Trotskyism or Leninism
By Harpal Brar
Preface
One of the myths perpetrated by Trotskyites, with not inconsiderable help
from the imperialist bourgeoisie, is that Leninism and Trotskyism are
synonymous; that Trotsky was, after Lenin, the most brilliant and greatest
Bolshevik (some even implying that Lenin was a great Trotskyist); that Trotsky
was the true inheritor of Leninism, and a worthy successor to Lenin, but was,
alas, deprived of his rightful place by the cunning manoeuvres of a third-class
mediocrity and oriental despot to boot, i.e., Joseph Stalin. This anti-communist
myth, repeated ad nauseam decade after decade in truly Goebbels fashion, not
only in Trotskyite publications but also in classrooms by petty-bourgeois
professors and teachers of history and sociology, not to mention the imperialist
press and electronic media, this myth has acquired the force of a public
prejudice. This prejudice is the product of deliberate distortion and
falsification by Trotskyism and its bourgeois allies, of Marxism-Leninism, of
deliberate inventions, deceptions, innuendoes, omissions and their tendentious
interpretations of the history of the Great October Revolution and the
revolutionary practice and role of the USSR, on the one hand, and the ignorance
of those on whom these deceptions, distortions and downright falsifications are
practised, on the other hand. Anyone who has made some study, let alone a deep
study, of the subject cannot but be aware of the total falsity of this myth. It
is the aim of this book to expose this myth and lay bare the truly reactionary,
counter-revolutionary, essence of the petty-bourgeois ideology of Trotskyism,
which is as irreconcilably hostile to Marxism-Leninism as is the bourgeoisie to
the proletariat – notwithstanding its pseudo-Marxist, ultra-'left' and
ultra-'revolutionary' terminology.
The task I set myself in this book is to show that Leninism and Trotskyism
are mutually exclusive; that Trotskyism is irreconcilably opposed to Leninism;
that those claiming to be Marxist-Leninists are duty bound, in the interests of
the proletariat, to wage a ruthless and uncompromising struggle against
Trotskyism; that they have to bury Trotskyism, as an ideological trend in the
working-class movement. Further, I seek to demonstrate that after the death of
Lenin in January 1924, as Leninism was upheld by the Bolshevik Party, now under
the leadership of Stalin, Trotskyism continued its ceaseless onslaught on
Leninism, with some tactical adjustments to the form of its attack. It now
attacked Leninism and the Party's Leninist policy under the guise of attacking
'Stalinism' in the name of Leninism. For all that, Trotskyism continued its
counter-revolutionary struggle against revolutionary Leninism, albeit without
overtly and specifically naming Lenin as its target. Be it-said to the honour of
the Bolshevik Party and to its leader, Stalin, Trotskyism was dealt blows
equally as shattering as those delivered against it during Lenin's lifetime,
causing it to suffer ignominious defeat. In particular I seek to emphasise three
specific features of Trotskyism – features which bring it into irreconcilable
contradiction with Leninism.
Three specific features of Trotskyism
1. 'Permanent revolution'
Trotskyism stands for the theory of 'permanent' revolution, failing to take
into account the vast mass of the poor peasantry as a revolutionary force and
reliable ally of the proletariat. As Lenin rightly pointed out, Trotsky's
'Permanent' revolution is tantamount to 'skipping' the peasant movement and
"playing at the seizure of power." Any attempt at such a revolution as was
advocated by Trotsky would have ended in certain failure, for it would have
denied the Russian proletariat the support of its most dependable ally, the poor
peasantry. Only this explains Leninism's unrelenting struggle against Trotskyism
from 1905 onwards.
For its part Trotskyism regarded Leninism as a theory possessing
"antirevolutionary features" for no better reason that at the proper time
Leninism correctly advocated and upheld the idea of the dictatorship of the
proletariat and peasantry. Going far beyond this indignant opinion, Trotskyism
asserts:
"The entire edifice of Leninism at the present time is built on lies and
falsification and bears within itself the poisonous elements of its own decay."
(Trotsky's letter to Chkeidze, 1913).
Leninism, on the other hand, asserts:
"Trotsky has never yet held a firm opinion on any important question of
Marxism. He always contrives to worm his way into the cracks of any given
difference of opinion, and desert one side for the other. At the present moment
he is in the company of the Bundists and the liquidators. And these gentlemen do
not stand on ceremony where the Party is concerned" (Lenin, Collected Works,
Vol. 20 p. 448, 1914).
2. Distrust of Leninism in matters of organisation
Trotskyism stands for the distrust of Leninism, of Bolshevism, in matters of
organisation. Whereas Bolshevism stands for the principle of a revolutionary
proletarian party of a new type, a disciplined and monolithic Party, hostile to
opportunist elements, Trotskyism stands for the co-existence of revolutionaries
and opportunists and for the formation of groups, factions and coteries within a
single Party. Anyone who is at all aware of the history of Trotsky's notorious
August Bloc, in which the Martovites and Otzovists,(1)
the Liquidators(2) and Trotskyites happily
co-operated in their struggle against Bolshevism, cannot have failed to notice
this liquidationist feature of Trotskyism. Thus, during this crucial historical
period, whereas Leninism regarded the destruction of the August Bloc as a
precondition for the development of the proletarian party, Trotskyism regarded
the liquidationist August Bloc as the basis for building a 'real' party.
Throughout this entire period – from 1903 to 1917 – Lenin again and again
denounced Trotsky for his "careerism", "Menshevism", "conciliationism" and
"liquidationism." Here are a few samples chosen at random from scores of Lenin's
writings in the same vein:
In a letter to Zinoviev dated 24 August 1909, Lenin writes: Trotsky behaves
like a despicable careerist and factionalist of the Ryazanov-and-co type. Either
equality on the editorial board, subordination to the central committee
and no one's transfer to Paris except Trotsky's (the scoundrel, he wants to 'fix
up' the whole rascally crew of 'Pravda' at our expense!) – or a break
with this swindler and an exposure of him in the CO. He pays lip-service to the
Party and behaves worse than any other of the factionalists." (Collected
Works, Vol. 34, p. 400).
When Lenin was waging a life and death struggle to purge the Party of
liquidators and otzovists, Trotsky, assuming the role of a conciliator, tried
his worst to reconcile the Party with these two bourgeois trends. This caused
Lenin to denounce Trotsky in these terms:
"In the very first words of his resolution Trotsky expressed the full spirit
of the worst kind of conciliation, 'conciliation' in inverted commas, of a
sectarian and philistine conciliation, which deals with 'given persons' and not
the given line of policy, the given spirit the given ideological and political
content of Party work.
"It is in this that the enormous difference lies between real partyism; which
consists in purging the Party of liquidationism and otzovism, and the
'conciliation' of Trotsky and Co., which actually RENDERS THE MOST FAITHFUL
SERVICE TO THE LIQUIDATORS AND OTZOVISTS, AND IS THEREFORE AN EVIL THAT IS ALL
THE MORE DANGEROUS TO THE PARTY THE MORE CUNNINGLY, ARTFULLY AND RHETORICALLY IT
CLOAKS ITSELF WITH PROFESSEDLY PRO-PARTY, PROFESSEDLY ANTI-FACTIONAL
DECLAMATIONS." (Notes of a Publicist, Collected Works, Vol. 16, June
1910, p 211 – emphasis added).
In November 1910, accusing Trotsky of following "in the wake of the
Mensheviks, taking cover behind particularly; sonorous phrases, " of "putting
before the German comrades liberal views with a Marxist coating." of
being a master of "resonant but empty phrases, " of failing to understand and
ignoring the "economic content of the Russian revolution, " and thereby
depriving himself "of the possibility of understanding the historical meaning of
the inner-Party struggle in Russia," Lenin goes on to state:
"The struggle between Bolshevism and Menshevism is... a struggle over the
question whether to support the liberals or to overthrow the hegemony of the
liberals over the peasantry. Therefore to attribute [as did Trotsky] our splits
to the influence of the intelligentsia, to the immaturity of the proletariat,
etc, is a childishly naive repetition of liberal fairy-tales."
Adding: "Trotsky distorts Bolshevism, because he has never been able to form
any definite views on the role of the proletariat in the Russian bourgeois
revolution."
Countering Trotsky's lies and falsifications in the German Social-Democratic
press and accusing Trotsky of following a policy of "advertisement" of
"shamelessness in belittling the Party and exalting himself before the Germans,
" Lenin concludes:
"Therefore, when Trotsky tells the German comrades that he represents the
'general Party tendency" I am obliged to declare that Trotsky represents only
his own faction and enjoys a certain amount of confidence exclusively
among the otzovists and the liquidators." (The Historical Meaning of the
Inner-Party Struggle in Russia, Collected Works, Vol. 16 pp. 374-392).
When Trotsky's Vienna Club, stepping up its activities, passed a resolution
in November 1910 to organise a 'general Party fund for the purpose of preparing
and convening a conference of the RSDLP", Lenin characterised this as a "direct
step towards a split... a clear violation of Party legality and the start of an
adventure in which Trotsky will come to grief."
Continues Lenin:
"It is an adventure in the ideological sense. Trotsky groups all the enemies
of Marxism, he unites Potresov and Maximov, who detest the 'Lenin-Plekhanov'
bloc, as they like to call it. TROTSKY UNITES ALL THOSE TO WHOM IDEOLOGICAL
DECAY IS DEAR; ALL WHO ARE NOT CONCERNED WITH THE DEFENCE OF MARXISM, all
philistines who do not understand the reasons for the struggle and who do not
wish to learn, think and discover the ideological roots of the divergence of
views. At this time of confusion, disintegration, and wavering it is easy for
Trotsky to become the 'hero of the hour' and gather all the shabby elements
around himself. The more openly this attempt is made, the more spectacular will
be the defeat." (Emphasis added).
Lenin ends this letter by calling, inter alia, for "struggle against
the splitting tactics and the unprincipled adventurism of Trotsky." (Letter
to the Russian Collegium of the Central Committee of the RSDLP, Collected Works,
Vol. 17, pp. 17-22 – December 1910).
In December 1911, being sick and tired of Trotsky's dirty work as an attorney
and diplomat for the liquidators and otzovists, Lenin, exposing Trotsky's
factionalism, wrote:
"It is impossible to argue with Trotsky on the merits of the issue, because
Trotsky holds no views whatever. We can and should argue with confirmed
liquidators and otzovists, but it is no use arguing with a man whose game is to
hide the errors of both these trends; in his case the thing to do is to expose
him as a diplomat of the smallest calibre." (Trotsky's Diplomacy and a
Certain Party Platform, Collected Works, Vol. 17 pp. 360362).
In July 1912, in a letter to the editor of Pravda, the daily legal Bolshevik
paper printed in Petersburg from 5 May 1912, Lenin advises the editor not to
reply to Trotsky's "disruptive and slanderous letters," adding:
"Trotsky's dirty campaign against Pravda is one mass of lies and
slander... This intriguer and liquidator goes on lying right and left."
(Collected Works, Vol. 35, pp. 40-41).
In The Break-up of the 'August' Bloc (March 1914), Lenin writes:
"Trotsky, however, has never had any 'physiognomy' at all; the only thing he
does have is a habit of changing sides, of skipping from the liberals to the
Marxists and back again, of mouthing scraps of catchwords and bombastic parrot
phrases."
And: "Actually under the cover of high-sounding, empty and obscure phrases
that confuse the non-class-conscious workers, Trotsky is defending the
liquidators by passing over in silence the question of the 'underground' by
asserting that there is no liberal labour policy in Russia, and the like.
"... Unity means rallying the majority of the workers in Russia about
decisions which have long been known, and which condemn liquidationism...
"But the liquidators and Trotsky,... who tore up their own August bloc, who
flouted all the decisions of the Party and dissociated themselves from the
'underground' as well as from the organised workers, are the worst splitters.
Fortunately, the workers have already realised this, and all class-conscious
workers are creating their own real unity against the liquidator
disrupters of unity." (Collected Works, Vol. 20 pp. 158-161).
In his article Disruption of unity under cover of outcries for unity,
written in June 1914, Lenin denounces Trotsky for his factionalism and
liquidationism and exposes the utter falsity of the charge of splittism hurled
by Trotsky and the liquidators at the Bolsheviks. Writing in his allegedly
nonfactional journal, Borba, Trotsky, having accused the Bolsheviks of splittism
for the sole reason that they exposed and opposed liquidationism, goes on to
admit that the Bolshevik "splittist tactics are winning one suicidal victory
after another." This said, Trotsky adds:
"Numerous advanced workers, in a state of utter political bewilderment
themselves often become active agents of a split."
Here is Lenin's retort to this accusation and 'explanation':
"Needless to say, this explanation is highly flattering, to Trotsky... and to
the liquidators… Trotsky is very fond of using with the learned air of the
expert pompous and high-sounding phrases to explain historical phenomena in a
way that is flattering to Trotsky. Since 'numerous advanced workers' become
'active agents' of apolitical and Party line [Bolshevik Party line] which does
not conform to Trotsky's line, Trotsky settles the question unhesitatingly, out
of hand these advanced workers are 'in a state of utter political bewilderment',
whereas he, Trotsky, is evidently 'in a state' of political firmness and
clarity, and keeps to the right line!... And this very same Trotsky, beating his
breast, fulminates against factionalism parochialism, and the efforts of the
intellectuals to impose their will on the workers!
"Reading things like these, one cannot help asking oneself. – is it from a
lunatic asylum that such voices come?" (Collected Works, Vol. 20 pp.
327-347).
Continues Lenin: "The reason why Trotsky avoids facts and concrete references
is because they relentlessly refute all his angry outcries and pompous phrases.
It is very easy, of course, to strike an attitude and say: 'a crude and
sectarian travesty.' Or to add a still more stinging and pompous catchphrase,
such as 'emancipation from conservative factionalism.'
"But is this not very cheap? Is not this weapon borrowed from the arsenal of
the period when Trotsky posed in all his splendour before audiences of
high-school boys?" (ibid.)
Lenin concludes his article with a brilliant description of Trotsky's
wavering and vacillation between the Party and the liquidators, calling him a
"Tushino turncoat" appearing before the Party with incredibly pretentious
claims, unwilling absolutely to reckon with either the Party decisions,
which since 1908 have defined and established our attitude towards
liquidationism, or with the experience of the present-day movement in Russia,
which has actually brought about the unity of the majority on the basis
of full recognition of the aforesaid decisions." (ibid.)
This brilliant description appears in the main body of this work and is,
therefore, excluded from the preface.
About the same time – early 1914 – Trotsky, writing in issue no. 2 of his
journal Borba falsely attributed to the "Polish Marxists" – not just Rosa
Luxemburg – the position according to which the right to national
self-determination "is entirely devoid of political content and should be
deleted from the programme." This falsehood drew from Lenin the following
observation:
"The obliging Trotsky is more dangerous than an enemy! Trotsky could produce
no proof except 'private conversations' (i.e., simply gossip, on which Trotsky
always subsists), classifying the 'Polish Marxists' in general as supporters of
every article by Rosa Luxemburg...
"Trotsky has never yet held a firm opinion on any important question of
Marxism. He always contrives to worm his way into the cracks of any given
difference of opinion, and desert one side for the other. At the present moment
he is in the company of the Bundists and the liquidators. And thee gentlemen do
not stand on ceremony where the Party is concerned." (The Right of Nations to
Self-Determination, Collected Works, Vol. 20 p. 447-8).
In his letter to Henriette Roland-Hoist, dated 8 March 1916, Lenin asks:
"What are our differences with Trotsky?"
To this question he gives the following answer:
"In brief – he is a Kautskyite, that is, he stands for unity with the
Kautskyites in the International and with Chkheidze's parliamentary group in
Russia. We are absolutely against such unity ... " (Collected Works, Vol.
43, pp. 515-516).
Writing to Alexandra Kollontai on 17 February, 1917, Lenin says:
"...What a swine this Trotsky is – Left, phrases, and a bloc with the Right
against the Zimmerwald Left!! He ought to be exposed (by you) if only in a brief
letter to Sotsial-Demokrat!" (Collected Works, Vol. 35, p. 285).
Finally, in this letter of 19 Feb, 1917, to Inessa Armand, Lenin writes,
inter alia:
"There is also a letter from Kollontai who... has returned to Norway from
America. N. Iv. and Pavlov... had won Novy Mir, she says,... but ... Trotsky
arrived, and this scoundrel at once ganged up with the Right wing of Novy Mir
against the Left Zimmerwaldists!! That's it!! That's Trotsky for you!! Always
true to himself, twists, swindles, poses as a Left, helps the Right, so long as
he can... "(Collected Works, Vol. 35, p. 288).
In the light of the foregoing historic evidence, of the most impeccable and
irrefutable kind, it can safely be asserted that Trotsky was during this long
period – between 1903 and 1917 – a Menshevik and a liquidator who waged a most
dirty and factional campaign against the Bolsheviks' attempts to build a
revolutionary Party of the proletariat.
Although people with knowledge about the history of the Bolshevik Party know
only too well that from 1903 to August 1917 Trotsky was a Menshevik and a
liquidator, Trotskyites generally maintain a studied silence over this question
or, worse still, they try and excuse him on this account. It is, therefore, very
refreshing to discover some ardent Trotskyites who condemn Trotsky's Menshevism,
centrism, conciliationism and factionalism. In this category fall the
Trotskyites of the International Communist League (ICL) of the so-called Fourth
International (the official Fourth International, of course, since each of the
milliard Trotskyist organisations claims to be the official Fourth International
and describes every other Trotskyist organisation as a fake – a hilarious
phenomenon reminiscent of the Life of Brian). The ICL publish the
theoretical journal Spartacist. The occasion for their frank admission
and condemnation of Trotsky's Menshevism was the review, in Spartacist
numbers 45 and 46, Winter 1990-91, English edition, by a certain ICL member,
Daniel Dauget, of a biography of Leon Trotsky published in 1988 by Pierre Broué.
Pierre Broué was a Professor at the Institute of Political Studies of Grenoble
University who had been for 40 years a member of "the ostensibly Trotskyist
Lambertist tendency in France" (ICL's description in the said review), i.e., of
the Parti Communiste Internationale (PCI).
Broué praises Trotsky for being a "freelancer" – praise winch rouses the ICL
to indignation and downright outrage. So as not to lose the full force of ICL's
fluent prose, the full burning anger and shame, and the thrust of their
argument, and so as not to be accused of quoting them out of context, we
reproduce here almost the entire section of the review that was concerned with
Trotsky's factionalism and Menshevism between 1903 and 1917
Trotsky as "Freelancer"
"Broué's treatment of Trotsky's political activity between the decisive 1903
Bolshevik-Menshevik split and the October Revolution is at the core of his
interpretation; because it is here that he deals with the debates within Russian
Social Democracy over the nature, form and structure a revolutionary party must
have if it is to take state power, as well as with the role of political and
programmatic debate in forging such a party. After the 1903 split between the
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Trotsky became a sort of freelancer in the party.
"Broué praises Trotsky for this, seeing in it the cause for Trotsky's
leading role in the 1905 Revolution as chairman of the St Petersburg Soviet and
his brilliant propagandist use of his trial following the 1905 defeat:
"'In fact, effectively fired from any factional obligations, at a good
distance from the up and downs of the conflicts between the two main factions,
satisfied in this respect with his unitary' position whose victory seemed to him
assured in the future, Trotsky had his hands completely free to devote his
attention and activity to the events that were unfolding in Russia...' – Broué,
p. 97.
"To read this, one would conclude that Lenin's factional struggle against
Menshevism was irrelevant – if not outright counterposed – to intervening in and
leading the revolutionary struggle. Indeed, Broué views Trotsky's role as the
leading 'conciliator' between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks as exemplary.
"Earlier, as Broué notes, 'Trotsky, partisan of centralization and of the
authority of the Central Committee ever since he bad been deported to Siberia,
was seen in the émigré circles as Lenin's 'hatchet man',' At the 1903 Congress
Trotsky began a programmatic struggle against Lenin on the question of
the party. For example Trotsky opposed the sovereignty of the party congress:
'The Congress is a register, a controller, but not a creator' (Report of the
Siberian Delegation, 1903) Although the programmatic implications were far
from clear at the time, the 1903 split was a fundamental spilt on the party
question Trotsky's federalist position on this question was also reflected in
'Report of the Siberian Delegation' with his rejection of the Bolshevik
definition of a party member that required 'personal participation in one of the
Party bodies.' In practical terms Trotsky was in favour of the Menshevik
definition of a party member as one who gave Personal assistance 'to the party –
he wished to allow all the broad 'workers organisations' which existed alongside
the party committees in many major Russian cities, to act in the name of the
party regardless of their adherence to the statutes or decisions of party
congresses.
"At the same time that Broué enthuses over Trotsky's independence, he
mentions in passing that Trotsky was wrong on the party question during this
entire period. But what he says pales in comparison with Trotsky's own
judgement:
"'The deep differences that divided me from Bolshevism for a whole number of
years and in many cases placed me in sharp and hostile opposition to Bolshevism,
Were expressed most graphically in relation to the Menshevik faction. I began
with the radically wrong perspective that the course of the revolution and the
pressure of the proletarian masses would ultimately force both factions to
follow the same road. Therefore I considered a split to be an unnecessary"
disruption of the revolutionary forces. But because the active role in the split
by with the Bolsheviks – since it was only by ruthless demarcation, not only
ideological but organizational as well, that it was possible, in Lenin's
opinion, to assure the revolutionary character of the proletarian party (and the
entire subsequent history has fully confirmed the correctness of those policies)
– my 'conciliationism' led me at many sharp turns in the road into hostile
clashes with Bolshevism.' – Trotsky, 'Our Differences' (Nov. 1924).
"The traditional 'center' and right wing of the Social Democracy were only
too happy to use Trotsky's name and journalistic brilliance as a left cover for
their own positions and as a weapon against Lenin. Thus Broué
reports that 'Trotsky was on good terms with Kautsky and the 'center of the
German Social Democracy until at least 1912... It was Kautsky during this period
who, to Lenin's great anger, opened the pages of 'Die Neue Zeit' and
'Vorwarts' to Trotsky, Broué also details Trotsky's warm relations with the
Austro-Marxists of Vienna, noting that he rapidly became 'the uncontested head
of the Social Democratic colony in Vienna' from 1909 to 1912 .He passes rapidly
over the fact that during the same period Rosa Luxemburg viewed Trotsky with
'systematic suspicion' and as a 'dubious individual', no doubt due to his ties
to her right-wing opponents in the German Social Democracy.
"Broué's attitude toward Trotsky during these years is exemplified by his
treatment of the infamous August bloc. The Vienna 'Pravda' edited by
Trotsky attempted to 'conciliate' the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions- – Broué
approvingly quotes the professional anti-communist Leonard Schapiro's praise of
the Vienna 'Pravda' for not being as polemical as the Bolshevik press. A 1910
agreement between the factions provided for Bolshevik financial support to the
Vienna 'Pravda', with Kamenev (who was close to Lenin and was Trotsky's
brother-in-law) responsible for administering the Bolshevik funds The agreement
stipulated that the Mensheviks would get rid of their right wing, and the
Bolsheviks of their left wing. While the Bolsheviks respected the agreement, the
Mensheviks did not, and in the subsequent polemics, Trotsky sided with the
Mensheviks and got rid of Kamenev. Trotsky's articles, aimed at militants inside
Russia who were unfamiliar with the details of the dispute, denounced the
Bolsheviks as a 'conspiracy of the émigré clique.' Kautsky solicited and
published several articles by Trotsky attacking the Bolsheviks, which provoked
angry rejoinders not just from Lenin, but also from Plekhanov and Rosa
Luxemburg. When the Bolshevik Prague Congress in 1912 proclaimed that it
represented the party as a whole, Trotsky organised a unity' counter-conference
in Vienna in August.
"In Trotsky's mind [the conference] was to have been the general unification,
the reunification of the party. In fact, the Bolsheviks' rejection of it reduced
the participants to a bloc against them, which they baptized the 'August bloc'.
The Polish Social Democrats and Plekhanov also chose not to appear ... In fact,
Trotsky's return to the factional arena proved particularly unfortunate.
Independent of his intentions, and even of his precautions, the positions he
took after the Prague conference and his role in forming the August bloc made
him appear, despite himself, as the soul of a general coalition against the
Bolsheviks and an indirect supporter of the 'liquidators'.' – Broué, pp.
139-140.
"Every qualifier in Broué's description of Trotsky's role in the August bloc
is wrong or misleading. As is clear from Trotsky's denunciation of the
Bolsheviks as an 'émigré clique', he was well aware that what Broué so
delicately terms 'general unification', was a polemical cudgel with which to
attack Lenin. Trotsky did not just 'appear' to be the soul of the anti-Bolshevik
coalition, he was in fact that soul in that he was the most left-wing, most
respected force outside the Bolsheviks. Trotsky's actions were not misconstrued
'despite himself,' but were an accurate reflection of the role he played
vis-à-vis the Bolsheviks in the entire period from 1903 to at least 1915."
"The outbreak of WWI and the betrayal by the parties of the Second
International most of whose leaders supported their own' governments in the
bloody inter-imperialist war, shifted the grounds of dispute within the world
socialist movement, forcing realignments and regroupments. Lenin and Trotsky
both fought against the imperialist war, and both attended the gathering of
antiwar socialists held in Zimmerwald Switzerland in September 1915." (pp.
33-34).
Be it noted in passing that the last sentence is either born out of
dishonesty or simple ignorance – most likely the former – for everyone with the
least knowledge about this matter knows that the Bolshevik slogan of working for
the defeat of one's own government in the imperialist war then raging was
countered by Trotsky with his chauvinist slogan demanding 'Neither victory nor
defeat'. Further, we have provided, quotations above from Lenin to the effect
that during this period Trotsky was a Kautskyite and fought against the
Zimmerwald left headed by Lenin's Bolsheviks. But that does not concern us here.
ICL continue:
"Broué argues that after Zimmerwald despite 'real disagreements' between
Lenin and Trotsky, there was 'a reasonable prospect for a gradual rapprochement
between the two men who in reality were divided only [sic] by the 1903
split, which had long since been outdated.' What Broué slides over is the fact
that Lenin never repudiated the 1903 split – instead he generalized from it to a
fully-formed theoretical position on the necessity for revolutionary
cadres to organize a vanguard party, separate from reformist and centrist
tendencies. Trotsky was ultimately won to Lenin's side on this question in 1917.
"There is something anachronistic and evocative of the worst aspects of
French political traditions in Broué's repeated presentation of Trotsky as a
simple star, freelancer, too busy being 'a leader of men' and giving brilliant
speeches before and after the Revolution to have been a 'party man' or to have
had the time to familiarize himself with [the] faction fights in the corridors'.
Trotsky was a factionalist before 1917 – on the wrong side. But his
program of conciliationism could never have built the sort of hard faction that
could win leadership in the party, nor the kind of Party that could take state
power." (p. 34).
Well said, Messrs the Trotskyites of the ICL! We think any comment on ibis
would be superfluous!
All this does not, however, prevent the Trotskyites of the ICL from
asserting, without as much as a blush, that Trotsky, after the death of Lenin,
was best placed "to carry forward the authentic Bolshevik programme against
Stalin's usurpers." Very strange logic indeed, according to which Trotsky, the
Menshevik liquidator, who, spent two decades in a mortal struggle against every
aspect of Leninism, was better suited to, carrying out the 'authentic' Bolshevik
programme than someone like Stalin who, had spent two and a half decades
faithfully supporting and actually carrying out the Bolshevik programme. Here is
how ICL put it:
"In his admiration for Trotsky the left-Menshevik, Broué also never considers
the potential authority that Trotsky would have gained and retained among
stalwart Bolsheviks had he come over to Lenin's side as a hard party man in 1903
– an authority that would have served him well in the subsequent period when he
fought to carry forward the authentic Bolshevik programme against Stalin's
usurpers." (Ibid. p. 35).
Pigs might fly! The above statement of ICL amounts, if it amounts to anything
at all, to a meaningless tautology, namely, had Trotsky been a staunch supporter
of Leninism in the period 1903-17, he would have been well placed to carry out
the authentic Bolshevik programme after Lenin's death. The problem, however, is
that he was not during this long period, nor was he in the subsequent period, a
staunch supporter of Leninism. The one who was a staunch Leninist, namely
Joseph Stalin, was quite correctly chosen by the Bolshevik Party to lead it in
carrying forward the authentic Bolshevik programme against the would-be usurper,
to wit, Trotsky.
There is method in ICL's madness. They admit Trotsky's pre-1917 Menshevism in
order to present gullible, readers with a sanitised version of Trotsky who, it
is claimed, suddenly saw the light and after 1917 became a better Bolshevik than
anyone else.
"The fact is," write the ICI, "that Broué... agrees with Trotsky's
conciliationism before 1917, and much prefers Trotsky the anti-Leninist to
Trotsky the Bolshevik."
Unlike Broué, in a vain attempt to gain credibility for Trotskyism, the ICL
would rather make a clean admission of Trotsky's pre-1917 Menshevism and
anti-Leninism in order to be able all the more zealously to fasten the label of
staunch Leninist on Trotsky's lapel. This trick will not work, however, for
apart from the short period during October when he hid his anti-Leninist
stock-in-trade in the cupboard, Trotsky continued to practise his anti-Leninism,
his anti-Bolshevism, with a zeal worthy of a better cause. It is not only the
case that Broué, as is justly claimed by the ICI, "subtly puts Lenin under the
gun" in order to gain the appreciation of the "anti- Leninist Soviet
intelligentsia" (these words were written in the winter of 1990-91), but also
the fact that the Trotskyites of the ICI, in common with all other Trotskyites,
are attempting to substitute Trotskyism for Leninism, albeit by denouncing
pre-1917 Trotskyism. No subterfuges, no tricks, no artful dodging, no deception,
can detract from this fact – not even the pretence of praising Leninism.
3. Distrust of Bolshevik leadership
Trotsky stands for the distrust of the leaders of Bolshevism, for
discrediting and defaming them. As Stalin correctly observed:
"I do not know of a single trend in the party that could compare with
Trotskyism in the matter of discrediting the leaders of Leninism or the central
institutions of the Party." (Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 366).
In Trotsky's letter to Chkeidze, already cited, Trotsky described Lenin as "a
professional exploiter of every kind of backwardness in the Russian
working-class movement."
If Trotsky could express such ill-mannered views about Leninism, is there
anything surprising in the fact that he showered, after Lenin's death, even more
vile abuse on Lenin's most faithful pupil, Stalin.
How could Trotsky end up in Bolshevik ranks?
How was it that Trotsky, having such an impeccably anti-Bolshevik and
anti-Leninist record, found himself in the Bolshevik ranks in the period of the
October revolution? Stalin, in a speech on 19 November 1924, asked and answered
this question:
"How could it happen that Trotsky, who carried such a nasty stock-in-trade on
his back; found himself, after all, in the rank of the Bolsheviks during the
October movement? It happened because at that time Trotsky abandoned (actually
did abandon) that stock-in-trade; he hid it in the cupboard .Had he not
performed that 'operation', real co-operation with him would have been
impossible. The theory of the August bloc, i.e., the theory of unity with the
Mensheviks, had already been shattered and thrown overboard by the revolution,
for how could there be any talk about unity when an armed struggle was raging
between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks? Trotsky had no alternative but to
admit that this theory was useless.
"The same misadventure 'happened' to the theory of permanent revolution, for
not a single Bolshevik contemplated the immediate seizure of power on the morrow
of the February Revolution, and Trotsky could not help knowing that the
Bolsheviks would not allow him, in the words of Lenin, 'to play at the seizure
of power.' Trotsky had no alternative but recognise the Bolsheviks' policy of
fighting for influence in the Soviets, of fighting to win over the peasantry As
regards the third specific feature of Trotskyism (distrust of (he Bolshevik
leaders), it had naturally to retire into the background owing to the obvious
failure of the first two features.
"Under the circumstances, could Trotsky do anything else but hide his
stock-in-trade in the cupboard and follow the Bolshevik; considering that he had
no group of his own of any significance, and that he came to the Bolsheviks as a
political individual without an army? Of course, he could not!
"What is the lesson to be learnt from this? Only one: that prolonged
collaboration between the Leninists and Trotsky is possible only if the latter
completely abandons his old stock-in-trade, only if he completely accepts
Leninism. Trotsky writes about the lessons of October, but he forgets ... the
one I have just mentioned, which prime importance for Trotskyism. Trotskyism
ought to learn that lesson of October too." (Collected Works, Vol. 6, pp.
366-367).
Trotskyism, however, failed to learn this lesson, and its old stock-in-trade,
hidden in the cupboard in the period of the October movement, was dragged into
daylight once more, especially after the death of Lenin, through Trotskyist
literary pronouncements aimed at undermining the Bolshevik Party principle,
belittling and discrediting Lenin (albeit under the guise of praising and
exalting Lenin) and asserting the correctness of the much-discredited theory of
permanent revolution, which was shattered by the experience of the three Russian
revolutions – ie, that of 1905 and those of February and October 1917.
On arriving in Petrograd in 1917, Trotsky affiliated to the Mezhrayontsi
(inter-regional), a group that vacillated between the Bolsheviks and the
Mensheviks. In August 1917, declaring that they had no differences with the
Bolsheviks, the Mezhrayontsi joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
(Bolsheviks). Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks with them. On joining the Bolshevik
Party, quite a number of Mezhrayontsi broke with opportunism; but, as subsequent
events were to reveal, for Trotsky and some of his followers, joining the
Bolsheviks was only a ruse. They continued to propound their harmful and
reactionary views, flout discipline and undermine the Party's organisational and
ideological unity.
As Trotskyism, Ear from abandoning its old nasty stock-in-trade, on the
contrary dragged it out into the light of day, it was bound, owing to its entire
inner content, to become the centre and rallying point not only of the
non-proletarian elements in the USSR who were then (in the 1920s and 1930s)
striving to disintegrate the proletarian dictatorship, but also of the
imperialist bourgeoisie seeking by a thousand means to overthrow the proletarian
regime that had been ushered in by the mighty October revolution. At every
crucial stage in the development of the Russian revolution and the existence of
the dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR, Trotskyism continued to
maintain its reactionary anti-Bolshevik, anti-Leninist stance in matters of
theory as well as organisation, cloaking it under thick layers of
'revolutionary' rhetoric.
Brest-Litovsk
In 1918 the young Soviet Republic, bereft of any army with the will and
ability to fight, was fighting for its very survival through signing the
Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty with German imperialism, thus gaining a much-needed
respite for the exhausted population. At a crucial moment in these negotiations,
Trotsky, as the head of the Soviet delegation to the peace talks, in violation
of the instructions of the Party central committee and the Soviet government,
declared the unilateral withdrawal of the Soviet Republic from the war,
demobilisation of the Russian Army, and he then left Brest-Litovsk on the
spurious ground that "we can only be saved in the true meaning of the word by a
European Revolution" (Extraordinary Seventh Congress of the RCP(B)).
This gave the German Command the pretext it needed for ending the armistice,
mounting an offensive and obliging the Soviet government to sign "a much more
humiliating peace, and the blame for this rests on those who refused to accept
the former peace." (Lenin, Political Report of the CC to the Extraordinary
Seventh Congress of the RCP (B), 7 March 1918, Collected Works, Vol.
27).
Apropos the failure of the European revolution to come to maturity thus
leaving the Bolshevik Revolution to solve its problems on its own, and forcing
the Bolsheviks to face reality as it was rather than as they would wish it to
be, Lenin admonished Trotsky and his ilk in the Party in the following terms:
"If you are unable to adapt yourself, if you are not inclined to crawl on
your belly in the mud you are not a revolutionary but a chatterbox; and I
propose this, not because I like it, but because we have no other road, because
history has not been kind enough to bring the revolution to maturity everywhere
simultaneously." (Ibid.)
Thus the young Soviet Republic paid a very heavy price for Trotsky's
adventurism and phrase-mongering defeatism, which is the chief characteristic of
his rotten theory of permanent revolution, according to which nothing good can
ever come of any revolution unless it is accompanied by a world revolution.
Trade union debate
With the victorious conclusion of the Civil War of 1918-1920, as the Soviet
Republic under Lenin's guidance, switched from war communism to the New Economic
Policy (NEP) and embarked on a programme of economic revival and rejuvenation –
of restoration of industry through an upsurge in agriculture and by drawing the
workers and trade unions into active socialist construction through planned
organisation and persuasion (and not coercion), Trotsky and his supporters
forced on the Party a discussion on the question of trade unions (a luxury and a
diversion from the work of economic construction, from the fight against famine
and economic dislocation that the Party could ill afford at the time). Trotsky,
the patriarch of bureaucrats, as Stalin rightly called him insisted on
"tightening up the screws" and "shaking up" the trade unions, and turning the
latter into state agencies, and on replacing persuasion by coercion.
The Party discussion on the trade unions resulted in the total rout of
Trotsky and his supporters. When the Central Committee of the Party rejected
Trotsky's Prussian sergeant's proposal, Trotsky went outside and gathered a
group of his supporters with the aim of fighting against the Central Committee.
So alarmed was Lenin by Trotsky's factionalism and flouting of Party discipline
that he caused the 10th Party Congress (March 1921) to pass a resolution
forbidding the formation of factions and disbanding existing factions forthwith.
It was further stated that the "non-fulfilment of this decision of the Congress
shall be followed by unconditional and immediate expulsion from the Party."
Trotsky's return to fully-fledged factionalism
This resolution was to arouse Trotsky's bitter hatred and opposition, for
whenever he could not get his own way on any question, he rushed to form a
Trotskyist faction within the Party, even if that meant threatening a split.
During 1921 Lenin's health began to decline. Cerebral arteriosclerosis was
already blocking his blood circulation and taking its toll, with the result that
this man of inexhaustible energy and drive was tiring easily, and spent most of
the summer resting in the village of Gorki, not far from Moscow. The 11th Party
Congress, meeting at the end of March 1922, created the new office of General
Secretary, to which, one day after the conclusion of that Congress (i.e., on 3
April 1922), on Lenin's initiation and sponsorship, Stalin was appointed. On 26
May 1922, while resting in Gorki, Lenin suffered a severe stroke, which caused a
partial paralysis of the right side of his body and loss of speech. He recovered
from this stroke remarkably quickly and was back at his desk in early October
1922. After two further minor strokes on December 13 and 16, 1922, he suffered
on March 10, 1923, a massive stroke, from which he never recovered and after
which he took no further part in politics.
Following the latest stroke suffered by Lenin, Trotsky, with an eye on the
leadership, stepped up his factional activity and intensified his vile and
slanderous attacks on the Party leadership, its central institutions and its
policy. On 8 October 1923 he sent a letter to the Central Committee, in which he
asserted that the country was being inexorably led by the Party leadership to a
catastrophe, to prevent which he demanded greater inner-Party democracy.
Stripped of its Trotskyite verbiage, this meant the right to form factional
groupings. A group of 46 followers of Trotsky also issued a manifesto – known as
the Statement of 46 – to the same effect. Trotsky's letter and the Statement of
46 were discussed and condemned at a joint plenary meeting of the CC and the CCC
with representatives of ten of the largest Party organisations in October 1923.
Trotsky followed his letter with a pamphlet entitled New Course, in which in
addition to the demand for more Party democracy, he accused the old Bolsheviks –
the Party leadership – of degeneration. He counterposed young people, especially
students, to veteran Bolsheviks, declaring the former to be the barometer of the
Party.
In talking about the degeneration of the 'old guard', Trotsky had used the
expression "we, the old Bolsheviks," which provoked Stalin to make this
observation, full of biting sarcasm:
"First, I must dispel a possible misunderstanding. As is evident..., Trotsky
includes himself among the Bolshevik old guard, thereby showing readiness to
take upon himself the charges that may be hurled at the old guard if it does
indeed take the path of degeneration. It must be admitted that his readiness for
self-sacrifice is undoubtedly a noble trait. But I must protect Trotsky from
Trotsky, because, for obvious reasons, he cannot and should not bear
responsibility for the possible degeneration of the principal cadres of the
Bolshevik old guard..."
With more than a covert reference to Trotsky's long Menshevik past, Stalin,
while admitting the possibility of degeneration of the Bolshevik old guard, goes
on to add:
"Nevertheless, there are a number of elements within our Party who are
capable of giving rise to a real danger of degeneration of certain ranks of our
Party. I have in mind that section of the Mensheviks who joined our Party
unwillingly and who have not yet got rid of their opportunist habits." (Collected
Works, Vol. 5 p. 395).
The Thirteenth Conference of the RCP(B), held on 16-18 January 1924, strongly
condemned the factionalism of Trotsky and his followers, stating that "the
present opposition is not only an attempt to revise Bolshevism not only a
flagrant departure from Leninism but patently a petty-bourgeois deviation
.There is no doubt whatever that this opposition mirrors the pressure of the
petty-bourgeoisie on the position of the proletarian party and its policy." (Resolution
On the Results of the Discussion and on the Petty-Bourgeois Deviation in the
Party – CPSU in Resolutions, etc. Vol. 2).
Lenin's death and Trotsky's attempt to substitute Trotskyism
for Leninism
Lenin, after a further stroke on the morning of 21 January, 1924, died in the
evening. Trotsky, although a newcomer to the Party, had convinced himself that
he had a better claim to succeed Lenin than old, trusted and tried Bolsheviks
such as Stalin. So in October 1924 Trotsky published an introduction to his
collected works entitled Lessons of October, which purported to deal with the
reasons for the Bolshevik victory in the October Revolution. Having made general
ritual references in it to the necessity of a revolutionary party for the
success of a revolution, Trotsky went on to belittle the role of the Bolshevik
Party, extol his, own part in the revolution, hinting that Lenin had suddenly
changed his previous position for that of Trotsky, to which fact alone was to be
attributed the success of the October Revolution. He also dragged out of the
cupboard his old and much-discredited theory of 'permanent revolution!, arguing
that hostile collisions between the proletarian vanguard and the broad masses of
the peasantry were inevitable. One gets the impression from reading his
Lessons of October that it was Trotsky who organised the October victory.
In other words, the man who had fought against Bolshevism and Leninism for 14
long years, who had sided with the Mensheviks and liquidators to oppose the
building by Lenin's Bolsheviks of the proletarian revolutionary party capable of
leading the proletariat and the broad masses in seizing political power, who had
spent his life opposing Lenin's theory of proletarian revolution with his absurd
theory of 'permanent revolution', who had opposed the Bolshevik slogan of defeat
of one's own government in the imperialist war (the first world war) with his
chauvinistic slogan demanding Neither victory nor defeat, suddenly and
providentially descended on the scene in Petersburg to rescue the revolution
from the frightened and useless lot that constituted the Central Committee of
the Bolshevik Party, the majority of whom, according to this fairy tale worthy
of the Arabian Nights, were opposed to the October uprising!!
Nothing could be further from the truth. Trotsky's special role in October
originated with John Reed, the author of Ten Days that Shook the World,
who, being remote from the Bolshevik Party, had no knowledge of the secret
meeting of its central committee on 23 October, 1917, and was therefore taken in
by the gossip spread by people such as Sukhanov. These fairy tales about
Trotsky's special role in October were later passed round and repeated in
several pamphlets written by Trotskyites, including Syrkin's pamphlet on
October. After Lenin's death Trotsky strongly supported these rumours in his
literary pronouncements.
Since a systematic attempt was being made by Trotskyites to re- write the
history of October and bring up Soviet youth on such legends, Stalin, in a
speech delivered at the Plenum of the Communist Group of the AUCCTU,(3)
refuted – by reference to hard facts – these Arabian Nights fairy tales
in his characteristically devastating manner. Citing the minutes of the meeting
of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party on 23 October 1917, he proved
that the resolution on the uprising was adopted by a majority of 10 against 2;
that the same meeting elected a political centre, called the Political
Bureau, to direct the uprising, the members of the Centre being Lenin, Zinoviev,
Stalin, Kamenev, Trotsky, Sokolnikov and Bubnov. Thus the Centre included even
Zinoviev and Kamenev who were the only two to vote against the resolution on the
uprising. This was possible in spite of the political disagreements between them
because there was at that time a unity of views between these two (Zinoviev and
Kamenev) and the rest of the Central Committee on such fundamental questions "as
the character of the Russian revolution, the driving forces of the revolution,
the role of the peasantry, the principles of Party leadership, and so forth."
(Stalin, Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 341). Thus the decision on the
uprising was taken by the Central Committee and the Central Committee alone.
Hence the political direction of the uprising was firmly in the hands of the
Central Committee.
As to the legend that Trotsky played a 'special' role in that he 'inspired',
and was the 'sole leader' of the October uprising – this legend was spread by
Lentsner, and Stalin dealt with it as follows:
"The Trotskyites are vigorously spreading rumours that Trotsky inspired and
was the sole leader of the October uprising. These rumours are being spread with
exceptional zeal by the so- called editor of Trotsky's works, Lentsner. Trotsky
himself, by consistently avoiding mention of the Party, the Central Committee
and the Petrograd Committee of the Party, by saying nothing about the leading
role of these organisations in the uprising and vigorously pushing himself
forward as the central figure in the October uprising, voluntarily or
involuntarily helps to spread the rumours about the special role he is supposed
to have played in the uprising, I am far from denying Trotsky's undoubtedly
important role in the uprising. I must say, however, that Trotsky did not play
any special role in the October uprising, nor could he do so; being chairman of
the Petrograd Soviet he merely carried out the will of the appropriate Party
bodies, which directed every step that Trotsky took .To philistines like
Sukhanov, all this may seem strange, but the facts, the true facts, wholly and
fully confirm what I say." (Ibid, pp. 341- 342).
Stalin then passes on to an examination of the minutes of the next Central
Committee meeting held on 29 October, 1917. Apart from the members of the
Central Committee, there were present at this meeting representatives of the
Petrograd Committee as well as representatives of military organisations,
factory committees, trade unions and the railwaymen. At this meeting Lenin's
resolution on the uprising was adopted by a majority of 20 against 2, with three
abstentions. At this meeting too a practical centre was elected for the
organisational leadership of the uprising. To this practical centre were elected
the following five: Sverdlov, Stalin, Dzerzhinksy, Bubnov and Uritsky. Let
Stalin speak:
"The functions of the practical centre: to direct all the practical organs of
the uprising in conformity with the directives of the Central Committee. Thus,
as you see, something terrible happened at this meeting of the Central
Committee, i.e., 'strange to relate', the Inspirer, the 'chief figure', the
'sole leader' of the uprising, Trotsky, was not elected to the practical centre,
which was called upon to direct the uprising. How is this to be reconciled with
the current opinion about Trotsky's special role? Is not all this somewhat
'strange', as Sukhanov, or the Trotskyites, would say? And yet strictly speaking
there is nothing strange about it for neither in the Party, nor in the October
uprising did Trotsky play any special role, nor could he do so, for he
was a relatively new man in our Party in the period of October. He, like all the
responsible workers, merely carried out the will of the Central Committee and of
its organs. Who-ever is familiar with the mechanics of Bolshevik Party
leadership will have no difficulty in understanding that it could not be
otherwise; it would have been enough for Trotsky to go against the will of the
Central Committee to have been deprived of all influence on the course of
events. This talk about Trotsky's special role is a legend that is being spread
by obliging 'Party' gossips.(4)
"This, of course, does not mean that the October uprising did not have its
inspirer. it did have its inspirer and leader, but this was Lenin, and none
other than Lenin, that same Lenin whose resolution the Central Committee adopted
when deciding the question of the uprising, that same Lenin who, in spite of
what Trotsky says, was not prevented by being in hiding from being the actual
inspirer of the uprising. It is foolish and ridiculous to attempt now, by gossip
about Lenin having been in hiding to obscure the indubitable fact that the
inspirer of the uprising was the leader of the Party, V.I. Lenin.
"Such are the facts." (Collected Works, Vol. 6, pp 342-344.)
Continues Stalin:
"Granted, we are told but it cannot be denied that Trotsky fought well in the
period of October. Yes, that is true, Trotsky did, indeed, fight well in
October, but Trotsky was not the only one who fought well in the period of
October. Even people like the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who then stood
side by side with the Bolsheviks, also fought well, In general I "must say that
in the period of a victorious uprising when the enemy is isolated and the
uprising is growing; it is not difficult to fight well. At such moments even
backward people become heroes.
"The proletarian struggle is not however, an uninterrupted advance, an
unbroken chain of victories. The proletarian struggle also has its trials, its
defeats. The genuine revolutionary is not one who displays courage in the period
of a victorious uprising; but one who, while fighting well during the victorious
advance of the revolution, also displays courage when the revolution is in
retreat when the proletariat suffers defeat, who does not lose his head and does
not funk when the revolution suffers reverses, when the enemy "achieves success;
who does not become panic-stricken or give way to despair when the revolution is
in a period of retreat The Left Socialist- Revolutionaries did not fight badly
in the period of October, and they supported the Bolsheviks. But who does not
know that those 'brave' fighters became panic-stricken in the period of Brest
when the advance of German imperialism drove them to despair and hysteria. It is
a very sad but indubitable fact that Trotsky, who fought well in the period of
October, did not in the period of Brest in the period when the revolution
suffered temporary reverses, possess the courage to display sufficient
staunchness at that difficult moment and to refrain from following in the
footsteps of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Beyond question; that moment
was a difficult one; one had to display exceptional courage and imperturbable
coolness not to be dismayed, to retreat in good time, to accept peace in good
time, to withdraw the proletarian army out of range of the blows of German
imperialism; to preserve the peasant reserves and, after obtaining a respite in
this way, to strike at the enemy with renewed force. Unfortunately, Trotsky was
found to lack this courage and revolutionary staunchness at that difficult
moment.
"In Trotsky's opinion, the principal lesson of the proletarian revolution is
'not to funk' during October. That is wrong; for Trotsky's assertion contains
only a particle of the truth about the lessons of the revolution. The whole
truth about the lessons of the proletarian revolution is not to funk, not only
when the revolution is advancing but also when it is retreat when the enemy is
gaining the upper hand and the revolution is suffering reverses. The revolution
did not end with October. October was only the beginning of the proletarian
revolution. It is bad to funk when the tide of insurrection is rising but it is
worse to funk when the revolution is passing through severe trials after power
has been captured. To retain power on the morrow of the revolution is no less
important that to capture power." (Ibid. pp. 344-345).
Stalin asked the question: "For what purpose did Trotsky need all these
legends about October and the preparation for October, about Lenin and the Party
of Lenin? What is the purpose of Trotsky's new literary pronouncements against
the Party?..." (Ibid. p.363)
By way of an answer, Stalin continues:
"Trotsky asserts that all this is needed for the purpose of 'studying'
October. But is it not possible to study October without giving another kick at
the Party and its leader Lenin? What sort of a 'history' of October is it that
begins and ends with attempts to discredit the chief leader of the October
uprising to discredit the Party, which organised and carried through the
uprising?... That is not the way to study October. That is not the
way to write the history of October. Obviously, there is a different 'design'
here, and everything goes to show that this 'design' is that Trotsky by his
literary pronouncements is making another (yet another!) attempt to create the
conditions for substituting Trotskyism for Leninism. Trotsky needs 'desperately'
to discredit the Party, and its cadres who carried through the uprising in
order, after discrediting the Party, to proceed to discredit Leninism. And it is
necessary for him to discredit Leninism in order to drag in Trotskyism as the
'sole' 'proletarian' (don't laugh!) ideology. All this, of course (oh, of
course!) under the flag of Leninism, so that the dragging operation may be
performed 'as painlessly as possible'.
"That is the essence of Trotsky's latest literary pronouncements." (Ibid.
pp. 363-364).
Trotskyism – a rallying point for counter-revolution
Stalin went on to conclude that the danger was "... that Trotskyism, owing to
its entire inner content stands every chance of becoming the centre and rallying
point of the non-proletarian elements who are striving to weaken to disintegrate
the proletarian dictatorship," in view of which it was "the duty of the Party to
bury Trotskyism as an ideological trend." (Ibid. p. 373).
In later years Trotsky himself was obliged to admit that "in the wake of this
vanguard [i.e., the Trotskyist opposition] there dragged the tail end of all
sorts of dissatisfied, ill-equipped and even chagrined careerists," adding,
however, that the opposition had managed to free itself from "its accidental and
uninvited fellow wayfarers." On the contrary, as the contents of the pages that
follow reveal, it is precisely the non-proletarian elements, with their
irreconcilable hostility to the proletarian dictatorship, their striving for the
disintegration of the proletarian dictatorship, who supported the Trotskyist
opposition in the USSR and who continued to support him abroad after his
expulsion from the Soviet Union. It is precisely the same type of person who has
since those times rallied around Trotskyism, driven by an innate hatred of
Marxism-Leninism and of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Even the Trotskyite Deutscher is compelled to say. 'Outside the party,
formless revolutionary frustration mingled with distinctly counter-revolutionary
trends Since the ruling group had singled out Trotsky as a target for attack he
automatically attracted the spurious sympathy of many who had hitherto hated
him. As he made his appearance in the streets of Moscow [in. the spring of
19241, he was spontaneously applauded by crowds in which idealist communists
rubbed shoulders with Mensheviks Social Revolutionaries; and the new bourgeoisie
of the NEP, by all those indeed who, for diverse reasons hoped for a change
[i.e., for the disintegration of the proletarian dictatorship through the
weakening and disintegration of the Bolshevik Party]" (Isaac Deutscher,
Stalin, Pelican, 1966, p. 279).
At its plenary meeting held on 17-20 January, 1925, the Central Committee of
the RCP(B) characterised Trotskyism as a variety of Menshevism" and Trotsky's
ceaseless attacks on Bolshevism as an attempt to substitute Trotskyism for
Leninism. This meeting resolved to remove Trotsky from the office of Chairman of
the Revolutionary Military Council of the USSR, and he was "warned in the most
emphatic term that membership of the Bolshevik Party demands real, not verbal
subordination to Party discipline and total and unconditional renunciation of
any attacks on the ideals of Leninism "
Emergence of the New Opposition
After the above meeting pronounced against Trotsky and warned that his
splittist activity and anti Leninist propaganda was incompatible with Party
membership, Trotsky retreated for a while, awaiting his chance This chance came
when Zinoviev and Kamenev – two old Bolsheviks – frightened by difficulties and
overcome by defeatism, went into opposition after the 14th Party Conference
(April 1925) affirmed the possibility of building socialism, in the USSR. Being
incorrigible defeatists and sceptics, Zinoviev and Kamenev denied the
possibility of building socialism in the Soviet Union, and in this way found
common ground with pessimism, scepticism and defeatism personified, namely,
Trotsky, the author of the theory of 'permanent revolution', the epitome of
hopelessness.
The New Opposition (as it was called), led by Zinoviev and Kamenev, launched
'vicious attacks on the Party's Leninist line (on the possibility of building
socialism) at the 14th Congress of the Party, winch opened in December 1925.
After suffering a crushing defeat at that Congress, the New Opposition, headed
by Zinoviev and Kamenev (who had until only recently been -seeking to remove
Trotsky from the leadership and whom Trotsky, in turn, had been seeking to
eliminate from the leadership of the Party) openly embraced Trotskyism. Thus
emerged an anti-Party opposition bloc, to which flocked the remnants of the
various opposition groups previously squashed by the Party – all motivated by
their hatred of, and opposition to, the Party's policy of strengthening the
proletarian dictatorship and building socialism in the USSR.
The leaders of this opposition, Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, "granting each
other mutual amnesty," as Stalin put it, and using as an occasion and a pretext
the collapse of the British General Strike (that they blamed on the leadership
of the Bolshevik Party for having allegedly failed to give leadership and
guidance to the British workers), produced their platform, written by Trotsky,
which was presented in part to the Plenum of the Central Committee on 6-9 April
1926, and in full to the meeting of July 14-23 1926. In flagrant breach of Party
discipline, the opposition organised demonstrations in factories, demanding full
discussion of their platform. The communist workers vehemently denounced the
opposition leaders and made them leave these meetings. Faced with this
humiliating defeat, the opposition leaders beat a retreat and sent a statement,
on 16 October 1926, in which they confessed their errors and promised to desist
in future from their factional activity against the Party. In the words of Ian
Grey:
"Appalled by their own temerity and recklessness, the six leaders – Trotsky,
Zinoviev, Kamenev, Pyatakov, Sokolnikov and Evdakimov – confessed their guilt in
a public declaration and swore not to pursue factional activity in future. They
also denounced their own left-wing supporters in the Comintern and the Workers'
Opposition group." (Ian Grey, Stalin – Man of History, Abacus, 1982, pp.
213-214).
Formation of an illegal party
The opposition's statement of October, 1926, turned out to be totally
insincere and thoroughly hypocritical. As a matter of fact the opposition had
formed an illegal party of its own, with a separate system of membership,
district committees, and a centre. The illegal party, with a secret illegal
printing press, held secret meetings at which the opposition's factional
platform, and the tactics to be adopted against the Bolshevik Party, were
discussed – all this in violation of the decisions of the 10th Party Congress
banning the formation and continuation of separate factions within the Party.
In October 1926, the Plenum of the Central Committee, sitting jointly with
the Central Control Commission, issued a severe warning to the leaders of the
opposition, removing Trotsky from the Politburo and Kamenev from his candidate
membership of this body. Zinoviev was removed from the Comintern.
The Fifteenth All-Union Party Conference (Oct-Nov 1926) characterised the
Trotsky-Zinoviev opposition as a Menshevik deviation in the Party, issuing the
warning that further development in the direction of Menshevism would lead to
the opposition's expulsion from the Party.
At the beginning of 1927 the opposition renewed its attack on the policy of
the Comintern vis-à-vis the Chinese revolution, blaming the Comintern and the
CPSU for the reverses of the Chinese revolution. Taking advantage of the
internal difficulties, as well as of the deterioration in the international
position of the USSR, the opposition yet again came out with the so-called
'platform of 83'. Renewing their slander against the Party, the opposition
claimed in this platform that the Soviet government was intending to abolish the
monopoly of foreign trade and grant political fights to the kulaks. Such
slanders could not but encourage the kulaks and imperialism alike in putting
pressure on the Soviet government in an attempt to wrest precisely such
concessions from the Soviet government. In addition, the opposition
demagogically demanded greater freedom in the Party, which it understood to mean
the freedom to form factions and to "indulge in unparalleled abuse and
impermissible vilification of the Central Committee, CPSU(B) and the ECCI. They
complain of the 'regime' within the Comintern and the CPSU(B). Essentially, what
they want is freedom to disorganise the Comintern and the CPSU(B)..." (Stalin,
Collected Works, Vol. 9, p. 317).
Trotskyism's struggle against 'Stalinism' – a continuation of
the struggle against Leninism
What the Trotskyite opposition was fighting against was the regime
established by the 10th congress under the guidance of Lenin – a regime designed
to strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat through unity and iron
discipline within the Bolshevik Party by outlawing factionalism. The underlying
principles of the regime established by the 10th Congress were that "while
inner-Party democracy is operated and businesslike criticism of the Party's
defects and mistakes is permitted no factionalism whatsoever is permitted, and
all factionalism must be abandoned on pain of expulsion from the party.,"
(Stalin, The Political Completion of the Russian Opposition, Collected Works,
Vol. 10, p. 166).
"I assert", said Stalin, "that the Trotskyites had already started their
fight against the Leninist regime in the Party in Lenin's time, and that the
fight the Trotskyites are now [i.e., September 19271 waging is a continuation of
the fight against the regime in the Party which they were already waging in
Lenin's time." (Ibid.)
As the opposition's platform drew no support from the workers, it retreated
again and handed another declaration to the Central Committee, on 8 August 1927,
in which they promised yet again to cease their factional activity, only to
violate it a month later.
As the preparations got under way in September 1927 for the Fifteenth Party
Congress, the opposition drew up the third statement of its aims and policies.
An end had to be put to the opposition's factionalism, its disorganising
activity and the charade of repeated violations of its hypocritical declaration
of admission of guilt and promises to cease factional activity. So, at the end
of October 1927, the Central Committee in a joint meeting with the Central
Control Commission, expelled Trotsky and Zinoviev from the Central Committee,
deciding further to submit all the documents relating to the factional activity
of the Trotskyite opposition to the Fifteenth Congress for consideration by the
latter.
It is worth recalling that during the Party discussion preceding the
Fifteenth Party Congress, 724,000 members voted for the Leninist policy of the
Central Committee, while a derisory 4,000 votes were cast for the platform of
the Trotskyite-Zinovievite opposition bloc, that is, half of one per cent of the
membership that took part in this debate.
Why did the opposition fail?
The opposition failed to get any support in the Party organisations, for its
line was that of utter bankruptcy the line of wanting to supplant Leninism by
Trotskyism, while the Party wished faithfully to pursue the line of Leninism –
that of revolutionary Bolshevism.
"How, then," asked Stalin, "are we to explain the fact that notwithstanding
his oratorical skill, notwithstanding his will to lead, notwithstanding his
abilities, Trotsky was thrown out of the leadership of the great Party which is
called the CPSU(B)?" He went on to answer: "The reason is that the opposition
intended to replace Leninism with Trotskyism, to 'improve'
Leninism by means Of Trotskyism. But the Party want to remain faithful to
Leninism in spite of all the various artifices of the down-at-heel aristocrats
in the Party. That is the root cause why the Party, which has made three
revolutions, found it necessary to turn its back on Trotsky and on the
opposition as a whole." (Collected Works, Vol. 10, p. 165).
Speaking at the Fifteenth Congress of the Party, Stalin returned to this
question again. "How could it happen that the Party as a whole, and after it the
working class as well so thoroughly isolated the opposition? After a1l the
opposition is headed by well-known people with well-known names, people who know
how to advertise themselves..., people who are not afflicted with modesty and
who are able to blow their own trumpets, to make the most of their wares.
"It happened because the leading group of the opposition proved to be a group
of petty-bourgeois intellectuals divorced from life, divorced from the
revolution, divorced from the Party, from the working class." (Stalin, ibid.
p. 345).
From factionalism within the Party to counter-revolutionary
struggle against the Soviet regime
Faced with utter defeat within the Party, bankrupt politically and isolated
from the Party membership, the Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc switched over from
factional activity within the Party to anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary
struggle against the Bolshevik regime, attracting in the process all the
anti-Soviet elements to their camp.
On 7 November, 1927, the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, Trotsky
and Zinoviev organised anti-Party demonstrations in Moscow and Leningrad. Poorly
attended, these counter-revolutionary demonstrations were easily dispersed by
the demonstrators of the working class under the leadership of the CPSU.
By its November 7 actions the opposition had given full proof of its
conversion into a counter-revolutionary force openly hostile to the proletarian
dictatorship in the USSR. Having infringed all the norms and rules of Party
life, the Trotskyites now embarked upon a career of violating state laws which
in due course led them to murder, sabotage, wrecking and, finally, to an
alliance with fascism.
On 14 November, 1927, the Central Committee expelled Trotsky and Zinoviev
from the Party, while other members of their group were removed from the Central
Committee and the Central Control Commission.
The Fifteenth Congress of the Party (December 1927), noting that the
opposition had ideologically broken with Leninism, had degenerated into
Menshevism, had adopted the path of capitulation to international imperialism
and the internal bourgeoisie and had become an instrument of struggle against
the dictatorship of the proletariat, enthusiastically endorsed these expulsions.
Moreover it expelled in addition a further 75 members of the Trotsky-Zinoviev
bloc, as well as 15 Democratic Centralists. Further, the Congress instructed
Party organisations to purge their ranks of incorrigible Trotskyites and take
steps to re-educate the rank-and-file members of the opposition in the spirit of
Leninism.
After the Congress many ordinary members of the opposition recognised their
errors, broke with Trotskyism and were restored to Party membership. In January
1928 Trotsky was exiled to Alma-Ata in Central Asia (Kazakhstan). Even there he
continued clandestinely to indulge in his anti-Party, anti-Soviet activity.
Consequently, in January 1929 he was expelled from the Soviet Union.
Since the opposition intended little by little to switch the Bolshevik Party
from the Leninist path to that of Trotskyism, and since the Party wanted to
remain a Leninist Party, it was only natural that the Party turned its back on
the opposition and raised ever higher the banner of Leninism. This alone
explains why, as Stalin put it, "yesterday's leaders of the Party have now
become renegades." (Collected Works, Vol. 10, p. 199).
Not personal factors but departure from Leninism is the cause
of Trotskyism's failure
Instead of grasping this truth, the Trotskyite opposition in its day, and the
Trotskyites ever since then, have explained the opposition's defeat by personal
factors. This is how Stalin described the far-reaching historical roots of
Trotsky's fight against Bolshevism and the reasons for the failure and
bankruptcy of the opposition's line:
"The opposition thinks that its defeat can be 'explained' by the personal
factor, by Stalin's rudeness... That is too cheap an explanation. It is an
incantation, not an explanation. Trotsky has been fighting Leninism since 1904.
From 1904 until the February revolution in 1917 he hung around the Mensheviks
desperately fighting Lenin's Party all the time. During that period Trotsky
suffered a number of defeats at the hand of Lenin's Party- Why? Perhaps Stalin's
rudeness was to blame? But Stalin was not yet the secretary of the Central
Committee at that time; he was not abroad, but in Russia, fighting tsarism
underground, whereas the struggle between Trotsky and Lenin raged abroad. So
what has Stalin's rudeness got to do with it?
"During the period from the October Revolution to 1922, Trotsky, already a
member of the Bolshevik Party, managed to make two 'grand' sorties against Lenin
and his Party: in 1918 – on the question of the Brest Peace; and in 1921 – on
the trade-union question. Both those sorties ended in Trotsky being defeated.
Why? Perhaps Stalin's rudeness was to blame here? But at that time Stalin was
not yet the secretary of the Central Committee. The secretarial posts were then
occupied by notorious Trotskyists. So what has Stalin's rudeness got to do with
it?
"Later, Trotsky made a number of fresh sorties against the Party (1923, 1924,
1926, 1927) and each sortie ended in Trotsky suffering a fresh defeat.
"Is it not obvious from all this that Trotsky's fight against the Leninist
Party has deep, far-reaching historical roots? Is it not obvious from this that
the struggle the Party is now waging against Trotskyism is a continuation of the
struggle that the Party, headed by Lenin, waged from 1904 onwards?
"Is it not obvious from all this that the attempts of the Trotskyists to
replace Leninism by Trotskyism are the chief cause of the failure and bankruptcy
of the entire line of the opposition?
"Our Party was born and grew up in the storm of revolutionary battles. It is
not a party that grew up in a period of peaceful development. For that very
reason it is rich in revolutionary traditions and does not make a fetish of its
leaders. At one time Plekhanov was the most popular man in the Party. More than
that he was the founder of the Party, and his popularity was incomparably
greater than that of Trotsky or Zinoviev. Nevertheless, in spite of that the
Party turned away from Plekhanov as soon as he began to depart from Marxism and
go over to opportunism. Is it surprising, then, that people who are not so
'great, people like Trotsky and Zinoviev, found themselves at the tail of the
Party after they began to depart from Leninism?" (Collected Works, Vol.
10, pp 199-201).
Just as the struggle waged against Trotskyism by the Bolshevik Party headed
by Stalin from 1924 onwards was a continuation of the struggle that the Party
headed by Lenin had waged from 1903 onwards, equally Trotsky's fight against the
Bolshevik Party headed by Stalin was a continuation of the struggle that
Trotskyism waged against the Bolshevik Party when it was headed by Lenin. Lenin
had been the chief target of Trotsky's vilifications from 1903 to 1917. After
the death of Lenin, Stalin came to occupy this honourable position, became the
chief target of the opposition's attack. This was because Stalin, by faithfully
defending and carrying forward the Leninist fine, became the most representative
spokesman of the Bolshevik Party and in that capacity drew the wrath of the
opposition in its repeated, if unsuccessful, attempts to substitute Trotskyism
for Leninism. It was not a case of the allegedly Leninist Trotsky fighting
against an allegedly outside usurper, Stalin, as is put out in Trotskyite fairy
tales; on the contrary, it was the staunch and indefatigable Leninist (Stalin)
who brilliantly continued the successful Leninist assault on the anti-Bolshevik
and petty-bourgeois ideology of Trotskyism. This alone explains Trotskyism's
hatred of Joseph St" the very mention of whose name causes Trotskyite gentry to
foam at the mouth- This is how Stalin described the opposition's hatred for him:
"First of all about the personal factor. You have heard here how assiduously
the oppositionists hurl abuse at Stalin, abuse him with all their might. The
reason why the main attacks were directed against Stalin is because Stalin knows
all the opposition's tricks better, perhaps, than some of our comrades do, and
it is not easy, I dare say, to fool him. So they strike their blows primarily at
Stalin. Well, let them hurt abuse to their hearts' content.
"And what is Stalin? Stalin is only a minor figure. Take Lenin. Who does not
know that at the time of the August bloc the opposition, headed by Trotsky,
waged an even more scurrilous campaign of slander against Lenin? Listen to
Trotsky, for example.
"'The wretched squabbling systematically provoked by Lenin, that old hand at
the game, that professional exploiter of all that is backward in the Russian
labour movement, seems like a senseless obsession' (See Trotsky's 'Letter to
Chkeidze', April 1913).
"Note the language, comrades! Note the language! It is Trotsky writing. And
writing about Lenin.
"Is it surprising, then, that Trotsky, who wrote in such an ill-mannered way
about the great Lenin, whose shoe-laces he was not worthy of tying, should now
hurl abuse at one of Lenin's numerous pupils – Comrade Stalin?
"More than that. I think the opposition does me honour by venting all its
hatred against Stalin. That is as it should be. I think it would be strange and
offensive if the opposition, which is trying to wreck the Party, were to praise
Stalin, who is defending the fundamentals of the Leninist Party principle." (Collected
Works, Vol. 10, pp. 177-178).
Trotsky's regular predictions of doom
Proceeding from the unscientific and pessimistic, not to say anti-Leninist,
theory of 'permanent revolution', which was refuted by the experience of the
three Russian revolutions and by all further social development in the USSR and
elsewhere, Trotsky could, and did, predict nothing but doom. The underlying
theme and purpose of all his statements between 1923 and 1940 was to deny all
possibility of building socialism in the USSR and thus to undermine the
confidence of the Soviet proletariat in building a new society by its own
efforts if the world revolution failed to come to its rescue. This was
accompanied by vicious attacks on the only guarantee for the successes of the
USSR during this epoch-making period of particular difficulty and particular
achievement, namely the Leninist leadership of the Party and state of the
proletarian dictatorship. Of course these attacks were always hidden under a
guise of attacking the 'bureaucratic state apparatus', or 'Stalinist
bureaucracy, with the alleged desire to improve matters. And when the
oft-predicted disaster did not happen, this only provided Trotsky with an
occasion to report on invented widespread disaster, disillusionment and
demoralisation as a means of bringing about the fulfilment of his jeremiads.
Trotsky's 'New Course' predicts degeneration of the Party
In 1923, at the time of the New Economic Policy (NEP), Trotsky predicted
immediate doom for the proletarian dictatorship through the "degeneration of the
state apparatus in a bourgeois direction." In his New Course, written in
1923, he claimed that "Bureaucratism has reached an excessive and truly alarming
development." This is how he predicted the restoration of capitalism through the
NEP, claiming that quantity would at a certain stage be transformed into
quality:
"...The rapid development of private capital... would show that private
capital is interposing itself more and more between the workers' state and the
peasantry, is acquiring an economic and therefore a political influence...
[S]uch a rupture between Soviet industry and agriculture, between the
proletariat and the peasantry, would constitute a grave danger for the
proletarian revolution, a symptom of the possibility of the triumph of the
counter-revolution.
"What are the political paths by which the victory of the counter-revolution
might come if the economic hypothesis just set forth were to be realised?...
[T]he political process would assume in the main the character of the
degeneration of the state apparatus in a bourgeois direction... If private
capital in creased rapidly and succeeded in fusing with the peasantry, the
active counter-revolutionary tendencies directed against the Communist Party
would then probably prevail...
"The counter-revolutionary tendencies can find a support among the kulaks,
the middlemen, the retailers, the concessionaires, in a word, among elements
much more capable of surrounding the state apparatus than the Party itself...
…[T]he negative social phenomena we have just enumerated and which now
nurture bureaucratisation could place the revolution in peril should they
continue to develop... bureaucratism in the state and party apparatus is the
expression of the most vexatious tendencies inherent in our situation, of the
defects and deviations in our work which... might sap the basis of the
revolution... Quantity will at a certain stage be transformed into quality."
(Chapter 4).
In all this, Trotsky forgets completely the role of the dictatorship of the
proletariat. Of course, the introduction of the NEP did unleash capitalist
elements, in the countryside in particular; of course it was a partial return to
capitalism. All that was known to the author of the NEP, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
But there was no other way of transition from war communism to socialism except
through the NEP even though the latter, by unleashing capitalist elements in the
countryside, carried the danger of capitalist restoration. This danger, however,
this possibility of capitalist restoration, could never be realised as long as
the proletarian dictatorship exercised its iron rule over hostile capitalist
classes – kulaks and traders. That is why Lenin called for the maximum
strengthening of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This, in turn, could only
be done through unity of will and iron discipline in the ruling Bolshevik Party.
That is why he caused the Tenth Party Congress to pass the resolution, written
by himself, calling for existing factions within the Party to be disbanded
forthwith, for the formation of new factions in the future to be banned, and
declaring that non-compliance with this resolution by anyone would result in
their immediate expulsion from the Party. Trotsky for his part consistently
undermined the proletarian dictatorship by his vicious attacks on the leadership
of the Party, his denigration of the Party and state apparatus in the USSR, and
by flouting all norms and discipline of the Bolshevik Party.
Failure of Trotsky's predictions
Notwithstanding Trotskyist sabotage, Trotsky's predictions did not come true,
thanks to the Leninist leadership of the Party and the state during this very
difficult period. Instead NEP Russia was actually transformed into a mighty
socialist USSR that then went on to achieve the crowning glory of defeating the
mighty Nazi war machine almost single-handedly. As the "degeneration",
"initiative-killing bureaucratism", "ossification", "estrangement" and "morbid
uneasiness" predicted by Trotsky failed to materialise and the USSR began to be
transformed through the collectivisation and industrialisation drive of the
Five-Year Plans, Trotsky intensified his attacks on the USSR and the leadership
of the Bolshevik Party – revealing in the process his true hideous features as a
market socialist, i.e., as a bourgeois socialist of the social-democratic
variety.
Contemptible and cowardly capitulator
In 1933, Trotsky published his pamphlet Soviet Economy in Danger, in which he
came out in opposition to this second assault on capitalism, i.e., the assault
mounted through socialist industrialisation and collectivisation – both measures
of world revolutionary historic significance. He declared that the "correct and
economically sound collectivisation, at a given stage, SHOULD NOT LEAD TO THE
ELIMINATION OF THE NEP but to the GRADUAL REORGANISATION OF ITS METHODS." (p.
32).
In other words, no attempt should be made to eliminate capitalism in general,
and capitalism in the countryside in particular.
Gorbachev style, pretending to stand for some sort of control of the market,
Trotsky's method of controlling the market is to leave it to the market to
control itself!
"The regulation of the market," he says, "itself must depend upon the
tendencies that are brought about through its medium." (p. 30).
Every revolutionary giant stride forward of the Soviet economy at that time,
because outside the market, is portrayed by this high priest of market socialism
as disorder and "economic chaos." He says:
"By eliminating the market and installing instead Asiatic bazaars the
bureaucracy has created... the conditions for the most barbaric gyrations of
prices and consequently has placed a mine under commercial calculations. As a
result economic chaos has been redoubled." (p. 34).
Trotsky, who in December 1925, at the 14th Party Congress of the CPSU, had
tried to force on the Party the policy of immediate collectivisation of the
peasantry, when the conditions necessary for such collectivisation were totally
lacking, this same Trotsky in 1933, when collectivisation was well on the way to
completion, comes out in opposition to the policy of liquidating the kulaks as a
class, demanding instead the establishment of "a policy of severely restricting
the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks." (p. 47).
In other words, capitalism must not be eliminated in the countryside.
Praying for miracles Trotsky declares: "Commodities must be adapted to human
needs..." Trotsky's position amounts to this: 'Economic accounting is
unthinkable without market relations.' In view of this, it is hardly surprising
that Trotsky came to the conclusion that: "It is necessary to put off the Second
Five-Year Plan. Away with shrieking enthusiasm!" (p. 41).
No wonder then that Stalin, in his Report to the 17th Party Congress (26
January 1934) made the following observation on the Trotskyist programme:
"We have always said that the 'Lefts' are in fact Rights who mask their
Rightness by Left phrases. Now the 'Lefts' themselves confirm the correctness of
our statement. Take last year's issues of the Trotskyist 'Bulletin. What do
Messieurs the Trotskyists demand, what do they write about in what does their
'Left' programme find expression? They demand: THE DISSOLUTION OF THE STATE
FARMS, on the grounds that they do not pay, THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MAJORITY OF
THE COLLECTIVE FARMS, on the grounds that they are fictitious, the ABANDONMENT
OF THE POLICY OF ELIMINATING THE KULAKS, REVERSION TO THE POLICY OF CONCESSIONS,
AND THE LEASING TO CONCESSIONAIRES OF A NUMBER OF OUR INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISES, on
the grounds that they do not pay.
"There you have the programme of these contemptible cowards and capitulators
– their counter-revolutionary programme for restoring capitalism in the USSR!
"What difference is there between this programme and that of the extreme
Rights? Clearly, there is none. It follows that the Lefts' have openly
associated themselves with the counter-revolutionary programme of the Rights in
order to enter into a bloc with them and to wage a joint struggle against the
Party." (Stalin, Collected Works, Vol. 13, pp. 370-371.
Trotsky's anti-Soviet diatribes are grist to the imperialist
mill
Although bourgeois economics learnt nothing from Trotsky's Soviet Economy in
Danger, seeing as he had but repeated, in a clumsy way, what had been said a
decade earlier by bourgeois economists such as Von Mises and Brutzkus, it was
nevertheless extensively quoted in the imperialist press by the bourgeois
critics of socialist construction, for it enabled them to stress that their
'objective' and 'impartial' critiques of socialism, and their dogma that it was
impossible for society to free itself of the market, were fully accepted by this
'old Bolshevik'. (For a fuller treatment of this subject, the reader is referred
to chapter 11 of my book Perestroika – the Complete Collapse of Revisionism).
Trotsky's diatribes against the Soviet regime were grasped with alacrity by
the German and Italian fascists: "See, my friends, " said Goebbels to the German
socialists and communists, "what Trotsky is saying about the Soviet state. It is
no longer a Socialist State but a state dominated by a parasitic bureaucracy,
living on the Russian people." (see Appendix 2) These and similar arguments,
broadcast by the fascists as well as other imperialist states, were designed to
weaken both the faith the masses might have in the USSR as well as their faith
in themselves, in their capacity to build a new life for themselves. These
Trotskyist arguments were, and continue to be, seized upon by the opponents of
communism in the Labour movement as well as by the radical petty-bourgeois
intelligentsia. Trotskyism thus performed, and continues to perform, the
function of confusing and disarming the working-class movement politically and
ideologically.
Flying in the face of all reality, ignoring the developments in socialist
construction in the USSR, Trotsky continued to predict disaster and to advocate
the overthrow of the 'Stalinist bureaucracy' – a euphemism for the Leninist
leadership of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet state – in other words, the
overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat. in an article written in
October 1933, Trotsky predicted the restoration of capitalism if 'Stalinist
bureaucracy' continued to hold sway:
"The further unhindered development of bureaucratism must lead inevitably to
the cessation of economic and cultural growth, to a terrible social crisis and
to the downward plunge of the entire society. But this would imply not only the
collapse of the proletarian dictatorship but also the end of bureaucratic
domination. In place of the workers' state would come not 'social bureaucratic'
but capitalist relations." (The Class Nature of the Soviet State).
In February 1935 Trotsky predicted the "inevitable collapse of the Stalinist
political regime" and its replacement by fascist-capitalist counterrevolution",
unless the removal of the Soviet regime came "as a conscious act of the
proletarian vanguard," to wit, the same Trotskyist counter-revolutionaries who
denied the very possibility of building socialism in the first place, who tried
to put every obstacle (albeit unsuccessfully) in the way of socialist
construction, who hand in hand with the imperialist bourgeoisie slandered the
Soviet state and Bolshevik Party leadership, who belittled and denigrated every
single achievement of socialist industry, agriculture, science, technology and
the arts and who ended up by being allies and tools of German and Japanese
fascism!! These very contemptible cowards and counter-revolutionaries, these
ardent advocates of the programme of capitalist restoration, in the topsy-turvy
world of Trotskyist make-believe and intrigue, convince themselves that they are
the 'proletarian vanguard'! At the same time we are told by Trotsky that the
Bolshevik Party which, following the Leninist line, not only believes in the
possibility of building socialism in the USSR but is actually accomplishing it
successfully in the face of internal and external difficulties and foes, is a
regime of 'Bonapartism' which is bound to make way for 'counter-revolution'
unless its removal comes about at the hands of the counter-revolutionary
Trotskyists who have awarded themselves the title of "proletarian vanguard"!
"The inevitable collapse of the Stalinist political regime will lead to the
establishment of Soviet democracy only in the event that the removal of
Bonapartism comes as the conscious act of the proletarian vanguard In all other
cases, in place of Stalinism there could only come the fascist-capitalist
counterrevolution". (Trotsky, The Workers' State, Thermidor and Bonapartism).
Trotsky acknowledges socialist achievements as a means of
gaining credibility
By the end of the Second Five-Year plan, however, even the blind could not
fail to see the gigantic, truly heroic and world- historic achievements of
socialist construction. Even intelligent representatives of imperialism began to
make admissions of the achievements of socialism in all walks of life of the
USSR – the only country to have achieved full employment while the capitalist
world was reeling under the hammer blows of recession. Trotsky was in danger of
being discredited because of the crying discrepancy between Soviet reality and
Trotsky's description of it. So Trotsky, that most anti-Soviet of all
anti-Soviets, in order to gain some credibility, was compelled to write almost
effusively of the gains of socialism in the USSR, again, of course, merely as a
prelude to a further scurrilous campaign of lies and slander against the Soviet
regime. In his Revolution Betrayed (1933), he writes:
"Gigantic achievements in industry, enormously promising beginnings in
agriculture, an extraordinary growth of the old industrial cities and a building
of new ones, a rapid increase of the number of workers, a rise in cultural level
and cultural demands – such are the indubitable results of the October
revolution...
"Socialism has demonstrated its fight to victory, not in the pages of 'Das
Kapital' but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the earth's
surface – not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel
cement; and electricity ... a backward country has achieved in less than ten
years successes unexampled in history.
"This also ends the quarrel with the reformists in the workers' movement. Can
we compare for one moment their mouse-like fussing with the titanic work
accomplished by this people aroused to a new life by revolution?..." (p. 16).
Thus quite mysteriously, and without any explanation let alone a correction
or an apology from Trotsky, we find that the "smug, negative, disdainful
cliquish, bureaucratic apparatus," characterised on the one hand by "inertia"
and on the other by "antagonistic violence towards criticism," staffed with only
"careerists and political hangers-on" who are so divorced from reality as to be
in danger of losing support of the masses and forfeiting state dominance to the
"counter-revolutionary tendencies" among "retailers, middlemen... and kulaks –
this bureaucratic apparatus", i.e., the leadership of the Bolshevik Party and
the Soviet state, has somehow risen to the occasion and organised "ten years of
successes unexampled in history."!
Normally Trotskyism paints a picture of the Soviet people being ordered about
and herded around by the 'Stalinist bureaucracy', meekly and sullenly accepting
their fate. – Yet in some pages of this book, which are characteristically
contradicted by some other pages in the same book, Trotsky describes the
enthusiasm with which the Soviet youth plunged into economic, cultural and
artistic activity, in the following glowing terms:
"To be sure, the youth are very active in the sphere of economics. In the
Soviet Union there are now 1.2 million Communist Youth in the collective farms.
Hundreds of thousands of members of the Communist Youth have been mobilised
during recent years for construction work timber work coal mining. gold
production; for work in the Arctic, Sakhalin, or in Amur where the new town of
Komsomolsk is in process of construction. The new generation is putting out
shock brigades, champion workers, Stakhanovites, foremen; under administrators.
The youth are studying and a considerable part of them are studying assiduously.
They are as active, if not more so, in the sphere of athletics in its most
daring or war-like forms such as parachute jumping and marksmanship. The
enterprising and audacious are going on all kinds of dangerous expeditions.
"'The better part of our youth,' said recently the well-known polar explorer,
Schmidt, 'are eager to work where difficulties await them.' This is undoubtedly
true...
"... [I]t would be a crude slander against the youth to portray them as
controlled exclusively, or even predominantly, by personal interests. No, in the
general mass they are magnanimous, responsive, enterprising... In their depths
are various unformulated tendencies grounded in heroism and still only awaiting
application. It is upon these moods in particular that the newest kind of Soviet
patriotism is nurturing itself. It is undoubtedly very deep, sincere and
dynamic..." (Chapter 7).
More scurrilous attacks on socialism
All this, however, is only a prelude to a vicious denunciation of the Soviet
regime, a negation of Soviet achievements and everything socialist, and a
distortion – nay a downright falsification – of Soviet history. Having been
forced to pay lip service to socialism having "demonstrated its tight to
victory, " to the Soviet state having achieved "ten years successes unexampled
in history," Trotsky devotes the rest of his book to a vitriolic attack on the
USSR and its leadership. We are told, despite all the admissions about
"successes unexampled in history", that "the Soviet State in all its relations
is far closer to a backward capitalism than to communism" (p. 22); that, far
from achieving the lower stage of communism, what the Soviet Union had achieved
was a "preparatory regime transitional from capitalism to
socialism." (p. 52); that this regime was engendering increasing inequalities:
"wage differences in the Soviet Union," he asserted, "are not less but greater
than in the capitalist countries" (p. 228); and that industry was dominated by a
"corps of slave drivers" (p. 229). Before this transitional regime could develop
in the direction of socialism, it was absolutely necessary for there to be "a
second supplementary revolution against bureaucratic absolutism" (p. 272)
because "the bureaucracy can be removed only by a revolutionary force. And, as
always there will be fewer victims the more bold and decisive is the attack"
(p.271). Since the Soviet leadership had the overwhelming support of the working
class and the collectivised peasantry, Trotsky's references to revolutionary
force" could either mean acts of terrorism against the leadership of the
Bolshevik Party, or a military conspiracy, or foreign intervention for the
overthrow of the Bolshevik regime – or a combination of all these means.
That this is precisely what Trotsky had in mind is made clear in the course
of the pages of this book.
Re-assertion of the discredited theory of 'permanent
revolution'
There is also the inevitable statement that the advance towards socialism
depends to some extent on the prior victory of the revolution in the rest of
Europe (p. 274) – a rehash and latest version of Trotsky's permanent
hopelessness that masquerades as the theory of 'permanent revolution. That being
the case, one may be forgiven for asking- what will the "supplementary
revolution against bureaucratic absolutism" achieve if the revolution is
destined to vegetate and degenerate into hopelessness in the absence of "victory
of the revolution in the rest of Europe"?
In addition, the book contains virulent denunciations of all attempts at
raising the productivity of labour, unattainable under the conditions of
capitalism Trotsky attacks all wage differentials, piece-work payments,
socialist emulation drives – all of which are simply denounced as "a source of
injustice, oppression; and compulsions for the majority, privileges and a 'happy
life' for the few" (pp. 244-245). Apart from the demagogy of it all, what comes
through is the sheer ignorance, not to mention dishonesty: it would appear that
its author has failed totally to grasp the essence of The Critique of the
Gotha Programme, in winch Marx deals, inter alia, with the norms of
distribution under the lower and higher stages of communism In the lower stage,
distribution can only be according to the formula From each according to his
ability, to each according to his work, a formula which does not "remove the
defects of distribution and inequality of 'bourgeois right'" (Lenin, State
and Revolution).
Equating socialism and fascism and spreading defeatist
demoralisation
Driven by his intense and insensate hatred of the Soviet state, mindless
subjectivism and limitless vindictiveness against the Bolshevik regime for the
reason that the latter had decided to expel him for his incorrigible
factionalism, Trotsky goes to the despicable length of saying in Chapter 11 of
his book Revolution Betrayed that "Stalinism and fascism ... are
symmetrical phenomena In many of their features they show a deadly similarity."
In the appendix to his book, Trotsky says:
"...with the working class and its sincere champions among the
intelligentsia... our work will actually cause doubts and evoke distrust – not
of the revolution but of its usurpers. But that is the very goal we have set
ourselves."
Trotsky predicts and calls for the defeat of the USSR in war
Since Trotsky, driven by a combination of egotistical factionalism and
bourgeois subjectivism, always referred to the Leninist leadership of the
Bolshevik party and the Soviet state as a "Stalinist bureaucracy", "caste of
usurpers", "totalitarian Regime", etc., it can hardly be denied that the purpose
and intention behind Trotsky's demented vituperations was to malign the Soviet
regime by attempting to convince workers all over the world that this regime,
indistinguishable according to Trotsky from fascism, was not deserving of their
support. Such an attitude is only the prelude to wishing, and calling, for the
defeat of this regime in any war against fascism by spreading demoralisation.
That Trotskyism took this step not only secretly but also openly is clear from
the following disgusting pronouncements concerning the then impending Second
World War. In these pronouncements Trotsky predicts with malicious glee the
military defeat of the USSR in the coming war. Indeed he goes even further,
asserting that a protracted war without a military defeat "would have to lead to
a bourgeois-Bonapartist revolution." Here are Trotsky's very words:
"Can we, however, expect that the Soviet Union will come out of the coming
great war without defeat? To this frankly posed question we will answer as
frankly; if the war should only remain a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union
will be inevitable. In a technical economic, and military sense, imperialism is
incomparably more strong. If it is not paralysed by revolution in the west;
imperialism will sweep away the regime which issued from the October Revolution"
(Revolution Betrayed, p. 216).
What would be the case if the Soviet Union managed to survive the fate
assigned to it by Trotsky? Well, the destruction of the Soviet state would ensue
just the same. Turn or twist as we may – military defeat or not – the Soviet
Union could not survive the war:
"The protracted nature of the war," Trotsky wrote, "will reveal the
contradictions of the transition economy of the USSR with its bureaucratic
planning.... [I]n the case of a protracted war accompanied by the passivity of
the world proletariat the internal social contradictions of the USSR not only
might lead but would have to lead to a bourgeois-Bonapartist revolution." (The
Fourth International and the War).
In 1940, nearing the end of his life – a life full of irreconcilable
hostility towards Leninism – Trotsky, with a zeal worthy of a better cause,
again predicted the defeat of the USSR and the triumph of Hitlerite Germany:
"We always started from the fact that the international policy of the Kremlin
was determined by the new aristocracy's... incapacity to conduct a war.
"...the ruling caste is no longer capable of thinking about tomorrow. Its
formula is that of all doomed regimes 'after us the deluge'...
"The war will topple many things and many individuals. Artifice, trickery,
frame-ups and treasons will prove of no avail in escaping its severe judgment"
(Statement to the British capitalist press on Stalin – Hitler's Quartermaster).
"Stalin cannot make a war with discontented workers and peasants and with a
decapitated Red Army" (German-Soviet Alliance).
"The level of the USSR's productive forces forbids a major war... The
involvement of the USSR in a major war before the end of this period would
signify in any case a struggle with unequal weapons.
"The subjective factor, not less important than the material has changed in
the last years sharply for the worse...
"Stalin cannot wage an offensive war with any hope of victory.
"Should the USSR enter the war with its innumerable victims and privations,
the whole fraud of the official regime, its outrages and violence will
inevitably provoke a profound reaction on the part of the people, who have
already carried out three revolutions in this century…
"The present war can crush the Kremlin bureaucracy long before revolution
breaks out in some capitalist country..." (The Twin Stars: Hitler-Stalin).
Trotsky's predictions refuted by the epic victory of the USSR
in World War II
As usual, and happily for humanity, all Trotsky's predictions were totally
belied. After initial reverses in the first few weeks of the war, attributable
in the main to the Nazi surprise attack, the Soviet defences stiffened. Before
long they struck back. The rest of the world, like Trotsky, had given the USSR
only a few weeks before collapsing in the face of the onslaught of the allegedly
invincible Nazi war machine. The Red Army and Soviet people, united as one under
the leadership of the CPSU and their Supreme Commander Joseph Stalin, exploded
this myth of Nazi invincibility. Soviet Victories in the titanic battles of
Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and Leningrad will forever be cherished not only by
the peoples of the former, great and glorious Soviet Union, but also by all
progressive humanity.
"The Battle of Moscow had been an epic event... It had involved more than 2
million men; 2,500 tanks, 1,800 aircraft, and 25,000 guns. Casualties had been
horrifying in scale. For the Russians it had ended in victory. They had suffered
the full impact of the German 'Blitzkrieg' offensive and, notwithstanding their
losses... they had been able to mount an effective counterattack. They had begun
to destroy the myth of German invincibility…" (Ian Grey, Stalin – Man of
History, Abacus, p. 344).
The surrender on 1 February 1943 at Stalingrad, by the fascist general Von
Paulus and 23 other generals, mesmerised the world. The victory of the Red Army
at Stalingrad was incredible as it was heroic. The Nazi losses in the
Volga-Don-Stalingrad area were 1.5 million men, 3,500 tanks, 12,000 guns and
3,000 aircraft. Never before had the Nazi war machine, which was accustomed to
running over countries in days and weeks, suffered such a humiliating defeat, a
defeat "in which the flower of the German army perished. It was against the
background of this battle... that Stalin now rose to almost titanic stature in
the eyes of the world" (Deutscher, Stalin, p. 472). From now on nothing
but defeat stared the Germans in the face, leading all the way to the entry of
the Red Army into Berlin and the storming by it of the Reichstag on 30 April
1945 – the same day that the Fuhrer committed suicide. Six days later, Field-
Marshall Wilhelm Keitel, acting on behalf of the German High Command,
surrendered to Marshall Zhukov.
Stalin and the Great Patriotic War
Although the credit for the victory must correctly be given to the Soviet
armed forces and the heroic efforts of the Soviet people, no narrative of these
fateful years is complete without a reference, indeed a fulsome tribute, to the
undisputed leader of the CPSU(B), the Soviet people, and the Supreme commander
of the Soviet forces Joseph Stalin. Even a renegade like Gorbachev is obliged,
apropos the Soviet victory in the Second World War, to admit that: "A factor in
the achievement of victory was the tremendous political will purposefulness and
persistence, ability to organise and discipline people, displayed in the war
years by Joseph Stalin." (Report at the Festive Meeting on the 70th
Anniversary of the Great October Revolution held in Moscow on 2 November
1987, p. 25).
Ian Grey, who is a bourgeois but honest writer, has this to say on this
score:
"The massive setbacks and the immediate threat to Moscow would have unnerved
most men, but the impact on Stalin was to strengthen his grim determination to
fight. No single factor was more important in holding the nation from
disintegration at this time." (Ibid. p. 335).
Further:
"It was in a real sense his [Stalin's] victory. It could not have been won
without his industrialisation campaign and especially the intensive development
of industry beyond the Volga. Collectivisation had contributed to the victory by
enabling the government to stockpile food and raw materials to prevent paralysis
in industry and famine in the towns. But also collectivisation with its
machine-tractor stations, had given the peasants their first training in the use
of tractors and other machines." (Ibid. p. 419).
Quoting Isaac Deutscher, who is far from being friendly to Stalin,
approvingly, Ian Grey continues:
"'Collectivised farming had been 'the peasants' preparatory school for
mechanised warfare'…
"It was his victory, too, because he had directed and controlled every branch
of Russian operations throughout the war The range and burden of his
responsibilities were extraordinary, but day by day without a break for the four
years of the war he exercised direct command of the Russian forces and control
over supplies, war industries, and government policy, including foreign policy."
(Ibid. pp. 419-420)-
Finally the same writer says:
"It was his victory, above all because it had been won by his genius and
labors, heroic in scale The Russian people had looked to him for leadership, and
he had not faded them. His speeches of July 3 and November 6, 1941, which had
steeled them for the trials of war, and his presence in Moscow during the great
battle of the city, had demonstrated his will to victory. He... inspired them
and gave than positive direction. He had the capacity of Wending to detail and
keeping in mind the broad picture and, while remembering the past and immersed
in the present; he was constantly looking ahead to the future"(p. 424).
Innately hostile as he is to Stalin, Deutscher is nevertheless obliged to
Paint this Picture of Stalin's role during the war:
"Many allied visitors who called at the Kremlin during the war were
astonished to see on how many issues, great and small military, political or
diplomatic, Stalin personally took the final decision. He was in effect his own
Commander-in-Chief, his own minister of defence, his Own quartermaster, his Own
minister of supply, his own foreign minister, and even his own chef de
protocole. The stavka, the Red Army's GHQ, was in his offices in the
Kremlin. From his office desk; in constant and direct touch with the commands of
the various fronts, he watched and directed the campaigns in the field From his
office desk, too, he managed another stupendous operation, the evacuation of
1,360 plants and factories from western Russia and the Ukraine to the Volga, the
Urals and Siberia, an evacuation that involved not only machines and
installations but millions of workmen and their families Between one function
and the other he bargained with, say, Beaverbrook and Harriman over the
quantities of aluminium or the calibre of rifles and anti-aircraft guns to be
delivered to Russia by the western allies; or he received leaders of the
guerrillas – -- from German occupied territory and discussed with them raids to
be carried out hundreds of miles behind the enemy's lines At the height of the
battle of Moscow, in December 1941, when the thunder of Hitler's guns hovered
ominously over the streets of Moscow, he found time enough to start a subtle
diplomatic game with the Polish General Sikorski who had come to conclude a
Russo-Polish treaty... He entertained them [foreign envoys and visitors] usually
late at night and in the small hours of the morning. After a day filled with
military reports operational decisions, economic instructions and diplomatic
haggling he would at dawn pore over the latest dispatches from the commissariat
of Home Affairs, the NKVD... Thus he went on, day after day, throughout four
years of hostilities – a prodigy of patience tenacity, and vigilance, almost
omnipresent almost omniscient." (Isaac Deutscher, Stalin, pp. 456-457).
And further.
" ...[T]here is no doubt that he was their [the Soviet troops] real
Commander-in-Chief .His leadership was by no means confined to the taking of
abstract strategic decisions, at which civilian politicians may excel The and
interest with which he studied the technical aspects of modern warfare, down to
the minute details, shows him to have been anything but a dilettante. He viewed
the war primarily from the angle of logistics ... To secure reserves of manpower
and supplies of weapons, in the right quantities and proportions, to allocate
them and transport them to the right points at the right time, to amass a
decisive strategic reserve and to have it ready for intervention at decisive
moments – these operations made up nine-tenths of his task" (Ibid. p.
459).
Deutscher also dispels any notion of popular hostility to the Soviet regime:
"It should not be imagined that a majority of the nation was hostile to the
government If that had been the case no patriotic appeals, no prodding or
coercion, would have prevented Russia's political collapse, for which Hitler was
confidently hoping The great transformation that the county had gone through
before the war had... strengthened the moral fibre of the nation. The majority
was imbued with a strong sense of its economic and social advance, which it was
grimly determined to defend against danger from without." (Ibid. p. 473)
So much then for the Trotskyist drivel about the "new aristocracy's
incapacity to conduct a war," the "discontented workers and peasants and a
decapitated army" making it impossible to make a war, the alleged inferiority of
the weapons of the Red Army, Stalin being unable to "wage an offensive war with
any hope of victory," and the war crushing "the Kremlin bureaucracy."
Far from being crushed, the Soviet regime emerged from the war much
strengthened. Far from crushing the Soviet regime by its war against the USSR,
the Nazi regime itself was crushed, as was Germany. What is more, the Soviet
victory demonstrated beyond measure the correctness the policies of
industrialisation. and collectivisation pursued, in the teeth of Trotskyist and
imperialist opposition, by the Soviet regime before the war.
"The new appreciation of Stalin's role did not spring only from
after-thoughts born in the flush of victory. The truth was that the war could
not have been wan without the intensive industrialisation of Russia; and of her
eastern provinces in particular. Nor could it have been won without the
collectivisation of large numbers of farms. The muzhik of 1930, who had never
handled a tractor or any other machine, would have been of little use in modern
war. Collectivised farming with its machine-tractor stations, had been the
peasants' preparatory school for mechanised warfare. The rapid raising of the
average standard of education had also enabled the Red Army to draw on a
considerable reserve of intelligent officers and men. We are fifty or a hundred
years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years.
Either we do it, or they crush us – so Stalin had spoken exactly ten years
before Hitler set out to conquer Russia. His words, when they were recalled now,
could not but impress people as a prophesy brilliantly fulfilled as a most
timely call to action. And, indeed a few yesrs' delay in the modernisation of
Russia might have made all the difference between victory and defeat. "
(Deutscher, Ibid. p. 535).
This is how Deutscher captures the victory parade in Red Square at the end of
the war.
"On 24 June 1945 Stalin stood at the top of the Lenin Mausoleum and reviewed
a great victory parade of the Red Army which marked the fourth anniversary of
Hitler's attack. By Stalin's side stood Marshall Zhukov, his deputy the victor
of Moscow, Stalingrad, and Berlin. The troops that marched past him were led by
Marshall Rokossovsky. As they marched rode, and galloped across the Red Square
regiments of infantry cavalry, and tanks swept the mud of its pavement – it was
a day of torrential rain – with innumerable banners and standards of Hitler's
army At the Mausoleum they threw the banners at Stalin's feet .The allegorical
scene was strangely imaginative...
"The next day Stalin received the tribute of Moscow for the defence of the
city in 1941. The day after he was acclaimed as 'Hero of the Soviet Union' and
given the title of Generalissimo." (Ibid. p. 534)
In "these days of undreamt-of triumph and glory," continues Deutscher:
"Stalin stood at the full blaze of popular recognition and gratitude. These
feelings were spontaneous, genuine not engineered by official propagandists
slogans about the 'achievements of the Stalinist era' now conveyed fresh meaning
not only to young people, but to sceptics and malcontents of the older
generation…" (Ibid. p. 534).
Thus, at the end of the war Trotskyism stood thoroughly discredited
-thoroughly bankrupt – and regarded as no more than an information bureau and
anti-communist ally of imperialism in particular during the US-led war of
aggression against the Korean people, during which most Trotskyists, consumed by
their genetical hatred of the Soviet Union, effectively sided with US
imperialism and against the forces of national liberation and socialism
The cold war – Imperialism's response to the prestige of
victorious socialism
The USSR's successes in the collectivisation of agriculture, massive
socialist industrialisation, gigantic achievements in education, science,
technology and culture, with a continuously rising standard of living for the
working class and the collective peasantry, and her crowning victory in the
anti-fascist Great Patriotic War, with the resultant victory of Peoples
Democratic governments in Poland, Hungary Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and
Albania, brought Soviet prestige to soaring point. It was this spectacle of
triumphant, confident and advancing socialism that put the fear of God into the
hearts of the imperialist bourgeoisie and caused the latter, under the
leadership of US imperialism which had emerged from the war as the strongest
imperialist power, to initiate the cold war, establish the NATO aggressive
warmongering military alliance and re-arm West Germany as a member of this
alliance.
The NATO warmongers threatened the USSR with an economic blockade and nuclear
blackmail. But the USSR defied the blockade and military threats alike. It
re-doubled its efforts to build its economy and destroy the US monopoly of the
atom bomb. At the end of September 1949, in the same week as Comrade Mao
Tse-tung proclaimed the Peoples Republic of China and the success of the Chinese
revolution, the world heard the detonation of the USSR's first atom bomb. Even
such a Trotskyite writer as Isaac Deutscher, whose hatred for Stalin is total
and who never misses a chance of describing Stalin as "dug and dreary", is
obliged to admit:
"He [Stalin] achieved some of his vital objectives. He resisted Western
pressures firmly enough to deter any American design for spreading the war, and
Soviet nuclear industry progressed by leaps and bounds and produced its first
hydrogen bomb in 1953, shortly after the Americans had achieved the feat. The
basic sectors of the Soviet economy, having reached their pre-war level of
output in 1948-49, rose 50 per cent above in Stalin's last years. The
modernisation and urbanization of the Soviet Union was accelerated. In the early
fifties alone its urban population grew by about 25 millions Secondary schools
and universities were giving instruction to twice as many pupils as before 1940.
Out of the wreckage of the world war the foundations had been re-laid for
Russia's renewed industrial and military ascendancy, which was presently to
startle the world" (Stalin, pp. 585-586).
A few pages further down, Deutscher observes:
"... it is a fact that 'Stalin found Russia with a wooden plough and left her
equipped with atomic piles'... This summary of Stalin's rule is, of course, a
tribute to his achievement." (Ibid. p. 609). The words quoted by
Deutscher are quoted from his own obituary of Stalin published in the Manchester
Guardian of 6 March 1953.
Of course, only the demented Trotskyites can argue that the above
achievements took place automatically on the foundation of socialist property
relations inherited from the October Revolution – not because of but despite,
the leadership, as it were. No, such achievements do not come without correct
leadership. One has only to compare the leadership, the policies pursued by the
leadership, and the consequences and achievements of those policies, in the USSR
up to the mid-fifties with those of the leadership from the 20th Party Congress
(1956) onwards until the August 1991 coup resulting in the disintegration of the
USSR to realise what a chasm divides the two periods. Even Roy Medvedev, no
friend of Stalin's and the author of the thoroughly anti-Stalin Let history
judge, has been obliged to say- "Stalin found the Soviet Union in ruin and
left it a superpower. Gorbachev inherited a superpower and left it in ruin."
Triumph of Khrushchevite revisionism and the resuscitation of
Trotskyism
Thus, in view of her gigantic achievements, winch were the fruit of domed
persistence in following the Leninist path of socialist construction, working
people treated with utter contempt the Trotskyist ravings against the USSR and
its leadership. All this, however, changed with the triumph of Khrushchevite
revisionism in the CPSU after the death of Stalin. Khrushchevite revisionism
could get nowhere in its desire to undermine socialism, reach an accommodation
with imperialism, and start the long process, on the road back to capitalism,
unless it attacked the person who had, after the death of Lenin and in a bitter
struggle for the victory of the Leninist line on the question of socialist
industrialisation and collectivisation, become the most representative spokesman
of, and whose name was indelibly and inextricably linked with, the building of
socialism in the USSR, namely, Joseph Stalin. Hence Khrushchev's attack on
Stalin in his so-called secret report to the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU in
1956. With this attack on Stalin's alleged 'personality cult' – all,
incidentally, in the name of Leninism and with the alleged purpose of returning
to true Leninist norms – began the long political and economic process that
brought forth ripe capitalist fruit under the loving and tender care of
Khrushchev's last successor, Gorbachev I cannot here go further into this
question, with which I have dealt in greater detail in my Perestroika – the
Complete Collapse of Revisionism.
Khrushchev's attack on Stalin brought some retrospective credence to
Trotskyist counter-revolutionary fulminations against the USSR from the
mid-twenties onwards. As under the tutelage of Khrushchev and his successors,
the CPSU itself, as well as the revisionist parties in Europe and elsewhere,
really did begin to degenerate, the long-repeated Trotskyist jeremiads about the
alleged Thermidor and degeneration gripping the CPSU from 1923 onwards came to
acquire the semblance of plausibility.
Trotskyism sides with every single counter-revolutionary
movement
In the aftermath of the triumph of revisionism at the, 20th Party Congress of
the CPSU, and under its direct stimulus, bourgeois-nationalist tendencies within
the working-class parties, acting in close coordination with the imperialist
agencies and broadcasting media as well as the church, came to the fore in some
of the Peoples Democracies. In a number of places – most notably Hungary – these
led to counter-revolutionary uprisings. Everywhere in these upheavals directed
against socialism and the rule of the working class, the Trotskyites were, as
was to be expected, on the side of imperialism reaction, counter-revolution and
clerico-fascism. The XIth World Congress of Trotskyites paid homage to the
CIA-Vatican inspired and led Hungarian counter-revolution in the following
glowing terms:
"The Hungarian revolution of October-November 1956 went the farthest on the
path of a fully-fledged anti-bureaucratic political revolution." (Imprecor,
Nov. 1979).
James Burnham, the American Trotskyist, and Trotsky's trusted henchman until
1940, openly advocated, from 1950 onwards, the US policy of 'liberation" of
captive nations" – a policy of destabilising People's Democracies in eastern
Europe.
Trotskyism and the Czechoslovak counter-revolution
When the extreme revisionists in Czechoslovakia, under the leadership of
Dubcek, impatient with the slow speed of 'reform' aimed at restoring a
capitalist economy and a multi-party bourgeois democracy, started the, so-called
Prague Spring they euphemistically declared that their aim was "to free Marxism
from Stalinist and bureaucratic distortions" and to "formulate the humanist
vocation of the communist movement." The meaning of these apparently attractive
slogans became all too clear during 1989, by which time the liquidation of the
Communist Parties in Poland and Hungary, the dismantling of what remained of
socialist planning of the economy in those countries, and the plunge into
capitalism and bourgeois democracy, under the tender mercies of imperialism and
its spiritual arm, the Vatican, had become obvious. Dubcek, in a letter to the
Party leadership, pleaded with them not to condemn reforms in Poland and
Hungary. So did his colleague, Jiri Pelikan, who called upon the "democratic
movement in western Europe [to] develop a dialogue with Solidarnosc... in
Poland, with the Democratic Forum ... in Hungary, with Charter 77... in
Czechoslovakia", that is, with the forces of capitalist restoration. Then, in
1968, as well as subsequently in the late 1980s and the beginning of the present
decade, the Trotskyites, true to form, were to be found on the side of
counter-revolution.
The Trotskyist, Petr Uhl, was one of the most active members of the
anti-communist Charter 77. On 15 October 1988, the luminaries of Charter 77 and
other opposition groups signed a Manifesto of the Movement for Civil Liberty
which, inter alia, demanded "economic and political pluralism," – freeing
of business from "the yoke of centralised bureaucracy," "complete
reestablishment of private enterprise in... commerce craft industry, small and
medium business," and "the integration of the Czech economy... in a natural way
with the world economy, based upon the international division of labour" – that
is, a manifesto for the restoration of capitalism and bourgeois democracy. While
declaring himself to be in sympathy with this manifesto of the velvet counter-
revolution, Uhl did not judge it opportune. to append his signature to it, even
criticising it as "liberal democratic" and "totalitarian." The conclusion?
Instead of denouncing it and disassociating himself from it, he welcomed the
manifesto because of the inclusion in it of "the demand for worker's control in
the big firms," of the kind that abounds in the imperialist countries with its
humbug of a share-owning democracy.
After the success of the counter-revolution and the implementation of the
above manifesto, Uhl stated:
"One might discuss the extent to which Trotsky's theory of the political
revolution has been justified. I think that it is in Czechoslovakia that the
reality is nearest to this theory."
He goes on to add by way of an explanation of this 'political revolution' and
the composition of this anti-communist coalition: "so long as people can say
they are against communism, Stalinism and bureaucracy, then everybody is in
agreement" (Imprecor, no. 304, 1990, p. 26).
And further: "There were those who saw in Charter 77 a step in the direction
of political revolution – of whom I was one; others saw in it a means of
propagating the word of Christ. It was a veritable laboratory of tolerance." (Imprecor,
no. 300, 1990, p. 8).
Comrade Ludo Martens, Chairman of the Belgian Party of Labour (PTB), in his
book The Velvet Counter Revolution which I recommend to any reader
desiring a detailed account of these events, justly remarks in this regard
"To overthrow and destroy socialism (whether it be a strong and vigorous
socialism or an eroded and sickly socialism), the clerico-fascists reactionary
nationalists, the agents of the CIA and social democrats all stick together and
needless to say they show great 'tolerance' towards those pseudo-socialists who
back up their political agitation with repeated quotations from Trotsky" about
the so-called anti-bureaucratic, political revolution, which turns out, as it
was always meant, to be no more than another expression, wrapped up in 'left'
verbiage, for the simple restoration of capitalism Thus has Trotskyism arrived
at its "political revolution" against "Stalinist bureaucracy"!!
The Belgian Trotskyist, Ernest Mandel, greeted the events of 12 January 1990
as: "the sudden access of hundreds of millions of men and women from the Eastern
countries to political life." (Imprecor, no. 300, 1990, p. 8). The
meaning of this meaningless hyperbole was made clear by the selfsame puffed-up
and pompous Trotskyist gentry a mere ten months later, on 23 November 1990:
"According to Petr Uhl there are probably only a few thousand, even a few
hundred militants from Civic Forum at the regional and local level."
Further: "The student movement which largely inspired the events of November
1989, no longer exists." (Imprecor, no. 319, 1990, p. 4).
In Czechoslovakia, the "access to political life", over which Mandel waxes so
lyrical, happened at a time when the masses were following the counter-
revolutionary Civic Forum, under the leadership of Havel, a notorious CIA agent.
This is what Pavel Pechacek, head of the Czech section of the CIA-financed Radio
Free Europe, has to say in this instance:
"We have always played important role. According to the leader the student
revolt in Bratislava, it was Radio Free Europe which lit the fuse. We always had
close contacts with Havel, Camogursky and Dienstbeir, who today are members of
the new government but who for years worked for us as independent
correspondents."
These were the people – the Havels and Pechaceks – who "awakened the masses
to political life" in Czechoslovakia. Knowing full well that the Civic Forum
stood for restoration of capitalism, that Vaclav, Klaus, head of the Civic Forum
Since October 1990 and one of the principal advisors to Havel, is not Only on
record expressing his admiration for Milton Friedman and Hayek the two bourgeois
economists most admired by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, former President
Of the USA and former Prime Minister of Britain respectively, but also his
commitment to "a market economy, without qualification" – knowing all this
Mandel told a Belgian financial paper on 21 March 1990:
"The transition to a completely western model is possible, but this is not
the case in countries like the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia" (De
Financieel Ekonomische Tijd, 21.3.90).
Knowing all this, why did the Trotskyists go along with the Civic Forum?
Their innate hatred of socialism and communism is the answer. This truth is
blurted out by the dim-witted Uhl, who explained that his support for the Civic
Forum and Havel was motivated by a desire to get rid of the remnants of the
socialist system!
After several political somersaults and mental contortions, the Trotskyist
Uhl finally, and not unexpectedly, carved for himself a nice little niche in the
'new bourgeois Czech state, as the head of the Czech Press Agency, a position to
which he was appointed in February 1990, from which to propagate the wonders of
capitalist restoration and the "access to political life" set in train by this
restoration – 'anti-bureaucratic revolution' if you like.
From jabbering away about worker's control only the previous day, Uhl had
little difficulty in getting on with the job of informing the masses that the
Czech state represents society:
"It a generally understood that, if we depend on the State, we support the
government which is not exactly the case. Of course we must 'respect' the
government but if there is a conflict it would be up to a parliamentary
committee to make a decision, because parliament represents the State more than
the government does Our task is to propagate news abroad about Czech society
This is the concern of the Czech State because it represents Czech society for
the moment." (Imprecor, no. 304, 1990, p. 27).
If this drivel amounts to anything at all it amounts to the worst form of
parliamentary cretinism, according to winch the, Czech parliament and bourgeois
Czech state are synonymous, and since, according to this Trotskyist imbecile,
the state represents society, it is "our task to propagate news abroad about
Czech society."!! This is the beginning and end, the sole meaning of the
much-trumpeted Trotskyist "anti-bureaucratic, political revolution." Nothing
could be clearer than this.
The Belgian Trotskyist Mandel and the French Trotskyist Broué
crudely defend counter-revolution
Mandel, notorious for his anti-Marxism and vulgar economism, had for more
than two decades held the view that in the absence of a violent
counter-revolution capitalism could not be restored in the socialist countries.
Proceeding from this erroneous premise, he has all along advocated multi-party
democracy (democracy for all). Since, according to his reasoning, there was no
danger to socialism and the real enemy lay in 'bureaucracy', through multi-party
democracy socialism would acquire a democratic character. Towards the end of
1989, in regard to the counter-revolutionary movement in Timisoara, which
resulted in the overthrow and foul murder of Ceaucescu and his wife, Helena,
Mandel surpassed even the lying imperialist media in denouncing the "hideous
Stalinist crimes in Timisoara" – crimes which turned out not to have been
committed after all. The bourgeois media's inflammatory figures of 70,000 to
100,000 dead in Timisoara, and the horror stones about mass graves, turned out
to be totally fabricated. The correction, of only 700 deaths, most at the hands
of the army rather than the Securitate, was made in half-inch columns relegated
to inside pages.
In regard to the counter-revolutionary movement in the German Democratic
Republic Mandel declared.
"I am delighted over what's happening in Berlin. The anti- socialist movement
is really weak." Welcoming this "revolution," – he went on to exclaim.
"Everything Trotsky ever hoped for could now become reality." (Dans Humo,
21.12.89).
In Trotskyist, as indeed in imperialist circles, whereas Gorbachev, Yeltsin
and Trotsky are revolutionaries, Stalin and the Bolshevik party that he led are
counter-revolutionaries!!
It is worth while reproducing the views of Mandel, considered to be the
theoretician of the Trotskyist IVth International, on the counter-revolutionary
Programme of capitalist restoration embodied in Gorbachev's Perestroika. During
an interview he gave to a journalist of New Times he was asked:
"Is it not true that Mikhail Gorbachev stated that Perestroika is a true new
revolution?"
To which Mandel replied: "Yes, he does indeed and again this is very
positive. Our movement has defended this thesis for 55 years and was therefore
labelled as counterrevolutionary. Today people, both in the Soviet Union and in
a large part of the international communist movement, understand better where
the real counterrevolutionaries were." (no. 38, 1990, French edition).
Again, in the same Belgian financial paper already referred to, Mandel
expresses himself on this question in the following terms:
'The reformer Yeltsin represents the tendency which wants to reduce the
gigantic state apparatus. Consequently he follows in Trotsky's footsteps." (21
March 1990).
These wonderful admissions from the Trotskyist Mandel, for which we thank him
heartily, only make our job of exposing Trotsky's anti-communism and
anti-Bolshevism, easier. For once, Mandel is absolutely correct. Gorbachev,
Yeltsin and Trotsky do have the same ideological and political physiognomy –
they all stand for capitalist restoration.
This same despicable Mandel had earlier described the arch reactionary
monarchist, Sakharov, as one of the "radical and progressive left" and the
bourgeois-nationalist Sajudis of Lithuania as belonging to "the radical
democratic and nationalist popular movement"!! (Imprecor, no. 285, 3
April 1989).
Without exception, all the Trotskyists everywhere supported the
counter-revolutionary brainchild of the CIA and the Vatican, Solidarnosc in
Poland, cheering its rise and accession to power – again in the name of
Trotsky's "anti-bureaucratic political revolution,"
The French Trotskyist Broué, already referred to, for his part applauds the
counter-revolutionary movements of eastern Europe which two years after the
publication of his Trotsky came to head the capitalist-restorationist regimes,
and correctly attributes to Trotsky the following version of "political
revolution."
"The demands appearing in these movements of workers and youth reconstitute
those that defined the program of political revolution' as Trotsky sketched it:
democracy, freedom for parties, destruction of the bureaucratic apparatus, 'free
'trade unions, electoral freedom and the right of criticism ending infringements
on human tights, punishing those responsible for crimes, winning the democratic
rights of speech, assembly, demonstration, as well as the appearance of a free –
and hence stimulating -press." (op. cit. p. 943).
The American Trotskyist ICL's sophisticated defence of
counter-revolution
Of course the correct and candid representation by Messrs Mandel and Broué of
Trotsky's 'political revolution" against "Stalinist bureaucracy" is highly
embarrassing to the Spartacists of the ICL, who are forever presenting a
sanitised version of Trotskyism in an effort to gain for the latter some
credibility in the eyes of progressive workers in order to be able to carry out
all the more successfully the propagation of counter-revolutionary Trotskyism
and the theory of permanent hopelessness. That is why they fly into a rage
against Mandel and Broué's straightforward admissions of the simple truth.
What is the ICL's own position? While it may appear to an unwary or
superficial observer that they defend the gains of socialism and socialist
construction, and workers' states, this is not the case. They are second to none
in maligning the former socialist regimes, especially the Soviet regime from
1923 to 1953, which they have always denounced as "bureaucratic", needing to be
overthrown by a "political revolution." In unguarded moments, however, dropping
their usual mask, they reveal the reactionary essence of their Trotskyist
political line. In an article written in November 1992 for the sole purpose of
presenting a sanitised version of Trotskyism, the truth literally oozes out,
despite themselves, in the following lines:
"The idea that 'socialism' could be built in a single country (and a backward
one at that), surrounded by imperialist enemies, is a nationalist perversion of
Marxism.
"Stalin's dogma of 'socialism in one country' was the ideological afterbirth
of a political counterrevolution which DEFEATED Leninist internationalism and
brought to power a nationalist bureaucratic caste."
Was the idea of socialism in a single country really a "nationalist
perversion of Marxism " was it really "Stalin's dogma" and "the ideological
afterbirth of a political counterrevolution which defeated Leninist
internationalism and brought to power a nationalist bureaucratic caste"? If what
Spartacist says is true, would it be worthwhile for them, or for anyone else, to
defend the gains of this "nationalist perversion"? The Spartacists of the ICL
only had to ask this question to realise that they were giving away their whole
game, of appearing to defend socialism in words while undermining it in deeds.
Are the Spartacists really so ignorant of Lenin's writings as not to realise
that this "nationalist Perversion" of socialism in one country was not "Stalin's
dogma," but Lenin's? He and he alone must get the credit (or discredit) for the
authorship of this 'dogma'. The Spartacists ought not to be so ignorant, for
they claim that they are Leninists and make the same claim for their guru,
Trotsky. Let them then read Lenin's 1916 article Military Programme of
Proletarian Revolution, and his article on cooperation at the beginning of
1923, just as Trotsky was writing his anti-Leninist, counter-revolutionary
pamphlet New Course. And let them read the following lines taken from Lenin's
20th November 1922 speech to the Moscow Soviet:
"We have approached the very core of the everyday problems, and that is a
tremendous achievement. Socialism is no longer a matter of the distant future,
or an abstract picture, or an icon. Our opinion of icons is the same – a very
bad one. WE HAVE BROUGHT SOCIALISM INTO EVERYDAY LIFE and must here see how
matters stand. That is the task of our day, the task of our epoch. Permit me to
conclude by expressing confidence that difficult as this task may be, new as it
may be compared with our previous task and numerous as the difficulties may be
that it entails, we shall all – not in a day, BUT IN A FEW YEARS – all of us
together fulfil it whatever the cost SO THAT NEP RUSSIA WILL BECOME SOCIALIST
RUSSIA." (V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33, p. 443 – Emphasis added).
After this, if the Spartacists have the courage of their convictions, they
ought to accuse Lenin of the "dogma" they attempt to pin on Stalin's shirt
sleeve; they ought to lay the blame for this "nationalist perversion" at the
doorstep of Lenin rather than depositing it at Stalin's.
SWP Trots welcome the demise of communism
The largest British Trotskyist Organisation, the Socialist Workers Party
(SWP), having cheered every counter-revolutionary movement in eastern Europe
from the CIA-Vatican inspired Hungarian uprising to the capitalist
restorationist Solidarnosc and the Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia, greeted with
frenzied glee the demise of socialism in the USSR. Its organ, Socialist
Worker, declared joyfully- "Communism has collapsed. Now fight for real
socialism." (31 August 1991). It went on to cheer the toppling of the statues of
Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky, and other "former Communist Party icons"; it even
considered it opportune to carry a picture of the statue of the great Lenin down
and to declare "Communism has collapsed... It is a fact that should have every
socialist rejoicing."
The SWP went as far as to argue that Yeltsin's victory had brought "the
workers of the USSR closer to the spirit of the socialist revolution of 1917,
not further from it."
Well, since the Berlin wall came down on 9 November 1989, what has this
'death of communism' and the fight for 'real socialism' brought in its trail?
Exactly what imperialism had been desiring and working for over decades. Exactly
what every intelligent observer, not consumed by anti-communist hate, expected
it to be. The market forces have been let loose over the unhappy peoples of
eastern Europe and the former USSR. Everywhere there is rising unemployment,
contraction of production, catastrophic rates of inflation, national strife,
rising racism, anti-semitism and fascism, increased crime, drug trafficking,
prostitution, black market and hunger. There has been an astronomic rise in the
prices of basic necessities such as food, accommodation, electricity and
clothing. In other words, all the freedoms have been unleashed that are
associated with a free market economy and the Trotskyite "political revolution"
against "Stalinist bureaucracy."
In the former German Democratic Republic, for instance, between the beginning
of 1990 and the end of 1991, the economy contracted by 20% as entire industries
were shut down. In the first half of 1990, industrial output fell by a huge 40%;
in the second half of the same year by another 40%! By the spring of 1991, a
third of East Germans had either lost their jobs or were put on short time. From
270,000 in July 1990, unemployment jumped to 1 million by the end of 1991 and
1.5 million in 1992.
In Poland, 2 million workers, representing 15% of the workforce, are
un-employed, and, while real wages have fallen by 30% the cost oil living has
risen by 40%.
The picture is the same in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, where industrial
Production has fallen by a fifth.
In the USSR, which had a giant economy before 1985, industrial production is
down by 40% since then; the rate of inflation stands at a staggering 2,500%; the
currency is in ruin, with the rouble, which used to have a value higher than the
US dollar, now having a rate of exchange of 800 roubles to the dollar (March
1993).
The same goons of the SWP who with such lurid delight greeted the "death" of
"communism" as the beginning of the fight for "real socialism" two years later
on bemoan, in the manner of innocent virgins, the fact that the changes are
hurting the workers. Writing in the Socialist Worker of 9 November 1991,
they say:
"Wealth, freedom democracy – This, the media claimed, was the future for east
Germany as the Berlin Wall came down on 9 November 1989.
"In the weeks which followed Czechoslovaks, Bulgarians and Romanians threw
off their Stalinist rulers too. Poles and Hungarians increased the pressure for
reform
"Two years on and those same politicians, commentators and pundits are
silent. Not one of their predictions has come true, none shows any prospect of
coming true.
"...the market economy has not led to prosperity, simply deepened the
misery."
On the contrary. Every prediction of bourgeois politicians and media has come
true. Capitalism is being restored, and this process, as was known to everyone
(including the dim-witted Trotskyists whose "anti-bureaucratic political
revolution" against "Stalinism" and "the command economy", shorn of all its
'left' verbiage, amounted to this capitalist restoration), can only take place
amid misery and ruin for the masses of workers and an extraordinary enrichment
of the few. The movement involving the demolition of all central planning and
the introduction of private property cannot but express itself in shocks, jolts
and dislocation which are hurting the working class of the former socialist
states.
It is indeed the SWP gurus who, if they had any sense of shame and a gram of
socialism in them, ought to be quiet at the very least, since it is their
darlings, Lech Walesa and his Solidarnosc in Poland, Havel and his Civic Forum
in the Czech Republic, Boris Yeltsin in Russia, etc., all leaders of the
Trotskyist "anti-bureaucratic revolution", who are introducing the wonders of
'democracy' and the free market'. Instead of wisely keeping quiet, Socialist
Worker, having summarised the results of introduction of the market economy in
eastern European countries, goes on mildly to complain:
"Yet this, and the misery being suffered in east Germany and Poland, has not
stopped Russia's President Boris Yeltsin proposing a programme of rapid and
widespread privatisation and the quick removal of food and rent subsidies."
But it would appear that they are not happy with the results as yet, for they
believe that the newly established bourgeois regimes have not been thorough
enough in destroying all the traces, instruments and institutions connected with
the previous regimes in the former socialist states:
"And not a week goes by without revelations proving the hated Stasi, the
Securitate, the Hungarian AVO and all the other riff raff which once enforced
the Stalinist regimes, are still around"!
The above sentence, apart from revealing that their hatred is most reserved
for the socialist regimes, is also a clever attempt to fool the simple Simons,
who swell the rank and file of Trotskyist organisations everywhere and who have
a weakness for catchphrases, into believing that the former regimes in eastern
Europe were Stalinist, i.e., Leninist. In the preface of my book Perestroika,
The Complete Collapse of Revisionism, referring in this context to the
Trotskyites, revisionists and social democrats, I said:
"This revolting gentry – in particular the counter- revolutionary Trotskyites
– have been gloating with delirium over the alleged collapse, in Eastern Europe
and the USSR, of Stalinism. Just the contrary. What has collapsed is
revisionism, and its inevitable degeneration into ordinary capitalism. What is
called 'Stalinism' by these despicable creatures is only Leninism in practice.
When Leninism was practised in the USSR, as it undoubtedly was during the three
decades of Stalin's leadership of the CPSU, it achieved world- historic feats on
all fronts – economic, social cultural, diplomatic and military – which is
precisely the reason why the very name of Stalin has become the target of so
much abuse on the part of the bourgeoisie and its 'hired prize-fighters'. So
what has collapsed is revisionism even though in order to confuse the
proletariat the sly and yet unthinking and uncouth Trotskyites using the word
'Stalinism' as a swear word rather than as a political characterisation, have
been applying it to the very revisionists who entertain mortal haired of
Stalin." (pp. viii-ix).
In the end when all is said and done, Socialist Worker is well
satisfied with the achievements of the counter-revolution in eastern Europe, and
ends with the following smug, not to say smutty, conclusion:
"What Socialist Worker said in November 1989 remains true today: 'what
really wonderful about the new movements in eastern Europe is they raise the
possibility of a society which is better, freer and more democratic than that
which east or west at the moment'."
In other words, what a wonderful thing it was to have replaced the former
socialist regimes with bourgeois regimes and free market economies, the
consequences of which Mr Alan Gibson, the writer of this article in Socialist
Worker, so dementedly and in such self-annihilatory a manner, bemoans!!
The same SWP, which in August 1991 had with great counter-revolutionary zeal
declared that Yeltsin's victory had brought "the workers of the USSR closer to
the spirit of the socialist revolution of 1917", now declares, through the
column of the despicable John Molyneux, that "it is precisely the viciously
anti-working class nature of Yeltsin's free market reform, that makes him aspire
to dictatorial powers in order to impose his Programme. Consequently no
socialist should now support Yeltsin." (Socialist Worker, 10 April 1993,
"Russia: should we take sides?")
Such is the logic of the counter-revolutionary gentry of the SWP: support for
Yeltsin's counter-revolution in August 1991 on the pretext that his victory
brought the USSR proletariat "closer to the spirit of the socialist revolution
of 1917" and opposition to Yeltsin in April 1993 for his attempt to put into
effect the declared programme of the very counter-revolution over which the SWP
waxed so eloquent!!
Nothing could reveal better the hideous social-democratic face of the SWP
than the fact that the same Socialist Worker, which felt elated at the death of
communism, suffered a deep "depression" and "post-election demoralisation" in
the wake of the fourth consecutive electoral rout of the Labour Party. Bleated
the Socialist Worker: "The election result was a disaster for everyone
who wants a better society."
The crudity of SWP's defence of capitalism and its representatives compelled
even the Spartacists of the ICL, another counter-revolutionary Trotskyite
organisation, to make the following correct observation:
"An organisation [i.e. the SWP – HB] which found a cause 'that should have
every socialist rejoicing' in the victory of Yeltsin's counter-revolutionary
forces that have brought poverty, mass unemployment and misery to the masses of
the former Soviet Union, while finding a cause to make socialists' sob in the
defeat of Neil Kinnock's scab-herding Labour traitors, obviously has a pretty
twisted weathervane..." (Workers Hammer July/August 1993).
And further down in the same article, continued the ICL: "Capitalist
counter-revolution in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union has meant untold
misery for the working masses of those countries – poverty, homelessness and
starvation – and made an onslaught of bloody nationalist fratricide. Europe –
East and West – faces massive unemployment, the ominous rise of anti-Semitism,
racist and fascist terror, attacks on women's fights… Now that the unifying
thread of anti-Sovietism no longer mutes their rivalries the imperialist ruling
classes are trying to tighten the screws of exploitation on the proletariat at
'home'. At the same time, they try to sell the lie to the working class and
oppressed that 'communism is dead' that any attempt to overthrow this system of
exploitation and oppression is condemned in advance, useless, even criminal.
"The SWP presents itself as a fighting alternative. If there were any justice
in this world, these Third Camp renegades should feel ashamed to even try to
show their face in public! From Poland to East Germany to Moscow, they were
among the foremost cheerleaders for the forces of counter-revolution that are
now devastating Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union. While most of the rest
of the left followed suit howling along with the imperialist wolves in
championing any and every anti-Soviet 'movement' the SWP not only supported some
of the darkest forces of reaction but offered them as a model for the struggle
against Stalinist 'totalitarianism.'
"So, for example, following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan the
Cliffites heralded the CIA-funded Islamic reactionaries who are now drowning any
shred of social progress in that country in blood. Socialist Worker (4
February 1989) enthused that a 'Mojahedin victory will encourage the opponents
of Russian rule everywhere in the USSR and Eastern Europe'! By rights the SWP
should now be pleased that just such 'opponents of Russian rule', i.e., vicious
nationalist reactionaries, fascist terrorists, women-hating clericalists, have
been unleashed by capitalist counterrevolution." (ibid.)
The SWP may be organised independently, but in terms of its programme and
political and ideological physiognomy it is indistinguishable from the
social-democratic Labour Party – as indeed are all Trotskyite organisations,
which everywhere act as an anti-communist militant wing of social democracy.
The hypocrisy of SWP's fake anti-Labour stance is exposed by another
Trotskyite, Sean Matgamna. Writing in the Socialist Organiser of 19
November 1992, from a perspective which would have the SWP within the Labour
Party to help build the 'left' within it, this is how he tears the mask of false
anti-Labourism, from the hideous face of the SWP:
"In the 1979 General Election the SWP while proclaiming itself 'the socialist
alternative' to the Labour Party declined to put up candidates, backed the
Labour Party!... It fell to Foot in a much-quoted interview in the London
Evening Standard, to express the SWP's dualism, the approach which left the
political labour movement to the right wing in all its crassness. He said: 'For
the next three weeks I am a strong Labour supporter. I am very anxious that a
Tory government shouldn't be returned, and I shall be going around to meetings
we are having telling everyone to vote Labour' (9 April 1979)."
Concludes Mr Matgamna: "In his role of SWP ambassador to the bourgeoisie and
the media Foot often blurts out the truth about the SWP's politics without the
usual 'socialist' obfuscation and phrase-mongering, Michael Foot's nephew Paul
is thus a useful man to have around."
The Healyite Trotskyites detect Trotsky's line and welcome
Gorbachev's Perestroika
The late and unlamented child molester and recipient of funds from a wide
variety of sources ranging from the Arab regimes to the CIA for his lifelong
devotion to the cause of anti-communism and anti-Sovietism, namely the
Trotskyite Gerry Healy of the old and notorious Socialist Labour League (SLL),
welcomed Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost as "the political revolution for
restoring Bolshevik world revolutionary perspectives." Since the collapse of the
Soviet Union and its disintegration, Healy's followers, the Redgrave Trots of
the so-called Marxist Party, have gone on to blacken all Soviet development and
history by asserting that Lenin had been wrong throughout and that Rosa
Luxemburg's denunciation of Lenin as a "sterile overseer" aiming at "blind
subordination" to "an intellectual elite hungry for power" through "pitiless
centralism" was correct.
With the disappearance of the former socialist states and the coming to power
of bourgeois regimes, the Trotskyites are at sixes and sevens as to how to
explain away their wretched theory of "anti-bureaucratic political revolution."
As a result they are at each other's throats. The other offshoots of Healy's
lunatic fringe, the Northites and Torrancites, are in convulsions over this. The
Northites simply pass the buck on to Trotsky who, they say, got it wrong for
there was nothing left with which to have a revolution:
What was destroyed between 1936 and 1940 was not only the flower of Marxism
but its roots.
"It doesn't detract anything from Trotsky's work to say that he simply could
not have known, even when he was writing his denunciations of the Moscow Trials,
the scale of the bloodbath that was taking place in the USSR."
This can mean one of two things: either that socialism had ceased to exist
and capitalism had been restored by the end of the 1930s, in which case, the
Northites appear to be arguing Trotsky ought to have then denounced the Soviet
regime far more vehemently than he actually did; alternatively it could mean
that the workers' state, albeit a 'distorted! one, continued to exist in the
USSR but that after the Moscow treason trials there was no 'revolutionary
vanguard' left capable of effecting the Trotskyist 'political revolution', and
that therefore the 'overthrow of the bureaucracy' could only lead to the
establishment of capitalism, to which end the Trotskyists, with their theory of
'political revolution' have worked all these years. In this case, Trotsky was
also wrong in advocating his 'political revolution' thereby leading his
followers up the blind alley which leads to capitalist restoration. Whichever
way one looks at the above Northite quotation, one comes to the conclusion that
these gentry are as much at sea in explaining the momentous developments in the
USSR as they are at home with Trotskyist gobbledygook.
From the anti-Soviet defeatism, hidden by veritable phrase-mongering and a
pretended belief in the chimerical "anti-bureaucratic political revolution", the
Northite Trots pass over without any difficulty to the following unreserved and
absolute defeatism, characterising the whole period from October 1917 onwards as
one of unmitigated disaster:
"We should avoid using phrases that become hackneyed from over-use; but in
this case it can truly be said that we have come to the end of an entire
historical period that was opened in 1917".
Their rivals, from the Torrance faction of Trots, the Newsline
Workers' Revolutionary Party (WRP) rump, do not like the Northite 'explanation'
whose utter defeatism greatly embarrasses them. In an attempt to gain some
credibility for Trotskyism and overcome doubts even among the Trotskyist rank
and file as to whether their guru Trotsky's theory of "political revolution" and
his lifetime spent in anti-Soviet activity ever contained an iota of
progressive, let alone revolutionary, content, the Torrancites come down, Mandel
fashion, in favour of characterising the counter-revolutionary developments in
the former USSR and eastern Europe as "revolutionary" in nature. Deriding the
Northites, the Torrancites write:
"The comic side of all this is that since the bureaucracy is the 'determining
force', if the so-called 'military industrial complex' were to overthrow
Yeltsin, reinstating the USSR, then no doubt North would have to declare that
the USSR was once again a workers state. He would have to say 'Thank god for the
Stalinist bureaucracy.'"
Thus we find one section of Trots (the Northites) blaming Trotsky for not
being firm enough in his fulminations against the Soviet Union, thereby
misleading his followers into the blind alley of supporting an allegedly
workers' state in need of political revolution, when, say the Northites,
socialism had already been destroyed and therefore there was nothing left
against which to have a revolution. The other section (Torrancites) exonerate
themselves from all responsibility for lifelong anti-Soviet and anti-communist
activity by pretending that the counter revolution has not taken place at all,
that Yeltsin represents the "political revolution", which, in the course of
time, will "restore Bolshevism."
Some other Trots
For its part, the Trotskyist rag Socialist Organiser, referred to immediately
above, exulted over the victory of the Yeltsin forces thus: "His brave defiance
of the Stalinist establishment will help workers to see what the issues are – an
opening society, with the beginnings of the rule of law and some degree of
democratic self-control, on one side, and stifling ice-age Stalinist
dictatorship on the other." (SO Supplement, 20 August 1992).
The 'Militant' Trotskyites were no less despicably shameless in welcoming the
Yeltsin counter-revolution: "All over the world workers will see this as
people's power reducing the threat of dictatorship to a poorly scripted farce.
Every dictator will tremble at the prospect of his own subjects taking such
action."
'Workers Power', yet another Trotskyist outfit, being fully cognisant of the
"socially counter-revolutionary nature of Yeltsin's programme" and the "spivs
and racketeers" who supported him, nevertheless felt obliged to back Yeltsin:
"No matter what the socially counter- revolutionary nature of Yeltsin's
programme, no matter how many spivs and racketeers joined the barricades to
defend the Russian parliament, it would be revolutionary suicide to back the
coup-mongers and support the crushing of democratic rights...
"It is far better that the fledgling workers' organisations of the USSR learn
to swim against the stream of bureaucratic restorationism than be huddled in the
'breathing space' of the prison cell."
Looking forward with great enthusiasm "to the next stage – the task of
rapidly dismantling the instruments of central planning" (Workers Power,
September 1991), 'Workers' Power', reducing its counter-revolutionary logic to
an absurdity, calls for "workers control of the counter-revolution! – for a
"workers Yeltsin" who will not stop half way:
"Revolutionaries share the workers' hatred for all the real and symbolic
representatives of their oppression. We support the closing down of the palatial
CPSU offices, private shops and sanatoria, the rooting out of the KGB officers.
But we put no trust in Yeltsin or the leadership of the main soviets in the
chief towns and cities to carry out the destruction of the Stalinist
dictatorship.
"We seek at every point to involve the masses independently in the process of
the destruction of the CPSU dictatorship...
"The workers must control the process of destruction of the Stalinists
through to the end and not let Yeltsin preserve what is useful to him."
Like the Socialist Organiser, it – Workers Power – too was fully aware
of the forces supporting Yeltsin. Its on the spot report stated that those
manning the Yeltsin barricades "were not for the most part, the most audacious
workers and students of Moscow," adding:
"Rather they were in the majority small businessmen, speculators and owners
of ['free enterprise'] co-operatives, the traditional base of the [Russian
nationalist] 'Democratic Russia' demonstrations, plus a few hundred young
enthusiasts. While there have been reports of strike action and mass
mobilisations in other parts of the USSR, in Moscow at least the working class
played little part in the resistance to the coup".
There are, of course innumerable other Trotskyist groups of which nothing, at
all has here been said. It is not, however, either possible or necessary or even
desirable to make reference to all of them, for they represent no more than
variations on themes already encountered in the brief sketch given above of the
major Trotskyist tendencies. What unites them all, however, is that they are all
Trotskyists. They are, therefore, all counterrevolutionary to their finger tips
– not out of a desire to be so, but because they cannot help being
counter-revolutionaries for as long as they follow Trotsky's petty bourgeois,
pessimistic and counter revolutionary theory of 'permanent revolution.'
The bankruptcy of Trotskyism and the triumph of socialism
The events of the last few years, which have overwhelmed eastern Europe and
the USSR, have not only proved the utter bankruptcy of Khrushchevite revisionism
but also exposed, if such exposure was ever required, the thoroughly
counter-revolutionary nature of Trotskyism. These events have proved beyond
doubt the inner affinity, notwithstanding the differences in form, of
revisionism and Trotskyism. Khrushchevite revisionism, right in form and in
essence, was aiming, through the Communist Party, for the same aim of restoring
capitalism in the USSR and other east European countries that Trotskyism, 'left'
in form and right in essence, had been attempting ever since the twenties
through the so-called "anti-bureaucratic revolution." This affinity, and the
proof in practice in a most vivid form of the counter-revolutionary essence of
revisionism and Trotskyism, ought to facilitate the task of exposing and
fighting both these counter-revolutionary trends.
We are, however, passing through a time of ideological decay, confusion,
disintegration and wavering – a time when renegacy and apostasy are the order of
the day. With the complete collapse of Khrushchevite revisionism, the
disintegration of the USSR and the east European socialist regimes, as well as
the liquidation of the revisionist parties elsewhere, the Trotskyists can yet
again be expected to come forward and say: 'We told you so. Trotsky was correct
in asserting that socialism could not be built in a single country, etc.' Our
task is to refute this nonsensical and counter-revolutionary chatter. The
collapse of the USSR, far from proving the correctness of Trotskyism, actually
smashes it to smithereens. What it proves is that had Trotskyism (or Bukharinism
for that matter) been put into effect in the USSR in the mid-twenties, the
latter would have collapsed much earlier, more than six decades ago. The CPSU,
however, rejecting Trotskyism and Bukharinism, went on to construct socialism
and a mighty Soviet state – a bastion and a beacon of socialism whose epic
achievements in war and peace, whose heroic feats in all spheres of social
development, economic, educational, artistic, military and scientific; whose
superhuman endeavours to build a new society based not on the exploitation of
one human being by another but on the basis of the law of balanced development
of the national economy for the satisfaction of the constantly-rising needs of
the population, a society based on fraternal cooperation and not on national
strife and racism, a society based on sex equality not on sex discrimination;
whose titanic struggle against, and crowning victories over, Hitlerite Germany –
victories which freed humanity from the scourge of fascism – brought socialism
to eastern Europe and imparted a tremendous impulse to the national liberation
movements thereby weakening imperialism; and whose unstinting support to the
revolutionary proletarian and national-liberation wars else -where, whose
proletarian internationalism, will continue to inspire humanity in its endeavour
to get rid of all exploitation and achieve a classless communist society through
the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Trotskyism or Leninism?
In this period of ideological confusion, the Trotskyites are bound to come
forward with scraps of pompous, high-sounding, empty, obscure and bombastic
catchphrases which confuse the intelligentsia and non-class-conscious workers,
in an attempt to fill the ideological vacuum and to pass off Trotskyism as
Leninism. They are bound to make yet another attempt to substitute Trotskyism
for Leninism. They must not be allowed to do this. Every Marxist-Leninist, every
class-conscious worker, must play his or her part in frustrating this attempt
and in ensuring that it fails as miserably as did all similar attempts in the
past.
It is by way of a contribution to frustrating this attempt to substitute
Trotskyism for Leninism that this book is presented. The author seeks no other
reward than the fulfilment of this aim. The choice is straightforward: either
counter-revolutionary Trotskyism or revolutionary Leninism. One or the other.
Trotskyism or Leninism?
A few words about this book
Finally, a few words as to the material which constitutes this book. Parts I
to IV are based on a series of lectures which I delivered in London at the
invitation of the Association of Communist Workers (ACW), an anti-revisionist
group which, although small in numbers, played a very important role in
defending the fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism against attacks from Trotskyists
and revisionists alike. Originally these pages were distributed as a series of
four separate pamphlets under the title Some Questions Concerning the
Struggle of Counter- Revolutionary Trotskyism Against Revolutionary Leninism.
The pages dealing with the Spanish Civil War (Part V) were never produced at the
time. Since then, on the basis of some of the notes that I had at my disposal
and further research on her part, my comrade and friend Ella Rule wrote this
section and presented it as a paper to the deliberations of the Stalin Society
on 24th March, 1991. The sections dealing with the question of collectivisation
and class struggle under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat
were both written by way of a preface to collections of Stalin's writings on
these two important questions. These too appeared as separate pamphlets, the one
on collectivisation in 1975 and that on class struggle in 1973. In this last
pamphlet, the section dealing with the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact has
been much expanded to include substantiating evidence which was not in the
original pamphlet. Now that this Pact has come in for renewed criticism, I have
decided to include this material. Also, I have updated the text to take account
of works which have been published since the original material was produced, or
have come to my notice since that time. From the context, and the dates of the
publications referred to, the reader will have little difficulty in spotting the
new material.
These last two publications were necessitated by a stream of attacks on the
Marxist-Leninist policies of the CPSU(B) during the leadership of Stalin
(1924-53) from individuals and organisations who called themselves
anti-revisionist and, therefore, by definition ought to have been opposed to
revisionism as well as Trotskyism. What these people were putting forth in
practice, however, was something incredibly confused and incredibly reactionary
– in many cases merely a rehash of Trotsky's propositions. Their writings were
characterised by a mixture of erroneous platitudinousness and ignorant
arrogance. The British anti-revisionist movement of those days really did go in
for a considerable amount of "sublime nonsense", to borrow Engels' expression,
producing several personages who gave themselves airs about the science of
Marxism-Leninism of which they really never learnt a word.
In the 1870s, in the preface to his Anti-Dühring, Engels complained
bitterly about the "infantile disease" which was then afflicting a large section
of the German intelligentsia, including a section of the socialist
intelligentsia, where "Freedom of science is taken to mean that people write on
every subject which they have not studied and put this forward as the only
strictly scientific method."
This "infantile disease" was rampant among a large section of the 1970s
anti-revisionist movement and its fellow travellers, causing great confusion.
Again, at the invitation of the ACW, I edited the two collections of Stalin's
writings on the subjects referred to above, provided each collection with a
lengthy preface with the purpose of refuting the sublime nonsense and platitudes
of our opponents who, possessing but little knowledge of the science of
Marxism-Leninism but a goodly amount of conceit and ignorance, were dishing out,
in the name of Marxism, a great deal of muddled and reactionary nonsense. Since
this reactionary nonsense came from quarters at least nominally
anti-revisionist, it had to be dealt with.
A long time has passed since the contents of this book were first published
in the form of six separate pamphlets. Some of the persons polemicised against
have either died or retired, or have simply, and wisely, retreated into the
little bourgeois niches they have carved for themselves. Equally, some of the
organisations have either gone into voluntary liquidation or faded into
political oblivion. Yet others are no longer recognisable as they have changed
their names once or more often (this being especially true of the Trotskyite
organisations). None of this matters in the least. What is really important are
the issues and questions which were then, and show every sign of becoming now or
in the future, the subject of heated arguments and polemics. In that case all we
need to do is to remove the name of the person or organisation while using the
substance of the argument against those who might insist on putting out nonsense
of the type which was put forward by the people I polemicised against two
decades ago. Moreover those against whom I polemicised are insignificant today,
or were perhaps insignificant even at that time. But similar nonsense has come
from quarters far more significant, whose word carries weight, influence and
authority. It is my hope that my polemics against my opponents will have the
desired effect of countering equally pernicious nonsense from these high
quarters.
Originally, when the contents of this book were distributed as separate
pamphlets, each pamphlet was provided with an introduction, so that each could
be read on its own if so desired. That form is maintained in the book now
presented. This ought to make it easier for the reader to read different
sections of the book in any preferred order. I have deliberately provided a
rather lengthy preface in order, first, to bring the text up to date by
including a brief reference to the demise of socialism in the USSR and eastern
Europe, as a culmination of a long process of revisionist theory and practice in
the fields of politics, political economy, class struggle and philosophy, all
set in train by the triumph of Khrushchevite modem revisionism at the 20th Party
Congress of the CPSU in 1956; second, to provide more evidence of the thoroughly
counter-revolutionary nature of Trotskyism by reference to the response of
present-day leading Trotskyite organisations and individuals to the restoration
of capitalism in eastern Europe; and finally to provide to all the matters dealt
with in this book a degree of coherence which, being originally issued as
separate pamphlets, they perhaps did not possess.
It has been decided, also, to provide three appendices – one on what has come
to be called Lenin's Testament, another on the relations between Trotsky and the
imperialist press and another on the murder of Trotsky by one of his own
followers. As they are self-explanatory, there is no need to say anything about
them here.
With these words I conclude this preface by expressing the hope that it will
make for a useful contribution, no matter how small, in the struggle against
Trotskyism and revisionism, and in defence of the eternally true propositions of
Marxism-Leninism. I make no pretensions to any originality whatsoever in writing
this book. What I have to say in it will be common knowledge to the older
generation of Marxist-Leninists. But, to our shame, knowledge of what ought to
be generally-known truths is becoming less and less with the younger generation.
We meet young comrades who want to join the movement and help with our work.
What are we going to do with these comrades? I answer this question in the
following words of Stalin's: "I think that systematic reiteration and patient
explanation of the so-called 'generally known' truths is one of the best methods
of educating these comrades in Marxism." (Stalin, Economic Problems of
Socialism in the USSR, FLPH Peking, p. 9).
If I have succeeded in correctly and systematically reiterating at least some
of the so-called 'generally-known' truths in this book, I shall consider myself
entirely satisfied with the enterprise involved.
Notes
1: Otzovists: an opportunist group formed in the
RSDLP in 1908. It was led by A. Bogdanov. From behind a screen of revolutionary
verbiage, the Otzovists demanded the recall of the Social-Democratic deputies
from the Third Duma (Czarist parliament) and the cessation of Party activity in
legal and semi-legal organisations, maintaining that because reaction was on the
rampage the Party had to confine itself to illegal work.
This would have isolated the Party from the masses and turned it into a
sectarian organisation incapable of mustering the forces for another
revolutionary upsurge.
Lenin showed that the views of the Otzovists were inconsistent, unprincipled
and hostile to Marxism. At a conference of an extended editorial board of the
Bolshevik newspaper, Proletary, in June 19D9, a resolution was passed to
the effect that "as a clear-cut trend in the RSDLP Bolshevism has nothing in
common with Otzovism or ultimatumism" (a variety of Otzovism). A. Bogdanov, the
Otzovist leader, was expelled from the Bolshevik Party.
2: Liquidators: representatives of an opportunist
trend in the RSDLP during the period of reaction from 1907-1912. The Mensheviks
were utterly demoralised by the defeat of the revolution of 1905-7. They wanted
the disbandment of illegal Party organisations and the cessation of underground
revolutionary activity. Their aim was to liquidate the revolutionary Party of
the working class and set up an openly reformist party. The liquidators urged
the working class to come to terms with the bourgeoisie, to reconcile itself to
the reactionary regime in Russia.
The liquidators were headed by Martov, Axelrod, Dan, Martynov and other
Menshevik leaders. Trotsky in fact sided with the liquidators.
At the Sixth (Prague) All-Russia Conference of the RSDLP (January 1912), the
liquidators were expelled from the Party.
3: AUCCTU: The All-Union Central Council of Trade
Unions.
4: "Among these legends most be included also the very
widespread story that Trotsky was the 'sole' or 'chief organiser' of the
victories on the fronts of the civil war. I must declare, comrades, in the
interest of truth, that this version Is quite out of accord with the facts. I am
far from denying that Trotsky played an important role in the civil war. But I
must emphatically declare that the high honour of being the organiser of our
victories belongs not to individuals, but to the great collective body of
advanced workers in our country, the Russian Communist Party. Perhaps it will
not be out of place to quote a few examples. You know that Kolchak and Denikin
were regarded as the principal enemies of the Soviet Republic. You know that our
country breathed freely only after these enemies were defeated. Well, history
shows that both these enemies, i.e., Kolchak and Denikin, were routed by our
troops IN SPITE of Trotsky's plans.
"Judge for yourselves:
"KOLCHAK: This is in the summer of 1919. Our troops are advancing against
Kolchak and are operating near Ufa. A meeting of the Central Committee Is held.
Trotsky proposes that the advance be halted along the line of the River Belaya
(near Ufa), leaving the Urals In the hands of Kolchak, and that part of the
troops be withdrawn from the Eastern Front and transferred to the Southern
Front. A heated debate takes place. The Central Committee disagrees with
Trotsky, being of the opinion that the Urals, with its factories and railway
network, must not be left In the hands of Kolchak, for the latter could easily
recuperate there, organise a strong force and reach the Volga again, Kolchak
must first be driven beyond the Ural range Into the Siberian steppes, and only
after that has been done should forces be transferred to the South. The Central
Committee rejects Trotsky's plan. Trotsky hands in his resignation. The Central
Committee refuses to accept it. Commander-in-Chief Vatsetis, who supported
Trotsky's plan, resigns. His place is taken by a new Commander-in-Chief,
Kamenev. From that moment Trotsky ceases to take a direct part in the affairs of
the Eastern Front.
"DENIKIN: This Is In the autumn of 1919. The offensive against Denikin is not
proceeding successfully. The 'steel ring' around Mamontov (Mamontov's raid) is
obviously collapsing. Denikin captures Kursk. Denikin is approaching Orel.
Trotsky is summoned from the Southern Front to attend a meeting of the Central
Committee. The Central Committee regards the situation as alarming and decides
to send new military leaders to the Southern Front and to withdraw Trotsky. The
new military leaders demand 'no Intervention' by Trotsky in the affairs of the
Southern Front. Operations on the Southern Front, right up to the capture of
Rostov-on-Don and Odessa by our troops, proceed without Trotsky.
"Let anybody try to refute these facts."
(Stalin, Collected Works, Vol. 6, pp. 350-352)