Trotsky's Marxism under attack

[p006] Trotsky’s Marxism under attack followed rather than led this action. At no time did they issue a call for a general strike nor recom- mend the occupation of the factories by the wor- kers. At no time did they consider the situation as revolutionary. Monsieur Séguy, general secretary of the CGT declared on June 13: ‘The question of knowing whether the hour for the insurrection had struck was never at any time posed before the Bureau of the Confederation or the Administrative Commission, which are composed, as is well known, of serious and responsible militants who do not have the reputation of taking their desires for reality”’.’ Whether Séguy is speaking the truth or not is scarcely important. What can be assumed from the whole behaviour of the CP is that its leaders well knew that a revolutionary situation did exist. Their main concern was to prevent the working class pushing towards a seizure of power—a task which they successfully carried out, but only by dint of immense efforts. After the event they were able to explain that there never had been a revolutionary situation, in order to cover up their tracks and their actual role in preventing it from maturing. Once again, then, as in 1936, as in 1945, as in 1953 and 1958 the Communist Party imposed a Strait-jacket on the working class and helped to preserve the bourgeois social order. The bitterness and hostility of the attacks launched by the CP on the student movement and upon the left-wing groups were required in order to prevent the latter from becoming a pole of attraction and an alternative leadership. _ What was the possibility of such an alternative arising? As far as the student movement was con- cerned, and those groups who concentrated their main efforts in the Sorbonne after its liberation from police control on May 13, it can be said that it evaded in practice such a task. Instead the ener- gies of the students were dispersed in interminable discussions, sallies to the barricades and occasional sorties to the factory gates. Only the supporters of the International Com- mittee, the Organisation Communiste International- iste, the youth movement Révoltes and the student movement, the Fédération des Etudiants Révolu- tionnaires put forward consistently a Marxist policy. Themselves taken by surprise by the rapid- ity with which the storm broke, fighting with small numbers in a most difficult situation these organiz- ations acquired a valuable capital of experience in struggle from which the whole international move- ment can draw. Undoubtedly their intervention in a number of decisive instances, including the first 43

[p007] occupation at Sud-Aviation, had an important bearing on the course of events. Links were de- veloped with important sections of the youth and the working class. In the universities the FER put forward a basically correct line against the advo- cates of ‘student power’ and the ‘critical university’ —that is to say against the mainstream of student feeling—with great consistency and courage in the face of slander and misrepresentation. In the end the smallness of the vanguard enabled the treachery of the Stalinists and the reformists to prevail. The alternative leadership, while it made its presence felt, was not able to take com- mand of the class. Now, along with other left groups, the OCI, Révoltes and the FER have been banned: but their struggle continues. Inside the CGT and the CP there is a growing volume of questions and criticism. The workers were not de- feated, and they know it; but the class-conscious elements also know that they could have gained much more—that power was within their grasp. In these conditions, with the crisis of French capitalism aggravated by the events of May and June, the opportunities for intervention, even under conditions of illegality, become very great. The struggle continues and in the coming period the Trotskyists will come forward to lead the final victorious struggle of the French working class. The Newsletter announces a new and comprehensive series of articles by Tom Kemp to follow his recent reports from France ‘These organizations i ce it zat calted che strike and, 0”! bey sore might and main to prevent it was wader way. @ wecomint tical Sts ' aon a ene Communist Party REWSPAPET never pent an which the sta ee she five weeks ne ut with a front-pake head e. It acted not as 3 wike. T NE NEWSLETTER a Gm ae, mS ar ee eee? % NAO ee Sse a, Se ote. # R HPs < sw4

[p008] -Trotsky’s Marxism under attack SINCE 1956—the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, the Hungarian Revolution and the overturn in Poland—Stalinism has been in a state of profound and open crisis. The events of that year were such an overwhelming vindication of Trotsky’s struggle against Stalinism that those who continued that struggle, Trotskyists, were able to strengthen themselves significantly in preparation for the revolutionary political tasks coming to the fore with the eventual end of the boom of the fifties and early ’sixties. But the onset of crisis in the ranks of the Com- munist Parties throughout the capitalist world produced other results besides this opportunity for Trotskyism. For two generations, the Stalinists had cultivated a section of their membership as ‘intellectuals’. The first wave was recruited on the basis of the ‘popular front’, class-collaborationist, policies of the period between 1934 and 1939. They were followed by the recruits of the ‘anti-fascist war’ and post-war period. The Stalin-Hitler pact at the beginning of the Second World War removed a number of these re- cruits from the ranks and later many others weakened and deserted under the pressure of McCarthyism and the cold war. But we can say that for most of this period their acceptance of the conquests of the October Revolution was adapted to the line that the communist movement was really the logical advance guard of the demo- cratic resistance to fascism. In the late ’forties and ’fifties the ‘peace move- ment’ was the form taken by this political line. Once again the independent class line of the revo- lutionary proletariat was suppressed, with Com- munist Party members supplying the leading cadre of all ‘anti-war’ movements. The secondary effects of this Stalinist line were Trotsky’s Marxism under attack A reply to the _ recent articles by Nicolas Krasso in ‘New Left Review’ attack- ing ‘Trotsky’s Marxism’ and the reply by Ernest Mandel. by Cliff Slaughter eventually to prove of some importance. Intellec- tuals in the Communist Party were separated from the trade union and general political work of he Party, and encouraged to pursue their special inter- ests. For all the talk about ‘the battle of ideas’, and despite certain periods of witch-hunting, these intellectuals were not required to step out of line with the petty-bourgeois ‘democratic’ atmosphere of their day-to-day work. At those points where the Stalinist bureaucracy did find collaboration . with the imperialists difficult, precisely at these points did the Party lose numbers of these intellec- tuals, above all during the McCarthy period in the USA. 1956: two bombshells _ Krushchev’s ‘secret speech’, revealing some of the manifestations of Stalin’s personal power, and the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in November 1956, were a bombshell in the lives of every one of these Communist Party intellectuals. The real lesson of this crisis was the counter-revo- lutionary nature of the Soviet bureaucracy and the need to re-establish continuity with the Bolshevik tradition of October, through the Fourth Inter- national and Trotsky’s struggle against Stalinism. But the vast majority of Stalinist intellectuals now set their political course not objectively, but subjectively: they saw their ‘communism’ as a vast deception; they could no longer hold up their heads in the liberal circles in which they lived and worked; they were outraged to discover that their idealist acceptance of Stalin and Stalinism had been used to cover up murder, torture and the suppression of all freedom; and so on. Politically speaking, and insofar as any of them remained in politics, the meaning behind these re- 45

[p009] Trotsky’s Marxism under attack SINCE 1956—the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, the Hungarian Revolution and the overturn in Poland—Stalinism has been in a state of profound and open crisis. The events of that year were such an overwhelming vindication of Trotsky’s struggle against Stalinism that those who continued that struggle, Trotskyists, were able to strengthen themselves significantly in preparation for the revolutionary political tasks coming to the fore with the eventual end of the boom of the ‘fifties and early ’sixties. But the onset of crisis in the ranks of the Com- munist Parties throughout the capitalist world produced other results besides this opportunity for Trotskyism. For two generations, the Stalinists had cultivated a section of their membership as ‘intellectuals’. The first wave was recruited on the basis of the ‘popular front’, class-collaborationist, policies of the period between 1934 and 1939. They were followed by the recruits of the ‘anti-fascist war’ and post-war period. The Stalin-Hitler pact at the beginning of the Second World War removed a number of these re- cruits from the ranks and later many others weakened and deserted under the pressure of McCarthyism and the cold war. But we can say that for most of this period their acceptance of the conquests of the October Revolution was adapted to the line that the communist movement was really the logical advance guard of the demo- cratic resistance to fascism. In the late ’forties and ’fifties the ‘peace move- ment’ was the form taken by this political line. Once again the independent class line of the revo- lutionary proletariat was suppressed, with Com- munist Party members supplying the leading cadre of all ‘anti-war’ movements. The secondary effects of this Stalinist line were Trotsky’s Marxism under attack A reply to the recent articles by Nicolas Krasso in ‘New Left Review’ attack- ing ‘Trotsky’s Marxism’ and the reply by Ernest Mandel. by Cliff Slaughter eventually to prove of some importance. Intellec- tuals in the Communist Party were separated from the trade union and general political work of he Party, and encouraged to pursue their special inter- ests. For all the talk about ‘the battle of ideas’, and despite certain periods of witch-hunting, these intellectuals were not required to step out of line with the petty-bourgeois ‘democratic’ atmosphere of their day-to-day work. At those points where the Stalinist bureaucracy did find collaboration with the imperialists difficult, precisely at these points did the Party lose numbers of these intellec- tuals, above all during the McCarthy period in the USA. 1956: two bombshells Krushchev’s ‘secret speech’, revealing some of the manifestations of Stalin’s personal power, and the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in November 1956, were a bombshell in the lives of every one of these Communist Party intellectuals. The real lesson of this crisis was the counter-revo- lutionary nature of the Soviet bureaucracy and the need to re-establish continuity with the Bolshevik tradition of October, through the Fourth Inter- national and Trotsky’s struggle against Stalinism. But the vast majority of Stalinist intellectuals now set their political course not objectively, but subjectively: they saw their ‘communism’ as a vast deception; they could no longer hold up their heads in the liberal circles in which they lived and worked; they were outraged to discover that their idealist acceptance of Stalin and Stalinism had been used to cover up murder, torture and the suppression of all freedom; and so on. Politically speaking, and insofar as any of them remained in politics, the meaning behind these re- 45

[p010] actions was the acceptance of the principal capital- ist ideological attack on the Russian Revolution and Communism: that Stalinism, with all its abuses and betrayals, is essentially a continuation of Leninism; that the essence of Stalinism is ‘dic- tatorship’ or ‘totalitarianism’, together with ‘Real- politik’ or pragmatic power politics; and that the ‘ideals’ with which rank-and-file members join and build the movement are simply cynically used by the power-seekers in the leadership. Conscious of this ‘continuity’, the ex-Commun- ists then cast around for alternative moral and political principles. They find, of course, only the leftovers of bourgeois ethics and the many varieties of reformist and liberal opportunism which have accepted them. None of these, since they flow from, and depend directly upon, a social order which is historically doomed and decaying, can provide a consistent course of action and theory. Consequently, the many groupings which blos- somed (if the word is appropriate in this connec- tion) after 1956 eventually either dissolved into the reformist and liberal movements, or else drifted more and more closely towards Stalinism, some- times in the form of open and direct collaboration, in other cases through an ideological accommoda- tion. This is because on an international scale capitalism survives not through any inherent strength, but only through the props provided for it by the Stalinist bureaucracy. This is the social force which holds back the proletarian revolution. Stalinism or Trotskyism Insofar as there is any political and theoretical work among those claiming to be socialists, it must either gravitate towards Stalinism, or be attracted to revolutionary Marxism, to Trotskyism. The New Left Review has a ‘certain continuity since 1956. It was an amalgamation of Universities and Left Review and The New Reasoner. Both of these were the result of collaboration between ex- Communist Party members and other left intellec- tuals. The New Reasoner was originally The Reasoner, a duplicated opposition bulletin for dissident Com- munist Party members in the North of England in 1956. Its editors, Edward Thompson and John Saville, were and remain strongly anti-Trotskyist. Thompson described Trotskyism as a sectarian, ultra-left and anti-revolutionary trend in the British working class. Like those who succeeded them, Thompson and Saville sought for future develop- ment from sources outside the Bolshevik tradition, and particularly from some supposedly special 46 socialist characteristics of the British working-class movement. . Their refusal to face up to the historical mean- ing of Stalinism and of Trotsky’s fight against it was reflected in their rejection of any campaign against Stalinism such as that carried out by the Trotskyists, on the grounds that .it amounted to ‘anti-Communism’. In this way they accepted the basic position of a continuity between Lenin and Stalin. Indeed, Thompson explicity called for a questioning of Marx’s theory of knowledge as a way of getting at the sources of Stalinism. (‘Social- ist Humanism: an epistle to the Philistines,’ New Reasoner, Vol. 1, No. 1, Summer 1957. See Peter Fryer’s reply ‘Lenin as Philosopher’ in Labour Re- view, Vol. 2, No. 5, September-October 1957.) Between thage days and 1968, many changes in the editorial personnel and the editorial statements of New Left Review have taken place. It no longer attempts the organization and mobilization of socialists and militants in every industrial centre, promised when the magazine was launched. It has become very much a university radical magazine, carrying a high proportion of translated material and literary and philosophical commentary. The New Left Manifesto of 1967, revised and re-issued in 1968, is predictably a left reformist plea to all centrists to stand firm on their principles—which must be the most hopeless of all lost causes! A new relationship From about 1964, rumours became strong that there was ‘Trotskyism’ abroad in the editorial offices of the New Left Review. The rumours re- ferred in fact to a certain relationship which had sprung up between some of the Editorial Board and the changing group of isolated individuals in Britain who claimed allegiance to the revisionist ‘United Secretariat of the Fourth International’ in Paris, an offshoot of the anti-Trotskyist programme developed by Michel Pablo in the early nineteen- fifties. Enthusiasm for the ‘Castro-ite’ currents in Latin America, expectation of a ‘left’ development inter- nationally from petty-bourgeois sources and ele- ments within the bureaucracies of the workers’ movement—these were the focus of agreement be- tween these two trends. It can be said that people like Ken Coates, who for many years played with the ideas of Pabloism, helped in this way to provide sophisticated formulae through which the New Left Review group maintained its anti-Trotskyist position and left itself open to co-existence with Stalinism. Fourth International, August 1968

[p011] Such co-existence is precisely the starting-point of Pabloism, which abandoned the building of Trotskyist parties based on the revolutionary role of the working class, and instead adapted itself to the supposedly automatic assumption of revolu- tionary tasks by elements of the Stalinist bureauc- racy and by the ‘democratic’ petty bourgeoisie in the colonial countries. There was a marriage of convenience. Enter, Krasso The New Left Review from time to time made sniping attacks on Trotskyism, particularly in its earlier phases, but it never provided any analysis of Trotskyism or of its own relation to the Trot- skyist movement. Naturally enough, it produced no useful material on the history of Stalinism either, for that would have implied an estimation of Trotsky’s role. In recent issues, however, the gap has been filled by lengthy contributions from a new member of the New Left Review Editorial Board, one Nicolas Krasso, who has given us ‘Trotsky’s Marxism’ (New Left Review 44, July- August 1967). This attack on Trotsky was taken up by Ernest Mandel, a Belgian economist who can be taken to follow faithfully the line of the Germain-Frank group in Paris to which we refer above (New Left Review 47, January-February 1968). Krasso returns to the fray (in New Left Review 48, March-April 1968) with ‘Reply to Ernest Mandel’. It is of some importance that the New Left Review at this juncture now launches an all-out attack on Trotsky and Trotskyism. They claim to publish what is above all a theoretical journal, and this is their ‘contribution’ to the preparation of the next stage in the political development of the working-class movement in Britain. Robin Blackburn, to take only one name from the list of editors, makes great play of defending Regis Debray and celebrating the Cuban Revolu- tion, but he chooses in 1967-1968 to publish a magazine jointly with an enemy of Marxism like Krasso, who joins the New Left Review board to find a platform to attack the revolutionary van- guard. Krasso himself is an ex-pupil of the Hun- garian Georg Lukacs. He has learned and ‘im- proved’ upon all Lukacs’ well-known capacities for capitulation and bending to the strongest prevail- ing winds, but without any of the learning and subtlety with which Lukacs conceals his retreat from Marxism. He is precisely one of those who reacted to the 1956 Revolution by moving away from Communism as well as from Stalinism. But, Trotsky’s Marxism under attack as we Shall see, by rejecting the line of Lenin and Trotsky, he is brought back to the position of an apologist for Stalin. An Evaluation of Mandel One purpose of this long introduction to our reply to Krasso is to prepare also our evaluation of Mandel’s reply to Krasso. Together with his British followers he too had flirted with the New Left Review, submitting articles to them and collabor- ating in their ventures, and so he was obliged to respond to the diatribe which issued from the pen of their new recruit, Krasso. But precisely because his politics have been of the type which could ac- commodate to the New Left Review line and orientation, both in Britain and internationally, he proves pitifully unable to deal with Krasso. He does not defend Trotskyism for a single minute, and by the feebleness of his reply actually strengthens Krasso’s attack. This episode is only one small example of the destructive service ren- dered to Trotskyism by the revisionists. Mandel’s reply to Krasso cannot be other than weak, allowing Krasso to return to the attack. Mandel’s own political revision of the basic posi- tions of Trotskyism and the Fourth International, along the lines of Michel Pablo, took the form of an adaptation to the Stalinist bureaucracy, which involved inevitably an abandonment of the build- ing of revolutionary parties independent of all elements in that bureaucracy. Krasso’s attack on Trotskyism, his wish to ad- vocate a ‘Marxism’ opposed to Trotskyism, is his own olive-branch to the ‘liberalizing’ Stalinist bureaucrats in Eastern Europe. He is telling them that any ‘independence’ from them which he may claim will certainly not involve revolutionary organization of the working class against them, and that he will assist them in their task of repel- ling Trotskyism. Mandel cannot even bring himself to defend the Fourth International, the crowning political act of Trotsky’s career. Instead, he makes . a purely abstract assessment of the historical ques- tions and criticisms raised by Krasso. Even where he makes correct points, this is only part of the overall effect, which is to help Krasso portray Trotsky as, at best, a historical tragedy and at most a dangerously wrong-headed deviationist from Leninism. Mandel cannot establish himself in the argument as a continuator of Trotsky’s work, the only real answer to Krasso, because he is part of a revisionist attempt to destroy the content of Trotskyism. 47

[p012] Similarly, his followers in Britain consciously cut off any connection they had with Trotskyism. Historical ancestry We take only two examples. Pat Jordan and his associates, followers of Mandel, have for the past two years devoted themselves entirely to the ‘Vietnam Solidarity Campaign’. From the theoreti- cal standpoint, even more significant than the politics of this movement, adapted as they are to Stalinism, is the conscious claim its leaders make for their historical ancestry: Our campaign recognizes its own historical prece- dents. In the nineteen-thirties, united fronts com- posed of liberals, democrats, communists and socialists, were forged to oppose the onslaught of Fascism, and international brigades were organized to lend material support to the heroic struggle of Republican Spain, etc. (Why Vietnam Solidarity?, p. 2). In a recently published collection of writings, Industrial Democracy in Great Britain, Tony Topham and Ken Coates, long-time close associ- ates of Mandel and opponents of the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League on his behalf, came out just as clearly: From the work of the original ‘New Left’ move- ment which in 1956 began its independent re- appraisal of the socialist interpretation of twentieth- century capitalism, its history and sociology . . .’ from the more recent activities of the ‘Voice’ con- ferences on workers’ control in Britain, and from accompanying contributions of the European left, we have drawn our inspiration. This brings us back to where we began: the relationship between revisionism, anti-Trotskyism and the New Left Review. This relationship begins to be revealed especially clearly on the eve of what will be undoubtedly the greatest class struggles for half a century—and the greatest betrayals by the Stalinists, to whom they are all making their way home. And this is the essential meaning of Krasso’s attack on ‘Trotsky’s Marxism’. Pseudo-Hegelian construction Krasso is not a modest man. He sets out to demonstrate the ‘mistakes’ of Trotsky through every phase of his political career. (In the course of this, he condescends to take five pages ‘to clarify some recurring misconceptions about the history of the international revolutionary movement since the nineteen-twenties’.) What is more, he claims to have found the secret, the single source, of all Trotsky’s mistakes. 48 The form of Krasso’s case is a crude application of the notion of ‘totality’, in the sense of a purely abstract unity, to Trotsky’s political writing and politics. This totality is a so-called ‘sociologism’, which led Trotsky always to relate the class struggle too directly to the course of political events, without ever grasping what Krasso calls the autonomy of political institutions. In consist- ' ently idealist fashion, Krasso ‘proves’ his case by tracing Trotsky’s relation to the revolutionary party as the expression of this ‘sociologism’. He manages to arrive eventually at a fine pseudo- Hegelian construction: Trotsky began as a crude advocate of centralism; never understanding the political concepts behind centralism, he went from 1903 to the nineteen-thirties through a series of basic errors on the question which decided his political fate; he then returned in old age to the vulgar conceptions of his youth. Into this con- struction—a house of cards—every ‘example’ is forced. Krasso begins by himself summing up this approach, an approach typical of bourgeois idealist sociology since the beginning of the century, and recently revived in the fashionable ‘structuralism’. The method is to erect an ‘ideal type’ of the motives which appear to the observer to predomin- ate in the behaviour of the individual or group observed, and then try and ‘illuminate’ the actual reality through this ideal type, or what Krasso calls ‘specific unity’. Thus: The aim of this essay is to approach such a prob- lem—how should we judge Trotsky as a Marxist? This means comparing him with Lenin (rather than with Stalin) and trying to see what is the specific unity of his theoretical writings and his practice as a politician. For this purpose, Trotsky’s life falls into four distinct phases: 1879-1917, 1917-21, 1921-29 and 1929-40. It will be the thesis of this essay that all four periods are best understood in the framework of a single problem: Trotsky’s rela- tion to the Party as the revolutionary organization of the proletariat, and its latent theoretical foun- dations. This focus, it will be argued, illuminates all the basic characteristics (vices and virtues) of Trotsky’s thought as a Marxist, and explains the vicissitudes. of his political career. (Krasso, New Left Review, 44, p. 65). Revisionist impotence This is the form. We have explained the actual content, the attack on the Trotskyist struggle for the continuity of Bolshevism in the building of revolutionary parties, for the social revolution against imperialism, linked with the political revo- Fourth International, August 1968

[p013] lution in the countries ruled by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Mandel’s reply to Krasso is feeble because it is purely abstract. Coming from the camp of revisionism on this very question, it can- not challenge the content of Krasso’s article, nor can it expose its anti-Marxist form, for in order to abandon the revolutionary party, our revisionists also abandoned the Marxist method in favour of empiricism and pragmatism (see Fourth Inter- national, Vol. 2, No. 1, Summer 1965, for the analysis of this revision of Marxist methods). Trotsky’s own writings are, of course, the only complete answer to Krasso’s long list of easy judg- ments on every aspect of his work. Here we shall take the central questions, and demonstrate that Krasso’s method involves a distortion which is in every case characteristic of a crude empiricist ap- proach on historical questions which is always the fate of the idealist. This empiricism, as always, has the political consequence of prostration before the relative equilibrium achieved by capitalism at any particular phase of the epoch of proletarian revo- lution. This ‘worshipping of the accomplished fact’, as Trotsky would have called it, is directly con- centrated upon a justification of the Stalinist bureaucracy. This is only to be expected, since Stalinism has been and remains the principal counter-revolutionary force on a world scale, and thus the most important instrument through which the crisis-ridden capitalist system achieves any temporary unstable equilibrium. Forty years of Stalinist lies about Trotsky’s supposed aid and comfort to the international bourgeoisie do not prevent every bourgeois scholar, almost without exception, deciding that Stalin ‘given the circum- stances’ was historically right as against Trotsky. Justification of bureaucracy According to Krasso, Trotsky was blinded to the realities of the early Soviet state, to the real dynamics of the struggle in the Bolshevik Party after Lenin’s death, to the actual potential of the class struggle in the metropolitan countries after the Russian Revolution. In every case, says Krasso, he ignored the immediate sociological background, substituting for it the play of global social or class forces. For all its appearance of high-sounding theory, this argument of Krasso amounts in every case to a justification of the Stalinist bureaucracy and of bourgeois order against the proletariat and the revolution. Krasso writes, for example: It may be argued that Stalin, by discounting the possibility of successful European revolutions, effectively contributed to their eventual defeat—this Trotsky’s Marxism under attack accusation has often been made against his policies towards Germany and Spain. There was, indeed, an element of the self-fulfilling prediction in socialism in one country. However, given this criticism, which is precisely that Stalin’s policies represented a de- basement of Lenin’s strategy —the superiority of Stalin’s perspective over Trotsky’s is undeniable. It forms the whole historico-practical context in which the struggle for power discussed above unfolded. No matter how strong Stalin’s position in the apparatus, it would have availed him little if his basic strategic line had been invalidated by the course of political events. It was, on the contrary, confirmed by history. In this lay Stalin’s ultimate, unshakeable strength in the ’twenties.’ [my empha- sis, C.S.] (Krasso, New Left Review, 44, p. 79). It is immediately apparent that Krasso’s attempt, in other parts of his essay, to appear as a great follower of Lenin as against Trotsky and Stalin, is mere window-dressing. If Lenin’s strategy was ‘de- based’ by Stalin, and Stalin’s ‘basic strategic line’ was ‘confirmed by history’, what remains of the ‘basic strategic line’ of Lenin? In Krasso’s book, could Lenin possibly have survived the judgement made on Trotsky—v‘a classical revolutionary thinker, stranded in an impossible historical im- passe’, committed to the ‘ill-starred venture’ of building an International of revolutionary parties? (Ibid. pp. 84-85). ; Krasso’s prostration before the existing order of class rule and the power of the Stalinist bureauc- racy, expressed most clearly in the passage quoted above on Stalin’s ‘correctness’, is the real meaning of his castigation of Trotsky’s supposed ‘under- estimation of the specific efficacy of political in- stitutions’, the so-called ‘sociologism’ which is Trotsky’s original sin. Every one of the doubtful talents of Krasso is turned to ‘proving’ that, what- ever criticisms are permitted of Stalin and Stalin- ism, they must not lead to the position established by Trotsky. 1927-1940: the alleged myth The period 1927-1940 must be characterized as ‘Myth’. Trotsky is the tragic hero, and the Fourth International an abortion. The last period of his life was dominated by his symbolic relationship to the great drama of the pre- vious decade, which had become for him a tragic fate. His activities became almost futile. He himself was completely ineffective—the leader of an imagin- ary political movement, helpless while his relatives were exterminated by Stalin, and interned wherever he went. His main objective role in these pitiful years was to provide the fictive negative centre needed by Stalin in Russia .. . Stalin installed his 49

[p014] iron dictatorship by mobilizing the party apparatus against the ‘Trotskyite’ threat. (Ibid. p. 84). Mandel, having spent so many years in the task of attempting to liquidate the Fourth International, gives no answer whatsoever to this neo-Stalinist distortion. What Krasso is doing here is providing a more ‘subtle’ and less brutal version of the old Stalinist falsifications of the Moscow trials. The last refuge of the Stalinists on these questions was for years that the forced confessions and the judicial frame-ups were ‘objectively’ necessary, whether or not Trotsky ‘consciously’ acted for the bourgeoisie and counter-revolution. That presenta- tion has become untenable, and Krasso’s role is to provide the last threadbare covering for the bureauc- racy as its past is exposed: the ‘negative’ features of Stalin’s rule, according to him, were established more easily because ‘objectively’ Trotsky’s ‘futile’ activities provided a focus for the purges! Never from the standpoint of the proletariat However perverse and flimsy, the argument is worth examination. It starts from and ends with only the standpoint of the bureaucracy, the scope and limits of its policy and power, and never from the standpoint of the working class. Internation- ally, the defeats of the 1926-1936 period are accepted as given and unalterable ‘objective’ obstacles to Trotsky’s policies and aims. In each particular country, the consciousness of those defeats became part of an ‘unfamiliar context’ for Trotsky, ‘the character of the new societies in which he found himself’, and of which he was ‘un- certain’. What is the significance of this last point? Krasso develops it in his reply to Mandel: But in all these cases, Stalin’s international policies were ultimately [?] a secondary factor within a contest fought and decided at national level. The primary unit [?] of class struggle was the nation... (New Left Review, 48, p. 101). The latter point is taken up later in relation to the theory of permanent revolution: in the present context the decisive thing is that Krasso presents and re-writes the whole history of the inter-war period as a justification of the Soviet bureaucracy. Like every petty bourgeois, Krasso finds a bit of good in everybody. But his praise of Trotsky on certain questions is only part of his attack, and it is made only insofar as it supports Krasso’s own orientation to Stalinism today. Krasso refers to the ‘tremendous prescience’ of Trotsky’s writings on German Fascism, and the uniqueness of his analysis 50 of the Stalinist errors of the ‘Third Period’. Simi- larly, although complaining about the “‘demagogic’ title of The Revolution Betrayed, Krasso commends Trotsky’s analysis of the USSR: While many of his followers were manufacturing new ‘ruling classes’ and ‘capitalist restorations’ in the Soviet Union at will, Trotsky in his analysis of the Soviet state and party apparatus emphasized, on the contrary, that it was not a social class. (Ibid., p. 85). With the sure judgement of the camp-follower, Krasso knows how far to go: he can faintly praise Trotsky for that part of his theory which, when abstracted and robbed of its content, can be used to lend support for Krasso’s own celebration of the - historical role of the Stalinist bureaucracy. His praise for Trotsky’s work on the rise of Nazism in Germany is just as informative. While recording his agreement with Trotsky that the line of the Comintern was disastrous, he at the same time (indeed, in the next sentence) argues that ‘Stalin’s international policies were ultimately a secondary factor within a contest fought and de- cided at national level’. ([bid., 48, p. 101). Of course, Trotsky’s entire analysis was based on precisely the opposite grounds! The ‘left’ zig- zag into the ‘Third Period’ in 1929 was an inter- national turn by the Stalinist bureaucracy. The designation of social democrats as ‘social-fascists’ and the rejection of the United Front was not a product of something ‘German’ but of the social position, needs and policies of the Soviet bureauc- racy, and it proved decisive in opening the way to Hitler’s victory in 1933. So much was this the central feature of Trotsky’s analysis that he drew from 1933 the historic conclusion that the reform of the Third International was no longer possible and that the Fourth must be constructed. This is, of course, the one decision above all others made by Trotsky which Krasso rejects outright. His commendation of Trotsky’s work on Germany is thus worse than meaningless: it is used to build up a case which is precisely the opposite of that argued and fought for by Trotsky. Since Krasso accuses Trotsky of non-Marxist method, how does he explain his own attempts to abstract ‘bits and pieces’ from Trotsky’s work and damn or praise them? Is it ‘Marxist’, then, to apply some external norms of judgement to each ‘essay’ by Trotsky in- stead of tracing Trotsky’s development as a unity of theory and practice? For Trotsky, the German tragedy and the building of the new International were inseparably linked. For Krasso, Trotsky is Fourth International, August 1968

[p015] ‘brilliant’ on one hand and ‘futile’ on the other! So much for ‘Krasso’s Marxism’! Crammed within one parentheses Again it is necessary to move immediately from the direct analysis of Krasso’s argument to the politics which lie behind it. In his rejoinder to Mandel, Krasso indicates with great clarity (the clarity of the naive, it should be said, and not of the brilliant) this relation between his opportunist politics and his eclectic method. He writes: Moreover, Trotsky’s critique of the Comintern poli- cies in Germany was excellent (it is perhaps signifi- cant, incidentally, that his best polemics of those years were written from a ‘rightist’ position, parallel to that of Brandler, not from a ‘leftist’ position, which he adopted during the Popular Fronts)... (Ibid.) This passage tells us as much about Krasso’s line and method as we need to know, and more than would emerge from going over in detail many of the other questions he raises. Like this question of Trotsky’s ‘right’ and ‘left’ lines, these have all been answered many times, and in the first place by Trotsky himself. Here, however, Krasso surpasses himself. So much confusion is crammed into one pair of paren- theses that it is difficult to know where to begin. But it must be done. Brandler and Thalheimer, ‘right-wing Commun- ists’ close to the thinking of Bukharin, were ex- pelled from the German Communist Party in 1929, They strongly criticised the ultra-left policy of the Comintern, particularly in its application to Ger- many. In appearances, many of the points they made were the same as points made by Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Did this mean that Trotsky had moved over to their ‘rightist’ position, later to return to the left after 1933? Krasso’s superficial judgements on Germany This superficial judgement did in fact prevail in some circles, not least among certain followers of the Left Opposition. But Brandler confined his political criticism entirely to this ‘left’ swing in the zig-zag of Comintern policies, zig-zags which were stumbling, empirical and tardy reactions to the disastrous consequences of earlier phases of their own policy. It was the reasons for the zig-zags, the nature of the bureaucracy, to which Marxists must direct their attention. And it was here that Trotsky was completely opposed to Brandler. Just as Brandler separated out one historical stage of Stalinist policy for attack, so he separated his Trotsky’s Marxism under attack criticisms of the ‘German policy’ of the Comintern from every other question of the policy and nature of the Stalinist leadership. Where Trotsky exposed the German Communist Party’s policy as only one expression of the whole turn against proletarian internationalism and Marxism by the Comintern leadership under the pressure of the Stalinist bureaucracy, Brandler compromised with the Stalinists, argued that to attack Comintern policy as a whole or Stalin’s policy inside Russia would make effective opposition impossible by alienating all Communists. From this standpoint, Brandler argued that the course of the bureaucracy could be corrected without an overall and principled struggle against them. All this is well known to serious students of the Communist movement, and Krasso’s ignorance of it is no more excusable than deliberate falsification. A light-minded attitude towards the history and theory of the revolutionary movement is the most serious fault possible in anyone claiming to be a Marxist. One cannot even be as generous as this in relation to Krasso’s imputation that Trotsky changed from a ‘rightist’ to a ‘leftist’ position in the period of the Popular Fronts. Trotsky’s posi- tion was that of continuation of the path of Lenin and of the first four Congresses of the Third Inter- national. He fought for and developed these prin- ciples, strategy and tactics until his death. The zig-zags to ‘left’ and ‘right’ were, once again, the frantic re-adjustments made by the bureaucracy after being brought face to face with the con- quences of their own line. Thus, after the victory of Hitler, they belatedly introduced, at the VIIth World Congress of the Communist International, a policy of ‘alliances’ against Fascism. But it was not a re- turn to the United Front of the early years of the International and explained in detail in the speeches and reports of Lenin and Trotsky. Instead, there were to be ‘Popular Fronts’ of the ‘democratic’ parties, i.e. alliances with the bourgeois ‘democratic’ parties, for the sake of which the independent de- mands and the revolutionary role of the working class were to be suppressed. Spain was to provide the great example. The point here is that the change of line, while prompted by the historical defeat of the German working class and all that it threatened to the workers of every country, was shaped by the political requirements of the Stalinist bureaucracy in its position between the Soviet proletariat and property relations on the one hand, and imperial- ism on the other. Stalin now settled for a strategy of using the Communist Parties as direct agents of 51

[p016] guaranteeing social peace to the bourgeois powers who in return would militarily and diplomatically ‘guarantee’ the isolation of Hitler and counter his threat to the USSR’s Western border. A special licence All this Trotsky analyzed with perfect clarity at the time. His position was not ‘rightist’ or ‘leftist’ but a Marxist one of fighting for policies based on the international interests of the working class, in- cluding the Soviet working class. How much then remains of Krasso’s easy formula about Trotsky’s change of position and his tendency to write better when in a ‘rightist’ position? Undoubtedly, nothing other than Krasso’s own subjective preference for a ‘liberalizing’, ‘non-sectarian’ position, from which he himself prefers to see both the past and the present of the Stalinist bureaucracy. For the same reason he falls easily into the position of arguing, in Stalin’s favour, that the unit of class struggle and revolution was primarily the nation. This is not just an abstract preference for Stalin over Trotsky, though that is congenital to oppor- tunists, but essentially an overture to the ‘liberal’ wing of the bureaucracy in Hungary and the other East European countries, with their lip service to ‘separate, national roads to socialism’. This formula is in fact a special licence to combine sycophantic service to the Kremlin bureaucracy with a measure of privilege and ‘independence’ as suitable reward. Independence from the Moscow bureaucracy is one thing; ‘independence’ from the working class, guaranteed by the tanks of this same Moscow bureaucracy, quite another. Krasso’s ‘Marxism’ is essentially of this type, a set of fixed formulae to explain why things are just what they appear to be. It is the revolutionary role of the working class, united and led to power by a conscious revolutionary party, which he rejects. That is the real meaning of his criticism of Trotsky’s supposed ‘sociologism’, or stress on the class struggle as determinant of the course of historical events. Again, Germany provides the best example, and a clearer one than would an analysis of all his abstract arguments. In the same breath as he talks about the ‘excellence’ of Trotsky’s writings on Germany, Krasso says: The possibilities of a socialist revolution in Ger- many were also remote. The KPD (German Com- munist Party) at no time had anything like the force to deal with the Wehrmacht (the German army)~—re-armed and equipped by the social demo- crats for the deliberate purpose of counter-revolution in 1918, and constantly enlarged thereafter. This 52 strategic situation was prior to any consideration of Nazism. A successful check on Nazism was one thing; a proletarian revolution quite another.’ (Ibid.) Trotsky on Germany Trotsky’s writings on Germany could certainly not have been written by a man with Krasso’s historical opinions, as expressed in this quotation. Krasso can only see these writings as ‘a pathology of the class nature of the dispossessed petty bour- geoisie and its paranoias’; from the comfortable chair of the petty-bourgeois intellectual, he thinks he can simply utilize the ideas of Trotsky for an abstract evaluation of his less enlightened pre- decessors in Germany. But reference to Trotsky’s works on Germany shows that he approached the ‘dispossessed petty bourgeoisie’ and its politics always from the point of view of the crisis of leadership and independent politics of the working class, the only revolutionary class against the great monopolies and banks. In Germany, as in France and every other capitalist country, the frustrated petty bourgeoisie, battered between these two main classes, would choose the demagogy and anti-proletarian violence of Fascism if the prole- tariat did not win it to a policy of revolutionary and decisive inroads into big capitalist property: anything else, and in particular the defence of the discredited ‘democracy’, would only impel the middle classes further to the right. It was for this purpose that Trotsky insisted on a united front of the working class both before 1933 in Germany, during the ‘Third Period’, and after 1934, when the Stalinists went over to ‘Popular Front’ politics. Krasso, as always opposed to a dialectical view- point, can only see pre-1933 and post-1933 as two opposites, and not as expressions and developments of the same revolutionary line against Stalinism and its zig-zags. This impressionistic separating out of phases is not just a weakness of logic: on the one hand, it flows from the idealist method of not proceeding from the development of Trotsky’s Marxism as revolutionary theory and practice; on the other, it is a necessary parallel of his rejection of the revolutionary role of the working class. Thus, at the end of his reply to Mandel, he defines Marxism, not as the theoretical basis of the prole- tarian revolution, but as ‘the intelligence of an intolerable era and the movement to transform it’ (Ibid., p. 103). From this standpoint, Krasso is per- fectly able to write the urbane-sounding and cyni- cal verdict on Germany which we have quoted. From the heights of ‘sociological’ promise we are Fourth International, August 1968

[p017] thrown down to the most vulgar and everyday judgements of the frightened petty bourgeois, whose sole aim is to make any class-conscious worker who will listen, just as frightened as he is— this is what is meant by pressure of the middle classes on the proletariat. The army was too strong —and'so there could be no revolution. Argument against revoiution This strikingly original theory is of course an argument against any revolution. Of course, Krasso takes into account his ‘sophisticated’ audience by adding that the social democrats had in 1918-1919 made possible the restoration of the German Army, but he uses this ‘fact’ purely, as Marx used to say, ‘to justify today’s swinishness by yesterday’s swinishness’. No doubt we should conclude, from the development of modern weapons and the ‘fact’ that the bourgeois state and army were restored with the active and indispensable help of French and Italian Stalinism in 1945, that revolution in Western Europe today is ‘remote’. Krasso’s analysis in 1929-1933 would have led to capitula- tion to Nazism, just as in 1936 in France the Stalinists and social democrats did use precisely the argument that the workers were not armed and so could not envisage revolution. Finally, when Krasso says: ‘A successful check to Nazism was one thing; a proletarian revolution quite another,’ he takes us through the last door into metaphysics, where every ‘fact’ and ‘possi- bility’ is separated out from every other to receive the approbation or the condemnation of the petty bourgeois as to its historical permissibility. Perhaps Krasso will now write an article explaining what policy, and what class, could actually have achieved the defeat of Nazism in Germany without prole- tarian revolution! What social force could be mobi- lized to defeat the Nazis and their capitalist backers? Does Fascism arise from the inability of capitalism to go on in the old ‘democratic’ way, or from purely political developments which can be halted? (Is this the meaning of Krasso’s high- sounding talk about the ‘autonomy of political in- stitutions’?) Was there then a path of democratic capitalism in Germany after the 1920s? Come, Mr. Krasso! Answer these questions, explain to us just what you mean by ‘a successful check to Nazism’ but without a ‘proletarian revolution’. This was precisely the petty-bourgeois Utopia with which Stalinism infected, misled, and betrayed the international working-class movement in the 1930s and 1940s. In this one ‘distinction’ between de- feating Fascism ‘on the one hand’ and proletarian Trotsky’s Marxism under attack revolution, ‘on the other’, Krasso’s whole political and theoretical position is revealed: his articles are a crude attempt to provide a theoretical sup- port for the Stalinist bureaucracy’s struggle against Trotskyism. For the rest, we must refer the reader to Trotsky’s own texts on the question of Germany. In the space of one article, it is of course not pos- sible to take up in detail all Krasso’s particular points, but the analysis of any one of them brings out the same essential method: denial of the Trotskyist continuity of Marxism in building alter- native revolutionary leadership; justification of the Stalinist betrayals on the grounds of their proceed- ing from a more ‘realistic’ perspective. Spain as another example We will take the example of Spain because it gives the opportunity to quote Trotsky on the more general theoretical questions raised by Krasso, as well as to answer Krasso on the Spanish Revolution itself. In the course of fulfilling his promise to ‘clarify some recurring misconceptions about the history of the international revolutionary move- ment since the ‘twenties’, Krasso writes: ‘The Spanish Civil War is another example. Mandel im- plies that the Spanish Communist Party could have made a successful revolution within the embattled Republic in 1936-1937 and then gone on to mili- tary victory over Franco. Yet they were only a small minority of the Republican forces at the time, which themselves had little chance of winning the war once the military relationship of forces crystal- lized in 1936.’ (Ibid. p. 101.) Of course, having insisted all along that the class struggle is essentially a national phenomenon, Krasso feels free to see the forces at work in the Spanish Civil War as nothing but numerical proportions of the nation’s political divisions, with their military ‘crystallizations’. The reality, of course, was different, and Stalinism was actually able to play a decisive role far beyond its numerical strength in the Spanish proletariat. So far as Krasso is concerned, none of the great politi- cal and social questions raised in action by the Spanish working class, and in theory and pro- gramme by Trotsky, are of any account, once he is able, with the advantage of hindsight, to calculate the ‘success’ of the ‘autonomous’ political and military institutions. As always for the petty bour- geois, these pillars of the establishment are more solid and more meaningful than the fact that the Spanish workers actually set their feet firmly on the path to revolution (it was a question of sup- 53

[p018] pression by the Stalinists and their allies, not of the Stalinists simply not deciding on a revolution), or than the socio-historical character of the Spanish Revolution, a false estimation of which was used by the Stalinists to provide the cover for counter- revolution. So far from Marxism have we been taken by Krasso’s ‘autonomy of political institu- tions’ that class forces no longer play any part in political development. Dominant social and political considerations Krasso writes about the ‘crystallization’ of the military relationship of forces in 1936 in Spain. Of course, in civil war the military relations require specific and detailed planning and attention, but they are in general subordinated to social and political considerations. Nineteen-thirty-six was no exception. Where Krasso produces an abstracted summary, an accomplished fact, the reality was different: In July 1936—not to refer to an earlier period— the Spanish workers repelled the assault of the officers who had prepared their conspiracy under the protection of the People’s Front. The masses improvised militias and created workers’ commit- tees, the strongholds of their future dictatorship. The leading organizations of the proletariat on the other hand helped the bourgeoisie to destroy these committees, to liquidate the assaults of the workers on private property and to subordinate the workers’ militias to the command of the bourgeoisie, with the POUM moreover participating in the govern- ment and assuming direct responsibility for this work of the counter-revolution. (Trotsky, The Class, the Party and the Leadership, WIR Pamphlet, p. 4.) Trotsky goes on to summarize the well-known events of May 1937, when the Catalonian workers rose up and were bloodily suppressed, and con- cludes: The only thing that can be said is that the masses who sought at all times to blast their way to the correct road found no new leadership corresponding to the demands of the revolution. Before us is a profoundly dynamic process, with the various stages of the revolution shifting swiftly, with the leadership or various sections of the leadership quickly desert- ing to the side of the class enemy, and our sages engage in a purely static discussion: why did the working class as a whole follow a bad leadership? (Ibid. p. 5.) Or, one might say: our sages sit and pronounce on the riddle—is it not a fact that the military relationship had already crystallized? ... 54 Primary importance of conscious leadership Trotsky attached primary importance to the building of a conscious leadership to give expres- sion and direction to the revolutionary struggle of the working class. It was the role of the Stalinists in cementing the Popular Front as a barrier be- tween the working masses and Bolshevism which played the essential part in clearing the path of the Spanish bourgeoisie to preserve their property through the victory of Franco. The Spanish Com- munist Party was the instrument through which Stalin’s policy, the policy of the Stalinist bureauc- racy, through the shipment of Soviet arms, was brought together with the policies of the Republi- can politicians, Socialists and Anarchists, all of whom wanted above all to avoid a revolutionary break with capitalism. As Trotsky pointed out time and again, the democratic and anti-socialist pro- gramme of Azafia, Negrin, Companys, Caballero, and Garcia Oliver could be applied only through terror against the proletariat, and this was why they sanctioned the bloody measures of the GPU. Trotsky concluded: The Spanish revolution once again demonstrates that it is impossible to defend democracy against the revolutionary masses otherwise than through the methods of fascist reaction, and conversely, it is impossible to conduct a genuine struggle against fascism otherwise than through the methods of the proletarian revolution. (The Lessons of Spain—the Last Warning, December 17, 1937. p. 10.) Krasso’s seemingly objective pronouncement on the crystallization of forces in 1936 is only another version of the attempt to find some middle road between these two, just as he did for Germany— ‘A successful check on Nazism was one thing; a proletarian revolution quite another’. This sublime distinction exists only in the head of the petty bourgeois. Its expression in reality was physically crushed by Fascism in the 1930s. The fact that Krasso still wants to justify, one way or another, this Stalinist past of murder and betrayal, only indicates the force exerted on him by counter- revolutionary forces today. (On Spain, see especially ‘Trotsky and the Spanish Revolution’ by P. Broué, in Fourth International, Vol. 4, No. 1, April 1967.) Attack on Trotsky’s notion of the party The question of leadership, raised very sharply in relation to Spain, brings us to the nub of Krasso’s argument, the attack on Trotsky’s notion of the party, of the relation beween party and class, and his supposed over-estimation of the direct and determining role of the class struggle. Krasso takes Fourth International, August 1968

[p019] a passage from Trotsky’s preface to the History of the Russian Revolution as ‘the most authentic and powerful expression’ of Trotsky’s ‘sociologism’. It is worth beginning by examining this quotation in detail. First, the paragraph quoted by Krasso is an attempt to prove the point that Trotsky had ‘a view of the revolution which explicitly rejects political or economic variables as of permanent importance’: In a society that is seized by revolution classes are in conflict. It is perfectly clear, however, that the changes introduced between the beginning and the end of a revolution in the economic bases of the society and its social substratum of classes are not sufficient to explain the course of the revolution itself, which can overthrow in a short interval age- old institutions, create new ones, and again over- throw them. The dynamic of revolutionary events is directly determined by swift, intense and passion- ate changes in the psychology of classes which have already formed themselves before the revolution. (History of the Russian Revolution, pp. 17, 18. Italics added by Krasso. In the original, Trotsky underlined only the word ‘directly’.) In the first place, it must be said that here Trotsky writes directly in the tradition of Marx and Engels, whose classical writings on the 1848- 1851 events in France are prefaced by the famous remarks that, while they constitute the first detailed example of the new historical materialism, they are written ‘holding constant’ the economic basis of society. While these economic conditions affect the course of the revolution, it remains true that the classes set in motion were formed by the economic and social development of the previous decades, and that the tempo of the revolutionary events is a qualitatively new phenomenon. It is of course a downright distortion to say that by writing this paragraph Trotsky excluded ‘political or economic variables’. Only one page later he writes: However, the processes taking place in the con- sciousness of the masses are not unrelated and independent. No matter much how the idealists and eclectics rage, consciousness is nevertheless determined by conditions. In the historic conditions which formed Russia, her economy, her classes, her State, in the action upon her of other states, we ought to be able to find the premises both of the February revolution and of the October revolution which replaced it. (Ibid. p. 19.) Does anything remain of Krasso’s fabrication? Perhaps Trotsky, even allowing for the economic and political ‘indirect’ conditioning of those mass forces which ‘directly’ determine the course of revolution, still neglects the role of the proletarian party in the revolutionary victory? But on the same Trotsky’s Marxism under attack page, Trotsky is highly explicit on this: Only on the basis of a study of political processes in the masses themselves, can we understand the role of parties and leaders, whom we least of all are inclined to ignore. They constitute not an independ- ent, but nevertheless a very important, element in the process. Without a guiding organization the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston-box. But nevertheless, what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam. (Ibid.) ‘Autonomy of political institutions’ When Krasso defends so stoutly the ‘autonomy of political institutions’, he has in mind of course not the revolutionary party so much as the estab- lished pillars of bourgeois political order. And this is why the quotation of which; he makes so much is torn from its context, a context where Trotsky explains that a revolution is precisely an end to the normal conditions in which the appearance of stability of ‘political institutions’ holds men spell- bound. In ordinary times the state, be it monarchical or democratic, elevates itself above the nation, and history is made by specialists in that line of busi- ness, kings, ministers, bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists. But at those crucial moment when the old order becomes no longer endurable to the masses, they break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside their tradi- tional representatives, and create by their own in- tervention the initial groundwork for a new regime. ... The history of a revolution is for us first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny. (Ibid. 9. 17.) This passage precedes immediately the paragraph quoted by Krasso, and it brings out once again the way in which Krasso always runs away from the fact of revolution. These revolutions, the rude entry of the masses into history, demanding the development of Marxism as the conscious spear- head of their struggle, are rejected as a disturbance of all fixed notions of ‘political institutions’ and their ‘autonomy’. The History itself develops in detail every aspect of this general presentation. After the detailed analysis of economic and political history of mod- ern Russia, Trotsky presents in chronological detail not simply the march of political events and the intervention of the masses, but also the main crises in the Bolshevik Party and the sharp changes in the relations between parties and classes. It is non- sense to say, as Krasso does, that the book is ‘not an account of the role of the Bolshevik Party in 55

[p020] the October Revolution so much as an epic of the crowds who were led to victory by it’. Any reader can check Trotsky’s intricate analysis of every stage of the contradictory developments inside the Bolshevik Party, as well as the presentation of the relation of other political tendencies to the masses. A dialectical conception Trotsky deals with the same question on many occasions, and nowhere does he fall into the error invented by Krasso. Indeed, Krasso’s argument is that in the 1920s and 1930s Trotsky over- estimated the counter-revolutionary influence of the Comintern’s policies. Of course, if Trotsky had ever believed the original simple-minded notion attributed to him by Krasso—that the conscious- ness of the masses is the directly determining causal factor—he could never have established the counter-revolutionary role of the Stalinist bureauc- racy and the Comintern. As we have seen, Trotsky had a dialectical conception: the conscious expres- sion, in principles, strategy and tactics by the revolutionary party, of the historical needs and tasks of the proletariat was an indispensable part of the relationship of forces. Thus, in Strategy and Tactics in the Imperialist Epoch, Trotsky explains again the relation between these different aspects: What have we in Europe in the post-war period? In economy—irregular, spasmodic curtailments and expansions of production, which gravitate in general around the pre-war level despite great technical successes in certain branches of industry. In poli- tics—frenzied oscillations of the political situation towards the Left and towards the Right. It is quite apparent that the sharp turns in the political situa- tion in the course of one, two, or three years are not brought about by any changes in the basic economic factors, but by causes of a purely super- structural character, thereby indicating the extreme instability of the entire system; the foundation of which is corroded by irreconcilable contradictions. This is the sole source from which flows the full significance of revolutionary strategy in contra- distinction to tactics. Thence also flows the new significance of the party and the party leadership. [My emphasis, C.S.] (The Third International After Lenin, p. 82.) Trotsky adds, two pages later: But as soon as the objective prerequisites have matured, the key to the whole historical process passes into the hands of the subjective factor, that is, the party. (Ibid. p. 84). Unfortunately for Krasso, we have here those points on the decisive significance of the party driven home by Trotsky in the midst of his titanic 56 struggle with Stalinist revisionism, and not only in a literary-historical work. This same emphasis re- appeared at every stage of Trotsky’s fight for the Fourth International: indeed, the key question raised in the founding programme is that of the crisis of working-class leadership as the key to the crisis of humanity. A hoary old practice If Krasso wants to make the point that Trotsky did not have a clear understanding of the import- ance of the party before 1917, then he is of course free to do so. Trotsky not only several times him- self explained his own mistakes on that score, but he also hit out very hard against those who care- fully selected such differences as had existed be- tween him and Lenin in order to discredit his fight for Bolshevism after 1917. Krasso’s presentation is precisely of the latter type. At a time when Stalin- ism prepares its greatest betrayals, Krasso’s fire is turned against the Trotskyists. Krasso himself quotes Trotsky’s own verdict on his ‘non-Bolshev- ism’ before 1917—that it arose from ‘a certain social-revolutionary fatalism’—but it must be said that even in those days Trotsky was closer to a correct Marxist position than Krasso. Even in Results and Prospects, Trotsky says, “The function of the socialist parties (is) to revolutionize the con- sciousness of the working class,’ though Krasso accuses him of ‘forgetting’ the vanguard of the working class. The real point, missed by Krasso, and quite foreign, naturally enough, to the mind of his shadowy opponent, Mandel, is made by Trotsky when he discusses his own mistakes of 1912, when he tried to conciliate Bolshevism and Menshevism. In In Defence of Marxism, Trotsky said about this phase: I had not freed myself at that period, especially in the organizational sphere, from the traits of a petty- bourgeois revolutionist. This meant above all that Trotsky had not until 1917 grasped the constant and intimate connection between inner-party struggles and the class struggle. Inside the revolutionary party, a conscious struggle must be waged against every reflection into the party of the one-sidedness, hesitation, opportunism and adventurism of sections of the working class affected by other classes. From Lenin’s 1917 struggle against the ‘old Bolsheviks’ Trotsky learned this lesson in a way which he never once forgot, and on the basis of which he wrote Lessons of October, The New Course and In Defence of Marxism. Krasso simply cannot grasp the signifi- Fourth International, August 1968

[p021] cance of Trotsky’s discussion of the class role of the various tendencies in the Party. His ‘relative autonomy’ has come to mean abstract independ- ence from the living struggle, again a conception by no means foreign to the Stalinist bureaucracy in Eastern Europe. To be victorious thé revolutionary party must anticipate and fight out within itself the struggles to be resolved in the workers’ move- ment. The party, says Trotsky, ‘besides its other attributes, is the central ideological laboratory of the working class’. (Communism and Syndicalism’, in Marxism and the Trade Unions, p. 47.) Krasso, without ever presenting a detailed case, throws in many other allegations of Trotsky’s ‘mistakes’, supposedly flowing from this central ‘sociologism’, e.g. the Trotskyist line on the 1926 General Strike, the wrong estimation of a ‘revolu- tionary’ situation in 1945 in Western Europe, but in every case the same basic issues occur. On most of these questions Trotsky answered for himself (see especially Brian Pearce, Early History of the Com- munist Party of Great Britain, and Trotsky, The Stalin School of Falsification), and we will rest content with answering in detail the point made central by Krasso, together with the examples already analyzed, which are sufficient to expose his crude and facile method. Trotsky answers for himself The best way to complete this reply to Krasso, and also to the pathetic Mandel, unable to defend the Fourth International and Trotskyism today, is to quote at length Trotsky’s opinions on these basic questions just prior to his death: Imitating the liberals our sages tacitly accept the axiom that every class gets the leadership it de- serves. In reality leadership is not at all a mere ‘reflection’ of a class or the product of its own free creativeness. A leadership is shaped in the process of clashes between the different classes or the fric- tion between the different layers within a given class. Having once arisen, the leadership invariably rises above its class and thereby becomes pre- disposed to the pressure and influence of other classes. The proletariat may ‘tolerate’ for a long time a leadership that has already suffered a com- plete inner degeneration but has not as yet had the opportunity to express this degeneration amid great events. A great historic shock is necessary to reveal sharply the contradiction between the leadership and the class. The mightiest historical shocks are wars and revolutions. Precisely for this reason the working class is often caught unawares by war and revolution. But even in cases where the old leader- ship has revealed its internal corruption, the class cannot improvise immediately a new leadership, Trotsky’s Marxism under attack especially if it has not inherited from the previous pericd strong revolutionary cadres capable of uti- lizing the collapse of the old leading party. (The Class, the Party and the Leadership, pp. 5-6.) In this passage, Trotsky brings to bear, against the apologists for Stalinism after the defeats of the 1930s, all the fruits of his experience of the revo- lutionary movement and its leadership. He follows it with a crystal-clear statement of the role of the revolutionary party which is in every way the dia- metrical opposite both of Krasso’s caricature and of the politics of Mandel: What was the ‘active’ [i.e., the essential assets] of Bolshevism? A clear and thoroughly thought-out revolutionary conception at the beginning of the revolution was held only by Lenin. The Russian cadres of the party were scattered and to a con- siderable degree bewildered. But the party had authority among the advanced workers. Lenin had great authority with the party cadres. Lenin’s political conception corresponded to the actual development of the revolution and was reinforced by each new event. These elements of the ‘active’ worked wonders in a revolutionary situation, that is, in conditions of bitter class struggle. The party quickly aligned its policy to correspond that is with the actual course of the revolution. Thanks to this it met with firm support among tens of thousands of advanced workers. Within a few months, by basing itself upon the development of the revolution the party was able to convince the majority of ‘the workers of the correctness, of its slogans. This majority organized into Soviets was able in its turn to attract the soldiers and peasants. How can this dynamic, dialectic process be exhausted by a for- mula of the maturity or immaturity of the prole- tariat? A collosal factor in the maturity of the Russian proletariat in February or March 1917 was Lenin. He did not fall from the skies. He personi- fied the revolutionary tradition of the working class. For Lenin’s slogans to find their way to the masses there had to exist cadres, even though numerically small at the beginning; there had to exist the con- fidence of the cadres in the leadership, a confidence based on the entire experience of the past. To cancel these elements from one’s calculations is simply to ignore the living revolution, to substitute for it an abstraction, the ‘relationship of forces’, because the development of the revolution precisely consists of this, that the relationship of forces keeps incessantly and rapidly changing under the impact of the changes in the consciousness of the prole- tariat, the attraction of backward layers to the advanced, the growing assurance of the class in its own strength. The vital mainspring in this process is the party, just as the vital mainspring in the mechanism of the party is its leadership. The role and the responsibility of the leadership in a revolu- tionary epoch is colossal. This is “Trotsky’s Marxism’. 57

[p022] 58 _ Strategy and Tactics Imperialist Enoch 29'd : "SZ “pg MARXISM and the TRADE UNIONS “Trude unions in the - epoch of imperialist ‘decoyeCommunism 2 - and syndicalisme + NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS LTD. 186a CLAPHAM HIGH STREET, LONDON, S.W.4 WHAT IS THE SOVIET UNION AND WHERE IS IT GOING? TROTSKY BETRAYED Bld : PIeH 49A0D “SOE Jedeg y9eq : "SzL "pg 89h : PLeH 40A09 "SLZ Jaedeq 49eq : ‘so, “po Fourth International, August 1958

[p023] First Congress of the Third International, March 1919: Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kalinin with the Russian delegation.