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Source:
Fourth International, Volume 5, no. 2, August 1968, pp. 45–57.
Scanned and prepared for the ETOL by Paul Flewers.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A reply to the recent articles by Nicolas Krassó in New Left Review attacking Trotsky’s Marxism and the reply by Ernest Mandel.
Since 1956 – the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, the Hungarian Revolution and the overturn in Poland – Stalinism has been in a state of profound and open crisis. The events of that year were such an overwhelming vindication of Trotsky’s struggle against Stalinism that those who continued that struggle, Trotskyists, were able to strengthen themselves significantly in preparation for the revolutionary political tasks coming to the fore with the eventual end of the boom of the ‘fifties and early ‘sixties.
But the onset of crisis in the ranks of the Communist Parties throughout the capitalist world produced other results besides this opportunity for Trotskyism. For two generations, the Stalinists had cultivated a section of their membership as ‘intellectuals’. The first wave was recruited on the basis of the ‘Popular Front’, class-collaborationist, policies of the period between 1934 and 1939. They were followed by the recruits of the ‘anti-fascist war’ and postwar period.
The Stalin–Hitler Pact at the beginning of the Second World War removed a number of these recruits from the ranks and later many others weakened and deserted under the pressure of McCarthyism and the Cold War. But we can say that for most of this period their acceptance of the conquests of the October Revolution was adapted to the line that the communist movement was really the logical advance guard of the democratic resistance to fascism.
In the late ‘forties and ‘fifties the ‘peace movement’ was the form taken by this political line. Once again the independent class line of the revolutionary proletariat was suppressed, with Communist Party members supplying the leading cadre of all ‘anti-war’ movements.
The secondary effects of this Stalinist line were eventually to prove of some importance. Intellectuals in the Communist Party were separated from the trade union and general political work of the party, and encouraged to pursue their special interests. For all the talk about ‘the battle of ideas’, and despite certain periods of witch-hunting, these intellectuals were not required to step out of line with the petit-bourgeois ‘democratic’ atmosphere of their day-to-day work. At those points where the Stalinist bureaucracy did find collaboration with the imperialists difficult, precisely at these points did the party lose numbers of these intellectuals, above all during the McCarthy period in the USA.
Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, revealing some of the manifestations of Stalin’s personal power, and the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in November 1956, were a bombshell in the lives of every one of these Communist Party intellectuals. The real lesson of this crisis was the counter-revolutionary nature of the Soviet bureaucracy and the need to re-establish continuity with the Bolshevik tradition of October, through the Fourth International and Trotsky’s struggle against Stalinism.
But the vast majority of Stalinist intellectuals now set their political course not objectively, but subjectively: they saw their ‘communism’ as a vast deception; they could no longer hold up their heads in the liberal circles in which they lived and worked; they were outraged to discover that their idealist acceptance of Stalin and Stalinism had been used to cover up murder, torture and the suppression of all freedom; and so on.
Politically speaking, and insofar as any of them remained in politics, the meaning behind these reactions was the acceptance of the principal capitalist ideological attack on the Russian Revolution and Communism: that Stalinism, with all its abuses and betrayals, is essentially a continuation of Leninism; that the essence of Stalinism is ‘dictatorship’ or ‘totalitarianism’, together with ‘Realpolitik’ or pragmatic power politics; and that the ‘ideals’ with which rank-and-file members join and build the movement are simply cynically used by the power-seekers in the leadership.
Conscious of this ‘continuity’, the ex-Communists then cast around for alternative moral and political principles. They find, of course, only the leftovers of bourgeois ethics and the many varieties of reformist and liberal opportunism which have accepted them. None of these, since they flow from, and depend directly upon, a social order which is historically doomed and decaying, can provide a consistent course of action and theory.
Consequently, the many groupings which blossomed (if the word is appropriate in this connection) after 1956 eventually either dissolved into the reformist and liberal movements, or else drifted more and more closely towards Stalinism, sometimes in the form of open and direct collaboration, in other cases through an ideological accommodation. This is because on an international scale capitalism survives not through any inherent strength, but only through the props provided for it by the Stalinist bureaucracy. This is the social force which holds back the proletarian revolution.
Insofar as there is any political and theoretical work among those claiming to be socialists, it must either gravitate towards Stalinism, or be attracted to revolutionary Marxism, to Trotskyism. The New Left Review has a certain continuity since 1956. It was an amalgamation of Universities and Left Review and The New Reasoner. Both of these were the result of collaboration between ex-Communist Party members and other left intellectuals.
The New Reasoner was originally The Reasoner, a duplicated opposition bulletin for dissident Communist Party members in the North of England in 1956. Its editors, Edward Thompson and John Saville, were and remain strongly anti-Trotskyist. Thompson described Trotskyism as a sectarian, ultra-left and anti-revolutionary trend in the British working class. Like those who succeeded them, Thompson and Saville sought for future development from sources outside the Bolshevik tradition, and particularly from some supposedly special socialist characteristics of the British working-class movement.
Their refusal to face up to the historical meaning of Stalinism and of Trotsky’s fight against it was reflected in their rejection of any campaign against Stalinism such as that carried out by the Trotskyists, on the grounds that it amounted to ‘anti-Communism’. In this way they accepted the basic position of a continuity between Lenin and Stalin. Indeed, Thompson explicitly called for a questioning of Marx’s theory of knowledge as a way of getting at the sources of Stalinism. (Socialist Humanism: An Epistle to the Philistines, New Reasoner, Volume 1, no. 1, Summer 1957. See Peter Fryer’s reply Lenin as Philosopher in Labour Review, Volume 2, no. 5, September–October 1957.)
Between those days and 1968, many changes in the editorial personnel and the editorial statements of New Left Review have taken place. It no longer attempts the organisation and mobilisation of socialists and militants in every industrial centre, promised when the magazine was launched. It has become very much a university radical magazine, carrying a high proportion of translated material and literary and philosophical commentary. The New Left Manifesto of 1967, revised and re-issued in 1968, is predictably a left reformist plea to all centrists to stand firm on their principles – which must be the most hopeless of all lost causes!
From about 1964, rumours became strong that there was ‘Trotskyism’ abroad in the editorial offices of the New Left Review. The rumours referred in fact to a certain relationship which had sprung up between some of the Editorial Board and the changing group of isolated individuals in Britain who claimed allegiance to the revisionist ‘United Secretariat of the Fourth International’ in Paris, an offshoot of the anti-Trotskyist programme developed by Michel Pablo in the early nineteen-fifties.
Enthusiasm for the ‘Castro-ite’ currents in Latin America, expectation of a ‘left’ development internationally from petit-bourgeois sources and elements within the bureaucracies of the workers’ movement – these were the focus of agreement between these two trends. It can be said that people like Ken Coates, who for many years played with the ideas of Pabloism, helped in this way to provide sophisticated formulae through which the New Left Review group maintained its anti-Trotskyist position and left itself open to coexistence with Stalinism.
Such coexistence is precisely the starting-point of Pabloism, which abandoned the building of Trotskyist parties based on the revolutionary role of the working class, and instead adapted itself to the supposedly automatic assumption of revolutionary tasks by elements of the Stalinist bureaucracy and by the ‘democratic’ petit-bourgeoisie in the colonial countries. There was a marriage of convenience.
The New Left Review from time to time made sniping attacks on Trotskyism, particularly in its earlier phases, but it never provided any analysis of Trotskyism or of its own relation to the Trotskyist movement. Naturally enough, it produced no useful material on the history of Stalinism either, for that would have implied an estimation of Trotsky’s role. In recent issues, however, the gap has been filled by lengthy contributions from a new member of the New Left Review Editorial Board, one Nicolas Krassó, who has given us Trotsky’s Marxism (New Left Review, no. 44, July–August 1967). This attack on Trotsky was taken up by Ernest Mandel, a Belgian economist who can be taken to follow faithfully the line of the Germain-Frank group in Paris to which we refer above (New Left Review, no. 47, January–February 1968). Krassó returns to the fray (in New Left Review, no. 48, March–April 1968) with Reply to Ernest Mandel.
It is of some importance that the New Left Review at this juncture now launches an all-out attack on Trotsky and Trotskyism. They claim to publish what is above all a theoretical journal, and this is their ‘contribution’ to the preparation of the next stage in the political development of the working-class movement in Britain.
Robin Blackburn, to take only one name from the list of editors, makes great play of defending Regis Debray and celebrating the Cuban Revolution, but he chooses in 1967–1968 to publish a magazine jointly with an enemy of Marxism like Krassó, who joins the New Left Review board to find a platform to attack the revolutionary vanguard. Krassó himself is an ex-pupil of the Hungarian Georg Lukács. He has learned and ‘improved’ upon all Lukács’ well-known capacities for capitulation and bending to the strongest prevailing winds, but without any of the learning and subtlety with which Lukács conceals his retreat from Marxism. He is precisely one of those who reacted to the 1956 Revolution by moving away from Communism as well as from Stalinism. But, as we shall see, by rejecting the line of Lenin and Trotsky, he is brought back to the position of an apologist for Stalin.
One purpose of this long introduction to our reply to Krassó is to prepare also our evaluation of Mandel’s reply to Krassó. Together with his British followers he too had flirted with the New Left Review, submitting articles to them and collaborating in their ventures, and so he was obliged to respond to the diatribe which issued from the pen of their new recruit, Krassó. But precisely because his politics have been of the type which could accommodate to the New Left Review line and orientation, both in Britain and internationally, he proves pitifully unable to deal with Krassó. He does not defend Trotskyism for a single minute, and by the feebleness of his reply actually strengthens Krassó’s attack. This episode is only one small example of the destructive service rendered to Trotskyism by the revisionists.
Mandel’s reply to Krassó cannot be other than weak, allowing Krassó to return to the attack. Mandel’s own political revision of the basic positions of Trotskyism and the Fourth International, along the lines of Michel Pablo, took the form of an adaptation to the Stalinist bureaucracy, which involved inevitably an abandonment of the building of revolutionary parties independent of all elements in that bureaucracy.
Krassó’s attack on Trotskyism, his wish to advocate a ‘Marxism’ opposed to Trotskyism, is his own olive-branch to the ‘liberalising’ Stalinist bureaucrats in Eastern Europe. He is telling them that any ‘independence’ from them which he may claim will certainly not involve revolutionary organisation of the working class against them, and that he will assist them in their task of repelling Trotskyism. Mandel cannot even bring himself to defend the Fourth International, the crowning political act of Trotsky’s career. Instead, he makes a purely abstract assessment of the historical questions and criticisms raised by Krassó.
Even where he makes correct points, this is only part of the overall effect, which is to help Krassó portray Trotsky as, at best, a historical tragedy and at most a dangerously wrong-headed deviationist from Leninism.
Mandel cannot establish himself in the argument as a continuator of Trotsky’s work, the only real answer to Krassó, because he is part of a revisionist attempt to destroy the content of Trotskyism. Similarly, his followers in Britain consciously cut off any connection they had with Trotskyism.´
We take only two examples. Pat Jordan and his associates, followers of Mandel, have for the past two years devoted themselves entirely to the ‘Vietnam Solidarity Campaign’. From the theoretical standpoint, even more significant than the politics of this movement, adapted as they are to Stalinism, is the conscious claim its leaders make for their historical ancestry:
Our campaign recognises its own historical precedents. In the nineteen-thirties, united fronts composed of liberals, democrats, communists and socialists, were forged to oppose the onslaught of Fascism, and international brigades were organised to lend material support to the heroic struggle of Republican Spain, etc. (Why Vietnam Solidarity?, p. 2)
In a recently published collection of writings, Industrial Democracy in Great Britain, Tony Topham and Ken Coates, long-time close associates of Mandel and opponents of the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League on his behalf, came out just as clearly:
From the work of the original ‘New Left’ movement which in 1956 began its independent reappraisal of the socialist interpretation of twentieth-century capitalism, its history and sociology ... from the more recent activities of the ‘Voice’ conferences on workers’ control in Britain, and from accompanying contributions of the European left, we have drawn our inspiration.
This brings us back to where we began: the relationship between revisionism, anti-Trotskyism and the New Left Review. This relationship begins to be revealed especially clearly on the eve of what will be undoubtedly the greatest class struggles for half a century – and the greatest betrayals by the Stalinists, to whom they are all making their way home. And this is the essential meaning of Krassó’s attack on Trotsky’s Marxism.
Krassó is not a modest man. He sets out to demonstrate the ‘mistakes’ of Trotsky through every phase of his political career. (In the course of this, he condescends to take five pages ‘to clarify some recurring misconceptions about the history of the international revolutionary movement since the 1920s’.) What is more, he claims to have found the secret, the single source, of all Trotsky’s mistakes.
The form of Krassó’s case is a crude application of the notion of ‘totality’, in the sense of a purely abstract unity, to Trotsky’s political writing and politics. This totality is a so-called ‘sociologism’, which led Trotsky always to relate the class struggle too directly to the course of political events, without ever grasping what Krassó calls the autonomy of political institutions. In consistently idealist fashion, Krassó ‘proves’ his case by tracing Trotsky’s relation to the revolutionary party as the expression of this ‘sociologism’. He manages to arrive eventually at a fine pseudo-Hegelian construction: Trotsky began as a crude advocate of centralism; never understanding the political concepts behind centralism, he went from 1903 to the 1930s through a series of basic errors on the question which decided his political fate; he then returned in old age to the vulgar conceptions of his youth. Into this construction – a house of cards – every ‘example’ is forced. Krassó begins by himself summing up this approach, an approach typical of bourgeois idealist sociology since the beginning of the century, and recently revived in the fashionable ‘structuralism’. The method is to erect an ‘ideal type’ of the motives which appear to the observer to predominate in the behaviour of the individual or group observed, and then try and ‘illuminate’ the actual reality through this ideal type, or what Krassó calls ‘specific unity’. Thus:
The aim of this essay is to approach such a problem – how should we judge Trotsky as a Marxist? This means comparing him with Lenin (rather than with Stalin) and trying to see what is the specific unity of his theoretical writings and his practice as a politician. For this purpose, Trotsky’s life falls into four distinct phases: 1879–1917, 1917–21, 1921–29 and 1929–40. It will be the thesis of this essay that all four periods are best understood in the framework of a single problem: Trotsky’s relation to the Party as the revolutionary organisation of the proletariat, and its latent theoretical foundations. This focus, it will be argued, illuminates all the basic characteristics (vices and virtues) of Trotsky’s thought as a Marxist, and explains the vicissitudes of his political career. (Krassó, New Left Review, no. 44, p. 65)
This is the form. We have explained the actual content, the attack on the Trotskyist struggle for the continuity of Bolshevism in the building of revolutionary parties, for the social revolution against imperialism, linked with the political revolution in the countries ruled by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Mandel’s reply to Krassó is feeble because it is purely abstract. Coming from the camp of revisionism on this very question, it cannot challenge the content of Krassó’s article, nor can it expose its anti-Marxist form, for in order to abandon the revolutionary party, our revisionists also abandoned the Marxist method in favour of empiricism and pragmatism (see Fourth International, Volume 2, no 1, Summer 1965, for the analysis of this revision of Marxist methods).
Trotsky’s own writings are, of course, the only complete answer to Krassó’s long list of easy judgements on every aspect of his work. Here we shall take the central questions, and demonstrate that Krassó’s method involves a distortion which is in every case characteristic of a crude empiricist approach on historical questions which is always the fate of the idealist. This empiricism, as always, has the political consequence of prostration before the relative equilibrium achieved by capitalism at any particular phase of the epoch of proletarian revolution. This ‘worshipping of the accomplished fact’, as Trotsky would have called it, is directly concentrated upon a justification of the Stalinist bureaucracy. This is only to be expected, since Stalinism has been and remains the principal counter-revolutionary force on a world scale, and thus the most important instrument through which the crisis-ridden capitalist system achieves any temporary unstable equilibrium. Forty years of Stalinist lies about Trotsky’s supposed aid and comfort to the international bourgeoisie do not prevent every bourgeois scholar, almost without exception, deciding that Stalin ‘given the circumstances’ was historically right as against Trotsky.
According to Krassó, Trotsky was blinded to the realities of the early Soviet state, to the real dynamics of the struggle in the Bolshevik Party after Lenin’s death, to the actual potential of the class struggle in the metropolitan countries after the Russian Revolution. In every case, says Krassó, he ignored the immediate sociological background, substituting for it the play of global social or class forces. For all its appearance of high-sounding theory, this argument of Krassó amounts in every case to a justification of the Stalinist bureaucracy and of bourgeois order against the proletariat and the revolution. Krassó writes, for example:
It may be argued that Stalin, by discounting the possibility of successful European revolutions, effectively contributed to their eventual defeat – this accusation has often been made against his policies towards Germany and Spain. There was, indeed, an element of the self-fulfilling prediction in socialism in one country. However, given this criticism, which is precisely that Stalin’s policies represented a debasement of Lenin’s strategy – the superiority of Stalin’s perspective over Trotsky’s is undeniable. It forms the whole historico-practical context in which the struggle for power discussed above unfolded. No matter how strong Stalin’s position in the apparatus, it would have availed him little if his basic strategic line had been invalidated by the course of political events. It was, on the contrary, confirmed by history. In this lay Stalin’s ultimate, unshakeable strength in the 1920s. [my emphasis – CS] (Krassó, New Left Review, no. 44, p. 79)
It is immediately apparent that Krassó’s attempt, in other parts of his essay, to appear as a great follower of Lenin as against Trotsky and Stalin, is mere window-dressing. If Lenin’s strategy was ‘debased’ by Stalin, and Stalin’s ‘basic strategic line’ was ‘confirmed by history’, what remains of the ‘basic strategic line’ of Lenin? In Krassó’s book, could Lenin possibly have survived the judgement made on Trotsky – ‘a classical revolutionary thinker, stranded in an impossible historical impasse’, committed to the ‘ill-starred venture’ of building an International of revolutionary parties? (Ibid., pp 84–85)
Krassó’s prostration before the existing order of class rule and the power of the Stalinist bureaucracy, expressed most clearly in the passage quoted above on Stalin’s ‘correctness’, is the real meaning of his castigation of Trotsky’s supposed ‘underestimation of the specific efficacy of political institutions’, the so-called ‘sociologism’ which is Trotsky’s original sin. Every one of the doubtful talents of Krassó is turned to ‘proving’ that, whatever criticisms are permitted of Stalin and Stalinism, they must not lead to the position established by Trotsky.
The period 1927–1940 must be characterised as ‘Myth’. Trotsky is the tragic hero, and the Fourth International an abortion.
The last period of his life was dominated by his symbolic relationship to the great drama of the previous decade, which had become for him a tragic fate. His activities became almost futile. He himself was completely ineffective – the leader of an imaginary political movement, helpless while his relatives were exterminated by Stalin, and interned wherever he went. His main objective role in these pitiful years was to provide the fictive negative centre needed by Stalin in Russia ... Stalin installed his iron dictatorship by mobilising the party apparatus against the ‘Trotskyite’ threat. (Ibid., p 84)
Mandel, having spent so many years in the task of attempting to liquidate the Fourth International, gives no answer whatsoever to this neo-Stalinist distortion. What Krassó is doing here is providing a more ‘subtle’ and less brutal version of the old Stalinist falsifications of the Moscow trials. The last refuge of the Stalinists on these questions was for years that the forced confessions and the judicial frame-ups were ‘objectively’ necessary, whether or not Trotsky ‘consciously’ acted for the bourgeoisie and counter-revolution. That presentation has become untenable, and Krassó’s role is to provide the last threadbare covering for the bureaucracy as its past is exposed: the ‘negative’ features of Stalin’s rule, according to him, were established more easily because ‘objectively’ Trotsky’s ‘futile’ activities provided a focus for the purges!
However perverse and flimsy, the argument is worth examination. It starts from and ends with only the standpoint of the bureaucracy, the scope and limits of its policy and power, and never from the standpoint of the working class. Internationally, the defeats of the 1926-36 period are accepted as given and unalterable ‘objective’ obstacles to Trotsky’s policies and aims. In each particular country, the consciousness of those defeats became part of an ‘unfamiliar context’ for Trotsky, ‘the character of the new societies in which he found himself’, and of which he was ‘uncertain’.
What is the significance of this last point? Krassó develops it in his reply to Mandel:
But in all these cases, Stalin’s international policies were ultimately [?] a secondary factor within a contest fought and decided at national level. The primary unit [?] of class struggle was the nation ... (New Left Review, no . 8, p. 101)
The latter point is taken up later in relation to the theory of permanent revolution: in the present context the decisive thing is that Krassó presents and rewrites the whole history of the interwar period as a justification of the Soviet bureaucracy.
Like every petit-bourgeois, Krassó finds a bit of good in everybody. But his praise of Trotsky on certain questions is only part of his attack, and it is made only insofar as it supports Krassó’s own orientation to Stalinism today. Krassó refers to the ‘tremendous prescience’ of Trotsky’s writings on German Fascism, and the uniqueness of his analysis of the Stalinist errors of the ‘Third Period’. Similarly, although complaining about the ‘demagogic’ title of The Revolution Betrayed, Krassó commends Trotsky’s analysis of the USSR:
While many of his followers were manufacturing new ‘ruling classes’ and ‘capitalist restorations’ in the Soviet Union at will, Trotsky in his analysis of the Soviet state and party apparatus emphasised, on the contrary, that it was not a social class. (Ibid., p. 85)
With the sure judgement of the camp-follower, Krassó knows how far to go: he can faintly praise Trotsky for that part of his theory which, when abstracted and robbed of its content, can be used to lend support for Krassó’s own celebration of the historical role of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
His praise for Trotsky’s work on the rise of Nazism in Germany is just as informative. While recording his agreement with Trotsky that the line of the Comintern was disastrous, he at the same time (indeed, in the next sentence) argues that ‘Stalin’s international policies were ultimately a secondary factor within a contest fought and decided at national level’ (Ibid., .p 101).
Of course, Trotsky’s entire analysis was based on precisely the opposite grounds! The ‘left’ zig-zag into the ‘Third Period’ in 1929 was an international turn by the Stalinist bureaucracy. The designation of social democrats as ‘social-fascists’ and the rejection of the United Front was not a product of something ‘German’ but of the social position, needs and policies of the Soviet bureaucracy, and it proved decisive in opening the way to Hitler’s victory in 1933. So much was this the central feature of Trotsky’s analysis that he drew from 1933 the historic conclusion that the reform of the Third International was no longer possible and that the Fourth must be constructed. This is, of course, the one decision above all others made by Trotsky which Krassó rejects outright. His commendation of Trotsky’s work on Germany is thus worse than meaningless: it is used to build up a case which is precisely the opposite of that argued and fought for by Trotsky. Since Krassó accuses Trotsky of non-Marxist method, how does he explain his own attempts to abstract ‘bits and pieces’ from Trotsky’s work and damn or praise them? Is it ‘Marxist’, then, to apply some external norms of judgement to each ‘essay’ by Trotsky instead of tracing Trotsky’s development as a unity of theory and practice? For Trotsky, the German tragedy and the building of the new International were inseparably linked. For Krassó, Trotsky is ‘brilliant’ on one hand and ‘futile’ on the other! So much for ‘Krassó’s Marxism’!
Again it is necessary to move immediately from the direct analysis of Krassó’s argument to the politics which lie behind it. In his rejoinder to Mandel, Krassó indicates with great clarity (the clarity of the naive, it should be said, and not of the brilliant) this relation between his opportunist politics and his eclectic method. He writes:
Moreover, Trotsky’s critique of the Comintern policies in Germany was excellent (it is perhaps significant, incidentally, that his best polemics of those years were written from a ‘rightist’ position, parallel to that of Brandler, not from a ‘leftist’ position, which he adopted during the Popular Fronts) ... (Ibid.)
This passage tells us as much about Krassó’s line and method as we need to know, and more than would emerge from going over in detail many of the other questions he raises. Like this question of Trotsky’s ‘right’ and ‘left’ lines, these have all been answered many times, and in the first place by Trotsky himself.
Here, however, Krassó surpasses himself. So much confusion is crammed into one pair of parentheses that it is difficult to know where to begin. But it must be done.
Brandler and Thalheimer, ‘right-wing Communists’ close to the thinking of Bukharin, were expelled from the German Communist Party in 1929. They strongly criticised the ultra-left policy of the Comintern, particularly in its application to Germany. In appearances, many of the points they made were the same as points made by Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Did this mean that Trotsky had moved over to their ‘rightist’ position, later to return to the left after 1933?
This superficial judgement did in fact prevail in some circles, not least among certain followers of the Left Opposition. But Brandler confined his political criticism entirely to this ‘left’ swing in the zigzag of Comintern policies, zigzags which were stumbling, empirical and tardy reactions to the disastrous consequences of earlier phases of their own policy. It was the reasons for the zigzags, the nature of the bureaucracy, to which Marxists must direct their attention. And it was here that Trotsky was completely opposed to Brandler. Just as Brandler separated out one historical stage of Stalinist policy for attack, so he separated his criticisms of the ‘German policy’ of the Comintern from every other question of the policy and nature of the Stalinist leadership. Where Trotsky exposed the German Communist Party’s policy as only one expression of the whole turn against proletarian internationalism and Marxism by the Comintern leadership under the pressure of the Stalinist bureaucracy, Brandler compromised with the Stalinists, argued that to attack Comintern policy as a whole or Stalin’s policy inside Russia would make effective opposition impossible by alienating all Communists. From this standpoint, Brandler argued that the course of the bureaucracy could be corrected without an overall and principled struggle against them.
All this is well known to serious students of the Communist movement, and Krassó’s ignorance of it is no more excusable than deliberate falsification. A light-minded attitude towards the history and theory of the revolutionary movement is the most serious fault possible in anyone claiming to be a Marxist. One cannot even be as generous as this in relation to Krassó’s imputation that Trotsky changed from a ‘rightist’ to a ‘leftist’ position in the period of the Popular Fronts. Trotsky’s position was that of continuation of the path of Lenin and of the first four Congresses of the Third International. He fought for and developed these principles, strategy and tactics until his death. The zigzags to ‘left’ and ‘right’ were, once again, the frantic re-adjustments made by the bureaucracy after being brought face to face with the consequences of their own line. Thus, after the victory of Hitler, they belatedly introduced, at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International, a policy of ‘alliances’ against Fascism. But it was not a return to the United Front of the early years of the International and explained in detail in the speeches and reports of Lenin and Trotsky. Instead, there were to be ‘Popular Fronts’ of the ‘democratic’ parties, that is, alliances with the bourgeois ‘democratic’ parties, for the sake of which the independent demands and the revolutionary role of the working class were to be suppressed. Spain was to provide the great example.
The point here is that the change of line, while prompted by the historical defeat of the German working class and all that it threatened to the workers of every country, was shaped by the political requirements of the Stalinist bureaucracy in its position between the Soviet proletariat and property relations on the one hand, and imperialism on the other. Stalin now settled for a strategy of using the Communist Parties as direct agents of guaranteeing social peace to the bourgeois powers who in return would militarily and diplomatically ‘guarantee’ the isolation of Hitler and counter his threat to the USSR’s Western border.
All this Trotsky analysed with perfect clarity at the time. His position was not ‘rightist’ or ‘leftist’ but a Marxist one of fighting for policies based on the international interests of the working class, including the Soviet working class. How much then remains of Krassó’s easy formula about Trotsky’s change of position and his tendency to write better when in a ‘rightist’ position? Undoubtedly, nothing other than Krassó’s own subjective preference for a ‘liberalising’, ‘non-sectarian’ position, from which he himself prefers to see both the past and the present of the Stalinist bureaucracy. For the same reason he falls easily into the position of arguing, in Stalin’s favour, that the unit of class struggle and revolution was primarily the nation.
This is not just an abstract preference for Stalin over Trotsky, though that is congenital to opportunists, but essentially an overture to the ‘liberal’ wing of the bureaucracy in Hungary and the other East European countries, with their lip service to ‘separate, national roads to socialism’. This formula is in fact a special licence to combine sycophantic service to the Kremlin bureaucracy with a measure of privilege and ‘independence’ as suitable reward. Independence from the Moscow bureaucracy is one thing; ‘independence’ from the working class, guaranteed by the tanks of this same Moscow bureaucracy, quite another.
Krassó’s ‘Marxism’ is essentially of this type, a set of fixed formulae to explain why things are just what they appear to be. It is the revolutionary role of the working class, united and led to power by a conscious revolutionary party, which he rejects. That is the real meaning of his criticism of Trotsky’s supposed ‘sociologism’, or stress on the class struggle as determinant of the course of historical events. Again, Germany provides the best example, and a clearer one than would an analysis of all his abstract arguments. In the same breath as he talks about the ‘excellence’ of Trotsky’s writings on Germany, Krassó says:
The possibilities of a socialist revolution in Germany were also remote. The KPD (German Communist Party) at no time had anything like the force to deal with the Wehrmacht (the German army) – re-armed and equipped by the social democrats for the deliberate purpose of counter-revolution in 1918, and constantly enlarged thereafter. This strategic situation was prior to any consideration of Nazism. A successful check on Nazism was one thing; a proletarian revolution quite another. (Ibid.)
Trotsky’s writings on Germany could certainly not have been written by a man with Krassó’s historical opinions, as expressed in this quotation. Krassó can only see these writings as ‘a pathology of the class nature of the dispossessed petit-bourgeoisie and its paranoias’, from the comfortable chair of the petit-bourgeois intellectual, he thinks he can simply utilise the ideas of Trotsky for an abstract evaluation of his less enlightened predecessors in Germany. But reference to Trotsky’s works on Germany shows that he approached the ‘dispossessed petit-bourgeoisie’ and its politics always from the point of view of the crisis of leadership and independent politics of the working class, the only revolutionary class against the great monopolies and banks. In Germany, as in France and every other capitalist country, the frustrated petit-bourgeoisie, battered between these two main classes, would choose the demagogy and anti-proletarian violence of Fascism if the proletariat did not win it to a policy of revolutionary and decisive inroads into big capitalist property: anything else, and in particular the defence of the discredited ‘democracy’, would only impel the middle classes further to the right. It was for this purpose that Trotsky insisted on a united front of the working class both before 1933 in Germany, during the ‘Third Period’, and after 1934, when the Stalinists went over to ‘Popular Front’ politics.
Krassó, as always opposed to a dialectical viewpoint, can only see pre-1933 and post-1933 as two opposites, and not as expressions and developments of the same revolutionary line against Stalinism and its zigzags. This impressionistic separating out of phases is not just a weakness of logic: on the one hand, it flows from the idealist method of not proceeding from the development of Trotsky’s Marxism as revolutionary theory and practice; on the other, it is a necessary parallel of his rejection of the revolutionary role of the working class. Thus, at the end of his reply to Mandel, he defines Marxism, not as the theoretical basis of the proletarian revolution, but as ‘the intelligence of an intolerable era and the movement to transform it’ (Ibid., p. 103). From this standpoint, Krassó is perfectly able to write the urbane-sounding and cynical verdict on Germany which we have quoted. From the heights of ‘sociological’ promise we are thrown down to the most vulgar and everyday judgements of the frightened petit-bourgeois, whose sole aim is to make any class-conscious worker who will listen, just as frightened as he is – this is what is meant by pressure of the middle classes on the proletariat. The army was too strong – and so there could be no revolution.
This strikingly original theory is of course an argument against any revolution. Of course, Krassó takes into account his ‘sophisticated’ audience by adding that the social democrats had in 1918–19 made possible the restoration of the German Army, but he uses this ‘fact’ purely, as Marx used to say, ‘to justify today’s swinishness by yesterday’s swinishness’. No doubt we should conclude, from the development of modern weapons and the ‘fact’ that the bourgeois state and army were restored with the active and indispensable help of French and Italian Stalinism in 1945, that revolution in Western Europe today is ‘remote’. Krassó’s analysis in 1929–33 would have led to capitulation to Nazism, just as in 1936 in France the Stalinists and social democrats did use precisely the argument that the workers were not armed and so could not envisage revolution.
Finally, when Krassó says: ‘A successful check to Nazism was one thing; a proletarian revolution quite another’, he takes us through the last door into metaphysics, where every ‘fact’ and ‘possibility’ is separated out from every other to receive the approbation or the condemnation of the petit-bourgeois as to its historical permissibility. Perhaps Krassó will now write an article explaining what policy, and what class, could actually have achieved the defeat of Nazism in Germany without proletarian revolution! What social force could be mobilised to defeat the Nazis and their capitalist backers? Does Fascism arise from the inability of capitalism to go on in the old ‘democratic’ way, or from purely political developments which can be halted? (Is this the meaning of Krassó’s high-sounding talk about the ‘autonomy of political institutions’?) Was there then a path of democratic capitalism in Germany after the 1920s? Come, Mr Krassó! Answer these questions, explain to us just what you mean by ‘a successful check to Nazism’ but without a ‘proletarian revolution’. This was precisely the petit-bourgeois Utopia with which Stalinism infected, misled, and betrayed the international working-class movement in the 1930s and 1940s. In this one ‘distinction’ between defeating Fascism ‘on the one hand’ and proletarian-revolution, ‘on the other’, Krassó’s whole political and theoretical position is revealed: his articles are a crude attempt to provide a theoretical support for the Stalinist bureaucracy’s struggle against Trotskyism.
For the rest, we must refer the reader to Trotsky’s own texts on the question of Germany. In the space of one article, it is of course not possible to take up in detail all Krassó’s particular points, but the analysis of any one of them brings out the same essential method: denial of the Trotskyist continuity of Marxism in building alternative revolutionary leadership; justification of the Stalinist betrayals on the grounds of their proceeding from a more ‘realistic’ perspective.
We will take the example of Spain because it gives the opportunity to quote Trotsky on the more general theoretical questions raised by Krassó, as well as to answer Krassó on the Spanish Revolution itself. In the course of fulfilling his promise to ‘clarify some recurring misconceptions about the history of the international revolutionary movement since the 1920s’, Krassó writes:
The Spanish Civil War is another example. Mandel implies that the Spanish Communist Party could have made a successful revolution within the embattled Republic in 1936–37 and then gone on to military victory over Franco. Yet they were only a small minority of the Republican forces at the time, which themselves had little chance of winning the war once the military relationship of forces crystallised in 1936. (Ibid., p. 101)
Of course, having insisted all along that the class struggle is essentially a national phenomenon, Krassó feels free to see the forces at work in the Spanish Civil War as nothing but numerical proportions of the nation’s political divisions, with their military ‘crystallisations’. The reality, of course, was different, and Stalinism was actually able to play a decisive role far beyond its numerical strength in the Spanish proletariat. So far as Krassó is concerned, none of the great political and social questions raised in action by the Spanish working class, and in theory and programme by Trotsky, are of any account, once he is able, with the advantage of hindsight, to calculate the ‘success’ of the ‘autonomous’ political and military institutions. As always for the petit-bourgeois, these pillars of the establishment are more solid and more meaningful than the fact that the Spanish workers actually set their feet firmly on the path to revolution (it was a question of suppression by the Stalinists and their allies, not of the Stalinists simply not deciding on a revolution), or than the socio-historical character of the Spanish Revolution, a false estimation of which was used by the Stalinists to provide the cover for counter-revolution. So far from Marxism have we been taken by Krassó’s ‘autonomy of political institutions’ that class forces no longer play any part in political development.
Krassó writes about the ‘crystallisation’ of the military relationship of forces in 1936 in Spain. Of course, in civil war the military relations require specific and detailed planning and attention, but they are in general subordinated to social and political considerations. Nineteen-thirty-six was no exception. Where Krassó produces an abstracted summary, an accomplished fact, the reality was different:
In July 1936 – not to refer to an earlier period – the Spanish workers repelled the assault of the officers who had prepared their conspiracy under the protection of the People’s Front. The masses improvised militias and created workers’ committees, the strongholds of their future dictatorship. The leading organisations of the proletariat on the other hand helped the bourgeoisie to destroy these committees, to liquidate the assaults of the workers on private property and to subordinate the workers’ militias to the command of the bourgeoisie, with the POUM moreover participating in the government and assuming direct responsibility for this work of the counter-revolution. (Trotsky, The Class, the Party and the Leadership, WIR Pamphlet, p. 4)
Trotsky goes on to summarise the well-known events of May 1937, when the Catalonian workers rose up and were bloodily suppressed, and concludes:
The only thing that can be said is that the masses who sought at all times to blast their way to the correct road found no new leadership corresponding to the demands of the revolution. Before us is a profoundly dynamic process, with the various stages of the revolution shifting swiftly, with the leadership or various sections of the leadership quickly deserting to the side of the class enemy, and our sages engage in a purely static discussion: why did the working class as a whole follow a bad leadership? (Ibid., p. 5)
Or, one might say: our sages sit and pronounce on the riddle – is it not a fact that the military relationship had already crystallised?
Trotsky attached primary importance to the building of a conscious leadership to give expression and direction to the revolutionary struggle of the working class. It was the role of the Stalinists in cementing the Popular Front as a barrier between the working masses and Bolshevism which played the essential part in clearing the path of the Spanish bourgeoisie to preserve their property through the victory of Franco. The Spanish Communist Party was the instrument through which Stalin’s policy, the policy of the Stalinist bureaucracy, through the shipment of Soviet arms, was brought together with the policies of the Republican politicians, Socialists and Anarchists, all of whom wanted above all to avoid a revolutionary break with capitalism. As Trotsky pointed out time and again, the democratic and anti-socialist programme of Azaña, Negrín, Companys, Caballero, and García Oliver could be applied only through terror against the proletariat, and this was why they sanctioned the bloody measures of the GPU. Trotsky concluded:
The Spanish revolution once again demonstrates that it is impossible to defend democracy against the revolutionary masses otherwise than through the methods of fascist reaction, and conversely, it is impossible to conduct a genuine struggle against fascism otherwise than through the methods of the proletarian revolution. (The Lessons of Spain: The Last Warning, 17 December 1937, p. 10)
Krassó’s seemingly objective pronouncement on the crystallisation of forces in 1936 is only another version of the attempt to find some middle road between these two, just as he did for Germany – ‘A successful check on Nazism was one thing; a proletarian revolution quite another.’ This sublime distinction exists only in the head of the petit-bourgeois. Its expression in reality was physically crushed by Fascism in the 1930s. The fact that Krassó still wants to justify, one way or another, this Stalinist past of murder and betrayal, only indicates the force exerted on him by counter-revolutionary forces today. (On Spain, see especially Trotsky and the Spanish Revolution by P. Broué, in Fourth International, Volume 4, no. 1, April 1967)
The question of leadership, raised very sharply in relation to Spain, brings us to the nub of Krassó’s argument, the attack on Trotsky’s notion of the party, of the relation between party and class, and his supposed overestimation of the direct and determining role of the class struggle. Krassó takes a passage from Trotsky’s preface to the History of the Russian Revolution as ‘the most authentic and powerful expression’ of Trotsky’s ‘sociologism’. It is worth beginning by examining this quotation in detail. First, the paragraph quoted by Krassó is an attempt to prove the point that Trotsky had ‘a view of the revolution which explicitly rejects political or economic variables as of permanent importance’:
In a society that is seized by revolution classes are in conflict. It is perfectly clear, however, that the changes introduced between the beginning and the end of a revolution in the economic bases of the society and its social substratum of classes are not sufficient to explain the course of the revolution itself, which can overthrow in a short interval age-old institutions, create new ones, and again overthrow them. The dynamic of revolutionary events is directly determined by swift, intense and passionate changes in the psychology of classes which have already formed themselves before the revolution. (History of the Russian Revolution, pp. 17–18, italics added by Krassó. In the original, Trotsky underlined only the word ‘directly’)
In the first place, it must be said that here Trotsky writes directly in the tradition of Marx and Engels, whose classical writings on the 1848–51 events in France are prefaced by the famous remarks that, while they constitute the first detailed example of the new historical materialism, they are written ‘holding constant’ the economic basis of society. While these economic conditions affect the course of the revolution, it remains true that the classes set in motion were formed by the economic and social development of the previous decades, and that the tempo of the revolutionary events is a qualitatively new phenomenon. It is of course a downright distortion to say that by writing this paragraph Trotsky excluded ‘political or economic variables’. Only one page later he writes:
However, the processes taking place in the consciousness of the masses are not unrelated and independent. No matter much how the idealists and eclectics rage, consciousness is nevertheless determined by conditions. In the historic conditions which formed Russia, her economy, her classes, her state, in the action upon her of other states, we ought to be able to find the premises both of the February revolution and of the October revolution which replaced it. (Ibid., p. 19)
Does anything remain of Krassó’s fabrication? Perhaps Trotsky, even allowing for the economic and political ‘indirect’ conditioning of those mass forces which ‘directly’ determine the course of revolution, still neglects the role of the proletarian party in the revolutionary victory? But on the same page, Trotsky is highly explicit on this:
Only on the basis of a study of political processes in the masses themselves, can we understand the role of parties and leaders, whom we least of all are inclined to ignore. They constitute not an independent, but nevertheless a very important, element in the process. Without a guiding organisation the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston-box. But nevertheless, what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam. (Ibid.)
When Krassó defends so stoutly the ‘autonomy of political institutions’, he has in mind of course not the revolutionary party so much as the established pillars of bourgeois political order. And this is why the quotation of which he makes so much is torn from its context, a context where Trotsky explains that a revolution is precisely an end to the normal conditions in which the appearance of stability of ‘political institutions’ holds men spellbound.
In ordinary times the state, be it monarchical or democratic, elevates itself above the nation, and history is made by specialists in that line of business, kings, ministers, bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists. But at those crucial moment when the old order becomes no longer endurable to the masses, they break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives, and create by their own intervention the initial groundwork for a new regime ... The history of a revolution is for us first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny. (Ibid., p. 17)
This passage precedes immediately the paragraph quoted by Krassó, and it brings out once again the way in which Krassó always runs away from the fact of revolution. These revolutions, the rude entry of the masses into history, demanding the development of Marxism as the conscious spearhead of their struggle, are rejected as a disturbance of all fixed notions of ‘political institutions’ and their ‘autonomy’.
The History itself develops in detail every aspect of this general presentation. After the detailed analysis of economic and political history of modern Russia, Trotsky presents in chronological detail not simply the march of political events and the intervention of the masses, but also the main crises in the Bolshevik Party and the sharp changes in the relations between parties and classes. It is nonsense to say, as Krassó does, that the book is ‘not an account of the role of the Bolshevik Party in the October Revolution so much as an epic of the crowds who were led to victory by it’. Any reader can check Trotsky’s intricate analysis of every stage of the contradictory developments inside the Bolshevik Party, as well as the presentation of the relation of other political tendencies to the masses.
Trotsky deals with the same question on many occasions, and nowhere does he fall into the error invented by Krassó. Indeed, Krassó’s argument is that in the 1920s and 1930s Trotsky overestimated the counter-revolutionary influence of the Comintern’s policies. Of course, if Trotsky had ever believed the original simple-minded notion attributed to him by Krassó – that the consciousness of the masses is the directly determining causal factor – he could never have established the counter-revolutionary role of the Stalinist bureaucracy and the Comintern. As we have seen, Trotsky had a dialectical conception: the conscious expression, in principles, strategy and tactics by the revolutionary party, of the historical needs and tasks of the proletariat was an indispensable part of the relationship of forces. Thus, in Strategy and Tactics in the Imperialist Epoch, Trotsky explains again the relation between these different aspects:
What have we in Europe in the postwar period? In economy – irregular, spasmodic curtailments and expansions of production, which gravitate in general around the prewar level despite great technical successes in certain branches of industry. In politics – frenzied oscillations of the political situation towards the Left and towards the Right. It is quite apparent that the sharp turns in the political situation in the course of ones, two or three years are not brought about by any changes in the basic economic factors, but by causes of a purely superstructural character, thereby indicating the extreme instability of the entire system, the foundation of which is corroded by irreconcilable contradictions. This is the sole source from which flows the full significance of revolutionary strategy in contradistinction to tactics. Thence also flows the new significance of the party and the party leadership. [My emphasis – CS] (The Third International After Lenin, p. 82)
Trotsky adds, two pages later:
But as soon as the objective prerequisites have matured, the key to the whole historical process passes into the hands of the subjective factor, that is, the party. (Ibid., p. 84)
Unfortunately for Krassó, we have here those points on the decisive significance of the party driven home by Trotsky in the midst of his titanic struggle with Stalinist revisionism, and not only in a literary-historical work. This same emphasis reappeared at every stage of Trotsky’s fight for the Fourth International: indeed, the key question raised in the founding programme is that of the crisis of working-class leadership as the key to the crisis of humanity.
If Krassó wants to make the point that Trotsky did not have a clear understanding of the importance of the party before 1917, then he is of course free to do, so. Trotsky not only several times himself explained his own mistakes on that score, but he also hit out very hard against those who carefully selected such differences as had existed between him and Lenin in order to discredit his fight for Bolshevism after 1917. Krassó’s presentation is precisely of the latter type. At a time when Stalinism prepares its greatest betrayals, Krassó’s fire is turned against the Trotskyists. Krassó himself quotes Trotsky’s own verdict on his ‘non-Bolshevism’ before 1917 – that it arose from ‘a certain social-revolutionary fatalism’ – but it must be said that even in those days Trotsky was closer to a correct Marxist position than Krassó. Even in Results and Prospects, Trotsky says: ‘The function of the socialist parties [is] to revolutionise the consciousness of the working class’, though Krassó accuses him of ‘forgetting’ the vanguard of the working class. The real point, missed by Krassó, and quite foreign, naturally enough, to the mind of his shadowy opponent, Mandel, is made by Trotsky when he discusses his own mistakes of 1912, when he tried to conciliate Bolshevism and Menshevism. In In Defence of Marxism, Trotsky said about this phase: ‘I had not freed myself at that period, especially in the organisational sphere, from the traits of a petit-bourgeois revolutionist.’
This meant above all that Trotsky had not until 1917 grasped the constant and intimate connection between inner-party struggles and the class struggle. Inside the revolutionary party, a conscious struggle must be waged against every reflection into the party of the one-sidedness, hesitation, opportunism and adventurism of sections of the working class affected by other classes. From Lenin’s 1917 struggle against the ‘old Bolsheviks’ Trotsky learned this lesson in a way which he never once forgot, and on the basis of which he wrote Lessons of October, The New Course and In Defence of Marxism. Krassó simply cannot grasp the significance of Trotsky’s discussion of the class role of the various tendencies in the party. His ‘relative autonomy’ has come to mean abstract independence from the living struggle, again a conception by no means foreign to the Stalinist bureaucracy in Eastern Europe. To be victorious the revolutionary party must anticipate and fight out within itself the struggles to be resolved in the workers’ movement. The party, says Trotsky, ‘besides its other attributes, is the central ideological laboratory of the working class’. (Communism and Syndicalism, in Marxism and the Trade Unions, p. 47)
Krassó, without ever presenting a detailed case, throws in many other allegations of Trotsky’s ‘mistakes’, supposedly flowing from this central ‘sociologism’, for example, the Trotskyist line on the 1926 General Strike, the wrong estimation of a ‘revolutionary’ situation in 1945 in Western Europe, but in every case the same basic issues occur. On most of these questions Trotsky answered for himself (see especially Brian Pearce, Early History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and Trotsky, The Stalin School of Falsification), and we will rest content with answering in detail the point made central by Krassó, together with the examples already analysed, which are sufficient to expose his crude and facile method.
The best way to complete this reply to Krassó, and also to the pathetic Mandel, unable to defend the Fourth International and Trotskyism today, is to quote at length Trotsky’s opinions on these basic questions just prior to his death:
Imitating the liberals our sages tacitly accept the axiom that every class gets the leadership it deserves. In reality leadership is not at all a mere ‘reflection’ of a class or the product of its own free creativeness. A leadership is shaped in the process of clashes between the different classes or the friction between the different layers within a given class. Having once arisen, the leadership invariably rises above its class and thereby becomes predisposed to the pressure and influence of other classes. The proletariat may ‘tolerate’ for a long time a leadership that has already suffered a complete inner degeneration but has not as yet had the opportunity to express this degeneration amid great events. A great historic shock is necessary to reveal sharply the contradiction between the leadership and the class. The mightiest historical shocks are wars and revolutions. Precisely for this reason the working class is often caught unawares by war and revolution. But even in cases where the old leadership has revealed its internal corruption, the class cannot improvise immediately a new leadership, especially if it has not inherited from the previous period strong revolutionary cadres capable of utilising the collapse of the old leading party. (The Class, the Party and the Leadership, pp. 5–6)
In this passage, Trotsky brings to bear, against the apologists for Stalinism after the defeats of the 1930s, all the fruits of his experience of the revolutionary movement and its leadership. He follows it with a crystal-clear statement of the role of the revolutionary party which is in every way the diametrical opposite both of Krassó’s caricature and of the politics of Mandel:
What was the ‘active’ [that is, the essential assets] of Bolshevism? A clear and thoroughly thought-out revolutionary conception at the beginning of the revolution was held only by Lenin. The Russian cadres of the party were scattered and to a considerable degree bewildered. But the party had authority among the advanced workers. Lenin had great authority with the party cadres. Lenin’s political conception corresponded to the actual development of the revolution and was reinforced by each new event. These elements of the ‘active’ worked wonders in a revolutionary situation, that is, in conditions of bitter class struggle. The party quickly aligned its policy to correspond that is with the actual course of the revolution. Thanks to this it met with firm support among tens of thousands of advanced workers. Within a few months, by basing itself upon the development of the revolution the party was able to convince the majority of the workers of the correctness of its slogans. This majority organised into Soviets was able in its turn to attract the soldiers and peasants. How can this dynamic, dialectic process be exhausted by a formula of the maturity or immaturity of the proletariat? A colossal factor in the maturity of the Russian proletariat in February or March 1917 was Lenin. He did not fall from the skies. He personified the revolutionary tradition of the working class. For Lenin’s slogans to find their way to the masses there had to exist cadres, even though numerically small at the beginning; there had to exist the confidence of the cadres in the leadership, a confidence based on the entire experience of the past. To cancel these elements from one’s calculations is simply to ignore the living revolution, to substitute for it an abstraction, the ‘relationship of forces’, because the development of the revolution precisely consists of this, that the relationship of forces keeps incessantly and rapidly changing under the impact of the changes in the consciousness of the proletariat, the attraction of backward layers to the advanced, the growing assurance of the class in its own strength. The vital mainspring in this process is the party, just as the vital mainspring in the mechanism of the party is its leadership. The role and the responsibility of the leadership in a revolutionary epoch is colossal.
This is ‘Trotsky’s Marxism’.
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