by Anton Holberg
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The Anti-imperialist Camp´s editorial board”
By referring to what Comrade Harsh Thakor claims is a criticism of Trotzkyism as `misunderstanding` I recognize that many comrades calling themselves Maoists are subjectively sincere revolutionaries, and though we don`t know him personally we reckon that Comrade Thakor most probably is one of them. However I feel that it is necessary to correct his misinterpretations of what he calls `Trotzkyism` and at the same time to reject some of his own ideas which I think he falsely declares to be Marxist.
As will be soon become clear I regard Maoism as a form of Stalinism, not because Maoists are uncritical of Joseph Stalin but because they share basic theoretical positions which Trotzkyists regard as fundamentally anti-proletarian and hence anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist.
In the case of Cde. Harsh Thakor he begins his criticism of Trotzky with the common Stalinist slanders about him having been a Menshevik and his alleged rejection of the revolutionary proletarian party. Those who regard themselves as Trotzkyists in general refer to Trotzky`s legacy as it has been established since 1917. It is true that in earlier years Trotzky did not join the Bolshevik party since he falsely believed that the two factions of the `Socialdemocratic Workers Party of Russia` could be reunited.
However in 1917 and in particular after Lenin came forward with his April thesis which rejected the appeasing line of some `old Bolsheviks` – among them Stalin – in face of the bourgeois provisional government Trotzky joined the Bolshevik Party and in particular Lenin to organize and later defend the first – and only successful – proletarian revolution. To claim that Trotzky – at least the Trotzky of 1917 and more so of all the following years up to his murder by a Stalinist hitman – rejected the crucial role of the proletarian revolutionary party for the advancement of the proletariat to power is simply pathetic.
Trotzky`s writings on the crucial role of the party are too numerous to be even mentioned here. His efforts to reconstruct the revolutionary worldwide vanguard party by establishing the Fourth International in 1938 moreover shows that this was not only a theoretical interest of his. In fact he regarded founding the 4th International as the most important achievement in his life, even more important than his feats at the time of the October Revolution and during the civil war. This clearly shows how crucial the party and internationalism was for both his theory and practice. As to his activities inside the Bolshevik party at Lenin`s time it might be enough to recall Lenin`s testament. While criticising Trotky`s tendency of too much self-assertion and of overrating the administrative handling of the economy Lenin called him the most able man in the present central comitee. How could Lenin say this about a basically Menshevik person? In fact Lenin had even proposed to Trotzky to block in order to remove Stalin from power, which Trotzky failed to do, probably the biggest mistake he ever made. The stress Trotzky laid on the revolutionary party was and integral aspect of his fight for the political and ideological independence of the working class from all other classes in society which again was the basis for his rejection of the Stalinist `popular front` strategy – and by implication of the Maoist theory of the New Democracy.
What is true however is that Trotzky contrary to Stalin and the bureaucratic caste whose political expression Stalinism became was generally not of the opinion that the party was something beyond or above the living proletariat, that it was not a goal in itself but a means to enhance proletarian power not in words but in deeds. To make it such a means it was absolutely necessary not only to defend the centralist aspect of the party but the democratic aspect as it was implemented during Lenin`s time as well. It must however be acknowledged that on some occasions in this he was less clear than Lenin. An outstanding example is his relative disregard for the independence of the trade unions before being corrected on this by Lenin. Cde. Thakor is of course right to point out that on several other occasions Trotzky was in disagreement with Lenin. At Lenin`s times it was not a big thing to be in disagreement on this and that. The party at that time was a democratic body of experienced revolutionaries with a broad Marxist education and not yet Stalin`s party flooded by means of the `Lenin levy` with masses of people whose only qualification was that they could serve as Stalin`s battering ram against any internal opposition. However these disagreements such as in the case of the Brest Litovsk treaty and the NEP were less sharp than Cde. Thakor`s wording might imply. Contrary e.g. to the then ultraleft Bukharin Trotzy did not advocate further war against Germany but only the non-signing of the treaty. This was wrong, and in general Lenin was much clearer on immediate necessities.
As to Trotzky`s alleged opposition to the NEP the truth is that he had proposed a NEP-like plan a year before Lenin and later favoured the reintroduction of NEP-type measures after the first Five Year Plan. However he was well aware of the difficulties that would necessarily develop by the strengthening of the bourgeois class, difficulties later abruptly `solved` in a bureaucratic manner by Stalin`s sudden forced collectivisation which by the very means it was implemented was largely a failure. Trotzky`s position on the matter was a slower but steady development of the industry which would also become the necessary basis for a sound development of the agricultural sector while Stalin`s policy was one of erratic big leaps from one corner into the other (e.g. ardent defence of NEP- sudden collectivisation and industrialisation, switch from the sectarian ultraleft `Social fascist`-theory to the right wing `popular front`-strategy), a policy later aped by Mao with dire consequences.
As to the crucial question of the position towards the colonial revolution it is simply untrue that Trotzky and later the `Trotzkyists` ever wavered in their support for the fighters against imperialism. In fact contrary to the Stalinists they did never advocate a class truce during WW II and hence any stop of the fight of the oppressed nations against their `democratic imperialist` oppressors. However on the basis of his theory known under the term of `permanent revolution`, a theory which he had at first only developed for Russia and which he only later extended to the rest of the world especially after he had the practical experience of the catastrophic results of Stalin`s policies in China he knew that in the epoch of decaying capitalism there was no historically progressive class left beside the working class and that any faction of the dependent bourgeoisie cannot break out of the imperialist world system.
Objectively the aim of anticolonial revolutions and antiimperialist struggles led by bourgeois forces is to secure for themselves a slightly better place inside the imperialist system. This is of course not the aim of the struggling masses. Therefore I call the bourgeois leaders of their struggles `misleaders`. Trotzkyists support the subjectively limited struggles of the oppressed masses but tell those masses that what they really look for can only be achieved if they keep on struggling for their own power. The leading force of the masses must be the working class. If the working class does not take the lead the petit bourgeoisie and other potentially allied classes will succumb to the influence of the local bourgeoisie which cannot but betray their struggle and lead it into a dead end. History is there to prove that point. The fate of the Russian revolution which at least had been a proletarian revolution in the first instance and that of the Chinese revolution led by a `Communist` Party the membership of which at the time of the antiimperialist revolution was not more than 2 % workers and which therefore was neither a workers party nor a communist party proves what is at the center of Marx`s thinking, namely that the working class can only liberate itself. It can not be liberated by more or less well meaning representatives of other classes. While the numerically weak and by the civil war further weakened working class of Russia could not cling on to its soviet-based real power on the long run, it never achieved power in China. In fact the CCP when liberating the industrial centers of China from the Guomintang-forces made sure that the local working class had nothing to do with this liberation. When the Red Army approached the cities the CCP called on the workers not to interfere with the liberation struggle but to keep on working and obeying their old masters until the Red Army would liberate them. The revolution of Mao who during the civil war had in vain sought the support of the USA therefore was a bourgeois nationalist revolution and not a socialist one. The direction China has taken under the leadership of the same old CCP proves that beyond any doubt. The idea commonly held by Maoists that either Mr. Khruschev or Mr. Deng Hsiao Ping could have changed the character of a state and a society is the peak of idealistic thinking. However it is plain that Marxists must defend such bourgeois nationalist revolutions from imperialism.
True liberation from imperialist oppression let alone from any form of oppression and exploitation is only possible under the leadership of the working class itself led by its own revolutionary vanguard party. Trotzky and the Trotzkyists therefore reject the Stalinist theory of a `democratic stage` knowing that no proletarian-socialist stage ever follows. While it is of course perfectly clear to all Trotzkyists that the workers` revolution will not take place all over the world at the same time Trotzky and his followers defended the Marxist and Leninist position that while proletarian revolutions can and must happen here and there at different times a socialist society can only be build as a world wide society. This does not mean that they advocate laying the hands in the lap before world revolution has miraculously broken out but to be aware that the fate of a limited local revolution depends on the revolution being extended. The Trotzkyists are far from being uninterested in mass movements mislead by non-proletarian forces. However they try to unmask those misleaders before their mass basis and work for it that the proletariat leads its own revolution which cannot remain then at any bourgeois stage. This in essence is `permanent revolution`.
As to the proves given by Cde. Thakor for an all over positive balance of Stalin it must said that none of it has much to do with socialism. The fact that the USSR notwithstanding all of Stalin`s initial blunders such as decapitating the Red Army defeated the German Wehrmacht doesn`t prove that Stalin was a proletarian revolutionist then. Don`t forget that Napoleon was defeated by the Tsar in the same country. As for Stalin`s role in forming the popular front in Spain with the PCE acting as the right wing of that bourgeois government it ought not be forgotten that it was exactly the bourgeois limitations of the republic which secured her final defeat. The same was true for the popular front in France and in many countries world wide after WW II (e.g. Chile). While it may be difficult if not impossible to prove that the defeat of all these cross-class experiments was mainly due to the fact that the working class was subjected to their bourgeois allies (as Trotzky pointed out generally only the `shadows of the bourgeoisie`) the Stalinists can`t find a single argument in their favour since in fact all of them led to bloody defeats for the working class. But contrary to what Cde. Thakor claims Trotzky did not call for overthrowing the Soviet Union, which he regarded as still being a workers` state albeit a degenerated one. He differentiated between the state and the government, in this case the Stalinist ruling caste. By calling for a political revolution and overthrowing the by then counterrevolutionary Stalinists he wanted to save the Soviet Union as a workers state and to regenerate it as a proletarian state. He thought that the degenerated and hence weak workers state would not survive the onslaught of the imperialist enemies. Although he made it abundantly clear that he didn`t believe that a `degenerated workers state` could survive as such for another 50 years or so he did not yet come to the conclusion that immediately before the war the USSR had finally become a new capitalist state with the bureaucracy acting as a regent class for the traditional bourgeoisie which the October revolution had got rid of. To my understanding this change from a unstable degenerated workers state to a state based on a statified capitalist mode of production (s. Walter Daum: The Life and Death of Stalinism. New York 1990) explains the relative stability of the USSR at that time and its capability of finally defeating German imperialism. This also explains the imperialist policies of the Stalin leadership during and after WW II (e.g. the joint stock companies in the postwar `Peoples` Republics`, the brutal exploitation and oppression of internal colonies inherited from Czarism).The fact that Stalinist imperialism was due to the relative weakness of Russia`s statified capitalism mainly defensive and based less on investments in her dependencies but in looting and in importing capital from those sattelites which were traditionally higher developed than Russia itself.
As for the so called orthodox Trotzkyist (i.e. those who cling to Trotzky`s positions as eternal ones) they are in fact proud to call themselves defensist in respect to the USSR. I however regard the USSR from 1939 on as statified capitalist and hence an imperialist country if however a weak one in comparison to the ordinary private capitalist imperialist countries Cde. Thakor is also wrong when he says that the Trotzkyist failed to recognize Socialist China if he means by that that they would not defend China against imperialist aggression.
If he however means that they failed to recognize that by the toppling of the Guomintang through a peasant army without any major contribution from China`s working class China became `socialist` he`s right. It`s up to him to prove that Marx, Engels and Lenin had thought about socialism as something to be achieved without the working class being an independent and leading force in the movement. If he thinks that for a society to be called socialist nationalisation of industry was sufficient he should both look at what Engels had to say about nationalisation without proletarian power and to the degree of nationalisation in both Taiwan and the PRChina in the first years. It seems that based on this criterion alone Taiwan was the more socialist country. Cde. Thakor is also wrong in referring in particular to Issak Deutscher as a `diehard anti-Stalinist`. His relatively refrained anti-Stalinism was in fact one of the issues which always kept Deutscher outside the Fourth International.
Likewise wrong is Thakor`s allegation that the Trotzkyists did not support the Vietnamese struggle against the US-imperialists. In the best case the way they did it was different from the Stalinist way. Trotzky`s legacy (really not always heeded by the majority of the post-Trotzky `Trotzkyists`) was to join Lenin in differentiating between `political` and `military` support. For Marxists `political support` was only for proletarian forces, while `military support` could be given to any force fighting the main enemy, the main historical example being the Bolshevik support for the Kerensky-government at the time of the Kornilov-coup, a support called by Lenin “as the rope supports the hanged”. The Trotzkyists would n o t need to make believe that a peasant based and petit bourgeois led antiimperialist movement no matter what its name is a proletarian communist movement in order to support and defend it against imperialist forces.
The Stalinists however who by the very class-character of the regimes and states they lean on cannot be interested in making this fundamental difference plain and to thus lay the basis for true proletarian states. True proletarian revolutions would have undermined the power of the Stalinist bureaucratic ruling classes.
This is not to say that lots of selfdeclared `Trotzkyists` haven`t made a lot of mistakes. But contrary to what Cde. Thakor says these were (and are) generally the result of a draw back from the theory of `permanent revolution` and hence of the hailing of forces with a non-proletarian character or in other words the acceptance of the Stalinist theory of stages – bourgeois democratic revolution first, socialism later but in fact never (see e.g. the popular frontism in Sri Lanka [1964] and before this in Bolivia` [1952] and later the theory of `multivaguardism` put forward by the Mandalite so called `Fourth International`). This was one of the results of the fundamental break of the class line by the postwar theory of `deformed workers states`, developed by the then secretary of the 4th International, Michel Pablo, and which credited the Stalinists, a force at that time already called `counterrevolutionary` by Trotzky, with establishing new workers` states without a proletarian revolution having taken place first. There were also mistakes in the other direction, sectarianism leading to staying clear off any movements not regarded as proletarian, but due to the pressure of an expanding new middle class during the post-war boom the rightist deviation was by far the greatest. With this Trotzky himself who at that time had already been murdered would most probability have had nothing to do.
