01.07.1999
Trotsky versus the left Trotskyists
The RDG and the CPGB have joined forces in defence of revolutionary democracy, argues Dave Craig
In What is to be done? Lenin explained the basic theory of revolutionary (social) democracy against its opposite, economism. He contrasts the ‘tribune of the people’, able to react to every violation of democracy, with the trade union branch secretary engaged in the struggle for better terms and conditions on which to sell labour power. The economists downgraded or simply failed to understand the importance of the revolutionary political struggle for democracy. In practice they had a conservative attitude to the existing bourgeois democracy, and at best were reformist democrats. The essence of their politics was a fundamentally false, mistaken and simply wrong attitude to democracy in general and bourgeois democracy in particular.
In 1916 Lenin wrote ‘The nascent trend of imperialist economism’ (VI Lenin CW Vol 23, p13). Here he identifies two apparently different forms of economism. On the one hand, there is right economism, otherwise known as centrism. On the other hand, we have left economism or ultra-leftism. Both see only the absolute opposition of bourgeois and proletarian democracy based on workers’ councils or soviets, and not a dialectical inter-relationship arising from class struggle.
Our main concern in this debate is with left economism, which crudely opposes the present state with the democratic workers’ state. The only answer is a workers’ state or workers’ republic. In Russia it was Parvus who coined the slogan ‘No tsar but a workers state’. The Stalinists later attributed this to Trotsky, claiming it as an example of his ultra-left adventurism. Trotsky says: “At no time and in no place did I ever write or utter or propose such a slogan” (Permanent revolution New York 1974, p222). In fact Trotsky says that he published leaflets in 1905 under the title ‘Neither tsar nor zemsti [local councils] but the people!’ (ibid p223). This was a republican slogan, not a call for soviet power.
In 1928 Stalin and Radek proclaimed the only answer for the Chinese revolution was an armed uprising and soviets. Trotsky opposes the ultra-leftism of the Stalinist 6th Congress of the International. He says the congress “condemned democratic slogans as impermissible (constituent assembly, universal suffrage, freedom of speech and of the press) and hereby completely disarmed the Chinese Communist Party in the face of the dictatorship of the military oligarchy” (ibid p140).
Trotsky explains that “for every person not entirely devoid of political sense and tempered with revolutionary experience, this resolution constituted an example of the most revolting and most irresponsible adventurism” (ibid p272). The Stalinists crudely counterposed soviets against bourgeois democracy when the movement was at a low ebb. They took a position of hard, ‘no compromise’ leftism.
Trotsky’s answer was to propose “a course towards the mobilisation of Chinese workers under democratic slogans, including the slogan of a constituent assembly for China”. But here the ill-starred trio (Radek, Preobrazhensky and Stalin) fell into ultra-leftism; that was cheap and committed them to nothing. Democratic slogans? Never: “This is a gross mistake on Trotsky’s part”. “Only soviets for China - not a farthing less!” “It is hard,” says Trotsky, “to conceive of anything more senseless than this - the slogan of soviets for an epoch of bourgeois reaction is a baby’s rattle: ie, a mockery of soviets. But even in the epoch of revolution - that is, in the epoch of building soviets - we did not withdraw democratic slogans” (ibid p273).
Trotsky then summed up the lessons of how the Bolsheviks combined democratic and soviet slogans:
“For a long number of years, the Russian Bolsheviks had mobilised the workers and peasants around democratic slogans. Democratic slogans played a big role in 1917. Only after soviet power had actually come into existence and clashed politically with the constituent assembly [in 1918], irrevocably and in full view of the entire people, did the party liquidate the institutions and slogans of formal - that is, bourgeois - democracy, in favour of real soviet democracy – that is, proletarian democracy” (ibid p140).
Trotsky was very clear on the need to take up bourgeois democratic demands - and not only in China. He argued this in his writings on Britain in the 1920s and Spain in 1930 where he called for a constituent assembly and the building of soviets. His programme for France in 1934 also contains important democratic demands.
The debate in recent issues of the Weekly Worker has been between the revolutionary democratic approach to politics and left economism. Comrades Phil Sharpe and Barry Biddulph argue a version of this, that I will call left Trotskyism. This has very little to do with the kind of politics advocated by Trotsky himself. Rather it is a product of monarchist culture in the UK, which has rotted the brains of most Trotskyists and made them frightened of republican slogans.
Let us begin by restating three basic propositions of modern revolutionary democratic communist politics. The first proposition is that revolutionary mass struggle is the best means to extend democracy. The second is that the democratic revolution is the highest form of that struggle. The third is that the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat is the highest form of the democratic revolution.
One of the important practical consequences of these propositions is that bourgeois democratic slogans and demands - for example the republic, constituent assembly, the right of nations to self-determination, people’s militia; and equal rights for women, ethnic minorities, gays and disabled people, etc - are a legitimate and essential part of the political struggle for world communism.
We adopt these slogans in a revolutionary, militant and vanguard fashion. We are not in any sense dependent on their adoption by bourgeois democrats. We do not follow them, but recognise the working class as the vanguard fighter for democracy and the party as the vanguard of that class.
The three propositions recognise the class distinction between bourgeois and proletarian democracy. However, they are not based on a simplistic and crude opposition of parliament to soviets, as proposed by the centrists and ultra-lefts. There is a dialectical relationship between the two forms of democracy. Democratic slogans and soviet slogans must to be combined correctly.
The Bolsheviks supported these three basic propositions with two important amendments. Their first amendment was that the democratic revolution (proposition 2) was defined to mean bourgeois democratic revolution. They fell out with the Mensheviks as to what this meant. Their second amendment was to replace the dictatorship of the proletariat (proposition 3) with the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.
How do revolutionary democrats interpret the experience of Bolshevism? In 1905 Lenin, Trotsky and Kautsky were revolutionary democrats. By 1914 Kautsky had become a centrist or right economist. He supported bourgeois democracy against workers’ democracy. Lenin and Trotsky remained revolutionary democrats before and after April 1917. The differences between Lenin and Trotsky were nuances within the same revolutionary democratic communist camp.
Lenin’s April Thesis in 1917 is obviously an important event. But what was its significance? In essence the experience of the Russian Revolution wrecked the Bolshevik ‘amendments’. Lenin recognised that the democratic revolution could not and should not be confined to bourgeois limits. The democratic revolution should be consummated by the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Trotsky summed this up in his theory of permanent revolution. He says: “The victory of the democratic revolution is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat” (ibid p277). He says: “The democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry is only conceivable as a dictatorship of the proletariat that leads the peasant masses behind it.”
These statements overturn only the old Bolshevik amendments. By stripping these away, the revolutionary democratic baby is saved and the rancid bathwater is drained away. Modern revolutionary democracy is alive and well, free from the bourgeois limits of the democratic revolution and the peasantry.
What interpretation do the left Trotskyists put on this? According to comrade Biddulph, revolutionary democracy equals Kautskyism. Consequently Lenin was a Kautskyist until April 1917, when he became a Trotskyist! Apparently Lenin ditched all the basic ideas of revolutionary democracy, and not simply the obsolete ‘amendments’. This of course is completely untrue. Not only did Lenin not abandon the revolutionary struggle for democracy, but neither did Trotsky, as his argument against the Stalinists over China in 1928 prove.
In 1918 Kautsky confirmed his position as a centrist or right economist by attacking the Soviet state. Lenin replied in a polemic entitled The proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky. Kautsky contrasted “democracy” to “dictatorship”. He tried to undermine the revolution by urging workers to oppose “dictatorship” and support “democracy”, by which he meant bourgeois democracy. Lenin destroyed the nonsense about ‘democracy versus dictatorship’. Every Marxist knows that all states, even the most democratic, are class dictatorships.
Let us take an analogy. Suppose that in 1998 the UK had become a workers’ state. Suppose also that the RDG and CPGB came forward and condemned this as ‘dictatorship’ and called for ‘democracy’. We then advocated a return to a federal republic on democratic grounds. We would justly be accused of being ‘Kautskyists’ and anti-working class renegades.
If anybody thinks this is where we are now, they must be living in a different part of the country to me. Perhaps when Barry goes to work he sees the red flag flying above his workplace. On arrival perhaps he is greeted by the workers’ militia who direct him to the daily meeting of the workplace council to discuss which manager to sack. Naturally when he hears that the CPGB and RDG are arguing for a federal republic to undermine all this, he is furious and writes off to the Weekly Worker to warn of the dangers of Kautskyism.
This shows the false, ahistorical method of the left Trotskyists. A debate in 1918 in and about an actually existing workers’ state against returning to bourgeois democracy is not relevant to the British constitutional monarchy in 1999. In case anybody had not noticed, the workers are not in power and our prime task is not to prevent us ‘returning’ to a federal republic.
Phil Sharpe is also wearing the mantle of left Trotskyism. He is another ‘hardline’ believer in soviets and against bourgeois democratic demands. Yet he exposes himself as a bourgeois democrat. Phil gives us his analysis as to what went wrong with the Russian Revolution (Weekly Worker May 27 and page 4 of this issue). He does not even mention Kronstadt. Not a single word about the workers, peasants and sailors who at the end of the civil war rose up demanding the rebuilding of the soviets. Instead Phil is crying into his beer about the closure of the Constituent Assembly in early 1918. This was the very thing that Kautsky was complaining about!
Barry Biddulph’s shouting about Kautskyism is a lot of nonsense. What is he frightened of? The political choice according to him is either the constitutional monarchy or a workers’ state. Under the constitutional monarchy, the bosses are in charge, so we know where we stand. In a workers’ republic the capitalists have been defeated and the workers are in charge. If you want stability these are the only options for you. It avoids all the messy business in between.
But the Russian Revolution showed very clearly that between tsarism and the workers’ republic was a transitional or dual power republic. The dual power republic was not invented by the RDG: it is merely a description of the nature of the state in that transitional period. This was not a non-class state. It is a form of bourgeois republic, in which the power of the bourgeoisie was under direct challenge from workers’ councils. It was a special type of republic. We could call this special republic by a variety of names: ‘dual power’, ‘transitional’ or even a ‘civil war’ republic.
The ‘civil war republic’ between February and October 1917 was, according to Lenin, the most democratic in the whole of Europe. But it was not some utopia. It was a republic of intensifying class struggle. Society was being polarised between military dictatorship and workers’ power. In State and revolution (VI Lenin Selected Works Vol 2, p289) Lenin refers to “a fundamental idea that runs through all of Marx’s works: namely, that the democratic republic is the nearest approach to the dictatorship of the proletariat”.
This quote makes no sense if Lenin is referring to any normal democratic republic. Is the American republic “the nearest approach” to the dictatorship of the proletariat? But it makes perfect sense if he is referring to a special type of democratic republic as existed in Russia in April 1917.
Lenin continues: “For such a [dual power] republic, without in the least abolishing the rule of capital, and, therefore, the oppression of the masses and the class struggle, inevitably leads to such an extension, development, unfolding and intensification of this struggle that, as soon as it becomes possible to meet the fundamental interests of the oppressed, this possibility is realised inevitably and solely through the dictatorship of the proletariat, through the leadership of the masses by the proletariat.” Exactly. This is the transitional republic.
Barry quotes Lenin saying, “The more highly developed a democracy is, the more imminent are pogroms and civil war in connection with any profound divergence which is dangerous to the bourgeoisie” (VI Lenin The renegade Kautsky Peking, p23). This sums up quite neatly the circumstances of a dual power republic. But Barry has his blinkers on. He condemns the civil war republic as an RDG invention. In his letter (Weekly Worker June 24) he dismisses it as the “cult of formal structures”.
Barry hates the thought of something that would upset stable life. He does not like the RDG for suggesting it. So he calls us “Kautskyist” to make himself feel better. He sees the only political option as a constitutional monarchy or a workers’ state. Whilst we see a dual power republic as an opportunity, he sees it only as a threat. He is like someone who wants to cross a river to get to the promised land. But he rejects the only possible means of transport. So it’s back to ‘Star Trek’.
Beam me up, Scotty, and magic me to that other safe place!