25.06.1998

Assessing Trotsky

Party notes

The most recent meeting of the Provisional Central Committee of our Party discussed a set of brief notes that I produced entitled ‘Trotsky and Trotskyism’. Comrades broadly concurred with most of the points, although some differences of nuance or interpretation were raised, but not explored.

The purpose of these sketchy notes is to provide a ‘gateway’ to open discussions with various Trotskyist organisations. Of course, if these comrades had been reading our press with less dogmatic eyes, they would have easily been able to glean the attitude of our Party majority to this great revolutionary and his contradictory heritage. Sadly, it has been our experience that most comrades from this background have a characteristically sterile approach to politics and have attempted to shoehorn us into a conveniently empty ‘left Stalinist’ gap in their world view.

Most recently for example, it was comrade Dave Osler - currently in residence in the Socialist Democracy Group - who demanded we cut the equivocation and “produce a formalised set of theses on Trotskyism …” This would save the messy business of trying to “nail the Weekly Worker’s jelly to the ceiling” (Weekly Worker April 9).

Given that this comrade had just breezily admitted in the same article that “for most of the last 17 years I publicly supported the view that the USSR was a degenerated workers’ state [surely a defining position of Trotskyism - MF] while privately having … reached a bureaucratic collectivist position”, readers would be forgiven for thinking that in truth it was ‘wobbly Osler’ who had the theoretical firming-up to do.

In a similar vein, the International Bolshevik Tendency told readers of its obscure 1917 journal (No18 - undated) that we had “avoided grappling with the record of Trotsky’s Left Opposition …” In reply, we listed the avenues through which we had been exploring the question - including reminders of refused requests for an open debate with the IBT itself. We had to conclude that this organisation was “simply misleading its readership in the most crude and cynical way” (Weekly Worker October 10 1996). Our substantial polemic was never replied to.

Perhaps this is the political DNA. My document ‘Trotsky and Trotskyism’ notes that the doctrinaire method employed by most contemporary Trotskyists has led them to decide our politics before we had opened our mouths. This is something we contrast with the approach of Trotsky himself:

“… to the very end of his life, Trotsky’s thought revealed dynamic tensions within itself and development. This is true despite a certain degeneration of his thought conditioned by the intense pressure of Stalinism and his personal isolation. It is entirely possible that - given the developmental logic of his thought before his assassination - Trotsky would have been able to resolve the contradictions in his analysis positively, to critique and outgrow his conditional category of ‘degenerated workers’ state’.

“Trotsky’s followers subsequently froze his method and these provisional categories into dogma … Trotskyism thus emerged - in contrast to the method of Trotsky at his best - as sterile sectarianism” (‘Trotsky and Trotskyism’).

We have found that, when confronted with the reality of our organisation, the majority of Trotskyist comrades have chosen not to engage critically with our real ideas. Instead, they have seen the name ‘Communist Party of Great Britain’, took note of the fact that this organisation evolved out of the ‘official’ world movement and then simply assumed our politics. Did I say ‘assume’? Many Trotskyists have in the past insisted that our politics were ‘Stalinist’, however comprehensively life contradicted them.

We hope that a positive by-product of this period of flux in the workers’ movement internationally will be the orientation of the best elements of the Trotskyist movement, alongside revolutionaries from other backgrounds, to the pivotal question - the reforging of a Leninist party.

Using ‘Trotsky and Trotskyism’ as an introduction, the PCC will be approaching a number of organisations for discussions. We will feature the resulting exchanges in the pages of the Weekly Worker.

Mark Fischer
national organiser