File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9709, message 133


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 ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005