A review of “Trotsky, Trotskyism, Trotskyists” by the Communist Workers’ Organisation of Great Britain

Our comrades from the Communist Workers’ Organisation (CWO) have published, in autumn 2000, an extremely well documented pamphlet on Leon Trotsky and the movement that continues his work and name, Trotskyism.

Since the disappearance of the Soviet Bloc at the end of the 1980’s, the ideologues of the ruling class have been endlessly celebrating the death of Communism and now claim that capitalism represents the unsurpassable horizon of human destiny. Francis Fukayama even proclaimed it to be the “end of history”. If the Western press still lashes out regularly against the totalitarian dinosaurs that are China, North Korea, Vietnam or Cuba, this certainly isn’t to force them to relieve the burden of the horribly exploited workers of these countries, but rather to convince the working class here of the futility of any revolt or hope of revolutionary change. According to our Masters, a clique or a dictatorial and bloody party would inevitably hijack the revolution.

However, the current of the Communist Left, to which we belong, demonstrated a long time ago, that the death of workers’ power, founded by the October 1917 revolution, didn’t date from 1989, but from way back in the 1920’s.

It was caused by the throttling and decisive failure of working class struggles in Europe during that period. As was noted by the great internationalist Rosa Luxembourg:

The question of socialism could only be posed in Russia.

The answer precluded any kind of so-called “national socialism”, completely at odds with the whole theoretical tradition of Marxism. The fate of the revolution depended entirely on its extension to the rest of Europe.

The total isolation of the Russian Revolution thus caused it to pass from the claws of tsarism, to temporary workers’ power only to end up in the trap of a new form of capitalism. A new exploiting class, based on the bureaucrats of the rotting former Communist Party, stripped the workers’ councils of all power. While private ownership of the means of production was abolished, they were not socialised but merely nationalised. Exploitation, money, wage labour and the market continued to exist. Only the Communist Left and some anarchistic currents ⁽¹⁾ came to understand that the USSR had become a different form of an essentially capitalist mode of production. But unfortunately, the myth that the Stalinized USSR was socialist or proletarian and an identification of nationalisation with socialism became the grand illusion of an epoch, the pipe dream of many a generation and the tragedy of 20th century.

Trotsky, saviour of socialism?

Because of the horror of Stalinism and its ultimate demise, there exists a whole historical school claiming that the legendary figure of Trotsky, tireless leader of the workers’ councils during the 1905 revolution and martyred by Stalin in 1940, aided by the fragmented succession of his many epigones, preserved the honour of Marxism. The proof of this would be the ostensible opposition of Trotskyism to the horrible travesty of communism, imposed on the working class by Stalinism and the whole slough of its slimy offspring: Titoism, Khrushchevism, Maoism, Eurocommunism, Castroism, Djoutcheism ⁽²⁾, etc. However, the pamphlet of our CWO comrades has the merit of placing the man and his movement in their proper historical and political perspective. Of course, this is not one of those Stalinist collections of fabrications, heavily distributed throughout Canada, by the groups of the “Marxist-Leninist” movement of twenty years ago. ⁽³⁾ Clearly, Trotsky never was the ultra-left “agent provocateur” nor the nazi agent imagined by Stalin’s devoted henchmen.

But, the documentation and arguments of the CWO do demonstrate and prove that Trotsky never was the valiant knight of the anti-bureaucratic struggle, nor a new proletarian Prometheus spitting in the face of the gods of the Stalinist Olympus. Thus, far from being critical of the new Russian state capitalism, Trotsky was, on the contrary, one of the most skilful among its first architects. He did not become a “left oppositionist” until 1923, once his star in the bureaucracy had started to fade. From that time on, Trotsky’s struggle within the Party (i.e. at this point, within the state), took the form of an opposition based on alliances, with or against Stalin, according to his interests at the moment, within the framework of numerous internal struggles of the new “red” bourgeoisie. Even after his expulsion from the USSR, in January 1929, Trotsky obstinately remained, until his death in Coyoacan, Mexico, ⁽⁴⁾, a fierce defender of the Stalinized capitalist state.

Indeed, to his last breath and in spite of the horrible fate reserved for his family and close relations remaining in the USSR, Trotsky upheld the alleged proletarian character of this state; a workers state that he qualified as “degenerate”, but would call to defend to the bitter end, including by military means. He would write,

The nationalisation of the land, the means of industrial production, transport and exchange, together with the monopoly of foreign trade constitute the basis of the Soviet social structure. Through these relations, established by the proletarian revolution, the nature of the Soviet Union as a proletarian state is for us basically defined. ⁽⁵⁾

For Trotsky:

capital could only be capital if it was in private hands. ⁽⁶⁾

The exploitation of the Soviet workers did not matter, the internal market did not matter, the appropriation of state power by a body foreign to the proletariat did not matter either, nor did the extreme brutality of its dictatorship. Reality and the principles of Marxism be dammed, Trotsky had definitively resolved the question... The USSR was a workers’ state because of the extent of its nationalisations. However, already in 1878, while writing Anti-Dühring, Friedrich Engels had shown that state property, in and of itself, did not eliminate the capitalist nature of the relations of production. Not only does Marxism recognize that a State can act as a “collective capitalist”, but moreover, it considers that the economic base determines the superstructure of society. The characterization of the capitalist state in the USSR as being a workers’ state was thus flawed from A to Z.

This is no small matter, because it determined Trotsky’s faithful support for the imperialist policies of the USSR and contributed immensely to disorienting and disintegrating the revolutionary workers’ movement. It served as a left cover to the Saturn-like ⁽⁷⁾ Soviet nomenclature and the counter-revolutionary runts it spawned. The political responsibility of Trotsky for the failure of socialism in the 20th century is thus enormous.

“The great renegade with a peacock’s tail”. That’s how the Italian Fraction of the International Communist Left ended up calling Trotsky. ⁽⁸⁾ The harshness of this characterization will probably scandalize several Marxists politically nourished at the trough of one of the various stillborn Fourth Internationals, proclaimed by Trotsky in September 1938.

And yet, even the final martyrdom of the ex-revolutionary nearly two years later, could not lessen this appreciation. Whether by entryism ⁽⁹⁾, imposed on his weak troops after 1934, by his disastrous Spanish policy in 1936, by his Transitional Programme of 1938 ⁽¹⁰⁾ or by the many opportunistic zigzags which constitute his theoretical stock in trade, Trotsky put into place all the major aspects of his, ultimately, reformist platform.

For him:

The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership. ⁽¹¹⁾

This formula, taken as gospel by the dispersed rump of his fragmented Fourth International ⁽¹²⁾, ignores the fundamental conditions allowing the rebirth of the revolutionary workers’ party.

To start off with, it’s a real slap in the face to more than a generation of revolutionary workers who had witnessed in their very lifetime, the passing into the bourgeois camp of two formerly revolutionary leaderships, those of the Second and Third Internationals. Even then, Trotsky still believed these parties could be won for the revolution. This disqualified him and his “International” in advance from offering any leadership to the working class.

This follows from Trotsky’s conception of the revolutionary party. According to him, more than just an important tool, the party assumes the form of a “deus ex machina”, ⁽¹³⁾ which, by the virtue of its members’ sheer determination and the tactical brilliance of its leadership, must surmount the historic impasse of humanity.

In closing, Trotsky’s conception of the party has as its corollary his defense of the Stalinist system. In one or the other, Trotsky’s presence at the helm would have saved the day... The peacock’s plumage is clearly showing from beneath the master’s frock. Even while covering himself with the feathers of his revolutionary of Trotskyism, past, Trotsky’s legacy to history is that of a would be Stalin.

(1) See for example, the Russian anarchist theorist Archinov

(2) A specifically North Korean expression of “Marxism-Leninism”.

Real anticommunist bogeymen, the petty bosses of Pyongyang have nothing to do with Marx or Lenin.

(3) One can still find some of these at local used bookshops, notable among these are: “Trotskyism: Counter Revolution In Disguise” by M.J. Olgin and by his Canadian counterpart, H.E. Bronson: “The Renegade Revolutionaries”.

(4) He was assassinated by Ramon Mercader, an agent of the GPU, Stalin’s secret police.

(5) Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, 1935.

(6) Revolutionary Perspectives, # 20, p34, CWO.

(7) In classical Roman mythology, Saturn, god of agriculture, had the deplorable habit of devouring his own children.

(8) Bilan, # 46, December 1937-January 1938

(9) This term refers to the criminal return to social democracy, accessory to the colossal butchery of 1914- 18, but also to the cowardly assassinations of the leaders of the Spartakist uprising of January 1919, Karl Liebnecht and Rosa Luxembourg.

(10) The original title was: “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International: The Mobilization of the Masses around Transitional Demands to Prepare the Conquest of Power.” The book is in fact a plan of ‘radical’ measures not very different from those proposed by his contemporary, the British economist Keynes, (major public works, nationalisation of the banks, etc). The difference being that the subterfuges of Trotsky’s programme were supposed to lead to “the conquest of the masses” at last gathered under the extremely faded banner of his “International”.

(11) Leon Trotsky, the Transitional Program, Labor Publications, 1981.

(12) Even if Canada is not a particularly strong bastion it is interesting to note that the largest organized group of the Canadian “far left” is undoubtedly the International Socialists (I.S.), affiliated to the British Socialist Workers’ Party of the late Trotskyist ideologue Tony Cliff. This group serves as a left cover fort the NDP and has probably outnumbered the fossilized Communist Party. There also exists a whole gamut of other groups claiming the mantle of the ex-revolutionary.
From memory, there are the Communist League (more and more Castroite), Socialist Action, Socialist Alternative, the Trotskyist League, the Bolshevik Tendency, the Communist Workers’ Group, Socialist Challenge/Gauche Socialiste, the Freedom Socialist Party, New Socialist, the Socialist Equality Party and Democracy and Socialism (possibly defunct). Each of these groups claims to defend, as closely as possible, the many zigs and zags of Trotsky’s tortuous political legacy.

(13) Latin phrase meaning “god from the machine”. In ancient Greek theatre, at the end of the play the god would descend to save the day.