ERNEST MANDEL, in an extended review (originally published in Quatrième Internationale magazine). and Page 13
"Trotsky was the boldest revolutionary theoretical thinker and strategist produced by the workers' movement in the twentieth century" revolutionary before Trotsky]. "The Left It only has any Opposition from 1923 had a correct idea of the danger of bureaucratic degeneration in the party and state. As Marx and Engels put it, ready-made there was a risk of the full time officials of the working class becoming ture. its oppressors" Page 14
SUPPLEMENT decrepitude of the ruling class.
This victory was going to unlock a process of international revolution which would eliminate the subjective weakness of the workers' movement in the most advanced industrial countries. If that did not happen, then holding on to proletarian power in Russia would become practically impossible. We can see that all the success and tragedy of the Revolution over the last 70 years was thus an-
However the loss of direct power by the Russian proletariat following the defeat of the first wave of intemational revolution did not take the form of capitalist restoration but the usurping of power by the bureaucracy. crises, Trotsky had not predicted that variant in 1905. It haunted him already in 1922, as it did Lenin from the same period. This is why the idea of
dominated Trotsky's thought and action for 15 years, if not right up to his assassination by a Stalinist agent. [The use of the term "Thermidor' refers to the French 1789 Revolution, being the month of the new French calendar in which the
Jacobins, led by Robespierre, were overthrown a wing among of the revolution which was reactionary but which did not restore the old feudal regime. Incidentally this analogy and concern was raised by Lenin
But like the forecast of the October victory as early as 1906 and the intuition of the universal value of the permanent revolution strategy for all
developed countries, the Thermidor concept is not simply a transposition of the French revolution experience to the Russian revolution.
sense within the framework of the internationalisation ogy. KIsaac Deutscher is a more bril Lant writer than Pierre Broué. His language is more striking, he has a more Lively style that is easier 1o read apd he has a gift for summarising ideas and events in an original way. But Broue is a better historian. He uses quotes and backs up his sources. He avoids
judgements. a And now, hunlike them time whene Deutscher was wting, het has been able to have access to and use supplementary documentary sources and a secondary litera-
Above all Deutscher's third volume was marked by the author s
of history and therefore of the class struggle that has been definitely opened up by the imperialist epoch.
As a class the Russian bourgeoisie had been smashed and to all intents and purposes eliminated by its defeat in the civil war. It could not return to power. Capitalist restorationist forces could only emerge from the new society created by the October revolution. They could only win out in an alliance with, and totally subordinated to, imperialism. But imperialism had itself gone into a profound, irreversible crisis with the First World War. It was challenged by successive waves of proletarian struggle in the industrial centres, by severe economic
by exacerbated inter-imperialist conflicts and by increasingly extensive uprisings by the colonial and semi-colonial peoples.
The fate of the remaining gains of the October revolution is therefore necessarily linked to the outcome of the class struggle - more precisely of all social-political conflict on a world scale. The question of Thermidor is inextricably combined with the process of world revolution and counter-revolution. Practically alone
communist leaders, Trotsky understood this as early as 1923. It is correctly one of the leitmotifs of Broué's book. This is also one of the reasons for what Trotsky saw as the decisive importance of building the Fourth International during the final period of his life. Nevertheless the significance and content of the Soviet Thermidor remained a central question in the factional struggles of Russian communists between 1923 and 1933. On this Broué's book gives us more details and some important conclusions compared to Deutscher's trilover-polemical approach to his subjection all the questions in dispute be tween the two men in the 1930s. An objective examination of these ques tions with the information we have today leads us to the conclusion that. i was Trotsky'S analysis and not Deutscher's that was right on most of them Two important examples bear this out First of allthe scope of the social/political crisis in France in cally closer to Trotsky 4934, culminating in the June 1936 General Strikemand the subsequent setive historian. He writes as a sup defeat of the 1938 General Strike, Deutscher clearly underestimated this, even if Trotsky's June 1936 for mulation "The French revolution has love for his subject e sentiments we begun' is debatable. Then there is the question of the foundation of the Fourth International in September or infallible politician
The Left Opposition from 1923
had a correct idea of the danger of bureaucratic degeneration in the party
and state, As Marx and Engels put it:
there was a risk of the full time offi-
cials of the working class becoming
its oppressors. That is what obviously
happened and can be summarised by
Trotsky's later formulation of the
proletariat (which brings with it many
consequences on the economic level).
But such a counter-revolution is
not a social counter-revolution, and
does not involve the restoration of
capitalism, just as the French Ther-
midor did not imply the restoration of
the Ancien Regime (the power of the
semi-feudal nobility and absolutist
monarchy). It was a political
counter revolution on the basis of a
society created by the victorious
For the Opposition this key dis
tinction was not clear in the first
period of its struggle. For a quite a lot
of its leaders Thermidor and capitalist
restoration were seen as the same
thing, or at least were put together in
an over-mechanical way. Then in the
struggle on three fronts against the
bureaucracy, the Nepmen (the new
medium scale urban bourgeoisie) and
the Kulak danger, the Opposition was
subjected to a stem test when Stalin
and his faction made a brutal ultra-
left turn in 1929 with forced collectivisation of agriculture and
breakneck industrialisation. One sec-
tor of the Opposition, Piatakov then
Preobrazhensky, Smilga and Radek,
saw this turn at least partially as a
vindication of their ideas. They used
it to justify their capitulation. The
other sectors of the Opposition who
kept fast to the fundamentally
proletarian, anti-bureaucratic and in1938, recognising the necessity to continue the work begun in 1933 of patiently building new revolutionary nucler both nationally and intematonally and of consolidating. this work as far as possible against the pounding it would receive from the effects of World War.
On these questions and on many more, Broue, who is obviously politi-
A than Deutscher was, is also a more objecporter of Trotsky but not as an a-enticalkor awestruck admirer He never hides his immense admiration and understand since we share them. But he does not mythologise some guru SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 17, Summer 1989
terationalist reasons for their struggle against Thermidorian degeneration, continued their battle ander Trotsky's leadership. This meant they had to clarify the content of the Soviet Thermidor. Broué takes us step by step through the development of the thinking of the Opposition and of Trotsky on this. It is a key part of his work.
Deutscher's hesitant and contradictory analysis on this does not hold up to an overall * historical examination. How can one speak of a 'revolution - 1. from above', as he describes the forced collectivisation, when the counter-revolution was carrying all before it in all areas of society? Trotsky illustrates this in a striking way in Revolution Betrayed, and his general analysis is backed up even more pungently by the radical criticism of this period in the glasnost of the Soviet Union today. The great development of French industry, made possible by the Jacobins, did not really begin until the Consulate and the Empire. But does that justify calling this period the "second revolution'? Were the Five-Year Plans the product of October or of Stalinism?
Today, when we can draw up a final balance sheet, little doubt remains. Anything positive built during the 1929-39 period was the product of the October revolution. But the mass assassinations, the famine, misery, oppression, wastage, and absurd inequalities which accompanied what was constructed were the product of Stalinism, the bureaucratic dictatorship and the power of a definite social layer. Deutscher seriously underestimated all this. The proletariat and true communists do not claim any co-responsibility for all those disasters. We have to relentlessly struggle against such crimes, as Trotsky and the trotskyists did.
The victorious political counterrevolution in Russia can only be overthrown by a political revolution. However there has always been a debate about the possible self-reform of the bureaucracy. Also on this ques tion Broué is generally right against Deutscher. The falsely defined 'revolutions from above' like those of the archtypical Emperor Joseph II of Austria or the abolition of serfdom by Tsar Alexander II of Russia are characterised by the fact that they do not radically eliminate all vestiges of the decrepit regimes, which have to SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 17, Summer 1989
S UP PLE ME NT Trotsky in exile: speaking in Copenhagen, November 1932 he swept away if progress is to be guaranteed. Such 'revolutions' can be radical. They can liberate important progressive forces. But their function is through certain changes to prevent popular revolutions. Precisely because they cannot be as radical as real popular revolutions they can at the most hold these back (sometimes they even facilitate the development of a popular revolution). In the long term they cannot stop popular revolution. What was true for Alexander II or Bismarck will prove to be true in the light of history for Khruschev and Gorbachev - whatever the differences with our historical examples.
It is important to understand the particular dialectic between radical reforms initiated from the top and the mass struggles below. This dialectic is even more important and specific in post-capitalist societies, where the bureaucracy is not a class, unlike the nobility of the Austrian court with their civil service, or the Prussian Junkers. This dialectic is more accentuated due to the fact that the proletariat has an enonnous potential socio-economic hegemony in the USSR, beyond comparison with that of the popular classes in the societies of our historical examples. It would have been useful if Broué had made this point clear.
Despite all its weaknesses, Deutscher's trilogy (which has reached an audience far greater than Broué's ever will) did have the historical merit of breaking the wall of silence and slanders that Stalinist and bourgeois historians, as well as fellow travellers and opportunists of all sorts, have tried to erect for a quarter of a century around the leader of the October insurrection and the founder
of the Red Army. Outside the small Trotskyist movement its periphery, where this book was ob viously not necessary, it marked out a path to the truth for hundreds of thousands of readers. Far from being, as Broué at one point suggests, an apology for Stalin, it was an essential stage in the demystification of Stalin for this part of world opinion.
The same comment applies to the Khruschev report at the CPSU Twentieth Congress. It would be quite irrational and historically blind to define it as a 'subtle apology for Stalin'. For millions of communists throughout the world it marked the end of the Stalin cult and not the subtle continuation of his authority. Ninety-nine percent of people at the time saw it this way too - even the strongest defenders of Stalin understood it.
The unjustified and injust attempt by Broué to systematise his criticism of Deutscher comes apart in two chapters where the polemic is strangely absent : the chapters dealing with 1920-21, tellingly entitled "The Crisis of the Revolution' and 'The Retreat'. We entirely agree with Broué's judgement on the Kronstadt events - it is nuanced and solidly backed up by documents from the imperialist archives which Trotsky himself was not aware of at the time. But we think Deutscher explains the tragic role of 1921, the watershed year of the revolution much better than Broué does.
The historical background is well known: there was a catastrophic fall in production; famine; numerical decimation of the proletariat; downturn of the first revolutionary wave in the West with the capitalist counter-offensive; but also the definitive defeat of the White armies in the Civil War and the end of imperialist
"Anything positive built during the 1929-39 period was the product of the October revolution. But the mass assassinations, the famine, misery, oppression, wastage, and absurd inequalities which accompanied what was constructed were the product of Stalinism, the bureaucratic dictatorship and the power of a definite social layer" Page 15
"In a period of enormous material difficulties for the working Class, to institutionalise the apparatus's power and its methods of command, reducing and then snuffing out workers? democracy, means contributing to a sharp decline in working class political activity" SAN 66 ...you cannot stop the growth of bureaucracy simply by defending trade union autonomy against the managers" ... Page 16
military intervention against Soviet Russia.This is the context in which the Bolshevik Party, with Lenin and Trotsky at its head, decided on the New Economic Policy, organised the retreat, and took a position in the Comintem against ultra-left adventurism and the theory of the 'offensive' put forward by Zinoviev and Bukharin. Against them, Lenin and Trotsky supported a united front policy giving communists a line for the masses and a way of winning a majority prior to any struggle for power. All this was logical, coherent and based on a correct understanding of reality, the relationship of forces and the tendencies of the situation. Broué (like Deutscher) correctly highlights all this.
But at the same time the Bolsheviks' attitude to the forms of exercising political power in Russia took an absolutely unjustified and il logical turn. Instead of saying 'the civil war is over, and the class enemy has received a decisive blow and will not recover quickly so we must decisively broaden democracy, particularly in the party, in the trade unions and in the soviets', the Bolsheviks, in their great majority, including Lenin and Trotsky, made a tum in precisely the opposite direction, saying: 'since the proletariat's political energy and dynamism will ease up, along with its idealism and commitment, so there is a mortal danger that the economic retreat will grow into a poltical retreat; hence we must step up discipline, control from above
centralisation. be radically
Furthermore this schema of analysis served as a model - we should say a justification - for generally accompanying measures of economic liberalisation with a political tightening up. This went on for decades, the forecasts and predictions of Western liberal dogmatists
In fact the analysis was false. It led to disastrous political conclusions. It it hard to show that the threat to Soviet power of the NEP men was worse than that of Kolchak or Wrangel. It was even more difficult to explain how a working class that was absent from political decision making and increasingly reduced to the role of a passive supporter of the ap paratus, was more capable than an active, consciously intervening one of struggling against the rampant' and
SU PP LEM ENT "underground' counter-revolution. Again, given the economic context the Bolsheviks should have understood that the number one danger was not the bourgeois counter-revolution but the alienation and political pas. sivity of the working class, which in turn would open the door to the political counter-revolution, to Thermidor.
The upturns and downturns of the revolution in the last analysis depend on the correlation of social forces and not on what happens in the two main political camps. Within this correlation, what happens inside the working class is at least as important if not even more important than what hap pens among the bourgeoisie and its allies.
In a period of enormous material difficulties for the working class, institutionalising the apparatus's power and its methods of command, reducing and then snuffing out workers' democracy, means contributing to a sharp decline in working class political activity and to its political weakening, therefore changing the relationship of forces at its expense. Trotsky and Lenin did not undetstand this in 1921. They understood it one year later. But meanwhile the damage had been done (we are not saying it was irreversible). The one-party regime was made official. Factions were banned inside the single party (a nearly inevitable consequence of the one party principle since each faction is a potential second party). Stalin became general secretary of the single party. At the same time there was an ultra-rapid, monstrous growth of the party apparatus - a few hundred full-timers just after the October revolution but 15,000 in August 1922.
Deutscher's book has the merit of showing the radical, decisive nature of this turn. This is not reflected in the pages of Broué's book. Moreover, Trotsky, in Revolution Betrayed, did not mince his words. In one of the most important self-criticisms of his political life this is what he said:
"The prohibition of oppositional parties brought after it the prohibition of factions. The prohibition of factions ended in a prohibition to think otherwise than the infallible leaders. The police-manufactured monolithism of the party resulted in a bureaucratic impunity which has become the source of all kinds of wantonness and corruption."
(New Park, 1967 pp 104-5)
How in the world can a writer like Deutscher, who gives over a chapter of his book to this mechanism, the analysis of which has been confirmed
by history and repeated by many people today in the USSR although not by Broué (yet), be characterised as a veiled apologist of Stalin? Ob viously the accusation just does not hold water.
There is another argument that goes along the following lines. While Lenin and Trotsky made the same political error of the bans in 1921 and while Lenin did in fact nominate Stalin for the post of general secretary, nevertheless Trotsky is more blameworthy because of his anti-democratic positions on the trade union question. By doing this he opened the way for Stalin. The latter's new post meant the removal of Trotsky's supporters Preobraz hensky, Krestinsky and Serebriakov as party secretaries following the Trotsky/Bukharin bloc's defeat on the trade union question.
However we should nuance the judgement made of Trotsky's error on the trade union question. Here Broué tends to follow Deutscher's incomplete position on the matter. In fact the trade union question as discussed in 1920 can not be reduced to the problem of the (relative) inde pendence of the trade unions from the state, or of the extent of working class action autonomous from the managers of industry (who were more and more bureaucratic). Lenin was right and Trotsky/Bukharin were wrong on this issue. But the trade union question also involved the form of management, the problem of 'who manages'.
On this aspect of the trade union question, Lenin defended the principle of management alone being in charge. Trotsky/Bukharin, while not clearly raising the question of self-management (the Workers' Opposition were for management by the trade unions, as stated in the official
programme) decisive moves in this direction in documents Broué, like Deutscher, does not take into account or is unaware of. We already referred to them in 1955. (1)
With hindsight it is clear you cannot stop the process of bureaucratisation by simply defending trade union autonomy against the managers who were separate from the mass of producers. Struggle against bureaucracy must be carried out on at least three fronts: defence of workers' immediate economic interests; socialist democracy, (working class and soviet) and its institutionalisation; and workers' management of the workplaces and the economy as a SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 17, Summer 1989
whole. On this last point at least Trotsky was in advance of Lenin in 1920.
IV
Broué's hesitations on the central question of political pluralism and on the watershed year of 1921 are particularly surprising, since one of the main merits of his book is precisely the way he brings out the continuity of Trotsky's. thought and action as the intransigent defender of working class self-activity and self-organisation.
Trotsky was the first theoretician of soviet organisation, from 1905-6. He foresaw even then that soviets would spring up all over Russia in the next Russian revolution. Lenin only took up this key idea, which also comes form Marx and Engels, with his book State and Revolution,in 1917. The Comintern generalised this idea in 19191920. It was made into a universal principle applicable to all revolutions with a predominantly proletarian character, all over the world. Rosa Luxembourg, Gramsci and other revolutionary Marxist thinkers further elaborated this concept in 1918-1920. So Trotsky had already made a theoretical "breakthrough' with such an idea in 1906.
While he was the theoretician and practical leader of working class self-organisation, Trotsky had to refine his conception of the organised workers' movement, especially after the division between communists and so cial democrats crystallised after 191920. Lenin had come down the same road in his fight for the united front, starting with Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder and then the Comintern's Third Congress. Trotsky's more precise focus on the workers' movement led to the concept of the organic nature of this movement as a contradictory whole. On the one hand there are political differentiations, conflicts and sometimes quite hard struggles, and on the other hand there is a continued reflex of class solidarity, common struggle, unity of action against the class enemy against common dangers and in pursuit of common interests. If this is obvious from the economic point of SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 17, Summer 1989
SUPPLEMENT Lenin In full flow, May 1920 view and fully justifies the line of a single mass trade union confederation, it is equally true on the political level.
Trotsky's analysis of fascism, his definition of the vital role of the workers" united front to stop the rise of the Nazis in Germany, his tactical proposals and his tireless campaign around the mortal danger which Hitler's taking of power would represent for the German and international workers' movements, are among the most brilliant contributions of Trotsky to revolutionary marxism. Broué shows an intimate knowledge of his subject here. Trotsky's writings on fascism are an indispensable complement to the general theory of working class self-organisation. Through them it is possible to understand how the soviets (workers' councils) are both the most effective and natural instrument for unitary struggle and the most effective instrument for the exercise of power by the working class. In one of those breathtaking insights that crop up regularly in Trotsky's writings - Broué does not like to call them "prophetic' which sounds a little religious when it is really a case of combining scientific analysis with intuition - he predicted, years before the event, that the soviets would emerge in Spain first in the for of anti-fascist militias. This is exactly what happened in 1936.
This obviously does not mean that the intransigent defence of the prin-
ciple of workers' self-organisation, which is at the heart of all Trotsky's political activity - with the tragic exception of 1921 - was absolutely without any weaknesses. Broué relates in passing how Trotsky, like Lenin, was an ally of Kautsky against Rosa Luxembourg around 1910, when the latter campaigned in favour of the mass political strike. Her success would have been of supreme importance for the future of the German workers' movement and the class struggle of that country. The question is closely linked to that of workers' self-activity and self-organisation.
History confirms that the workers' "average' class consciousness is very much connected to their experience of concrete struggle and therefore to the concrete forms of struggle they have lived through. It would have been useful if Broué had emphasised this point more.
We should be thankful to Broué for having the courage to lift, at least partially, the taboo that still exists in out ranks on the writings of the young Trotsky - Our Political Tasks.It is a very uneven book, very unfair to Lenin. However to find there, as certain historians have done, the seeds of Stalinism and the bureaucratisation of the party and soviets is to make a mockery of a whole concrete and complex historical process that produced Stalinism stretching over two decades, involving three revolutions and two
"Trotsky was the first theoretician of soviet organisation, from 1905-6. He foresaw even then that soviets would spring up all over Russia in the next Russian revolution" 88888888898889838 Page 17
"Real working class self organisation, a network of soviets with effective power involving the whole of the working class or at least its great majority, is only possible on the basis of party pluralism" 30 ES •..only Trotsky presented not only a denunciation of Stalinism but also an explanation based on the marxist tradition, of the bureaucratic dictatorship. Inevitably this made him the main enemy of the regime..."
Page 18
counter-revolutions, the activity of fluctuating and millions of men varying the women, relationships of forces of colossal social forces and their inevitable repercus- sions on the thinking of leaders including Lenin. This is particularly mis guided, since Our Politi- cal Tasks is a declaration of war against such bureaucratisation. It is hard to deny that the Lenin of 1905-7 or of 1917-19 had rectified some of the excessive formulations of What is to Done? concerning the radical, centralising, lead- "jacobin' ing role of professional revolutionaries. He had obviously bent the stick too far in one direction, and he rapidly bent it back the other way when he insisted, notably in the Preface to the collection In Twelve Years on the broadest application of democratic principles, the need for the election of for public, leaders, transparent debates in a legal and public mass party. On a more theoretical level he stated: 'Of course the primary reason for this success [of the party of profes- sional revolutionaries| resides in the fact that the working class, whose in Social best elements are the Democratic party [ie. the marxists], is different for economic reasons from all other classes in capitalist society by having a greater aptitude to organise itself. Without the organisation of this condition professional revolutionaries would have been a plaything, an adventure, a mere facade. The pamplet What is to Done? on many occasions em- phasises that this organisation's only reason for existence is its liaison with the really revolutionary class spontaneously into which goes battle. Collected Works, Vol 13, [trans- lated from French] our emphasis. This seems to us to be the correct formulation of the problem of the relationship between the vanguard or- ganisation (as a specific task to be achieved), spontaneity and mass working class self-organisation, al- though Lenin's term 'in liaison with' could be further developed.
SUPPLEMENT Trotsky, returning to Russia In May 1917, urges proletarian elections, revolution: soviet organisation has always been the key.
Having said all that it is nevertheless the case that Our Political Tasks does voice concer and war against the risks any party runs where one of the components of this doctrine, and especially the practice of democratic centralism, is developed in a one-sided way, particularly when the party exercises state power and there is a decline of the masses' self-activity. Broué has done a good job is bringing this out into the open. The taboo needed to be lifted.
Our conclusion | is self-evident. Real working class self-organisation, a network of soviets with effective power involving the whole of the working class or at least its great majority, is only possible on the basis of party pluralism.
This is not only true because the working class in practice follows different parties and political currents. Stifling or banning them is not the same as restricting the rights and powers of the bourgeoisie or imperialism but is rather an attack on the rights and political initiative of important sectors of the working class. Without free political debate and struggle working class political education and activity will rapidly degenerate. First you get a system of
passive tailending and then bureaucratic obedience. The masses' consciousness and intel- ligence decline. Finally generalised indifference and cynicism replaces a living workers democracy. The great Rosa Luxembourg first under- this stood problem, despite her passionate support for the Russian revolution and despite the fact she was not in- formed of the particular circumstances of the war raging in civil 1918-20. From 1921 on, her warning (issued earlier, three years before she was brutally