12.09.2024

Matters past and present

Historical and theoretical issues are important, but they should not be turned into obstacles. Steve Bloom critically defends Fourth International orthodoxy and, despite that, calls for revolutionary unity in the concluding part of his response to Mike Macnair

When assessing developments during the 1920s and 30s, we need to remember that those who founded both the Comintern and the Trotskyist movement believed/understood that they were living through revolutionary times.¹

Mike himself notes, though indirectly, in his book, Revolutionary strategy, that the Trotskyist movement was founded on a rejection of his primary thesis - that the revolutionary potential of 1917 was exhausted by 1921, the Russian Revolution decisively defeated and inexorably on the road to capitalist restoration:

Now, if it were true - as Trotsky claimed - that the USSR was a kind of workers’ organisation, a “trade union that had seized power”, and a strategic gain for the working class in spite of the bad leadership of the Stalinists, then defencism would be broadly justified and it would be equally justified to call its opponents scabs. Soviet-defencism would also clearly be a task of the working class in every country, whether imperialist or colonial and whether at war with the USSR or not”. (p74)

Trotsky’s appreciation was, simply, that because the times remained revolutionary a revival of the USSR as a revolutionary force could be achieved - by political revolution in the USSR backed by a broader European social revolution. Mike acknowledges that in this context the specific programme Trotsky proposed makes sense.

Readers should be able to understand, therefore, from all that has been said above why I maintain a different balance sheet on Trotskyist history. I agree with Trotsky’s assessment of the historical period he was living through post-1917. I do believe that Mike is correct to criticise the Trotskyist movement for its embrace of organisational Cominternism - that is, the over-centralisation of authority in leadership bodies. This ‘military chain of command’ style was not appropriate, even in revolutionary times. And Mike is still more correct to criticise the post-World War II survivals of Trotskyism for the same weakness. But his overall critique of Trotskyism misses the mark.

By way of illustration let us consider one specific critique:

Trotskyists imagine that partial, trade union, etc struggles can be led into a generalised challenge to the capitalist state, and in the course of that challenge the Trotskyists could guide the movement to the seizure of power in the form of ‘All power to the soviets’ - in spite of their marginal numbers before the crisis breaks out. (p147)

But that is not at all what the Trotskyists imagine. Trotskyists imagine that, as consciousness changes due to experience - through trade union struggles, etc - the present “marginal number” of Trotskyists can grow into a far larger number well before “the crisis breaks out”.

This perspective can, of course, be reasonably critiqued in its own right. Many post-war Trotskyists have carried it to the point of utter absurdity, declaring that groups of a few dozen can self-proclaim as the ‘vanguard’. It remains essential, however, if we are going to critique Trotskyism at any stage of its history, that we first state the Trotskyist viewpoint correctly. This is something Mike seems to have a lot of trouble with - in large part because he fails to place the development of a Trotskyist ideology in its proper historical context: the revolutionary nature of the decades during which Trotskyism originally emerged as a distinct political current.

Comintern

Mike writes:

The peculiarity of this [call for a Fourth International] is the fact that Trotsky denounced the Third International on the basis of events in a single country (Germany) … Trotsky seems to have imagined that the Comintern would be defined forever by the disaster in Germany, as the Second International was defined forever by August 1914.

But 1933 was not comparable to August 1914. By 1935 the Comintern had abandoned the sectarian ‘third period’ politics that led to the disaster of 1933 and turned to the people’s front policy. In spite of a brief return to the ‘third period’ during the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939-41, the people’s front was to be the main strategic line of ‘official communism’ permanently (and still is today). The ‘third period’ and its role in the disaster in Germany has become a matter of interest to historians and Trotskyists.

The 1933 call for a Fourth International was therefore plainly premature. (pp139-40)

And yet the call for the Fourth International was not at all a response solely to events in Germany. Trotsky had been developing a critique of the Third International for many years. His seminal ‘The draft programme of the Communist International - a criticism of fundamentals’ was first presented in 1928 (later published as a book under the title The Third International after Lenin).

Germany in 1933 was merely the trigger - the event which caused Trotsky to conclude that the Comintern had become hopelessly compromised by Stalinist ideology with no hope that this could be corrected through further debate and experience. The Comintern refused to draw a self-critical balance sheet regarding the responsibility of its own ‘third period’ ultra-leftism after Hitler took power without active resistance. If this disaster could not provoke a rethinking of the Comintern’s trajectory, then nothing would. The book was closed on the Third International and a Fourth was needed.

The subsequent turn to the “peoples’ front” is not a negation of this conclusion for two reasons:

(1) It was not the ‘third period’ itself that was the source of Trotsky’s judgment about the Comintern. It was the inability to draw a self-critical balance sheet after the German disaster.

(2) The ‘popular front’ was not founded on a reconsideration of the ‘third period’. It was simply another pragmatic turn by the Stalinist bureaucracy attempting to maintain itself in power.

The ‘popular front’ was not, therefore, the opposite of the ‘third period’ - merely the flipside of the same coin.

It is also essential to remember that in 1938 Trotsky believed the coming war would have the same effect as World War I, triggering revolutionary events in the combatant nations (including in the USSR - the only alternative being the military defeat of the USSR.) That prognosis turned out to be mistaken. But, if we want to assess the decision to found the FI in 1938, we do have to keep in mind that it was Trotsky’s prognosis, central to the choice to found the FI at that moment.

Finally on this subject, let is assess one more comment in Mike’s book, this time about the post-war Fourth International:

If you asked them what their international was for, the only answer they could give was to be a “centre where the international experiences of the mass movement and of the revolution are progressively assimilated”. At the end of the day this is to say no more than the Fourth International must exist because it must. Their international had become the Mandelites’ sectarian shibboleth. (p145)

Personally, had Mike asked me this question after I became a member of the FI in 1968, I would have said that the reason for continuing the Fourth International was to preserve and progressively help to develop a revolutionary Marxist theory and programme (most importantly including the question of class independence) which was otherwise in danger of being lost as a result of the legacy of Stalinism - the ‘popular front’ legacy in particular.

Revolution

Mike writes:

The need for an international is posed because the working class cannot take power in a single country and wait for the proletariat of other countries to come to its aid. This is the fundamental lesson of the degeneration and collapse of Comintern and the eventual fall of the ‘socialist countries’. It was a lesson that was not learned by the Trotskyists. The strategic task that this lesson poses for an international is an internationally united struggle of the working class for political power. (p145)

And then:

But exactly the same reasons mean that it is impossible to have political power of the working class or the democratic republic - for more than a few months - in a single country. The struggle for workers’ power is therefore a struggle for a global democratic republic and immediately for continental democratic republics. There is an important implication of this point: it is strategically necessary - as far as possible - to fight for a majority for working class politics on the international scale before attempting to take the power in any single country: taking the power in any single country, unless the workers’ party is on the verge of at least a continental majority, is likely to lead to disaster. (p156)

The length of time a working class in a particular country might hold onto political power - as it not only waits for, but helps to promote the development of, working class power in other nations - is not some predetermined “few months”. It depends on a complex of factors and can extend for a considerably longer period, as we have already seen from our examination of the Russian experience. And what can Mike say about the Cuban revolution, where a political form that I would characterise as the dictatorship of the proletariat (I hope Mike agrees) survived for decades after 1959, waiting for the revolution elsewhere in Latin America to come to its aid?

Waiting for the conditions to exist for a continent-wide revolution before taking power in a single country is as impractical as waiting for world revolution. We do not have an on-off switch that controls the timing of revolutionary processes. If we fail to take advantage of the social crisis in country A that creates the potential for revolution, because we insist on waiting for a simultaneous opportunity in countries B, C and D, by the time the possibility is posed in country B the opportunity in country A will have disappeared.

We have no choice, therefore, except to proceed with the “chain of revolutions” approach. Its failure in Europe during the 1920s and 30s cannot properly cause us to conclude that such a development is impossible. Let’s now examine the primary reason why that’s true.

There is a methodological error in Mike’s dismissal of the ‘chain of revolutions’ approach. His “few months” represents a generalisation based on his understanding that the revolutionary potential of 1917 was exhausted by 1921. This is wrong, as noted above, because his assessment of the years post-1921 is wrong. It is also wrong, however, because, even if Mike’s expiration date of 1921 were correct in relation to the Russian experience, a method which generalises a time frame of “a few months” based solely on one historical experience is completely unscientific. Human beings cannot properly generalise from a single data point. Scientific generalisations can only be developed based on repeated tests that result in the same or similar outcomes. No matter how many times Mike asserts that the history post-1917 proves his assessment of this or that phenomenon, any such attempt at proof is fatally compromised by this basic principle of scientific investigation.

Please consider: The length of time the Russian working class could hold onto power in isolation was conditioned primarily by the economic backwardness of Russia in relation to other imperialist nations. This is a condition unique to this one revolutionary experience; it will never be duplicated again. We will, therefore, under no circumstances be building precisely the same bridge for a second time, with precisely the same factors limiting this aspect of the process.

In my last article I raised a question about this paragraph:

There is no way forward from capitalism other than the self-emancipation of the working class. The ideas of a peasant-led revolution, of a long-term strategic alliance of the proletariat and peasantry as equals, of ‘advanced social democracy’ or of a ‘broad democratic alliance’ have all been proved false. They have been proved false by the fate of the so-called ‘socialist countries’ and by the fact that the fall of the USSR, combined with the decay of the US-led world economic order, has led to increasing attacks on the concessions that capital made to social democratic and left nationalist governments elsewhere in order to ‘contain communism’. The idea of the ‘movement of movements’ has proved, with extraordinary rapidity, to lead nowhere. (p151)

Mike and I agree regarding the class character of any revolutionary struggle that is actually going to lead to the emancipation of the peasantry, oppressed nationalities, women, etc. I note, however, that this correct overall understanding has generated a demonstrable historical tendency within the revolutionary workers’ movement: to actively subordinate struggles by other oppressed social layers to working class revolution, expecting such struggles to wait until the working class is victorious, or limit demands to those which are deemed compatible with a working class agenda. This is a tendency we must actively repudiate in my judgment. The passage quoted above seems dangerously one-sided from that point of view.

Mike expresses the weakness directly when he writes:

In relation to the national question, I have argued that the positive goal of the workers’ party should be the international - continental and eventually global - democratic republic. The implication of this approach is that slogans about national ‘self determination’ have a secondary tactical character. (p157)

The Trotskyist movement, and the Leninist movement before it, have always had a different appreciation: that our support to self-determination by an oppressed/colonised nation is unconditional, and of a principled nature. Mike, however, characterises this as the “muddle of 1937-40”:

The muddle of 1937-40 has become a part of Trotskyist orthodoxy. That is, Trotskyists in the imperialist countries must be ‘defeatist’ in colonial wars in the peculiar sense of being ‘defencist’ in relation to the colonial country or movement. Trotskyists in the colonial countries must be ‘defencist’ in the same sense. To do otherwise is said to be to be ‘pro-imperialist’. (p76)

Personally I continue to support the “muddle”. The failure of socialists in imperialist nations to give unconditional support to the struggles of oppressed nations for their own liberation as a matter of principle (that is, support for their independence from the colonial power that is not conditioned by who is in the leadership of the struggle or its social programme) is one of the biggest obstacles to a genuine internationalism, today as in the past. The working class of the imperial centres must demonstrate in practice and not just in words that it can be a reliable ally of the oppressed colonial masses. This is a prerequisite to any call for them to join us in a common international struggle.

Method

Let us consider three points, without going into their substance, in order to highlight additional methodological difficulties that run consistently through Mike’s analysis:

(a) ‘For a workers’ government’: We have talked above about Mike’s tendency to counterpose elements that ought to be combined dialectically instead. We return to this question in order to illustrate that we are dealing with a generalised flaw in his method, not just an isolated problem here or there.

Mike objects to the slogan, ‘For a workers’ government’. Since an appreciation of this shares much with our previous conversation about ‘All power to the soviets’, we will not go into the substance of the issue again. I would say, in fact, that the two slogans represent precisely the same idea under different social conditions. Where actual soviets already exist and we can identify the specific form a new government might take, the slogan is ‘All power to the soviets’. In more normal times, when the masses have not yet created a potential new governmental form, the same social content is captured by the more generic call for a ‘workers’ government’.

Mike writes:

The present task of communists/socialists is therefore not to fight for an alternative government. It is to fight to build an alternative opposition: one which commits itself unambiguously to self-emancipation of the working class through extreme democracy, as opposed to all the loyalist parties. (p121)

And yet the abstract (propaganda) slogan of a ‘workers’ government’ is not suggesting an immediate campaign/“present task”. It is merely a slogan, and not, therefore, counterposed to building “an alternative opposition”. It is, instead, part of that process. If a workers’ government were a “present task”, then it would be formulated as the call for ‘All power to the soviets’. The objective we have in raising the propaganda slogan, when it is not an immediate task, is to help educate masses of people that the problems inherent in the present capitalist government flow from its class nature, thus helping to recruit them to our campaign for an alternative opposition, based on an alternative class point of view.

(b) Labour aristocracy: Mike writes:

The theory of the imperialist labour aristocracy is false. In the first place, workers’ level of class consciousness does not map inversely onto their relative material advantages. To take a single British example out of many possible ones, in the late 19th century skilled miners and railway workers were on the right wing of the movement; by the early 20th they were on its left. The theory of the imperialist labour aristocracy is also completely impotent to explain reformism and the labour bureaucracy in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, which has been an all too obvious problem since the 1930s. (p80)

And then: “Working class support for one’s own capitalist nation-state is produced by dynamics inherent in the capitalist nation-state system and world market, and there is no grouping within the working class which is presumptively free of it.” (p81)

I considered the substance of this question some years ago in the pages of Against the Current. Regarding that substance I therefore refer readers to my reply to Charlie Post, who raised an argument similar to Mike’s.² But let us briefly consider the question of method.

I will insist that, while the theory of the labor aristocracy does not explain everything, and that it is only a partial explanation for those things it does explain, this is hardly proof that the theory is false. It just lets us know that it is not the only truth.

Consider the theory that hurricanes result in power outages. It would be absurd to declare this false just because not everyone’s power is cut off after a hurricane, or because in many cases of power failure there is no hurricane involved at all. The theory that hurricanes result in power outages is true even though all the rest is also true. We simply have to understand that the truth we are discussing has more than one layer.

Mike writes: “The logic of the idea that a split would purge the workers’ movement of opportunism was expressed in the sectarianism of the ‘third period’.” (p102)

This treats the ‘theory’ projected by the Comintern after its Stalinisation as if this were some legitimate expression/continuation of the theory of Lenin, rather than a distortion of Lenin’s theory developed to serve the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy. Stalinist ‘theory’ did borrow snippets of quotations in order to advance a bureaucratic agenda. But that does not make it a continuation of the theory that was being quoted.

The sectarianism of the third period was a direct product of Stalinism and of Stalinism’s distortion of both Marxism and Leninism. It had nothing whatsoever in common with Lenin’s pursuit of the 1914 split.

The same difficulty is expressed in the following:

… it was quite clear to the Russian leadership that the proletariat could not hope to hold power in Russia for long - how long was uncertain - unless the western workers’ movement came to their aid. October 1917 was thus a gamble on the German revolution. By 1919, with German social democracy in the saddle, this gamble had failed; it was only gradually that the possibility of ‘hanging on and waiting for the Germans’ for a year or two was transmuted into the idea of a prolonged period of isolation of the Soviet regime, and from there in turn into ‘socialism in one country’. (p134)

But the theory of ‘socialism in one country’ does not belong on the same continuum as the other ideas cited. It is the opposite of these, because it was a conscious rejection of the understanding that the Russian revolution required assistance from the west at all, positing instead that the USSR in isolation could actually create ‘socialism’. This is a direct product of ‘theory’ in the hands of the Stalinist bureaucracy after it had broken completely with Leninism.

Definitions

(a) ‘Minimum programme’: Mike uses the term in a way that can generate confusion unless we define things clearly. There are a couple of formulations in his book that suggest a useful understanding:

On p119 he refers to “a core political minimum platform for the participation of communists in a government”. On the next page he says:

Without commitment to such a minimum platform, communists should not accept governmental responsibility as a minority. Contrary to Trotsky’s argument on Saxony, whether the conditions are ‘revolutionary’ or not makes no difference to this choice. To accept governmental responsibility as a minority under conditions of revolutionary crisis is, if anything, worse than doing so in ‘peaceful times’: a crisis demands urgent solutions, and communists can only offer these solutions from opposition.

Mike does make a mistake here, because in revolutionary times there is the possibility of establishing united-front governments that can become transitional to the dictatorship of the proletariat. But it would require a fairly long exposition if we wanted to explore this question, and the present article is already long. So let us focus simply on the idea of a “minimum programme for participation in a government”. Used in this way, the idea of a “minimum programme” seems like a clear and useful concept. In the history of the revolutionary movement, however, the same term was first used in a different sense - most clearly by the Bolshevik Party before 1917 - to mean a programme that would limit itself to bourgeois-democratic demands, since that was the expected class character of the coming Russian revolution.

As I was working on the present article, it occurred to me that if I am understanding Mike correctly we might also formulate this as ‘the minimum programme for a proletarian dictatorship’. I sent him a note asking whether he agrees that the two formulations are equivalent (‘minimum programme for participating in a government’ and ‘minimum programme for the dictatorship of the proletariat’). He wrote back that, yes, they both express essentially the same social content. This underlines the importance of not confusing any call we might raise for a ‘minimum programme’ with the pre-1917 use by the Bolsheviks of the same term.

(b) “Kautskyism”: Mike writes: “‘Kautskyism’ means the struggle for an independent workers’ party, intimately linked to independent workers’ media, trade unions, cooperatives and so on, and for - at least symbolic - internationalism.” (p149) Personally I can embrace ‘Kautskyism’ in this form. I only object when this form is counterposed to the idea of insurrection based on a mass strike or other social crisis.

Many have, however, used ‘Kautskyism’ to describe the capitulation to national defencism in World War I. It is imperative, therefore, that, if we want to use the term to mean something different, we offer our definition clearly and put it up front - also probably note the contrasting definition that we reject.

Blind alleys?

Mike refers only in passing to ‘permanent revolution’, but his formulation contains a key error that I think is important for us to talk about:

I have said nothing about the ‘permanent revolution’ versus ‘stages theory’. Again, a principal lesson of the 20th century is that both approaches are blind alleys. In addition, both are strategic approaches to pre-capitalist states and countries under global capitalism. There are a few of these left, but not enough to justify treating the issues as fundamental to strategy. (pp156-57)

And yet ‘permanent revolution’ was not, actually, about revolutionary struggles in pre-capitalist states. It was initially formulated to deal with the revolutionary struggle in Russia, which was a less-developed imperialist nation ruled by a feudal autocracy, not “pre-capitalist”. Later Trotsky theorised permanent revolution further, applying the concept to other countries where the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution remained a central task. It did, therefore, also apply to pre-capitalist states. But it was not specifically about them. ‘Stages theory’ was a contrasting approach to precisely the same set of social conditions.

Permanent revolution asserted that in the 20th century, bourgeois-democratic revolutionary tasks could not be properly resolved without simultaneously engaging the socialist revolution. In my view this remains a key element of revolutionary strategy today, one which clearly revealed its importance as recently as the fall of apartheid in South Africa in 1992.

The belief that the anti-apartheid struggle could be waged strictly around the question of ‘democracy’ (in the bourgeois sense of that term), is precisely what has led the South African masses into their present impasse. The same dilemma arises every time there is a struggle to liberate a nation from imperial domination. A choice inevitably faces these struggles - the same choice that is answered in contrasting ways by permanent revolution and stages theory: Should the strategy be to promote a native capitalism, in the expectation that this will carve out more favourable relationships with the imperial powers? Or should the struggle pursue a proletarian revolutionary agenda, solving problems related to ‘democracy’ and national independence in the process?

Two other areas where I disagree with Mike, but that he refers to only in passing in Revolutionary strategy, are the transitional method (‘transitional programme’) and our attitude toward sectoral organising (‘identity politics’). We will have to deal with these some other time, since this particular book does not give us easy-to-cite quotations.

In closing let me return to the theme I stressed at the outset, because in the length of this exposition it might have been forgotten:

All these differences about historical and theoretical matters, interesting and important as they may be, should not constitute an obstacle to the formation of a common revolutionary political current based on the convergence Mike and I should, in my judgment, be able to develop regarding questions of revolutionary strategy.

I hope readers walk away after reading all I have said above with that thought foremost in their minds.

Steve Bloom’s first article - ‘Historical and methodological differences’ Weekly Worker August 29: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1504/historical-and-methodological-differences.↩︎
stevebloompoetry.net/sb internet archive/Political Essays/ATC Labor Aristocracy.pdf.↩︎