04.03.2004

Sect illusions

Workers Power/League for the Fifth International, 'From protest to power - manifesto for world revolution', London, 2003, pp59, £1.50

Last spring the Trotskyist grouping known as the League for a Revolutionary Communist International, led by the smallish British Workers Power group, took what for it was a momentous decision (though for those whose lives do not revolve around the subtleties of sectarian nomenclature it was rather less so). It changed its name to the ‘League for the Fifth International’.

This has a certain significance in the arcane world of orthodox Trotskyism: in brief, it comes from the desire to claim continuity with the original Fourth International of Leon Trotsky. This was an international revolutionary organisation founded in 1938, to reassert the politics of communism against social democracy and the by then degenerate and anti-revolutionary ‘official communist’ parties.

The ‘Fourth International’ itself claimed to be the successor to the first two international organisations founded under the influence of Marx and Engels, and the Communist International of Lenin and Trotsky. Yet, unlike these earlier internationals, Trotsky’s Fourth International was not founded upon any mass organisations. Not only that, but it also was established on a very narrow ideological basis: primarily on agreement with Trotsky’s own highly problematic view of the nature of the Soviet Union under Stalinism - despite the destruction of all semblance of working class power and the erection of a monstrous bureaucratic tyranny over the working class, nevertheless for Trotsky the Stalinised USSR remained a degenerated form of a working class state. Therefore it supposedly was the duty of socialists to take its side - not only in wars against the capitalist world, but also against its own population, should any movement arise that appeared prepared to abandon the ‘planned economy’.

There were, of course, several other theoretical approaches among socialists and communist opponents of Stalinism that claimed to explain the degeneration of the Soviet Union - they came to rather different conclusions about the attitude socialists should take to the USSR in international or domestic conflicts.

There was the theory of state capitalism, which held that the USSR had been transformed, though the destruction of all forms of working class control, into a giant, state-owned capitalist enterprise in its own right, which was therefore just as imperialistic and exploitative in its domestic and international role as the more traditional capitalist powers.

There was also bureaucratic collectivism, a theory which held in essence that the USSR was a new form of class society, based on totalitarian slavery, that appeared destined to replace capitalism as the predominant form of exploitation across the globe. This latter understanding had a tendency to lead its adherents to embrace ‘democratic’ capitalist imperialism as the lesser evil compared to this new class despotism, as happened with one of its best known adherents, Max Shachtman.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to recognise the flaws and one-sided aspects of all these theories. The thesis of the ‘proletarian’ USSR was never really able to rationalise away the complete lack of any proletarian political influence in the USSR - workers in general actually had more right to self-organisation in the imperialist west. Nor could it explain the subsequent creation of replicas of the USSR in China, Vietnam, Cuba, Yugoslavia (not to mention the entire east European ‘buffer zone’) without the kind of independent class organisations (soviets, etc) that were the driving force of the 1917 revolution in Russia.

Conversely, both the theories of state capitalist and bureaucratic collectivism were falsified by historical reality - the idea that the USSR was run on capitalist lines was exposed as a joke: the massive inefficiency and technological backwardness of its economy was above all a product of the fact that it was not run according to the goal of maximising the yield of monetary reward above investment (aka profit). Rather essentially, non-market economic and social forms were the means by which a social layer of bureaucratic oligarchs maintained a privileged existence on top of the working masses. The eastern bloc was able to compete militarily for a while with the capitalist powers, but it was not able, because of a fundamentally different ethos in economic organisation, to compete economically, and it was the contradictions of attempting to maintain the former competition along with the latter non-competition that eventually brought the system crashing down between 1989 and 1991. Of course, the same reality also disproved the ‘bureaucratic collectivist’ thesis that Stalinism was a new stage of class society, which was supposedly more dangerous and more dynamic than capitalism.

It is useful to draw out a synthesis of these various flawed theories. The bureaucratic collectivists were closest to the truth, in that they postulated that Stalinism was some new kind of exploitative society, neither socialist nor capitalist. But they erred in believing that it therefore had to be historically viable, that it could not in turn be defeated by the further development of capitalism. Stalinism was a freak, ectopic form of class society, an evolutionary dead end. It resulted from the creation within an isolated backward country of a socialised economy in material conditions where the productive forces were qualitatively insufficient to bring about anything other than equality in dire poverty (which is simply a recipe for “all the old crap” of exploitation and inequality resurfacing, as Marx put it in his Critique of the Gotha programme). This is in my view a correct synthesis of the various partial, one-sided theorisations of the nature of Stalinism attempted by (among others) Trotsky, Shachtman and Tony Cliff.

One key weakness of Trotsky’s Fourth International - and indeed its precursor organisations such as the International Communist League, Movement for the Fourth International and the like - was that it organised almost exclusively around agreement with Trotsky’s own analysis of the USSR under Stalinism. This despite the fact that the nature of the USSR was a highly contentious and problematic question for revolutionary opponents of Stalinism. In fact, there was no real consensus on this question among those broadly referred to as ‘Trotskyists’; despite Trotsky’s own attempts to brand positions other than his own ‘degenerate workers’ state’ as “petty bourgeois” deviations (see In defence of Marxism 1940).

Even among the heroic Bolshevik-Leninist oppositionists held in Stalin’s labour camps there were deep divisions on the class nature of the USSR, with significant numbers holding ‘state capitalist’ or ‘bureaucratic collectivist’ views. The great flaw of the ‘Fourth International’ current is that, particularly after the 1939-40 fight against Shachtmanism, but indeed implicitly long before, it was effectively organised as a mono-ideological sect around Trotsky’s views - mainly on the USSR, but by extension afterwards around sterile ‘orthodox’ views on many other questions as well.

Workers Power thinks it has given itself fresh dynamism with its supposedly new perspective of fighting for the ‘Fifth International’. In reality, the change is a somewhat pedantic one, a nuance among ‘orthodox’ disciples of Trotsky when he was in his position of greatest isolation and lacking real, equal collaborators - in other words, when his vulnerability to fateful and disorienting mistakes was the greatest. The debates between Workers Power and other, politically close and somewhat like-minded sects about whether to call for the ‘rebirth’ of the Fourth International or a ‘Fifth International’ are tragicomic and sterile. What these comrades are in fact disputing is which precise formulation, which particular interpretation of Trotskyist ‘continuity’, will suffice to re-enact Trotsky’s own mistakes in this respect.

There is much material in From protest to power that is positive and of merit. It is certainly revolutionary in its intentions - that shines out from virtually every page. Yet what it is ultimately about is creating a mono-ideological sect around a particular interpretation of a tradition that is itself restricting and mistaken. Thus the unintended irony of the introduction: “We appeal to activists and organisations working within the working class, anti-capitalist, youth and peasant movements to consider this programme and, where necessary, propose changes and amendments to it.”

The big problem with this proposal, of course, is that it would seem to presuppose an ethos of public, open debate. But that is not exactly the strong point of Trotskyist organisations such as Workers Power. Any of their own members who differ from the majority view are generally forbidden from publicly expressing differences in public - indeed one curious feature of Workers Power’s political life over the past decade or so is the defeat of one majority position on the nature of Stalinism and its replacement by another. The new minority thus took over from the old one the privilege of being publicly gagged and prevented from expressing, still less publishing, its disagreements - a privilege the current majority previously ‘enjoyed’ for a couple of decades or so. How such “changes and amendments” are to be debated out with the broad masses will rightly be seen as something of a moot point.

Thus the whole political framework of this programme is wrong. It is also not the first time the LRCI/LFI current has published its own updated version of Trotsky’s programme. One remembers the launch in 1989 of The Trotskyist manifesto - which embodied the politics of the then WP majority around the late Dave Hughes, the remnants of which today form the minority. Now we have the other grouping’s interpretation. Despite the differences between them, both embody the same illusions.

Fundamentally these were the illusions of the original Transitional programme itself: that a narrow, ideologically based sect could, through a programme of ‘transitional demands’ whose core focus is ‘radical’ economic questions that contradict the logic of capitalism itself, win leadership of the mass of the proletariat by means of a catastrophic process of exposure of the existing leaderships of the workers. In reality, this particular form of ‘transitional politics’ understates struggles around the vital question of democracy, as well as underestimating the complexity of building a party of the working class.

It is certainly true that, in order for a genuinely revolutionary party to take root among the masses, a consistently Marxist current must come into being and prove, in theory and practice, its ability to provide revolutionary leadership to the working class and its allies in struggle.

But, at the same time, a party is not a sect organised around the ideas of a particular current. A genuine revolutionary party embodies the advanced, militant and class-conscious section of the class. The consistent revolutionary current will win its authority in the advanced section of the class by political struggle, including against flawed political currents within the party itself, openly and in front of the class. Only in that manner can a real party be built - a party worthy of the traditions of Russian Bolshevism that was built according to these principles of polemical openness, even in conditions of illegality.

Despite its many correct points, and its revolutionary aspirations, this new version of WP’s Transitional programme is, because of the sect illusions at the heart of its politics, fatally flawed on this central question.