[Final Part of the Discussion Documents „World Perspectives“, 25 June 1974]
The last six decades have seen the movement of the masses towards revolution in country after country, and continent after continent. It has been a period of revolution and counter-revolution unexampled in history. No other epoch in history can show a like movement of the oppressed classes in the bloody history of mankind. Yet,despite the fact that the working class, proving this in action, is the most heroic and self-sacrificing class, and a class united in a common struggle by the very processes of industry itself, only for a matter of a few years in Russia, between 1917 and 1923,did the proletariat succeed in capturing power and holding it in a workers’ democracy.
The twilight and decay of capitalism pushes the proletariat into the struggle to change society, Exceptionally favourable revolutionary situations, one after the other, one revolution after another, have ended in defeat. Even worse have been the victories of the counter-revolution despite the potential power of the working class. The frustration of the revolution and the successes of the fascist or Bonapartist military-police counter revolution have been entirely due to the policies of the reformist and Stalinist leaderships.
Trotsky, in his last writings, dealt with the question of „Class, Party and leadership“ in a way that has never been excelled in Marxist literature. It summed up the ideas of all the great Marxist teachers on this question. Without a revolutionary party and a revolutionary leadership, it is not possible for the proletarian revolution to succeed and the working class to gain power.
After the writings of Trotsky on this question over a number of decades, even those who have not the foggiest idea of the dialectical method of Lenin and Trotsky, have – formally – grasped this point. From Mandel, through Healy and Lambert to Posadas and belatedly, Tony Cliff, they are busy constructing the phantom image of such a party – in their own image. Each more blatantly sectarian than the other.
It is an interesting fact that all of them in 1974 – and of course previous decades – repeat word for word (especially the errors that Lenin made in this early work and later repudiated) the ideas of “What Is To Be Done“. This is as if the history of the last 50 years could be undone and that correct agitation (most often they […] incorrect) in the factories and workplaces would result in the creation of a mass revolutionary party.
Every one of these petit-bourgeois tendencies regards (secretly, but sometimes openly) the working class with scorn, as an ignorant mass only waiting the call from these self appointed messiahs, None of them examines the real process of history and tries ,on that basis, to orient their forces in that way to penetrate the active masses. They are furthest from the materialist Marxist method. They have learned nothing from the experience of the working class since the Second World War. The lesson of the immediate post-war – the most revolutionary period internationally since 1917-1921 […].
They have not understood the process of awakening of the proletariat to political activity, which is very different to that of the students and petit-bourgeoisie. The petit-bourgeoisie, as an extremely erratic and mercurial class, without the stability, endurance and stubbornness of the workers, can make amazingly speedy and wide swings to revolutionary or counter-revolutionary parties within months and sometimes weeks. This when their semi-sheltered economic basis breaks down or their standards are steeply lowered. The mass of petit-bourgeois swing between support of the bourgeoisie and its parties and sometimes the proletariat and its parties at a time of economic stress. It is fickle and prone to change as the movement of quicksilver.
Perhaps it is not accidental in this regard, that,as a sensitive barometer of changes in the mood of society, students in many countries – for a short season – moved in sizeable numbers over to many of the fashionable sects. For a time, the idea of being “the vanguard“ competed with the other interests of students.
The movement of students has been a harbinger of the coming revolutionary wave and of the fact that the womb of capitalism is pregnant with revolutions. The best students can be won to the banner of Marxism and play an outstanding role in the revolutionary movement, but not in the sects, where their activity will be barren. The sects poison them with all the ills of ultra-leftism and they in turn reinforce the worst aspects of the sectarianism of the sects. They act as emigrés from the masses, in their own countries.
On the other hand, the best students will learn from the workers, as well as teach them. This can only be done constructively when they are connected to the mass labour movement, with all its faults and defects, but with its living connection with the workers.
A movement, like the sects, which has its main basis in the students and other petit-bourgeois layers of the population, can never succeed in attracting a mass basis within the working class. Even a small grouping of workers would be afflicted with all the diseases of ultra-leftism – and of opportunism – stifling in a stale atmosphere without the oxygen supplied by contact with the mass movement.
None of these tendencies has made a re-appraisal of the history of the 20th century. In not a single case historically, in industrialised countries, has the revolutionary movement appeared except out of the old revolutionary movement – which had ceased to be revolutionary – or out of the old movement, even when from its inception it was reformist.
In a sense even the Bolshevik Party came from the old Social-Democracy. It was a faction of the Russian Social-Democrats until 1912. Its history up to that period had been one of ceaseless attempts at unity with the Mensheviks – in the same Party! Thus although it developed with the growth of Social-Democracy in the revolutionary epoch of the 1900’s, and appeared with the accidental split of 1903, it grew out of Social Democracy.
In fact, until 1914, Lenin considered the Bolsheviks as a Russian faction equivalent to that of Kautsky in Germany. „What Is To Be Done“, whose mistakes, the authorship of which belongs to Kautsky – the idea that the proletariat is only capable of trade union consciousness and that only „intellectuals from outside“ can bring socialist consciousness to the benighted and backward working class – was written long before the split, even the beginning of the split, as a pamphlet for the united Social Democracy. The model of the party, in that material, was the German Social Democratic Party and its methods, which were to be transferred to Russian soil and of course in relation to Russian conditions.
(Here it should be noted, as in everything that Lenin wrote, that there is an enormous mass of valuable material. But to imagine that by a repetition of Lenin’s formulas for work and agitation, a magic carpet has been given,whereby a revolutionary party will be automatically wafted into existence, to he who sits on it, is to fail to understand the concrete method of Lenin, and the history of Bolshevism and the working class, during the 20th century).
In most countries, the forces that formed the Communist International in its early stages came from the old organisations of the Social Democracy (explained in previous documents).
This even on the basis of the Russian revolution. It reflected the attractive power and the great authority of the revolution and its leaders. Since then, decades of opportunism and crimes by the Stalinist leaders have overlaid with a thick wall of slime the great traditions of Marxism-Leninism. In addition, the great historical events of this epoch have been defeats of the workers (it is true, due to the leadership) and victories in a bastardised Stalinist form. Even the victory of the Soviet Union in the war, which has the greatest significance historically in weakening the whole international system of capitalism, nevertheless for a period further strengthened the Stalinist bureaucracy. In addition were the abolition of capitalism and landlordism in Eastern. Europe and China.
There was an historical detour through Mao, Tito and Castro. These socialist aberrations, to this day, have only been explained adequately by our tendency. But the effect was to further reinforce the eclipse of the fundamental ideas of Marxism.
The mistakes of the so-called Fourth International can be explained only by the isolation of these movements from the working class and the fact that even the advanced workers and those intellectuals looking for ideas, found the pull of Maoism and Castroism as a strong magnet. In fact, it is far from accidental that the leaders also of these tendencies succumbed to the pressures of these peasant-based movements. They could not stand against this enormous historical hurricane and even today eclectically base their ideas, methods and tactics on it. They have followed the Stalinists and reformists, in reality in the complete repudiation of the tactics and methods of Marxism, of Lenin and Trotsky.
Even at the present time, the effect of this peculiar historical detour, has been to wipe out – for the masses – the authority of Trotskyism – i.e. the Marxism of the present epoch. The abysmal mistakes and degeneration of the cliques was due to their incapacity to maintain the traditions and ideas of Marxism, in spite of the Stalinist, reformist and capitalist tides in the boom. This degeneration made it impossible for them to keep the ship of revolution, battered by the unfavourable tides, afloat till more favourable tides came to push it forward.
Thus they prostrated themselves before every petit-bourgeois tendency and idea. Not only adopting themselves to Castroism, Maoism and Titoism as a programme for backward countries, but for advanced countries also. (Thus their pathetic antics in the Portuguese revolution).
As the latest word in modern thought, they have put forward methods and ideas already demolished by Marx, Pre-Marxist ideas of terrorism associated really with the policies of Bakuninism, ultra-leftism equivalent to 3rd period Stalinism, urban guerrillaism, lumpenism, instant direct actionism. A whole series of ideas and methods refuted meticulously and thoroughly by Marx and Engels and later „finally“ by Lenin and Trotsky, have been revived as immediate panaceas to the problems facing the working class.
This is because of the lack of an authoritative Marxist organisation and theory. The young – and many not-so-young – petit-bourgeois radicals awakening to revolutionary ideas, want simple answers and a sure-fire short-cut to the revolution.
Decades of capitalist economic upswing in the industrialised countries, on the one hand, and the distortion of the revolution in the backward countries on the other, bore with enormous weight on a young and weak tendency. It required the flexibility of the dialectical method, to maintain the fundamental traditions of Bolshevism on the one hand, and orientate to the new (although all the problems were in the germ in Russia, and it required only an extension of Trotsky’s method – taking into account all the factors involved to understand them) – phenomena of Stalinism on the other. Failure to do so has meant the collapse of these tendencies, as a serious factor, in the movement in the working class.
Only an implacable maintenance of the theoretical ideas, as was done by Lenin and Trotsky in the black years of reaction, could have kept the Marxist tendency relatively intact, and prepared for the inevitability of a new advance. In the years before the war, under far less difficult conditions, it was not easy even for the theoretical genius, Trotsky, with his great authority, to hold the forces together, in an adverse historical situation. Under the pressure of isolation and hostile currents end classes, there were a series of splits. But the a cadre was maintained and strengthened. Above all, the basic ideas of Leninism were always strengthened and shown in new aspects. In that way, Trotsky hoped to prepare for the future, The homunculi and epigones who captured the leadership of the movement abandoned this stern and rigorous method – and consequently, over a period, abandoned everything but the pretence of being Marxists.
They bowed in the most humiliating fashion, to the accomplished fact, and turned themselves into professional, unpaid, and ignored attorneys and advisers to all the Stalinist leaders in the Stalinist countries. They lost their political balance and believed that „new“ methods and policies – away from the „conservative“ and „old-fashioned“ methods and „formulas“ of Lenin and Trotsky – would give them a way to the rapid winning of mass support.
The fact that fundamental principles, worked out by Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, underlay all the immediate policies they adopted, was not understood by these heroes of „new methods“ and „new policies“. Like the bourgeoisie, the Stalinists and reformists, they worshipped at the altar of accomplished „facts” They adapted themselves purely empirically to the immediate realities, and were thus lost to the movement. The disappointing reality led them to abandon all perspectives of revolution in the industrialised countries. Their „cadres“, thin enough in numbers, degenerated politically because of lack of perspectives and understanding of the revolutionary process.
Under pressures of two generations of theoretical bankruptcy, and the pressures of capitalism and the reformist powers; under pressure of the economic upswing, the CP and Social Democratic Party leadership completed their degeneration. But they retained the support of the masses, under the peculiar conditions – and in fact the organisation of the class, trade unions and parties – increased their power more than at any other time in history.
Mandel and Co. did not have the support of the masses, but they lost what can compensate for it for a period, the precious heritage of revolutionary theory. If the ideas are right, then in time, with correct policies, tactics and strategy, the masses can be won, and inevitably will be won.
Our tendency scrupulously maintained the treasury of Marxism bequeathed by Lenin and Trotsky. This inevitably brought us into conflict over and over again with these tendencies. Not enabled to answer the arguments, they resorted to the methods of exclusion, In this they were historically correct. Marxism and petit-bourgeois empiricism and impressionism cannot co-exist indefinitely in the same organisation. Perhaps the best of these tendencies is the SWP, which manages to arrive at correct, or almost correct, conclusions – about 10 or 20 years late. But like the Stalinists does a turn-about without explanation or conclusions and in this way lays the basis for future mistakes. Such a method is the worst one for the education of cadres. It is the opposite of the method of Lenin and Trotsky, in creating the revolutionary party, revolutionary tradition and revolutionary theory. „Correct“ conclusions, stealthily putting forward the opposite of what was said yesterday, is the means of miseducating and mystifying the cadres. It is not for nothing that Lenin, declared that without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. Changing course in this way, which is the main thing possessed in common by all these ultra-left, and opportunist, tendencies, makes certain that they stagger from one mistaken course to the opposite mistake. They are a caricature of the pre-war Stalinists who showed the same process in this connection, But the Stalinists had the masses, or a big section of the masses, under their control. These are dead tendencies, capable of operating only on the. periphery of the Labour and TU movement.
If we have turned our backs decisively on all the petit-bourgeois cliques and sects, where will come the forces for the New International ? The history of the Communist International provides the answer. The mass forces of Marxism will come from the old organisations of the proletariat.
With the revolutionary wave which has begun in the industrialised and semi-industrialised countries, it will provoke a differentiation in the mass organisation of the proletariat.
The beginning of the revolution in Portugal and Greece and soon more profoundly in Spain, marks a definitive period of the weakening of reaction on a European and international scale.
The crisis in politics in Britain, Japan, W. Europe and America, in its turn will provoke crises in the organisations of the proletariat. This will be so in the CPs, but more especially in the Social Democracy. Already, almost as a laboratory example, has been the vomiting out of the extreme right wing in Australia, Japan, Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark and Italy.
This marks the beginning of the process of differentiation, at a faster or slower pace, on the basis of events of all, or nearly all, the parties of Social Democracy. But without the active intervention of Marxism within these parties, the process can run itself into the desert sands of left reformism, semi-centrism and centrism. To repeat the process as a vicious circle – as for a period the Social Democracy turns to „normal“; or there are barren and untimely splits, as there have been in the post-war period, which end in sterility.
But the mass Stalinist parties and even the small ones, are subject to the same; process, despite their harder bureaucratic structure; they too are in a revolutionary epoch and will not be able to hold their ranks intact … They are no longer the monolithic parties of the past. They will split and split again and extrude centrist, or semi-centrist, tendencies,
The experience of Italy is an instructive one in this connection. The right wing of the Socialist Party split away, but there was not a Marxist nucleus to take advantage of it. The SP split again, and again. The opportunity was lost and the rump of the PSIUP was cabured by the Communist Party; the Socialist Party moving left, and being taken in tow by the CP – and then moving right again. The Communist Party has had many splits, moving in a centrist direction, or in the case of the Manifesto group, anarchist, in organisation and left reformist in policies. A whole galaxy of tiny ultra-left and Maoist and anarchist groups has proliferated. In this sense testifying to the lack of a viable Marxist tendency.
This is the mirror of the inevitable processes in the future. Under the hammer blows of revolution and revolutionary situations, both the Social Democracy and the Communist Party will inevitably be involved in a series of crises.
With the vomiting out of the right wing, the social democracy will then be in a process of ferment and of discussion. To hold their members they will have to make token moves to the Left, and even more left verbal gestures. This will provide an enormously fruitful field for the ideas of Marxism.
The Stalinist parties too will be subject to enormous stress and strain and similar tendencies will begin to appear.
Both in the C.P. and S.P. processes like those in the pre-war social-democracy will begin to take place the formation of the independent Social Democracy Party in Germany and the S.A.P. at a later stage, The I.L.P. in Britain and similar phenomena.
The processes among the youth, always a portent of future processes, within the Socialist Party are an anticipation of the future explosive awakening of the ranks in the Socialist Parties – and the Communist Parties.
The eight or possibly ten sections of our movement – this too is a harbinger of future processes and the organisation of groupings within the Socialist Parties – and the Communist Parties too.
From the ranks of the mass organisations will come future cadres of Trotskyism. As we begin to gain sizeable groupings – also perhaps from the organisations of „Trotskyism“ younger elements will possibly be won. They will require, as experience demonstrates, even more re-education than fresh members of the social-democracy because of the miseducation of the sects. Even from the Maoists, it is possible that younger elements, workers can be re-educated and assimilated.
The cadres will come in the main from the youth, but also the Trade Unions and as the crisis develops the S.P. and C.P.
But at the beginning of revolutionary events it will be the organisations of the C.P. and S.P. who will stand at the head of the proletariat.
We have the fresh lesson of Portugal and now we can add in anticipation Greece the C.P. will emerge immediately immensely more powerful – organisationally. Tomorrow, on an even bigger scale there will be the movement in Spain, The S.P, and C.P. will have the support of the overwhelming majority of the workers.
Our tendency, decades ago, predicted this process in Spain and Portugal. The revolution in the latter has demonstrated the correctness of our analysis and method.
In the immediate pre-war period Trotsky had looked confidently to an overpowering revolutionary wave – the troughs of which would he succeeded by an even higher wave of radicalism and of revolution. This in the post-war period was smothered by the Stalinist Parties – and more important the post-war economic upswing.
Pre-war the revolutionary movement of the workers were stifled by Fascist reaction. Now Fascism, as a mass movement is exceptionally weak. Military- police states have Collapsed in Portugal and Greece. Tomorrow Franco-Spain, now a Bonapartist military police state, will come crashing down, either by an anticipatory move from the top, as in Portugal, or a revolution from the bottom.
Now in international scale one wave after the other of revolution, or of radical mass action, will follow upon another.
There will be troughs of reaction to be followed again by a higher wave of radical action: this will be „Permanent Revolution“ in action in the main Capitalist countries, especially of Europe;The masses, especially the working class, are not stupid: They will test and re-test their organisations, again and again: They will learn and assimilate on the lessons of experience and of great events.
The next decade is such a period as Trotsky was waiting for. The Spanish revolution of 1931-1937 will be the model for all Europe.
But on the fringes of the mass organisations nothing will be accomplished. Only within, and as part of the mass organisations will the tendency grow. On the background of such a perspective our tendency can have a swift growth. The very modest gains we have made internationally are seeds of the future in the hothouse of the revolution can have a swift and stormy growth. Young cadres, in many cases in age and contact with revolutionary ideas , can learn and grow rapidly in such an atmosphere. A generation of experience can be compressed into half a decade. The fussing and fooling of the self styled „Fourths“ in creating „Revolutionary“ parties, has not the least hope of success. History will not even notice them, except as a footnote, like the Maoists and Guerrillaists who have done so mush damage in the industrialised – and for that matter – the ex-colonial countries.
Before the war the big Bukharinite – Brandlerite – Lovestonite parties and factions disappeared without leaving anything behind. Some were mass parties, but on the basis of false theories and perspectives, they have vanished, leaving only their names behind. ‘Once the mass movement really begins that will be the fate, also, of the Maoists and the „Fourth“ist sects. We must combat their ideas, particularly in our internal material, but it is far more important to turn our attention to the ideas and processes in the mass movement. Trotsky wrote that it required decades to educate a revolutionary leadership. But each year in the coming period will be equivalent to a decade of the past. Learning and- assimilating the lessons of the great events which impend, we can create an international cadre.
Young cadres, who will be steeled in action. In this connection the British section has a responsibility and a duty because they possess more leading cadres and resources. They must participate in and help all the sections, of course, scrupulously acting in the best traditions of the Communist International of Lenin and Trotsky. The publication of the main documents of the tendency in six languages must be undertaken. We must have a printed International bulletin in the shortest space of time in other languages. The Bulletin must be used for theoretical material, for polemics and education. We must publish the principal articles, perspectives and material of the other sections. Theory and controversial material must be published and discussed as a means of education of the entire membership internationally. Some material translated and printed in Britain.
Our Task is the congenial, if difficult, one of organising new parties and a new International. This can only be done concretely on the basis of correct theory and correct perspectives. Many mistakes will be made internationally but by common correction, and common experiences, we will correct them, and raise the whole movement to a higher level.
On this basis we will create parties, that basing themselves on the real experiences of the masses, will lead them to victory in the coming period of revolutions.
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