The Third International After Lenin, by Leon Trotsky

[p031] The Third International After Lenin, by Leon Trotsky (Second edition. New York, Pioneer Publishers. London, New Park Publications, cloth 28s., paper 18s.) THERE are many people in Britain today who say: ‘What we need is a Marxist analysis of what went wrong in Russia and the international communist movement.’ Some of them resigned from the Communist Party after Hungary. Some, out of loyalty to the October Revolution, have mistakenly remained inside the party despite the severe shaking they have received from the events of the last three years. They want a Marxist explanation—an explanation in terms of class struggle—of the Stalinist terror, of Hungary, of the failure of communist parties in the west to achieve power, of the reformist political revisionism of such programmes as ‘The British Road to Socialism’, and of such acts of treachery as that of the French Communist Party when it voted to send troops to quell the Algerian revolution. What some of these people appear not to know—and there are some who seem not to want to know—is that this very Marxist analysis was begun, brilliantly and incisively, not in 1956 but thirty years ago, by Lenin’s comrade in arms Trotsky. The Stalinist bureaucratic machine—the very social phenomenon whose explanation is being sought—remains to this day the means whereby members of the Communist Party are prevented from studying and developing that analysis. ‘Dangerous’ books. are still officially banned. But it is a ban that is now often ‘more honoured in the. breach than the observance’. Once perhaps there was some excuse for refusing to believe that Trotsky’s theoretical works have some significance. Today there is none. Without more fuss or pleading let it be said plainly, bluntly: those people who seriously want to be Marxists and com- munists in Britain today will find themselves increasingly adrift, playthings alternately of Left sectarianism and Right opportunism, defenders of the indefensible, cogs in a party machine, pawns in Khrushchev’s secret diplomacy, and abso- lutely isolated from the Labour movement, unless they make the effort, consciously and deliberately, to study the writings of Leon Trotsky. Vv ‘The Third International After Lenin’ is made up of two major polemical works written by Trotsky when he was in exile in Alma Ata in 1928. They are ‘The Draft Programme of the Communist International’ and ‘What Now?’. The former has three main sections. First, ‘The Programme of International Revolution or a Programme of Socialism in One Country?’; secondly, ‘Strategy and Tactics in the Imperialist Epoch’; and thirdly, ‘Summary and Perspectives of the Chinese Revolution’. In 1924 Trotsky had been unanimously re-elected to the executive committee of the Communist International. In 1927 Stalin, with the aid of the police régime he had established inside the party, had manoeuvred the expulsion of Trotsky from, the CPSU and had exiled him to Alma Ata. Trotsky had the right to appeal against his expulsion to the forthcoming Sixth World Congress of the Third International. Accompanying his appeal, Trotsky submitted the two docu- ments forming this book. James P. Cannon has described in detail in his ‘History Book Reviews of American Trotskyism’ (1944) the treatment these documents received at the hands of the ‘machine’ which stage-managed the Sixth Congress. By an administrative accident Cannon got hold of a copy.. Later he smuggled it out to America and published it there. But the vast majority of the Congress delegates never saw the documents or even heard of them. They were referred to a ‘select? committee, which merely ‘noted’ them without debate. In this way, temporarily at least, the purpose of the documents, which was to stimulate a discussion in the Communist International on the political and social origins of Stalinism, was frustrzted. The Sixth Congress, and the suppression of the legal existence of the Left Opposition inside the International, were followed by the reign of terror against the Russian people and political workers, the horrors of which were outlined—and then only faintly—in the famous Khrushchev report to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. The internal crisis of the Stalinist régime which Trotsky. had forecast in 1928 became obvious to one and all in 1956. The events of the last three years have been, often in detail, brilliant confirmations of Trotsky’s diagnosis. , Vv This book is one of the most important basic works of Trotsky’s gigantic contribution to modern Marxism. It takes its place alongside ‘The History of the Russian. Revolution’, ‘In Defence of Marxism’, “The Revolution Betrayed’, ‘Literature and Revolution’, ‘Their Morals and Ours’, ‘The New Course’ and ‘Where is Britain Going?’ as a classic which remains a guide to the future. _ JOHN DANIELS Workers and Liberals