After years of crisis and confusion:
The critical role of criticism ¡HE political development oi the Marxist movement always had to begin from a criticism of the inadequacy of previously accepted often transformed by years of routine into empty dogma. Only on this basis has possible to elaborate new, more adequate theory and gramme to meet the changing objective situation.
Marx himself in this way broke from the radical bourgeois politics of the Young Hegelians to spell out a scientific basis for the understanding of capitalism itself, and a consistent materialist conception of historical development including development of ideology and theory itself.
Lenin's decisive contributions to the Russian revolution centred on his fundamental break from the loose, opportunist type of mass party an increasingly reformist programme - favoured by most of the leaders of the Marxist movement of the day the Second International. He fought instead for an alternative model not found in Marx: a disciplined vanguard party working class, able to draw sharp lines of demarcation between itself and the "liberal" bourgeoisie, and to make sharp and decisive turns when necessary in the class struggle.
Of course the organisational structure in itself did not guarantee a correct political line would evolve, and Lenin's further key contribution was in the April 1917 fight, in which he effectively discarded his movement
By HARRY SLOAN has while he fought tenaciously to overtheory.
the conservative, turn schemas
"Marxist' it been prothe
— он centralised, of the tactical own
Lenin with Trotsky, previous conceptions of the developguide ment of the Russian revolution, even orthodox
"My which had led
Stalin and the other "Old Bolsheviks"
1917
Socialist Viewpoint No. 15 February 1987 p17 inside Russia to lend support to the bourgeois Provisional Government.
Lenin insisted upon Marx's point that "Our theory is not a dogma, but a to action." He made no apologies about the need to abandon some cherished old ideas in order to advance the revolution:
answer is: The Bolshevik slogans and ideas on the whole
have been confirmed by history; but concretely things have worked out differently; they original, more peculiar. variegated than anyone could have expected.
"To ignore or overlook this fact would mean taking after those 'Old Bolsheviks' who more than already have played so regrettable a role in the history of our Party by reiterating formulas learned by rote instead of studying the specific features of the new and living reality."
(First "Letter on Tactics" in The
We can see this same healthy Marxist spirit of criticism and self-criticism in the political development of the early years of the Communist International, which rapidly moved denunciations of social democracy Lenin developed the struggle against ultra-left sectarianism, and the Third and Fourth Congresses direct the new inexperienced Communist Party leaderships masses", with the development of a programme, and tactics - centrally the United Front tactic - to enable these parties to build work in the mass trade unions and among the masses of workers who remained loyal to social democratic parties.
It was in defending this same bold, critical approach, and sound the alarm bells against a rising tide of bureaucratism and economic contradictions arising from the New Economic policy after the Revolution that Trotsky and what became the Left Opposition first ran into confrontation with Stalin and the rising bureaucracy.
Trotsky's insistence the political lessons trom the tailed German revolutionary struggles 1923 and from the successful October revolution also brought him into conflict with conservative, routinist "Old Bolsheviks' in the leadership.
Though driven out of Russia, out of the Russian party and eventuallly out of the Comintern, Trotsky and the left Oppostion continued to battle for a conception of internationalism which drew experiences of actual working class struggles in Britain, China, Germany, France and Spain. They set out not simply to attack and expose the false positions of the Stalinists, but to spell out an alternative analysis, and an alternative, revolutionary line of action.
In December 1932 Trotsky wrote:
"The International Opposition stands on the ground of the first four congresses Comintern. This does not mean that it bows before every letter of its decisions, many of which had a purely conjunctural character and have been contradicted subsequent events, but all the are more more once senselessly fought to the fighting to essential principles (...) remain upon drawing even today the highest expression of proletarian strategy in the epoch of of the general crisis of capitalism.
revisionist decisions of the Fifth and Sixth World Congresses and
Russian necessary restatement of the programme of rendered has been worthless by centristic alloy.
Trotsky went on in the mass movement since the fourth so,
Left politics formed in 1938; but even while arguof the ing for these conceptions, was critically quacy by extent of the
Comintern and its parties.
Socialist Viewpoint No. 15 February 1987 p18
КОММУ ИЗМ
Troops demonstrate in Russia 1917: Lenin's ability to develop beyond routine schemas was the key to the October Revolution.
"The Left Opposition rejects the the Comintern, whose Marxist gold completely
"
(The International Left Opposition,
Its Tasks and Methods, in
Writings 1932-3, pp51-52)
to elaborate an eleven-point summary of basic principles to be reaffirmed, each one of which related to the experiences of congress of the Comintern. In doing he encapsulated much of what was to become the essence of the of the Fourth International
Trotsky assessing their ade-
Eight months later he was to change objective situation.
his assessment on one basic issue: the degeneration of the
He argued it this way:
most dangerous thing in politics is to fall captive to one's own formula that yesterday was appropriate, but is bereft of all content today."
(It is Necessary to Build..., Writings, 1932-3, p305)
After the failure of the Comintern parties to respond politically even to the catastrophic defeat inflicted on Period" turn, Trotsky saw the need to reassess what had been a firmly held conviction — and to renounce his attempts to reform the Comintern from within. The International formed by Lenin had under Stalin's domination become "dead for the purposes of the
, and a new International and new parties would have to be
The workers' movement now contained not only the living relics of the Second "Marxist" International, but also the degenerated parties of the bureaucratised Third International — each with vastly more mass support and implantation in the working class than the small, isolated forces of the Left Opposition.
In critically reworking his own previous analysis of the degenerated Russian workers' state, Trotsky again spelled out the scientific approach:
"Our tendency never laid claim to infallibility. We do not receive ready-made truths as a revelation, like the high priests of Stalinism. We study we discuss, we check our conclusions experience, we openly correct the and personal strictness are the best traditions of Marxism and Leninism."
(The Workers' State and the Question of Thermidor, 1935)
It was on the basis of this kind of approach — developing a tradition political lessons from the experiences and struggles of the working class,
Fourth International founded in 1938, gramme which does not restate but programme and tactics of the early
That was nearly 50 years ago, before World War 2, in a radically different international situation. The Fourth International itself was - as Trotsky put it - "born amid the roar of defeats", the relentless body-blows inflicted upon the international working class as fascism stalked Europe and Stalinist police terror crushed working class opposition in the Soviet Union.
Yet despite the immense changes that have taken place in the overall situation facing the working class since the war, there have been few systematic attempts to criticise, expand and develop the 1938 Programme to provide a new, unifying programme for the Trotskyist and international workers' movement. An unchanged Programme in a changing world Among the issues to be incorporated into a programme for Trotskyism in
1990s are many developments that have transpired since the drafting of the basic Theses on which the Fourth International was processes which brought the emergence of deformed workers' states in Eastern Europe, successful liberation much of the colonial world from the direct grip of imperialist rule - bringing in its train the emergence of new types of populist bourgeois and petty bourgeois nationalist leaderships with their own means of gagging the independence of the working class.
• In particular there have been the mass revolutionary struggles that
Castro: revolutionary of 1959, now feted by Soviet press and IV ousted the Batista dictatorship Algeria, US imperialism from Vietnam, the Caetano fascist regime in Portugal, the Shah's police regime in Iran, and the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. Each of these events has brought important political tests for the Trotskyist movement, which was not able to refer for guidance to any writings of Trotsky.
• There have also been defeats reflecting the unresolved crisis of working class leadership Bolivia 1952 — as well as those inflicted by imperialist intervention and CIA-provoked destabilisation in Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954 and by a succession of military coups and USBrazil, Zaire, Indonesia, the Philippines, Turkey, and sponsored Zionist state has inflicted repeated setbacks on the Palestinian and Arab masses. The US invasion of Socialist Viewpoint No. 15 February 1987 p19 and threats and pressure alongside renewed proxy wars by CIA-backed
Kampuchea Afghanistan. A developing analysis is needed of the balance of forces between the struggling masses and the imperialists, in which the most and consistent factor rethe bankruptcy of political leadership in the mass struggle.
• The development of capitalism in the "boom" period brought an increase in the size, strength and militancy of the proletariat, not least in the exploited countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia - some of which have emerged as substantial economies in their own right. Both
"boom" and now the effects of recession in much of the world women and immigrant workers into a central position of exploitation within the enlarged ranks of the proletariat in the advanced economies and in the
Since World so-called "Third World", raising the need for specific policies and tactics in mobilise and support the against racist and sexist oppression.
•The Kremlin bureaucracy gained in military strength relative to 1945, and gained a world-political role enabling it to act as an alternative patron to the Cuban revolution and to certain nationalist seeking to distance themselves from imperialism. But while it is capable, and on occasion prepared, to overturn capitalist property, Stalinism remains inflexibly hostile to any independent revolutionary action of the working class.
• However the post-war period has also seen this same continue and even deepen counter-revolutionary opposition to working class independence and revolutionary struggle. First the cynical betrayal of revolutionary opportunities in Western Asia and elsewhere at the end of the war, in the search for a coexistence" with imperialism. was followed by the bureaucratic measures to exclude the class from any real power even while capitalist property relations overturned in Eastern came the exploitation Vietnamese liberation struggle as a bargaining counter in dealings with imperialism. The same Stalinist leaders also gave political support in their attempted liaisons with a variety of anti-working class nationalist leaderships. run alongisde periodic
War 2 the Soviet light has regimes bureaucracy
Stalin's
Stalin carving up onslaughts came military workers of East Germany,
Europe,
Hungary sustained police repression in all the
"peaceful
Stalinist states
This for an independent working movement.
• Despite its best control were maintain
Europe. Later
"sphere" of world of the
Kremlin bureaucracy global monolithic movement under the war
All this has apparatus of brutal bureaucracy has acquired a global role the world with imperialism the against
Poland
Stalin-Tito and and Czechoslovakia basic of democratic rights that are essential working class efforts to over its own politics, been the has bureaucracies.
unable to prevent a shattering of the
• The which
Stalin had been able to maintain before the wreckage, unchallenged leadership of what was then the single workers' state, controlling the police class
The the Comintern.
emergence of rival national-based exploited
Socialist Viewpoint No. 15 February 1987 p20 bureaucracies - symptomised by the
"break" of 1948 but repeated in different fashion in other circumstances since - has not lead to any qualitative break from Stalinist politics or methods, but has rather emphasised the ways in which whatever the "ideological" trappings - the material pressures of seeking "socialism in one country" are the decisive factor in the politics of such re-emergence of social democratic parties from the post-war in the absence 0f revolutionary mass leaderships, and able to divert upsurges of working militancy into reformist channels, has been recognised and on occasion by the
run alongside developing struggles for political revolution in East
The military strengthening and bourgeoisie, most notably with the CIA backing tor Soares' Portugal after 1974. In Britain and elsewhere social democracy represented the chief obstacle for the small, isolated forces of Marxism, and played a central managing and capitalist economies. Internationally, it seeks out class solutions to potential confrontations - as in the Second International's search for a "solution" in Central America.
• A new lease of life has been found for the politics of the Popular Front, following the post-war cross-class coalition involving the Communist Parties of France and Italy. The long-running Italian "historic between Stalinists and Democrats helped lay groundwork for "Eurocommunism" which in turn seeks to replicate the disastrous Popular Front politics that opened wide the door for Pinochet's coup against Allende in Chile 1973.
• The growth and
Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland.
organisation of the black working
Party in role reconstructing
A starting point for collaborationist development
Programme drafted governments activity.
turning the compromise
Christian the or ikon.
acted an obstacle as increasing enhanced world role of Stalinism has also ciass of South Africa has opened a new phase in the struggle against the the class collaborationist programme of the ANC under the domination of the South African Communist Party.
The sum total of these changes is a world substantially different in many respects from the world of 1938 - so
1938, different as to make the Transitional damental by Trotsky crucial starting point, but inadequate on its own as a guide to analysis or
Marxists must reject any notion of
Programme from its original purpose — as a guide to the action of revolutionaries - into some kind of semi-Biblical, immutable text
Already it is clear that those who have reacted in this way to the need to develop the progrmme have rather than assisting the political and theoretical
Socialist Viewpoint No. 15 February 1987 p21 strengthening of the movement.
There have been two basic false attitudes to the 1938 Programme. One is the opportunist "Broad Church"
which simply seeks to regroup those who, nearly 50 years
"accept" the Transitional Programme, irrespective of the differences that such agreement can conceal. The other is the wooden dogmatist view that despite the global events of half a century, the world is somehow still basically the same as in and that therefore no funprogrammatic development is necessary - and anyone who seeks to make such development is a "revisionist". This is quite the reverse of the method of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, who fearlessly criticised outdated conceptions in order to build upon the conquests of the past.
Too often the post-war Trotskyist movement has shrunk from a bold analysis of new problems, falling back on the one hand on "orthodox" repetition of quotations from Trotsky's writings, or conversely throwing
over basic principles ment in a lightminded "junking the old Trotskyism", capitulating instead to empiricism and opportunism in a complex and hostile The splits and fusions of post-war Trotskyism This has set the framework of the splits and fusions which since the major split of 1953 have chaotic, divided Trotskyist movement
• A failure to grasp and explain the forms taken revolutionary politics of Stalinism in the overturn of capitalism in Eastern Europe, and the false identification of Stalinism with Stalin himself and the Soviet Union opened the door wide bureaucratic face of Tito, and illusions in the possible "centrist" evolution of mass CPs from 1949 onwards. This in turn helped lay the political basis for the 1953 split in the Fourth International and subsequent confuover the Chinese of the moveblem underlies
Castro to the political
"left"
the presentiy
Stalinism.
• The failure to tional liberation struggles, such leaderships background tunist political basis of the new
Secretariat", formed fusion in all of the abysmally to grasp revolutionary situations, missed op and theoretical weaknesses.
majority elsewhere in the years
Unanswered, the same political prothe later political adaptation of many Trotskyist forces leadership which is face of world comprehend the processes of petty bourgeois-led naand a lack of any coherent programme for proletarian political independence from formed the to the false sectarian positions on the Cuban Revolution which helped split the International Committee in 1963, and the opporpositions which tormed the "United in 1963. The same failure caused widespread concurrents of the Trotskyist movement in assessing and intervening in the Algerian Revolution. Both the "opportunist" and "sec. tarian" wings of the movement failed the distinctive tasks of a Marxist leadership in such portunities to learn from experience, further compounded existing
• The misreading of the lessons of the Cubar revolution - and the attempts to generalise from what was a unique, exceptional situation - led a catastrophic turn away from Marxist USFI into party-building in Latin America and even after 1969. This turn (opposed by a minority led
• The "new the USFI Socialist Viewpoint No. 15 February 1987 p22
MITE Stalinist cartoon of Tito prior to 1955. by the American SWP) took place after Castro himself had discarded his naive reliance upon guerrillaism in the wake of Guevara's gallant Bolivian disaster.
disorientation from this "turn" on the one hand, and the muddled and idealist notions of the USFI's vanguardism" in Western Europe following the 1968 events, left majority ill-equipped to give a clear political lead to the Portuguese working class in the revolutionary events of 1974-76, in which clarity on the role of the Stalinist CP element in the Armed Forces Movement and the ultra-left and centrist forces was vital. However, the opposing line taken by the SWP(US) and by Pierre Lambert's OCRFI involved political adaptation to the anticommunist, witch-hunting Socialist Party forces led by Mario Soares. The lingering confusion and uncorrected blunders of the past had thoroughly disorientated the majority of the Trotskyist movement in the face of a major revolutionary opening.
• The collapse of the imperialist puppet regime of South Vietnam under the hammer blows of the Stalinist-led liberation forces in 1975 enabled the Vietnamese people finally to regain the round surrendered by the Hanoi Stalinists in 1945 and 1954 But even while it dealt a historical military defeat to US imperialism ne regenerated fresh illusions in "revolutionary" character of certain Stalinist leaderships, not only in some
sections of the USFI, but also among
"anti-Pabloite" British None of the main currents of the Trotskyist movement raised gramme for independent working class action in Vietnam building workers' councils, seizure of land and factories, or any other measures to offer an alternative to brueacratic domination from Hanoi folowing the great victory. Stalinists were to wait three years to ensure that the masses of the South wre firmly under control before moving to expropriate capitalist property in the South.
• In 1979 it was not so much new problems which wreaked havoc on the Trotskyist movement as the reemergence of the old, unresolved problem of orientation to petty bourgeois nationalist leaderships — this time the Sanidinista Front in Nicaragua. The Sandinistas ousted Somoza and established cross-class government millionaire opponents of the Somoza dynasty.
History repeated itself, with a majority of the USFI, comprising porters of the US SWP and the European leaderships, echoing previous slavish support for the Algerian leadership by extending a political blank cheque to the Sandinistas. This included suport for the expulsion from Nicaragua Simon Bolivar Brigade been sponsored by Nahuel Moreno's Bolshevik Faction of the USFI as a solidarity gesture in the final stages of the civil war, but which had taken a less starry-eyed
WRP government.
split of the BF the any prominority the
World Congress.
- the adaptation by the USFI followed the coup which ousted the vicious Gairy regime in
Maurice
The
Movement.
ing and its international co-thinkers. In a but still
"revolutionary which was to lead to them:
-jettisoning containing
Permanent Revolution;
of calls for Political Revolution
Stalinist states;
sup schema of revolution leading through its a "dictatorship of proletariat peasantry" which had been so abused under Stalin's leadership;
-fetishising calls for of the and farmers' governments";
which had
-embracing the world view of the world as divided into two "camps" — the imperialist and the anti-imperialist - in which the independent interests of the working
Socialist Viewpoint No. 15 February 1987 p23 imperialist"
ignored;
this by fear propaganda;
a massive party unionists, the
Shah sections promoting
Tito with Kruschev 1955.
brutal repression view of the new
This helped precipitate and another class oppositional current from
USFI in advance of the XIth
WaI
Similar uncritical and
Grenada and installed
Bishop's New
Jewel claimed
Programme
• The same period also saw a swtowards the most crass
USFI, political illusions in Fidel Castro's linked
Cuban leadership on the part of the
Socialist Workers Party later
International thorough and unashamed rethink on the most fundamental issues to bring enormously
SWP politics more into line with the internationalism" of modern-day
Castro, the SWP began a process
Trotsky's theory of
-seriously questioning the validity
-returning to Lenin's discarded and
"workers'
Castro/Kremlin class in the Stalinist states and "antiregimes are effectively
—giving concrete expression to enthusiasticlly detending Khomeini's reactionary anti-working class leadership in Iran, and offering only mealy-mouthed support for the Solidarnoso struggles in Poland for of assisting Reagan's
—embracing Castro's style of inner-party democracy - mounting purge of long-standing members, especially trade who rejected the propagandist "turn to industry" and baulked at the political line pumped out by the Barnes leadership.
• The "anti-imperialist" gestures of
Khomeini regime in Iran following the upsurge that ousted the served to disorientate other of the USFI, with the majority abandoning the necessary fight for independent working class
Praitics as the basis for a section in
shrinking a from those comrades in the section who rejected such 'a course. This same crass adaptation to a bourgeois nationalist, clerical-reactionary regime with a record from early. on against women, gays, national minorities, and increasingly against the Iranian left and working movement, led the USFI majority to side with Iran in the Gulf instead of upholding the principle of fighting for the defeat overthrow of the reactionary regimes in both Iran and Iraq.
• But even the current which to take seriously the development of the Transitional failed abysmally to clarify basic questions of strategy and tactics. After its 1979 split from the
Moreno's Bolshevik Faction up with Pierre Lambert's OCRFI to form a Parity Committee - renamed the "Fourth (International Committee)". This adopted an lengthy "Theses" document, claimed at the time to be a equivalent the Comintern Theses. Yet missing from
USFI regards the text was any serious analysis of social democracy, popular frontism, any coherent analysis of post-war Stalinism, and even reference to the fight women's oppression liberation. The text skated around differences between two fusing tendencies, and dealt in no detail at all with their tactical line in their own sections: the result was a rapid blow-up and new split in this
"orthodox" tendency following new differences on how to relate to the new Mitterrand govenment.
• More recently, Moreno's current, the International Workers League, now modestly proclaiming itself "the World Trotskyist Movement" adoped a Manifesto reeking sectarian denunications and proclamation, and allotting a mere half paragraph of 44 pages for a passing reference to women, again ignoring the fight against bigotry, and rehashing crude analysis of Stalinism.
•The USFI at its last Congress focusssed almost its whole discussion on only two countries — Nicaragua and El Salvador which the Majority would be wrong to build Trotskyist parties, and full political support was extended to the Sandinistas FMIN. Worse, basic elements Marxist analysis were thrown aside in order retrospectively to Nicaragua proletariat as a "dictatorship of the since the seizure power by the Sandinistas in 1979! Though documents were carried against the opposition of supporters of the US SWP which reaffirmed support for Trotsky's Permanent Revolution, orthodoxy bears little relation to the USEI's actual policy support for the Sandinistas, who are committed to an indefinite policy of
Nicaragua as a "workers' maintaining economy in this "workers' state"!
A political crisis the slightest against requiring political for gay solutions the
Though it may appear to take an organisational form, with the division of the world movement into contending factions — to represent the "continuity" of Trotskyist politics — the crisis of the Fl is above all a political development.
What is needed is a new programmatic foundation, based on the central principles and method of the
Transitional Programme, ing in the experiences and political of lessons of 48 years more expereince selfof the fight for Marxist leadership and world revolution.
anti-gay the most
Instead class.
World improvised, in agreed that it the most overtly bureaucratic leadership.
and of re-label of political mistakes, dialectical materialism theory of this formal developing political ment.
democratic
"mixed" (capitalist)
leaves confusion struggle history as another" each claiming itself This
There has been little serious at-
This same tempt to hammer out a rounded programme and perspective for the key struggles of the international working each new round of struggle has been met either by stale, stock formulae, empty phrases and outdated slogans, or alternatively by empirical schemas, abrupt about-faces, and adaptation to
"left" components of the spontaneous movement or of its
Time and again, too the leaders of the main currents have run from any re-examination or serious debate on their own past political mistakes, and the lessons from the movement's past and the lessons from the movement's past tailures oi analysis. This denies the role in the movement of the Marxist method of which must start with practical experience and constantly return to it, enriching and the theory of the moveIt also negates the role of confusion. centralism as the mechanism for analysing, criticising Socialist Viewpoint No. 15 February 1987 p24 and developing the practical work of the Marxist party. As a method, it the movement constantly floundering in the same unresolved and mistakes, staggering from one blunder and missed opportunity to the next, viewing the class as Henry Ford viewed "one damned thing aiter introspective, misguided, defensive attitude towards experience (in which every current has shared in the errors that have been made), and the haste with which each current has rushed to denounce its rivals, indicates a sectarian fixation on preserving the narrow interests of the leading elements of a grouping rather than any feeling of urgency to resolve the political problems in constructing a Marxist ledership of and for the working class method makes it even more difficult to create conditions in which long-standing "blind spots" of the movement - in particular the development of working class comrades, black comrades, women, lesbians and gay men into the leadership of national sections and the international movement.
The same secatarianism, coupled with the development in some oi the larger groupings (and even in some quite small ones) of a fixed hierarchy of quasi-bureaucratic "leaders" and mini cults of personality, explains the frequent resort in the post-war movement to organisational means to muzzle discussion and tendency struggles in organisations which present themselves as "Bolshevik"
Only a real international debate, involving a sharp struggle for programmatic clarification and against sectarianism in all its guises can otter a serious alternative to the danger oi further disintegration and political