File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1996/96-10-28.110, message 80


From: JEFF SPARROW <jeffs-AT-werple.net.au>
Subject: M-I: Bolshevism, Louis, etc
Date: Sun, 27 Oct 1996 12:06:29 +-1100





LOUIS: One of the worst features of Trotskyist sectarianism is its 
tendency to turn every serious political fight in a party into a conflict 
between a "proletarian" and a "petty-bourgeois" wing. 

Jeff:

It's even more ludicrous in terms of the tiny groups that exist today.
The SWP at least had a couple of thousand members and some 
serious working class supporters. There is nothing more tragic
than reading of splits in tiny Trot groups in which a majority of twenty
describes a minority of ten as "petty bourgeois".

The other thing about this kind of method is that it's never clear
whether the use of class terms is meant as an empirical description
or as a political characterisation. Cannon seems to slide between the
two. That is, "Proletarian Party" is full  of snide remarks about the
opposition being a pack of professors in opposition to Cannon's
group of horny handed sons of toil. But would it have been a sufficient
rebuttal to produce evidence of the numbers of genuine workers
amongst the opposition? What would this have proved? Are workers
always right? Are those from p-b backgrounds (like, for example, Lenin)
always wrong? In any case, what do you say about the class position
of someone (like Cannon) who has spent thirty years as a paid full-timer in the
revolutionary movement? Are their conditions of life so different from other 
intellectuals?

Louis:
Where did they pick this "workerist" 
reductionism from, one has to wonder? It comes from the "good" 
Comintern of Trotsky and Zinoviev. Trotsky used it in an especially 
hamfisted manner in the Cannon-Schachtman fight you allude to. In 
his factional interventions, Trotsky described the Schachtman group as 
a "scratch" that could turn into "gangrene" if the party wasn't careful.

Jeff:
I dunno that Trotsky's intervention was so "hamfisted." If you read
his letters during the crisis, the thing that stands out is his genuine
attempts at conciliation. In the midst of it all, one of his letters
begins with (paraphrasing from memory): "Max, old friend, I fear that
this time you are on the wrong side of the barricades. Why don't 
you come down to Mexico so we can have a long talk about this?"

I think the fault, initially at least, was much more with Cannon.

After all, the way the SWP has always presented the documents
is in terms of a political fight carried out by Trotsky ('Defense of 
Marxism') and an organisational fight carried out by Cannon
('Defense of a Proletarian Party'). That to me seems much
closer to Zinoviev than anything in Trotsky's intervention. It's
an approach that had disastrous consequences once
Trotsky was no longer around to provide political leadership.
(Tim Wohlforth's book on American Trotskyism is really good
on how, after Trotsky's death, Cannon simply followed
the same method by ceding political control to people like
Mandel and Pablo). 

As for Trotsky, well, I think he did the best he could in very
difficult circumstances. In hindsight, it is pretty clear that
the Opposition was a rotten bloc of people with widely disparate
politics united only by an opposition to Cannon. Trotsky did come
up with a whole series of organisational compromises to avoid a split,
which were refused by the opposition.

And while I think Trotsky does go a bit over the top with all the 
"gangrene" stuff, it's worth remembering that he was writing in a
time in which the revolutionary traditions of Marxism were in 
danger of disappearing. If ever there were a time in which
it was important to be hard politically it was then, in order to
preserve some of the lessons of Bolshevism for future generations.



Louis:
Of course, the big question is how Trotsky got the right to recommend 
to Cannon that he "hold back" and offer the minority major 
organisational concessions to "prevent a split". Or, how did he get the 
right to involve himself in the faction fight of the American SWP? He 
of course learned this from the practices of the early Comintern, and 
without skipping a beat, incorporated it into the Fourth International.

Jeff:
I'm not sure I understand your point here. Are you arguing against the
idea of an International as such? I mean, I can see a case for
claiming that the Fourth International was subject to delusions
of grandeur (a bunch of tiny groups very much dependant on
the prestige and political acumen of Trotsky himself). But if you accept
the idea of an International, well, of course Trotsky had the 'right'
to intervene.

In any case, it's clear from the documents that if he hadn't the Americans
would have made much more of a hash of things.


LOUIS: Well, as it turns out, Lenin was the biggest softie on police 
agents that the socialist world has ever seen. Even when his comrades 
kept insisting to him that Malinovski was an Tsarist agent, Lenin kept 
supporting him. It was virtually impossible to give him the boot. With 
respect to the single political expulsion of Bogdanov, I base my case 
on a reading of Noel Harding's "Lenin's Political Thought" and Paul 
Le Blanc's "Lenin and the Revolutionary Party". The only expulsion 
mentioned is the Bogdanov affair. If, of course, you come up with 
contrary evidence, I am willing to listen.

Jeff:
It kind of depends on what you mean by 'expel'. For most of their history,
the Bolsheviks simply weren't the kind of 'professional' organisation that
Lenin often stated that he want. So, for example, until really late in the piece
many Bolshevik groups had no separate existence from the Mensheviks, even
though Lenin was clear that they should.

But there's plenty of cases of Lenin using fairly heavy handed organisational
methods against his opponents. Amongst many of the Russian revolutionaries,
he seems to have had a reputation for being a 'hard' organisational man, who
was given to a fair bit of bureaucratic maneouvring.

So I must say, I find the idea of the "factional" Trotsky as opposed to Lenin
the softie a bit hard to swallow. But it's a while since I read this stuff. If I
get a chance, I'll go back to the musty old books and try to find some
quotes.



LOUIS: There is no sin in "going overboard" during a period of 
upsurge like Russia in 1905, or France in 1968. What is a sin is to 
view capitalism as being in constant crisis. This helps to keep 
Trotskyite sects in a constant state of alert and allows the leadership to 
deploy members around the map the way Kasparov moves pieces 
around on a chessboard. A much better posture for socialists is to 
maintain a completely adversarial stance toward the capitalist class 
and its parties without looking at the calendar so much.

Jeff:
This is all very well, but it's self contradictory.

How can you keep  an "adversarial stance [..] without looking at the calendar"
and still be able to "go overboard" when a revolutionary situation presents itself?

Obviously, you do have to behave differently depending on the political climate.
It would be ludicrous to imagine a mass organisation can simply operate in 
the same way no matter what is happening politically.

The difficulty is, of course, knowing how to assess the climate when you are
a tiny group on the very margins of society, which is the position the far left
finds itself in today.

The way I see it, you do have to make assessments about the political 
situation and the opportunities that it presents to you. However, as a small
organisation, you have to be reasonably relaxed about it. You don't have
a great deal of knowledge about what is happening in the working class,
and so your assessments are most likely to be flawed.

So you try to do the best you can, you attempt to avoid Messianism and
you honestly discuss your fuck-ups.
     



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