Open University Press £6.99 Reviewed by Stephen Valentine Alex Callinicos is on the way to becoming one of the leading Marxist intellectuals in the English speaking world. He has written a bagful of books and proved himself a lucid and tenacious scholar.
Callinisos's erudition matches his commitment: he is an active member of the British SWP. However, his work-from earlier books like Is there a future for Maryism? to his recent Against Post Modernism - all suffer from the same flaw. Suddenly the flow of argument is interrupted by the key to answer everything, theoretical Batman taking the unlikely shape of Tony Cliff and the theory of state capitalism. In most of these explanations the caped crusaders' Robin is played by Chris Harman.
'Trotskyism' departs from the pattern of academic precision followed by startling sectarian lurch. It is much more straightforwardly the SWP's line given academic expression.
Callinicos argument is this: Trotsky saved the revolutionary heritage of 1917. He kindled the flame of October while European capitalism lit the pyre of Fascism, and Stalin razed the worker's state to the ground.
He was able to keep together _ in termole circumstances - a small band of socialists. who rejected both social democracy BOOKS Stalinism.
Meanwhile, Trotsky also began to deepen the tactical and strategic applications of Marxism. Because of the circumstances though, these were very partial and imperfect.
It was these weaknesses which were to dominate, after the Old Man died. Post-war boom and the extension of Stalinism in eastern Europe left Trotskyists in a quandary. Like medieval scholars tney manipulated and twisted the tneory, sneitering it rom criticism rather than reworking Trotsky's ideas, which became dogma. The SWP's orthodoxy Callincos identifies two fatal flaws in orthodox Trotskyism. The first is 'substitutionism' the urge to supplant the working class as the key agent of socialism. Thus the Fourth International, according to Callinicos, has regularly extolled the virtues of third world peasants, students, nonproletarian oppressed layers etc as the vanguard of socialist change.
The second is 'dogmatism' -the rigid defence of Trotsky's thought, irrespective of the evidence which disproves substantial parts of it.
In fact, both these accusations turn out to be necessary by-products of the defence of the SWP's own special dogmatism - the theory of 'state capitalism'. In order to justify it, Cállinicos is forced to repeat the traditional SWP slander that orthodox Trotskyists have seen the USSR, eastern Europe, China and Cuba as 'socialist, which is of course untrue.
mediating between bosses and What the Fourth International has said is that is that postcapitalist states, transitional societies, could come into existence without the working class wielding direct political power. At one level this argument is obvious and accepted by the SWP. They think that 'state capitalism' arose in Russia in 1928; but concede that socialist democracy, the direct rule of the workers, was dead by 1923. So what was Russia for those tive years? Nothing other than a deformed/degenerating workers state with the growing power of the bureaucracy.
At the heart of the 'state capitalist' theory is an idealism: the belief that post-capitalist states can only exist when the workers wield direct political power through soviets. Everything else, of whatever shade or complexion, is simply a variety. of capitalism. The end point of this idealism is the (absurd) current line of the SWP that the restoration of capitalism in eastere side ways sim be a not a defeat for the working class.
Moreover orthodox Trotskyism has never abandoned the central role of the working class. It has recognised that in many third world case es thenust inget a mass base peasantry nonscal for repolor amongst tionary strategy. It has recognised that in advanced capitalist countries there is a anti-capitalist dynamic in the struggles of the spearedible revolute each The search strategies, which always have the working class at their centre, is not a product of a TORY collec Soclall A Sociales worker.