The Platform of the Trotskyist Tendency of the Campaign for a Marxist Party: Minority Elaboration
Platform adopted 1 March 2008
- We stand with Karl Marx: “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. The struggle for the emancipation of the working class means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies but for equal rights and duties and the abolition of all class rule” (General Rules of the International Workingmen's Association, October 1864)
- We defend the heritage of the Russian Revolution and critically support the revolutionary thrust of the first four Congresses of the Third Communist International before the victory of the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy and the imposition of the theory of socialism in a single country.
- We see democratic soviets/workers’ councils as the instruments of participatory democracy to directly embody the dictatorship of the proletariat and for a successful struggle for workers’ control as the pre-condition for the revolutionary struggle for political power and the organisational form of the workers’ state.
- We acknowledge the need for a democratic Marxist Revolutionary Socialist Party. The process of revolution is based upon democratic interaction between party and class. This interaction creates the political conditions for the self-emancipation of the working class. It is more difficult to economically overcome the alienating power of capital over labour than to politically repress the forces of counter-revolution. The process of economic success in transcending the alienating power of capital will also facilitate the political conditions to develop consent for the movement towards communism. The revolutionary process of transition to communism is based on the struggle to form an international workers’ state and such a state is required in order to overcome the domination of global capital.
- We support Trotsky’s Transitional Programme of 1938 in its context. It is the Marxist method of mass work. No to sectarian abstention from the class struggle and no to popular fronts with the political representatives of any capitalist class to ‘defeat fascism’, stop war or for any other reason. We recognise the need for programmatic development in order to understand the tasks of the contemporary period.
- We support Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution and its applicability for the era of globalisation. We are opposed to the idea of Socialism in one Country.
- We recognise the necessity for revolutionaries to carry out serious ideological and political struggle as direct participants in the trade unions (always) and in the mass reformist social democratic parties when conditions are favourable and (always) to fight against, fascism, racism, sexism and all forms of reactionary and divisive bourgeois ideology.
- We recognise the urgent necessity for a programme for women’s liberation and prioritise work in defence of abortion rights, crèche facilities and equal pay. We call for a struggle against racial and sexual oppression. We aim to develop a programme for the tasks of emancipation of the specially oppressed.
- We are in favour of building a Trotskyist International. There are no differences in principle to keep Trotskyist groups separate. However we dissociate ourselves from the organisational methods of most Trotskyist Groups from 1938. These can be characterised as a) bureaucratic centralist with a top-down elitist leadership, often with a single guru-like figure, and b) sectarian in the sense of wishing to control or destroy broad movements or campaigns. We are in favour of an open democratic party with rights for factions and tendencies.
Differences have been declared on two questions and we will continue the debate on these questions.
- The question of imperialism and oppressed and oppressor nations.
- Position 1. We support Lenin’s differentiation of all nations into imperialist oppressor nations and oppressed colonial or semi-colonial nations. We are always and in all circumstances for the defeat of imperialism as the main enemy of progressive humanity even by non-working class forces.
- Position 2. Careful economic and political analysis is required before deciding that it is possible to support an oppressed nation in its opposition to imperialism. It is not possible to arrive at a conclusion on this question without assessing what are the independent political interests of the working class.
- The question of Social Democracy – specifically the British Labour Party
- Position 1. Their adherence to the neo-liberal agenda has transformed reformist political organisations into instruments of global capital. This means that the question of work within New Labour is a tactic that is not generally applicable although it is possible for revolutionaries to critically support campaigns like that of John McDonnell for Labour Leadership.
- Position 2. The Labour Party was never a socialist party. Its Clause 4 so beloved by left-reformists was never more than a fig leaf. The Labour Party remains a bourgeois workers’ party, that is to say, it is a pro-capitalists party based on the organised working class. So long as this remains the case, Marxists advance tactics towards Labour Party members which may include both entryism and critical electoral support.
Introduction
This elaboration will fill out our position on the first nine agreed points of the Platform and will be defending the minority position on the two questions on which differences have been announced. We support position 1 on imperialism and oppressed and oppressor nations and position 2 on the question of Social Democracy – specifically the British Labour Party.
Let us at the beginning reaffirm the revolutionary programme and method we seek to rediscover and reapply as testified to in 1939 by Robert Coulondre, French ambassador to the Third Reich, and Adolph Hitler as recounted by the International Communist Current (ICC).
Hitler had boasted of the advantages he had obtained from his pact with Stalin, just concluded; and he drew a grandiose vista of his future military triumph. In reply the French ambassador appealed to his ‘reason’ and spoke of the social turmoil and the revolutions that might follow a long and terrible war and engulf all belligerent governments. ‘You are thinking of yourself as a victor...’ the ambassador said, ‘but have you given thought to another possibility - that the victor might be Trotsky?’ At this Hitler jumped up (as if he ‘had been hit in the pit of the stomach’) and screamed that this possibility, the threat of Trotsky’s victory, was one more reason why France and Britain should not go to war against the Third Reich”. Isaac Deutscher rightly highlights Trotsky’s remark on hearing of this conversation: “They are haunted by the spectre of revolution, and they give it a man’s name”
Point 1: The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves
As revolutionary socialists, we Trotskyists declare with Marx and the First Workingmen’s International in 1867, ‘the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves, the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule’. Only the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by the organised working class, led by a revolutionary socialist party based on the theoretical conquests of Marxism and Trotskyism (its modern form), can win a world planned socialised economy which will achieve full human liberation, the communist goal. This will end all human oppression manifest in alienation in all its religious and social forms. The violently oppressive capitalist state forces or those of the oppressive police/bureaucratic deformed workers’ states exist ultimately to protect and reinforce these relations, which are the fundamental ‘secret’ of continuing capitalist rule. Only when we ‘change the old conditions’ by revolution can we achieve the full economic and social equality of all human beings, develop our real species-essence as egalitarian co-operative co-producers of life’s necessities by winning economic and political control over our own destinies. With Marx we defend ‘The Necessity for the Communist Revolution’ as elaborated in The German Ideology:
Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.
Point 2: The heritage of the Russian Revolution
Here we will confine ourselves to the defence of October, the Bolsheviks and the Left Opposition and Trotskyism up to 1940. The defence of the heritage of the Russian Revolution of October 1917 is very important because this is one of the most important ideological tasks facing us as revolutionary socialists. We stress that the Berlin Wall fell to the right, to the forces of capitalist counter-revolution, and not to the left, to the working class as the force of socialist revolution. There is great historical confusion on this point particularly among those on the revolutionary left who hailed, together with imperialism, the collapse of ‘communism’ and the victory of ‘democracy’. They were hailing their own defeat and marginalisation. In an atmosphere of triumphant free market capitalist reaction (e.g. Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay The End of History?) many have now abandoned the heritage of October entirely, many have denounced Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks and others have signalled their loss of faith in the revolutionary potential of the working class by entering popular fronts (the UK SWP in Respect) or by defending the ‘left’ bureaucracy where they have gained influence in or even control of union executives (SP and SWP).
In defending the heritage of October we critically defend the actions of the Bolsheviks in their main thrust before the victory of the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy based on the theory of ‘socialism in a single country’ after Lenin’s death in 1924. That is we say that the victory of the Stalinist state-based bureaucracy over the Bolshevik party represented a qualitative break with the struggle for world revolution, a counter-revolution against that great party and the revolutionary working class. And we defend the actions of the Left Opposition, again critically and in their main thrust, in championing that heritage until Trotsky’s defeat and expulsion from the USSR in 1929 and his subsequent struggle to found the Fourth International in 1938. Those so-called revolutionary socialists who fail to do this capitulate to bourgeois ideology in all its Anarchist, Libertarian Marxist, ‘Left Communist’ or straight liberal reactionary and conservative forms, concede to the class enemy the lie that bolshevism betrayed the working class and the Revolution, Leninism led to Stalinism, Trotskyism is no better than Stalinism and the working class is bereft of all ideological weapons with which to fight for a communist future. We see today many forces representing or influenced by at least some of these tendencies, as well as many who are opposed to them but in ways that are as yet confused for some and unorganised and/or not sufficiently theorised for others. And, of course, these conflicting tendencies will be reflected not just between individuals but also within serious thinking individual revolutionaries, particularly the youth
In an article in Marxist Voice No. 3 and in talks Simon Pirani attacks the Bolsheviks pre-1920 for having abandoned ‘democratic principles – the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, the primacy of the soviets of elected workers’ and peasants’ deputies, the rights of self-determination for colonised nations in the Russian Empire, free political association and free speech, and the abolition of the death penalty’, nonetheless their ‘room for manoeuvre was very, very limited’ because of the Civil War until 1920 when the economy improved and discussions began on how to build the new society’. We must first of all acknowledge that the conditions of Civil War forced a rigid militarization on the Bolsheviks which was theorised as Marxism when it should have been accepted as a temporary state of affairs which had to be abandoned as soon as conditions permitted.
The first ‘mistake’ he has charged against the Bolsheviks is the suppression of the Constituent Assembly. Although the Social Revolutionaries gained the majority in the Assembly in the November 1917 elections (17 million to just under 10 million) nevertheless the Bolsheviks won the cities by a very large majority, the SRs split before the convocation of the Assembly with the Left SRs sympathetic to the new Soviet power – most were later to join the Bolsheviks. Even by bourgeois democratic standards the Assembly no longer represented electorate amongst the peasantry, as the Left SRs, who represented the poorer peasantry, now supported the Bolsheviks but were almost unrepresented in the Assembly. The Assembly became a bastion of the counter-revolution for the Cadets, Right SRs, Mensheviks and others. In short the Soviets represented the socialist revolution based not only on the working class minority but also by then the majority of the poor peasantry whereas the Constituent Assembly represented the bourgeois counter-revolution based on the reactionary richer peasants, the landlords and the bourgeoisie. This was the political expression of the dual power which had co-existed since the February Revolution. Having seized power in the name of the working class in October the Bolsheviks could not cede it to a peasant dominated body representing capitalist social relations immediately after they had triumphed. The Bolsheviks correctly suppressed the counter-revolutionary Assembly. Rosa Luxemburg charged the Bolsheviks with abandoning democracy by suppressing the Assembly but even the ICC rejects this as theoretically incorrect, although of course her criticisms had nothing to do with Kautsky’s pro-imperialist line,
On “democracy” and “dictatorship”, there are profoundly contradictory elements in Luxemburg’s views. On the one hand, she saw the Bolsheviks’ suppression of the Constituent Assembly as negative for the life of the revolution, revealing a curious nostalgia for the outmoded forms of bourgeois democracy. On the other hand, the Spartacus programme written shortly afterwards called for the replacement of the old parliamentary assemblies by congresses of workers’ councils, which indicates that Luxemburg’s views on this point had evolved quite rapidly.
However it is possibly to argue that this was a tactical error of timing only and that the Assembly should not have been abolished until later. Although this is wrong in our view it is not to be equated with those who denounce the dissolution from a bourgeois democratic standpoint.
The Left Communist Fraction was founded in 1918 and the Democratic Centralists was influential until the middle twenties. The Workers’ Truth Group was attacked by the Communist Workers’ Group’s Miasnikov in 1924 who said that by then the Workers’ Truth had nothing in common with them, and that they were ‘attempting to wipe out everything that was communist in the revolution of October 1917’ and were therefore completely Menshevist… (and) shares with Menshevism the vision that the revolution was premature. Most groups viewed the Workers Opposition as opportunist and were united to ‘oppose the Russian Soviet government’s New Economic Policy and United Front’. The Workers Opposition Group was led by ‘Left Communists’ Alexandra Kollontai, Alexander Shliapnikov and Sergei Medvedev and made many correct criticisms of the regime. For instance Kollontai’s 1921 pamphlet The Workers Opposition made an analysis of bureaucratisation which was later echoed by Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Despite agreeing with many of their criticisms of the regime we do not accept their workerist politics which concentrated on the needs of isolated groups. Very often these were skilled workers like the metalworkers in Moscow who demanded privileges for themselves which could only come from the surplus value produced by less skilled and organised workers. The material reality of isolation and poverty excluded the superabundance precondition for communism.
For instance ‘Left communists’ like Nichcolai Bukharin never showed any appreciation of the transitional method and his ultra-leftism consisted in infantile ‘class-against-class’ ultimatums which opposed the united front tactic at the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920 when Lenin had to declare himself on the right to make the case for demands on reformist Social Democratic leaders to expose them in practice and not just by sterile propaganda. The Left Communist line of ‘the united front from below’ was later adopted by the Stalinists to counter Trotsky’s demand for the workers’ united front and amounted in practice to the same sterile propagandism. Bukharin’s ultra-leftism transformed itself seamlessly into rightism, championing the rich peasantry under Stalin’s interpretation of the NEP, again rejecting the working class as the vital conscious class force which must be won to revolution, as his present day followers still do. We reject as muddled nonsense the theories of Libertarian Marxists like Daniel Guerin who defines his current thus,
‘Libertarian Marxism rejects determinism and fatalism, giving the greater place to individual will, intuition, imagination, reflex speeds, and to the deep instincts of the masses, which are more far-seeing in hours of crisis than the reasonings of the ‘elites’; libertarian Marxism thinks of the effects of surprise, provocation and boldness, refuses to be cluttered and paralysed by a heavy ‘scientific ‘apparatus, doesn’t equivocate or bluff, and guards itself from adventurism as much as from fear of the unknown.’
In Left Wing Communism Lenin polemicised against other Left Communists like Herman Gorter, Anton Pannekoek, Otto Rühle, Karl Korsch, Amadeo Bordiga and Paul Mattick because they combined ringing revolutionary manifestos with an abject failure to engage with the working class in struggle in their trade unions and reformist social democratic parties by the united front tactic. But these were naive but sincere revolutionists who had not yet learned how to approach the masses and thought that it was sufficient to voluntaristically summons them to the barricades to make the revolution and there was no time to politically educate and raise their consciousness and confidence by intersecting with their partial struggles, as Lenin outlined in his famous polemic with them. Left wing communists today, like the ICC, reject the right of nations to self-determination and so objectively side with world imperialism despite their anti-capitalist intentions, see parliament and elections as nothing but a masquerade so are indifferent to the election of Tory governments and say ‘the various forms of union organisation, whether ‘official’ or ‘rank and file’, serve only to discipline the working class and sabotage its struggles’. This is indeed ‘an infantile disorder’, a backward workerist bourgeois ideology.
Comrade Pirani criticises the Bolsheviks for not allowing other Soviet parties political rights, for suppressing opposition to their rule and not allowing real measures of workers’ control of ‘non-alienated labour’. Comrade Pirani bases his arguments on the defence of the Factory Committees and opposition to the imposition of managers on factories by the Bolsheviks, similar to restructuring of the Red Army by Trotsky along professional lines where commands had to be executed without prolonged discussions and the officer was not elected. Quite simply the Civil War could not have been won or production revived without these methods.
In looking at the transitional period between a workers’ revolution and the future communist society we must firstly recognise that the social relations of production will continue to be bourgeois, even in a healthy workers’ state, although these will be progressively eliminated as material circumstances allow. The Soviet Union was ‘a bourgeois state without a bourgeoisie’ in Lenin’s words. In a degenerate or deformed workers’ state these relations become permanent because the defence of the bureaucracy’s privileges necessitate national economic autarky and so denies the possibility of building socialism through world trade based on the international division of labour. Obviously the aspirations of the working class are to slough off the severe discipline of the bosses and their foremen and managers, to end sackings, low wages, and exploitation in all its form. But this necessitates the production of what Marx calls ‘super abundance’. Comrade Pirani makes a big deal about the lack of alienated labour in the USSR. In the section of The German Ideology called ‘The Development of the Productive Forces as a Material Premise of Communism’ this argument was brilliantly anticipated and fully answered by Marx,
This ‘alienation’ … can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an ‘intolerable’ power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity ‘propertyless,’ and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the ‘propertyless’ mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism (our emphasis).
In this passage we can see also direct anticipatory refutations of the theory of ‘socialism in a single country’. It contains the kernel of the main arguments Trotsky uses in The Revolution Betrayed in 1936. The first premise could not be met in Russia on its own; with its overwhelming peasant majority; ‘the great mass of (Russian) humanity’ certainly were not ‘propertyless’. And the second premise was not realised either; the Russian working class remained isolated and not in ‘their world-historical, instead of local, being’. This is a direct refutation of left Stalinists apologists for Stalin’s counter-revolutionary policies, up to his pact with Hitler in 1938 while the Spanish Republic was barely cold in its grave and Poland was awaiting its terrible fate.
Survival was the Bolshevik’s main goal from 1918 to 1920 and together this does explain, if not excuse, some of their excesses. However we would be guilty of historical falsification if we did not set these excesses in their historical context. Here again the IBT Platformism & bolshevism sets down these, citing Paul Avrich (The Russian Anarchists, Princeton 1967),
A few months later, relations between the Bolsheviks and the left-SRs and anarchists were severely strained by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk… Left Socialist Revolutionaries and a leftist Bolshevik minority faction, considered it a shameful capitulation... Partly in preparation for the anticipated guerrilla war against the Germans, and partly to discourage hostile manoeuvres by the Soviet government, the local clubs of the Moscow Federation of Anarchists had been organizing detachments of ‘Black Guards’, arming them with rifles, pistols and grenades…. After the stubborn anarchist campaign against the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the formation of armed guards and their underworld excursions came as the last straw. The Bolshevik leadership decided to act…On the night of 11-12 April, the Cheka (the Soviet security service) raided the anarchist headquarters and a furious gun battle broke out. According to Avrich, “A dozen Cheka agents were slain in the struggle, about 40 anarchists were killed or wounded, and more than 500 were taken prisoner.” In the months that followed, the SRs and anarchists sought revenge through assassinations and bombings. Lenin was shot and seriously wounded. On 25 September 1918, a joint left SR-anarchist squad blew up the headquarters of the Moscow Committee of the Communist Party during a leadership plenary. Twelve Committee members were killed, and 55 others were wounded.
It is easy to condemn with hindsight but surely we can understand why these groups were now banned. The revolution was not crushed by the mistakes of Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks nor by Stalin’s deviousness and cunning in outmanoeuvring Trotsky, though these did make their contribution, but by sheer grinding poverty and the despair it engendered in the masses (the working class primarily) when hopes of world revolution faded. Neither the German Social Democrats nor the Bolsheviks had knowledge of much of Marx’s early works on the question of alienation, although his short work of 1843 On the Jewish Question was available. So they lacked crucial insights into communism’s ultimate goal of human liberation. The surviving bits of The German Ideology (1845), was finally literally liberated from the ‘gnawing criticism of the mice’ only in 1932 as was The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. The Grundrisse was written in 1857-61 but was not published until 1939-41. As Trotsky explains in The Revolution Betrayed, his chief contribution to the Marxist cannon, when shortage arises at a market a queue forms, when severe shortages arise scuffles break out and a policeman has to be called. Stalin’s bureaucracy was the policeman of inequality whose main task was to say who got what. Those with that task never forget themselves. Material reality reproduced ‘all the old filthy business’.
Although we must lay part of the blame for this on both Lenin and Trotsky, however Lenin’s last struggle against Stalin’s bureaucratic methods on the Georgian question and Trotsky’s subsequent struggle to defend the heritage of October against Stalinist falsification until his assassination by Stalin’s agent in 1940 fully justifies for us their position, together with Rosa Luxemburg, as the twentieth century’s foremost revolutionary socialists. Stalinism represented cowardly, right/ultra left centrist vacillations which cried ‘back’ at the point of revolution and ‘forward’ when it had suffered a defeat and so could not advance, e.g. Germany 1923 – Stalin urged restraint as the revolutionary situation developed and denied the defeat when the revolution was lost, ‘the revolution is not a bear, it will not run off into the forest’ he ridiculously proclaimed after the 1923 defeat..
From 1924 to 1933/5 the centrist Stalin based everything on defending the bureaucracy by the mantra of ‘socialism in a single country’ and abhorred world revolution as threatening to that bureaucracy. The gross errors in Germany, Italy, Britain, China, etc. are understandable only in that context. After the adoption of Popular Front right turn to class collaboration in 1935 we can no longer speak of Stalinism’s errors, now they definitively embraced counter-revolution in collaboration with capital to defend bureaucratic privileges. Stalinists consciously betrayed the Spanish Revolution to sign a pact with Hitler; they betrayed the working class in France and everywhere else, they consciously conspired and in WWII they actively collaborated with world imperialism in the mass bombing of the proletariat in urban centres from Warsaw to Berlin (by both ‘allies’), Dresden, Hamburg, Athens, Milan and Turin, after the latter two had been liberated by the Italian partisans, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The allied conferences at Potsdam and Yalta were in effect tacit agreements to betray and crush the post WWII revolutions. The ‘Red Army’ did not call on Germany workers to arise and overthrow Hitler as help was at hand, they slandered all Germans as Nazis as Churchill and Roosevelt did, they brutally mass bombed, murdered and raped their way to Berlin as imperialism’s ally.
How might it have been had the German Revolution succeeded? The passage from Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme (demonstrating again the spurious nature of Louis Althusser’s ‘epistemological break’ between the early and late Marx) again can be negatively related to the USSR in 1920-24,
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
It takes but a moment’s reflection to see that ‘the narrow horizon of bourgeois right’ was not and could not have been ‘crossed in its entirety’ in this period in Russia and indeed it cannot ever be crossed in an isolated state (even one as rich as the USA) cut off from the great productive advantage which international trade based on the international division of labour affords to humanity in a globalised economy.
Neither could the Bolsheviks cede to the Kronstadt sailors in 1921, or to Makhno’s Anarchist Revolutionary Insurgent Army not only because of their links with the counter-revolution and the danger posed of imperialist invasion but because a settlement would have had to come from the surplus of workers elsewhere; there was not yet a privileged bureaucracy in command of the economy who were appropriating a disproportionate share of the economic wealth. Comrade Pirani concedes that ‘there is some evidence that counter-revolutionary forces wanted to exploit it to get at the Bolshevik government’ in Kronstadt but this completely distorts the case. Trotsky proved otherwise in Hue and Cry over Kronstadt in 1938. Counter-revolutionary leaders were central to the revolt which took place in response to a nation wide strike wave which included Petrograd. However the vast majority of rank-and-file mutineers were sincere revolutionaries caught in a terrible bind of oppression and international isolation to which the Bolsheviks could supply no solution. From recent researched archive documents it is sufficient to note that all communists were imprisoned by the mutineers (‘Soviets without the communists’ was their slogan) and the commandant of the Kronstadt prison, an anarchist named Stanislav Shustov, was preparing to execute the leading Communists and had set up a machine gun outside the cell where the twenty three of them were held to do so but was baulked only by the advance of the Red Army across the ice (Spartacist No. 59). Neither however can we endorse the manner of the suppression of the mutineers and the terrible fate meted out to those captured by the Cheka, prolonged torture and executions as recounted by Victor Serge, who nonetheless continued to defend the revolution. It is clear that here the repressive state apparatus was taking on a role of its own (Lenin managed to save some Menshevik leaders when he learned of their impending execution), eventually to finds a true champion for the protection of the privileges and corruption of the bureaucracy in the person of Stalin.
Of course comrade Pirani can point out that before Stalin’s triumph the Bolsheviks policed inequality and he makes big on the question of the inequality of rations. The crucial difference for us is that this was not a developed centrist not yet a hardened counter-revolutionary party; its mistakes and failings were discussed and fought against. However there is truth in the charge that bureaucratic methods were employed against loyal oppositionists, particularly the anti-political workerist currents, when political struggle would have been far more appropriate. This reliance on force is understandable as counter-revolution was using any political space afforded to it to rally for the overthrow of the Soviet regime. However space should have been found for these loyal oppositionists, and we must reject the concept of ‘objective counter-revolutionaries’ and strongly differentiate between sincere revolutionists and open counter-revolutionaries who fully deserved the revolutionary justice meted out to them in the Civil War and when they sought to overthrow the state. However blanket oppression with only the Bolsheviks allowed was the wrong approach as it facilitated the rise of Stalinism. Lenin’s secret ban on factions in the 10th Congress in 1921 illegitimatised all opposition, even within the party. This clearly did facilitate the victory of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Point 3: The need for democratic soviets/workers councils
Human beings are political animals as Aristotle (almost) said. Only the direct participatory democracy prefigured by Athenian democracy, which however did not include women, slaves or other non-citizens, can liberate all from the tyranny of the few. Up to now only revolutions in the brief periods of the ascendancy of the oppressed have produced anything approaching participatory democracy. The masses, apart from women, Blacks and Native Americans participated in the New England Town Meetings of the War of Independence, in the Putney Debates Colonel Rainsborough famously asserted that ‘...for really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, Sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under...’. Gracchus Babeuf (1760 -1797), the great French Revolutionist famously proclaimed that ‘Society must be made to operate in such a way that it eradicates once and for all the desire of a man to become richer, or wiser, or more powerful than others.’ Marx’s The German Ideology and The Economic and philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 identified all forms of alienation with oppression which communist society would finally end. Alienation in its religious form has been historically produced by ignorance of the workings of nature but it has been constantly reproduced by class oppression; specifically today it is reproduced in all its forms by the division of labour under capitalism and social relations of production.
The Paris Commune of 1871 was the example of working people taking power. The freely elected council members were instantly recallable, paid an average wage and had equal status to other commune members. It was the first soviet or workers’ council to hold power. Marx recognised it as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Lenin agreed but said they had ‘stopped half way … led astray by dreams of … justice’; he thought their ‘excessive magnanimity’ had prevented them from ‘destroying’ the class enemy by ‘ruthless extermination’. In 1905 the first Petrograd Soviet produced the next and more widespread example of participatory democracy led by the working class. It was revolutionary and controlled by workers’ democracy with elected and instantly recallable delegates imposing its mass rule on the minority capitalist and landlord class. They reappeared in February 1917 beginning in the cities but spread throughout Russia, including the countryside. Soviets/workers’ councils appeared everywhere a serious movement of the working class challenged for power in Germany and Eastern Europe. However they did not last long, the Bolsheviks were unable and unwilling to sustain them when the tide of revolution ebbed. Their revolutionary character explains this.
We reject the left communist/anarchist theories that counterpose the revolutionary party to the class and to the soviets. It is inconceivable that the October Revolution would have triumphed if the Bolsheviks had not won the majority in the strategically important soviets in Petrograd and Moscow in political struggle from February to October. Left to the ‘spontaneous’ leadership of Cadets and Mensheviks or the vague semi-religious aspirations of the anarchists the revolution would have been lost. This was the fate of the Iranian shoras in 1979-80. The demand that the party does not substitute itself for the class does not imply that the party or some combination of revolutionary socialists must not win the allegiance of the vanguard of the masses to the need for revolution. This vanguard, whether or not they join a revolutionary socialist party, then in turn is the key to guiding the masses in revolution. When the tide of world revolution was thrown back in Germany bourgeois relations of production had to be restored to sustain the economy. Marx’s vision is ultimately only realisable on a world scale; the state can then progressively wither away as its tasks are accomplished in the transitional period after the workers have seized power until the full communist society of social and economic equality as the world revolution progresses. As the PR D is for Democracy puts it,
Society in this stage would be ruled and administered by workers’ councils: assemblies of delegates elected in every workplace and locality. Administrative tasks would be rotated to avoid the emergence of a permanent bureaucracy. No official could earn more than the average wage of a skilled worker, to prevent careerism and corruption taking hold. This sort of state would be only ‘half’ a state, since it would be made up of a large proportion of the armed population and thus unable to oppose and coerce the majority or demand privileges from it.
Yet even this form of working class democracy would continue to be state, that is, an instrument of coercion and thus a dictatorship. Of course, this time not against the working class majority but against the capitalist minority; the working class has not need to conceal this fact. It says openly and honestly that the capitalist would be denied the right to treat the means of production as private property, the right to sack workers, the right to control the media and the right to live in luxury while others do all the work. Faced with revolt from within or attack from without, a working class revolutionary dictatorship would not flinch from all the emergency measures of a war to prevent the capitalist minority from using force to recover their power, privileges and property.
Indeed, such a state would, after many decades of democratic socialist planning, be able to finally overcome the legacy of the division of society into classes, thus removing the necessity for a state apparatus of coercion altogether. The institutions of working class democracy could gradually be absorbed into society at large, as ever fewer of the functions required the use of authority. The classless society would therefore also become a stateless society – democracy would wither away.’
Frederick Engels put it thus in Socialism, Utopian or Scientific:
The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society—the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society—this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not ‘abolished.’ It dies out.
And with it, of course the soviets and democracy as there would no longer be any need to regulate the behaviour between human beings other than by social convention. But everything depends on the advance of the world revolution. The Russian Soviets died because that failed, not because of the mistakes of the Bolsheviks.
The prime and overwhelmingly dominating reason for the failure of soviet democracy was the defeats of revolution in the west, particularly in Germany in 1918, 19, 21 and 23, the subsequent isolation of the revolution, the crushing disappointment suffered by the working class and the Bolsheviks themselves at these defeats and the terrible material, social and cultural poverty of Russia combined with the immense devastation caused by WWI and the Civil War (1914-1920). This devastated the economy, down to a fraction of its pre-war capacity by 1920; this is why the factory committees and proper workers’ control could not operate and why eventually Stalinist bureaucracy crushed the Bolshevik party and the workers’ hope of real communism.
No good intentions could overcome that isolation, no revolutionary aspiration could supply the ‘springs of co-operative wealth’ in these dire circumstances. In 1918 most of the left joined the Bolsheviks, supported Lenin and Trotsky and became stalwarts of the revolution. Many right Mensheviks and SR did go over to the counter-revolution and then when it failed many later joined the party and supported Stalin against Trotsky. They only flocked to the assistance of the state to secure good jobs for themselves when Stalin had crushed the revolution and society looked somewhat like the one they had aspired to in 1917. Indeed we might speculate on what type of a society was envisaged by Lenin’s ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ and how many Bolsheviks must have envisioned this in Russia before October emboldened visions of the world revolution? In a sense comrade Pirani’s assertion that the Mensheviks and SRs could have done no worse than Stalin had they won power is misplaced because they did get to do their worst under Stalin, with the exception that by then they judged it unwise to restore the capitalist class to power, even though the working class was by now totally politically expropriated.
Soviet, that is workers’ council democracy, is the only really possible modern form of participatory mass democracy. This must be always and ever be a revolutionary phenomenon. If a national revolution is baulked in advancing to world revolution by defeats of the other national revolutions then communism is impossible, the best that can be achieved in national isolation is a degenerate workers’ state where the capitalists of world imperialism are denied the possibility of exploiting those workers, but the workers themselves are denied the possibility of advancing to communism through participating in the world revolution and the international division of labour. A communist society is totally out of the question at that stage and that is the type of society the leaders of Bolshevism settled for as soon as they realised after 1920-23 that the world revolution was lost for a whole historical period. But they should have spoken the truth and left us revolutionary socialists to pick up the banner they had been forced to drop by these appallingly adverse conditions.
Anyone who knows the history of the period realises that the revolutionary politics of the epoch was very like bourgeois politics in that it had great difficulty in making objective analysis outside of immediate struggles; those who won these struggles got to impose their historiography on subsequent events. Significantly it was when Lenin’s illness and enforced divorce from the immediate struggles that allowed him the space to begin the struggle against Stalinism. And likewise it was only when Trotsky lost high office that he began his serious struggle against the degeneration of the regime after 1926.27. We are fortunate that we have the works of Leon Trotsky to enable us to oppose the revolutionary perspective to that Stalinist status quo ‘socialism in a single country’ justification for the lost revolution.
Point 4. The need for a Marxist Revolutionary Socialist Party
We must acknowledge that the ultimate goal of human liberation from oppressive alienation imposed by capitalist social relations are the same for the best from the Platformist Anarchist/Left Communist tradition as they are from the Marxist/Leninist/ Trotskyist tradition. In particular we acknowledge a large measure of agreement on the final aims with those from the Platformist Mekhno, the Friends of Durruti, the International Communist Current, the Irish Workers Solidarity Movement traditions.
But the Platformist Anarchists and Left Communist fail ideologically in their perspectives for the winning of state power or when power passes into the hands of the working class spontaneously as in Spain in 1936; they do not support the necessity for a workers’ state. When Franco launched his coup in July 1936 the mainly anarchist workers defeated his army in Catalonia and many other places by heroic self-sacrificing struggle. From the IBT’s Platformism & bolshevism this is an account of what the leadership of the anarchist FAI/CNT did,
On 21 July 1936, after the working class had defeated the army’s attempt to seize power, leaders of the CNT/FAI were summoned to the palace by Catalonia’s president. Diego Abad de Santillán, a prominent FAI leader, reported that President Companys, who had no military or police apparatus, told them: ‘You are masters of the town and of Catalonia, because you defeated the Fascist soldiers on your own….You have won and everything is in your power. If you do not need me, if you do not want me as president, say so now, and I shall become just another soldier in the antifascist struggle. If, on the other hand, you believe me…then perhaps with my party comrades, my name, and my prestige, I can be of use to you…’cited in The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain, Pierre Broué and Emile Témime, p 130.
Santillán provided the following timeless example of the logic of ‘apolitical’ anarchism,
‘We could have remained alone, imposed our absolute will, declared the Generalidad null and void, and imposed the true power of the people in its place, but we did not believe in dictatorship when it was being exercised against us, and we did not want it when we could exercise it ourselves only at the expense of others. The Generalidad would remain in force with President Companys at its head….’ --Ibid. p 131.
Santillán was rewarded with the post of Minister of Economy in the Catalan government.’
Of course the Friends of Durruti (FoD) rejected this rotten capitulation to popular frontism. But they came close to advocating a workers’ state and so repudiating anarchism – they were accused of ‘bolshevising anarchism’ by the rest of the anarchists. When faced with the immediate necessity for a state to fight the fascists and having no theory of a workers’ state the majority capitulated to the bourgeois state but the FoD, with the Trotskyists, saw the necessity to fight on and so denounced the FAI/CNT betrayals of June 1936 and the May Days of 1937. But in reality the FoD sought to ‘anarchise’ bolshevism. Because they failed to understand that the workers need their own state, as the IBT pamphlet points out, they proposed a revolutionary army instead – a sort of untheorised semi-state. To whom could this army answer if not to a government of soviets? And will not this government be forced to organise the economy, set up a judicial system and a police force against counter-revolution? This could only be a workers’ state. However as anarchists they reject all ‘authoritarian’ bureaucratic structures. Platformists, like all anarchists, lump together the workers’ state and even the trade unions with the bourgeois state so they must inevitably capitulate to the bourgeois state if power ever falls into their hands.
And like all anarchists they fail to distinguish between a united front and a popular front, between military alliances against imperialism without conceding political support or definite agreements on short term aims without political capitulation to the bourgeoisie. In other words they reject the transitional method of the united front and anti-imperialism united front as the communist method of placing demands for class struggle action on the reformist leaders of the working class and for a real fight against imperialism by the self-proclaimed anti-imperialist leaders of the national liberation movements to expose both of them in practice before their followers and so prepare for the building of a mass revolutionary socialist party.
But the most telling criticism of Platformism is that outside of a world revolution which builds communism on a global scale how can any isolated national revolution survive? Even if it does repel the imperialist attacks and survive economic blockade is it not bound to degenerate like the USSR under Stalin because of sheer grinding poverty? Most left communists and anarchists (but not all) never look at these problems at all; those that do attempt to substitute an international political group for an internationalist political perspective. For them the most important arena is their own local struggle. If they had won in 1917 or 1936/7, supposing that were possible, they would have had to build their non-alienated nirvana as a privileged minority – anarchism in a single locality is worse that socialism in a single country because it is even further divorced from the reality of globalised capitalism. And communism must supersede the globalised division of labour by an international federation of workers states’ before all states can wither away in the communist future. If your aim is not world revolution via a world federation of workers states your fights will always end up like the FAI/CNT in Barcelona in 1936 and 1937.
Would the October revolution have triumphed without the Bolsheviks? Would the Bolsheviks have changed their programme from The Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry to All Power to the Soviets, Down with the Government of Landlords and Capitalists without the April Theses? Without the struggle against the betrayal of the German Social Democrats on 4 August 1914 would the October revolution been even in the position to launch the assault on the Winter Palace? The weakness of the Bolsheviks was that they were a national party only and not yet a part of a world party. Other revolutionaries might have been able help them to avoid or at least to modify some of the errors in the crucial years after the first flush of the revolution had spent itself.
As August Thalheimer argued in his 1930 work Rosa Luxemburg or Lenin, ‘Out of genuine revolutionary Marxism, both Rosa Luxemburg and also Lenin rescued the general conception of the proletarian dictatorship and the role of revolutionary violence within it. Rosa Luxemburg championed this conception… (against Bernstein and Kautsky) who opposed the proletarian dictatorship and limited the revolutionary struggle to the democratic-parliamentary-trade union struggle’. Luxemburg later correctly criticised the Bolsheviks for justifying in theory the measures they were forced to take in the Civil War. Germany and other western countries had a more mature working class and moreover one that was educated enough to exercise a democratic interaction with their revolutionary leadership. But she did not understand the crucial role of the party and she was wrong about the suppression of the Constituent Assembly and wrong about the banning of other opposition parties who had become openly counter-revolution. But she was right to oppose Lenin’s decree of 1918 abolishing workers’ control. And the ban on opposition parties should have been only temporary. Lenin’s ban on internal party factions at the Tenth Congress in 1921 was clearly wrong and a mistake that did assist the rise of Stalinism as we have observed above.
As for revolutionary violence in the Civil War period we have only contempt for those pacifists and Libertarian Marxists who denounce it, decry the restoration of the death penalty in those circumstances. They had no option but to fight with everything they had. To deny that is to take a cowardly bourgeois liberal stance and to accept the bourgeois myth that all ‘legitimate’ violence belongs to the slave owner and slaves are not entitled to use violence to burst their chains asunder. ‘We were now hard, cold and ruthless as our enemies had been since hostilities began. The British were met with their own weapons. They had gone down in the mire to destroy us and our nation, and down after them we had to go to stop them.’ Thus Tommy Barry justified the very undemocratic way in which the west Cork IRA meted out summary executions to Black and Tans, spies and informers in 1920-21. Revolutions are not schools of humanity and when Karl Kautsky attacked the Bolsheviks in 1918 from this bourgeois liberal stance in his book The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Lenin replied ‘burning with anger’ in his The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism (both given to all delegates at the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920) and Trotsky’s Social Democracy and the Wars of Intervention: Between Red and White (1920) are the three major works that attack Kautskyism and the Second International who were supporting the destruction of the Revolution. The three books each have one chapter devoted to the specific question of ‘democracy’; its class nature and the fraud of abstract pure democracy whilst defending the dictatorship of the proletariat and the use of revolutionary violence. They had not encountered the same animal in its ‘extreme’ CPGB form but it is clearly the same thing.
Point 5: Trotsky’s Transitional Programme
The idea behind transitional demands is simple, and should be non-controversial amongst serious Marxists: we must find a method to develop the current struggles of the working class and the reformist consciousness that goes with them towards revolutionary consciousness and pose the necessity for the overthrow of capitalism itself. Simply posing the stark alternatives of reformist demands and a revolutionary overthrow is a recipe for rejection and is the method of ultra-left sectarians – the Left Communists we examined above. We must find demands that seek to escalate the struggle in a way that poses the revolution, initially to a vanguard and thence to the broader masses. In this regard serious Marxists, As Plekhanov and James P Cannon did, distinguish between agitation and propaganda. We seek to advance the struggle by agitational demands for the broad masses: ‘land, bread and peace’ is a very famous example. But such a demand on its own can never make the revolution. Simultaneous propaganda demands are necessary to win the political vanguard. The most famous example is the April Theses. Neither of these was adequate on their own - in fact each individually was useless if not taken as part of the revolutionary process. If they are taken in conjunction, the vanguard can be won and that then becomes the key to the masses, gains their trust and by that can hold back the fight when only a section is ready or unleash it in the most favourable circumstances for victory - the restraint of the 1917 July days and the organisation of the insurrection in October were the result of that approach. Of course, we do not have revolutionary situations every day (or decade), but the method should be clear even in the dispiriting periods of capitalist booms. We would argue that it was this method of approach that distinguished the Bolsheviks from the German Social Democrats, even in the period between 1905 and 1914, although these differences were then untheorised. Lenin clearly had big illusions in Kautsky, as demonstrated by What is to be Done? He had ‘bent the stick’ in that polemic, he admitted in 1908. Whatever he failed to understand in 1903 about mobilising the masses he had certainly learned by 1917.
Trotsky’s programme was directed at the organised working class in the factories and other workplaces. To call this ‘economism’ is to reject the traditional orientation of communism to the working class as the depository of the revolution itself. Those who reject work in the trade unions objectively reject the revolution. The revolution needs the cadres to lead the masses, but Trotsky certainly was not hung up on factory committees: his proletarian military policy, drafted in the Spring of 1940, was designed to turn his followers towards military training and war, because he knew that resistance armies would inevitably feature in the outcome of that war. Risibly comrade Conrad seeks to prove that Trotsky saw no further need for education and organisation, because ‘fighting to maintain existing conditions was all that was needed to ‘win the prize’’ and Trotsky was suffering from ‘a classic case of elevating trade union struggles to the level of socialist politics’.
The Transitional programme itself has been superseded by the post-war stabilisation of capitalism following the defeat of those revolutionary crises, but the method is still valid because it is the communist method in the epoch of imperialism - of the Bolsheviks, of Lenin and Trotsky. This rejected the maximum-minimum dichotomy of the old German social democracy with its illusions in capitalist democracy and its mechanical determinism which saw the march of socialism as an unstoppable force, and the subjective factor of revolutionary leadership were reduced to passive observers at worst (Bernstein) or at best to professional advisors to urge on this historical process (Kautsky).
Revolutionary socialists must, after all, believe that the subjective factor of revolutionary leadership will be the decisive factor in the final analysis even while rejecting the mechanical materialism of Plekhanov’s The role of the individual in history. The Bolsheviks also discarded (in 1919) the name ‘Social Democracy’ for ‘Communist’ because they rejected the last vestiges of illusions in the progressive role of ‘red republicanism’, which radicals saw as the main threat to 19th century bourgeois society, because even in England the political domination of the landed, albeit bourgeoisified, aristocracy reflected the fact that radical capitalism had not yet outlived its historically progressive role. But by 1917 the world had moved on from the pre-(modern) imperialist 1891 Erfurt programme, the great depression had intensified inter-imperialist rivalries, the domination of finance capital and the emergence of vast syndicates and trusts in Germany in particular and the robber barons in the US signified a different world order and with it different programmatic imperatives.
Now on the agenda was the mass insurrection for the seizure of power via a new and far more direct democracy signalled by the emergence of the 1905 soviets. By 1917 these were directly and immediately counterposed to the Constituent Assembly - the best example of the CPGB’s ‘extreme [bourgeois] democracy’. These elements of the Erfurt programme - illusions in parliamentary democracy combined with mechanical determinism and a lack of orientation to a new imperialism which had not yet fully matured - were products of their time. The Erfurt programme cannot be the model for the revolutionary programme for the modern, imperialist world because that world had not yet emerged in 1891. It is true that the 1938 Transitional programme is also outdated but it does address the tasks of a whole historical period of the modern imperialist world, whereas Erfurt largely addressed the pre-imperialist world.
Moreover Erfurt addressed a world where Marxist philosophy had degenerated at the hands of the German and Austrian Marxists to marginalise the dialectic. Not in vain did Lenin sweat over his Philosophical Notebooks in Switzerland from 1914 to recapture the dynamic and profound influence of Hegel on Marx. Read Plekhanov, Franz Mehring, Paul Lafargue or Abram Leon’s On the Jewish question to appreciate that, whilst the Second International’s non-dialectical and mechanical understanding of Marxism could produce some profound insights into the workings of capitalist societies – far better than any bourgeois commentators in most cases – nevertheless it inevitably produced profound errors as well. And, yes, this relative but historically profound backwardness did facilitate both the vote of the German Social Democracy on August 4 1914 for the Kaiser’s war credits and the capitulation by ‘the creeping revolutionary defencism of Kamenev-Stalin’ pre-October 1917 to the Provisional Government’s bourgeois democratic programme, as well as to the ideological form of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. That all these lessons should now be rejected so forcefully by comrade Conrad under the mantra ‘Back to classical Marxism’ demonstrated that this rejection is necessary for those who seek a third camp in communism between Stalinism and Trotskyism.
Let us first say what the Transitional Programme is not and then what it is. It was not a soothsayer’s guide to the future to enable revolutionaries to correctly place themselves in order to take advantage of the new situations, which only their leader could foretell. It was a programme designed to make the future: that is, to orientate those serious Marxists who understood the world situation to the revolutionary potential lodged in that situation and to educate them on how they might actualise that potential.
But let us now turn to the current political significance of transitional demands and the method of comrade Conrad and the CPGB. In attacking Trotsky’s thesis that mankind’s productive forces had stagnated (surely that was true in 1938?), he reveals his own philosophical idealist outlook. He is surprised that Marx’s famous Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (flawed in some important respects he says but does not tell us which ones) ‘can, after all, be read to mean that the material productive forces, not the class struggle, are the locomotive of history’ and Trotsky can therefore be excused for making the same mistake. What mistake? The class struggle cannot be the ‘locomotive of history’ (surely ‘motive force’ would be better?), because that immediately poses the question, what is the motive force of the class struggle? Marx explained, Trotskyists understand, but apparently comrade Conrad does not. It is the conflicts between the social relations of production and the productive forces that are the motive force of history and thereby the class struggle. Trotsky never regarded the ‘existing consciousness’ of workers as unproblematic - that was the whole point of transitional demands: we must approach the working class at its existing level of consciousness or accept that we cannot approach them at all, and thereby give up the struggle and reduce ourselves either to a propaganda sect or a reformist group.
The Workers Power’s article, The Transitional Programme fifty years on, makes the following valuable points which correspond closely with our own position;
Minimum or immediate demands can, under certain conditions, be granted by capitalism as a means of pacifying the working class. Transitional demands, on the other hand, providing they really correspond to the objective situation, cannot be granted in full by capitalism. If they are fought for and even partially won then they raise class warfare to a qualitatively higher level, at once obliging the proletariat to move more and more against the very foundations of class society and at the same time creating the consciousness and organisation capable of a socialist solution. They pose a solution, a way forward from the impasse of normal immediate demands (reforms) and methods of struggle towards more effective ones, which organise working class strength so that it challenges the very logic of capitalist economy, as well as the capitalists’ control and direction of that economy.
These perspectives were short to medium term, not epochal—a matter of years not decades or half a century. They applied to the period—the pre-revolutionary period—Trotsky confronted. The beginning and end of such a period is determined by world historic events. The period on which Trotsky based his perspectives can, roughly speaking, be said to have begun with the victory of Hitler and ended with the victory of US imperialism at the end of the Second World War. For that period Trotsky’s perspectives were both realistic—they took stock of the enormity of the crisis facing mankind—and filled with revolutionary optimism. That is they counted, on the subjective side, on the will of the FI—embodied in its programme—to resolve that crisis in a revolutionary fashion. In the context of 1938 to have advanced any other perspective than Trotsky’s for proletarian triumph would have been merely an excuse for either treachery or abstentionism.
We recognise that to establish and maintain the class independence of the working class, only half-formed at present by the reformist class consciousness lodged in the trade unions and social democratic parties and the various centrist groupings that proclaim revolution, we need a revolutionary socialist party.
Therefore the transitional method is
- The united front tactic and the series of demands and slogans we place on the reformist misleaders of the trade unions and mass reformist workers parties
- The Anti-imperialist united front tactic is the limited tactical agreements and military blocs we may form with nationalist misleaders of anti-imperialist struggles to win the mass away from them.
To refuse all tactics, to fail to see the difference between united fronts and popular fronts, to foolishly seek to maintain the class independence of the working class by ‘Left Communist’ abstentionist sectarianism is to abandon transitionalism and to harangue the masses from the sidelines as the Spartacus League, the IBT and other do. That is the road to total marginalisation.
Point 6: Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution
Trotsky sums up his famous theory thus, ‘the Perspective of permanent revolution may be summarized in the following way: the complete victory of the democratic revolution in Russia is conceivable only in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, leaning on the peasantry. The dictatorship of the proletariat, which would inevitably place on the order of the day not only democratic but socialistic tasks as well, would at the same time give a powerful impetus to the international socialist revolution. Only the victory of the proletariat in the West could protect Russia from bourgeois restoration and assure it the possibility of rounding out the establishment of socialism’ (Trotsky, Three Concepts of the Russian Revolution, August 1939). As we have previously argued no modern revolution can be purely a national event – in fact this is true also for bourgeois revolutions from the seventeenth century – but globalisation today makes every country so interdependent that Stalinist ideology only finds its autarkic redoubt in semi-feudal-ruled North Korea.
We reject reductionalist notions from those like the International Communist Current that the world is not split into oppressed and oppressor nations, that ‘since the beginning of the 20th century, all wars are imperialist wars, part of the deadly struggle between states large and small to conquer or retain a place in the international arena…The working class can only respond to them through its international solidarity and by struggling against the bourgeoisie in all countries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/international_Communist_Current). Likewise we reject State Capitalist and all Libertarian Marxist theories which have historically refused to defend the USSR, Eastern Europe, China, Viet-Nam and Cuba as degenerated and deformed workers states. We defend oppressed semi-colonial albeit relatively industrialised nations like Argentina and Iraq against imperialist attack and reject attempts to create new categories within Marxism like ‘sub-imperialism’. We reject the defence of any so-called ‘rights to self-determination’ of colonial settlers in the Malvinas, the North of Ireland, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Palestine, etc. These settlers cannot claim national rights because they specifically reject any attempts to define themselves as nations, affirming their ‘Loyalist’ status to their imperialist masters, as the North of Ireland Unionists and the Malvinas, Gibraltarian and Zionist settlers do. They are in most cases entitled to rights of cultural autonomy on the national territory of their host nations. We defend Trotsky’s theory as applicable to all semi-colonial nations, bourgeois of deformed workers states, and its method as applicable to all countries. As Indian Marxist M N Roy said at the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920,
We have to develop our parties in these countries in order to take the lead in the organisation of the united front against imperialism. Just as the tactics of the united proletarian front lead to the accumulation of proletarian strength in the Western countries and unmasks and discloses the treachery and compromising tactics of the Social-Democratic Party by bringing them into active conflict, so will the campaign of the united anti-imperialist front in the colonial countries liberate the leadership of the movement from the timid and hesitating bourgeoisie and bring the masses more actively in the forefront, through the most revolutionary social elements, which constitute the basis of the movement, thereby securing the final victory.
A Colonial or semi-colonial bourgeoisie is not capable carrying through a ‘democratic revolution’ to produce political democracy or solve the agrarian problems of semi feudal landlords and poor and landless peasants. Only the proletariat can achieve the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution but they cannot stop there. All genuine revolutionary upsurges, the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the German and Central European revolutionary upsurges that followed, the Italian Factory Occupations of 1920 and many others including the Iranian Revolution of 1979, produce situations of dual power because of the following contradiction. The initial revolutionary ‘democratic’ consciousness of the masses, the cowardice of the ‘left’ petty bourgeois representatives of capitalist socialist relations and the pressure from the working class and the fact that socialisation of the economy is the objectively posed task of the epoch. As Trotsky observed,
But the events have proved that without a party capable of directing the proletarian revolution, the revolution itself is rendered impossible. The proletariat cannot seize power by a spontaneous uprising. Even in highly industrialized and highly cultured Germany the spontaneous uprising of the toilers – in November 1918 – only succeeded in transferring power to the hands of the bourgeoisie. One propertied class is able to seize the power that has been wrested from another propertied class because it is able to base itself upon its riches, its cultural level, and its innumerable connections with the old state apparatus. But there is nothing else that can serve the proletariat as a substitute for its own party. (Trotsky, Lessons of October Chapter 1)
It is an iron law of history that unless a revolutionary leadership of the working class emerges which understands these objectively posed tasks and wins the vanguard of the class to its programme the revolution will be defeated and vicious, murderous reaction will triumph. This is a key feature of the theory of permanent revolution and one moreover that applies to all countries. Trotsky again,
Not only backward China, but in general no country in the world can build socialism within its own national limits: the highly-developed productive forces which have grown beyond national boundaries resist this, just as do those forces which are insufficiently developed for nationalization. The dictatorship of the proletariat in Britain, for example, will encounter difficulties and contradictions, different in character, it is true, but perhaps not slighter than those that will confront the dictatorship of the proletariat in China. Surmounting these contradictions is possible in both cases only by way of the international revolution (Perm Rev p.131).
In expropriating the capitalists the working class would have to socialise the economy, plan production for need and fight internationally for the world revolution, as only on the basis of an internationally planned economy could the economic, social, political and environmental crises of capitalism be overcome. This theory directly refutes Stalinist theories of ‘socialism in one country’ and the Anarchist/Libertarian Marxist illusions in local autonomy or producers’ communes divorced from the globalised class struggle. As against these we again say that the working class needs its own state, its own repressive apparatus, the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the transitional period between the seizure of power by the working class and the flowering of the communist society of the future based on the victory of the world revolution, the ending of economic want, super abundance and the liberation of humanity from all class oppression.
In the CPGB both the RDG, in an explicit form, and the Provisional Central Committee of the CPGB, in more sophisticated but nonetheless clear form, propose not a socialist but a bourgeois-democratic political revolution. That is a Kautskyite utopian scheme to render perfect modern capitalist society without overthrowing it. The RDG’s democratic republic is clearly a stage that will allow a socialist revolution (workers’ republic) to be fought for as the next stage in the indefinite future. This Menshevik position allows the PCC to appear far more orthodox than they really are by defending Lenin’s pre-1917 ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ condemning stageism, but crucially having the same governmental slogan for the democratic republic. The traditional Marxist understanding of the term ‘democratic revolution’ is that it equates with ‘bourgeois revolution’. At least that is how Marx, Lenin and Trotsky used it. We can see that this is not how the CPGB or the RDG use the term. Does some form of universal democratic consent (the magic 50% +) need to be given before they could accept the legitimacy of a revolution? But no, It is wrong to think a ‘democratic revolution is a revolution achieved in a democratic way’ witness the English, French and Russian revolutions, etc.’ But we have that democracy now or at least enough of it to hope that if we get a good leader, say John McDonnell, we will get a great deal more of it or even complete it. Hurray for McDonnell, the democratic revolutionist!
A political revolution in Marxist terms is counterposed to a social revolution, not to some supposedly non-political economic revolution. The very idea suggested by the RDG that removing economic power from the bourgeoisie is a non-political act, ‘economism’ is ludicrous. The 1830 and the 1848 revolutions in France were successful political revolutions because power passed between sections of the ruling class. The terrible fate of the working class who defended the unemployed workers’ centres in Paris in 1848 makes it clear whose victory it was. Social revolutions like the English, French or Russian ones transfer power from one class to another; they are events of world historical import, far more important than political revolutions. It certainly is not ‘economism’ to fight for a social rather than a political revolution. The latter is what the RDG advocates, it seems to us.
What is the purpose of this democratic revolution then if not democracy? Crucially does it transfer both economic and political power from the capitalist class to the working class? And this is a question for the entire CPGB. If its purpose is not to institute a planned economy as the first step (not stage) in a world revolution then it can only have this limited political goal. But if it aims to produce all its goods and services to look after the social and economic needs of global humanity and not for the profits of global corporations, increasingly now the finance capital ones, then we have a real social, socialist revolution. And if that is what is objectively posed, that is the perspective we should orientate all our forces towards. Than is why comrade Mike Mcnair’s ‘mixed economy’ is so problematic. Surely the first sweep of revolution would have to (undemocratically) seize control of the banks and all the other leading heights of the economy and abolish the stock exchange? Of course this does not include corner shops, small businesses or farms, although obviously there would be controversy about the dividing line between petty private enterprise and the large scale productive forces. The political signal this would give to the working class would be the equivalent of that given to the Parisian sans culottes by Robespierre’s reign of terror; it would establish that the leadership was serious about the revolution. It would arm that revolution far better for the inevitable counterrevolutionary offensive of the bourgeoisie. That is where Salvador Allende failed, his illusions in ‘democracy’ (albeit of the non-revolutionary variety) meant that he defended the economic interests of capitalism and disarmed the workers and peasants before the final and fatal onslaught of the generals. The mixed-economy line ‘forgets’ who rules, the working class or the capitalists and would be seen as a half-hearted effort and would not mobilise any significant revolutionary fervour. McDonnell would not make that mistake, would he?
Comrade Conrad makes clear his stageist views in his article in Weekly Worker 548 Thursday October 14 2004,
In envisaging a third (workers’) revolution, socialists and communists in the US will, of course, learn from the Patriots of 1776 and the Radicals of the Civil War. What these revolutionaries began in terms of democracy the third revolution must complete. The third revolution must therefore arm itself, as a vital precondition for success, with a programme for a root and branch overhaul of the 1787 constitution...A single chamber of congress, elected annually, which has full legislative and executive powers, is what is needed. Congress delegates, or representatives, should get their democratic mandate from an equal constituency basis. The democratic case against the standing armed forces - grown to the point of hypertrophy since World War II - is surely unanswerable. A system of popular militias must be initiated.
Having rejected the socialist revolution he admits that,
Technically none of these demands in themselves go beyond the limits of capitalism. However, they do, taken together, provide the necessary salient from which the battle for democracy can be fought and won. Then the rule of the majority can be realised - not merely in form, but in substance. That is a truth we communists hold to be self-evident. Finish the American revolution
Is this not a stageist, bourgeois programme in the good old Stalinist tradition which would be a noose for the working class and leave them at the mercy of the same forces massacred the Shanghai Soviet in 1927? And does it not suggest that the method, at least, of Permanent Revolution applies to all countries? Trotsky on China,
‘All right,’ says the Communist of the East, hanging his head, ‘we will try to conceive of it exactly as Lenin, according to your words, conceived of it before the revolution… ‘But didn’t Lenin explain in 1918 that the democratic dictatorship found its genuine and true realization only in the October Revolution which established the dictatorship of the proletariat? Would it not be better to orient the party and the working class precisely toward this prospect?’ ‘Under no circumstances. Do not even dare to think about it. Why, that is the per-r-r-manent r-r-r-evolution! That’s Tr-r-rotskyism!’ (as comrade Conrad might say) (Perm Rev p.136).
Point 7: Direct participation in the Labour Movement
From its beginnings the British Labour party was reformist, it sought a ‘brotherhood of man’ socialism which blurred if not eliminated class lines. Its strongest influence was the old Methodist egalitarianism that reduced the class struggle to moral issues. But it was, and still is, a living contradiction, a bourgeois-workers party in Lenin’s famous analysis, capitalist at the top but uniquely built by and organically tied to the trade unions and so susceptible to pressure from its working class base. We should seek to be in the forefront of organising workers in TUs independently of the bureaucracy. In order to achieve this we assert,
- Independent rank-and-file organisation is the best way to win in struggle against the bourgeoisie and/or their agents and
- Workers organised for themselves in this way presents a harbinger of the future society of communist freedom that we should promote.
The currently organised rank-and-file and broad left bodies in the unions are almost useless - they fail to offer a viable alternative to the neo-liberal offensive of the bourgeoisie and their agents, they are inaccessible to the mass of TU members and they only appear at election time in order that the ‘permanent bureaucrat’ positions in the unions are filled by ‘left-wingers’. As is visible in every TU with a ‘left-wing’, they are virtually indistinguishable from the ‘right’. Standing in TU elections is a matter of offering a way forward to the mass of TU members against the bosses and against the misleaders - a fighting rank-and-file should seek elected office only on a principled basis of total transparency and accountability, which is how we demand the unions are run! Any full-time positions must certainly be electable, accountable and recallable, and the official should continue to receive the wage and any ‘perks’ that they did before election - i.e. the same as those they represent (meaning as well that only workers can stand for and gain elected position in the union)
Perhaps the best opening for Revolutionaries is the National Shop Steward’s Network (NSSN). Although dominated by the SP it is still open and democratic enough to permit struggle. The SWP Fighting Union network is patently a party front with the traditional lack of democracy. However the NSSN has its problems too. The founding NSSN Conference took place in Camden on 7 July. The objective tasks facing it were three; 1. To establish its independence from the left bureaucracy, Crow, Serwotka, etc. – and thereby from the union bureaucracy and bureaucratic methods as a whole, as a prelude to fighting for the class independence of the working class itself. 2. To link the struggles of all those fighting government austerity, CWU, PCS etc. and 3. From this to begin to organise regional and local branches of the Network to give a real lead in the fight back of the class itself. It failed or was severely inadequate in all three but nevertheless the fighting capacity of the class was on show at the conference in the form of reports from struggles so it is certainly a venue for intervention for working class activists and committed revolutionists.
Trade union membership has plummeted from fourteen million in the late 80s to over seven and a half now. Trade union leadership throughout the world have retreated in front of the bosses’ offensive in the ideological confusion that has reigned on the left following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But back in the 70s much of the militancy was simply on wages led by the LCDTU who had Stalinist aspiration that power might be won by left Labourism or the ‘Red Army’ and a socialist revolution led by the working class was not needed to get rid of capitalism. Despite the election of a whole raft of ‘left’ general secretaries and union executives in Britain, many containing self-proclaimed revolutionaries, showing a radicalisation of the working class, no viable strategy to combat this global offensive has been developed. The views of the Unite’s US partner, Andy Stern of the SEIU and the welcome for them given by Tony Woodley shows that there is a big danger of a further lurch to the right by the TU bureaucracies.
The appalling collapse to the right of so many lefts in the top leadership of the TUs in refusing to endorse and/or campaign for John McDonnell and the many that then endorsing Gordon Brown pathetically because ‘we do not need a glorious failure’ shows how much we need genuine Marxist perspectives for trade union work now. Any fundamental change in society in favour of the working class has to come from below, from the working class itself. Because shop stewards are directly elected representatives of the working class they feel the pressure from below far keener than top bureaucrats, many of whom simply posture to the left on occasion only ignominiously to collapse when their bluff is called (remember Gate Gourmet). Co-ordinating our struggles at rank and file level across Unions and workplaces will add tremendous strength to all disputes and would begin to open the road for a New Marxist Party.
The civil servants of the PCSU and the postal workers of the CWU are being misled by their left leaderships – including national executive committees with a majority of revolutionary socialists, members of the SP, the SWP and others – into a programme of ineffectual action, based on one-day token strikes, which can only lead to demoralisation and defeat.
Crucial now to taking this movement forward is the formation of regional and local branches of the network, linked to local community struggles and campaigns. We advocate an alternative strategy focussed on the development of workers control, which would foster widespread direct resistance to the attacks, by challenging management prerogatives. Workplace action committees would decide which aspects of excessive workloads would not be performed and would arrange the boycotting of work required to facilitate privatisation, and work transferred from closure threatened offices, together with picketing of privatised ‘competitors’. As self organisation and class consciousness grew, the workplace committees would make links with the struggles of other groups of workers, for instance those fighting the benefit cuts on the sick and disabled and the turning of the ratchet of oppression on unemployed workers, and those fighting deportations. Such an alternative strategy would inspire new, young workers and link the struggles of today with the communist future. This is what we expect of socialist leaders of our unions – nothing less will suffice!
We welcome the focus this campaign is giving to defeating the anti-union laws but we all know that the passage of the totally inadequate Trade Union Freedom Bill would make little difference. What is needed is mass defiance of the laws; Gate Gourmet was such an opportunity. And we are confident that had the Shop Stewards Network been integrated into that Heathrow workforce they would have been able to take the control of the dispute out of Woodley’s hands and would have driven several nails in the coffin of the anti-union laws.
But to do that we have to get rid of the rule that precludes us from interfering in the ‘internal affairs’ of trade unions, i.e. from challenging the right of trade union bureaucrats to betray these vital struggles in the name of preserving the funds of the union. In reality the majority of the trade union general secretaries and their immediate coterie in the top bureaucracies want to retain the anti-trade union laws because they protect them from their own membership. The Tories intended it that way and Blair, Brown and the majority of the Labour MP agree. Fat bureaucrats are even more comfortable when the movement is defeated.
We need international solidarity to defend jobs and we need to understand and explain how global capital works and how it is exploiting the working class of the world. One of our main problems is the Union leaderships who are in league with New Labour – and New Labour is in league with the international capitalist class. There will be no difference under Gordon Brown. Any fight-backs and defence of our conditions have to be seen in this political context. Our strengths are our ability to explain the world and then to take the necessary action to change it by forging national and international solidarity.
However the democracy in the NSSN is seriously flawed as pointed out above. This is no accident. Bob Crow, firstly on behalf of the left bureaucracy, Mark Serwotka, Billy Hayes et al. and then indirectly and maybe even inadvertently in some cases on behalf of the bureaucracy as a whole, knows what is best for the working class. The Socialist Party agrees with him and they promote the NSSP on that basis. Democracy would only get in the way of this paternalistic project; ‘ultra lefts’ would only put a spanner in the works by asking awkward questions and alienating the left bureaucrats so collapsing the movement, they must be silenced because ‘we all know’ really, despite all the revolutionary verbiage, that the working class are not capable of altering the balance of class forces in their own favour, we must do it for them, we must substitute for the dumb, stupid workers to advance the cause of socialism. This whole method of approach means that the prospects of building a genuine rank-and-file fighting organisation of the working class to throw back the capitalists offensive is primarily left now to the ‘ultra lefts’, that is those revolutionary socialist and sincere class fighters who understand the need to fight for the independence of the working class.
Point 8: women’s liberation and the specially oppressed
We politically agree with Workers Power’s pamphlet Marxism and Women’s oppression and will propagate and defend that line. We also agree with their pamphlet on LGBT liberation - Marxism and gay liberation
Point 9: A Trotskyist International
We are for the reconstruction of the Fourth International and will fight for the splits and regroupments necessary for this in our international work.
Point 10: Lenin’s differentiation of all nations into imperialist oppressor nations and oppressed colonial or semi-colonial nations
We are opposed to Popular Fronts with capitalist parties and formations nationally and internationally. This does not preclude episodic pacts for immediate military self-defence of for limited agreed goals, which can be concluded, in the words of Trotsky, ‘with the devil or his grandmother’.
This is how Workers Power defends the revolutionary Comintern in1986,
Lenin’s theses (at the 1920 Second Congress of the Comintern) raise the possibility of an ‘alliance’ between the Communist International, and therefore national communist parties, and ‘national revolutionary movements’. Lenin stressed in his opening speech that this was possible because of the fundamental difference between an oppressor and an oppressed nation. The theses declared: ‘The Communist International should accompany the revolutionary movement in the colonial and backward countries for part of the way, and should even make an alliance with it, but must unconditionally maintain the independent character of the proletarian movement, be it only in embryo.’ 1 In Lenin’s original formulation he had talked about the CI entering into a ‘temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and. backward countries’.
‘A determined fight is necessary against the attempt to put a communist cloak around revolutionary liberation movements. The C.I. has the duty to support the revolutionary movement in the colonies
only for the purpose of gathering of the future proletarian parties in fact and not just in name - in all countries and training them to be their special tasks... of fighting bourgeois democratic tendencies within components communists the backward conscious of against the nation.’
For the Second Congress therefore there were two important conditions for the possibility of an alliance with the bourgeois nationalists: (i) that they were actually leading a struggle against imperialism, and (ii) that they placed no restrictions on the communists organising the workers and peasants in a revolutionary way against the imperialists.
There are a number of obvious differences with Iran today. Ahmadinejad leads a bourgeois nationalist government which has only tactical differences with US imperialism. However if a war with the US we must be for the defeat of imperialism. We cannot in this situation be sectarian or abstentionist. Trotsky gives this example of this wrong method, ‘the only salvation of the workers and peasants of China is to struggle independently against the two armies, against the Chinese army in the same manner as against the Japanese army.’ And Trotsky explains ‘to participate actively and consciously in the war does not mean ‘to serve Chiang Kai-shek’ but to serve the independence of a colonial country in spite of Chiang Kai-shek. And the words directed against the Kuomintang are the means of educating the masses for the overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek. In participating in the military struggle under the orders of Chiang Kai-shek, since unfortunately it is he who has the command in the war for independence—to prepare politically the overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek . . . that is the only revolutionary policy’.
Let us see how this struggle developed at the Fourth Congress and after as related by SK,
It (the AIUF) is a method of breaking the political hold of the nationalists over the masses. By fighting alongside and in these movements against imperialism, in temporary united fronts around concrete and specific demands and actions, the communists can expose, in struggle, the vacillating and treacherous leadership of the movement, winning the workers and peasants to their side. By abandoning this tactic we abandon this vital method of communist work.
Trotsky recognised that this could only be the case where the bourgeoisie’s ‘fundamental class aspirations are satisfied either by revolutionary means or in another way (for instance, the Bismarkian way)’. As long as this was not the case, as long as imperialism continued to divide and exploit the country, stunt the possibility of the bourgeoisie achieving its basic interests, them there was always the possibility of a section of this class ‘supporting the revolution again, or at least flirting with it.’
‘Let us repeat again that a military bloc does not imply at all the setting up of a united front: two classes facing each other cannot stipulate a non-belligerence treaty.’ And earlier, attacking groups ‘claiming to be Trotskyist which mistake the policy of temporary alliances with bourgeois national forces for a proper united front’. Since when has the united front been anything else than a ‘temporary alliance’? Since when has a united front been a ‘non-belligerence treaty’?
Of course, nine tenths of the bourgeoisie for nine tenths of the time will be an agent of imperialism against its own people. But there is that section of the bourgeoisie that deludes the masses with anti-imperialist rhetoric. Here the united front, providing it fulfils all the conditions of the united front - a clear, precise and limited object of real struggle with no confusion of banners (marching separately and striking together) – can expose the bourgeois party and win over its mass base. This tactic is not qualitatively different from the united front that could be used in the case of an oppressed nationality (which also has a bourgeoisie).
Comrade Torab Saleth has attacked Permanent Revolution as irrelevant today because he says all states are now bourgeois and, as the first part of Trotsky’s theory is concerned with the transition from the bourgeois democratic to the socialist revolution, it just does not apply today (How Useful is the Theory of Permanent Revolution Today?). He thereby blurs and seeks to eliminate Lenin’s differentiation of all states into imperialist and semi-colonial and colonial oppressed states. He claims that the other two parts of the theory; the uninterrupted character of the period of transition (no stages separated by long historical periods) and the necessity for the world revolution to complete the national revolution, were not unique to Trotsky and so we can largely ignore them. To begin with it is important to emphasis that the theory is an integrated whole. It cannot be broken down and dissolved into its constituent parts and then invalidated by repudiating one of them. The application of the theory today depends on the understanding of the integrated nature of the entire world economy and the worldwide division of labour. If we remove that from our considerations, and ‘that’ is world imperialism, then the question of why the democratic revolution is incapable of triumphing is lost. This stratagem is a means of dismissing world imperialism as the main enemy of humanity and focusing solely on Iran’s internal problems with a dismissive nod in the direction of world imperialism which is not treated at all in his article. ‘We need a socialist revolution here’ says comrade Saleth; ‘forget all that anti-imperialist nonsense, the main enemy is at home’ is the implication in an ideological capitulation to socialism in one country and to the left communists dismissal of ‘our main enemy is world imperialism’ and the whole concept of oppressed semi-colonial nations like Iran. As Trotsky observed,
‘The struggle of the epigones is directed, even if not always with the same clarity, against all three aspects of the permanent revolution. And how could it be otherwise when it is a question of three inseparable parts of a whole? They separate the national socialist revolution from the international. They consider that in essence the conquest of power within national limits is not the initial act but the final act of the revolution.; after that follows the period of reforms that lead to the national socialist society.’ (Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution, New Park, p9)
Comrade Saleth misquotes Trotsky when he claims, ‘The first aspect - according to Trotsky himself, ‘the central idea of the theory’ - deals with ‘the problem of transition from the democratic revolution to the socialist’. This is the actual quote from Trotsky,
The theory of the permanent revolution…pointed out that the democratic tasks of the backward bourgeois nations lead directly, in our epoch, to the dictatorship of the proletariat and that the dictatorship of the proletariat puts socialist tasks on the order of the day. Therein lay the central idea of the theory (Perm Rev p8).
The phrase, ‘the problem of transition from the democratic revolution to the socialist’ comes a whole page earlier, on page 7 of my New Park edition and IS NOT the central idea of the theory and Trotsky, or any serious Trotskyist since, has never claimed it was. I knew immediately it was not and it was this that prompted me to go back to the original text. It is impermissible to jumble quotations like this but it does point to a discrepancy in Trotsky’s formulations. We can understand this if we accept that the page 7 formulation was looking back at 1905 and 1917 but the page 8 formulation was looking forward and dealing with ‘the democratic tasks of (all) the backward bourgeois nations’. The Permanent Revolution group’s article on The Anti-Imperialist United Front on its website explains why this analysis is correct,
Its (the Comintern’s) perspectives for the revolutionary struggles in that arena remained flawed by its failure to generalise the lessons of the Russian Revolution with regard to the theory of Permanent Revolution. This should come as no surprise since even the author of this theory, Leon Trotsky, did not think this perspective was applicable to the colonial countries, and did not raise it as an operative guide for revolutionary strategy between 1917 and 1927…Trotsky’s… report on the Fourth World Congress to the Russian Party: ‘It is self-understood that the colonies - Asia, Africa… if taken independently and isolatedly, are absolutely not ready for the proletarian revolution. The growth and influence of communist ideas… can be assured not only by, and not so much by the role of the native communist nuclei as by the revolutionary proletariat of the metropolitan centres for the emancipation of the colonies.’
Moreover it is hopelessly schematic to base an entire article on a (misquoted) differentiation between the ‘democratic’ and the ‘socialist’ revolution. As we highlighted above the initial phrase of all revolutions will be spontaneously ‘democratic’. To the masses it will simply be ‘the revolution’. The Russian ‘democratic’ February revolution had and will have this in common with all revolutions. And despite the numerous quotes we can pull from Lenin and Trotsky pre-1917 that this approaching revolution will be ‘the bourgeois revolution’ they knew, and even Kautsky knew, that it was impermissible in serious theoretical debate, to make this absolute separation. Take the following from 1906.
To Plekhanov’s question: Is our revolution bourgeois or socialist? Kautsky had answered that it is no longer bourgeois, but not yet socialist, that is it represents the transitional form from one to the other. In this connection Lenin wrote in his foreword; ‘Is our revolution bourgeois or socialist in its general character? That is the old schema, says Kautsky, that is not how the question should be put. That is not the Marxist way. The revolution in Russia is not bourgeois for the bourgeoisie is not one of the driving forces of the present revolutionary movement in Russia. But neither is the revolution in Russia socialist’’ (ibid. p.55).
And Trotsky goes on,
On the other hand, I never denied the bourgeois character of the revolution in the sense of its immediate historical tasks, but only in the sense of its driving forces and its perspectives… in calling it a bourgeois revolution…The general sociological term bourgeois revolution by no means solves the politico-tactical problems, contradictions and difficulties which the mechanics of a given bourgeois revolution throw up.’ (Perm Rev, p56)
Contrast this sophisticated and dialectical approach to the coming revolution with the method applied by comrade Saleth to dismiss Permanent Revolution,
Trotsky, both in 1904-06 when he developed the theory and in 1928-29 when he was defending it against the Stalinist attacks, was obviously referring to pre-capitalist countries ruled by non-bourgeois classes. Why else should he say in 1906 ‘Russia was approaching the bourgeois revolution’ if indeed the bourgeoisie had already achieved state power? Thus in the eyes of Trotsky himself the whole concept of transition depends on the starting point of a non-bourgeois state. But, in how many countries of the periphery today do we have similar conditions to Russia or China of the early 20th century? Who has seriously claimed that countries like Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Iran, India, Philippine, Egypt, etc., are still dominated by pre-capitalist economies with pre-capitalist ruling classes? ‘
Having ignored world imperialism and misquoted Trotsky he then ignores that fact that the Chinese bourgeois revolution had already triumphed in 1911 in the form of the Kuomintang, Sun Yat-sin and Chiang Kai-shek and it was to this new world of semi-colonial nations that Trotsky was now applying his theory. It was here that the force and applicability of his theory educated a whole new generation of revolutionaries and enabled the theoretical struggle against Stalinism and ‘socialism in one country’ to be fought out for future generations.
Comrade Saleth says,
To cut a long story short, this fact alone is enough to claim therefore, there is hardly anywhere left in the world today where the first aspect of the theory of permanent revolution can be usefully applied. If you have a bourgeois state what you have ahead of you is called a socialist revolution and not a growing over or the transition of the democratic to socialist revolution.
On the contrary the theory applies to all semi-colonial nations fighting against imperialism, with Iran, Iraq, Palestine and Venezuela in the forefront. Why else would HOPI say ‘The main enemy is imperialism? The Iranian regime does not represent a progressive or consistent anti-imperialist force’ if but we can only fight it consistently on a world, i.e. Permanent Revolution perspective, and recognise the impossibility of defeating the regime in Iran and going on the construct socialism by a national socialist revolution. Permanent Revolution (the theory not the group!) recognised the HOPI launch conference even if many did not recognise it; some fought for its premises consciously, some unconsciously, and others, consciously or unconsciously, opposed it.
Comrade Saleth counterposed his theory of ‘combined revolution’ to Permanent Revolution on the basis that the only reason Trotsky called ‘the Russian revolution a bourgeois revolution’ was that ‘the immediate objective tasks of the revolution’ consisted in the creation of ‘normal conditions for the development of bourgeois society as a whole’. And that ‘at least Trotsky had a need for the term permanent to explain a ‘transition’ from this bourgeois revolution to a socialist one. What need does it serve today when you face combined anti-capitalist and democratic tasks against a bourgeois state?’ Comrade Saleth, in his ultra-leftism, forgets entirely the consciousness of the masses, the working class leading the peasantry, who must make the revolution. In correctly pouring scorn on the pseudo-Trotskyist, Gerry Healy, Jack Barnes and Ernest Mandel who objectified Permanent Revolution and the world revolution as unstoppable processes which moved through the semi-feudal Ayatollah Khomeini’s reactionary utopian Islamic Republic he dismisses the anti-imperialist of the Iranian masses themselves and the Iranian Trotskyists who did get it right,
When The Students Following Imam's Line took US Embassy personnel as hostages, even the bourgeois liberal politicians in Iran could see that the clerics were simply trying to consolidate their own position within this ‘post-revolutionary’ regime at the expense of the more liberal wing, but our Trotskyist generals were in fact calling on the masses to abandon their own real anti-imperialist struggles and come in front of US Embassy and passively watch this charade.
Indeed they should not ‘abandon their own real anti-imperialist struggles’ but we would respectfully suggest that the Imam hijacked and focused this anti-imperialism on the personage of Khomeini because they recognised that the masses did have an internationalist understanding that the main enemy was US and world imperialism. How should revolutionaries tackle this contradiction? It was made immensely more difficult in 1979-80 by the capitulation of the the Stalinist Tudeh Party, the Fedayeen guerillas, the Islamic leftist Mojahedinand the pseudo-Trotskyists to Islamic reaction which had immensely weakened the class consciousness of the vanguard, particularly in the shora struggles. These workers’ councils/soviets, before they were transformed into tools of the reactionary clerics were,
Based on general assemblies of all employees, assumed control over the Iranian economy. They ensured continued production amidst the revolutionary chaos, initiated radical reforms in work organisation and (in the course of 1979) developed into the focal point of a democratic restructuring of Iranian society from the bottom up. The shora movement, arguably the most comprehensive experiment of workers' control in a developing-world country to date, was also a major threat to the power of Ayatollah Khomeini and the sort of society he and his fellow Islamists were striving to establish (Iran: the hidden power, Shora Esmailian, Andreas Malm http://www.opendemocracy.net/trackback/4513).
This was where the revolution was ideologically defeated by Stalinism, pseudo-Trotskyism and those to their right by capitulation to Khomeini. But to take the line of the pro-imperialist liberal bourgeoisie and refuse even critical support to the hostage takers was to side with imperialism. The correct transitional demand was critical support to set the base against the leaders by pointing out that their bogus ‘anti-imperialism’ was tied to the reactionary clergy who sought to destroy all the working class organisations, the only force that can defeat imperialism internationally. What Khomeini wanted then and what Ahmadinejad wants now is a new compromise with imperialism on terms far worse for the working class than before.
But an imperialist-neutral or even a pro-democratic-imperialist working class leading a ‘socialist’ revolution in Iran is a reactionary utopia, whose superficial attraction is that at least it appears more modern. If ‘Trotsky’s theory about the ‘transition’ from the democratic to the socialist revolution’… is ‘in fact is nothing but a proletarian revolution with combined tasks’ then we have no need at all to fight imperialism. This is not the Marxist way because it is not the path to winning the masses to revolutionary socialism with the programme of Permanent Revolution.
Point 11: The question of Social Democracy – specifically the British Labour Party
As we say above ‘The Labour Party was never a socialist party. Its Clause 4 so beloved by left-reformists was never more than a fig leaf. The Labour Party remains a bourgeois workers’ party, that is to say, it is a pro-capitalists party based on the organised working class. So long as this remains the case, Marxists advance tactics towards Labour Party members which may include both entryism and critical electoral support’. We reject the notion that the Labour Party has become a bourgeois party like the US Democrats and we are not fpr the building of a ‘new workers party’ along reformist lines such as Respect or the SP NWP. This is an avoidance of the prime political task of the epoch which is to intervene in the existing labour movement and fight the increasing bureaucratic stranglehold of the misleaders of the Trade unions over its membership. This includes the hounding and victimisation of militants, the diminution of democracy and using the anti-trade union laws as a cover for collaboration with New Labour. As proof of the falsity of this orientation to a new party of the working class we would point out the SWP and SP trade unionists act in almost the same was as traditional bureaucrats once they are elected to their union executives.
Appendix 1: Our stance on workers states
We defend the categorisation of the former Soviet Union, eastern European, China and Vietnam as degenerate and deformed workers’ states until capitalist restoration in the counter-revolutions of 1989-91. China and Vietnam abandoned autarky in the late 1980s, and with it they ceded whole areas of their economies to imperialist exploitation. This is not socialism via the international division of labour but enhanced imperialist rates of profit via exploitation of cheap labour policed by violently repressive bureaucracies. They have progressively integrated their economies into the global world economy resulting in appalling labour conditions for the export-orientated sectors dominated by US capital. They can no longer be considered deformed workers’ states in any real sense, apart from the continued domination of the communist parties. In this narrow and spurious sense some continue to defend China, Vietnam and North Korea but in what way can they now be said to serve the interests of the international working class by challenging the interests of imperialism? On the contrary China and Vietnam assist imperialism, the US in the first place, as a vital prop of world imperialism as suppliers of semi-slave labour producing or processing and re-exporting; e.g. US cotton as clothing for Wal-Mart. North Korea only now exists to defend the privileges of the semi feudal Stalinist bureaucracy and is indefensible except as any semi-colonial country must be defended by revolutionists against imperialism.
We continue to defend Cuba as the only deformed workers’ state left. Its economy has recovered from the ‘special period’ of the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union and has managed to circumvent the US/EU blockade by developing relationships with China, the Middle East and principally Venezuela, exporting medical services and developing tourism. Its relationship with Venezuela does represent a major new obstacle to US imperialism’s plans in the region. The regime still commands considerable mass support although household income has not kept pace with the rise in national income. Though poor by the standards of the western working class, its education system and health service are better than any other third world country and even than the USA in many ways. Realistically the Cuban working class understand that what awaits them on capitalist restoration is not vast increase in wages comparable to Europe and America but the fate of neighbouring Haiti, the poorest and most exploited country in the west. Here the Disney Corporation and other corporations have vicious Tonton Macoute-originated militias attacking the supporters of ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to keep unions out and wages low. Cuban workers are still prepared to accept the denial of many democratic rights to escape that fate. There is no possibility that Chavez will lead a socialist revolution and counter-revolution is still the most likely outcome of his stalinoid policies. The growing development of a Latin American movement under this dual influence does make space for a genuine socialist revolution in any one of several countries in the region with strong Trotskyist traditions. This makes it imperative to continue to defend the Cuban deformed workers’ state, albeit with all its bureaucratic deformations and dominated as it is by counter-revolutionary Stalinist ideology, and to fight for a political revolution to institute workers’ democracy and the communist programme for world revolution.
Appendix 2: No Platform for Fascists
To be added
ICC The Russian Communist Left p65
The Communist Left in Russia after 1920 - Ian Hebbes, http://libcom.org/library/communist-left-russia-after-1920-ian-hebbes
See the review by Martin Kopple of Lenin’s Final Fight in The Militant (US) Vol.59/No.22, June 5 1995 for a brief summary of this important record. The Pathfinder publication contains ‘everything Lenin is known to have written from Dec. 21, 1922, until his last letter of March 6, 1923, addressed to Georgian communist leaders’ http://www.themilitant.com/1995/5922/5922_21.html
See Trotskyite economism? by Gerry Downing, Weekly Worker 651, Nov. 30 2006 for a fuller analysis.
Trotsky, Leon, Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt, January 15, 1938, http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/russia/kronstadt/trotsky_hue_cry.html
Platformism & bolshevism, IBT, April 2002, http://www.bolshevik.org/pamphlets/Platformism/platformism.html#7
Permanent Revolution No. 7, Spring 1988.
Stuart King, The Anti-Imperialist United Front, In defence of the revolutionary Comintern – 1986.
