25.09.1997

Trotsky’s ‘slur’

Party notes

Readers of this paper will be aware that in recent months the CPGB has been subjected to a sustained attack by the Scottish Socialist Alliance majority - in particular Scottish Militant Labour. Apparently we have committed a heinous crime. The term ‘national socialism’ has openly been used to scientifically describe not only the counterrevolutionary ideology of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini but all ‘socialism in one country’ panaceas.

Ironically in terms of language and method our approach here fully accords with SML’s supposed mentor, the great Marxist thinker, Leon Trotsky (that, of course, does not signify our conversion to Trotskyism). Socialism is international or for Marxists it is something else. That is why Trotsky did not by any means consider national socialism a fixed category peculiar to the Nazionalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party). To do so is to slip into nominalism. Like ourselves Trotsky explicitly denounced “all varieties of national socialism” - not least the bureaucratic socialism personified by JV Stalin (L Trotsky The Third International after Lenin New York 1982, p4).

The global economy - brought into existence by capitalism itself - is synonymous with both the possibility of universal human liberation and the impossibility of successfully going it alone. Thus in adopting a programme of national socialism Stalin doomed the post-capitalism of the USSR to eventual collapse. Moreover, as Trotsky explained, Stalin’s national socialism legitimised other communist parties taking the same disastrous course.

In Germany the communists stupidly thought the Nazis could be beaten at their own game (an idea originally theorised by Karl Radek). To win over the hungry, suffering and disorientated masses Nazi propaganda promised a volksrevolution and the liberation of “oppressed” Germany from “capitalism and imperialism incarnated” in the Versailles treaty. The Communist Party, following the logic of ‘national communism’ or ‘national Bolshevism’, freely borrowed these slogans. They tried to “out-shout” the Nazis in what Trotsky witheringly characterised as an “auction of patriotism” (L Trotsky The struggle against fascism in Germany New York 1977, p100). History records who beat whom.

Revealingly, where we have gone into print to elaborate the CPGB’s agreed position on national socialism, our critics have confined themselves thus far to postage stamp polemics of the most puerile kind and crude Scargill-type attempts to bureaucratically gag and even void us out of the SSA.

In designating SML’s programme for ‘socialism’ in a breakaway Scotland an example of national socialism there is no implication that somehow the comrades have gone over to fascism (nor did Trotsky say the Communist Party of Germany was indistinguishable from the Nazis - a calumny thrown against him by Stalin and his cohorts). Yet, despite numerous verbal and written statements confirming what is to any reasonable observer self-evident, our critics insist that this is not the case. Again and again they repeat the patently false claim that in the pamphlet, Blair’s rigged referendum and Scotland’s right to self-determination, Jack Conrad directly equates SML with Nazism.

Why do the comrades insist on being outraged and hurt by something they themselves have invented? There are, I believe, two factors at play.

Firstly, a desire to punish the CPGB for its refusal to join the Scotland Forward establishment and the majority of atomised Scottish voters in backing Tony Blair’s plan for a ‘modernised’ constitutional monarchy. Instead of passively recommending ‘yes, yes’ on September 11 the CPGB intransigently stood by the SSA’s founding aims and principles and boldly argued for an active boycott. Not through a majority to revolutionary tactics, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority - that is our road.

However, the main reason must surely be that SML is acutely sensitive to any charge of nationalism. Having abandoned Peter Taaffe’s reformist programme for British socialism in favour of a reformist national socialism in Scotland, SML is riven with stresses and strains as it clumsily attempts on the one hand to assert its autonomy from the Socialist Party and on the other to adapt to Scottish separatism.

Undoubtedly for most SML comrades - leaders and rank and file alike - the Scottish turn derives from a deep commitment to what they understand as socialism. By advocating freedom for Scotland they do not have in mind freedom for Edinburgh financiers, Glasgow brewers or Highland lairds. They sincerely want to build on the spirit of the anti-poll tax movement, the Timex strike and the tradition of Red Clydeside.

Yet basing themselves on a programme of Scottish socialism means sacrificing not only the principle of ‘one state, one party’, but proletarian internationalism - which takes as its point of departure the interdependent global economy, not reforms enacted by way of a sop parliament handed down from above. As we stand on the threshold of the 21st century, the last thing we should be doing - or trying to do - is repeating what utterly, tragically and miserably failed in the 20th century.

The future is not national, but international socialism.

Jack Conrad