From: "Dave Bedggood" <dr.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz> Date: Sun, 21 Sep 1997 23:09:23 +0000 Subject: Re: M-TH: Wall street pathognominics > Louis P wrote: : > No, Bedggood. You are wrong and I am right. Trotsky never once challenged > the resolution on party organization at the Comintern or in his subsequent > writing. As I pointed out, James P. Cannon voted for the resolution and > then came back to the United States and voted for and participated in the > "Bolshevization" of the CPUSA. Cannon, to his dying day, thought highly of > the bone-headed Zinoviev and his fucked up notions of how a revolutionary > party should be built. The net effect is to eliminate any possibilites of > dissent, since the implication is that dissenters are expressing an alien > class influence. Why should Trotsky oppose "Bolshevisation" since that was what was necessary? The German revolution failed ultimately because of the lack of a Bolshevik party. But to merge the form and content of Bolshevisation in order to then say that Trotsky did not oppose the bureaucratisation of the Comintern under Zinoviev, Bukharin etc is bullshit. Trotsky admitted to having Menshevik tendencies before 1917. He said he suffered from a "fatalist optimism" which led him to see Lenin's "ideal" of Bolshevism as "substitutionism". This changed in 1917 when he saw the need for a vanguard party. Reflecting on this years later in My Life he said: "Revolutionary centralism is a harsh, imperative and exacting principle. It often takes the form of absolute ruthlessness in its relation to individual members, to whole groups of former associates...It is the most impassioned, revolutionary striving for a definite end - a striving that is utterly free from anything base and personal - that can justify such personal ruthlessness...There is not doubt that at that time [referring to the split between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in 1903] I did not fully realise what an intense and imperious centralism the revolutionary party would need to lead millions of people in a war against the old order...I still could not see Lenin's centralism as the logical conclusion of a clear revolutionary concept". What Louis dishonestly will not face up to, is that it is Lenin whom he opposes not Zinoviev. In reality it is the Menshevik critique of "substitutionism" that motivates Louis. Trotsky in his Diary in Exile, recognised that what he had formerly characterised as substitutionism was rather a ruthless centralism, even to the point of one man, Lenin, being necessary for the Boshevik Revolution to have occured. This was the centralism that led Trotsky and Lenin to disagree on the method, but to agree on the need to spread the Russian revolution to Europe; they disaggreed on Brest-Litovsky and the Red army invasion of Poland, but these were tactical differences. They both agreed on the necessity of the Bolsheviks internationalising the revolution. When it came to the German revolution, the problem was not too little Russian "interference", but too little and the wrong kind. The Bolsheviks had not insisted that the Spartacists break from the centrists early enough and model their party on the Bolshevik party. This left Luxemburg and co waiting for the spontaneous upsurge which never happened. Relying upon "national" impressions and not the Comintern instructions led to a second abortive adventure in 1921. Then the failure of the leading figures of the Comintern[excluding Trotsky] to understand the potential for revolution in 1923 led to the final defeat of the German revolution. Thus "bolshevisation" was necessary, but one based on the Lenin/Trotsky [after 1917]method of democratic centralism in which the subjective role of the party was decisive in shifting the masses when the other conditions for revolution were ripe. This is what underlies the timetable for the German revolution -not a formal anniversay of the Bolshevik revolution, but the interlocked nature of the international revolution. Trotsky argues in The 3rd International After Lenin, [in the passages that Louis objects to as Trotsky's special pleading for his "Zinoviev" party line], that the Comintern's intervention was bungled - it misread the situation and was ill-timed. Why? because it was undergoing the bureaucratic degeneration which replaced the Bolshevik model of the party for a bureaucratic-centralist one - that is, a reversion back to the default position of the old Bolsheviks like Zinoviev, Kamanev and Bukharin -that of menshevism. Precisely that "fatalistic optimism" that Trotsky had repudiated so decisively in 1917.. This is why Louis cannot be more wrong in saying that Trotsky endorsed the bureaucratic content of the "Bolshevisation" of the Comintern. That also, incidentally, is why Trotsky, and not out of false modesty, thought that in the absence of Lenin, he would not have been able to carry through the October revolution. It was Lenin's personal authority alone which prevented the party from baulking at the starting gate in October and in burying itself in the Constituent Assembly. I wont indulge your gastronomic marxism Louis beyond agreeing with Doug that, as the "small intestine" we trotskyists do all the vital processing before the stuff reaches you. Where you go from here is your business. Dave. Dave Bedggood --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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