Saturday, January 11, 2014

HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor An Historic Leader Of The Russian Revolution-Leon Trotsky

 
 EVERY JANUARY WE HONOR LENIN OF RUSSIA, ROSA LUXEMBURG OF POLAND, AND KARL LIEBKNECHT OF GERMANY AS THREE LEADERS OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT. DURING THE MONTH WE ALSO HONOR OTHER HISTORIC LEADERS AS WELL ON THIS SITE.

BOOK REVIEW

THIS IS A REVIEW OF LEON TROTSKY’S HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, ORIGINALLY WRITTEN IN 1930-32, (EDITION USED HERE-THREE VOLUMES, PATHFINDER PRESS, NEW YORK, 1980) BY AN UNREPENTANT DEFENDER OF THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION OF 1917. HERE’S WHY.

Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution is partisan history at its best. One does not and should not, at least in this day in age, ask historians to be ‘objective’. One simply asks that the historian present his or her narrative and analysis and get out of the way. Trotsky meets that criterion. Furthermore, in Trotsky’s case there is nothing like having a central actor in the drama he is narrating, who can also write brilliantly and wittily, give his interpretation of the important events and undercurrents swirling around Russia in 1917.

If you are looking for a general history of the revolution or want an analysis of what the revolution meant for the fate of various nations after World War I or its affect on world geopolitics look elsewhere. E.H. Carr’s History of the Russian Revolution offers an excellent multi-volume set that tells that story through the 1920’s. Or if you want to know what the various parliamentary leaders, both bourgeois and Soviet, were thinking and doing from a moderately leftist viewpoint read Sukhanov’s Notes on the Russian Revolution. For a more journalistic account John Reed’s classic Ten Days That Shook the World is invaluable. Trotsky covers some of this material as well. However, if additionally, you want to get a feel for the molecular process of the Russian Revolution in its ebbs and flows down at the base in the masses where the revolution was made Trotsky’s is the book for you.

The life of Leon Trotsky is intimately intertwined with the rise and decline of the Russian Revolution in the first part of the 20th century. As a young man, like an extraordinary number of talented Russian youth, he entered the revolutionary struggle against Czarism in the late 1890’s. Shortly thereafter he embraced what became a lifelong devotion to a Marxist political perspective. However, except for the period of the 1905 Revolution when Trotsky was Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet and later in 1912 when he tried to unite all the Russian Social Democratic forces in an ill-fated unity conference, which goes down in history as the ‘August Bloc’, he was essentially a free lancer in the international socialist movement. At that time Trotsky saw the Bolsheviks as “sectarians” as it was not clear to him time that for socialist revolution to be successful the reformist and revolutionary wings of the movement had to be organizationally split. With the coming of World War I Trotsky drew closer to Bolshevik positions but did not actually join the party until the summer of 1917 when he entered the Central Committee after the fusion of his organization, the Inter-District Organization, and the Bolsheviks. This act represented an important and decisive switch in his understanding of the necessity of a revolutionary workers party to lead the socialist revolution.

As Trotsky himself noted, although he was a late-comer to the concept of a Bolshevik Party that delay only instilled in him a greater understanding of the need for a vanguard revolutionary workers party to lead the revolutionary struggles. This understanding underlined his political analysis throughout the rest of his career as a Soviet official and as the leader of the struggle of the Left Opposition against the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution. After his defeat at the hands of Stalin and his henchmen Trotsky wrote these three volumes in exile in Turkey from 1930 to 1932. At that time Trotsky was not only trying to draw the lessons of the Revolution from an historian’s perspective but to teach new cadre the necessary lessons of that struggle as he tried first reform the Bolshevik Party and the Communist International and then later, after that position became politically untenable , to form a new, revolutionary Fourth International. Trotsky was still fighting from this perspective in defense of the gains of the Russian Revolution when a Stalinist agent cut him down. Thus, without doubt, beyond a keen historian’s eye for detail and anecdote, Trotsky’s political insights developed over long experience give his volumes an invaluable added dimension not found in other sources on the Russian Revolution.

As a result of the Bolshevik seizure of power the so-called Russian Question was the central question for world politics throughout most of the 20th century. That central question ended (or left center stage, to be more precise) with the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s. However, there are still lessons, and certainly not all of them negative, to be learned from the experience of the Russian Revolution. Today, an understanding of this experience is a task for the natural audience for this book, the young alienated radicals of Western society. For the remainder of this review I will try to point out some issues raised by Trotsky which remain relevant today.

The central preoccupation of Trotsky’s volumes reviewed here and of his later political career concerns the problem of the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the international labor movement and its national components. That problem can be stated as the gap between the already existing objective conditions necessary for beginning socialist construction based on the current level of capitalist development and the immaturity or lack of revolutionary leadership to overthrow the old order. From the European Revolutions of 1848 on, not excepting the heroic Paris Commune, until his time the only successful working class revolution had been in led by the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917. Why? Anarchists may look back to the Paris Commune or forward to the Spanish Civil War in 1936 for solace but the plain fact is that absent a revolutionary party those struggles were defeated without establishing the prerequisites for socialism. History has indicated that a revolutionary party that has assimilated the lessons of the past and is rooted in the working class, allied with and leading the plebeian masses in its wake, is the only way to bring the socialist program to fruition. That hard truth shines through Trotsky’s three volumes. Unfortunately, this is still the central problem confronting the international labor movement today.

Trotsky makes an interesting note that despite the popular conception at the time, reinforced since by several historians, the February overthrow of the Czarist regime was not as spontaneous as one would have been led to believe in the confusion of the times. He noted that the Russian revolutionary movement had been in existence for many decades before that time, that the revolution of 1905 had been a dress rehearsal for 1917 and that before the World War temporarily halted its progress another revolutionary period was on the rise. If there had been no such experiences then those who argue for spontaneity would have grounds to stand on. The most telling point is that the outbreak occurred in Petrograd, not exactly unknown ground for revolutionary activities. Moreover, contrary to the worshipers of so-called spontaneity, this argues most strongly for a revolutionary workers party to be in place in order to affect the direction of the revolution from the beginning.

All revolutions, and the Russian Revolution is no exception, after the first flush of victory over the overthrown old regime, face attempts by the more moderate revolutionary elements to suppress counterposed class aspirations, in the interest of unity of the various classes that made the initial revolution. Thus, we see in the English Revolution of the 17th century a temporary truce between the rising bourgeoisie and the yeoman farmers and pious urban artisans who formed the backbone of Cromwell’s New Model Army. In the Great French Revolution of the 18th century the struggle from the beginning depended mainly on the support of the lower urban plebian classes. Later other classes, particularly the peasantry through their parties, which had previously remained passive enter the arena and try to place a break on revolutionary developments.

Their revolutionary goals having been achieved in the initial overturn- for them the revolution is over. Those elements most commonly attempt to rule by way of some form of People’s Front government. This is a common term of art in Marxist terminology to represent a trans-class formation of working class and capitalist parties which have ultimately counterposed interests. The Russian Revolution also suffered under a Popular Front period under various combinations and guises supported by ostensible socialists, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, from February to October. One of the keys to Bolshevik success in October was that, with the arrival of Lenin from exile in April, the Bolsheviks shifted their strategy and tactics to a position of political opposition to the parties of the popular front. Later history has shown us in Spain in the 1930’s and more recently in Chile in the 1970’s how deadly support to such popular front formations can be for revolutionaries and the masses influenced by them. The various parliamentary popular fronts in France, Italy and elsewhere show the limitations in another less dramatic but no less dangerous fashion. In short, political support for Popular Fronts means the derailment of the revolution or worst. This is a hard lesson, paid for in blood, that all manner of reformist socialists try deflect or trivialize in pursuit of being at one with the ‘masses’. Witness today’s efforts, on much lesser scale, by ostensible socialists to get all people of ‘good will, etc.’, including liberal and not so liberal Democrats under the same tent in the opposition to the American invasion of Iraq.

One of Trotsky’s great skills as a historian is the ability to graphically demonstrate that within the general revolutionary flow there are ebbs and flows that either speed up the revolutionary process or slow it down. This is the fate of all revolutions and in the case of failed revolutions can determine the political landscape for generations. The first definitive such event in the Russian Revolution occurred in the so-called "April Days" after it became clear that the then presently constituted Provisional Government intended to continue participation on the Allied side in World War I and retain the territorial aspirations of the Czarist government in other guises. This led the vanguard of the Petrograd working class to make a premature attempt to bring down that government. However, the vanguard was isolated and did not have the authority needed to be successful at that time. The most that could be done was the elimination of the more egregious ministers. Part of the problem here is that no party, unlike the Bolsheviks in the events of the "July Days" has enough authority to hold the militants back, or try to. Theses events only underscore, in contrast to the anarchist position, the need for an organized revolutionary party to check such premature impulses. Even then, the Bolsheviks in July took the full brunt of the reaction by the government with the jailing of their leaders and suppression of their newspapers supported wholeheartedly by the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionary Parties.


The Bolsheviks were probably the most revolutionary party in the history of revolutions. They certainly were the most consciously revolutionary in their commitment to political program, organizational form and organizational practices. Notwithstanding this, before the arrival in Petrograd of Lenin from exile the Bolshevik forces on the ground were, to put it mildly, floundering in their attitude toward political developments, especially their position on so-called critical support to the Provisional Government (read, Popular Front). Hence, in the middle of a revolutionary upsurge it was necessary to politically rearm the party. This political rearmament was necessary to expand the party’s concept of when and what forces would lead the current revolutionary upsurge. In short, mainly through Lenin’s intervention, the Party needed to revamp its old theory of "the democratic dictatorship of the working class and the peasantry" to the new conditions which placed the socialist program i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat on the immediate agenda. Informally, the Bolsheviks, or rather Lenin individually, came to the same conclusions that Trotsky had analyzed in his theory of Permanent Revolution prior to the Revolution of 1905. This reorientation was not done without a struggle in the party against those forces who did not want to separate with the reformist wing of the Russian workers and peasant parties, mainly the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries.

This should be a sobering warning to those who argue, mainly from an anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist position, that a revolutionary party is not necessary. The dilemma of correctly aligning strategy and tactics even with a truly revolutionary party can be problematic. The tragic outcome in Spain in the 1930’s abetted by the confusion on this issue by the Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) and the Durrutti-led left anarchists, the most honestly revolutionary organizations at the time, painfully underscores this point. This is why Trotsky came over to the Bolsheviks and why he drew that lesson on the organization question very sharply for the rest of his political career.


The old-fashioned, poorly trained, inadequately led peasant-based Russian Army took a real beating at the hands of the more modern, mechanized and disciplined German armies on the Eastern Front in World War I. The Russian Army, furthermore, was at the point of disintegration just prior to the February Revolution. Nevertheless, the desperate effort on the part of the peasant soldier, essentially declassed from his traditional role on the land by the military mobilization, was decisive in overthrowing the monarchy. Key peasant reserve units placed in urban garrisons, and thus in contact with the energized workers, participated in the struggle to end the war and get back to the take the land while they were still alive. Thus from February on, the peasant army through coercion or through inertia was no longer a reliable vehicle for any of the various combinations of provisional governmental ministries to use. In the Army’s final flare-up in defense, or in any case at least remaining neutral, of placing all power into Soviet hands it acted as a reserve, an important one, but nevertheless a reserve. Only later when the Whites in the Civil War came to try to take the land did the peasant soldier again exhibit a willingness to fight and die. Such circumstances as a vast peasant war are not a part of today’s revolutionary strategy, at least in advanced capitalist society. In fact, today only under exceptional conditions would a revolutionary socialist party support, much less advocate the popular Bolshevik slogan-‘land to the tiller’ to resolve the agrarian question. The need to split the armed forces, however, remains.

Not all revolutions exhibit the massive breakdown in discipline that occurred in the Russian army- the armed organ that defends any state- but it played an exceptional role here. However, in order for a revolution to be successful it is almost universally true that the existing governmental authority can no longer rely on normal troop discipline. If this did not ocassionally occur revolution generally would be impossible as untrained plebeians are no match for trained soldiers. Moreover, the Russian peasant army reserves were exceptional in that they responded to the general democratic demand for "land to the tiller" that the Bolsheviks were the only party to endorse and, moreover, were willing to carry out to the end. In the normal course of events the peasant, as a peasant on the land, cannot lead a modern revolution in even a marginally developed industrial state. It has more often been the bulwark for reaction; witness its role in the Paris Commune and Bulgaria in 1923, for examples, more than it has been a reliable ally of the urban masses. However, World War I put the peasant youth of Russia in uniform and gave them discipline, for a time at least, that they would not have otherwise had to play even a a subordinate role in the revolution. Later revolutions based on peasant armies, such as China, Cuba and Vietnam, confirm this notion that only exceptional circumstances, mainly as part of a military formation, permit the peasantry a progressive role in a modern revolution.


Trotsky is politically merciless toward the Menshevik and Social Revolutionary leaderships that provided the crucial support for the Provisional Governments between February and October in their various guises and through their various crises. Part of the support of these parties for the Provisional Government stemmed from their joint perspectives that the current revolution was a limited bourgeois one and so therefore they could no go further than the decrepit bourgeoisie of Russia was willing to go. Given its relationships with foreign capital that was not very far. Let us face it, these allegedly socialist organizations in the period from February to October betrayed the interest of their ranks on the question of immediate peace, of the redistribution of the land, and a democratic representative government.

This is particularly true after their clamor for the start of the ill-fated summer offensive on the Eastern Front and their evasive refusal to convene a Constituent Assembly to ratify the redistribution of the land. One can chart the slow but then rapid rise of Bolsheviks influence in places when they did not really exist when the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, formerly the influential parties of those areas, moved to the right. All those workers, peasants, soldiers, whatever political organizations they adhered to formally, who wanted to make a socialist revolution naturally gravitated to the Bolsheviks. Such movement to the left by the masses is always the case in times of crisis in a period of revolutionary upswing. The point is to channel that energy for the seizure of power.

The ‘August Days’ when the ex-Czarist General Kornilov attempted a counterrevolutionary coup and Kerensky, head of the Provisional Government, in desperation asked the Bolsheviks to use their influence to get the Kronstadt sailors to defend that government points to the ingenuity of the Bolshevik strategy. A point that has been much misunderstood since then, sometimes willfully, by many leftist groups is the Bolshevik tactic of military support- without giving political support- to bourgeois democratic forces in the struggle against right wing forces ready to overthrow democracy. The Bolsheviks gave Kerensky military support while at the same time politically agitating, particularly in the Soviets and within the garrison, to overthrow the Provisional Government.

Today, an approximation of this position would take the form of not supporting capitalist war budgets, parliamentary votes of no confidence, independent extra-parliamentary agitation and action, etc. Granted this principled policy on the part of the Bolsheviks is a very subtle maneuver but it is miles away from giving blanket military and political support to forces that you will eventually have to overthrow. The Spanish revolutionaries in the 1930’s, even the most honest grouped in the Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) learned this lesson the hard way when that party, despite its equivocal political attitude toward the popular front, was suppressed and the leadership jailed by the Negrin government despite having military units at the front in the fight against Franco.

As I write this review we are in the fourth year of the American-led Iraq war. For those who opposed that war from the beginning or have come to oppose it the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution shows the way to really end a fruitless and devastating war. In the final analysis if one really wants to end an imperialist war one has to overthrow the imperialist powers. This is a hard truth that most of even the best of today’s anti-war activists have been unable to grasp. It is not enough to plead, petition or come out in massive numbers to ask politely that the government stop its obvious irrational behavior. Those efforts are helpful for organizing the opposition but not to end the conflict on just terms. The Bolsheviks latched onto and unleashed the greatest anti-war movement in history to overthrow a government which was still committed to the Allied war effort against all reason. After taking power in the name of the Soviets, in which it had a majority, the Bolsheviks in one of its first acts pulled Russia out of the war. History provides no other way for us to stop imperialist war. Learn this lesson.

The Soviets, or workers councils, which sprang up first in the Revolution of 1905 and then almost automatically were resurrected after the February 1917 overturn of the monarchy, are merely a convenient and appropriate organization form for the structure of workers power. Communists and other pro-Communist militants, including this writer, have at times made a fetish of this organizational form because of its success in history. As an antidote to such fetishism a good way to look at this form is to note, as Trotsky did, that a Soviet led by Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries does not lead to the seizure of power. That tells the tale. This is why Lenin, in the summer of 1917, was looking to the factory committees as an alternative to jump-start the second phase of the revolution.

Contrary to the anarchist notion of merely local federated forms of organization or no organization, national Soviets are the necessary form of government in the post- seizure of power period. However, they may not be adequate for the task of seizing power. Each revolution necessarily develops its own forms of organization. In the Paris Commune of 1871 the Central Committee of the National Guard was the logical locus of governmental power. In the Spanish Civil War of 1936 the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias and the factory committees could have provided such a focus. Enough said.

For obvious tactical reasons it is better for a revolutionary party to take power in the name of a pan-class organization, like the Soviets, than in the name of a single party like the Bolsheviks. This brings up an interesting point because, as Trotsky notes, Lenin was willing to take power in the name of the party if conditions warranted it. Under the circumstances I believe that the Bolsheviks could have taken it in their own name but, and here I agree with Trotsky, that it would have been harder for them to keep it. Moreover, they had the majority in the All Russian Soviet and so it would be inexplicable if they took power solely in their own name. That, after a short and unsuccessful alliance with the Left Social Revolutionary Party in government, it came down to a single party does not negate this conclusion. Naturally, a pro-Soviet multi-party system where conflicting ideas of social organization along socialist lines can compete is the best situation. However, history is a cruel taskmaster at times. That, moreover, as the scholars say, is beyond the scope this review and the subject for further discussion.

The question of whether to seize power is a practical one for which no hard and fast rules apply. An exception is that it important to have the masses ready to go when the decision is made. In fact, it is probably not a bad idea to have the masses a little overeager to insurrect. One mistaken assumption, however, is that power can be taken at any time in a revolutionary period. As the events of the Russian Revolution demonstrate this is not true because the failure to have a revolutionary party ready to roll means that there is a fairly short window of opportunity. In Trotsky’s analysis this can come down to a period of days. In the actual case of Russia he postulated that that time was probably between late September and December. That analysis seems reasonable. In any case, one must have a feel for timing in revolution as well as in any other form of politics. The roll call of unsuccessful socialist revolutions in the 20th century in Germany, Hungary, Finland, Bulgaria, Spain, etc. only painfully highlights this point.

Many historians and political commentators have declared the Bolshevik seizure of power in October a coup d’etat. That is facile commentary. If one wants to do harm to the notion of a coup d’etat in the classic sense of a closed military conspiracy a la Blanqui this cannot stand up to examination. First, the Bolsheviks were an urban civilian party with at best tenuous ties to military knowledge and resources. Even simple military operations like the famous bank expropriations after the 1905 Revolution were mainly botched and gave them nothing but headaches with the leadership of the pre- World War I international social democracy. Secondly, and decisively, Bolshevik influence over the garrison in Petrograd and eventually elsewhere precluded such a necessity. Although, as Trotsky noted, conspiracy is an element of any insurrection this was in fact an ‘open’ conspiracy that even the Kerensky government had to realize was taking place. The Bolsheviks relied on the masses just as we should.

With almost a century of hindsight and knowing what we know now it is easy to see that the slender social basis for the establishment of Soviet power by the Bolsheviks in Russia was bound to create problems. Absent international working class revolution, particularly in Germany, which the Bolsheviks factored into their decisions to seize power, meant, of necessity, that there were going to be deformations even under a healthy workers regime. One, as we have painfully found out, cannot after all build socialism in one country. Nevertheless this begs the question whether at the time the Bolsheviks should have taken power. A quick look at the history of revolutions clearly points out those opportunities are infrequent. You do not get that many opportunities to seize power and try to change world history for the better so you best take advantage of the opportunities when they present themselves.

As mentioned above, revolutionary history is mainly a chronicle of failed revolutionary opportunities. No, the hell with all that. Take working class power when you can and let the devil take the hinder post. Let us learn more than previous generations of revolutionaries, but be ready. This is one of the political textbooks you need to read if you want to change the world. Read it.

 

 

 

 
***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II…

 

 

…she was crazy to dance, could hardly wait from week to week for the Friday night USO dance to show off her stuff, her proper dance step stuff, to the soldiers and sailors who were being feted. Trouble was while she was crazy to dance, saw her better self through dancing she had, oh no, two left feet. And it was not like she hadn’t tried to correct the problem by going to Miss Sadie’s Saturday dance classes to get a handle on her problem. It wasn’t like she didn’t try to avoid those precious dance partner toes but to no avail. It got so that when she showed up on Friday nights guys would head the other way, not obviously but the other way. And so it went through the first year of the war, so it went until she found out that one did not have to dance the slow ones, do some mangled foxtrot or some hideous waltz but one could swing, one could do jitter-bug. And she did and all the guys, those sullen soldiers and sailors, noticed that it did not mean a thing because she now had that swing…    

 

Friday, January 10, 2014

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-With the Masses, Against the Stream-French Trotskyism in the Second World War

...the question of the right revolutionary response to imperialist war, and whatever else they were (vehicles for colonial liberation struggles, etc.) WWI and WWII were such wars, was developed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks during World War I. 

That position of revolutionary defeatism for your imperialist homeland however has been a tough nut to crack no more so that during WWII when the long knives were very sharp  and it was easy to become defensist for the losing imperialist side like in France during the Occupation.  As recent wars like the American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have shown it is relatively easy (hell even bourgeois politician have fed at that trough) to oppose your side in the  wars aims it pursues it is another to call for its defeat as the lesser evil in the class struggle. Yet as the Bolshevik example showed there is not much wiggly room on this question to drive the struggle forward.   
 
 


Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm


Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.

Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.

 

The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff. 

******** 

Ian H. Birchall

With the Masses, Against the Stream-French Trotskyism in the Second World War


Revolutionary History, Vol.1, No.4, Winter 1988-89. Used by permission.
The following piece, an extended review of two French works on the history of Trotskyism in that country during the war, was written in 1981 by Ian Birchall of the Socialist Workers Party for his Party’s theoretical quarterly International Socialism. It was not published at the time, apparently because it was considered somewhat esoteric. The article is thus an attempt to make known some of the material available in French and to attempt some sort of analysis from the standpoint of the SWP.
The Editorial Board of Revolutionary History is very pleased to publish this article. We have no doubt that it will engender considerable disagreement and hope that those who have differences with Comrade Birchall on some of’ the points that he raises will take them up in their own journals or will write to us.

For Marxists, the Second World War remains an unsolved enigma. Yet it is one which continues to haunt us. The world we live in today is still, to a large extent, that of the ‘spheres of influence’ carved out by the victorious powers. And as our own crisis deepens, the poisonous doctrines of Nazism and Fascism swim once more to the surface. In fighting them we have quite legitimately mobilised the traditions of anti-Fascism. Yet it is necessary to be aware that those traditions are deeply rooted in the ideology of an imperialist war.
There can be no simple formula to resolve the enigma. The dangers of uncritical support for the Allied cause and of capitulation to the worst varieties of nationalism are all too apparent in the grotesque record of the Stalinist parties. Yet to argue that it made no difference whether or not Hitler was victorious is to collapse into the unrealistic sectarianism of the Comintern’s Third Period. The Allies did demolish Fascism (except in Spain and Portugal), and in some countries at least their victory did restore the rights of political and trade union organisation. Yet they did so at the price of – and in large measure in order to achieve – the strangling of a potential revolution.
The enigma may be illuminated, if not solved, by examining how those revolutionaries who lived – and died – during the war elaborated their line. The case in France, where one of the strongest Trotskyist currents in Europe had to fight for four years against the Gestapo and the Stalinists in order to maintain independent proletarian politics, is of particular interest. Two recent books have made available much of the documentation on this period. [1]
The Trotskyist movement entered the war armed with a theoretical perspective developed by Trotsky in the extensive writings of his final year, notably the Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution of May 1940, written by Trotsky himself. When compared with the confusion and opportunism emanating from the reformist and Stalinist parties, Trotsky’s analyses were lucid and principled. They were, however, to prove wrong on a number of key questions.
Essentially, Trotsky believed the coming war would produce a cataclysmic upheaval in the world order. The political regime in Russia, he claimed, would ‘not survive the war’. [2] And in the West the consequences would be equally catastrophic:
‘All countries will come out of the war so ruined that the standard of living for the workers will be thrown back a hundred years. Reformist unions are possible only under the regime of bourgeois democracy. But the first to be vanquished in the war will be the thoroughly rotten democracy. In its definitive downfall it will drag with it all the workers’ organisations which serve as its support. Capitalist reaction will destroy them ruthlessly. [3]
In such a perspective there was no place for reformist politics. The Comintern was ‘already a corpse’ and the Second International was being ‘killed by the present war for the second time and, one must think, this time forever’. [4] Trotsky was even confident enough to name names:
Attlee and Pollitt, Blum and Thorez work in the same harness. In case of war the last remaining distinctions between them will vanish. All of them, together with bourgeois society as a whole, will be crushed under the wheel of history. [5]
By 1946 Attlee and Blum became Prime Ministers, Thorez headed France’s largest political party, and even Pollitt had seen his party achieve greater size and influence than at any time before or since.
The predictions had political implications. If reformism was, in effect, already dead, then the politics of the United Front, of slowly winning reformist mist workers away from their organisations by patient engagement in struggles for limited objectives, had no meaning. Socialism or barbarism was the immediate choice, and the Fourth International, whose sections at best counted their membership in hundreds, had to win millions within the space of a few years. The situation invited a search for short-cuts, in particular the pseudo-magic of ‘transitional demands’.
Trotsky sharply rejected any notion of taking sides in the war:
By his victories and bestialities, Hitler provokes naturally the sharp hatred of workers the world over. But between this legitimate hatred of workers and the helping of his weaker but less reactionary enemies is an unbridgeable gulf. The victory of the imperialists of Great Britain and France would not be less frightful for the ultimate fate of mankind than that of Hitler and Mussolini. Bourgeois democracy cannot be saved. By helping their bourgeoisie against foreign Fascism, the workers would only accelerate the victory of Fascism in their own country. The task posed by history is not to support one part of the imperialist system against another but to make an end of the system as a whole. [6]
Just as in 1914, Trotsky was urging his followers to swim against the stream. In doing so, he cut through the ideological claptrap of the ‘democracies’ opposed to Hitler. What he failed to do was to offer any real indication of a strategy which would enable the tiny Trotskyist current to relate to the broad anti-Fascist movement that would emerge in occupied Europe. [7]
At the start of the war French Trotskyism was in a state of some disarray. Entry into the PSOP and the subsequent disintegration of that party had left the movement deeply divided, [8] and the rapid military collapse of France followed by the German occupation left militants dispersed and disoriented. However, clandestine organisation and publication were fairly rapidly resumed, and four groupings emerged. Firstly, the pre-war Parti Ouvrier Internationaliste (POI), which had been deeply divided by entry into the PSOP, regrouped; initially it did not resume its title of party, but, recognising its modest potential, took the name of French Committees for the Fourth. At the end of 1942 it again adopted the name POI. This grouping was probably the largest, yet its membership was only about three to four hundred, almost all under the age of 25. [9] It had a clandestine printing press in the cellar of a suburban villa near Paris, and its paper La Verité appeared regularly. [10]
Militants of the pre-war Parti Communiste Internationaliste came together to form the Comité Communiste Internationaliste pour la construction de la IVe Internationale (CCI), which published the paper La Seule Voie. This was a tighter-knit group, more orientated to theory, which only very gradually developed an agitational practice.
Thirdly there was the Octobre group, which had evolved out of the pre-war Abondanciste movement, and developed towards Trotskyist positions. And finally there was the Lutte de Classes group which had broken from the rest of the French Trotskyist movement in 1940, primarily over its insistence on tighter organisational forms.
Early in 1944 the POI, CCI and Octobre groups agreed to unite into a single organisation, the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI), which became the French section of the Fourth International. Only the Lutte de Classes group stood aside from the reunification Рit was the forerunner of the Lutte Ouvri̬re grouping of today.

Difficulties

Working illegally under a repressive regime, the French Trotskyists had the greatest difficulties in obtaining reliable information on which to base a world analysis. Contacts with other sections of the International were tenuous and fraught with danger. The French Trotskyists always put the possibility of a German revolution at the centre of their perspective; but reliable information from Germany was hard to come by, and they seem to have greatly overestimated the indications of opposition in that country.
In this context, it is hardly surprising that all the groupings clung tenaciously to Trotsky’s 1940 analyses. As late as February 1944 the European Conference of the FI predicted that reformism would try to save capitalism again but would fail in the face of the absolute inability of capitalism to offer the slightest conciliating reform and in the face of the irresistible upsurge of the masses’. [11]
The Lutte de Classes grouping essentially shared this prospective, writing in May 1943:
In fact European capitalism cannot live on after this war without lowering the standard of living to its furthest limit and establishing a dictatorial political order. Longer and deeper economic crises than all those we have hitherto known, massive and permanent unemployment, low wages, rising prices, political slavery, these are the post-war perspectives if we permit capitalism a further spell of life. [12]
As for the CCI, they insisted as late as November 1943 that the reality of the American intervention in the war was, despite appearances, to oppose Russia rather than Germany:
The United States wants to preserve Hitler as a counter-revolutionary gendarme in Europe for as long as it will take them to overcome the resistance of the Stalinist bureaucracy, whose existence does not allow them the freedom of manoeuvre they need against the European revolution. [13]
The POI’s position was that revolutionaries could not simply ignore this upsurge of opposition, however nationalist it might be. Their position was confirmed by a resolution of the European Secretariat of the FI in December 1943:
Faced with the partly spontaneous character of the partisan movement, an expression of the open and inevitable revolt of broad layers of working people against German imperialism and against the order and the state of the native bourgeoisie who in their eyes are responsible for their poverty and suffering, the Bolshevik-Leninists are obliged to take into account this will to struggle on the part of the masses and to try, despite the many dangers deriving from the nationalist forms that this struggle assumes, to orient it towards class aims. [14]
This analysis of progressive nationalism echoes an earlier statement of the European Secretariat from 1942:
The national movement of the masses, far from having strictly nationalist roots, goes deep into one of the most fundamental contradictions of the capitalist system in the imperialist epoch; it is above all the manifestation in the form of nationalism of the radicalisation of the petit-bourgeoisie, a new expression of the revolt of the middle classes against big finance capital. [15]
In 1941 the POI had gone so far as to find in ‘the Gaullism of the workers, peasants and petit-bourgeoisie something basically healthy which means the will to fight to free the country from the Hitlerite yoke and to re-establish democratic freedoms and social gains’. [16] But by 1942 La Verité made it clear there could be no question of Popular Frontism:
Unity can be established this very day in the struggle for wages, for food supplies, against deportations to Germany. But it cannot and must not be established around a programme which once more subordinates the working class to the bourgeoisie. It must on the contrary open the way to the struggle of the working class for power. [17]
The POI, then, was ambiguous and less than consistent in its attitude to nationalism. But, in a sense, this was an academic question. For although some tentative links were made with Jean Moulin in early 1943, the POI never actually entered the Resistance movement; the question of its relation to nationalism remained on the level of propaganda. [18] And even if they had entered, it is unlikely they would have had any significant impact, given their size in relation to that of the PCF. The Insurgie group, made up of former members of the Pivertist PSOP, who did join the Resistance in order to push it towards a revolutionary line, appear to have had no impact. [19]
The other tendencies, above all the Lutte de Classes group, were highly critical of the POI’s alleged concessions to nationalism; but they do not seem to have evolved any alternative strategy for intervening in the movement.
One practical question on which the French Trotskyists were able to do limited but significant work was fraternisation with occupying Germany soldiers. They were not, of course, the only people to do so. In terms of sheer quantity the PCF distributed far more propaganda aimed at German troops. But what they produced fell within the normal framework of military propaganda aimed at demoralising enemy forces. It was within the framework of these analyses that the French Trotskyists had to face the practical question of how to relate to the growing Resistance movement. The harsh conditions imposed by the occupiers, and the imposition of forced labour and deportation, drove thousands upon thousands of people into active opposition. From 1941 onwards the movement was dominated by two tendencies, Gaullism and the French Communist Party (PCF), and the latter often outdid the former in terms of crude nationalism; their slogan was ‘chacun son boche’ (let everyone kill a Hun).

Testimony

For the POI, on the other hand, the question of the German Revolution was central to their perspective; German workers in uniform were to be perceived, not as an object of a military tactic, but as part of the subject of revolutionary change.
La Verité reported, perhaps over optimistically, on instances of discontent and mutiny in the German ranks. A paper aimed at German soldiers, Arbeiter und Soldat (Worker and Soldier), was produced by a young German Trotskyist, Paul Widelin, and distributed in Paris and especially in Brest. [20]
Such work is a testimony to the courage and dedication of those involved, but its actual effectiveness seems to have been limited. However, the political line which led to this work ensured that the Trotskyists clearly demarcated themselves from the political line of the PCF, which supported and organised acts of individual violence against members of the occupying forces. The Trotskyists opposed this, in terms of classical Leninist opposition to terrorism as well as because of their perspective towards the German proletariat. As La Verité put it:
The terrorist act creates a barrier between French workers and German soldiers, but no victory is possible without unity between them. [21]
The potential of the fraternisation policy is shown by the ferocity of the repression exercised against it. In 1943 the Gestapo discovered a meeting in Brest and seventeen German soldiers and a French Trotskyist, Robert Cruau, were shot. In July 1944 Widelin was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured and left for dead; he was found and taken to hospital, but the Gestapo discovered him and this time succeeded in killing him.
By 1944 there were a number of cases of desertions and mutinies in the German occupying army – Angers, Correze, Beziers, Dijon, etc. In many cases, however, the soldiers in question were not in fact Germans, but soldiers of other nationalities – Tartars, Georgians and so on – who had been integrated into the army of occupation.
On balance, we can say that the Trotskyist strategy of fraternisation was politically correct, but that the hopes of a significant response were very over-optimistic. The key factor, which both confirmed the validity of the perspective and prevented its success, was the determination of the United States that Hitler should be crushed militarily and that there should be no question of a popular anti-Hitler rising in Germany which could threaten the security of capitalist domination of occupied Europe. Hence the publication of the Morgenthau Plan, which declared the intention to reduce Germany to the level of an agricultural country, and the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender. Though this may have prolonged the war, it effectively stifled any revolt in the German army or working class. [22] Given the relation of forces, there was little or nothing the revolutionary left could do to alter this situation.
The other question which helped define the French Trotskyists’ attitude to the war was, of course, the characterisation of the Russian state. Here ‘orthodox Trotskyism’ was unchallenged. (At the first Congress of the PCI in 1944 one delegate argued that Russia was imperialist, and then left to join the Council Communists.) Theoretically, this was a serious defect; but in practice the consequences were not so grave, since the movement still held firmly to Trotsky’s contention that the best way to defend Russia was to strengthen the international working class and advance the cause of world revolution. The tendency to abstract the ‘defence of the Soviet Union’ from a revolutionary context and to glorify the Red Army as an agency of Socialist expansion still lay in the future. But the analysis of Russian society as essentially unstable did undoubtedly reinforce the tendency to develop a cataclysmic perspective of events at the end of the war. In January 1944 the European Conference of the FI declared:
The war, making contradictions of the Russian economy intolerably acute, has inescapably struck the hour for the liquidation of the Russian bureaucracy. [23]
But, although in retrospect we might wish to clarify certain aspects of their analysis, the real problem for French Trotskyism in the Second World War was not the political perspective; it was the ability to influence events. With a real implantation they might well have been effective; but the movement entered the war with no such implantation, and ended it little better off.
The key question, therefore, was their relation to the mass of workers still under the influence of reformist ideas. And here their continued adherence to Trotsky’s perspectives of 1940 was to prove disastrous. The French Trotskyists remained convinced that there could be no post-war revival of bourgeois democracy, and hence no political space for reformism. Commenting on the impact of the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943, La Verité declared:
These are only the first echoes of the crisis which will soon sweep away Stalinism as an ideology foreign to the proletariat. [24]
Meanwhile, of course, the PCF, working inside the Resistance on the basis of essentially nationalist politics, was growing rapidly. And, since the new recruits were being won to an openly nationalist and reformist programme, there could be no hope that they would be disillusioned by their leaders and seek an alternative to the left.
 

Economic

A central problem was therefore the relation of the economic struggle to political struggle. Undoubtedly the working class bore the heaviest burden during the occupation – wage-freeze, anti-strike laws, unemployment and longer hours. From 1942 workers were deported to work in Germany. And the fightback that came often started around economic rather than immediate political issues. The miners’ strike of May 1941, the first major struggle against the occupiers, began with demands for money, bread and soup. Strikes continued during the occupation, and despite the fact that employers could draw on support from the German military authorities, some struggles were won.
Important efforts were made to work within the industrial milieu. By 1944 Trotskyist papers had appeared for a number of industrial groups – firefighters, railway workers, miners, telephonists – though most of them were short lived. But the tendency to seek shortcuts was illustrated by the decision, in 1943, of the CCI to ‘industrialise’ all its student members – several of whom succeeded in creating small factory groups. The Lutte de Classes group gave priority to factory organisation.
Yet despite the determination shown by the militants, the task of industrial implantation presented enormous problems. On the one hand was the danger of simply submerging oneself into the day-today economic struggles. In July 1944 the PCI internal bulletin reported on the success of the members in Nantes in producing a workers’ paper Front Ouvrier. This had taken up local grievances – for example poor conditions in a factory canteen – and had become very popular among the workers, who enthusiastically helped to distribute it. Yet the paper failed to draw out a clear political line; as a result many workers believed that the paper was produced by the PCF. [25]
Yet on the other hand militants of a tiny organisation found it difficult to integrate with their fellow-workers; as an article in the POI internal bulletin from April 1943 puts it:
Our comrades don’t go to the canteen with their workmates because they have too many other things to do, and they’re wrong. They change address frequently and local contacts suffer as a result. This tends to make Bolshevik-Leninists a sort of social category which is alien to the others, and having only rare and difficult points of contact with the others. [26]
Moreover, for quite a long time the Trotskyists seem to have neglected, under the conditions of illegality, the question of trade union work. Only in 1944 did the PCI move to a position of stressing the fight inside the unions. The PCF, on the other hand, had not only built the CGT in clandestinity, but also worked inside the pro-Vichy official unions. [27] It was this work that undoubtedly gave the PCF the implantation that enabled it to carry out its non-revolutionary line in 1944-45.
Isolation made serious application of the United Front tactic difficult. The strategy of the ‘front ouvrier’ (workers’ front) adopted at the beginning of 1944 aimed to regroup revolutionary workers into workers’ groups as a first step towards the establishment of workers’ committees. [28] In practice such a strategy was both too ambitious and too late.
Early in 1944, the PCF decided to build armed groups of workers in the factories (patriotic workers’ militias). Initially La Verité denounced these as a ‘nationalist trap’, and it was only towards the end of May that the line changed and the PCI called on workers to ‘join the militias in your factories, whatever label they have, and make them into effective workers’ militias’. [29] Once again, this was too late for effective United Front work.
In August 1944, at the moment of the liberation of Paris the PCI issued an appeal for a United Front with the PCF and the Socialist Party. Needless to say, no reply was ever received; without any prior preparation in terms of United Front at the base, the mass reformist parties could afford to treat the Trotskyists with contempt. [30]
It is, of course, a frequent phenomenon for small groupings to make their own weakness into a virtue; and the French Trotskyist movement was no exception. The worst offender in this respect was the grouping around La Seule Voie. This argued right up until 1943 that the key task was not to work among the masses, but rather to form a disciplined and theoretically trained cadre which would eventually be able to take advantage of a changed situation. Against this the POI grouping insisted that a cadre could be trained and a party built only through the experience of involvement in the mass struggle. [31]
In retrospect the 1944 fusion of the POI and the CCI may be seen as less than the major step forward which it appeared to offer at the time. If the POI had carried on with its own more open orientation, instead of compromising with the much more unhealthy sectarian elements in the CCI [32], it might have had more chance of taking advantage of the situation that opened up in 1944. The pursuit or ‘Trotskyist unity’ meant that much time and energy was diverted into internal debate and negotiation.
The Normandy landings in June 1944 opened up a new social dynamic. For the Lutte de Classes group nothing had changed; it refused to seek the right to publish legally and its paper continued to appear as a clandestine publication, arguing:
Today the bourgeoisie is trying to manoeuvre the Fourth International movement in France by granting permission to appear legally to a paper which claims to belong to the movement. We denounce this manoeuvre, and we also denounce the compromise of those who believe that they can really fight against imperialist war with the authorisation and under the control of bourgeois censorship. [33]
The PCI’s line in La Verité was rather more sensitive to the possibilities of the new situation:
The PCI says to workers: you’ve had enough of the war; you want to be really liberated; trust no-one but your own class. Don’t trust Eisenhower. Get organised today in militias, stay grouped in your own factory which is your bastion; don’t let yourself be mobilised in the army of liberation; prepare for a new June 1936: you must elect your factory committee, your soviet, to free yourself from your proletarian slavery. [34]
To put this line into practice was quite another matter. Workers’ committees were set up in many places; and if the PCF had a tight grip in many cases, militants of the PCI took the initiative or played leading roles in a number of cases. Often, however, they did so on the basis of personal credibility rather than as representatives of a distinct political current; certainly they were quite unable to challenge the PCF’s grip on the majority of the class. [35]
On the contrary, the reformist forces were able effectively to stifle the voice of the POI; La Verité was persistently, under PCF pressure, refused permission to appear legally. The novelist Andre Malraux and Gaston Deferre (who recently served in Mitterrand’s cabinet) were among those who conspired at this suppression of press freedom. [36]
From now on the movement was downhill. While immediate seizure of power was unlikely in 1944, a rising tide of struggle might have produced a revolutionary situation within two or three years. Instead, the PCF co-opted and tamed the movement. The Trotskyist movement retained a certain degree of influence up to the time of the Renault strike in 1947, before falling apart in a series of debilitating internal disputes. [37]
The story of French Trotskyism in the Second World War is, despite the enormous courage and determination of those involved, one of failure. To ask whether that failure was inevitable can only be an exercise in idle speculation. What we can learn from that experience is, firstly, the possibility of fighting for principled internationalism even against enormous odds; and secondly the danger, even in the deepest crisis, of underestimating the power of reformism.
Ian Birchall

Notes

1. J. Pluet-Despatin, Les Trotskystes et la Guerre 1940-1944, Paris 1980; Y. Craipeau, Contre Vents et Marees, Paris, 1977. Pluet-Despatin’s work is essentially academic in tone, based on the laborious attempt to reassemble what remain of the clandestine publications of the period. Craipeau was a leading figure of the French Trotskyist movement until 1947. His work gains from the insights of personal experience, but often seems to be written as a justification of Craipeau’s positions against those of his political opponents.
2. L. Trotsky, On the Eve of World War II, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, New York 1973, p.18.
3. L. Trotsky, Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution, ibid., p.213. Trotsky’s positions caused problems for some of his more dogmatic followers in the post-war period. Thus James P. Cannon wrote: ‘We disagree with some people who carelessly think the war is over ... The war is not over, and the revolution which we said would issue from the war in Europe is not taken off the agenda’. (The Militant, 17 November 1945) There is, of course, a bizarre logic to Cannon’s comments; since the Second World War there have been over a hundred local or civil wars; virtually every one of them can be traced back to unresolved conflicts stemming from the Second World War. Trotsky was right to see that the war would solve nothing; wrong in failing to see that the system would find new ways of patching itself up for a comparatively long period.
4. L. Trotsky, Stalin – Hitler’s Quartermaster, op. cit., p.80 and Manifesto ..., ibid., p.208.
5. L. Trotsky, Progressive Paralysis, ibid., p.43.
6. L. Trotsky, Manifesto ..., ibid., p.221.
7. Trotsky further muddied the waters by his advocacy that the American SWP should pursue what came to be known as the Proletarian Military Policy. Trotsky’s argument was that the SWP should not oppose conscription. ‘We are absolutely in favour of compulsory military training and in the same way for conscription. Conscription? Yes. By the bourgeois state’! No.’ (On Conscription, ibid., p.321) ‘We will defend the United States with a workers’ army, with workers’ officers, with a workers government, etc.’ (American Problems, ibid., p.333) What such a demand could mean on the part of a tiny group like the SWP is quite unclear. It presents an unrealisable and hence abstract alternative, which in practice leads to a capitulation to the Roosevelt government’s war effort. Equally lamentable are some of the arguments that Trotsky used to defend his position: ‘The Institute of Public Opinion established that over 70 per cent of workers are in favour of conscription ... We place ourselves on the same ground as the 70 per cent of the workers.’ (How to Really Defend Democracy, ibid., p345) A revolutionary policy based on opinion polls would lead to some strange conclusions. ‘Conscription under workers’ control’ has no more merit than the call for ‘incomes policy under workers’ control’ hawked in some Trotskyist circles a few decades later.
8. Cf. I. Birchall, Too Much. Too Little. Too Late, International Socialism 2/13.
9. Y. Craipeau, op. cit., p.93.
10. For the sake of simplicity, this group will be referred to as the POI throughout.
11. Pluet-Despatin. op. cit., p.160.
12. ibid., p.139.
13. ibid., p.120.
14. Craipeau, op. cit.. p.203.
15. Pluet-Despatin. op. cit., pp.86-7.
16. ibid., p.84.
17. Craipeau, op. cit., pp.112-3.
18. ibid., p.181.
19. ibid. p.205.
20. Cf. ibid., pp.129-30. By the nature of things, few copies of such publications survived, and there seems to be a doubt as to how many issues of Arbeiter und Soldat appeared.
21. La Verité, 15 March 1942: Craipeau. op. cit., p.120.
22. For a confirmation of this analysis from a source which can scarcely be suspected of Trotskyism, cf. Chester Wilmot, The Struggle for Europe, London 1959, p.632: ‘By coupling the Morgenthau Plan with the demand for “Unconditional Surrender” Goebbels convinced the mass of the German people that their only hope of saving the Fatherland and themselves lay in giving unconditional obedience to the Führer and unconditional resistance to their enemies ... the underground opposition, crippled and disrupted by the purge which followed the ill-fated attentat of 20 July, was powerless.’
23. Craipeau, op. cit., p250.
24. La Verité; 30 July 1943: Craipeau. op. cit., p.209.
25. ibid., p.260.
26. Pluet-Despatin, op. cit., p.145.
27. ibid., pp.192-3.
28. Craipeau, op. cit., p.251.
29. ibid., pp.268-70.
30. Pluet-Despatin, op. cit., pp.200-2.
31. Cf Craipeau, op. cit.. pp 147-8 Pluet-Despatin. op. cit.. ppIO9. 131-3.
32. One of the leading members of the CCI was Pierre Lambert, who today leads the rightist-sectarian OCI.
33. Lutte de Classes, 19 September 1944, quoted by Y. Craipeau, La Liberation Confisquée, Paris 1978, p.104.
34. La Verité, 22 June 1944: Craipeau, op. cit., p.19.
35. ibid., pp.41-4, 53-7.
36. ibid., pp.105-7.
37. Cf. Duncan Hallas, Fourth International in Decline, International Socialism 1/60.

Revolutionary History, Vol.1, No.4, Winter 1988-89
Editor: Al Richardson
Deputy Editors: Ted Crawford and Mike Howgate
Business Manager: Barry Buitekant
Production and Design Manager: Paul Flewers
Editorial Board: John Archer, David Bruce, William Cazenave, Keith Hassell, Ravi Jamieson, George Leslie, Sam Levy, Jon Lewis, Charles Pottins, Jim Ring, Bruce Robinson and Ernest Rogers.
ISSN 0953-2382
Copyright © 1989 Socialist Platform, BCM 7646, London WC1N 3XX
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HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor The Historic Leader Of The German Spartacists-Karl Liebknecht   

    

 

EVERY JANUARY WE HONOR LENIN OF RUSSIA, ROSA LUXEMBURG OF POLAND, AND KARL LIEBKNECHT OF GERMANY AS THREE LEADERS OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT.

Karl Liebknecht Thumbnail Biography

The son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the founders of the SPD, Karl Liebknecht trained to be a lawyer and defended many Social Democrats in political trials. He was also a leading figure in the socialist youth movement and thus became a leading figure in the struggle against militarism.

As a deputy in the Reichstag he was one of the first SPD representatives to break party discipline and vote against war credits in December 1914. He became a figurehead for the struggle against the war. His opposition was so successful that his parliamentary immunity was removed and he was imprisoned.

Freed by the November revolution he immediately threw himself into the struggle and became with Rosa Luxemburg one of the founders of the new Communist Party (KPD). Along with Luxemburg he was murdered by military officers with the tacit approval of the leaders of the SPD after the suppression of the so-called “Spartacist Uprising” in January 1919.
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Markin comment:

Karl Liebknecht- A Model Anti-Warrior

This comment was written in 2006 but the main points hold true today:

I recently (2006) received a comment from someone whom I took earnestly to be perplexed by a section of a commentary that I had written where I stated that the minimum necessary for any anti-war politician was to vote against the Iraq war budget in a principled manner. Not the way former Democratic presidential candidate Massachusetts Senator John Kerry’s (and others) dipsy-doodled votes for and against various war budgetary requests in 2004. And certainly not the other variations on this theme performed recently by aspiring Democratic presidential candidates Senators Obama and Clinton in the lead-up to 2008. Nor, for that matter, the way of those who oppose the Iraq war budget but have no problems if those funds were diverted to wars in Afghanistan, Iran , North Korea, China or their favorite ‘evil state’ of the month. What really drew the commenter up short was that I stated this was only the beginning political wisdom and then proceeded to explain that even that would not be enough to render the politician political support if his or her other politics were weak.  The commenter then plaintively begged me to describe what politician would qualify for such support. Although I have noted elsewhere that some politicians, Democratic Congressman James McGovern of Massachusetts and presidential candidate Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich stand out from the pack, the real anti-war hero on principle we should look at is long dead-Karl Liebknecht, the German Social-Democratic leader from World War I. Wherever anyone fights against unjust wars Liebknecht’s spirit hovers over those efforts.  

…I do not believe we are lacking in physical courage. What has declined is political courage, and this seems in irreversible decline on the part of parliamentary politicians. That said, I want to finish up with a woefully inadequate political appreciation of Karl Liebknecht, member of the German Social Democratic faction in the Reichstag in the early 1900’s. Karl was also a son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, friend of Karl Marx and founder of the German Social Democratic Party in the 1860’s. On August 4, 1914, at the start of World War I the German Social Democratic Party voted YES on the war budget of the Kaiser against all its previous historic positions on German militarism. This vote was rightly seen as a betrayal of socialist principles. Due to a policy of parliamentary solidarity Karl Liebknecht also voted for this budget, or at least felt he had to go along with his faction. Shortly thereafter, he broke ranks and voted NO against the war appropriations. As pointed out below Karl Liebknecht did much more than that to oppose the German side in the First World War. THAT, MY FRIENDS, IS THE KIND OF POLITICAN I CAN SUPPORT. AS FOR THE REST- HOLD THEIR FEET TO THE FIRE.

One of the problems with being the son of a famous politician is that as founder of the early German Social Democratic Party Wilhelm Liebknecht's son much was expected of Karl, especially on the question of leading the German working class against German militarism. Wilhelm had done a prison term (with August Bebel) for opposition to the Franco-Prussian War. As for Karl I have always admired that famous picture of him walking across the Potsdam Plaza in uniform, subject to imprisonment after loss of his parliamentary immunity, with briefcase under arm ready to go in and do battle with the parliamentary cretins of the Social Democratic Party over support for the war budget. (THIS PICTURE CAN BE GOOGLED) That is the kind of leadership cadre we desperately need now. REMEMBER HIS FAMOUS SLOGANS- "HE MAIN ENEMY IS AT HOME’-‘NOT ONE PENNY, NOT ONE PERSON (updated by writer) FOR THE WAR." Wilhelm would have been proud.