In 2007, Loren initiated an online discussion of the relative importance and political potential of the Trotskyist formations in the United States and Europe in comparison to what was described as individuals and groups in the left-communist tradition. The exchange included Loren and three of his political comrades—Yves from France, and Will and Amiri from the United States.
Besides Loren, Yves, a long-time militant, was the most active participant in the discussion. He articulated very distinctive positions in response to Loren’s enthusiastic embrace of the 1917 Russian Revolution, his more or less friendly portrayal of various left communist writers and groups (such as the Situationists) and his sympathetic portrayal of various Trotskyist groups in Europe and the United States. The following is an extensively edited version of several of the key exchanges in the larger discussion.
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Loren to All:
After spending time in Korea where he found a great deal of interest in the history of the Russian Revolution, Loren found himself immersed in the controversies associated with 1917. He felt compelled to write about them.
In short, there I was back again on the Russian Revolution. About that time a friend passed on the Glaberman book [a collection of CLR James’s writings] and I found the portrait of Lenin so interesting that I went back to Moshe Lewin’s Lenin’s Last Struggle, and began to feel (again) some sympathy for the guy (James makes a big deal of Lenin’s speech to the 1922 Comintern 4th Congress, in which he seems to repudiate many of the theses of the 3rd Congress as “too Russian"). It was his last public speech.
You recall Lenin’s eulogy for Rosa Luxemburg after her death: “She was wrong on the question of organization, of nationalism, of economics, but she shall always remain for us an eagle.”1 Somehow, I feel I could say the same thing about Vladimir Ilyich. In 1971, in the funk after the collapse of the New Left, I traded in my complete works for the complete Remembrance of Things Past of Proust. I unloaded another set in 2000, this time into the garbage can, since my local used bookstore wouldn’t trade it for anything! I then acquired a third set in Paris in 2003, I’m not sure why. Do you know Valentinov’s portrait of Lenin (Oxford University Press, 1968)? He was not—how shall I say—a nice guy. But I do buy the idea, reiterated many times, that he was, in contrast to Trotsky, not overly taken with himself and utterly without vanity. He wrote about philosophy, about literature, about the Russian economy. He was a hack in philosophy, not terribly inspiring about literature, quite problematic in his economics. He did write an entire book on American agriculture in 1913. The key books: What Is To Be Done?, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Imperialism, Left-Wing Communism, the Philosophical Notebooks (if that can be called a book) taken individually or as a whole, are deeply flawed. But I guess he lingers with me as the supreme example of a certain coherence of theory and practice, however one criticizes both. Trotsky is more appealing and has a wider range. One cannot easily imagine Lenin collaborating with Breton and Rivera in 1938. The History of the Russian Revolution is a masterpiece. But one cannot (as Eastman points out in his memoirs) imagine Trotsky without Lenin backing him up, as evidenced by what happened after 1923. Lenin owed a lot to Trotsky, to be sure, but the dependence was not mutual. Luxemburg is a third figure, undoubtedly the most humane of the three, and so much more right about so much.
There were a number of people of the historical ultra-left—Bordiga, Pannekoek, Gorter, Mattick, Ruehle, Canne Meier, Cajo Brendel—who produced important oeuvres but, I ask you, when one sets them side by side with Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg, does one see the range of the latter three? CLR James, who to my knowledge never repudiated his interpretation of Lenin, also had that range. In one essay in the 1999 Glaberman book, James says in passing that there was nothing comparable to Russia as it prepared the revolution, not merely in the Marxist tradition, but also in literature, painting, music. The pressures that produced the revolutionary movement and then the revolution also produced a unique culture, a hot house to be sure. And what do we have to show in our own time? Of course, there is an endless list of creative people, from Debord, Camatte via EP Thompson—you can fill in your favorites. But as Thompson said in his polemics with the Althusserians, all this heavy theory has not produced one practical mouse.2 That’s what pulls me back, I think. I recently saw the Warren Beatty film “Reds” again. Is there anything since 1917 comparable to that brief moment of hope in which everything seemed possible, on a world scale? 1968, of course, comes close, without the practical success (such as it very briefly was).
I recently told a good friend (who’s pushing 70, and who is no slouch) that I experience the pull of the Russian Revolution like a bear trap from which I cannot extricate my leg. Am I living in the past? Not in the sense of Faulkner’s remark that “the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even the past,” but in the sense that one’s sensibilities (I’ll be 60 in October, f’chrissakes) almost necessarily become superannuated, in the way 1930s survivors struck us as superannuated in the 60s.
Yves to Loren:
There are three different problems in your [initial] letter.
The historical role of Lenin and his status as a theoretician. It seems quite obvious that Lenin’s works only had such a lasting political influence because of the existence of a “totalitarian” state which published and used its works internationally in all sorts of social and political contexts. Note that the Russian state never published in other languages the complete works of Marx. That says much about the difficulty in using Marx for the same aims as Lenin. Hopefully Marx was not a Marxist and did not build a system, or a state or a “totalitarian” Party (although he used all sorts of maneuvers to kill the First International).
The fact that the Russian state was a counter-revolutionary state, which made possible a huge primitive accumulation, gave birth to an imperial power, gave its full meaning to the concept of totalitarianism, persecuted everywhere revolutionaries, manipulated national liberation movements, etc., all that in the name of Lenin, points to the weaknesses and ambiguities of Lenin (and the party he contributed to build) both as a theoretician and as politician. There are elements of continuity between Leninism and Stalinism, and the 1917–1924 period enabled these elements to take a decisive negative form which has influenced our history until now.
The Russian Revolution as an exceptional event in history. No doubt about that. But I don’t think we should underestimate other failed insurrections, nationalist insurrections, long general strikes, democratic revolutions, massive factory occupations, that happened since 1917.
Unless one is obsessed by state coups and the building of a new so-called “socialist state” (which you are not), history gives us many examples of the creativity of the exploited to resist by all sorts of means. And that is what fuels my optimism; not the nostalgia of 1917, 1919, 1921 or 1936. It’s also the continuous attempt of the exploited to find a way to counter all forms of oppression (the fight against racism and sexism has made huge historical progresses, and these questions were totally underestimated before the Second World War and even during the early 60s). Since 1917, there have only been small groups of revolutionary militants who often were preoccupied by their own survival and did not have much time and energy to devote to illuminating new perspectives. Very often they just repeated what had been written in the sacred texts with an uncritical mind or picked up some trendy new idea and made a strange cocktail between rigid literal Marxism and some fashionable ideology.
Instead of being nostalgic about past revolutions, I think those who want to help revolutionary militants to get out of their present mediocrity should analyze today’s world and offer new and inspiring perspectives to them and all those who care about changing this world.
Yves to Loren:
“militantism itself is often an ideology”
Loren wrote: “I don’t think it’s fair to call the most important writings of Debord and Camatte “fake” because they fail the “militancy” test.”
That’s not my point. The Situationists are fakes because they spent a lot of energy presenting others’ ideas as theirs. That is not intellectually honest. And the worst is their young followers today: as we live in a society where only what was produced today is valuable to their eyes (the rest is corny, outdated, boring, etc.), they think they don’t need to read Marx, Pannekoek, Bordiga or Luxemburg, because everything is in Debord, Vaneigem or Sanguinetti. And tomorrow they will read the heirs of Debord and probably ignore where these ideas come from.
Obviously, but Marxism has no interest for me if it is not related (in whatever form) to my daily life. The first writings of the Italian operaistas were obscure and difficult to read for an ordinary militant with no academic or Marxist background but at least they were addressing Italian realities in the 1960s. They could not be reduced to the 1567th analysis of the law of value, alienation or fictitious capital in Marx’s writings
Loren criticizes the fact of “relegating theory and culture to window dressing and Sunday morning edification, and generally favoring people who had no use for theory of any kind.” He is right but this situation is also linked to the very abstract and difficult character of the writings which pretend to produce new theories or new interpretations of old theories. It is linked to the unwillingness of their authors to address ordinary militants, to give lectures, to confront other militants in the streets, in struggles, etc.
If a radical author writes for a small audience who has to know and understand all sorts of mysterious concepts, then he should not complain if people don’t read his writings. If he never confronts other militants or ordinary working-class people to explain his ideas, then he has no reason to complain about the small impact of his ideas. But usually academic or radical Marxologists don’t bother with these details. They like to have a court of admirers around them and that’s enough to satisfy their ego.
Loren writes about the Situationists: “I clearly “saw” the world I lived in, of high-rise apartment buildings, suburbia, freeways, television, mass consumption, and white-collar work.” There are many sociologists, novelists, filmmakers who described all these realities. They did not claim to be revolutionaries—but cares? What is important is to find good sources of information about the world we live in. And so-called radical philosophers and Marxologists are perhaps not the most useful ones for people who can only devote 45 minutes per day to reading—as a working-class militant told me recently.
The Situationists were not only people who described the world, like Loren says; they were a group which pretended to have a form of political activity, which pretended that this activity could change the world or has effectively changed the world. That’s why we should be much more demanding than if we were discussing an interesting novel, film or piece of sociology which has no militant or political aims.
Loren praises Camatte for having underlined: “the centrality of the Russian peasant commune and the agrarian question which, in my own experience, no one had ever talked about before.” Did not Marx write about Russia and the importance of the Russian peasant commune in his letter to Vera Zasulich? Camatte may have dwelled on this idea but it did not come from him. And the centrality of the agrarian question in a country where 90 percent of the population is composed of peasants does not seem to me a very original idea. After all, Lenin spent a lot of energy discussing the importance of the peasantry, the possibilities of class alliances between the working class and the peasants, and he defended the idea of the “democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants” at least until April 1917 (according to Trotsky) and even later (according to the Stalinist version of history). If you don’t concentrate your attention on the Bolsheviks and the Putilov factories and start looking at the other political parties during the Russian revolution including the anarchists and the Narodniks or left revolutionary-socialists, if you analyze what happened during the Civil War, it’s not difficult to see the importance of the agrarian question! You will “discover” the same basic element, if you try to understand the mass resistance against the collectivization of agriculture launched by Stalin.
Loren to All:
I do not wish to make a big deal of my bout of nostalgia, if that’s what it was, for “1917.” When I say 1917, I don’t just mean Russia, I mean the world moment of 1917–1921, just about everywhere. Which took to its paroxysm the world revolutionary wave of 1905–1914. Of course, as Yves says, there have been many movements and general strikes and creative moments, large and small. But I frankly don’t think that capitalism has been on the defensive at any time, in face of a world movement, as it was in those years.
Second, on Russia itself. The thread that ties me to the complex of events, people, etc. conjured up by “Russia” is the contemporary importance of Trotskyism. This may sound strange, to some people on this discussion and in the broader left. Not too many people at “Porto Alegre” (for example) give a damn about Trotskyism.3 But frankly, I think that “Trotskyism” in the broad sense is still the “team to beat” in the contemporary period.
In 2003, at the demos just before the Iraq war in Washington, New York and Paris, I was struck by the fact that, after more than 30 years during which I had been influenced by and involved with “left communists” or the broader ultra-left (the Situationists, Socialism or Barbarism, Bordiga, and many journals from around the world) that the weight of those currents in these events wasn’t much different from 1968. In 1968 as in 2003, the “traditional left groups” seemed to have the ability to capture the high ground (in terms of the ability to “set the tone"). The work of the “old mole” in undermining the conditions for the “bureaucrats” did not seem to have progressed much.
Yves to All:
One should not discuss Trotskyism as Trotskyists do (and as most of its adversaries do): as a coherent and unified ideology or theory, as the continuation of “Leninism” (for its partisans) or “Stalinism” (for its adversaries), as the “revolutionary Marxism of the 20th or 21st century.” This method may seem useful for polemics but it’s a lazy and unproductive way of dealing with Trotskyist ideas and practices.
One should differentiate between Trotskyism as a rather coherent ideology or theory until 1940 (Trotsky’s assassination), and what it became afterwards. Today one can’t talk anymore of Trotskyism, but only about very different forms of “Trotskyisms” which have very little in common in theory and practice with their origins. What is left of the original Trotskyism today, among its present followers, is mainly a cult of the personality of Trotsky and a general incapacity to make a balance between his theoretical work and actions when he was in power or in exile.
For the same reason, the fact of reducing Trotskyism to a form of “centrism” (this ideology which allegedly hesitates between reform and revolution) is just a lazy way to deal with the complex and multiform evolution of different political currents—unless one has a very simplistic vision of the political world as divided into three basic forces: the revolutionaries (ourselves), the counter-revolutionaries and those in between (the centrists). This kind of vision is a simple copy of what Lenin wrote during the First World War 80 years ago when he analyzed the positions inside the international Social Democracy and can’t be seriously applied to all non-100 percent-revolutionary political groups since then. For the same reason, comparisons between the different political Russian tendencies before 1917 (Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Narodniks) and present revolutionary groups are not of any use today.
Today, it’s more important to pinpoint what Trotskyists do, than what they write. Or better to study the relationship between what they write and what they do in practice. At least in the countries where they have some influence on reality. And that’s true for all political currents; it does not apply just to Trotskyist groups. A French libertarian group like Alternative libertaire is in fact, by its practice, much nearer to the Trotskyist Ligue communiste révolutionnaire than to the Fédération anarchiste. The British SWP today is nearer to the Mao-populist or even Mao-Stalinist groups of the 1970s than from its Marxist-Luxemburgist origins or its Trotskyist heritage. The anarcho-syndicalist CNT-AIT is strongly influenced by traditional Marxist ultra-left thinkers. So, what applies to Trotskyism applies also to anarchism and other political tendencies. There are no more definite frontiers between the most active “revolutionary” tendencies. Or, if they exist, they are more subtle than the officially proclaimed theoretical and practical differences.
These prerequisites are essential because if we don’t agree on these minimum points, discussing Trotskyism becomes like discussing genealogy: one goes as back as far as possible in the past (for revolutionaries, it’s usually the mid-19th century) and then one establishes an apparently “coherent” list of political ancestors (what Marxists usually call the “red thread” or the “historic continuity”). Then, the game (and political reflection) is already over—your present political group belongs to a long, “coherent” tradition which was always right for the last 150 years, so obviously what you do and say today is right because you are continuing what all your always-right-political ancestors did.
Trotsky’s failures
They are today rather easy to spot, at least in what concerns the analysis of Soviet Russia and Trotsky’s desire to defend Lenin’s ideas and the political theses of the first four congresses of the Third International. This work has been partly done by all the different “state-capitalist” (Socialisme ou Barbarie, Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis; Tony Cliff and the International Socialists), “left communist’ (Amadeo Bordiga, Anton Pannekoek, Grandizio Munis, Otto Rühle, Paul Mattick) and anarchist groups or intellectuals (Luigi Fabbri, Makhno, Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman and Rudolf Rocker). This work has been useful because it showed that Trotsky’s conception of Marxism had disastrous political consequences when he had to analyze Stalinism, both in Russia and internationally. And also that he proposed totally or partially wrong tactics to face the traditional forms of reformism and the general crisis of capitalism in the 1930s.
But these criticisms, written in the 1920s, 1930s and used by their political heirs generally share the point of view that an international revolution was possible between the two world wars. This assumption should be today discussed in detail, if one wants to understand what happened at that time but also after the Second World War.
In other words, the explanation by a long-term “counter-revolution” and/or by the “lack of a revolutionary Party” does not suffice to explain the weight and continuing existence of Social Democrat reformism or why Stalinism controlled so easily the newly formed CPs.
Another problem: left communists and “state-capitalist” analyses of Soviet Russia start from the point of view that Marxist categories could be applied to Soviet Russia’s economy and politics. Although Soviet Russia does not exist anymore, it’s strikingly astonishing that since 1989, no revolutionary group has tried to re-evaluate Stalinism now that access to this country, its archives and its people is much easier. 4 The same could be said about Eastern European former Stalinist states. No effort has been made to put together and confront the concrete experiences and theories of Stalinism in Eastern European countries by local revolutionaries and the theoretical analyses produced in the West. At least for a last check of what was wrong and right, in the analyses of Stalinism. This theoretical laziness has dangerous political consequences because it means that the bureaucratic problem inside the workers movement is strongly underestimated even by those who always denounced the bureaucracy as a class or a social layer in the Stalinist states.
What happened to Trotsky’s ideas?
Most Trotskyist groups have in fact rejected the most revolutionary insights of their political mentor. They kept the worst (the tactical recipes: like “entrism” into reformist or Stalinist parties, the faith in the magical effect of political slogans like the Constituent Assembly, the United Front or the Workers Government) and rejected the best—his revolutionary hatred of reformism and Stalinism).
At least one positive thing remained from Trotsky’s voluntarism, if one compares the fate of Trotskyist groups with the fate of the groups influenced by the Left Communist tendencies: Trotskyist groups have always attracted people (intellectuals of all kinds, but also workers) who wanted to do something concrete against capitalism and oppression, while left communist groups have attracted mostly people who despised what they called “activism” or had such a pessimistic and defeatist analysis of reality that they decided to only comment on what was happening and not intervene in political struggles. So, the concrete consequences today in France, for example, are that Trotskyist militants are well-known in their workplaces, lead strikes or at least can express their opinions publicly inside strike movements, while ultra-lefts are in marginal positions, are rarely known by their workmates and have rarely a leading role in strikes. In other words, there is a strange division of labour: Trotskyists act (with wrong political tactics and strategies) and ultra-lefts criticize them in little-read theoretical journals.
If we turn back to the negative aspects of the various forms of Trotskyisms for the last 60 years, they are so numerous that it is difficult to list them all:
- tailism towards the national liberation movements,
- tailism towards the states which were born after the success of these national liberation movements,
- tailism towards all the so-called left-wing tendencies which appeared inside the socialist and Stalinist parties,
- incapacity to analyze the basic trends of postwar capitalism,
- until the end of the 1950s (they believed in the possibility of a Third World War and never asked themselves since then why their prognosis was wrong),
- and then the incapacity to foresee the basic developments of world capitalism: oil crisis, ecological crisis, social role of women and its effects on capitalist society, the changing international role and place of Chinese and Indian capitalist powers, disappearance of the USSR and Eastern European Stalinist states, fundamental changes inside the Western working class, etc.
- incapacity to renew, modernize the socialist program both in function of the failures of the revolutions between the two world wars, and of the changes occurring inside world capitalism.
Loren to All:
Yves has supplied us with some excellent insights into the realities “on the ground” in France and to some extent in the rest of Europe. But does this material really undermine what I said? I refuse to consider myself a dinosaur. I mentioned earlier the feeling of superannuation, somewhat analogous to the way we in the 60s looked at the people still around from the 30s. Certainly, there is a “style” in Marxism that resonates with the contemporary world in which it is expressed. It actually exasperates me that the “cultural” writings on my web site get far more hits than the critique of political economy stuff. When one thinks of a figure like Hal Draper, no one could have been more out of sync with the “cultural style” of the 1960s, yet he was the only adult “over 30” hailed by the 1964 Free Speech Movement and his overall oeuvre influenced hundreds of people, beyond the small circle of militants he personally formed. Lyn Marcus, too, with his bow ties and business suits, cajoled his ex-New Left following (1000 members, including in Europe, at its peak ca. 1973) into giving up Bob Dylan and rock for Beethoven and Spinoza, and into reading Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital instead of Marcuse.
The left communist “scene” in the world today looks at the Trotskyists and says: the CPs and the SPs are parties of “state capitalism"; the unions are instruments of capital which cannot be captured for revolution; national liberation fronts etc. are reactionary, the “left wing of capital.” In fact, for the left communists, the Trotskyists themselves are the “left wing of capital,” a role they have certainly played in Chile or Nicaragua or (with the exception of LO) in France during the Mitterand years.
Around 1940, American Trotskyism had a few thousand militants. Or perhaps 2 percent of the CP’s membership. Was their social weight comparably small? How about the Minneapolis Teamsters’ Strike and the Toledo Auto-Lite strike, both in 1934, two of the most important battles of the American 30s and again, unthinkable without Trotskyists? How about the waves of wildcats against the no-strike pledge during World War II in which the (Shachtmanite) Workers’ Party, just off its split with Trotsky, played a leading role? How about CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Hal Draper, and Lyn Marcus, who at their best (we can discuss exactly where this was) influenced thousands of people in the 60s and 70s let’s not forget that Ex-Trotskyists became key figures of the post-World War II intelligentsia, on the “left” (the Daniel Bells and Irving Howes and Michael Harringtons) and on the right (some of the neo-cons).
There are of course much larger populist formations afoot today. But when I say Trotskyism remains the “team to beat,” I don’t trouble myself overmuch with these more visible, obviously bankrupt groupings. However much in the past, the question of Stalinism still hovers over the international left like a shadow, something that billions of people instinctively point to when the question of “going beyond capitalism” is raised. Isn’t going beyond capitalism still the issue, Yves? Isn’t the abolition of commodity production still the goal?
Yves to All:
Trotskyism is almost dead. Has neo-Trotskyism a future? I would give another meaning to the term “neo-Trotskyism.” In the European context, I consider the neo-Trotskyists to be those who have abandoned the following aspects of traditional Trotskyism: 1) the perspective of building a revolutionary party around their program as a long-term perspective of building parties with “undelimited programmatical frontiers"; 2) the idea of a revolution as an insurrection; 3) opposition to participation to a bourgeois government; 4) reference to Trotskyism as a main element of their political identity; 5) democratic centralism as a main reference; 6) the dictatorship of the working class. The LCR and the 4th International have made their turn towards the defense of democracy, a move which impedes them to defend the dictatorship of the working class.
In contrast, I would call Trotskyists those who in words, on paper, maintain more references to their political origins.
We have to get accustomed to the idea that “our” (at least Loren and I) past Trotskyist references discovered 40 years ago are totally un-understandable today, including for the new generations of Trotskyists and neo-Trotskyists. As Trotskyism was always deeply interlinked with Stalinism for all sorts of reasons (both as mortal enemies and competitors claiming the same heritage: the October Revolution and Lenin), it’s quite normal that as Stalinists die or change skins, Trotskyists follow the same biological and political process.
The whole generation of Trotskyist leaders who have known the October Revolution has disappeared. The next generation who lived at the time of 1936 in Spain and France and the Second World War will soon die. And the third generation in Europe has only known a long period of peaceful development (at least in Western Europe) obviously with some serious political and social crises in the 60s in Italy, and France and later in Portugal (factory occupations and self-management) but that’s already too far away to be a concrete reference for the militants who arrived in the revolutionary milieu in the late 80s, 90s and later.
As regards the other grouplets of the communist Italian, German and Dutch Left, their references are even more esoteric and unknown today, as their publications (when they are published more than twice or once a year) are almost impossible to find not to speak of their non-existent “militants” or clandestine meetings. The web may be a source of information but I doubt ideas which are not defended by frequent face to face contacts and discussions can last very long.
Dear Loren, I hope this won’t make you more nostalgic, but we are already dinosaurs.
Yves to All:
Trotskyism was built in opposition to Stalinism. Very roughly speaking it took radically two opposite directions when it faced a mass CP.
Some Trotskyists chose to see the local CP and Stalinism in general on a world scale as their main enemy. One could say roughly the same thing about people like Cornelius Castoriadis or Daniel Mothé who chose to cooperate with the journal of the CFDT trade union just after 1968 (when this former right-wing Catholic trade-union progressively evolved in the direction of a “left-wing” Social Democracy after 1968; later the CFDT evolved more and more to the right, even of Social Democracy and Castoriadis took his distance with traditional political or trade union circles).
The strong anti-Stalinism of these groups and intellectuals had a positive aspect (they did not have illusions on the exploitative nature of the Soviet bloc, they supported the 1956 Hungarian revolution, they did not fall in the trap of the Chinese cultural revolution or the Cuban revolution) but on the other hand they were not able to maintain a radical position after the crisis of the 1960s and went more and more politically to the right.
Another aspect of this strongly anti-Stalinist current: all these groups and intellectuals were very critical towards national liberation movements when everybody else hailed them in the 1960s. This was positive in a way, but it did not lead them to propose an alternative policy to immigrant workers in France or to the “colonial peoples” in French colonies.
Some Trotskyists chose to enter clandestinely the CPs (the majority of the Fourth International) or to oppose it openly (Lutte ouvrière triggered the Renault strike in 1947 which obliged the French CP to leave the government and abandon its open pro-bosses and national unity policy; after 1956 they started distributing factory bulletins in front of the factories which provoked numerous fights and even battles with the Stalinists) before 1968 but they always considered Stalinist militants and Stalinist states as “comrades in error” and at least “anti-imperialist” states which had a positive role. For them there was only one imperialist power: the USA. Therefore, they were much more critical towards Social Democracy, generally much more “anti-American” during the Cold War. They criticized the formation of the EU as an American plot (1) to struggle against the Soviet Bloc, and they supported uncritically the national liberation movements.
Today this soft anti-Stalinist tendency leads them to be allied, uncritical or soft towards the neo-Stalinists (in Germany, France, Italy at least it is the case) and to be much more anti-social-democrat that anti-CP. These tendencies openly regret the positive influence of the USSR in international politics and have illusions about Cuba, Chavez, Hamas, etc.
This primary option (who is our main enemy—Social Democracy or Stalinism?) may help to explain many splits and differences inside the Trotskyist movement. I took this idea from Philippe Raynaud’s book (L’extrême gauche plurielle) who applies it to France and I tried to apply it internationally.
But we have to go further. In the countries where the CP was not a mass party, or was not the hegemonic force inside the workers movement, the Trotskyists had a big problem. They did not have the same monstrous enemy (Stalinism) to define themselves against.
But maybe we can apply the same division between those who decided to be, from the start, ferocious anti-Stalinists and to ally themselves with Social Democracy, the Labour Party or whatever moderate “anti-communist” forces and those who decided to be more or less soft on the Russian camp. The Spartacists and the American SWP being a good example of this soft anti-Stalinism in the Anglo-Saxon world where the CPs were never a significant force. And this soft anti-Stalinism has progressively led them to be a pro-Stalinist force today.
As regards the British SWP (first called IS) it grew inside the Labour Party as a strong anti-Stalinist and Luxemburgist group, but strangely enough when it left the Labour Party, when it grew by itself and later when it made its “Leninist” turn, the positive aspects of their anti-Stalinism progressively disappeared: they started supporting a third worldist party in Portugal in 1974 (the PRP), then they discovered the radical aspects of political Islam and today they look like any confused Maoist group of the 1960s: third worldist, anti-working class, building the Respect Coalition with the MAB, a group linked to the ultra-reactionary and anti-Communist Muslim Brothers. In international politics the SWP and its International Socialist Tendency defend the same so-called “progressive anti-imperialism” that the USSR, the Stalinist CPs or the Maoists defended in the 1960s and 1970s.
It would be very useful if other people could add some information to this picture or criticize its flaws. Or propose another picture. Obviously, it is a way to see large tendencies in the International Trotskyist movement and they are many national exceptions to the general picture. But I think it can help us to stay less focused on the past political heritage of the “revolutionary” groups, their so-called Trotskyism, and interpret their evolution in relation to the evolution of the big forces of the “workers movement” (Social Democracy and Stalinism) and of the powers and States (today for example Russia, Iran and Venezuela) competing with American and European imperialism on a world scale.
Yves to All:
To start with I think there is a little misunderstanding. We (Loren and I and may be others who would like to join the club) are not dinosaurs because we are asking ourselves how to change the world, we are dinosaurs because (or if) we think young militants today have the same references as we had 30 or 40 years ago. That’s one of the reasons I attacked the Situationists so much, because they are the worst theoretical link between the experiences of the 60s and today that I can imagine; with their confused writings about “alienation,” “consumer society” and “spectacle industry” they provide intellectual justifications to all those who don’t want to fight against this society today: the exploited are so dumb and alienated, the system’s ideology is so pervasive and subtle, let’s just have a bohemian lifestyle and be proud of our isolated esthetic radicality.
This is why we are dinosaurs if we discuss Trotskyism today, as if it had not radically changed.
The British SWP has not used all these Trotskyist slogans in its daily propaganda for years, if it has ever used them in Socialist Worker or its leaflets, which I doubt.
According to Loren “Trotskyists think that the trade unions are workers’ organizations that can become revolutionary with the correct leaders"
We are dinosaurs if we think Trotskyists are still worried by socialist revolution; and we are dinosaurs if we think that they are worried by transforming the trade unions into revolutionary organisations.
Yves to All:
“Isn’t going beyond capitalism still the issue?” asks Loren.
Yes, but not in the terms posed by the Third or the Fourth International or the Communist Left.
Obviously knowing the past is important. The journal Ni patrie, ni frontières reproduces and translates old texts in almost every issue. I agree that there are “trans-generational” problems, concepts, etc. as Loren writes, but we also need to produce NEW answers to these old questions. Often the left is blocked by old answers—when it knows them, which today is less and less the case (the radical left culture including among the anarchists and Trotskyists is much more oriented towards trendy sociologists, like Bourdieu or critics of imperialism, like Chomsky, than towards Trotsky, Marx, Bakunin or Proudhon.
“Isn’t the abolition of commodity production still the goal?” asks Loren.
Well for the mass of the no-global young militants, for the Trotskyist young sympathizers, NO, unfortunately. And we are dinosaurs if we discuss as if we had a common culture with these guys even if they are vaguely interested in the radical left.
That’s the big difference with the 60s and 70s. We have lost (and this is not our choice) a common ground of discussion, a common set of references, with the rest of the revolutionary left and even with the reformist left.
We have kept and cherished very important ideas, but the young generation does not care. And not because it is interested in “cultural politics,” as Loren writes (although rap or comic books or movies are a source of politicization of the youth), but because it is engaged in massive humanitarian actions, from the defence of illegal workers (you may have heard about the RESF network in France) to solidarity work in Palestine or elsewhere. International solidarity work in the 60s and 70s was 100 percent political. Today it is totally centered around humanitarian micro-projects and refuses to discuss political issues—like, for example, what are the political forces in Israël, Lebanon and Palestine, outside the ones the media talk about? Are there political discussions inside the Left of these countries, etc.). If we deal with Third Worldists (that is, in modern terms, partisans of the no global movement) today as we did 40 years ago, then we are dinosaurs.
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Although Lenin did make the observation about Luxemburg being an eagle, he didn’t do so until February of 1922. A few days after her assassination in 1919, along with Liebknecht, he had only this to say about them at a demonstration in Moscow to mourn their deaths:
"Today the bourgeoisie and the social-traitors are jubilating in Berlin-they have succeeded in murdering Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Ebert and Scheidemann, who for four years led the workers to the slaughter for the sake of depredation, have now assumed the role of butchers of the proletarian leaders. The example of the German revolution proves that “democracy” is only a camouflage for bourgeois robbery and the most savage violence.
Death to the butchers!”
Not another word! The eagle comment of 1922 could never make up for Lenin’s icy detachment of 1919.
Furthermore, Lenin’s 1922 observations about Luxemburg, in the document titled “Notes of a Publicist,” only amounted to a paragraph in several pages of assorted comments about different matters. This is the relevant one. It should be noted that Lenin could not resist listing what he thought were Luxemburg’s numerous serious errors (see italics below).
"Paul Levi now wants to get into the good graces of the bourgeoisie—and, consequently, of its agents, the Second and the Two-and-a-Half Internationals—by republishing precisely those writings of Rosa Luxemburg in which she was wrong. We shall reply to this by quoting two lines from a good old Russian fable: “Eagles may at times fly lower than hens, but hens can never rise to the height of eagles.” Rosa Luxemburg was mistaken on the question of the independence of Poland; she was mistaken in 1903 in her appraisal of Menshevism; she was mistaken on the theory of the accumulation of capital; she was mistaken in July 1914, when, together with Plekhanov, Vandervelde, Kautsky and others, she advocated unity between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; she was mistaken in what she wrote in prison in 1918 (she corrected most of these mistakes at the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919 after she was released). But in spite of her mistakes she was—and remains for us—an eagle. And not only will Communists all over the world cherish her memory, but her biography and her complete works (the publication of which the German Communists are inordinately delaying, which can only be partly excused by the tremendous losses they are suffering in their severe struggle) will serve as useful manuals for training many generations of Communists all over the world. “Since August 4, 1914, German Social-Democracy has been a stinking corpse"—this statement will make Rosa Luxemburg’s name famous in the history of the international working-class movement. And, of course, in the backyard of the working-class movement, among the dung heaps, hens like Paul Levi, Scheidemann, Kautsky and all that fraternity will cackle over the mistakes committed by the great Communist. To every man his own."↩︎
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Edward Thompson, The Poverty of Theory. New York: 1978.↩︎
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Porto Alegre was the site in Brazil where the first meeting of the World Social Forum was held in 2001.↩︎
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I am not certain that this citation is an adequate response to Yves’ comment but his views regarding a Marxist analysis of the Soviet Union deserve serious consideration. See Paresh Chattopadhyay, The Marxist Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience: Essay in the Critique of Political Economy. Westport: 1994.↩︎