WeeklyWorker

30.04.2026
Claudia Webbe: historical nonsense

New proscriptions for old

Claudia Webbe, Tristan Colum and Duncan Chapel have all declared war on the curse of faction and division. In each case it amounts to using dead Marxists to silence living Marxists. Mike Macnair defends political democracy and the right to organise

On April 16 the Morning Star carried former MP Claudia Webbe’s defence of Your Party’s Corbynista leadership’s regime of bans and proscriptions of far-left groups1 - like the Labour Party’s 1920s banning of the Communist Party, which has continued down to the present day in various forms.2

Webbe grounds the argument - broadly - on competing loyalties preventing democracy. Not quite coincidentally, on April 8 Tristan Colum, a leftist in the German Die Linke, wrote, on the Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century website, a critique of the (in his view) excessive pluralism of Die Linke and of the allegedly excessive attention of the party’s leftists to debating with other party members.3 On April 10 Duncan Chapel, of the ‘Fourth International in Scotland’ and the Red Mole Substack site, published a polemic specifically against the CPGB (and me individually) and our advocacy of ‘permanent factionalism’.4

I said above that this was “not quite coincidentally”. The reason is that all these texts are defences of the longstanding view of the British Labour left, ‘official communists’ and far left that factions in parties and political groups should either be altogether banned or subject to control by the full-time apparatus to distinguish between ‘constructive’ and ‘disruptive’ factions. Until recently, this view has been so commonplace as not to need actual defence. The CPGB’s opposition to it has had, within the UK, absolutely marginal impact, and the standard response to the Weekly Worker has been to characterise our insistence on open reporting of political differences within parties and political groups as ‘gossip’.5

Recently, however, outside the UK the existence of permanent public factions in political organisations has proved not to be a disaster. The Democratic Socialists of America now has more than 100,000 members and significant political impact.6 Die Linke, after a period of decline, has revived in 2024-26, with 8.8% of the vote in the February 2025 federal elections and 123,000 members in December 2025.7 Both groups have permanent open factions and caucuses. It is only a minor-key addition to this point that my own small 2008 book, Revolutionary strategy, which argues inter alia for full freedom of factions and which is specifically targeted in Chapel’s polemic, has reached a readership well beyond people willing to join CPGB or identify politically with us.

The model of tight apparatus control remains available as a model of success - in Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s proprietary brand, La France Insoumise, having over 500,000 ‘members’ in France (actually, supporters without rights) and 10.5% of the votes in the 2024 legislative elections, and the similar Podemos in Spain having upwards of 500,000 “members” and 25,000 “activists” and around 11% in opinion polls (in recent elections they have stood in coalition with other left parties).8 This was the model of Momentum during the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party and it is pretty clearly the model the Corbynista leaders aspire to for Your Party.

Nonetheless, the growth in support for what may roughly be called a model of open debate has meant that it is necessary to actually defend anti-factionalism. This is still not true for the Socialist Workers Party, which, while attempting to overcome some of the outcomes of its managerialist model of organisation, does not feel the need even to argue for either the ban on ‘permanent factions’ and its implications, or the central apparatus appointment of local full-timers.9

The three authors mentioned above offer three different brands of anti-factionalism. Claudia Webbe reproduces standard cold war ‘anti-Leninism’ as a form of advocacy of the dictatorship of the apparatus and the elected representatives over the membership, in the name of the ‘silent majority’. Googling produces nothing about Tristan Colum other than this article and promos of it; from the content, his arguments are broadly Cliffite (‘Face outwards towards the masses’).

Duncan Chapel defends Mandelism, which ostensibly permits factions (usually called “tendencies”), but subject to the continued control of the apparatus. He is involved in a contradiction here, since he opposes the Podemos model.10 But the practical activity of the Mandelites’ anti-factionalism and “non-sectarianism” in the last 60 years has been to serve as left flank-guards for ‘official left’ bureaucrats of one sort or another - right down to the moment of catastrophe, when the Mandelites either serve no useful purpose for the ‘official lefts’ and are dumped, or are forced to break by the ‘official lefts’ moving too far to the right for even the Mandelites to stomach.

This is going to be a series of articles. In this one I will run through the immediate arguments of Webbe, Colum and Chapel for anti-factionalism. The next article will go absolutely down to basics - about why we need socialism and why socialism needs political democracy, including freedom of association in factions and parties, not only in the future workers’ state, but also in the workers’ movement under capitalism.

Webbe

Claudia Webbe is part of the Islington Labour left core of the Corbynistas - coming out of the charity/NGO milieu, acting as ‘advisor’ to Ken Livingstone as mayor of London, becoming an Islington Labour councillor in 2010 and being elected to Labour’s NEC in 2016. She was ‘parachuted in’ for the 2019 general election, with Momentum backing, to the Leicester East constituency previously held by Keith Vaz, and was elected (though with a substantially reduced vote share, down 16%).

She rapidly became a victim of ‘lawfare’, with a dispute between her and her partner’s ‘other woman’ being turned into a harassment prosecution (the Crown Prosecution Service was eventually forced to apologise for publicising a false allegation that she had threatened the other woman with acid-throwing) and on the basis of this lawfare operation was suspended and then thrown out of the Labour Party. She stood as an independent in 2024, winning 11.8% of the vote; Keith Vaz also stood, taking 7.9%, and a collapse of the Labour vote share, down 29.3% towards independents and the Lib Dems (up 8%) let the Tories take the seat in spite of their own vote declining.

The core of Webbe’s Morning Star article is, as I have already said, a standard cold war argument, which deploys Luxemburg and Gramsci for ‘Leninism leads to Stalinism’. These arguments already functioned, when Anglo-American security services started promoting them in the 1950s, as ideological support for the Atlanticist right wing of the workers’ movement.

Webbe begins with Luxemburg’s 1904 critique of Lenin’s ‘substitutionism’ in What is to be done? and in his line at the 1903 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Marxists Internet Archive, which has the Luxemburg text, helpfully gives the publishing history.11 It appeared in 1904 in the Menshevik Iskra and in Die Neue Zeit; it was translated into English in 1934 and 35 (the 1935 publication by the Glasgow Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation); and the 1934 translation was then reprinted by the University of Michigan Press in 1961, together with Luxemburg’s critical comments from jail on the policy of the new Soviet government, as The Russian revolution and Leninism or Marxism?), with an introduction by ex-communist Bertram D Wolfe. Wolfe’s introduction, whose line is followed by Webbe, reflects his employment by the state department in the construction of Voice of America radio in the 1950s and thereafter by the Hoover Institution.

Wolfe wrote that “Luxemburg was offended in her whole being by Lenin’s worship of centralism …” (p14). Webbe ‘strengthens’ this to “Luxemburg spent much of her political life engaged in precisely this debate with Lenin” - which makes it nonsense. By the end of 1905 the Menshevik opponents of Lenin had adopted ‘democratic centralism’, which was actually just the organisational model of the German Social Democratic Party, and the debate which Luxemburg’s 1904 article was about. Luxemburg herself went on to operate an ultra-centralist regime in the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, of which she was one of the central leaders.12

Equally arbitrary is Webbe’s name-check of Claudia Jones (1915-64) for the proposition that “a socialist movement could not succeed through the imposition of a pre-formed programme on communities - even communities experiencing acute exploitation and oppression. It had to meet people where they were, develop their political voice from within their own experience and build power that was genuinely theirs”. Jones was a member of the YCL USA from 1936 and then the CPUSA till her deportation in 1955, and of the ‘official’ CPGB from 1955 till her death. These were ‘democratic-centralist’, meaning bureaucratic centralist organisations, and in both cases pursued party programmes - in Britain, the British road to socialism (1951).

Webbe is slippery in talking about “the imposition of a pre-formed programme” - since no-one is proposing to impose a programme: merely that Your Party members should have the right to decide what Your Party’s programme - that is, its political platform - should be; and hence, the right to speak, to organise and to vote. What Webbe is demanding of the left is self-silencing in the name of the prior rights of the silent (oppressed) majority. Jones, as a loyal ‘official communist’ and hence a disciplined advocate of the British road, might well have agreed - but her reasons would look less attractive outside the ‘official communist’ milieu than Webbe wants them to appear.

Gramsci

Next comes the idea that the “vanguard party” was “theorised for conditions of revolution and repression, for moments when rapid centralised decision-making was essential to survival”. In contrast, Webbe cites Antonio Gramsci’s Prison notebooks for the idea that “The task in societies like Britain is the war of position - the long construction of working class counter-hegemony in civil society, politics, culture and ideas.”

This use of Gramsci was a standard argument of the Eurocommunists (in fact, beginning with Palmiro Togliatti’s use of Gramsci to support the policy of the Partito Comunista Italiano in seeking people’s front coalitions with ‘left’ capitalist parties13). It is arguable, as Ewan Tilley suggests on his ‘State and confusion’ Substack response to Webbe, that this line involved radical misreading of Gramsci’s (highly coded) prison writings.14 Without getting into the extraordinarily extensive debates involved in attempts to appropriate Gramsci,15 there are a couple of points worth making.

The first is that the ‘war of position’ idea is not, in fact, original to Gramsci. The argument has old military-strategic roots.16 The immediate root of Gramsci’s ‘east-war of motion versus west-war of position’ contrast must, however, have been Trotsky’s arguments about the point in his military writings at the end of the Russian civil war: he argued that there was a danger of Red Army generals generalising on the civil war experience of highly fluid fronts; these, however, reflected the low development of the forces of production in the ‘east’, where the 1914-18 immobile western front was the true image of industrialised war.17 In 1940, Trotsky’s military-political-economic argument was proved false: rapid, fluid warfare overran the bulk of the industrialised ‘west’. It had turned out, moreover, in 1933-34 that the political Ermattungsstrategie (‘war of position’) failed the German and Austrian socialist parties, as the gradual conquests of “working class counter-hegemony in civil society, politics, culture and ideas” were abruptly overthrown by fascism.

The second point is that we should judge the Togliatti and Enrico Berlinguer version of Gramsci on ‘war of position’ by the results achieved by the Eurocommunist PCI. The PCI was a party of opposition during the bulk of the cold war period (not by its own choice, but because the USA instructed the Italian capitalist parties to exclude it from office). In this period the PCI did build up a substantial amount of “working class counter-hegemony in civil society, politics, culture and ideas”.

However, deepening ‘Gramscian’ commitments to the ‘historic compromise’ and the ‘broad democratic alliance’ produced the transformation of the PCI into the Partito Democratico della Sinistra (‘Democratic Left Party’) in 1991, Democratici di Sinistra (‘Democratic Left’) in 1998 and finally Partito Democratico (‘Democratic Party’) in 2007. Far from working class counter-hegemony, this is an instrument of capitalist liberal hegemony. Moreover, the collapse of the anti-systemic claims of the old PCI and the full entry into the parliamentary coalition game of the PCI-PDS-DS-PD has produced the widespread sense that the only alternative to the corrupt regime of liberal centre-left and liberal centre-right is right-populism - successively in the form of the media magnate, Silvio Berlusconi, then the comedian, Beppe Grillo, and Five Star, and now the post-fascism of Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia.

The advocates of Togliattian and left-populist interpretations of Gramsci need to accept their political responsibility for this outcome. (Analogously, the British advocates of Eurocommunism, Stuart Hall’s ideas, and so on, need to accept their political responsibility for Blairism, which they actively promoted.)

The reality is, first, that capitalism is a process of change. It does not stand still to be shot at either by a ‘war of position’ or by a ‘war of movement’. Committing to exclude ‘war of position’ (the far-left mass-strikists) is to adopt Ferdinand Foch’s ‘principle of the offensive’, and in politics to condemn yourself to small sects, like Luxemburg’s SDKPiL or Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labour Parties, forever. Committing to exclude ‘war of motion’ (the ‘Gramscians’) is to bet on the Maginot line as an absolute defence - and in politics, to lay down to be sent to camps without fighting, as the SPD did in 1933.

Secondly, the capitalist state is, by virtue of the forms of the constitutional order, committed to capitalist class rule - through the character of the state as one firm among many and the ‘national interest’ depending on ‘competitiveness’; through corruption in media, elections and lobbying, etc; through the ‘property owner/employer-decides’ principle in the form of monarchies, elected presidencies, directly elected party leaders, and so on; and through the judicial power as sanctifying the right of private property. Claudia Webbe and Jeremy Corbyn, both of whom have been personally targeted by security apparat/media/judicial operations, should be aware of this character.

The issue is not ‘insurrectionary politics only’. Rather a ‘war of position’, which seeks to build up mass disloyalty to this state order, can build with it a degree of “working class counter-hegemony in civil society, politics, culture and ideas”. However, as soon as the left accepts the constitutional order and the ‘national interest’, leftwingers are driven to political collapse into tail-ends of one of the two great capitalist parties - liberal-free-marketeer or nationalist-patriarchalist (the right-populists).

Silent

Stripped of the spurious authority of Luxemburg, Gramsci and Claudia Jones, what is left is the argument that the organisation of factions with their own platforms and discipline “circumvent[s] the rights of the members who are not members of organised currents”; and that

Two loyalties cannot produce one democratic party. The CEC’s framework resolves that structural truth.

The reasoning is democratic, not ideological: “Transparent, democratic decision-making is only possible when every member is able to trust that, whatever differences of opinion arise, all members put Your Party’s interests first.”

The problem is that we do not know before any decision procedure what “members who are not members of organised currents” actually want; or, for that matter, what “Your Party’s interests”, which we are required to “put first”, are.

It might be that with freedom to organise and an open and transparent decision process (unlike the Bonapartist plebiscitary method actually adopted by the leadership of Your Party, imitating La France Insoumise and Podemos) there would be an actual majority for the leadership’s views. But it might be that there would not. The actual online plebiscitary votes, linked to the ‘founding conference’ of November 29-30 in Liverpool, did not consistently produce the results sought by the leadership (and the leadership has decided to disregard those which ‘went wrong’).

Equally, it may be that purging the left groups would create the possibility of a ‘party’ (actually, a political brand) as successful as LFI or Podemos. But, given British political conditions and history, it is equally likely that getting rid of the groups produces the same dynamic as in Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party: failure, accompanied by a succession of purges, as the Bonapartist method allows no means of decision when differences arise within the leading group.

Allowing factions does not deprive the silent majority - “the members who are not members of organised currents” of any rights. They have the right to speak, to vote and to organise themselves against the organised minorities.

In contrast, the method of banning the organised groups also bans the silent majority from organising themselves. What they are left with is the choice exclusively between which of the full-timers and elected representatives to give allegiance to. This choice may be expressed as plebiscites on options selected by the full-timers, but it is actually merely an option of personal loyalties.

The regime thus created is in fact a form, on a smaller scale, of the liberal parliamentary regime - in which MPs are ‘answerable’ to the silent majority of their constituents and not to their party membership. But the result, which has been known since Friedrich Engels, writing in 1891, is:

Nowhere do ‘politicians’ form a more separate, powerful section of the nation than in North America. There, each of the two great parties which alternately succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics, who speculate on seats in the legislative assemblies of the Union as well as of the separate states, or who make a living by carrying on agitation for their party and on its victory are rewarded with positions.

It is well known that the Americans have been striving for 30 years to shake off this yoke, which has become intolerable, and that, in spite of all they can do, they continue to sink ever deeper in this swamp of corruption. It is precisely in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was originally intended to be. Here there exists no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army, beyond the few men keeping watch on the Indians, no bureaucracy with permanent posts or the right to pensions. Nevertheless we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends - and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality exploit and plunder it.18

I do not mean in the least to accuse Jeremy Corbyn or any of his co-thinkers of personal corruption. The point is that the organisational regime of MPs and officials relying on the silent majority against the right of activists to organise, when applied to a party which actually achieves more than merely small minority electoral representation in parliament and local government, would necessarily produce the usual sort of corruption (which we can see in today’s Labour Party in the Mandelson affair).

Die Linke

Tristan Colum, “a revolutionary socialist in Die Linke”, is presumably a political supporter of RS21 who happens to be currently resident in Germany. He gives us a potted history of Die Linke, which is of success down to the party’s electoral momentum “stalling” in 2012-13. At this point, he argues:

The party factions incorporate revolutionary socialists and social movement activists on one side, and municipal politicians and reformist social democrats on the other. This causes a continuous contradiction not just in programmatic terms, but also on the practical, strategic and tactical level. Theoretically, pluralism and the synergy of ‘street and parliament’ can work as a unifying internal concept - especially while advancing successfully. However, it begins to fall apart, when faced with the problem that, eventually, one form of politics must take precedence over the other.

The result is that “pluralism plays out as the locally more dominant fraction enacting its strategy and boycotting or undermining actions by the opposing fraction … The leadership selected cannot enact even the most basic kind of collective action. In this worst of all worlds, the party congress passes resolutions that half of the organisation breaches or dismisses …” And “Factionalism and a continuous latent power struggle within the party undermine any common platform for action.”

He goes on to argue that this is partly a result of “wrong priorities set by the revolutionary wing”: that is, centring “their efforts on winning over other party members or leftwing activists within the party”. On the contrary, he argues:

The communists who have been most successful in tipping the balance of forces in a multi-tendency organisation have been groups focused on building out the party’s strength, using a revolutionary-realist strategy. Other leftwingers are swayed more easily by seeing a successful campaign run or a strong local organisation built than by purely abstract arguments. This is not to denigrate theory, but rather to say that theory must be put to the test and measured by success, or it will shrivel into a purely academic exercise.

His actual example of the positive is no such thing, but rather that under its new leadership Die Linke moved into “sustained door-knocking campaigns and direct voter contact” - a policy which is perfectly available to Liberals, Greens or rightwing Social Democrats.

In substance, this is a critique of Die Linke, a party of over 100,000 members, for factionalism and lack of clear, decisive leadership in the style of the central committee of the SWP (which has about 2,500 dues-paying members), written by a supporter of RS21, a splinter of the SWP that has a few hundred members.

It is fine for a small group to criticise Die Linke for bad politics - especially coalitionism, which is likely, if they actually get into government, to end with demoralisation, as happened to Rifondazione Comunista in Italy. It is also possible, as we in the CPGB do, to point out that the SWP’s 2,500 members is as far as they have got and leaves them still on the same scale as the Morning Star’s CPB (around 1,200), the Socialist Party in England and Wales (around 1,000) and the Revolutionary Communist Party (substantially under 1,000); so that this looks like an impasse of anti-factionalist far-left groups. But to argue (implicitly), as comrade Colum does, that the SWP is a more successful organisational model than Die Linke is plainly fatuous.

Chapel

Duncan Chapel is a “member of the Fourth International in Scotland”, which I guess means that Anti-Capitalist Resistance has carried its commitment to Scots nationalism to the point of not organising in Scotland. He runs a currently very active Substack called Red Mole - the title of the newspaper of the International Marxist Group, the then British section of the Mandelite Unified Secretariat of the Fourth International (now just Fourth International) in 1970-73. The name implies nostalgia for the 1970s IMG, which, with 600 members and a weekly paper (at its height), was certainly a lot stronger than ACR is today.

His April 10 post, ‘Flat-pack Leninism: Why Mike Macnair can’t save the Weekly Worker from Moreno’s dead end’, is a direct polemic against the CPGB on the undesirability of ‘factionalism as a permanent condition’. He flags, in this context, Ernest Mandel’s 1977 polemic against Nahuel Moreno for (alleged) permanent factionalism; he has now gone on to publish an e-book translation of Mandel’s polemic.

Chapel begins with Trotsky arguing in 1940 for a split with the oppositionists who “live on factionalism”.19 There is a curious character to this argument. That is, a substantial part of Chapel’s underlying polemic is against the CPGB’s “campism”, by which is meant, our dual-defeatism on the Ukraine war: that is, that we seek (so far as we can, of course, which for the whole of the left is merely by writing) both the defeat of the US-Nato proxy war against Russia - for us, “the main enemy is at home”; and we support (again as far as we can, which is only by writing) anti-war forces in Russia.

Chapel, in contrast, along with the Mandelite majority, seeks the victory of the US-Nato proxy war in Ukraine (and in order to do so, denies that it is a proxy war, denies that 2014 was a coup, denies that there are far-right elements in the Ukraine government and armed forces). In this respect, Chapel’s politics are those of Max Shachtman - not in 1939-40, when he was arguing for ‘third camp’ politics, but in 1965, when he was arguing in support of US victory in Vietnam.

In Chapel’s view Shachtman’s politics were soft on Trotsky’s “campism”, but Trotsky was right to push for a split. I think that the logic of 1939-40 pointed towards a split, but that the split was premature, because the issues were not fully clarified. In my view In defence of Marxism, by its arguments for a premature split, has poisoned the Trotskyists against the practical ability to unite.

Chapel continues by accusing me of failing in Revolutionary strategy to cite Trotsky’s 1923 The new course. To this I plead guilty. I am critical of Trotsky for hesitations and caveats on the question of factions, both in The new course and in the section on ‘The question of the internal party regime’ in The Third International after Lenin - which I did cite, because it contains the important point that the party full-time staff is inherently a permanent faction.20

We now move to a simply false story about the CPGB in Left Unity. Comrade Chapel claims we went into Left Unity, acting as part of Communist Platform, as a “Flat-Pack”. The reality is that we agreed with Nick Wrack to participate in the Socialist Platform. When it came to the founding meeting of Socialist Platform, however, it turned out that comrade Wrack and his co-thinkers were committed to the idea that no binding votes could be taken on the content of the platform (to which we wished to propose amendments). The justification for this refusal to allow binding votes was that the silent majority of people who did not attend the meeting would not be able to vote!

We would have been perfectly willing to continue participating in Socialist Platform on the basis of being defeated in an actual vote - although part of our concern was that we considered the inclusion in Socialist Platform of the Atlanticists for Workers Loyalism (Alliance for Workers’ Liberty) to be unprincipled. But, as we wrote at the time, the method of refusing to vote on the basis that the silent majority outside the room should have a veto was undemocratic. It was, in fact, the same undemocratic method that the Corbynistas are using in Your Party and that Duncan Chapel and his co-thinkers denounce in Podemos.

I shall develop the argument in the second part.

  1. morningstaronline.co.uk/article/your-party-what-kind-socialist-party-does-british-working-class-actually-need-2026.↩︎

  2. labourpartymarxists.org.uk/2011/06/23/fight-the-bans-and-proscriptions.↩︎

  3. revsoc21.uk/2026/04/08/the-charms-and-pitfalls-of-extreme-pluralism-lessons-from-die-linke.↩︎

  4. redmole.substack.com/p/flat-pack-leninism-why-mike-macnair.↩︎

  5. It would be curious to identify who originated this particular smear. I guess going back to the factional opponents of The Leninist in the ‘official’ CPGB, then later picked up by the Scargillites? That was before I joined the CPGB.↩︎

  6. Wikipedia has a convenient summary: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Socialists_of_America.↩︎

  7. Wikipedia summary: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Linke.↩︎

  8. On LFI, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_France_Insoumise; cf also prometheus-mag.com/2026/03/04/the-populists-and-the-workers-party. For Podemos, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podemos_Spanish_political_party; cf also redmole.substack.com/p/before-your-party-there-was-podemos.↩︎

  9. There is a limited discussion of the SWP pre-conference document, ‘Party democracy: what we should defend; what we should reconsider’, in M Macnair, ‘False party concepts’ Weekly Worker October 30 2025 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1559/false-party-concepts).↩︎

  10. His post is referenced above in note 8.↩︎

  11. www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/questions-rsd.↩︎

  12. R Blobaum Felix Dzerzhinsky and the SDKPiL New York 1984, chapters 7-9.↩︎

  13. P Togliatti On Gramsci and other writings London 1979. See also D Broder, ‘The misuses of Gramsci’ Weekly Worker February 25 2021: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1336/the-misuses-of-gramsci.↩︎

  14. stateconfusion.substack.com/p/the-undemocratic-principle. See also comrade Broder (see note 13 above) for more details.↩︎

  15. There are 154 pages of results on Amazon … (I was looking unsuccessfully for a Northite critique of Gramsci as a Stalinist, which I bought years ago, but have misplaced).↩︎

  16. It was debated as Ermattungsstrategie (‘war of attrition’) versus Niederwerfungsstrategie (‘war of overthrow’) in the SPD discussions on the Prussian suffrage campaign in 1910-12. K Kautsky, R Luxemburg, A Pannekoek Socialisme: la voie occidentale Paris 1984.↩︎

  17. How the revolution armed Vol 5, London 1981, pp297-429 at various points.↩︎

  18. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htm.↩︎

  19. My copy of In defence of Marxism is older and does not have this passage; nor does MIA. But I am happy to believe that it exists.↩︎

  20. www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1928/3rd/ti07.htm (pp2-11).↩︎