The Ironies of Isaac Deutscher

[p021] THE IRONIES OF ISAAC DEUTSCHER Union in the period of the Stalinist reaction, but a characterization of political trends and tenden- cies that crystallized out of the struggle between the bureaucracy and the Soviet and international working class. The break from Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy by Pablo led on inevit- ably to a denial of the Transitional Programme, to a rejection of the political programme which had as its foundation Trotsky’s fifteen-year struggle against Stalinism and for the traditions of Marxist internationalism. Pablo’s defection from Trotskyism, which in- volved a revision of the Transitional Programme to correspond with the ‘new reality’ of world Stalinism, had its roots in profound changes in the relationship between the classes in the post- war world. The continued, if uneven, decline of imperialism, the victory of the Chinese Revolution and the break-up of capitalism in Eastern Europe, all demanded an even closer tie-up between the bureaucracies and imperialism in order that they could achieve some form of stability after the social upheavals precipitated by the Second World War. This search for social stability refracted it- self most sharply in the intermediate layers be- tween the monopolist bourgeoisie and the hard core of the industrial proletariat. It is these layers, swollen in the imperialist states to a considerable size, which have dominated the world of ‘official’ politics. An important section of this intermediate layer seeks its econo- mic and political stability by serving the capitalist class through its intervention in the life of the working class in alliance with the leaders of the labour aristocracy. As several Marxist analyses of this class have brought out, it seeks this stability through what it considers to be the most appropriate political channels—sometimes through Social Democracy, at other times through liberalism, and on other occasions again, via its support for fascism. What this class is always forced to reject as thoroughly alien to its intermediate position between the two major classes is the existence, basis and historical outcome of the class struggle. Middle-class radi- calism, its progressive role exhausted with the French Revolution and Jacobinism, and already found wanting in the abortive 1848 bourgeois revolutions in Germany and Austria, is a basically reactionary political force and conflicts with Marxism on all the main questions of political theory and action. Today large sections of the middle class, and particularly their radical spokesmen, attempt to resolve this problem of stability through both a 19 leaning upon and also a curbing of the power of the working class. This alliance with the reform- ist leaders of the working class is sought as a necessary counterweight to the power and rapacity of monopoly capital, which often stands in the way of the economic and social advancement of the middle class. The middle-class radical there- fore readily sees the bureaucracy, quite often even its ‘left’ face, as precisely that force which he can turn to in order both to pressurize the ruling class into reforms, and also to hold in check the power of the working class as a force in its own right. Sudden changes in the course of economic and political events, such as the international crisis after 1929, or the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939, can create havoc amongst the most politically oriented of the petty bourgeoisie. After 1930 the German middle class defected en masse from its traditional bourgeois-democratic and mildly nationalist parties and swung into line behind Hitler’s Brown Shirts. From the recesses of petty-bourgeois respectibility, vast layers of the German middle class, particularly its youth, turned into street-fighting toughs and desperadoes. This middle-class instability manifests itself even, and in fact most accurately, inside the Marxist movement. The defection of the Burnham- Shachtman group to bourgeois democracy and patriotism illustrated that often the radical middle-class elements within the revolutionary party are pulled more by their own social milieu than by the discipline, programme and method of the party. Even those who at one stage began to take up a struggle against Stalinism, and who were drawn towards Trotsky’s struggle for the new In- ternational, were unable to see Stalinism in any- thing other than moral terms, and hence were unable to make the theoretical and class break from middle-class radicalism to revolutionary Marxism. To make this breakthrough to Marxism and the working class demands a complete rupture with the ‘official’ world of left politics, which at bottom is nothing but a highly sophisticated com- promise with the status quo. Trotskyism is not a protest at the iniquities of imperialism and Stalin- ism, but a preparation of the working class for their overthrow. Pabloism was the form that this petty-bourgeois adaptation to radicalism and the power of the bureaucracy took within the Fourth International. What was at stake in the fight against it was not simply the preservation of a fixed programme. It was a fight to defend the Marxist conception of the revolutionary role and independence of the

[p022] 20 working class and the party through which it finds its highest expression. Pabloism was a rejection of this constant Marxist orientation towards the working class, and expressed a search, empirical in its nature, for other, already estab- lished and influential forces which could carry through the overthrow of capitalism. Always outside the ranks of the Fourth Interna- tional, but destined nevertheless to play an im- portant part in the development of revisionism within it, Isaac Deutscher has been the epitome of this turn away from the working class and capitulation before the power of the Stalinist bureaucracy. It is perhaps one of the most impor- tant facets of the struggle against the revisionists in the Fourth International that their most sophisticated theoretician was never a member of the International, and was in fact responsible for the opposition put up by the Polish delegation against its foundation at the First Congress of 1938. (Deutscher gives the full details of his own role in these events on pages 421-422 of The Prophet Outcast.) Pabloism only accepted in 1953 what Deutscher had already decided in 1938 and had been arguing ever since—that the Fourth Inter- national was irrelevant to the struggle for world socialism, and that the goal of the Marxist pioneers was to be realized through some agency other than an authentically communist international. Deutscher was the highly skilled pioneer of a revision of Trotskyism to which the leaders of the Socialist Workers’ Party, by a series of rather crude improvisations, evolved their way pragma- tically over a period of ten or more years. In examining the philosophical and political position of Deutscher, as he reveals it in the series of essays recently published under the title Ironies of History, we can probe yet deeper to the roots of revisionist method, and bring out the class and philosophical origins of its attack upon the posi- tions of revolutionary Marxism. The point has already been made that the essence of revisionism is not just the formal rejection of this or that aspect of the programme of the Marxist movement, of the Transitional Pro- gramme. The fight to defend programme has a deeper significance. Revisionism is an attack by capitalism, usually mounted through middle-class radicals, on the independence of the working class from all other classes of capitalist society. This independence, as all the experiences of the class struggle have proved, can only be developed and consummated through the building of a world revolutionary party to lead the workers to power and to build socialism. Revisionism therefore aims FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1967 its main shafts at fhe party, as the concrete embodi- ment of the fusion of Marxist theory with the unconscious drive of the working class towards power. As a body of theory, revisionism is consistent only for its eclecticism, for its borrowing from the ragbag of discarded bourgeois philosophies. Bern- stein leaned heavily on the moral philosophy of Kant and the utilitarianism of the English Fabians. The ‘left liquidators’ or ‘Otzovists’ within the Bol- shevik faction, led by Bogdanov and Bazarov, dipped into the well of the subjectivist school of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius, while Burn- ham espoused ‘scientific politics’ based on the mathematical logic of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. These defectors from Marxism formed a philosophical bloc with the bourgeoisie— a bloc which corresponded to their alliance with this same class on the question of the party. Deutscher discovered empirically in his fight against Trotskyism and the Fourth International that certain formulations of Hegel were useful in rounding his ‘objectivist’ revision of the world outlook of dialectical and historical materialism. In order to bring out clearly the class essence and origin of Deutscherism as a political tendency, in conflict with those forces struggling to rebuild the Fourth International of Trotsky, it is necessary to pay close attention to the interpretation he gives to the Hegelian categories, and to the precise way in which he selects those which best suit his aim of reducing the struggle for socialism to an ‘objective’ and ‘inevitable’ process. What must be stressed is that the driving force behind Deutscher’s employment of a_ half-assimilated Hegelian philosophy of history is the rejection of Trotsky’s designation of our epoch as one of a crisis of leadership. From this denial of the central, decisive role of leadership flows the flirting with Hegel—an exercise which reveals the sympathy that Deutscher feels for the German philosopher’s system as oppored to his dialectical method. The very title of the selection of essays under review—Ironies of History—indicates the close affinity that the author has for bourgeois objectiv- ism. In his review of E. H. Carr’s work, Socialism in One Country (Labour Review, December 1958), Deutscher makes great play of the Hegelian system in order to justify politically his own position in relation to the founding and building of the Fourth International, and to the theoretical heritage be- queathed to it by Trotsky. For Deutscher, no new International was required, as Stalin ‘found himself to be carrying out, in his own way, some of the

[p023] THE IRONIES OF ISAAC DEUTSCHER major policies expounded by his defeated enemy’.! As he is at great pains to point out throughout these essays, ‘here, the MHegelian “List der Geschichte”, the sly irony of history, comes into its own. Circumstances force men to move in the most unforeseen directions and give their doc- trines the most unprecedented contents and sig- nificance. Men and their doctrines thus serve purposes diametrically opposed to those they had envisaged’.2 Hegel put it in almost identical terms: ‘Reason is as cunning as it is powerful. Cunning may be said to lie in the inter-mediative action which, while it permits the objects to fol- low their own bent and act upon one another till they waste away, and does not iinterfere with the process, is nevertheless only working out its own aims.’3 This is clearly not only Hegel’s, but also Deutscher’s conception of history. The proletariat does not come on the historical scene as a class in its own right, as a subjective force for itself, but remains only an object in itself, having its power mediated through the Stalinist bureaucracy, which acts aS a proxy and temporary agency of class consciousness on behalf of the working class. This same bureaucracy, despite all the subjective intentions and reactionary policies which flow from its social privileges, finds itself forced by the sheer weight of historical logic to implement piecemeal the programme of world revolution, albeit with great reluctance. With Pablo, Deutscher therefore faces with equanimity the prospect of ‘centuries of deformed workers’ states’. This objectivist con- ception of the class struggle liquidates the central role that class consciousness plays in the develop- ment of that struggle. It is the total negation of revolutionary Marxism. The bureaucratic extension of the nationalized property relations from the Soviet Union into Eastern Europe after the Second World War led to an impressionist revision of Trotsky’s analysis of the bureaucracy by Pablo and his supporters in the leadership of the Fourth International. Like Deutscher, they argued that the bureaucracy could, under certain conditions, play a progressive, that is to say, revolutionary role, and that flowing from this, the bureaucracy could no longer be con- sidered as completely counter-revolutionary. This involved a revision of all the analysis undertaken by Trotsky of the bureaucracy, from The New Course in 1923 to the last mature works, The ’ Revolution Betrayed and In Defence of Marxism. Pabloism sought to destroy that analysis and the political programme of action that was based upon it. What Pablo and later Hansen chose to say in the crass language of the empiricist and the 21 pragmatist, Deutscher has always attempted to cloak in the most orthodox ‘classical Marxist’ traditions. The revolution is indeed both cunning and ironic, choosing as it did to work through Stalin and not Trotsky. In Deutscher’s essay, The Failures of Khrushchevism, he sketches out the mechanics of this historical cunning: ‘However, history has not been moving in a vicious circle. What has remained of the old barbarism and of Stalinism has been gradually diluted to suit the needs of national and international progress. Now the retrograde elements of Khrushchevism are perhaps being similarly reduced.’* Thus we see this ‘objec- tive’, though devious, drive towards socialism, mediated and refracted through Stalinism, and ‘gradually diluted’ to meet the requirements of the liberal and the radical in pursuit of ‘national and international progress’. Deutscher is as overawed as Pablo by the sheer weight and pressure of this historical logic, which is driving us all irresistably towards socialism: ‘How these ambiguities have been piling up! Stalin employed barbarous means to drive bar- barism out of Russia; Khrushchev was destroying Stalinism in a Stalinist manner, and now Brehznev, Kosygin and their associates are trying to deal with the confused balance of Khrushchevism in a more or less Khrushchevite fashion.’> Where is the Soviet working class in this process? Where. indeed is Marxism as anything more that a useful set of categories for analysing and commentating on the outside world? Marxism in the hands of a Deutscher becomes a passive and one-sided reflection of reality. It is not a preparation for the future, but an apology for the past and a justifi- cation for the present. No doubt Deutscher finds full sympathy with the definition of Philosophy given by his mentor: ‘as the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed. ... The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the fall of dusk’.® Deutscher’s passive projection of the Marxist method is shared by the ex-Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers’ Party. For the leaders of this _wreck of a once combative party, Marxism begins with the deed. In the case of Cuba, a socialist and revolutionary consciousness was established after the Ironies of History, p. 237. Tbid., p. 236. Hegel, Smaller Logic, OUP 1959, p. 350. Ironies of History, p. 142. Thid., p. 142. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, OUP 1962, p. 13. AUB Wh

[p024] 22 revolution, after what they claim to be the taking of power by the Cuban working class. Marxism therefore, like Hegel’s philosophic owl, appears on the scene only after the working class has carried through its historic tasks. Marxism helps us to explain more easily what has already taken place, helps us to appreciate better the deeds of others. If Hansen and Deutscher are correct, then of course, the revisionists’ break from the propo- sitions of Leninism and the building of the party must also be supported. Hansen and the other leaders of the SWP share with Deutscher the belief that history is a cunning process, which even with the socialist revolution to use again Hegel’s apt words, ‘permits the objects to follow their own bent and act upon one another till they waste away’. Admitting, as do both the SWP and Deutscher, that socialism can be achieved without class consciousness, without the inter- vention of Marxists in that struggle, their final step must be to renounce the party. And this they have done in the Pabloite organ World Outlook, of December 16, 1966, in which they dream instead of ‘the renovation of the World Communist Movement in a new mass international —to the formation of which the Fourth Interna- tional has made and will continue to make an in- dispensable contribution... .’ As Trotskyists we recognize only one Interna- tional, that founded by Trotsky in 1938 and con- tinued in the fight against attacks from the revisionists by the work of the International Committee of the Fourth International. Any other position on this, the most central of all questions of Marxist theory, is a capitulation to the liquida- tionists of the Pabloite camp, who now conceive of their role as a midwife to assist in the birth of a new international, made up in the main of the rejuvenated elements of world Stalinism. Here, as all along the line, the revisionists now share common ground with Deutscher. What is the political role of Deutscher, played by one who claims to have been an enemy of Stalinism ‘first as a member of the Communist Party, and then as a Marxist belonging to no party’.7 (Emphasis added.) What is this Marxism that belongs to no party, fights for no programme, trains no cadres and builds or believes in no international? We have already noted that Deutscher’s method is Marxist in its vocabulary only, that behind the phrases of ‘classical Marxism’ there is concealed a bourgeois conception of history and social development which reveals itself in a hostile attitude to the task of building a conscious leadership to carry through the task FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1967 that history poses to mankind and its proletarian vanguard. Profound pessimism about the ability of the working class to break free from bureaucracy and act in its own right lies at the base of such a world outlook. Deutscher, in sharing it with thousands of other worn out and dispirited radi- cals, becomes the spokesman for several genera- tions of radicals who were attracted by the power of the working class to change society only to have their expectations and often Utopias dashed on the twin rocks of Stalinism and Social Democracy. The betrayal of the October Revolu- tion by a certain section of the Bolshevik Party leadership has been elevated by this middle-class radical element into a mistrust of parties in general, into a rejection of organizational forms that appear to the empiricist and impressionist to be identical with those of Stalinism. The havoc wrought by Stalinism within the working class finds its reflection in those sections of the middle class pulled towards Marxism. Stalinism has deepened to an enormous extent the theoretical scepticism already endemic within the petty bourgeoisie—and in so doing streng- thened both its own rule and that of imperialism by disorientating elements that would otherwise have been able to make the break from radicalism to Marxism and the building of the Fourth Inter- national. Deutscher is thus the product of a whole epoch of class struggle, whose main feature has been the betrayals and defeats inflicted on the working class by its treacherous or ill-prepared leaderships. Deutscher, in turning away from lead- ership, searched, as did Pablo, for forces already present that could carry through the overthrow of capitalism. It is here that the gulf opens up be- tween Deutscher and revolutionary Marxism. Even though Deutscher turns to Hegel for his philosophical inspiration (though, we might add, in the process doing scant justice to Hegel) he invests such categories as he borrows with a politi- cal content that is shaped by the struggle between classes in the epoch of imperialist decay and the fight for revolutionary leadership. Hegel’s thought was nurtured by a vastly different accumulation of political and intellectual experiences, and re- presented a high point in the evolution of bour- geois science and culture. Hegel’s interpretation of the dialectic of history, even though grasped and presented idealistically, was a conquest of thought which Marx, Engels and Lenin under- stood to be historically progressive. Deutscher’s political theory and his role in the struggle for 7 TIronies of History, p. 151.

[p025] THE IRONIES OF ISAAC DEUTSCHER working-class leadership can only be judged as reactionary, even taking into account his populari- zation of the life of Trotsky and his refusal to endorse the Stalinist lies and slanders on the history and leaders of the Russian Revolution. Ours is not a literary estimation, nor for that matter only a philosophical one, but is essentially political. It is on the question of programme and method that Trotskyism clashes most sharply with the biographer of Trotsky. To take but one example. Towards the end of The Prophet Outcast Deutscher tries to convey the impression that Trotsky retreated from a position of revolutionary defeatism in the first year of the Second World War: ‘In the article his mind wandered between France, humiliated and saddled with a “treacherous senile Bonapartism’”, and the vastly different American scene. But he had no time to develop these inchoate thoughts; his voice in the dictaphone was to remain the only trace of his last inconclusive gropings in a new direction.” Trotsky appears here as someone re- vising his own programme, as retreating from the position of revolutionary defeatism. If the text of this and other writings by Trotsky on the prob- lems of the Second World War are studied care- fully, what becomes apparent is not that Trotsky was for the defence of the so-called ‘democratic’ allies against the fascist powers, but that the formation of a revolutionary and not pacifist programme of struggle against fascism and war took into account the feelings of workers and the illusions shared even by the most advanced sections of the labour movement. Trotsky was not for the defence of an imperialist United States. That is a slander. Trotsky was for participation by the Socialist Workers’ Party in the life of workers as the latter sought to guide the war into democratic and anti-fascist channels. The Transitional Programme took into account this desire of workers to defend their class organizations against fascism—but at the same time did not adapt to the illusion that this defence could be achieved by supporting a war of one’s ‘own’ ruling class, however democratic its pre- tensions, against the capitalist class of another nation. The post-war developments of American imperialism have proved that any other stand- point on the Second World War leads inevitably to defencism and social chauvinism. Trotsky argued for participation in the war by the Fourth International. But on a certain programme: ‘we are ready to defend democracy with you, only on condition that it should be a real defence, and not a betrayal in the Pétain 23 manner’. Struggling for a concrete and non- sectarian presentation of the Marxist programme of struggle against imperialist war, a war that Trotsky sought to turn into war against imperial- ism, he employed formulations that would enable the SWP to obtain a sympathetic hearing from the more class-conscious workers. In doing so, he was following in a tradition he acquired from Lenin in the struggle of the Bolsheviks against the first imperialist war. Deutscher attempts to present this deepening of a method and a tradition as a ‘groping in a new direction’. The opposition to the Fourth In- ternational undertaken by Deutscher involves therefore a clash with all its essential program- matic foundations. Distortion and revision become part of the biographical and literary work of Deutscher, and are for us its most important aspect. As we have already indicated, Deutscher’s use of Hegel is based on a very one-sided and partial assimilation of the life’s work of the German idealist. His predilection for the ‘ironic’ and the objective which he sees in Hegel has its counter- part in his neglect, which is not accidental, of ithat side of Hegel’s thought which emphasised the subjective and conscious side to development, his fervent affirmation of man’s aspiration to free- dom, which Hegel regarded as being his very essence. Human freedom Hegel saw as being realizable through struggle and through an under- standing of what was necessary in order to win his freedom. Thus freedom was consummated through the struggle for consciousness, through the knowledge of necessity. We find that it is pre- cisely this side of the younger Hegel, nurtured in the epoch of the French Revolution, that was carried over by Marx in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts—1844 and later in his Theses on Feuerbach. It is the discovery of the materialist and class basis to human development and con- sciousness, grasped one-sidedly and idealistically by Hegel, that embodies the revolutionary break- through in science achieved by Marx and Engels. In a sense, Deutscher is to be placed in a pre- Marxist category in his denial of the materialist class basis to human knowledge, and clinging as he does to objective idealism in order to be able to justify his opposition to the construction of Marxist parties based on the struggle between material interests embodied in classes, political programmes and leaderships. As the references 8 Quoted in Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, p. 502. 9 Ibid., p. 502.

[p026] 24 “to the text of his writings bring out, socialism is an idea, which works out its inner contradictions through the historical process. It is not the pro- gramme and expression of class interests but rather a ‘World Spirit’ which manipulates pro- grammes and classes in such a cunning and para- doxical fashion that only those such as Deutscher, being far removed from the scene of the drama, can grasp the design and complexity of the process in all its detail. Deutscher sees and presents man and _ parti- cularly the working class as a passive object. Those who struggle to give conscious direction to human development, to build working-class leader- ship, are seen by Deutscher as heroic or tragic figures, batthing against forces and an historical design which is destined to take another, para- doxical course. It is in this light that he presents both Lenin and Trotsky. Thus great men are not so much leaders as prophets, born tragically ahead of their time, crushed by objective events and able only to register an impassioned protest against the irony that has consigned them to oblivion and vilification. Deutscher takes comfort that gradually, the thoughts and words of his prophets are implemented by the very forces that betrayed the life’s work of Lenin and Trotsky— the Soviet bureaucracy. Deutscher substitutes the tragic aspects of Trotsky’s life for his central message and for the task to which he devoted himself to his dying day—the construction of re- volutionary leadership. The very ‘cult’ of Trotsky, built up by intellectuals such as Deutscher, ob- scures the highest point in his whole life’s struggle: the integration of the traditions and principles of Bolshevism into the founding of the Fourth Inter- national. Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy serves this end and this end only. The ability of Trotsky to carry through such a struggle for the new International was based upon his assimilation in the course of the class struggle of the whole continuity of Marxism, from its origins in the crisis of German idealism and bourgeois political economy through to the found- ing of Bolshevism by Lenin and their joint fight for the consolidation and theoretical education of the sections of the Communist International. ‘Deutscherism’ is a challenge to this continuity. It fails even to assimilate those elements within bourgeois philosophy which fertilized the mind of ‘the young Marx. It is deaf to the Hegel of the ‘Phenomenology’, to the Hegel who asserts that in the struggle for consciousness ‘the process of bringing all this out involves a twofold action— action on the part of the other and action on the FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1967 part of itself... . But in this there is implicated also the second kind of action, self activity. ... The relation of both self-consciousnesses is in this way so constituted that they prove them- selves and each other through a life-and-death struggle. They must enter into this struggle, for they must bring their certainty of themselves, the certainty of being for themselves, to the level of objective truth. . . . And it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self- consciousness is not bare existence .. .”10 Like Hegel thirty years before him, Marx came up hard against the political backwardness of Germany. Hegel sought a reactionary political solution in his later years, abandoning the idea of freedom for the ‘power-protected inwardness’ of the Prussian bureaucracy, while Marx looked for- ward to the new social force that was emerging as -yet slowly from within a semi-feudal Germany. ‘In politics Germans thought what other nations did. Germany was their theoretical conscience. . . . German philosophy is the ideal prolongation of German history.’!! Marx realized that the solution to the problem of German, and therefore human society, lay in the grasping of the relation- ship between thought and action, between theory and practice. Against both the purely activist tendency that sought merely the abolition of philosophy by ‘turn- ing its back to it and its head away from it’, and also those who ‘thought it could make philosophy a reality without abolishing it’, Marx saw the unification of thought with reality as being possible only ‘in the formation of a class with radical chains’—the industrial proletariat. Marx at this point broke for ever with German idealism, sub- suming its dialectical method within his broader reworking of bourgeois political economy and: revolutionary French socialism. Deutscher, be- cause he has been unable to follow through Marx’s dialectical synthesis of the high points of bourgeois thought and science, stands outside of all the subsequent enrichments of Marxism. The central issue at stake in the break with Hegel was on the question of the relationship between thought and human practice—and it is on this question that we find Deutscher, the ‘Marxist be- longing to no party’, most vulnerable. If the real revolutionary essence of Marx’s break 10 Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, Allen and Unwin 1961, pp. 232-233. 11 Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in On Religion, Moscow 1957, p. 49.

[p027] THE IRONIES OF ISAAC DEUTSCHER from idealism is not understood in relation to the role played by the emergent proletariat in the crystallization of his world outlook, then any analysis of the contemporary political scene, any biographical work or historical research cannot be- come enrichments of the Marxist literary heritage, for they leave out the one question upon which all others devolve—the party. Instead of classes and their parties, ever-changing forces ina living struggle in which the working class seeks to take the power consciously through the party, we have, with the Deutscher schema, a working out of a paradoxical, supra-human design over which the human actors have no control. The process unfolds, not through the contradictions contained within capitalism, but by the gradual self-realization of an abstract history through a series of logical contradictions contained within the categories of progress. In this schema, Marxism is not an active element which derives its power from its conscious grasp of the real relationships between things and men, but serves as a means of recording the progress of history, as if the commentator were somehow able to place himself outside the universe and all its vast com- plex of interrelated processes. Marxism of this variety is the veritable abdication of working- class leadership, as it by implication denies the necessity to intervene in this process to guide it to fruition. That is the meaning of Leninism, of ‘What is To Be Done’ and all Lenin’s writings on the party. Intellectuals such as Deutscher, who feel the pull of the incisiveness of Marxism as an analytical tool, still remain unable to develop Marxism beyond a highly sophisticated impressionism be- cause they see the working class through the prism of the bureaucracies that dominate and betray it. Only those who begin with the first proposition of the ‘Communist Manifesto’, that all history is the history of class struggles, can fight their way through to the working class against all those false leaderships that seek to adapt it either directly or indirectly to the rule of imperialism. It is because all the great Marxists proceeded from the objective contradictions at work within capitalism, and not from any hastily gained im- pressions filtered through the narrow categories of middle-class radicalism, that they became able to harness and unleash this enormous class power at the moments of deepest capitalist crisis. That was the contribution of Lenin—and yet, from these essays, it would appear to have passed Deutscher by. Deutscher, for all his ‘objectivism’, is a product of the international class struggle, and has in fact 25 adjusted himself most adroitly to the prevailing ‘market trends’ in his post-war political and literary activity. His biggest opening came of course, as an almost professional anti-Stalinist, with the death of Stalin and the events following the famous Khrushchev ‘secret speech’. It is very instructive to see exactly how Deutscher rode this particular tiger. We would agree with Deutscher that this speech was a most significant turn in the developments inside the Soviet Union. But exactly what twist did he and the Pabloites give to that speech? Which side they chose to exaggerate, and which aspects they sought to play down or even deny, is most revealing from the point of view of Marxist method. For the revisionists, this speech served as evidence of a liberal wing within the bureaucracy ——a wing which could be given ‘critical support’ against the ‘hard line’ Stalinists of the Molotov faction. (As time went by, ‘support’ tended more and more to displace any elements of ‘criticism’.) Far from this speech being seen as evidence of a deep-going crisis within Stalinism, a crisis pro- duced above all by the pressure of the radicalized student and working-class youth within the Soviet Union, it was presented as proof of the possibility of an internal regeneration within Stalinism itself. In so far as any intervention was made by the Pabloites following the secret speech, they played the same role as that of Deutscher, namely to bolster illusions amongst wavering Stalinists that the Communist Parties and the Soviet bureaucracy were capable of self-reform and liberalization. It was Deutscher himself who was the pioneer of this theory, and like all pioneers, he had to undergo the taunts of those who were only a short time later to embrace him. The death of Stalin in 1953 was, according to Deutscher ‘the end of the Stalinist era’.!2. But this was precisely the conclusion drawn by Pablo from the same event! As if the death of a single person, however exalted his governmental status, could mark the break up of a whole social layer upon which the rule of this person rested, reinforced as the bureaucracy was with all the powers of the modern state and supported politically by the most high-powered international publicity agency the world has yet seen. But that is just Deutscher’s role, to separate out Stalinism as the politics of one man from the social dominance of a bureaucracy which to date has outlived him by fourteen years. Stalinism presented in this way appears as an aggregate of moral excesses, and not 12. Ironies of History, p. 153.

[p028] 26 the policies of a counter-revolutionary bureau- cracy which can only be removed from its usurped positions of power by a violent political revolu- tion. How did the International Committee of the Fourth International see the ‘secret speech’? Above all, as a confirmation of the perspective of political revolution, as developed by Trotsky against both opportunism and sectarianism on the question of the class nature of the Soviet Union. An intervention was made where possible by supporters of the International Committee of the Fourth International in all the Communist parties racked by the 1956 crisis of Stalinism. The basis of this intervention was not support, however ‘critical’, for any so-called ‘liberal’ wing of the bureaucracy, but the need to understand and destroy Stalinism as a counter-revolutionary agency within the working class. We saw the Soviet, Polish and Hungarian events of 1956 from the standpoint of building the Fourth International. Any other position led along the road to capitulation to the bureaucracy. For Deutscher, the death of Stalin served as an excellent opportunity to develop his ironies of history. Like Stalin, Lenin had died just at the right time. ‘If Lenin had lived longer, he would have had to become either a Stalin or a Trotsky, for these two men embodied two opposed solu- tions to the dilemmas of the 1920s. He was saved the agony of this choice by a timely death. Yet Lenin could have probably become neither a Stalin nor a Trotsky—in a sense both these characters were blended within him. JIllness and death gripped him, while he stood at a cross road at which he was incapable of choosing any of the roads that lay ahead.’!3 An historical sleight of hand on questions of fact lays the basis for the introduction of his favourite paradoxes and ironies. But what are the realities of the period to which he refers? Deutscher is well aware that Lenin had long since chosen the only possible Marxist road ahead, and that he did not baulk at the so-called ‘cross roads’ of the early 1920s. Deutscher, who has been fortunate enough to have had full access to the Trotsky Archives, must know that Lenin, far from being torn between a ‘Stalinist’ or ‘Trotskyist’ solution to the problems of the revolution, had formed a political bloc with Trotsky to fight Stalin as the personification of bureaucratic conservatism and nationalism within the party and state apparatus. In another context, Deutscher would be only too willing to avail us of these facts. To his credit, he did make them public through his writings when the over- FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1967 whelming majority of political experts—both Stalinist and pro-capitalist—did all in their power to prove that Stalin was the logical and chosen continuator of the Leninist cause. But here, Deutscher makes concessions to just these people, whose whole literary lives have been devoted to the propagation of lies concerning the history of the Communist movement. The reasons why he does so are obvious. Deutscher argues that Leninism died with Lenin. Trotsky’s fight and contribution was not for the Fourth International—he sees that as ‘a futile venture’—but as a preserver of the integrity of ‘classical Marxism’—as ‘the Prophet Outcast’. The ‘other half’ of Lenin, Stalin, carried on the practical work of defending the gains made by the revolution, even if in a crude and barbaric way. Stalinism seen in this light is not of course a break from the Marxist tradition, but a variation within it, or as Deutscher himself puts it, ‘Stalinism represented an amalgamation of Marxism with the semi-barbarous and quite barbarous traditions and the primitive magic of an essentially pre-industrial, i.e, not merely pre-socialist but pre-bourgeois society’.!14 Not, one notices, the destruction or negation of Marxism and Bolshevism, but their mutation into ‘the version of Marxism suited to a country in which barefoot muzhiks working their land with sokhas, wooden ploughs, formed the over- whelming majority’.© Stalinism as a form of peasant Marxism is indeed an intriguing theory, but one for which the mass of Soviet peasantry will have little sympathy. Deutscher explains how Stalin carried through, in his own perverse and ironic way, the pro- gramme of October Revolution: ‘After the second world war, Stalin, still waving the flag of socialism in one country (irony), found himself carrying the revolution into half-a-dozen foreign countries ... He out-Trotskyed Trotsky, as it were, who had never thought of spreading revolution in such a manner.’!6 Not only in international affairs, but within the Soviet Union itself, reason’s cunning worked through the murderer of the Bolshevik party: ‘All the same, under Stalinist tutelage the Soviet people have come of age culturally. They owe to that tutelage at least as much as they have suffered from it ... The core of the Stalinist achieve- ment consists in this, that he had found Russia working with wooden ploughs and is leaving her 13 Ibid., p. 182. 14 Ibid., p. 21. 15 Ibid., p. 184. 16 Ibid., p. 237.

[p029] THE IRONIES OF ISAAC DEUTSCHER equipped with atomic piles. He has raised Russia to the level of the second industrial power of the world.’!7 Despite this gloss which Deutscher attempts to put on the history of Stalinism, Trotsky’s writings on the Soviet Union, together with all the fresh evidence (much from Soviet sources) that has come to light in recent years, prove up to the hilt that the economic, military and cultural advances made by the Soviet people have been made despite and in conflict with the bureaucracy. Only those who, consciously or otherwise, bow down before the bureaucracy can attempt to argue that it was Stalin who modernised the Soviet economy. That the Soviet economy survived the ravages of the empirically conceived crash industrialization, forced collectivization and slave labour camps is hardly due to the wisdom of Stalin, but rather proof of the immense loyalty of the Soviet working class to the planned economy established by the revolu- tion. It was the moral and political capital of the October Revolution that saved the Soviet Union from internal collapse and external invasion at the moments of its deepest crisis. But Deutscher in his ‘Obituary of Stalin’ makes no such distinction. He insists that somehow, some- where, the communist conscience of the revolu- tion was preserved in the bureaucracy. Evidence of this he finds in the most unlikely of places: ‘By spreading education, by arousing the people’s intellectual curiosity (sic) and by keeping alive the socialist tradition of the revolution [even if he was not to allow this revolution’s leaders to remain alive, R.B.] Stalinism has in fact accumulated many of the elements that should eventually go into the making of an extraordinarily high political consciousness.’!8 And who are the continuators of this task of ‘socialist accumulation’? ‘Paradoxically (of course), circumstances have forced Malenkov and Khru- shchev to act, up to a point, as the executors of Trotsky’s political testament ... It is not done well, but the wonder is that it is done at all.’19 As if with the same voice as the Pabloites, Deutscher joins the chorus against the political revolution: ‘No matter how much one may dis- like Stalin’s epigones, one must acknowledge that they have proved themselves capable of a much more sensitive response to the need for reform than was generally expected of them.’20 » Grovelling before the Stalinist bureaucracy, the bureaucracy that murdered a whole generation of revolutionaries, that handed the German working class over to fascism and paved the way thereby for the second world war, can go little further. This counter-revolutionary machine for the destruction of class consciousness Deutscher is able to present as ‘up to a point, the executor of Trotsky’s political testament.’ The stand that Deutscher takes, with all his ironies and para- doxes, is in defence of the bureaucracy against the building of the Fourth International. He makes no secret of his fear of the political revolution in the Soviet Union: ‘It is possible for a spon- taneous mass movement to acquire suddenly a very stormy momentum and to outstrip the growth of political consciousness. Such a move- ment may well upset the nation’s political balance before it has itself acquired a clear awareness of aims, a positive political programme, and a firm and confident leadership.”2! How interesting! Suddenly, leadership becomes decisive, a political programme imperative and class consciousness essential. Deutscher draws attention to these deficiencies in the struggle against the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, not in order that Marxists should be encouraged to build such a leadership and develop such a programme, but precisely in order to write off the political revolu- tion, to present it as an undertaking that might get out of hand, leading to a sequence of events similar to those in Hungary, which he claims, along with other rather dubious authorities, ‘developed into a fully-fledged struggle between communism and anti-communism’.22_ No comment is required on this lamentable endorsement of the lies of the State Department and the Kremlin. Glibly Deutscher spins out his Hegelian web. Lenin dies, containing within himself both Stalin and Trotsky, the realist and the prophet. Stalin, through the irony of history, ‘negates’ Trotsky, but having carried out his alloted task, is negated in his turn by Khrushchev. Then—further irony: Khrushchev is negated by Brehznev and Kosygin. This version of the ‘negation of the negation’ (which would have both Hegel and Marx turning in their graves) takes place without any sight of or sound from the Soviet working class. They, clearly, are barred from ‘negating’ the bureau- cracy! The manoeuvres and inner tensions within the bureaucracy Deutscher prefers to see as ‘the emergence of various schools of thought’ reflect- ing ‘real contradictions inherent in a living his- 17 Ibid., pp. 184-185. 18 Ibid. p. 41. 19 Ibid., p. 42. 20 Ibid., p. 25. 21 Ibid., p. 48. 22 Thid., p. 45.

[p030] 28 torical process and real dilemmas confronting a living movement’.23 On the contrary, they are the desperate attempts by a doomed social formation to preserve for as long as possible the political and economic privileges that the bureaucracy has filched from the working class over a period of forty or more years. Not regeneration, but degen- eration, is the reality of Soviet and world Stalin- ism. As against an intervention in this crisis to sharpen it and hasten the break-up of Stalinism, Deutscher counsels caution and patience, assuring us that ‘Stalinism is breaking down and dissolving; and it is the Stalinists themselves who are the subverters of their own orthodoxy’.24 Once again, the irony of history! From all these examples of Deutscher’s method- ological approach to the nature and role of the Stalinist bureaucracy, it becomes clear that his attack upon the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International is based upon a revision of materialist dialectics. What exactly does he mean by ‘de-Stalinisation proceeds in dialectical con- tradiction’?25 The dialectic, least of all in its social application, is not something that just happens, that ‘proceeds’. It is first of all a material struggle between opposed forces, in human society, between classes. This struggle is grasped consciously precisely by those who participate in it at its highest point, where the contradictions find their clearest and most acute expression—in the building of revolutionary parties to carry this conflict through to its fruition. The dialectic is thus not an objective process only—contained within this objectivity is its opposite, the subjective factor of human, class consciousness, of Marxist theory and the party. But this is exactly what is missing from the ‘dialectics’ of Deutscher. The conscious, subjective side of human practice he sees as a purely cognitive process, as awareness of, but not participation in, the contradictions of the living world. The attack on the dialectic, open in the case of Bernstein and Burnham, more restrained and masked in the case of Pabloism, is the hallmark of revisionism. The abandonment of the dialectic, or the liquidation of its materialist content, as with Deutscher, is not simply an abstract question of correct or incorrect formulations, but is a class retreat which denies the fundamental opposition between the working and capitalist classes, and between the working class and the bureaucracies that hold it back from coming to grips with the rule of capital. Deutscher will pay lip-service to the existence of the former only to deny the latter. For him, far from the bureau- FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1967 cracy acting as a barrier between the working class and independent political action, Stalinism contains ‘many of the elements that should eventually go into the making of an extraordinarily high political consciousness’. Of course, Deutscher is against the bureau- cracy. But, you see, ‘necessity works through such human material as it finds available’.2 Instead of the political revolution, he therefore proposes ‘genuine social control over the bureaucratic Establishment’.27 In lieu of a genuine communist International, Deutscher suggests that ‘social con- trol over the bureaucracy would at the very least make it much more difficult for the latter to pur- sue its nationalist intrigues and political power games against the other “workers’ states” ’.28 Deutscher is able to develop this reformist pro- gramme for the Soviet Union because he pro- ceeds from a false analysis of the bureaucracy. He draws attention to ‘the dual role Stalinism has played in Russia’s life, degrading her morally and enslaving her but also transforming her into a modern, industrial and educated nation’.2® The dialectical relationship between the bureaucracy and the Soviet and East European working class is confused and obscured by Deutscher with his introduction of the idea of the ‘dual role’ of Stalinism. This, it must be remembered, was the formulation used by the Pabloites to facilitate their capitulation to Stalinism after 1953. Trotsky developed his understanding of the nature and role of the Soviet bureaucracy, not in a contemplative way, but through a struggle to defend that which was progressive in the Soviet Union from that which held back and distorted the productive forces and the international struggle to overthrow capitalism. The fight for a Marxist programme for the USSR had to be waged on two fronts: against those who capitulated to the bureaucracy when it swung to the left in order to defend itself against attacks upon its social support in the nationalized property rela- tions (the 1928-1929 capitulators Radek, Preo- brazhensky and Smilga) and also against those who capitulated directly to imperialism by a refusal to defend these same property relations established by the revolution and manipulated by the bureaucracy to defend its own rule and social 23 Ibid., p. 140. 24 Tbid., p. 24. 25 Ibid., p. 20. 26 Ibid., p. 23. 27 Ibid., p. 127. 28 Ibid., p. 141. 29 Ibid., p. 243.

[p031] THE IRONIES OF ISAAC DEUTSCHER privileges (the so-called schools of ‘state capital- ism’ and ‘bureaucratic collectivism’). Naturally, in waging these theoretical wars on two fronts, an eclectic and not dialectical concep- tion of the bureaucracy is gleaned from the writings of Trotsky unless his starting point of the Fourth International and his method of dialectical materialism is grasped. The bureau- cracy is not ‘on the one hand’ reactionary, and ‘on the other hand’ progressive, according to whether it is under attack from the working class or im- perialism. It is a social formation, a parasitic growth conditioned by the course of the inter- national class struggle over many decades, and being a regime of transition not bound up with any legitimate historical class interests or mode of production, exhibits forms of behaviour that can only be understood in terms of its position in rela- tion to the continued struggle between the two major classes of capitalist society. Here, as else- where in The Prophet Outcast, Deutscher attempts to convert Trotsky’s defence of the Soviet Union against the ‘bureaucratic collectivists’ into some- thing vastly different, an unconscious admission by Trotsky that the Soviet bureaucracy was in itself a progressive force. But throughout his writing on this bureaucracy, Trotsky makes the point that even when compelled to defend the last gains of the Russian Revolution in order to protect the economic basis upon which it rests, it does so in a counter-revolutionary way, as in the case of Finland and Poland in 1939- 1940, in a high-handed and bureaucratic fashion which alienates the international working class, and stores up such deep resentments against the bureaucracy that they might threaten to overspill into hatred of the gains of the revolu- tion itself. Only in this very specific sense can we speak of the dual role of the Stalinist bureaucracy -—and only those who intend to prepare for its overthrow can continue ‘to defend and enrich the political and social analysis made by Trotsky of this counter-revolutionary agency, which at the death will choose in its vast majority to go with its imperialist masters. Naturally, once we con- cede to Deutscher the correctness of his theory of the dual role of Stalinism (which amounts to a great deal more than a bureaucracy) we are tread- ing the path back to the camp of the opportunists. If we agree with Deutscher that ‘if all major decisions on policy and strategy were taken by Stalin alone, as Krushchev says, ‘then it is at least illogical to deny Stalin all credit for the results’,30 then we cannot but extend this revaluation of the bureaucracy to the role of Social Democracy and 29 Stalinism in Western Europe. Could not ‘left’ critics of the trade-union and Social-Democratic bureaucracy in Britain argue that since we place the responsibility for the defeats of the working class on its shoulders, should we not, to be con- sistent, give it its due credit for all the advances that the working class has made in the same period? From the ‘dual role’ of the Soviet bureau- cracy, We must proceed to the dual role of world bureaucracy. That is the logic of Pabloism—and also Deutscherism. Social control over these bureaucracies, and not their removal, becomes the slogan of the day, this pressure being exerted by centrist leaders guided from behind the scenes by Marxist or even ‘Trotskyist’ advice bureaux. In travelling along the path to Deutscher, Pablo and his supporters in the SWP drew all these logical conclusions from their failure to under- stand the nature of the Soviet bureaucracy in relation to the struggle for leadership. From that position it is only a short step to declare openly that the Fourth International is irrelevant, un- necessary—and impossible. The process of ‘unification’ within the ranks of the revisionists shares an intimate relationship with the political evolution of Deutscher. In 1956, following the Khrushchev speech, James P. Can- non warned members of the SWP on the dangers of sharing Deutscher’s illusions in the capacity of the Soviet bureaucracy for self-reform. He advised Trotskyists to have no truck with ‘Deutscherism, which leaves out the Soviet masses as if the bureau- cracy were a rational autonomous power’, a theory which ‘turns out to be the ideology best suited to assist the demagogy of the Khrushchevs’.3! In March 1956, Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, defended the Transitional Programme and its perspective of the political revolution. But already by 1958 there were clear indications that his warnings had gone unheeded. In an empirical attempt to break out of their political isolation, the SWP leadership began to chase after ex-Stalinist elements who, in many cases, were moving to the right, even further away from revolutionary Marxism and towards middle- class radicalism. Of course, the programme of the political revolution came under sharp attack from these quarters, whose dominant orientation was towards bourgeois and not proletarian democracy. It was Hansen who began first to toy with Deutscher’s analysis of the bureaucracy in his attempts to bring the SWP closer to this middle- 30 = Ibid., p. 14. 31 The 20th Congress and World Trotskyism, New Park Publications 1965, p. 35.

[p032] 30 class group of ex-Stalinists—the process of so- called ‘regroupment’. In an article entitled ‘Proposed Roads to Soviet Democracy’, Hansen openly declared war on the political revolution. The whole article is written in an apologetic tone, playing down the violent form that the overthrow of the bureaucracy must take (and this was nearly two years after Hun- gary): ‘The programme of the political revolution is not held as a dogma by the Socialist Workers Party . .. It can be modified or revised if certain events require it.32 The counter-revolutionary role of this bureaucracy is similarly played down— indeed, almost denied: ‘As such, whether under attack from the side of capitalism, or, in an opposite way, from the Russian workers, with enough pressure the bureaucracy may be obliged to take a proletarian, even revolutionary orienta- tion’.33 Why then, we must ask Hansen, the Fourth International? Reaching out for the liberal ex-Stalinists, he suggested a more amenable formulation than the overthrow of the bureaucracy: ‘It is much closer to reality to view the programme of the political revolution as the total series of reforms gained through militant struggle, culminating in the trans- fer of power to the workers’.34 The publication of the third volume of Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky gave Hansen another opportunity to come closer to its author. In the chapter dealing with Trotsky’s writings on the nature of the Soviet bureaucracy, Deutscher concludes that ‘the chances of revolution are still as slender as they were in Trotsky’s days, whereas the possibilities of reform are far more real’. In a footnote to this, Deutscher adds, ‘I underlined this circumstance in my book Russia after Stalin (1953) and in many articles published at the end of the Stalin era. The American Trotskyists then devoted a whole issue of their theoretical organ, The Fourth International (Winter 1954) to the theme “Trotsky or Deutscher’; and James P. Cannon, their leader, vehemently denounced me as a revisionist and as “the Bernstein of Trotsky- ism”. My sin was that I had forecast that in the next few years there would be no chance of a “political revolution” in the USSR and that a period of reform from above was opening.’3> What was Hansen’s reply to this reiteration of Deutscher’s stand on the political revolution? ‘From the viewpoint of the world Trotskyist movement, Deutscher’s agreement on the validity of Trotsky’s programme establishes the possibility in principle of practical collaboration with him. .. .’ (My emphasis, R.B.)}36 What does it FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1967 matter if Deutscher regards as ‘stillborn’ the very organisation that Hansen claims to represent, and whose ‘practical collaboration’ he now offers Deutscher? To smooth the way for this joint work, he even apologises for the stand taken by Cannon against Deutscher in 1954! ‘Some harsh and even un- justified things were said of Deutscher ... To many Trotskyists Deutscher’s position appeared as an alternative programme which could prove to be a bridge to Stalinism. . . It turned out, however, that Deutscher was not interested in recruiting from the Trotskyist movement or in organising a section of his own, still less a cult. This spoke strongly in his favour’. With the publication of Deutscher’s writings on the Soviet Union, and their increased appeal for wavering members of the American Communist Party, ‘Deutscher’s position under these circumstances proved to be a bridge from Stalinism to Trotskyism. Trotskyists could not be against that kind of public facility. They therefore began undertaking their own self- reform—in relation to Deutscher’.37 So far had the pragmatism of the SWP debased Trotskyism, that Hansen was willing to trade the whole heritage of Bolshevism for the sake of a ‘public facility’ for the propagation of Deutscherism— which, Hansen assures us, is neither a section not a cult. Their estimation of Stalinism became the com- mon ground for unity between the Pabloites, Deutscher and the SWP. In the essay ‘Three Currents in Communism’ Deutscher develops a case for the inner regeneration of the Stalinist movement through the logic of its own internal divisions. Again invoking Hegel, he argues that ‘any political movement (or any philosophical school of thought) as it grows and develops can- not help unfolding the contradictions inherent in itself and its environment; and the more it un- folds, the richer its content and vitality.38 This position is shared by the revisionists of the ‘United Secretariat’, as the extract from their ‘World Outlook’ has already established. Deutscher’s orientation towards various wings of Stalinism forced him to take a reactionary stand on the question of the second Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956. What was posed here in real 32 International Socialist Review, Spring 1958, p. 46. 33 Ibid., p. 49. 34 Ibid., p. 50. 35 Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, p. 312. 36 International Socialist Review, Winter 1964, p. 14. 37 = Ibid., p. 13. 38 Ironies of History, p. 68.

[p033] THE IRONIES OF ISAAC DEUTSCHER life—the political revolution against the bureau- cracy—had been written about and discussed for years by all sorts of people claiming to be sympathisers of Trotsky. What was Deutscher’s attitude to this shattering upheaval in Hungary, an uprising which to this day leaves a deep scar on the face of world Stalinism? Just prior to the outbreak of the Budapest up- rising and its brutal suppression by the Kremlin, Deutscher was able to write that ‘the break with Stalinism is now felt in every aspect of Soviet activity and thought: in domestic and foreign poli- cies, in education, in philosophical writing, in historical research, and indeed, in the whole atmosphere of Soviet life’.29 Within weeks, Deutscher’s analysis of Soviet society lay in ruins. The Hungarian working class and youth showed scant respect for Deutscher’s ‘reforms from above’ or for that matter for the tanks of the Red Army. The Fabianism of Pablo and Deutscher was demolished in the streets of Budapest by the first armed confrontation between the bureau- cracy and the proletariat of the workers’ states, as well as being theoretically laid bare by the political struggles inside the Fourth International itself. Little wonder that Deutscher was later compelled to pass off the Hungarian revolution as an attempt ‘unwittingly to put the clock back, while Moscow sought once again to wind up with the bayonet, or rather with the tank, the broken clock of the Hungarian Communist revolution’.4° All com- munist roads must lead through the Kremlin—even if they pass over the corpses of 20,000 Hungarian workers on the way. Any sharp and open break with bureaucracy has to be condemned, as it fails to conform to Deutscher’s ideal of the regeneration of communism from within and not against the bureaucracy: ‘The emergence of various schools of thought reflects real social contradictions inherent in a living historical process and real dilemmas confronting a living movement.’4! What is striking is the similarity between this estimation of Stalin- ism and that adopted at the Pabloite ‘unification’ congress of 1963: ‘An early victory of the political revolution in the Soviet Union would.at the same time hasten the process of proletarian revolution inside the imperialist countries in an even more decisive manner. . . .It would lead rapidly to the disappearance of the bureaucratic Stalinist leader- ships in the old CPs, which would split in various directions, principally into a left-reformist wing 31 and a genuine revolutionary-socialist wing.’4 The basic contradiction of the epoch, the con- struction of revolutionary leadership in the struggle against all tendencies which adapt to or are them- selves part of the bureaucracy, is evaded, even denied. Here the Pabloites and Deutscher join hands. What was once tacit has now become ex- plicit precisely because the building of such a leadership is a practical task flowing from all the struggles of the international working class, from Vietnam and Peking to Moscow and New York. As such, Pabloite revisionism serves as an out- post of Stalinism. It presents a danger to the Fourth International in as much as the centrist illusions which it disseminates can link for a brief period with the level of consciousness of workers faced with the necessity of a fight against bureau- cracy, but who are as yet unable to grasp the full implications of that fight. For the working class, this changed attitude represents a big step forward, for at once it raises in their minds the question of a new leadership. But precisely now the Deutscher- ite comes forward, advising workers to take things steady, not to rape the historical process, but to allow the bureaucracy, with, of course, a certain amount of popular pressure, to unfold all its rich- ness and complexity. Centrism takes up a position to the left of the bureaucracy all the better to serve iit through its role as a ‘loyal opposition’. Reforms—by all means. Social control—of course. The overthrow of the bureaucracy—never. The agreement that centrists may appear to have with sections of radicalized workers is on just those questions that have still to be clarified in the struggle against the bureaucracy. Such cen- trists flourish in a world of propaganda groups where their programmes run no risk of being put to the test by workers in struggle. Therefore to fight against centrism, against the theories of Deutscher, is to develop the struggle against these propaganda methods which have for so long cramped and held back the political strengthening of many sections of the Fourth International. The tracing through of the methodological, philosophical and political features of Deutscherism will assist in the preparing of the Fourth International to lead decisive class battles of tomorrow. 39 Ibid., p. 18. 40 Ibid., p. 46. 41 Ibid., p. 140. 42 International Socialist Review, Fall 1963, p. 121.

[p034] 32 FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1967