01.08.1996

A ‘proletarian party’?

Party notes

Many comrades will have Trotsky’s In defence of Marxism on their shelves. In years past, we have organised study classes on Trotskyism and the question of the USSR that this seminal text included. Trotsky’s work has important flaws, and many in the Party today would probably be far more critical of its conclusions than in the past. However, characteristically of the man, even in error his writings contain many flashes of brilliant insight and analysis.

In defence of Marxism charts a faction fight inside the American Socialist Workers Party immediately after the Stalin-Hitler pact and the outbreak of World War II. An oppositional grouping in this organisation - the largest in the Fourth International - called into question the Trotskyist analysis of the Soviet Union as a degenerate workers’ state and thus the obligation of revolutionaries to defend it. The oppositionalists were a fairly disparate bunch, but included central leaders of the SWP such as James Burnham, Max Shachtman and Martin Abern. Their rebellion embroiled the organisation in a bitter seven-month faction fight and culminated in a deep split.

Trotsky’s work on this internecine factional joust has a companion volume: The struggle for a proletarian party by James P Cannon, national secretary of the SWP. I have recently read this book and recommend it to all comrades. According to the introduction in my edition (by George Novack, a leading SWPer in the US), “Trotsky’s work centres on the major disputed questions of Marxist theory and political principle, while Cannon concentrates on Leninist organisational principles” (The struggle for a proletarian party New York 1972).

This is simply nonsense. Cannon’s book is in fact motivated from the first page to the last by a sect-like understanding of the Party question, by a firm opposition to the Leninist principles of democratic centralism. Whatever his merits as a leader, Cannon simply did not understand how a Leninist party resolves its differences. Today’s Trotskyist groups take their model of organisation from the archetype revealed in this and other disputes in the Fourth International - an abortion of an organisation, which was Trotsky’s most abject failure.

I certainly recommend that the Party as a whole makes a special study of this question. In our practical work in the movement, we are constantly confronted by the Trotskyist view of ‘democratic centralism’ (most recently in the Workers Power education school, where leading WP cadre condemned the Weekly Worker for “confusing” advanced workers). We must include such a discussion in the syllabus of appropriate Party educationals and perhaps onto a new draft of the induction course for new contacts that I know is now under discussion.

I will finish with two quotes which highlight the difference between the Trotskyist approach and that of Leninism. There are plenty more which could be underlined. Buy your own copy of Cannon and see what I mean.

First, Cannon here responds to the opposition’s demand for open discussion in the party press:

“In this conception of organisation, as in their theoretical and political positions, the leaders of the minority demonstrate their antagonism to the principles and traditions of Bolshevism. The demagogic demand for ‘freedom of the press’ represents a petty bourgeois, anarchist revolt against revolutionary centralism” (Ibid p125).

Lenin, on the other hand, believes that

“We desire our publications to become organs for the discussion of all questions by all Russian social democrats of the most diverse shades of opinion. We do not reject polemics between comrades, but, on the contrary, are prepared to give them considerable space in our columns. Open polemics, conducted in full view of all Russian social democrats and class conscious workers, are necessary and desirable ...” (Lenin, ‘Draft of a declaration of the editorial board of Iskra and Zarya’ Collected Works Vol 4, p320).

Trotskyists will respond that these were specific circumstances; that the thrust of Lenin’s later work was against this approach to inner-party democracy; even - in their more sophisticated objections - that such statements represented Lenin’s continued adherence to “those elements of classic social democracy retained by the pre-1914 Bolsheviks” (Lenin and the vanguard party Spartacist, p1).

On the contrary, such an approach embodies the principle of Partyism, against the methodology of the sect world that Trotskyism has historically condemned itself to.

Mark Fischer
national organiser