Trotsky, 'Tribune' and the 'Socialist Leader'

Once Icaand lute scrapped. ain.

Ling 'ass. the danger of imperialist war. lust lust ised JUST as Karl Mars ras praised for his brilliance' by all manner of anti-revolutionaries, once he was long dead, with the intention, Lenin said, of turning him into a 'harmless ikon', so today 25 years after his assassination by a Stalinist agent, Leon Trotsky is 'adopted' by people whose politics are a denial of everything Trotsky fought for.

Trotsky was a Marxist from his early youth. He fought all his political life for a revolution of the working class, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the defeat of all reformism and class collaboration. way.

He learned from Lenin that firmness in dealing politically with revisionists in the socialmust be closed down. ist movement was not a sign of rigidity and dogmatism, but of revolutionary intransigence and the defence of principles as the very basis of the Marxist movement.

LACK OF THEORY

In Britain, it is precisely the lack of Marxist theory, indeed a hostility to theory, which has always characterised the Agency in these countries. socialist movement. As a result the British movement has always been characterised by a vague division between 'left' and 'right, based upon different versions of reformist adaptation to bourgeois society rather than on any theory or principle. Marxism has not been the basis of either 'right' or 'left'.

Today the Trotskyist movement, founded on the struggles of the international Marxist movement, is making big gains as the crisis of the British capitalist system deepens, and ALARIES the traditional 'left' groupings disintegrate along with the system of rule to which they are adapted.

Twenty-five years after

Trotsky's death, as the 'Easy on the mustard, Mac - IT'S INFLATIONARY!' highly successful Trotsky Memorial Meeting showed, his internationalist and revolutionary programme is vindicated more than ever before.

PROFOUND CONTEMPT Trotsky wrote a great deal about Britain and other West European countries, for his great work was the building of economic crisis. the Fourth International, the world revolutionary movement.

In these writings he showed a profound contempt for the reformists of the British labour movement, not only those of the official Fabian' brand, but especially the 'centrists', those who could not make their minds up between reformist and revolutionary politics.

Amongst those political newspapers which provide space for the latter kind of Remove enemies of working class politics today—though with all the effects of 30 years of sheer decay-are "Tribune' (the proNone of these necessary measures can be carried out duct of a variegated group of so long as the machinery of business, government and Labour 'lefts') and the 'Socialist -the state remains in the hands of tried and trusted Leader' (organ of the Indepenservants of the ruling class. The Labour government has not dent Labour Party). removed any of the permanent Civil Service, Diplomatic Service, Last week-end both of these and military chiefs who served the Tories. The boards of papers belatedly commented on nationalised industries, national and local, are infested with the the 25th anniversary of friends of big business and the establishment. Trotsky's assassination. Wisely The measures of workers' control, which we have put forward, they refrained completely from mean a purge of all these officials. Open enemies of the working mentioning any of Trotsky's class must be removed. Those who remain in technical and writings about their own poliadministrative posts to sabotage the priorities of housing and tical trends. living standards, must be removed and punished.

All the vested interests of capital and the banks are entrenched SQUEEZED LEMONS in the machinery of government. Their attempts to place obstacles After all F. A. Ridley could in the way of the solution of the crisis, by defending the profit hardly have ended his article as system, must be answered forthrightly by the vigilance and he did, with reference to strength of the workers' own organisations. "Trotsky's own revolutionary activities and ours!' and at the same time quoted Trotsky's Sack the Wilson leadership verdict on the Independent Labour Party's world associa12 which is preparing a severe defeat for the working The first task is to remove the present Labour leadership tions as the 'International of squeezed lemons'.

class. The Tories must not be allowed to return. Only the working class and a planned socialist economy can solve the Like Lenin, Trotsky crisis. The labour movement must act now to remove the Wilson always added to the title leadership and adopt socialist policies. 'Independent Labour Party' ADOPTED BY THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE the words independent of the working class.

Fenner Brockway, once of the Independent Labour Party, but now Lord Brockway and 'a regular' in "Tribune', surely remembers the kind of thing Trotsky wrote about him.

Ridley waxes enthusiastic about Trotsky as a modern 'Leonardo da Vinci', ', 'a genius of the universal type' and refers to his role in building the Red Army, leading the Russian Revolution and in writing history.

But Trotsky himself described his later years of struggle to build the Fourth International as his most important work. About this Ridley can only scathingly comment that the parties of the Fourth International today have not made any revolutions.

'INDEPENDENT'

And yet he deliberately refuses to see what is going on under his very nose. He says that Trotsky is 'less known to this generation than a thirdrate film star or a pop singer consistently out of tune'.

Ridley's party is so 'independent' of the labour movement that he ignores the victorious struggle of the Trotskyists in the British Labour youth movement resulting in the most politically conscious and active youth organisation, the Young Socialists, ever known in Britain.

Trotsky's programme has been vindicated. From the workers of the advanced capitalist countries, real forces for the revolutionary party are now being produced and trained in the traditions of Lenin and Trotsky.

SECTARIANS

Ridley and those like him, incurable sectarians with narrow propagandist methods, prefer Trotsky 'the genius' on their shelves to the political continuation of Trotsky's work.

For this reason, Ridley feels obliged to echo Deutscher and other commentators in suggesting that Trotsky's 'personal weaknesses' contributed to the victory of Stalin.

Marx long ago, in his controversy with Proudhon, demolished this method of 'on the one hand ... on the other hand', so typical of the vacillating middle class.

Personal characteristics inevitably affect the form of every political struggle. But it was Trotsky's 'personal' role to be able to unite and lead all the revolutionary elements against Stalinism and the betrayal of the revolution.

Trotsky had absorbed

into his very life's blood the need for implacable struggle to develop Marxist theory and organisation on an international basis.

ROLE OF INDIVIDUAL Only from this point of view

Page September , 196

SOCIALIST LABOUR LEAGUE Sunday, September 5, 1965 can his role as an individual be understood. Ridley, standing outside such a concept of the relation between the individual and history, falls back on bourgeois conceptions of 'personal weakness' or 'contributory factors in the political Machiavellian conflict with Stalin.' He apparently thinks big political-historical questions of the class struggle are settled on the model of meetings of the editorial board of the 'Socialist Leader'.

'Tribune' can afford less space and makes the editorial comment that our Trotsky Memorial Meeting should not really have been our prerogative. That this was left to the Socialist Labour League was, they say, 'a reflection not only on so-called Trotskyism, but on the decay of the whole Labour movement'.

According to "Tribune', 'such a man belongs to international socialism and not to one or other of the minority sects' How strange that 'international socialism' did not conduct any meetings! Or is it?

Does 'international socialism' mean the official movement of social-democracy and of Stalinism? If international socialism includes Russia, Eastern Europe and China, as well as the British Labour Party, then in what sense does Trotsky belong to it?

Surely, only in the sense that the movement consists of two opposites; its working-class followers on the one hand, and its leaders, agents of capitalism, on the other.

Trotsky's life work was to fight out this contradiction; to defeat the bureaucracy in the labour movement, to resolve what we call 'the crisis of the working-class leadership'.

We must explain this to "Tribune' because it is the answer to their plaintive cry that only the Trotskyists commemorate Trotsky's death.

The fight remains the same; the class-collaborationist leaders, using the likes of "Tribune' for cover, on one side, the workers and the Marxist revolutionaries on the other.

This is the key to the second part of 'Tribune's attack. They say:

MAJORITY 'Our quarrel with those who call themselves Trotskyists is that they have used this name to dignify a trivial faction fight within the Young Socialist movement.

The position was that the Labour Party had a Young Socialists organisation. Socialist policies, under the leadership of supporters of Trotskyism, were victorious at three successive conferences of this organisation.

For two years, these Trotskyists were elected to majority leadership of the National Committee of the Young Socialists. Their purpose was —and who will now say they were misguided?-to defeat the traitors to the working class who led the Labour Party, and build an alternative leadership.

"Tribune' will have some difficulty in explaining how such an aim was incompatible with the teaching and practice of Trotsky! His whole purpose, as we have explained, was precisely to build an alternative leadership to the Harold Wilsons of this world.

CHALLENGE

"Tribune' supporters and inspirers were presented with the challenge in 1960 when Gaitskell lost the Labour Party Conference battle on the H-bomb.

They retreated shamefully, and were routed. In 1964, Mr. Michael Foot—no sectarian our Mickael!-—wrote a very nice biography of Mr. Harold Wilson, to help that gentleman's election campaign.

Please, you pathetic lapdogs in the "Tribune' office, don't tell us we don't carry forward Trotsky's teachings. Your real complaint against us is our success at the Trotsky Memorial Meeting and in the Young Socialists.

Were we a tiny propaganda and publishing society you would have a few soft words for us as well as for the myth of Trotsky which you like to remember.

REVOLUTIONARY

The real Trotsky, fighter against bureaucracy, merciless critic of centrism and opportunism, ruthless defender of the workers' dictatorship and above all defender and active revolutionary representative of Marxist theory, frightens you so much that you must pretend he never existed. But he did, and his work lives today in the Trotskyist movement.