a thousand years. He confidently gave it 10 years at most. He especially pointed out what the formidable conquests of the German army under Nazi leadership would mean for the working masses of Europe: “They bear a sentimental hatred against Hitler mixed with confused class sentiments.” [11]
According to Trotsky, we have here the positive aspect on which the work of revolutionary preparation in the USA was to rely. This was the starting point from which he developed (before his somewhat disconcerted comrades of the SWP) the idea that they must demand worker-officers in the army and the military training of every worker under trade union control, in anticipation of new forms of political work in a militarised society. These demands for militarisation and control – political independence by means of arms – went alongside agitational slogans, “to explain to the millions of American workers that the defence of their ‘democracy’ cannot be delivered over to an American Marshal Pétain”:
You, workers, wish to defend and improve democracy. We, of the Fourth International, wish to go further. However, we are ready to defend democracy with you, only on condition that it should be a real defence, and not a betrayal in the Pétain manner. [12]
The ‘orthodox’ interpreters of Trotsky’s thoughts have often seen this as nothing more than a tactical device, a ruse, a trick intended to have made the bourgeoisie reveal its true self, to show that it really feared the working class more than the Fascists at home and abroad. This argument cannot stand up to serious examination. How is it possible to reconcile, even at the most abstract level, the formula “not ... in the Pétain manner” with a certain vulgar conception of ‘defeatism’ which was never that of Trotsky?
That is not all. In Trotsky’s discussions with his SWP comrades, he did not hesitate to pose the question of ‘militarising’ the party, of its distancing of itself from pacifist attitudes, which he forcefully condemned. He proceeded to proclaim that his comrades, and every revolutionary, must become ‘militarists’ ’ the expression he used was “proletarian Socialist revolutionary militarists”. [13] They had to turn themselves into ‘militarists’ because of the prospects for humanity were of a militarised society and armed struggle. The proletarian revolutionary Socialists had to become militarists because the fate of humanity was to be decided arms in hand. The Second World War had started. Revolutionaries had to prepare themselves for a rapidly approaching armed struggle for power against the class enemy. They could only prepare themselves for that fight by being where the masses were. Such was Trotsky’s conviction.
This conviction rested on a concrete forecast about the movement of the masses, especially in Europe. In an article of 30 June 1940, Trotsky outlined a perspective of European development, which he expected to pass through the mass uprising against foreign occupation:
In the defeated countries the position of the masses will immediately become worsened in the extreme. Added to social oppression is national oppression, the main burden of which is likewise borne by the workers. Of all the forms of dictatorship, the totalitarian dictatorship of a foreign conqueror is the most intolerable. [14]
Can we doubt that Trotsky located the revolutionaries on the same side as those who were socially and nationally oppressed, who felt the “totalitarian dictatorship” of a “foreign conqueror” to be “intolerable”?
He knew the Nazis would try and exploit the industries and natural resources of the countries which they conquered and occupied. He knew that this super-exploitation would reduce them to pauperism. He foresaw a workers’ and peasants’ resistance: “It is impossible to attach a soldier with a rifle to each Polish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Belgian, French worker and peasant.” [15] He believed that the Hitlerite domination of Europe would provoke the general uprising of the peoples:
One can expect with assurance the rapid transformation of all the conquered countries into powder magazines. The danger is rather this, that the explosions may occur too soon without sufficient preparation and lead to isolated defeats. It is in general impossible, however, to speak of the European and the world revolution without taking into account partial defeats. [16]
The threat which hung over Hitler was that of the proletarian revolution in every part of Europe. He forecast “attempts at resistance and protest” by the masses, “at first muffled and then more and more open and bold”, against which the armies of occupation would have to act as pacifiers and oppressors. [17]
Addressing the Dewey Commission, Trotsky had distinguished the attitude to adopt in an imperialist country at war with the Soviet Union from that towards an imperialist country allied to it. In the former case, the immediate aim was to disorganise the whole machine, and in the military machine in the first place. In the latter case, the immediate aim was political opposition to the bourgeoisie and preparation for proletarian revolution. [18] It was clear, likewise, when the Wehrmacht attacked the Soviet Union, that throughout all occupied Europe the necessity to disorganise and to strike at the German military machine would be added to that of armed resistance, and this implied armed struggle.
However, to understand at least some of the aspects of the criticism which we have called ‘orthodox’, we may recall that Vereeken and some of his political friends had accused Trotsky of denying his principles by abandoning ‘defeatism’ in a country allied to the Soviet Union, in the event of war, on the pretext of the defence of the Soviet Union. We find a little of that manner of thinking in the criticism made by the Spaniard Grandizo Munis of the policy followed by James P. Cannon and the SWP in their defence at the time of the Minneapolis Trial. The political history of the Fourth International during the Second World War certainly demonstrates the strength of the current, which, under the flag of ‘orthodoxy’, often confined itself to pacifist positions, considering armed struggle to be participation in the war and in the union sacrée, and an acceptance of the war, purely because it was armed struggle. This current was simultaneously sectarian and conservative.
Of course, the belief that the policy which Trotsky advocated betrayed the influence of his ‘Soviet patriotism’ is completely out of the question. He explained the basis for his defence of the Soviet Union often enough to preclude anybody taking this belief seriously. Nor is there in his analyses or slogans the slightest concession to social-patriotism or to national defence in an imperialist country. Simply, as he forcefully declared: “ny confusion with the pacifists is a hundred times more dangerous than temporary confusion with the bourgeois militarists.” [19]
Guérin considers that the Manifesto of the International Conference of May 1940 is “the central piece” in his compilation, “both by length and by content”, and that it “expresses with so much force and conviction the fundamentals of proletarian internationalism”. Trotsky’s conclusion, which follows the call for workers to “become skilled specialists of the military art”, leaves no doubt on the matter:
At the same time, we do not forget for a moment that this war is not our war... The Fourth International builds its policy not on the military fortunes of the capitalist states but on the transformation of the imperialist war into a war of the workers against the capitalists, on the overthrow of the ruling classes of all countries, on the world Socialist revolution. [20]
The question for Trotsky, therefore, was indeed that of the revolution, of the form which the revolutionary movement was to adopt, as it was developed by the war and the crisis of the capitalist world, which the war both expresses and exacerbates, and which creates the conditions for the working class to struggle for power. This struggle during the war and within the framework of the militarisation of society could not be imagined if it did not have a practical link with political struggle in a form which was not, in the main, armed class struggle or class war. Only incorrigible dreamers or sectarians could imagine anything else. The new arena, in which it would be necessary to smash the militarists, demanded that revolutionaries and the working class themselves be militarised.
There are certain observations which must be made by anybody wishing to test the validity during the war of the perspective which Trotsky sketched out in 1940. In the first place, the various Communist parties have often succeeded in giving the illusion that they held the monopoly over the armed struggle, with which they identify with their politics after the events. This is due to them propounding the ‘defence’ of the Soviet Union, which from June 1941 transformed them into ‘Resistance activists’. However, on the basis of a certain development of the armed struggle, what this ‘defence’ of the Soviet Union actually meant, as it was conceived in Moscow, no longer consisted of sabotage or partisan operations against the German military machine. It became a direct or indirect political struggle and, where necessary, a police-style repression aimed at the mass movement itself, whenever, as it nearly always happened, the latter threatened to disrupt the agreements between the Soviet Union and its allies, to call into question the arrangement of spheres of influence, or, still more seriously, to unleash a revolution, which Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill desired as little as Hitler, and who were, in any case, determined to crush any uprisings if Hitler failed previously to do so.
In fact, the whole of Europe underwent German occupation, and suffered in varying degrees not merely the national oppression which every country undergoes when it is occupied by a foreign army, but also the systematic looting which plunged several of these countries into famine, and all into poverty. In this way the conditions for a revolutionary upsurge were created. This revealed itself first and with the greatest force in the weakest links of the imperialist chain in Europe. In the face of this danger, the safety valves provided by the Stalinist apparatus no longer had the same effectiveness in relation to the former relations between the parties and the masses, and even to historical circumstances of an accidental kind. Nonetheless, the movement did advance through its contradictions.
We shall attempt here to ascertain which general verifications of Trotsky’s perspectives can be found in the cases in which a revolution occurred, and which, with its own momentum and as far as it could by its own efforts, broke out of the hold of the official Communist movement, but which lacked an alternative leadership to that which handed them over to Allied repression once German imperialism fell. From this viewpoint, the Greek example appears to be the most instructive.
2. The Greek Resistance
We shall attempt to test Trotsky’s conceptions about the Second World War by studying two aspects of it: firstly, the revolt of the soldiers and sailors of the Greek armed forces in the Middle East, and secondly, the armed resistance in Greece, which was crushed by the British army in December 1944 on the personal orders of Winston Churchill, who denounced the armed resistance as “triumphant Trotskyism”.
One of the peculiar features of Greece, which we find also in its neighbouring countries, Italy and Yugoslavia, is that it had been subjected to a bloody military/Fascist regime, in this instance the 4 August regime of General Metaxas and King George II. It had very severely repressed the workers’ movement, imprisoning or interning in dungeons on the islands the leaders and cadres of the workers’ movement.
This drove the Greek Communist Party (KKE) into precarious clandestinity, which made its communications with Moscow intermittent and fragile. Like their comrades in neighbouring Yugoslavia, what the Greek Communists failed to understand about their international movement was that, after the death of Metaxas, his successors and executioners would become the ‘democratic allies’, and the restoration of the king would become a positive factor in the liberation of humanity!
Immediately after the German attack, the KKE issued the slogan of a constituent assembly. This automatically opened up the ‘royal question’. The king was in exile, under the protection of Churchill. This demand placed an obstacle between the internal resistance and the exiled monarch, and was an obstacle to the adoption of the policies which the Communist International was to dictate to the KKE. From 1942 communications became difficult not only between Moscow and the KKE, but also between the party leadership and the leaders of the partisan fighters. The KKE had attempted to start to control and centralise the activities of the partisans, who were growing stronger, arms in hand, in the mountains and in the workers’ quarters in the cities. The fighters were led by the andartes, the kapetanios, who had gained popularity by acceding to the demands of the poor peasants.
The Greek resistance, like that of the proletariat, the petit-bourgeoisie and the peasantry, did not emerge from any organisational decision. Likewise, it was outside any organisational framework that on the night of 30-31 May 1941 two students scaled the Acropolis and tore down the swastika from it. André Kedros describes this as “a madly daring and splendidly gratuitous act”, for him it became “the symbol of the Greek refusal to submit”. [21] Around that time, army officers often organised or provoked the disbandment of the defeated Greek army. The first guerrilla bands appeared in the countryside, armed with rifles and ammunition which they collected almost without resistance on the battlefields and alongside the roads where the army had been defeated.
There was a tradition of agrarian struggle in Greece. The ‘bandit’ had long been regarded as the liberator and defender, beloved by the poor. Kedros relates how the villagers “bred armed bands as an antidote to poverty and oppression” that was caused or exacerbated by the occupation. We know that tiny groups were formed more or less everywhere. They sported a variety of names, ranging from “mixed companies” to “assault groups”. They were formed spontaneously and developed their own leaderships. Some of their leaders were young men of militant temper, others had won their spurs by escaping from Metaxas’ concentration camps during the retreat of the army.
However, at first the KKE did not apply itself to the organisation, centralisation and development of these groups. It remained obedient to the orders of Moscow. It considered its first task to be the formation of a ‘national front’ against the occupation, which meant a bloc for a certain period with other Greek political formations. It did not, however, succeed in doing so, mainly because, despite its efforts, it could not formulate a consistent policy towards the restoration of the monarchy. This was a very sensitive point with its own supporters. It was also a very sensitive point with the forces linked to the bourgeoisie and the landlords. They did not wish to break from the monarchy and their British ‘protectors’ – nor could they.
The EAM (National Liberation Front) was founded in September 1941, but it was no more than one organisation which bore this name. It was not the hoped-for national front. Alongside the KKE there were only the very small Socialist formations, two equally small ‘democratic’ organisations, and the trade unions. However, the EAM only accepted a ‘national’ basis for struggle. It refused to consider social liberation, and addressed the ‘nation’ regardless of classes. It concentrated on attempting to attract support from the upper strata of society, and kept silent on the demands of the workers.
This desire to maintain a ‘united nation’ against the invader – when it was not united – and to ignore in silence the class sources of the popular opposition to the occupiers and to the members of the Greek bourgeoisie who collaborated with them, did not, however, succeed in preventing the workers and the poorest strata of the people from laying hold of the framework of organisation which the KKE offered. They instinctively used it to fight for their demands. The influx of fighters gave a working class character to the EAM, which was doing so much to reject it.
The workers demonstrated in their thousands on 18 October 1941, the first anniversary of the Italian invasion. Then in December 1941 the students took up the fight. On 26 January and 17 March 1942 the wounded war veterans, a particularly downtrodden section of the poor, took to the streets, supported by militants of the clandestine EAM clad in hospital nurses’ uniforms. The organisation spread and was elaborated. On 15 March 1942 there were strikes in support of economic demands in several cities, including Athens. Other strikes followed, including, for example, those by 40,000 civil servants, in whose leadership were Trotskyist militants. Then there was the fertiliser workers’ strike in the Piraeus in August 1942. Meanwhile, the peasants of the Peloponnese had successfully mounted a series of demonstrations. The KKE decided to send a handful of its militants to organise the partisans, the andartes, within the framework of the People’s National Liberation Army (ELAS), the armed wing of the EAM.
A report by the German Abwehr in November 1942 mentioned that whole districts of Greece were in the hands of the guerrillas, who executed traitors, distributed the corn which they collected by forced levies, and who called upon the villagers freely to elect their representative leaders and to discuss all their problems in a democratic manner. The struggle of the andartes became a factor in the rural class war, by the force of events and against the desire of their political leaders, even when the partisan group led by the celebrated Aris Velouchiotis took part in spectacular acts of sabotage of communications and transport which disorganised the German military machine.
We cannot detail here the history of the mass movement in Greece. On 22 December 1942 there were 40 000 people on strike. The demonstrations and strikes which followed the announcement of compulsory labour service in Germany, and which developed from 24 February to 5 March 1943, resulted in the only occasion when the occupying power backed down on this issue. By 1943 the armed struggle was no longer the work of small groups but that of real military units. When they arrived in a region with the intention of extending the liberated zones, there would be an immediate mass uprising of the armed people. Kedros declared that “the entire population was involved in the armed resistance”. The mass movements in the cities were irrepressible. There was a general strike in Athens on 25 June 1943 against the execution of hostages by the occupying power. The tram drivers’ strike, which began on 12 June, had led to 50 tramway workers being sentenced to death. They were saved by the general strike. By 1944 not only were wide rural areas liberated, but the German troops lived under siege in the cities, which they could only leave in guarded convoys. The ‘Red Belt’, the workers’ quarters around Athens, were nothing less than fortresses of the armed people.
During all this the KKE leaders, who controlled the EAM and ELAS, continued to insist that they were waging a purely national struggle, and denied that it had any class character. This was by no means the opinion of the Greek Government in Exile, under the protection of Winston Churchill. In 1942 elements in the officer corps – that “ultimate rampart of the state”, as Churchill said at the time of Franco – grouped in Grivas’ Khi organisation, the Pan organisation, the military hierarchy, the Zervasites and Dentirisites, attached to Metaxas’ secret services, organised a counter-attack.
They tried to organise –national guerrillas’ with the intention of fighting the –Communist guerrillas’ rather than the occupying invaders. Here we had exactly the Greek equivalent of Mihailovic in Yugoslavia, the Serbian colonel who led the Chetniks, who was a minister in the king’s government in exile, and who fought arms in hand against Tito’s partisans. There was no shortage of money or equipment. They wanted to create new formations, but they also hoped to undermine the ELAS militants, who were deprived of equipment now that their operations seemed certain to succeed. One of the leaders of the British Special Operations Executive, Eddie Myers, quoted a document on this subject in his memoirs. It corroborates Trotsky’s analysis, and demonstrates how lucid was Churchill, that champion of the existing order, the strategist of the opposite side of the class war. Myers’ superiors informed him in April 1943 that “the Cairo authorities consider that after the liberation of Greece, civil war is almost inevitable”. [22]
The mass movement swelled the ranks of the EAM and ELAS, which grew from strength to strength, sweeping these diversions aside, and never ceasing to assert its mastery. Colonel Saraphis, the ‘democratic’ officer chosen to be the Mihailovic of Greece, decided to join the ELAS because he recognised how efficient and representative it was! The Italian capitulation placed more weapons in the hands of the andartes and their civilian allies than all that the Allies provided by parachute drops.
The crucial year was 1943. Ioannis Rallis, a politician whom even the Germans knew was in contact with the British secret service, became Prime Minister of occupied Greece. [23] The ruling classes actively and consciously prepared to transform the national war into a civil war. In Athens there were Security Battalions, a militia with a sinister reputation. In Cairo there was the Mountain Brigade. Both were intended to crush the popular movement. The KKE announced that more than ever it sought collaboration with the ‘national guerrillas’ and desired ‘toleration’, which meant renouncing a class approach, whilst at the same time it prepared to launch attacks upon the left. In March 1943 Aris Velouchiotis was summoned to Athens from his mountain base, despite the dangers posed by such a journey, to receive a severe reprimand. That May, when the Communist International was dissolved, the KKE adopted an orientation from which it would not thereafter deviate:
The KKE supports by all possible means the struggle for national liberation, and will do all in its power to help gather all the patriotic forces into one unbreakable national front, which will unite the whole people to shake off the foreign yoke and to win national liberation at the side of our great Allies. [24]
At the same time it developed its own political police, the OPLA, recruited from reliable killers, and used them more against ‘Trotskyists’ and leftists in its own ranks, than against real collaborators.
The policies of all these tendencies underwent their first test when the Greek army in Egypt mutinied. The history of this episode is still fairly obscure, and seems to this writer to be a fruitful contribution to the discussion about the Proletarian Military Policy. The affair occurred in what, by analogy with France, could be called ‘Free Greece’; this consisted, after the defeat of the Greek forces in April 1941, of the remnants of the Greek army and fleet, with senior civil servants and ministers of King George II’s government in exile.
These worthies, especially the military chiefs, were evidently important figures in the Fascist dictatorship of Metaxas. Many people believed that this was the reason for their ‘treachery’ in the face of the Nazi invasion. Nonetheless, as Dominic Eudes says: “Alongside the royal clique of officers and politicians, however, the embryo of a new Greek army was formed in Egypt.” [25] This was composed of people who had escaped by sea from military units, volunteers who had endured tremendous hardships travelling individually to Egypt, and merchant and naval seamen. They were obviously people who wanted to “fight against Fascism for freedom and democracy”, as the new ‘liberal’ head of the government put it. A collision was inevitable between the bulk of the 20,000 men who had arrived in Egypt to fight Fascism, and the monarchist camarilla which, like Churchill, was concerned above all to “save Greece from Communism”.
In October 1941 a secret organisation, the Military Organisation for Liberation (ASO), was formed within the Greek army in the Middle East. Its aims were simple, even over-simple. They were to send Greek units to the front, to fight in Greece alongside the Resistance, and to oppose the infiltration into the army in Egypt of those sympathetic to Metaxas, who wanted to restore their regime in Greece at the end of the war. The Metaxist cadres demanded that cadres sympathetic to the ASO be removed by large-scale discharges from the army. The officers due to be dismissed from the Second Brigade were arrested and replaced. The mutineers stood firm in the face of threats. The First Brigade supported them. The government submitted and accepted that the Metaxist officers should be isolated, on the one hand to prevent events from running out of control, and on the other hand to prepare a fresh attack. Over the next few months military directives caused the units to be dispersed, the rebels were punished by disciplinary training, and finally the subversive elements were weeded out and the officers who had been isolated were brought back into key positions.
The second mutiny was more serious and significant. The demands of the officers under the influence of the ASO were evidently more political than before. Under the pressure of the men, the Committee for Armed Coordination presented a petition, signed by the majority of the Greek soldiers, as soon as the real provisional government of the Greek resistance, the PEEA, was formed in Greece. It demanded that a real government of ‘national unity’ be formed on the basis of the proposals of the PEEA. The initiative came neither from the EAM and ELAS nor from Greece, but quite simply from the ideas which the soldiers formed of the situation in their country and the conditions in which they could really ‘fight Fascism’.
On the same day, 31 March 1944, the delegates of the soldiers and the mixed committee demanded to be received with their petition at the Soviet Embassy. The ambassador closed the doors on them. They found no echo or promise of support except from the left wing of the British Labour Party. In Egypt, however, they enjoyed the sympathy of the Egyptian population, who were always close to the Greek workers. There was a series of meetings and demonstrations in Alexandria and Cairo. On 4 April the Egyptian police intervened on the side of the Greek Government in Exile and the British, and arrested some 50 militant workers and trade union leaders, in particular the leaders of the Greek dockers. The British High Command, for its part, disarmed two regiments and sent 280 ‘ringleaders’ to concentration camps. Then on 5 April it disarmed the unit attached to the High Command of the Greek army and interned the mutineers. By now the mutineers had their backs to the wall. The First Brigade arrested its Metaxist officers, reorganised its command, and refused to hand over its arms as a prelude to internment. The movement spread to the navy, to the destroyer Pindos, the cruiser Averoff, the Ajax and several more. The crews elected a mixed committee of men and officers to take conunand. The British Ambassador to the Greek Government in Cairo, Reginald Leeper, telegraphed to Churchill: “What is happening here among the Greeks is nothing less than a revolution.” [26]
Churchill directly and personally took control of the repression. The arrival of King George II was a symbol as well as a provocation. The support of the Egyptian youth for the mutineers was a promise. On 13 April Admiral Cunningham announced that he had decided to put down the rebellion by force, and if necessary to sink the Greek ships in the very roadstead of Alexandria. The mutinous land formations were surrounded, deprived of water and starved out. On 22 April a successful raid was made on the Ajax by the leading Metaxist, Admiral Voulgaris. The other ships lay under British guns and surrendered. General Paget launched his tanks against the First Brigade, and it also surrendered. Within a few days, some 20,000 Greek volunteers on the Army of the Middle East found themselves in concentration camps in Libya and Eritrea. [27]
The Greek army in the Middle East no longer existed, and its place was now free for the formation of specially prepared shock troops, technically equipped and politically trained for the civil war following the ‘liberation’.
We must note that British censorship suppressed reports of this episode in the press. It was not a minor episode, in fact it was very significant, which no doubt explains the violent response of the British authorities. It exposed the myth about ‘national defence’ and ‘national unity’. The 20,000 volunteers wanted ‘defence’ and ‘unity’, but their leaders did not, and they crushed them. The incident exposed the lie about the “war against Fascism and for freedom and democracy”. The Greeks considered Metaxas to be a detested Fascist dictator. Churchill’s policy aimed at restoring the rule of the forces upon which Metaxas had been based.
Trotsky’s remarks in 1940 about the war became concrete. The Greek soldiers in the Middle East wanted to fight, arms in hand, against Fascism. They therefore demanded officers whom they could trust, allied themselves with.the labour movement, and formed their own soviet-style organisations. This was precisely along the lines which Trotsky had developed when he wrote that the defence of their ‘democracy’ could not be delivered over to the likes of a Marshal Pétain. The mass movement born out of the war expressed itself along these lines, and did so, as Trotsky had forecast, in the army, that central section of militarised society, no less important than in the factories.
The talks in Moscow and the bargaining which followed them led to the agreement with Stalin that Churchill would have a free hand in Greece. The KKE and through it the EAM were ultimately to place the noose around the neck of the extraordinary mass movement in Greece itself, after contributing politically to the repression of the mutineers.
After the April 1944 crisis, the Government in Exile in Cairo was entrusted to George Papandreou, who helped to develop the anti-Communist movement. Under his pressure the leaders of the EAM and ELAS signed on 30 May 1944 the Lebanon Charter, which denounced ELAS ‘terrorism’, the indiscipline of the mutineers (many of whom served sentences for it), left open the question of the monarchy, and agreed to a single command of the Greek armed forces and to the re-establishment of order “alongside the Allied troops” at the Liberation. The EAM and ELAS were unhappy at this, and for several weeks bargained and demanded ministerial posts and a change of prime minister.
However, a Soviet mission, led by Colonel Popov, arrived and put an end to these ill-tempered grumblings. The KKE and the EAM unconditionally entered the government. When the German forces left Athens on 12 October 1944, the KKE called on the Greek people to “ensure public order”. It also ensured that Papandreou came to power. He arrived with the British forces, at a time when the ELAS exercised real power all across the country.
Churchill was to provoke the Resistance when he ordered that General Scobie, the commander of the Allied forces, to maintain the military formations of the collaborators as ‘security battalions’ and to forbid them to be purged, and to ensure that on 2 December the Papandreou government could disarm the ELAS forces. A demonstration against the disarmament of the ELAS in Athens on 3 December was fired upon by the police. This assault in Syntagmata Square upon the biggest demonstration in Greek history left dozens dead and hundreds wounded. Thirty-three days of armed fighting followed in Athens between the forces of order grouped around Scobie and those of the local Resistance.
At last Churchill carried through his plan to crush the Greek revolution. He announced that he was intervening to prevent a “hideous massacre”, and to stop what he called the victory of “triumphant Trotskyism” – with a grin of complicity in the direction of Stalin. [28] From 3 December onwards those ELAS units whose leaders had decided not to surrender their arms were paralysed by the orders not to fire on British forces, who, as Churchill put it, were there by the “goodwill” of Roosevelt and Stalin. The andartes in Macedonia, the shock troops and the forces in the mountains were ordered to stay put and let the fighters in Athens be exterminated. The heroism with which they fought could not prevail against the policies of leaders who had made up their minds to lead these fighters into the surrender that was demanded by Moscow.
The Varkiza agreement of 15 February 1945 provided for all Resistance forces to be disarmed, but the ELAS forces in Athens had not submitted to this. The forces in the countryside had not moved to support them. This time Aris Velouchiotis understood the magnitude of the KKE’s betrayal. He was attacked in the KKE’s journal Rizospastis on 12 June. On 16 June he was assassinated, and his head was publicly exhibited in the villages on 18 June. How many other Resistance fighters fell at tha time under the fire of the British and of the counter-revolutionary formations which the Germans had created in Athens and the British in Cairo? Nonetheless, several more years of Stalinist treachery were required to exhaust the fighting potential of the Greek revolution.
3. The Trotskyists in the War
We cannot undertake here a wide-ranging study of the policies of the Trotskyists during the war, or compare them with the policies which Trotsky outlined on the eve of his death and of which his comrades were generally unaware at the time. This will be the objective of larger works. My ignorance of the Greek language prevents me from making use of the solid researches into the activities of the Trotskyists during the war which exist in Greek. Let us hope that this gap will be closed.
But in the meantime, let us be careful not to make over-hasty judgements. From 4 August 1936 onwards the Trotskyists were subjected to ferocious repression. The great majority of Trotskyist militants were arrested and thrown into prisons from which many did not emerge. Several leading cadres, including Pantelis Pouliopoulos, the former General Secretary of the KKE, were killed during the occupation. The conditions of illegality appear to have been particularly difficult for them because they were unable to participate even in the unification of the three organisations on which the leaders had agreed in 1938.
At best, any known Trotskyist militants who actually managed to join ELAS units were closely observed and carefully isolated. The Stalinists removed in one way or another any Trotskyists who managed to win responsible positions in the ELAS or in the People’s Army. Furthermore, between October and December 1944, the OPLA, which was really a Greek GPU, mounted a campaign of extermination against the Trotskyists. Throughout the country OPLA agents abducted, tortured and murdered such militants as Stavros Veroukhis, the Secretary of the Association of the War Wounded, and Thanassis Ikonomou, former Secretary of the Communist Youth at Ghazi. Workers, dockers, metal workers and teachers all suffered alike. “We killed more than 800 Trotskyists” boasted Barzotas, a member of the KKE Political Bureau, in 1947.
We do not have the means here to discover the truth about the policies of the Greek Trotskyists and how they could have escaped the dreadful fate that awaited them. Rene Dazy quotes from a document of 1943 in a Greek Trotskyist publication: “The Anglo-Americans will come to restore state power to the bourgeoisie. The exploited will only have changed one yoke for another.” [29] If that really was the case, then it is clear that the Greek Trotskyists sentenced themselves to death by confining themselves to negative perspectives and not taking their place in the mass movement.
Michel Raptis, at that time European Secretary of the Fourth International, and writing under the pseudonym of M. Spiro, recalled just after the events of December 1944 what Trotsky had written about the era of armed struggle. He paid tribute to the activity of the Greek masses when “a wind of revolution blew through the workers’ districts and suburbs of Athens”, declaring that their activity would “stand among the finest examples of the proletarian movement”. But he said nothing about what the Greek Trotskyists were doing. He also stated that “despite the official ideology of its Popular Frontist democratic and petit-bourgeois leadership”, the EAM “retained considerable class independence in action”. [30] There is nothing more, and often much less, to be found in the documents of the Fourth International.
André Kedros, the historian of the Greek Resistance, whose ideas about Stalinism are far from clear, stresses the international impact and effect of the ‘Athens coup’ as a “rebuke to all the resistance movements heavily influenced by the Communist parties”. Does this mean, as he declares, that the British repression in Greece “weighed heavily upon the decisions and tactics of Thorez, Togliatti and other such leaders”? [31] That view cannot be accepted. Their decisions and tactics were determined by the same factors that had determined the tactics of the KKE – and they had been determined in Moscow. But it is highly probable that the Greek defeat strengthened the Stalinist policy of capitulation and of restoring the capitalist order in Western Europe, and that it weighed heavily and negatively upon those who throughout Europe had identified the national struggle with the social struggle, and had believed that they had found the road to revolution when they joined the Resistance. We need to do what we cannot do here: to analyse concretely the developments in each of the countries of Europe.
However, an examination of the documents which Prager has assembled in Les congrès de la Quatrième Internationale provides what is essential for the study of the Fourth International during the war. He has omitted little but the initial positions of the former PCI and its sister-tendency led by Vereeken in Belgium. In the introduction to the second volume, he writes:
The war sharply corrected those who had doubted the timeliness of founding the Fourth International in a period of downturn and with weak forces. The Fourth International bravely confronted the violence and persecution of ‘democratic’ and Fascist regimes, plus the Stalinist thugs who attacked our organisations. Despite heavy losses to be mourned, and despite some inevitable individual collapses, it is remarkable that it not only maintained its forces, but notably strengthened and rejuvenated them in the USA, Britain and other countries. Even though it could not break through into the masses as it had hoped, because of the limits of revolutionary situations and of the rise of Stalinism, nonetheless it saw new sections come into existence. [32]
This was undoubtedly a remarkable result, but it was in stark contrast with what Trotsky had written at the beginning of the war, for example about the USA:
The American working class is still without a mass labour party even today. But the objective situation and the experience accumulated by the American workers can pose within a very brief period of time on the order of the day the question of the conquest of power. This perspective must be made the basis of our agitation. It is not merely a question of a position on capitalist militarism and of renouncing the defence of the bourgeois state, but of directly preparing for the conquest of power and the defence of the proletarian fatherland. [33]
Furthermore:
Ahead lies a favourable perspective, providing all the justification for revolutionary activism. It is necessary to utilise the opportunities which are opening up and to build the revolutionary party. [34]
In the face of these absolutely clear statements, the historian cannot restrict himself to mentioning the “limits of revolutionary situations”, or “the rise of Stalinism”, or to suggesting that we have “here elements which Trotsky could not foresee”. We must, at least, recognise the contradiction, even if we do not explain it, or even consider whether it was Trotsky or the Trotskyists who were wrong.
Moreover, Prager indicates that the Proletarian Military Policy, which the SWP (US) adopted at Trotsky’s suggestion, provoked widespread opposition within the Fourth International. He notes that the Belgian section excised several paragraphs on this question from the clandestine version of the May 1940 Manifesto. He also refers to the ‘reservations’ of the French section and of the European Secretariat. [35]
In 1940 the French Trotskyists were divided into two tendencies over perspectives which were ultimately as far away from each other as they both were from that of Trotsky. Beginning from the conception that the defeat of French imperialism and the occupation of French territory were leading, not only to national oppression, but to the rebirth of a genuine ‘national question’ in which all classes were interested, as in a colonial country, the majority of the POI, organised around the committees which published La Verité, outlined a strategy according to which the bourgeoisie of an occupied country becomes the natural ally of the workers’ movement, and the latter devotes itself completely to “national resistance”. Conversely, the La Seule Voie (The Only Road) group, which had emerged from the PCI, and subsequently became the CCI, denied that an imperialist nation could ever become an oppressed nation following a military defeat, and considered that national demands were “the importation of bourgeois ideology into the proletariat in order to demoralise it”.
These two positions, remote from each other, were both in a way the result of isolation. Under the pressure of the European Secretariat, they were gradually abandoned. The European Secretariat, led first by Marcel Hic and, after his arrest, by Raptis, was formed in the village of St Hubert in the Belgian Ardennes. This was a remarkable political and organisational feat in itself, and it also signified a return to an organisation which planned and functioned on an international scale. In 1944 the two viewpoints were rapidly converging, whilst the CCI continued to assert that the elementary duty of revolutionaries at the time was ferociously to denounce the union sacrée, to explain to the working class that it had to prepare for another ‘June 1936’ on a world scale, and at the same to carry out intense agitation for fraternisation with the German workers. Prager adequately summarises the consensus on the question of armed struggle:
Relations with the official Resistance could take on no forms other than independence, without agreeing to the ‘Front of Frenchmen’. But this structure should not be confused with the mass movements, nor include the latter in the same condemnation. Nor did these relations exclude individual participation in these movements in order to influence some of its members ... This work no doubt did not develop sufficiently, due to lack of forces and because the Trotskyists gave priority to the struggle in the factories. It certainly did not noticeably change the balance of forces or the course of events. The lack of success of the Trotskyists was not essentially the result of tactical or other faults, but to their situation, swimming against the stream, and to the grip of Stalinism on the masses. [36]
All the evidence shows that Trotsky’s appeal for the line of armed struggle and his proposal that revolutionary Socialists should become ‘militarists’ in order to play their rôle in a militarised world, are missing in this conception, or rather reduced to a secondary, ‘partisan’ level, entirely subordinated to ‘the struggle in the factories’. The discovery that ‘the armed struggle’ exerted an attractive force upon the masses must have presented many problems in the absence of the dimension which Trotsky contributed on ‘militarisation’.
Thus the resolution of the Provisional European Secretariat in 1943 on the partisan movement – which was adopted in full by the 1944 European Conference – recognised the “partly spontaneous character” of the partisan movement, and declared that Bolshevik-Leninists were now “obliged to take this form of struggle into account”. The resolution stated that “the guerrilla movements” were “military organisations in the tow of Anglo-Saxon imperialism”, but it noted that “the participation of the masses in the Balkans and in the West since the large-scale deportations of workers to Germany, though they had not changed the character of these movements”, obliged revolutionaries to advance a programme for them, in order to “make them understand that they must play the part of armed detachments in the service of the proletarian revolution”. [37] The resolution undoubtedly had left it rather late.
One could suggest that there was a wide gap between the positions of the Europeans, as Prager had summarised them, and those of the Americans, who systematically applied in their 1940s meetings and statements the Military Policy as advocated by Trotsky. Indeed, a completely exceptional kinship revealed itself on this level as well as on that of general principles. James P. Cannon came under attack from Munis for the ‘opportunist’ manner in which he presented the attitude of the SWP towards the war at the trial of its Minneapolis leaders which commenced on 27 October 1941. Cannon replied in May 1942:
The masses today, thanks to all kinds of compulsions and deceptions, and the perfidious role of the labour bureaucracy and the renegade Socialists and Stalinists, are accepting and supporting the war, that is, they are acting with the bourgeoisie and not with us. The problem for our party is, first, to understand this primary fact; second, to take up a position of ‘political opposition’; and then, on that basis, to seek an approach to the honestly patriotic workers and try to win them away from the bourgeoisie and over to our side by means of propaganda. That is the only ‘action’ that is open to us, as a small minority, at the present time. [38]
If we leave aside two documents which were published at that time by Jean Van Heijenoort under the pseudonym of Marc Loris [39], who was then Secretary of the Fourth International, we could conclude that apart from him, who had been in contact with Trotsky’s undogmatic thinking for years, nobody in or on the fringe of the Fourth International had understood the question of militarisation. Jean Rous, with his National Revolutionary Movement [40], and Marcel Hic with his theses on the national question in the Committees for the Fourth International [41], each in his own way missed the mark.
Meanwhile, the other tendencies locked themselves in a paralysing orthodoxy, and were running the risks arising from the ‘pacifist’ tendencies against which Trotsky had warned so vigorously. Apart from the veteran of the Russian Left Opposition, Tarov (A.A. Davtian), who under the false identity of Manouchian individually joined the FTP/MOI and was executed with other members of the group that was named after him, we meet only one contrary example.
This is Chen Duxiu, whose foresight led him, soon after he emerged from jail, to intervene in the political department of a division of the army, the head of which understood how military effectiveness depends upon political clarity. [42] This enterprise was nipped in the bud. The Guomindang police understood the danger better than Chen’s own comrades did.
In the same order of ideas, the hesitancy with which Trotskyists looked at armed resistance suggests that it would be interesting to study how the revolution was conceived within the Fourth International during the war. It seems sometimes to have been conceived as something apocalyptic, which would occur independently of what was going on, and not as a result of being worked for. Had their almost exclusively ‘propagandist’ education, involving the use of the weapons of denunciation and ‘explanation’ – which clearly were the essential activities of an organisation the leaders of which felt themselves to be “swimming against the stream” – prepared the cadres for such a belief?
Did not the extraordinary weakness of the SWP’s resolution of November 1943 result in part from this same ‘propagandist’ isolation? [43] How could people – who declared that the Kremlin was unable to play a counter-revolutionary rôle on a large scale, that American imperialism would play in Europe in the immediate future the same plundering rôle as German imperialism, that the only alternatives in Europe were a workers’ government or a brutal dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, without any prospect of a parliamentary regime, and which rejected democratic demands with the declaration that the European working class had no ‘democratic illusions’ – place themselves in the stream of development after the objective turn in the situation?
We can go even further and say that if the Trotskyists, after pushing that line for years, had found themselves placed, if not at the head of such a revolutionary movement, but actually within it, they would have been obliged to revise the ABC of teachings of Marxism and Bolshevism. They would have had to admit the correctness of a point of view which sectarians always defend, according to which the role of revolutionaries consists in confining themselves to propaganda in periods of reaction, whilst they wait for the swing of the pendulum to bring the masses back to them.
What lay beneath this discussion – or rather this absence of discussion – on the most vital issues is not merely the question of the role of Stalinism, but that of the orientation towards the construction of the revolutionary party, as Trotsky had defended it in 1940. Our feeling, after treading the documents of the war period, is that there were often references that more resembled incantations than reflections on what had been gained and on working out a method by which to construct parties. It seems to me – and there is no ill-will here, because I was one of them – that during this period the Trotskyists at least learned how not to build a revolutionary party.
Serge Lambert has shown in a recent work, Revolutionary Tradition and a ‘New Party’ in Italy 1942-45, that, contrary to a certain legend, the Italian revolution was not decisively defeated at the moment when the short-lived dual power was set up in 1945 between the Allied administration and the Committees of the Republican Partisans, but from 1943 when the apparatus of Togliatti’s ‘new party’, which the men from Moscow established, broke the resistance of the scattered Communist oppositional groups.
When every chance of establishing a revolutionary party had been destroyed, the game was played out in which the leaders of the Italian Communist Party could without risk give the signal for what they called “the insurrection against the revolution”. [44] Moreover, Lambert shows very well that the decisive political weakness of many of these groups – some of which here and there developed considerably more powerful armed forces than those of the PCI – lay in the illusion which they held that the Soviet Union possessed some kind of “objectively revolutionary” character. They thought that the revolution was spreading along with every advance of the Red Army. We meet this conception not only in the well-known article in La Verité in February 1944, but throughout the world press of the Trotskyist movement. [45]
The question which we have tried to raise here is by no means academic. During the Second World War were the Trotskyist organisations, leaders and members alike, victims of an objective situation that was beyond them? Could they have done no more than what they did, that is to survive by drawing in more members and saving the honour of the internationalists, by maintaining against wind and tide the militant work of fraternising with German workers in uniform?
If that is the case, it would be necessary to recognise that Trotsky, with his analysis of the militarisation which had to be carried out, and his perspective that the revolutionary party could be constructed and the struggle for power begun in a short time, was completely isolated in 1940, not only from what was really happening politically in the world, but also from the political reality of his own organisation. He was, therefore, entertaining illusions and perceiving possibilities of breakthroughs when the Fourth International was in fact doomed to impotence, forced for a long time to swim against the current, and confronted with “the grip of Stalinism on the masses”.
But we may suppose, on the contrary, that the Trotskyist organisations, their members and their leaders, were involved, and that they have at least some responsibility for their own setbacks. In that case, we may think, if we start from the premises of Trotsky’s analysis of 1940, that the Second World War did see the development of a mass movement based upon a national and social resistance, which the Stalinists did their utmost to divert, and which, in the case of Greece, they led to its destruction – a resistance which the Trotskyists could neither support nor utilise, because they did not know how to locate themselves in it and even, perhaps, because they could not understand the concrete character of the moment in history in which they were living.
We believe that this question deserves to be asked.
Pierre Broué
Notes
1. These documents are in L. Trotsky, Sur la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, originally published by La Taupe in Belgium, and republished by Seuil in Paris in 1974. The articles and interviews by Trotsky were sometimes mutilated by the removal of passages which do not bear directly upon the Second World War, but were generally concerned with the Spanish Civil War and the Fourth International.
2. The preface and postscript are printed below. pp.12-14, 18-19 – Editors.
Some of these documents were published in 1945 in the European Secretariat’s Internal Bulletin (No.5). Some members reacted strongly against Trotsky. One of them, ‘Am’, French or Belgian, sent to the International Secretariat an article entitled On the Subject of the Proletarian Military Policy: Did the Old Man Kill Trotskyism?. This article characterised Trotsky’s position as “pure and simple chauvinism”, speaking of the “importance of his errors”, and attributing to him “willingness to defend the fatherland without first overthrowing the bourgeoisie, while at the same time using in agitation the danger from its imperialist opponent”.
He went as far as to ask: “We must openly and frankly pose the question whether we can continue to bear the name of ‘Trotskyists’, when the leader of the Fourth International has dragged it into the mire of social-chauvinism.” This article is in the Archive of the International Secretariat, in the possession of the Institut Léon Trotsky.
3. L.D. Trotsky, Bonapartism, Fascism and War, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, New York 1977, pp.410ff. This version has been slightly edited. Another version, with editorial interpolations, appears in L.D. Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, New York 1971, pp.444ff. It first appeared in the October 1940 issue of Fourth International in the incomplete state in which Trotsky left it on his death – Editors.
4. L.D. Trotsky, Bonapartism, Fascism and War, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, op. cit., p.411.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid. The translator of Trotsky’s article added: “Several citations from Lenin during that period fit Trotsky’s description”, and gives two: “It is possible, however, that five, 10 or even more years will elapse before the Socialist revolution begins.” (V.I. Lenin, The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination, Collected Works, Volume 22, Moscow 1977, p.153), and: “We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution.” (V.I. Lenin, Lecture on the 1905 Revolution, Collected Works, Volume 23, Moscow 1974, p.253).
7. Trotsky, op. cit., p.411.
8. Op. cit., p.412.
9. Op. cit., p.414.
10. These will be published in Volume 23 of the Oeuvres, and the articles and interviews, including Bonapartism, Fascism and War, will be found in Volume 26. [Cf. L.D. Trotsky, On the Future of Hitler’s Armies, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, op. cit., p.406, Fragments from the First Seven Months of the War, Fragments on the USSR, Preface to a Book on War and Peace, Writings of Leon Trotsky: Supplement 1934-40, New York 1979, pp.72ff. – Editors]
11. L.D. Trotsky, Discussions with Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, op. cit., p.253.
12. L.D. Trotsky, How to Really Defend Democracy, op. cit., pp.344-5.
13. L.D. Trotsky, Discussions with Trotsky, op. cit., p.257.
14. L.D. Trotsky, We Do Not Change Our Course, op. cit., p.297.
15. Op. cit., p298
16. ibid.
17. L.D. Trotsky, On the Future of Hitler’s Armies, op. cit., p.406.
18. The Case of Leon Trotsky, New York 1969, pp.289-90
19. L.D. Trotsky, Discussions with Trotsky, op. cit., p.256.
20. L.D. Trotsky, Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution, op. cit., p.222.
21. A. Kedros, La Resistance Grèque: 1940-44, p.174.
22. E. Myers, The Great Entanglement, p.189.
23. A. Kedros, op. cit., p.199, mentions a report by the German police when Ioannis Rallis came to power: “He passes for the confidential adviser of Pangalos, who is on the side of the English.” Kedros also refers to the semi-Fascist military hierarchy, General Papagos and Rallis: “All these men and formations were to be headed in a certain direction by a secret adviser of the king, who was also a prince of the church, the Metropolitan of Athens, Chrisanthios.” (p.179)
24. Svetozar Vukmanovic-Tempo, How and Why the People’s Liberation Struggle of Greece Met With Defeat, London 1985, cited in Kedros, op. cit., p.409.
25. D. Eudes, The Kapetanios, New Left Books, 1972, p.75.
26. W. Churchill, The Second World War, Volume 5, London 1952, p.479. Churchill’s account clearly shows how much he was worried about the mutiny, and how anxious he was to see it crushed.
27. The official sources of the Government in Exile placed this figure at 10,000.
28. Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons on 19 December 1944, defended his use of the term ‘Trotskyism’, saying:
I think that ‘Trotskyism’ is a better definition of Greek Communism and certain other sects than the usual term. It has the advantage of being equally hated in Russia.
This was followed by “prolonged laughter”. On 13 December Churchill had invited Communist MP William Gallacher not to get too excited over the subject of the situation in Greece, if he didn’t want to be accused of ‘Trotskyism’. Interestingly, Churchill noted that Archbishop Damaskinos, who was more or less imposed by the British authorities as regent, “greatly feared the Communist, or Trotskyite as he put it, combination in Greek affairs” (W. Churchill, The Second World War, Volume 6, London 1954, p.272).
Churchill noted that the British massacres in Athens were widely and strongly criticised in the US press and by the US State Department, and also in The Times and the Manchester Guardian in Britain, but added:
Stalin, however, adhered strictly and faithfully to our agreement of October, and during all the long weeks of fighting the Communists in the streets of Athens, not one word of reproach came from Pravda or Izvestia. (Ibid., p.255) [Editors’ note]
29. R. Dazy, Fusillez les chiens enragés, p.266.
30. M. Spiro, The Greek Revolution, Quatrième Internationale, no.14-15, January-February 1945. On the same subject, the special International Internal Bulletin (January 1945) does not even mention the existence of Trotskyist organisations in Greece. The organ of the US Socialist Workers Party, Fourth International (February 1945) contains a documented article, Civil War in Greece, and the paragraph headed Trotskyism in Greece confines itself to generalities:
ELAS is ‘Trotskyist’ in one sense only – in the revolutionary instincts of its indomitable fighters, in their great capacity for struggle and sacrifice. But its programme and leadership has no resemblance to Trotskyism.
Further on it declares: “The Trotskyists will team to connect themselves with the masses and their struggles.” It adds that under the reign of terror unleashed by the Stalinists, this would take some time. Quatrième Internationale (no.22-24, September-November 1945) contains a note headed Greece which calls for the exposure of the murder of revolutionary militants in Greece by the Stalinists, and is followed by a preliminary list of names. Fourth International (October 1945), 39. reported in the Inside the Fourth International column that:
Papers of the International Communist Party (Fourth International), the only revolutionary party in Greece, are illegal. Members of that party are persecuted, hounded and quite frequently killed by both the government and the Stalinists.
In fact there were serious divergences between the International Secretariat and the Greek Trotskyists. On 25 November 1946 Michel Raptis (Pablo) wrote under the name of ‘Pilar’ to the Greek section:
`It is not a matter of conforming to the letter of every political resolution of the International. But it is not a matter, either, of taking a diametrically opposite line on such important questions as your attitude to the movement of the EAM and ELAS and to the events of December 1944.
Quatrième Internationale (October-November 1946) reported on the Unification Congress of July 1946, which produced the KDKE, and published the Congress manifesto:
Despite itself, despite its nationalist pronouncements, despite its policy of conciliation and class collaboration, the Greek Communist Party grouped around itself the forces which history set in motion and which, in the last analysis, were the forces of the proletarian revolution.
Rodolphe Prager stated that the Greek Trotskyists held a “generally dismissive attitude to the national movement”, that they distanced themselves from it, and held a neutralist position “hostile equally to the two factions in struggle” during the civil war:
The principle mistake was an inability to discern the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist character which was powerfully germinating in this mass movement, and its revolutionary dynamic, behind the bourgeois and Stalinist leaderships. Ignorance of this reality prevented the Trotskyists from understanding that in December 1944 the conflict could not be reduced to a confrontation between British imperialism on the one side and the Soviet bureaucracy and its supporters on the other. (R. Prager, Les congres de la Quatrième Internationale, Volume 2, pp.348-9, cf. R. Prager, The Fourth International During the Second World War, Revolutionary History, Volume 1 no.3, Autumn 1988, p.33)
It is not an easy question to answer. We have found in the archives of the International Secretariat a letter from George Vitsoris in which he protests against the omission from the manifesto of the Unification Congress of the slogan “Withdraw the British troops”, and considers “unacceptable” the fact that the manifesto does not say a word about the murder of the Trotskyists by the Stalinists.
31. A. Kedros, op. cit., p.512.
32. R. Prager, op. cit., p.2. This introduction does not appear in the English translation.
33. L.D. Trotsky, Bonapartism, Fascism and War, op. cit., p.414.
34. Op. cit., p.413.
35. Prager, op. cit., pp.13-4.
36. Op. cit., p.12.
37. Op. cit., p.221-3.
38. J.P. Cannon, Socialism on Trial, New York 1970, p.167.
39. One article by Van Heijenoort appeared in the September and November 1942 issues of Fourth International, with an editorial note in the October issue describing it as “a discussion article”. In an article dated June 1941, entitled Where is Europe Going?, Loris stated that the working class would lead the struggle against the Hitlerite occupation. He then emphasised the dialectical link between ‘national’ and ‘social’ liberation, in fact proletarian revolution, whilst he criticised the illusions that could arise from the national liberation movement. This article appeared in the October 1942 issue of La Verité. Loris wrote:
It is not the task of Marxists to impose this or that form of struggle which they themselves may prefer. The task is really to deepen, widen and make more systematic all the manifestations of resistance, to bring to them the spirit of organisation, and to open a broad perspective before them.
The article seems to criticise the European ‘revisionists’ on the national question. The 1942 article seems rather to be a polemic against the position of the SWP. One of the documents that Loris wrote in 1944 stresses as “one of the teachings of Bolshevism” its contempt for simple propaganda that merely tries to shed light on the virtues of Socialism, its “capacity to sense the aspirations of the masses and to take advantage of their progressive aspects”, and in knowing “how to conduct activities which can win the masses away from their conservative parties and leaders”. Much of the original documentation in the discussion was devoted to the Three Theses of the IKD, and to their position on the national question. We have not dealt with this question here, which involves open revisionism that conceals other divergences. In any case, the essential documents are in the second volume of Prager’s collection.
40. Compare La Révolution Française, 1/1940, and the different comments of J. Rabaut in Tout est Possible, pp.343-4, and J.P. Joubert in Revolutionaires dans la SFIO, pp.224-6.
41. Prager, op. cit., pp.92-101, and M. Dreyfus, Les Trotskystes pendant la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, Le Mouvement Sociale, pp.20-2.
42. P Broué, Chen Duxiu and the Fourth International, 1938-42, Revolutionary History, Volume 2 no.4, Spring 1990, pp.16-21.
43.The text of this resolution of the SWP’s National Committee appeared in Quatrième Internationale, no.11-12-13, September-November 1944, under the title of Perspectives and Tasks of the European Revolution. It was accompanied by an introduction which emphasised “the remarkable agreement between the general line of this document and that of the resolution of the European Conference of February 1944”.
44. Serge Lambert, Tradition Revolutionaire et ‘Parti Nouveau’ Communiste en Italie, 1942-45, thesis in political science, Grenoble 1985.
45. The clandestine issue of La Verité (10 February 1944) carried a front-page headline, The Banners of the Red Army will Join with Our Red Banners. Felix Morrow in the SWP Internal Bulletin (Volume 8, no 8) quotes this article and mentions analogous positions adopted by the Bolshevik-Leninist Party in India, La Voix de Lenin in Belgium, El Militante in Chile, etc. Of course, the fact that they all reacted in the same way is not necessarily a sign that they agreed on principle. It may also express conservative responses or overriding pressures upon them.
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