Trotsky, Socialist Democracy and Stalinism

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Published on Thursday, 19 August 2010 18:56

Trotsky’s greatest sin, it seems, was that he often disagreed with the “general line” of the party. Or so the contemporary devotees of Joseph Stalin would still like us to believe. Perhaps this should be viewed, rather, as Trotsky’s continuing commitment to the pre-Stalinist Marxist tradition, for which commitment to working class democracy, viewed as more expansive than the best that bourgeois democracy could afford to offer, and hence as his greatest legacy for socialists in the twenty-first century if they do not want to bow movingly to market forces, yet want to be relevant. For the days when one could say in a commanding tone, “this is the party line”, and expect everyone to lie down and play dead like tame dogs, are gone forever.

 

When Karl Marx started his political career, he began as a democrat. Unlike many earlier and contemporary socialists and communists, he did not advocate an educational dictatorship of the party (or a group of wise and enlightened elite, by whatever name) over the working people. And his call for a “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” was not a call for party dictatorship. One has to remember that in the Paris Commune, there were very few people holding close to Marx’s views, and that moreover it was an elected body with laws far more democratic than anything that then existed in any liberal state. Yet both Marx and Engels unhesitatingly called the Commune a dictatorship of the proletariat.

 

The Young Trotsky’s Critique of Lenin

 

Trotsky stood in this tradition, as despite occasional ferocious statements, did Lenin, till 1921. In 1904, in his polemical pamphlet against Lenin entitled Our Political Tasks, Trotsky wrote that “The problems of the new regime are so intricate that they can be solved only through the rivalry of the various methods of economic and political reconstruction, by long “debates”, by systematic struggle – not only between the socialist and the capitalist worlds, but also between the various tendencies within socialism, tendencies that must inevitably develop as soon as the dictatorship of the proletariat creates tens and hundreds of new unsolved problems …. And no ‘strong authoritative organisation’ will be able to put down these tendencies and disagreement for the purpose of accelerating and simplifying the process, for it is only too clear that the proletariat capable of a dictatorship over society will not tolerable a dictatorship over itself.” This is not to try and replace the myth of the infallible Lenin followed by the infallible Stalin, by another myth of the prophetic Trotsky. Considering that at stake was also a debate over whether a minority, defeated in a democratically organised Congress, should accept the decisions of the Congress or not, where Trotsky was supporting the creation of a special category of members who had the right to flout decisions because they were leaders, he made his share of errors. On this issue he was wrong, not just according to some special canons of Leninism, but by any commonsense definition of democracy. However, by the time Trotsky came to write this particular pamphlet, Lenin had tried to bolster his claims with further arguments. Trotsky argued, against Lenin, on three points, which together constituted, according to him, an alternative (and superior) theory of organisation. The first is the opposition that he set up between the self activity of the class and a “fantastic” sectarian error, whereby Lenin allegedly wanted a ready made set of tactics to enable the Central Committee to control the masses. The second point is the opposition between democracy and Lenin’s “pitiless centralism” (to borrow a term used by Rosa Luxemburg). The third point is the contrast between a formalist and a historical political viewpoint. One important charge he made against Lenin and his supporters was that they believed in automatic success due to their possession of Marxist doctrine. One can refer to statements like: “The Party is the organized detachment of the working class”, or the “General Staff”. Trotsky himself was a Marxist. And it was certainly not his intention to decry the merits of Marxism. But he did question its exclusive possession by any individual, group of individuals, or party; and even more strongly did he reject the notion that possession of Marxism was a guarantee against mistakes. Acknowledging the existence of different political trends in the Russian working class movement, he insisted that they have to be situated in the historical context, and argued that part of their mistakes stem from an ahistoricity. “Each period has its own routine and tends to impose its own tendencies on the movement as a whole.” The necessary and correct industrial work gave rise to the errors of “economism”. The centralising of Iskra gave rise to the errors of Bolshevism. So ran his argument. The problems arose because “Each new tendency casts the previous one into anathema. For the bearers of new ideas, each preceding period seems no more than a gross deviation from the correct path, an historical aberration, a sum of errors, the result of a fortuitous combination of theoretical mystifications.” Trotsky’s position is of more general value, because even if Lenin is taken to be free of every error that Trotsky mentions, the “Leninism” that has been propagated, by Stalinists, and sometimes by sectarians who believe that revolutionary discipline means utterly wooden rigidity entirely measures up to Trotsky’s critique.

 

On one hand, then, references to The Party of the proletariat in the singular. On the other hand, the inevitability of the struggle of tendencies, not only between capitalism and socialism, but also within socialism. The tension this created in Trotsky's thought was to be resolved only in the 1930s, when he finally accepted that a vanguard party can remain one only in a pluralistic political system. Alternatives to this range from denunciations of “party persons taking the capitalist road”, gun-point arrest and summary executions of feared rivals (e.g., the Beria or the Mehmet Shehu cases), or, alternatively, the abandonment of the concepts of vanguard party and class vanguard, either openly and fully, or de-facto, partially, in the name of pluralism.

 

Revolution and Reaction in Russia

 

However, even before the 1930s, Trotsky was to take his position for deepening of democracy. Trotsky’s writings themselves present a confusing picture, and one has to pick one’s way carefully. There is no doubt that he genuinely considered himself a Leninist after 1917, though he continued to cherish his independence of mind. In late 1924, in his unpublished pamphlet ‘Our Differences’ Trotsky stated that he had been fundamentally wrong, because he had expected events to force the two factions together. He admitted that his “conciliationism” had led him to err, chiefly in the direction of not realising the need to split with the Mensheviks. He acknowledged that Lenin’s criticisms of his line regarding party unity were correct. However, Trotsky no less than Lenin progressed in his thinking, and we find him taking a dialectical stand in 1905 on the question of building the party. At that time, he was editing a popular socialist paper, Nachalo. Though his famous biographer Isaac Deutscher gives the impression that he only preached permanent revolution and unity, we find him devoting space to programme and organisation as a whole. And what emerges clearly from those articles is that while he decried what he felt were Bolshevik rigid attitudes, he did not thereby lapse into any spontaneism or into condoning arm-chair socialists.

 

In the period of reaction, no less than during the revolution of 1905, the revolutionary camp was not simply equated with the Bolshevik faction, nor was Bolshevism identical to Leninism. At the Third Congress of the RSDLP, a purely Bolshevik affair, one of the points where Lenin was defeated was over whether the committees should have a majority of workers, or not. On the other hand, at the Fourth or Unity Congress at Stockholm, a Menshevik majority (62 to 44 for the Bolsheviks) approved of the principles of democratic centralism. In a report on the Stockholm Congress Lenin called the principles of democratic centralism the heart of the system, and called for a generalisation of the elective principle. The application of this principle, Lenin held, “implies universal and full freedom to criticise, so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action …”

As the mass party of 1905-6 collapsed responses varied. Among Bolsheviks, there developed a current, originally in a majority, especially among the underground committees, that favoured boycotting the elections to the Duma (Russia’s very limited power semi-parliament), and later, for recalling the Duma deputies and sticking only to the underground structures. Among Mensheviks, a considerable number of theorists and émigré leaders became “liquidators”, people who wanted to drop the old structures and build a workers’ party within the constraints of existing legality. In between these two extremes stood a majority of activists. Re-examining the issues and the documents in debate, one finds that Lenin and Trotsky also stood in between. But until 1912, Lenin tended to consider all legal activists as liquidators. According to Marcel Liebman, a historian sympathetic to him, Down to 1914, he had a tendency to pass up opportunities on open work.

 

A large group of worker activists or ‘praktiki’, who had been party members in 1905-6, sought to fuse legal work with the underground. They were criticised from opposite ends by Lenin and the liquidators. Younger Mensheviks, notably the ‘praktiki’, by and large rejected the liquidators’ proposals. Between 1909 and 1911, this meant a definite rise in Trotsky’s influence. Left Mensheviks, as well as Bolshevik – conciliators (i.e., those who wanted to unite the revolutionary forces though they supported the Bolshevik programme) found in Trotsky a leading figure who advocated a line they found close to their outlook. A distortion of this history began in 1923, when Lenin lay dying and a Triumvirate, consisting of Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin tried to organise a tight control over the party. Zinoviev wrote a History of the Bolshevik Party which began the distortions of history completed over a decade later in Stalin’s History of the CPSU(B) – Short Course. In these histories, bereft of documentary evidence, Lenin’s views were proclaimed the sole correct revolutionary general line. Trotsky was cast as an arch-villain who opposed Lenin and was therefore a renegade. The problem was of course, that Lenin till 1912 considered himself a part of the common Social Democratic Party, so opposing Lenin did not mean, for example, opposing any general line. Secondly, whether Lenin was correct at different moments can only be tested by looking at the specific history, not by a teleology that claims the Bolshevik triumph of 1917 as proof of Lenin’s correctness all his life (in High Stalinist myth, of course, he abandoned terrorism for Marxism at age 11, on hearing of the death sentence on his elder brother Alexander). Moreover, during the revolution of 1905, Lenin had changed his own position about party democracy, and argued that it was wrong to demand that the Soviet should accept the programme of the RSDRP. On the question of the party press, Lenin stressed that here there could be no question of a mechanical “rule of the majority over the minority ...” In other words, the party press should publish different viewpoints. Indeed, during the period of reaction, when Lenin differed with Bogdanov, leader of the boycottists, he had Bogdanov expelled from the Bolshevik faction, arguing that while a party was broad and contained many shades, a faction had to be tightly knit. This was an acknowledgement of the validity of the criticism made earlier by people like Trotsky or Luxemburg, and also a blow to the Stalinist myth that a party had to be monolithic.

 

From October Revolution to the Collapse of Democracy

 

In 1917, when Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks, he did so with the conviction that a proletarian revolution was in the offing, and all revolutionaries should unite. When he did so, he did not abjure his earlier views, and in exhorting his supporters in the Inter-Borough Organisation (a revolutionary, non-Bolshevik organisation) to unite with the Bolsheviks, he argued that the Bolsheviks had in practice “de-Bolshevised” themselves. And contrary to Cold War propaganda, serious historiography has repeatedly shown that the Soviet insurrection of October 1917 was more democratic than any of the alternatives.  Throughout Russia, from late August, new elections to soviets were being organised. The Bolsheviks made significant gains. Thus, at the Second Congress of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies of Urals, representing 505,780 workers and soldiers, which met on 17-21 August, the Bolsheviks had 77 deputies against 23 for the Mensheviks. On 31 August - 1st September, the Petrograd Soviet adopted a resolution on power, which led to the resignation of the old executive committee. On 5 September, the Moscow Soviet passed a resolution condemning the Provisional Government by 355 votes to 254. By September 21, the Saratov Soviet had 320 Bolsheviks against 103 SRs, 76 Mensheviks, and 34 non-party deputies. The First Congress of Soviets had stipulated that fresh Congresses were to be called every three month. But the Executive Committee elected by that Congress, controlled by Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, now began to hesitate. So the Bolsheviks started putting pressure by organising regional congresses. These included the Moscow regional Congress, the All Siberian Congress, the Congress, the regional Congresses at Minsk (Byelo Russia), the Northern Caucasus, provincial Congresses in Vladimir and Tver, etc. But the most important was the Congress of Northern Soviets.  Represented in it were Soviets from Petrograd, Moscow, Archangel, Reval, Helsingfors, Kronstadt, Vyborg, Narva, Gatchina, Tsarskoe Selo, the Baltic Fleet, the Petrograd Soviet of Peasant Deputies, the Petrograd District Soviets, and the soldiers organisations of the Northern, Western, South-Western and Rumanian fronts. Alexander Rabinowich’s classic work, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, lays out in detail the network of mass organisations through which the Bolsheviks established their hegemony. As Marc Ferro, a hostile historian, was compelled to write about the moment of insurrection, a state without a government (the nationwide network of council type institutions) was facing a government without a state (Kerensky’s government, based on absolutely no institutional support whatsoever). Between this and the Stalinist dictatorship lay a Civil War and a 14-country war of intervention, followed by a counter-revolution within the revolution as Stalin consolidated his rule between 1923 and 1928-29.

 

There did occur a phase, under the blows of the civil war, when every non-Bolshevik party sided with White Guard counter-revolution, that Lenin and Trotsky alike played a role in legitimising authoritarianism in the name of Marxism. What were wrong were not always the specific acts. In a Civil War, when your opponent is shooting at you, you cannot extend full democracy to them. Serious histories of the Civil War, like W. Bruce Lincoln’s Red Victory, or of the Red Terror, like Leggett’s The Cheka, show that the Reds were in fact less violent than the Whites, who often shot workers because they were workers, something that does not stir the souls of upper class writers as much as the shooting of Nicholas and Alexandra. But when Trotsky (or Lenin) started justifying these actions not as emergency measures to save the republic but as Marxist theory, they committed serious errors. The climax came in 1921, when, at the end of the Civil War, but following the Kronstadt uprising, all opposition parties were banned, as were opponent factions within the party. Yet, Trotsky, while still in full power, as Commissar for War and Politbureau member, came out opposing the continuation of these measures by 1923. In late 1923, a strike wave broke out. Feliks Dzherzhinskii, head of the OGPU, successor of the disbanded Cheka, wanted party members in factories to finger the strike leaders and report them to the secret police. It was this proposal that moved Trotsky to write two letters to the Central Committee, demanding restoration of democratic rights. These started the New Course debate, which Stalin and the Triumvirate won only after gagging open discussions and rigging the only open voting that took place, in Moscow. By 1926-7, the Platform of the United Opposition was calling for restoration of Soviet Democracy. And alone among all the Bolshevik leaders, it was Trotsky who wrote, in The Revolution Betrayed, in a self-critical tone that “The degeneration of the party became both cause and consequence of the bureaucratization of the state.” In analysing this degeneration, he came to the conclusion that “The prohibition of oppositional parties brought after it the prohibition of factions. The prohibition of factious ended in a prohibition to think otherwise than the infallible leaders.” On the basis of this analysis, when it came to drafting the programme of the Fourth International Trotsky wrote that “Democratization of the Soviets is impossible without legalization of soviet parties,” and he further said that “the workers and peasants themselves, by their own free votes will indicate what parties they recognize as Soviet parties.” This was absolutely a negation of any conception of the “general line of The Party”.

 

The Creation of the General Line

 

The idea that there is something called the general line of the party, and that opposing it is a secular sin not less heinous than heresy as detected and rooted out by Torquemada, was a concept that developed as Lenin lay dying. Stalin’s funeral speech on Lenin’s death is overlaid with religious overtones. The embalming of Lenin showed the turn in the party upper ranks towards cultism. Trotsky later claimed he and Krupskaya had opposed this. This naturally meant a consolidation of every anti-democratic practice. Indeed, as early as the 1923 Congress of the party, which Lenin could not attend due to his stroke, Stalin responded to demands for broadening inner party democracy by arguing that a party of 400,000 could not have full democracy as long as it was ruling a country surrounded by imperialism. This was and has been the logic for imposing and maintaining de jure or de facto one party rule with a top down commandist structure in every so-called communist country. By the mid 1920s, one of Stalin’s then supporters (later executed for siding with Bukharin), Uglanov, was defining party democracy in terms that made it look exactly like bureaucratic rule. Responding to him, Trotsky wrote: “Comrade Uglanov for the first time has made an open attempt to overcome the contradiction between the programmatic definition of democracy and the actual regime by bringing the program down, drastically, to the level of what has existed in practice. As the essence of democracy he proclaims the unlimited domination of the party apparatus, which presents[ the report -- KC], draws in [comments by masses -- KC], checks and rectifies [itself, without the ranks having the right to reject the leadership itself—K.C.]. ... Attempting to define the essence of democracy, Comrade Uglanov has defined the essence of bureaucracy.” By the mid-1930s, the situation was worse. The 1934 Congress of the Party was called the Victor’s Congress, because the spine of all opposition within the USSR except those of Trotskyists and their allies, the Democratic Centralist group, had been broken. Their leaders had been made to grovel. Yet the majority of the delegates to even this Stalinist Party Congress, and the majority of Central Committee members, would be executed over the years, many in secret trials, some in show trials where they would “confess”, like the hapless Bukharin to save his wife and child.

 

The central story would be, that these people had started out as opponents of the “general line” and as a result had become counter revolutionaries. So in place of Marx’s notion of a pluralist commune state, the idea of the general line came to mean that there could be no alternative thinking. Stalin explained this in an interview with a journalist, Roy Howard, where he said that a party is part of a class, so since there were no opposed classes in the USSR there could not be a multi-party system.  Obviously, this was grammatically no less than politically utter nonsense. A class can have more than one part, else why use the term part. So each part should be free to create its own party. Even more pertinent is the question whether parties and classes are to remain welded till the end of time. Would differences disappear if classes were abolished? If not, then there would be formed parties – over environmental alternatives, over alternative models of social construction. The reason why Trotsky, alone among the opponents of Stalin, could articulate this idea was because of his past. Even Bukharin, a very talented theoretician, was helpless, because after all, in power, he had said that if there were two parties in the USSR the place for the second party would be in prison. That was why, when the ruthless murder machine crushed the old Bolshevik Party, including the majority of the Central Committee that had made the October Revolution, the majority of pre-1917 activists, and the majority of the Civil War era cadres, only those who had a clear understanding of the democratic promise of classical Marxism could avoid the options of surrendering to the murder machine like Koestler’s Rubashov, or defecting to the capitalist west. Today, in most of the world, Stalinism is utterly discredited. From the vantage point of what we know clearly today, Khruschev’s speech was a bid to save the Stalinist system by purging it of its most extreme excrescences. Khruschev, after all, defended the mass murders of workers and peasants, of non-Bolsheviks (the Mensheviks and SRs) as well as the dissidents within the party. It was only Stalin’s murder of dissident Stalinists that he rued. Yet what is known today ( and even what was written in Soviet years by dissidents like Evgeniia Ginsberg, a survivor of the Gulag, or documented through painstaking research under dictatorial rule by Roy Medvedev) suggests that Stalin and his henchmen, who of course included Khrushchev, killed more communists (not only Russian but global) than did most bourgeois states, and that socialism cannot survive unless it clearly disavows his crimes. In a country like India, where the vast majority do not have access to any Western language information system, it is by simply suppressing or not making available in Indian language editions the information available to much of the world including Spanish and Portuguese speaking South America (the continent where leftists are currently advancing, but by openly rejecting Stalinism), that the Indian Stalinist left hopes to buy time for a few more years. The fables they spread, to the effect that revelations about the Moscow Trials, the mass murders etc are all undocumented gossip, can be disproved with ease. Contemporaries like Anton Ciliga (Ten Years in the Country of the Big Lie) or Alexander Orlov (The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes), as well as later historians like Robert Conquest (The Great Terror), Roy Medvedev, and others have shown how terrible were these purges. If socialism is to survive other than as a museum piece or as a part of Political Science curricula, it has to take the ideas of revolutionary democratic politics to heart. For that, Trotsky’s alternative to the brutal culmination of the politics of the general line remains an essential contribution.

Trotsky's Struggle to Build the Fourth International

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Published on Thursday, 19 August 2010 18:41

We commemorate the 70^th death anniversary of Lev Davidovitch Bronstein on August 21 this year with a question: Do his revolutionary formulations have any relevance for the world, especially the developing part of it, any more? Or is classical Marxism dead and buried? But if the news of this burial is more in the nature of rumour, prematurely doing the rounds, there could be some profit for the human race – especially the submerged nine-tenth, in a manner of speaking, condemned to dehumanized despair in the ‘developing’ world – in revisiting the thoughts of one of the greatest Marxist revolutionaries who ever walked this earth.
Lev Davidovitch Bronstein (Trotsky) spent the last decade and a bit more of his life trying to reorient the international communist movement away from the suicidal course towards which the Soviet bureaucracy led by Stalin was taking it. This meant initially a struggle to reform the Communist International, and then a struggle to establish a new, Fourth International. We publish below a chapter from The Marxism of Leon Trotsky, by Kunal Chattopadhyay, dealing with the struggle for the Fourth International.

 

 

TROTSKY'S STRUGGLE FOR THE  FOURTH   INTERNATIONAL

 

I.       Introduction

Never had times been so bleak for internationalism as in the 1930s.  The Soviet Union had disappeared behind an autarchic veil, secured by the OGPU and the great frame–ups.  Two Internationals had collapsed in the lifetime of a generation. Even the heritage of the enlightenment, Aufklarung and the French Revolution was besieged, as ultranationalist, racist and obscurantist ideologies gained ground.

When Trotsky was expelled from the USSR, he still had some adherents, and more admirers.  Few of the latter, however, were willing to following him in continuing the battle for world revolution.  It cost little to applaud him in abstract. But to take him seriously enough to stake everything on building up new communist parties and a new International required a tremendous faith in the regeneration of working class politics and a commitment to internationalism unshaken by the demise  –– and current anti–revolutionary roles –– of the two Internationals.

This gives us a measure of Trotsky’s stature as, above all, a revolutionary who fought, “with a passion, a tenacity, and a success such as few could rival”, to quote words spoken on the graveside of another revolutionary.[i] Such a claim would certainly be hotly contested –– from a number of considerations.  It would be claimed –– though today   with far less vigour and faith than in the past –– that Trotsky worked for the counter–revolutionaries.[ii] On the other side, there is the position of Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky’s great biographer. Deutscher concurred with Trotsky’s analysis of fascism and Stalinism, of the decline of revolutionary politics, only to prescribe withdrawal from active politics and the transformation of Marxism into a method for analysis of events and trends.[iii] One could say, despite Deutscher’s differences with them, that in this Deutscher stands as a forerunner of the current known as ‘Western Marxism’. Finally, it could be argued that Trotsky’s claims were pretentious, and led to little in terms of solid achievements. It will be the case of this essay that such an argument is erroneous.

Accepting that Marxism is theory and practice, it is still possible to question Trotsky’s ideas.   It can be asked, as J. Arch Getty has done, as to how far his failure to the recalled to Moscow led to the decision to form a new International.[iv] It can, on the other hand, be accepted that it was necessary to break with the Comintern, but then claim that since the Trotskyist movement was weak, not sufficiently implanted in the working class, the new International should not have been proclaimed. This proclamation, it can be claimed, was what so burdened the fledgling movement that it was stuck in a groove of ‘orthodoxy’ and practical incapacity.[v]

We must, therefore, explore, in order, the following issues:  why and how did Trotsky move towards a break with the Comintern; why did he, after so many warnings of his own, speed up the proclamation of the Fourth International; what was the political basis of the new organization; and what, if any, were the problems built the organisation. At each stage, we shall find that the evolution of world politics and especially of the Comintern had a close bearing on the shifts in Trotsky’s ideas.

 

II.      The Break With the Comintern

Between 1929 and early 1933, Trotsky repeatedly rejected any course towards founding a new International. He insisted that he was fighting for a reversal of the Comintern’s course.[vi] He rejected “the cry” for a Fourth International as “merely ridiculous.”[vii]

As late as 1932, Trotsky had written: “The Stalinists by their persecution would like to push us on the work of a second party and a forth international.  They understand that a fatal error of this type on the part of the Opposition would slow up its growth for years, if not nullify all its successes altogether.”[viii]

Yet less than a year later he was to concede that the German party was gone for good, and by July 1933 he was to call for a new international.  The parties of the Communist International  –– the world party founded as the indispensable instrument to achieve workers’ power worldwide  –– had degenerated beyond any scope of revival. From being a part of the solution to the crisis of humanity, they had become a part of the crisis. It was necessary to start again.

The necessary conclusions were drawn not without hesitation.  When Getty tries to score a point by showing that Trotsky called for the formation of a new party in Germany in April 1933, of a new international only in July 1933; for the use of force against Stalinism in the USSR only in October 1933,and a revolution as late as 1935 (The Revolution Betrayed), he shows a singular lack of sense.[ix] It would be difficult for any leader of a revolution, any founder of a mass movement, to accept its degeneration and turn against it –– calling for a supplementary revolution.  Moreover, Trotsky had to answer theoretical questions and move forward not alone, but with his organization.

Getty’s main thesis is that Trotsky had hopes of being recalled to Moscow.  It was a renewed capitulation by Zinoviev and Kamenev in May 1933, plus Moscow’s non–response to Trotsky’s  ‘secret letter’ of 15 March 1933, that forced him to break with the Comintern.[x]

For our purposes, however, a supplementary claim by Getty is more important.  It is the claim that the German debacle was not central to the change in front by Trotsky. (This follows, of course, from Getty’s claim about Trotsky’s real motivations).

We have already seen the importance placed on the German question by Trotsky.  Within his repeated insistence on fighting to revive the Comintern we can see again and again this theme: “ … [for the immediate future, though not forever] a victory of fascism in Germany would mean a break in the continuity of revolutionary development, collapse of the Comintern, and the triumph of world imperialism….”[xi]practically a new course began)  but that the worst-case  scenario had materialised. And if the Comintern had indeed collapsed, if the KPD had been driven to suicide, the communist task was to build anew. Consequently, the failure of the KPD to fight, and the Comintern’s defence of this line, meant not that Trotsky was breaking new ground theoretically (though of course

On 14^th March, 1933, Trotsky wrote ‘The Tragedy of the German Proletariat: The German Workers will Rise Again –– Stalinism, Never!’[xii] This is a particularly important article, because in it, Trotsky does not only talk about the need for a new party. He also shows how, within the ultraleftism of “Third Period” Stalinism, there existed the class collaborationist and liquidationist policy of an earlier period. This collaborationist policy would bloom again, in due season. Trotsky’s critique of Stalinism is very often abused by non–Trotskyists, and at times by Trotskyists, who fail to see the dialectical character of this critique, and therefore fail to see why Trotsky was equally implacably hostile to the popular frontism and liquidationism of the 7^th Congress of the Comintern. This has a strong relevance for the present. As the pressure of a resurgent imperialism mounted after 1989-91, many forces, even on the non-Stalinist left, tended to succumb to similar illusions. Thus, the PT, led by its historic leader, Luis Ignacio da Silva, won elections in Brazil and Lula became president in a classic popular front, with a bourgeois vice president and bourgeois ministers in key economic positions. The PT left wing was restive, with Senator Heloisa Helena in particular throwing down the gauntlet. But important sections of the left also decided to give Lula a space, and as a result, Trotskyists and others also joined the cabinet. Yet, both in 1933, and later, during the Spanish Civil War and the French upsurge of 1936, Trotsky argued why any governmental alliance with the bourgeoisie was going to be a disaster and a betrayal of working class interests. Te response to these arguments in the present day world by those who defend joining such governments is simply a rejection of theory, of the sort that says: “what someone said fifty years ago cannot be cited to oppose adapting to current realities”. Every effort to look at the experience of history is rejected by such leftists on the road to ideological dilution as dogmatism.

It also follows, that for Trotsky, forming a new party was not something to be done out of pique. Only if objective circumstances dictated such a course would he accept it. This is the central message of the article under discussion. “About eighteen months ago, we wrote that the key to the situation is in the hands of the German Communist Party. The Stalinist bureaucracy has now let this key fall from its hands.”[xiii]

But was this clear to all? This was what Trotsky wanted to gauge -- not passively, but by confronting communists everywhere with his alternative. Hence the slight obscurity in the title –– no clear statement as to the links between the party to be built up and the party that had been sold down the river. The conclusion of the article shows that it was a call to members of the International to rethink: “The law of uneven development acts also upon in different stages of decomposition. To what degree the tragic experience of Germany will serve as a stimulus to the rebirth of the other sections of the Comintern the future will show. In Germany, in any case the swan song of the Stalinist bureaucracy has been sung.”[xiv]

Trotsky’s secretary Jean Van Heijenoort has related that nearly two weeks earlier, on 2^nd March, Trotsky had already told Heijenoort something along the following lines: “I am certain that, if Hitler remains at the helm in Germany and the party collapses, then a new party will have to be built.”[xv]

On 12^th March, Trotsky wrote an internal letter for the left opposition. It is sharper that the public essay of the 14^th. He wrote that the KPD had become a corpse. Reform of a dead party was not possible. “The question of preparing for the creation of a new party must be posed openly.”[xvi] The cautious phrasing should be noted. This was no ultraleft rhetoric about “we” being the true party. Trotsky was not likely to underestimate the role of theory. But he knew well that no programme could exist ready-made, without constant inputs from working class practice. So he wrote “The turn obviously does not consist in “proclaiming” ourselves the new party. There can be no question of that. But we declare the following: “The official German party is politically liquidated, it cannot be reborn. The vanguard of the German workers must build a new party. We Bolshevik–Leninists offer them our collaboration.”[xvii]

As a split with the Stalinists in Germany raised the question of a split generally, Trotsky also turned to this issue. A problem was however created, in his writings of this period, by the conflation of two issues –– splitting the Comintern and defending the USSR. We saw in an earlier chapter that for many years, Trotsky remained stuck in the one party rule formula. He therefore made a series of equations which were to subsequently plague him, and after him, the world Trotskyist movement. As he wrote in a programmatic statement: “This question is put more clearly and more sharply in the USSR than anywhere else. The policy of a second party there would mean a policy of armed insurrection and a new revolution. The policy of the faction means steering a course toward internal reform of the party and the workers’ state.”[xviii] But since the Stalinists controlled the entire Comintern, what was the Left Opposition to do? Trotsky did not, pace Getty, bank of Stalinist Stalwarts suddenly donning revolutionary garbs. What he hoped was that the very magnitude of the disaster might provoke rebellion in the Comintern ranks.(However, the assertion that the call for a second party meant a call for an insurrection would lead to many Trotskyists rejecting the call for a second party or for openly campaigning for a multiparty democracy in Cuba at various times).

An objection at this point can take the form of saying that in times of defeat, workers don’t stream out of old organizations into a new and untested one, whatever its revolutionary claims. To this Trotsky’s reply was that he wanted to reorganise the vanguard. There was no scope of immediately mobilising millions of workers. But the communist parties had been built, by and large, at a higher theoretical level than the best of the pre–war Social Democratic parties. So it was not all that wild a hope that sizeable segments would break away. Therefore, Trotsky wrote: “In my opinion it would be incorrect to give a rigid answer –– yes, we break with them. The collapse of the KPD diminishes the chances for the regeneration of the Comintern. But on the other hand the catastrophe itself could provoke a healthy reaction in some of the sections. We must be ready to help this process. The question has not been settled for the USSR, where proclamation of the slogan of the second party would be incorrect. We are calling today for the creation of a new party in Germany, to seize the Comintern from the hands of the Stalinist bureaucracy. It is not a question of the creation of the Fourth International but of salvaging the Third.”[xix]

Leaving aside for the moment the question of the Soviet Union, then, the main objection for calling for a new international was the hope that the Third might be salvaged. The April 1933 resolution of ECCI Presidium, and the failure of any significant section of the Comintern to protest against the abysmal “theory”, forced Trotsky to conclude that the whole International had to be refounded. It seems that only in Germany was there series opposition. Heinz Neumann had been moving towards an oppositionist (though not Trotskyist) position since 1931.[xx] Even Remmele, who had been on the receiving end of many of Trotsky’s attacks, had reservations. At the 13^th Plenary Session of the ECCI, in December 1933, it was claimed that he had been opposing Thaelmann’s line since 1932. He had also advocated armed insurrection in response to Hitler’s seizure of power.[xxi]

But by and large, Comintern “discipline” held the forces together. Two reasons may be put forward. On one hand, where even Trotsky was making the error of linking second party and revolution in the USSR together, the mass of communists may be expected to feel that opposition to the CPSU leadership, and hence, through them, the Comintern, was not possible, however unfortunate such a situation might be. Even the rebels in their rebellion felt themselves to be heretics rather than open challengers for leadership.

Secondly, of course, the same process that had killed the CPSU had also affected all Comintern parties. Independent–minded leaders had been repeatedly purged. The newer crop of “leaders” was dependent on reflected glory from Moscow. The ranks had been diluted by constant miseducation.

Trotsky was therefore to move towards a total break. But at the same time, a new question came up. Heijenoort says that though Trotsky favoured a new orientation from April, he was unsure about the name to be taken, on the ground that “When we broke with the Second International, we changed our theoretical foundations. Now, no; we remain based on the first four Congresses. We could also proclaim: the Communist International is us.”[xxii]

The internal discussion came out in the open by April, as the U.S. Trotskyist paper Militant published an article by Trotsky. The article noted the existence of a fairly large group, including among German comrades, who wanted a continuation of the old course. Trotsky’s most important comment was perhaps: “In what concerns the essence of the objections themselves, I cannot agree with them although I can understand them psychologically.”[xxiii]

Trotsky strove to explain to his comrades in the International Left Opposition that Hitler’s conquest of power, and the liquidation, within weeks, of every kind of independent working class organisation, had radically changed the situation. Upto March 5, 1933, the KPD still had “a centralized apparatus, tens of newspapers, thousands of units, tens of thousands of members, millions of votes. We declared ourselves a part of this party…. Not for the sake of the Stalinist apparatus but for the sake of the lower units…. Now, when the official apparatus, found by ultimatism and illegality, must transform itself completely into a Stalinist agency, there can be no thought of influencing it through the lower strata from which it is completely cut off.”[xxiv]

The nub of the question was the relation of forces. Hitler’s victory had not automatically increased the strength of the Left Opposition. Trotsky did not deny it. He admitted that “Today, as yesterday, our main task is to form cadres”.[xxv] But cadres, i.e., the core of a revolutionary party, comparable to, say, the Social Democrats of Russia in 1904–5, cannot be formed without a programme. The programme may be amended subsequently, but to start with, the advanced workers’ outlook must fuse with the given level of theory.

This was not possible unless one engaged in party building as a concrete process. Even earlier, he had argued that fighting for reform of the old party did not mean confining oneself to Stalinist legality. “Today, under the conditions of the split, our adherence to the Communist International cannot be expressed by organizational self–limitation, by refusal to assume independent political initiative and to engage in mass work, but must be expressed by the content of our policy.”[xxvi] So the difference lay not at all in propagandism vs mass work. Even more, building cadres did not mean, at any stage whatsoever, simply or mainly, organizing study circles, party schools, etc. The school where cadres are taught is the school of class struggle, as Trotsky pointed out at all times. When counter–revolution was forcing the best cadres of the old party to question their leaders, sticking to the old course was an error of huge magnitude. “The Brandlerites, as is reported, are already calling for a new party; this shows that, although opportunistic, they are politicians. If we, with our revolutionary platform, should prove ourselves doctrinaire, then opportunistic politicians will always succeed in pushing us aside.”[xxvii]

However, Trotsky dithered on the question of the international. Alternately, he may have had to cope with a great deal of opposition.  But by July, he was insisting that the Comintern as a whole was a rotten tree that had to be chopped down. Moreover, because of the immeasurable prestige it enjoyed through its association with the only surviving workers’ state, even revolutionary workers were disarmed before it, as they were not before the Social Democracy.

Two articles summarized Trotsky’s position.  A brief review of these two will reveal the strengths and weaknesses of the ‘new Trotskyism’.  Prior to the German debacle, he wrote, “the masses were waiting in the critical moment for the political leadership of their old organizations.”[xxviii] Now, however, the situation had changed. Events since 5^th March, 1933, had shown that in Germany, the fate of the entire Comintern had been decided.  Politically, the Comintern was dead. And yet, Trotsky warned, this fact, while imposing imperiously the duty of building a new world party, slowed down the process of such construction. “A revolutionary tendency cannot score stromy victories at a time when the proletariat as a whole is suffering the greatest defeats.  But this is no justification for letting one’s hands hang.  Precisely in the periods of revolutionary ebb tide are cadres formed and tempered which will later be called upon to lead the masses in the new assult.”[xxix]

Having said this, he was forced to hold out the hope of a relatively faster growth.   From the necessity of a new organization of the vanguard, he moved to assert that its necessary prerequisites were being provided.[xxx] The tension between the realism of the analyst and the ‘one-foot-in-utopia’ attitude of the revolutionary politician here went beyond the point of containment.  In later years, it did at times, distort his perspective and lead to absurd propositions, such as the illusion of a rapid growth of the Fourth International in war–time.

Regarding the USSR, a first important step forward lay in the admission that the “CPSU is not a party”[xxxi] [i.e., not a workers’ party – K. C].  But he went on making a false analogy with Thermidor.

In the second article, cast in the form of a dialogue, he wrote that “To speak  now of   the “reform”  of the CPSU  would  mean to look backward and not forward ….”[xxxii] But still, revolution was not on the agenda.  The new party was the instrument of reform of the USSR.[xxxiii]

Responding to doubts that he was overestimating the forces on his side and therefore moving to an adventurist course, he wrote: “It would be pure adventurism if we were to “Proclaim” that our present organization is the Communist International…. It is impossible to “proclaim” a new International: the perspective as yet is still to build it. But one can and should, from today on, proclaim the necessity of creating a new International.”[xxxiv]

To sum up: Trotsky’s perspective was resolutely internationalist. In a polemic with the Prometeo group, he argued that building a national party first, and then building the international, was a false perspective. From the Communist league and the Manifesto through the Communist International, the proletarian internationalist task was one of simultaneously building a national and an international organisation. In a polemical vein he wrote that if there were five communists in the world they would still have to adopt this perspective. It was possible for a revolutionary proletarian tendency to arise in one or another country, but it could not thrive and develop in one isolated country. A guarantee of the correctness of the national policy could exist only when a proper international orientation existed. A tendency, which remained shut in nationally over a stretch of years, condemned itself irrevocably to degeneration.[xxxv]

This passage is cited by Duncan Hallas in order to decry the foundation of the Fourth International.  According to Hallas, the Communist Manifesto was written for essentially a national organization, the First International developed on the opposite lines of the Communist League, etc.  As a matter of fact, the Manifesto, written on behalf of the Communist League, looked beyond it to a whole international tendency. The first International and the League were certainly different, but in the days of the League, there was already a growing international linkage (with the English and the French left in particular).  The programme of the First International was less precise, but that too spoke of the self-emancipation of the working class.

The real objection lies elsewhere. Can an international party be proclaimed without first building strong national sections?  If the question is posed in this way, Trotsky can be faulted for at all trying to build an international.  His real vocation should have been, by this logic, to provide an analysis of political trends in the USR, and in imperialism, and let Trotskyists implant themselves in working class politics with those analyses in one or more country, and build national parties. To this we shall return below.

 

III.    Stalinism and Revolution

Trotsky repeatedly claimed that in the case of the rupture with the Third International, at stake was not breaking with the political foundations but returning to them. Yet this was an incomplete and in part misleading claim.  Integral to the political foundations of the Fourth International was the struggle against Stalinism.  This involved two issues.  The first was a re–evaluation of the nature of the USSR. The other issue was the transformation of the Comintern. Both were related, but for analytical purposes we must separate them.

The problem of the earlier analysis of Stalinism has already been commented on.  Trotsky saw Stalinism as “bureaucratic centrism”, standing between the Left Opposition and the Bukharinist Right with its kulak–NEPmen following. Moreover, he saw the Plan as a bureaucratic response of the workers’ state to a restorationist threat.  Finally, using the Thermidor analogy, he claimed repeatedly that the Thermidoreans were the restorationists, while the bureaucracy, though it paved the way for the Thermidoreans, was itself distinct from them. Politically, the tasks that flowed out of this were the need to struggle energetically for reforms, and the defence of the gains of the October Revolution.  Even as Trotsky began revising his assessment of the KPD and the Comintern he reaffirmed the old course in the Soviet Union.  Parenthetically speaking, this is where Getty stumbles. On 15^th March 1933, Getty writes, Trotsky wrote a ‘secret letter’ to the CPSU. The letter was an offer to return to the USSR.  On  10^th May he added an explanation which served notice that he would take the letter to lower ranks.  As a matter of fact, on 3 March Trotsky wrote a long article, ‘Alarm Signal’ where an offer was again made for a united front. The article was double edged.  It offered conditional support to the existing rulers, and at the same time, distrusting them, it appealed, not only to the workers, but also the lower ranks of the bureaucracy.  “The slogan “Down with Stalin!”  may be understood,  and inevitably would be understood, as a slogan for the overthrow of the  faction now in power, and even  more ---  the overthrow of the apparatus.  But we do not want to overthrow the system but to reform it by the efforts of the best proletarian elements.  Of course, an end must be put to the Bonapartist regime of a single leader….  But what matters is not the expulsion of individuals but the change in the system…. Revenge is not a political sentiment….We are motivated by considerations  of revolutionary expediency ….”[xxxvi]

The letter to the Politburo followed the same line of argument.  In fact, reading the letter, it is impossible to find any plea to be restored to power. What it says is that “The Left Opposition –– of this I have no doubt  –– will be willing to offer the Central Committee full cooperation in returning the party to the track of normal existence …”[xxxvii] This was not a personal plea. Trotsky acknowledged that “The Left Opposition has its own program…. Naturally there can be no question of renouncing this program…”[xxxviii] Even before he made the contents of the letter public, Trotsky wrote another article in the Byulleten Oppozitsii, which explained the contents of the letter.[xxxix]

From late 1933, Trotsky slowly began to revise his position. The revision consisted of disentangling the struggle for workers’ democracy in the Soviet Union from the Thermidor analogy. In “The Class Nature of the USSR”, he affirmed that the USSR remained a workers’ state, and so historically progressive not so much for what its current leaders were doing but due to the impulse given by the October Revolution.[xl]

In early 1935, he wrote an essay in clarification and self–criticism. This was ‘The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism’. In it he admitted that “the analogy of Thermidor served to becloud rather than to clarify the question”[xli] The error lay in assuming that Thermidor –– the original Thermidor –– was in any way a social counter–revolution, i.e., a starting point for the restoration of feudalism. In fact, of course, Thermidor brought about a political shift to the right within the same bourgeois order. So Thermidor, in the revised theory, was to mean a reaction on the political foundation of the revolution. The Thermidoreans, or for that matter their heirs, including and up to Napoleon, had a dual characteristic. From the viewpoint of the fighters on the barricades, the revolutionaries of the first wave, they were reactionaries, ‘most unambitious slaves’ who did ‘dance and revel on the grave of Liberty’. Yet, as the united hostility of old Europe showed, ‘virtue owns a more eternal foe’ than the worst of Bonapartist despotism: ‘old Custom, legal Crime, and bloody Faith’.[xlii] With the more sober passion of an older revolutionary, Trotsky denounced Stalinism in almost identical terms. He urged the workers of the world to hate Stalinism as a tyrannical, totalitarian despotism that had donned the stolen mask of socialism, but urged them to realise that when the capitalist world hated even the degenerated USSR as the living embodiment of the revolution, it was correct according to its standards.

Trotsky now presented a revised chronology, “The smashing of the Left Opposition”, he wrote, “implied in the most direct and immediate sense the transfer of power from the hands of the revolutionary vanguard into the hands of the more conservative elements among the bureaucracy and the upper crust of the working class. The year 1924 –– that was the beginning of the Soviet Thermidor.”[xliii] Returning to an oft-repeated theme, he showed how the personnel at the top had changed. More and more, those who had been Mensheviks, SRs, and the like, and who therefore knew a little Marxist or socialist jargon but were steeped in petty–bourgeois prejudice had replaced old revolutionaries. Dissecting for posterity one such specimen, he wrote that in Lenin’s 1917 writings, the phrase “Zaslavsky and other scoundrels like him” appears as a refrain, while in 1934, “he defends Stalinism from the counterrevolutionists Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev.”[xliv]

More than personnel, it was a matter of the kind of state, the kind of society being built. And that was where the analogy had to be brought to a halt. Once feudal political power was broken, and capitalist production could grow unchecked, restoration of the monarchy could no longer mean restoration of feudalism. “In contradistinction to capitalism, socialism is built not automatically but consciously”[xlv] So, even while Trotsky conceded that the factual bureaucratic dictatorship could be called, sociologically speaking, an extremely degenerated form of the proletariat, he insisted that all the forms did not equally guarantee a transition to communism. The regime of Stalin was a regime of Red Bonapartism. But while Napoleon I’s Bonapartism guarded one exploiting class against another and at the same time consolidated the bourgeois revolution despite the liquidation of its democratic political institutions, Stalin’s Bonapartism (or a bureaucratic regime of proletarian origin that stood vis-à-vis the proletariat as Bonapartism had stood vis-à-vis the bourgeoisie) could not consolidate the revolution. Indeed, “the Bonapartist degeneration of the dictatorship represents the direct and immediate threat to all the social conquests of the proletariat.”[xlvi]

The final product of this line of reasoning was The Revolution Betrayed, which remains the most important theoretical work to grapple with the problem of degeneration of a post–revolutionary society. As Miliband wrote decades back (and little has changed since then) “There has not really been very much, beyond Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed of forty years ago, by way of Marxist attempts to theorize the experience of Stalinism.”[xlvii] The only significant effort, in fact, is the Trotskyist updating by Ernest Mandel.

The aim of the book was to define the nature of the USSR and its dynamic (the subtitle was What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going?). Point-by-point, he tackled what he often called “official theory”, and showed that all it offered were sophistries and empty syllogisms, in an attempt to prettify the totalitarian regime. He insisted that statisation was not identical to the socialisation of the means of production. And hence, he flatly denied the claim that the USSR was in any sense a socialist society. It was a society in transition from capitalism to socialism, and the bridge on which it now stood stretched a long distance ahead. “In order to become social, private property must as inevitably pass through the state stage as the caterpillar in order to become a butterfly must pass through the pupal stage. But the pupa is not a butterfly…. State properly is converted into socialist property in proportion as it ceases to be state property. And the contrary is true: the higher the Soviet state rises above the people, and the more fiercely it oppose itself as the guardian of property to the people as its squanderer, the more obviously does it testify against the socialist character of this state property.”[xlviii]

From this, Trotsky did not proceed, as others had done, to immediately conclude either that a new bureaucratic class had come to power, or that “state capitalism” had been established. Instead, he argued that reality was complex, and should be viewed in its complexity, not for academic accuracy that was devoid of political content, but in order to establish proper programmatic goals.

Though there have appeared many criticisms of Trotsky on this score, his basic arguments have been hardly demolished. He correctly pointed out that though the bureaucracy gained chiefly on the distribution side, there was a ‘dialectic of interaction’[xlix] between production and distribution. “The means of production belong to the state. But the state, so to speak “belongs” to the bureaucracy. If these as yet wholly new relations should solidify, become the norm and be legalized, whether with or without resistance from the workers, they would, in the long run, lead to a complete liquidation of the social conquests of the proletarian revolution.”[l]

Though, as he said, the book was not a statistical compendium, enough data was cited to show how massively inequality had grown. The idea of workers’ self–management had been shattered, and workers were now the underlings of a new “corps of slave drivers.”[li]

But all this, and the necessary moral indignation that this should have provoked in a communist, was not to lead, Trotsky insisted, to some overhasty generalisation. Discussing the nature of the state, he showed it had deviated far from the programmatic norms -- of a programme worked out not a priori but on the basis of the historical experience of class struggles stretching from Babeuf to the Russian Revolution -- in the hypertrophy of the state and the skewed distribution enforced by the state itself. The role of the state was shown by the constitution. “The Soviet state in all its relations is far closer to backward capitalism than to communism. It cannot yet even think of endowing each “according to his needs”. But for this very reason it cannot permit its citizens to work “according to their abilities.” It finds itself obliged to keep in force the system of piecework payment…. Instead of frankly acknowledging that bourgeois norms of labour and distribution still prevail in the Soviet Union, the authors of the constitution have cut this integral Communist principle in the two halves, postponed the second half to an indefinite future, declared the first half already realized, mechanically hitched on to it the capitalist norm of piecework payment, named the whole thing “principle of Socialism”, and upon this falsification erected the structure of their constitution.”[lii]

The actual state was, Trotsky said, being changed by the juridical liquidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat.[liii] The anti–democratic nature of the state was asserted.[liv] In a long discussion, he showed that without a multiplicity of parties, the promise of socialist democracy was a vulgar joke at the expense of the downtrodden.[lv] This remains the sole classical Marxist statement since the Russian revolution’s decline that is unambiguous on this point.[lvi]

Despite all this, he insisted time and again, the bureaucracy was not a class. “Classes are characterized by their position in the social system of economy, and primarily by their relation to the means of production. In civilised societies, property relations are validated by laws. The nationalisation of the land, the means of industrial production, transport and exchange, together with the monopoly of foreign trade, constitute the basis of the Soviet Social structure. Through these relations, established by the proletarian revolution, the nature of the Soviet Union as a proletarian state is for us basically defined.”[lvii]

Trotsky was not arguing that a check–list of rules by themselves made up the proletarian state. No. This check–list was valid only as the boundary created by a workers’ revolution. Its continued existence showed that the work of the revolution had not yet been wholly undone. Failing to understand this argument, Tony Cliff has ascribed to Trotsky’s ‘definition’ of the (or all) workers’ state an ahistoricity that is absent in reality.[lviii]

Basically, Cliff insists on a full correspondence between content and form in a workers’ state. The problem with such a theory is that it is itself normative and ahistoric, and hence a prey to critics further to the “left”, which end up by arguing that the October Revolution itself was a coup, and the existence of even the Sovnarkom was proof of the non-proletariann nature of the regime.[lix]

So according to Trotsky, the state remained a workers’ state, but terribly deformed. In the chapter entitled ‘The Soviet Thermidor’, he sought to explain again how this had happened. The reasoning was complex, and avoided both the thesis that Stalinism was inevitable, was rooted in Bolshevism, in Russia’s entire past, etc., except as a partial explanation is so far as the last point is concerned; and the thesis that Stalin’s victory was only the victory of the shrewder tactician vis-à-vis the inferior opponents. “A political struggle in its essence a struggle of interests and forces, not of arguments.”[lx]

Within this complex reasoning, one striking self-criticism stands out. The ban on the opposition parties, he wrote, was “obviously in conflict with the spirit of Soviet Democracy”,[lxi] and claimed that the Bolshevik leaders had “regard [this ban] not as a principle, but as an episodic act of self-defence.”[lxii]

What he now saw, and characteristically admitted, was that there had been too many unthinking ‘emergency’ measures, leading to a deformation at an early age. “We are far from intending to contrast the abstraction of dictatorship with the abstraction of democracy, and weigh their merits on the scales of pure reason …. The dictatorship of the Bolshevik party proved one of the most powerful instruments of progress in history. But here too, in the words of the poet, “Reason becomes unreason, kindness a pest.” The prohibition of oppositional parties brought after it the prohibition of factions. The prohibition of factions ended in a prohibition to think otherwise than the infallible leaders.”[lxiii]

Without this self-criticism, the next step – making the legalisation of all soviet parties a part of the programme – would be impossible.

So how did Trotsky characterise the bureaucracy? Unlike other bureaucracies, it did not serve one class and live off the production by another. The proletariat was both socially dominant and politically prostrate. Unlike a real ruling class, the bureaucracy had no independent ideology. Its whole existence was justified functionally. It’s battening down represented, not the rule by a new class but a social parasitism.

Trotsky gave no single sentence definition. But the whole book is centrally about this theme. The contradictions in the USSR were piling up. The bureaucracy, having obtained privilege, was trying to legalise and perpetuate this privilege. For the moment, the bureaucracy did not rest on its own class foundations. What was as important was a subordinate line thrown out by Trotsky. Here, as well as elsewhere, he constantly called the bureaucracy ‘caste’. The suggestion is that unlike a class (e.g., the bourgeoisie) in modern society, the bureaucracy had certain peculiarities. It depended on its membership of a politico-ideological order. To gain privilege, to be a bureaucrat, one rose through the ranks of the party.[lxiv]

One reason why Trotsky objected so strongly to all “new class” notions was the damage it would do to historical materialism. If all classes have roots in the production process, how in the old society, did a Communist party become the basis for the new class? Moreover, was the class-struggle worldwide going take on a new, tripolar basis?

As for the other alternative, USSR was not “state capitalist” either. As Trotsky wrote: “The bureaucracy has neither stocks nor bonds. It is recruited, supplemented and renewed in the manner of an administrative hierarchy, independently of any special property relations of its own. The individual bureaucrat cannot transmit to his heirs his rights in the exploitation of the state apparatus. The bureaucracy enjoys its privileges under the form of an abuse of power.”[lxv]

History’s verdict has lain with Trotsky, and not his critics. Let us look at his final summation, and at the evocation of models of growth. In a long definition he wrote: “The Soviet Union is a contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism, in which: (a) the productive forces are still far from adequate to give the state property a socialist character; (b) the tendency toward primitive accumulation created by want breaks out through innumerable pores of the planned economy; (c) norms of distribution preserving a bourgeois character lie at the basis of a new differentiation of society; (d) the economic growth, while slowly bettering the situation of the toilers, promotes a swift formation of privileged strata; (e) exploiting the social antagonisms, a bureaucracy has converted itself into an uncontrollable caste alien to socialism; (f) the social revolution, betrayed by the ruling party, still exists in property relations and in the consciousness of the toiling masses; (g) a further development of the accumulating contradictions can as well lead to socialism as back to capitalism; (h) on the road to capitalism the counterrevolution would have to break the resistance of the workers; (i) on the road to socialism the workers would have to overthrow the bureaucracy. In the last analysis, the question will be decided by a struggle of living social forces both on the national and the world arena. …. In our analysis, we have above all avoided doing violence to dynamic social formations which have had no precedent and have no analogies. The scientific task, as well as the political, is not to give a finished definition to an unfinished process, but to follow all its stages, separate its progressive from its reactionary tendencies, expose their mutual relations, foresee possible variants of development, and find in this foresight a basis for action.”[lxvi]

Even the route to be travelled was better told by Trotsky. For Cliff and his adherents, the East European events are a case of one kind of capitalism changing into another. If so, why this jubilation now, among capitalists world-wide? Trotsky, on the contrary, had predicted that the victory of the counterrevolution, including through the solidification of the bureaucracy, would mean the collapse of the planned economy, and the abolition of state property. But the return to capitalism in an imperialism-infested world would mean [as in today’s Russia] a “decline of industry and culture”.[lxvii]

So to build socialism, a supplementary anti-bureaucratic revolution was essential. The agenda was broadened to include this. This strategy of an anti-bureaucratic revolution was a vital programmatic development, one of Trotsky’s greatest legacies, along with the whole struggle that he waged, since 1923, to halt the degeneration.[lxviii]

IV.     The Liquidation of the Comintern

Though Trotsky called for a Fourth International in 1933, he did not immediately proclaim it. He repeatedly argued that it could only be built slowly, by an accumulation of cadres. But the centrist formations that he tried to win over by and large proved to be incapable of understanding either the need for an international party or for theoretical solidity.

From 1936, there appeared a certain pressure, a demand that the International be proclaimed. This had ill effects, to be discussed below. But why did Trotsky do it? It would appear that the imminence of war and the 7^th Comintern Congress with its liquidationist politics greatly influenced him.

Hitler’s victory did not lead to an immediate united front. Till mid-1934, the Comintern continued blithely along the old path. Then, after having participated in the right-wing and royalist demonstration of 6 February 1934,[lxix] the French CP carried out a volte face. On 12 February the French working class responded to the rightists by a one-day general strike. The idea of a workers’ united front grew. Trotsky, then in France, drafted in collaboration with French cothinkers ‘A Program of Action for France’.

This was an attempt to put forward an action programme, and through it, to reach out to the proletarian masses. This was a kind of transitional programme, intended as a step to the revolutionisation of the workers.

The Stalinists, however, responded in a completely different manner. Already, a short-term panicky gesture of 5^th March 1933 had seen the ECCI swing to the opportunist extreme, offering a united front and saying that if two conditions (organising joint defence and struggle for economic elements) were met, “the ECCI considers it possible to recommend the communist parties to refrain, for the period of the common struggle, … from attacks on social democratic organisations.”[lxx]

At that time, Trotsky had denounced this as the beginning of a capitulationist strategy. Though the Comintern soon withdrew this line, it was clear that in future, calls for a united front would be distorted in the rightist direction as well as the “left” one (“non-aggression” as well as “united front from below”).

At the Ivry Congress of the French Communist Party, the united front line was endorsed. Soon after, Soviet diplomacy made a major turnabout. On May 2, 1935, the announcement of a Franco-Soviet nonaggression pact was made in Moscow. On May 15, a final communiqué was issued at the end of Laval’s conferences with Stalin, Litvinov and Molotov. It stated: “They were wholly in agreement about recognizing, in the present state of the international situation, the obligations that force themselves upon the governments sincerely dedicated to safeguarding the peace and which have clearly demonstrated this desire for peace by their participation in every search for mutual guarantees, precisely in the interest of preserving peace. Duty first of all obligates them not to weaken in any way their means of national defence. In this respect Mr. Stalin understands and fully approves of the policy of national defence made by France in order to keep its armed strength at the level of security.”[lxxi]

Stalin’s participation, and the use of his name in the communiqué, gave a special twist to it, for he was the leader of the party, not of the state. Whatever the reality, so far this distinction had been made in practice. So Stalin’s understanding implied an instruction to the French Communist Party. The PCF, which had only recently called the French government fascist, promptly turned a somersault. Thorez declared: “The peace policy of the Soviet Government is in conformity with the historic instructions of Lenin; it is firmly conducted by Stalin; it corresponds to the interests of the international proletariat … there is, for the moment, a correspondence of interest between bourgeois France and the Soviet Union against Hitler.”[lxxii]

Trotsky’s immediate riposte was an article entitled ‘Stalin has signed the Death Certificate of the Third International’. Comparing the pact with the Brest-Litovsk peace, Trotsky pointed out that since the recent pact was being hailed as a victory, “Should, then, the Communist and Socialists vote in parliament [in France] for the ratification of the Franco-Soviet agreement?”[lxxiii] Such a vote, he pointed out; would be a vote of confidence on the right-wing Flandin-Laval government. And he went on to make the prediction that having shifted from anti-patriotism and an outright hostility to one’s own bourgeoisie, Thorez and Co. would find it impossible to stop midway. “Today we are told, ‘with throbbing hearts we shall make common cause with our bourgeoisie in the defence of the USSR’ …. The very same people will be obliged to proclaim, ‘with throbbing hearts we shall make common cause with our bourgeoisie to defend our people against the barbarism of Hitler, because the French people has the right to call for the same sacrifices on the part of its heroes as the Russian people.’

“There is nothing new in the new position of the Communist Party. It is social patriotism.”[lxxiv]

Trotsky anticipated the coming line of argument: the main danger stems from fascism, so it was necessary to make a bloc against it. He conceded that such an approach could, within limits, define the cause of Soviet foreign policy. But it could not be communist party policy. War was being prepared by the contradictions of capitalism, and exclusively relating war with fascism would be to repeat the social patriotic errors of the last war. “Have we forgotton that revolutionary activity during the last war considered precisely in denouncing the propaganda of the allies who spoke in the name of democracy against the Prussian junkers and the Hohen-Zollerns?”[lxxv] He predicted that when war broke out, this line would lead to a subordination of the French workers to the French imperialist bourgeoise on the plea of saving democracy or the USSR.

Not only would such a submission weaken and ideologically disarm the French working class, but it would enable Hitler to stand before the German working class with the slogan of racial or national unity in a racial/national struggle. Stalinism was therefore now a greater enemy (since unexpected and possessing the mantle of Bolshevism) than reformism.[lxxvi]

“When we, the Bolshevik-Leninists, began our struggle against the theory of socialism in one country, it may have seemed that only an academic question was under discussion. Today the historical function of this formula may be clearly seen: its task is the severing of the fate of the USSR from the fate of the world proletariat…. And it is precisely at the moment when the war danger threatens the state founded by the October Revolution that the government of the USSR draws the final conclusions from the theory of socialism in one country, prostituting the ABC of Marxism and degrading the Comintern to the role played by Scheidemann, Noske, Renaudel, Vandervelde and Co.”[lxxvii]

It was this, what Trotsky considered to be an open, definitive and irrevocable crossing of the class lines that prompted him to speed up the work of founding the new international. The entries in his personal diary reflect the same concern. In June 1935, he wrote: “Two years ago, l’Humanite used to harp daily: “The Fascist Daladier has called the social fascist Trotsky to France in order to organize, with his assistance, a military intervention against the USSR.”…. Today, as everybody knows, these gentlemen have made an antifascist “People’s Front’ with the “fascist” Daladier …. Right now, Messrs. Calumniators are beginning to say … that the policy of Trotsky and the Bolshevik-Leninists performs a service … to Hitler.”[lxxviii] This was reminiscent of the previous war, when Trotsky was sentenced in absentia for Lese majesty in Germany and accused of being a German agent in France.

“The Stalinists actually stand at the extreme right wing of the working class movement, and to the extent that they continue to drape themselves with the authority of the October Revolution, they are immeasurably more harmful than the old, traditional opportunists.”[lxxix]

On the same day, he wrote to the International Secretariat of the International Communist League that “It is absolutely essential to speed up the preparatory work for the Fourth International.”[lxxx]

The accuracy of Trotsky’s analysis of the evolution of the Comintern could be seen at the Seventh Congress. In closing the Congress, Dimitrov said: “At this congress we have adopted a course for the formation of a single mass political party of the working class, for putting an end to the political split in the ranks of the proletariat, a split caused by the class-collaboration policy of social democracy.”[lxxxi]

Communist parties were now to become “responsible” parties. Manuilsky explained that “the Communist parties had to abandon their old propagandist view that they represented the militant revolutionary opposition in the working class, while disclaiming responsibility for what happened.”[lxxxii]

The continuity between the old and the new lines was explained by Wilhelm Pieck, who even now claimed that the KPD’s error had been “to dissociate itself from the social-democratic workers”[lxxxiii] --- i.e., asserting that calling Hermann Muller and Otto Braun, Wels and Leipart, fascists had not been an error, not calling for a proper united front had not been an error.

The World Congress resolution on the work of the ECCI began to openly liquidate the International. Initially, the International had been founded as a world party. Then it had declined, and had become a tool of Stalinism. But once the line of collaborating with one’s ‘own’ bourgeoisie became the norm, direct control was more and more unfeasible (which does not mean that Moscow ceased to exert control through its hand on the purse-strings, and by other means). Moreover, once the unity of the world revolution was negated at the realm of theory, steady global coordination was of course unnecessary. So the resolution stated that henceforth the ECCI should avoid direct intervention in national parties.[lxxxiv] Of course, this was also due to the success, as Manuilsky said, in building up reliable cadres, for “a Bolshevik Stalinist guard has grown up.”[lxxxv]

A long discussion on fascism, working class unity and the tasks of the Comintern produced the main political plank for liquidationism. In the name of fighting fascism, a swing from ultraleftism to ultrarightism was made, as in India, where the old (2^nd Congress) distinction between national revolutionaries and reformists was rejected. In his speech, Dimitrov again said: “The interests of the class struggle demanded a single party of the proletariat in each country”. It is true that he also said that “unity was impossible unless the socialists recognized the necessity for the revolutionary overthrow of bourgeois rule and the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship ….”[lxxxvi] Stalinists on the would-be left could quote this. But this was a necessary cover-up for liquidationism.The splits in international Social Democracy had occurred because of the division between revolutionary and reformist politics. To call on the socialists at this stage, when more years had passed to unite on the basis of a revolutionary programme was farcical. Rather, this showed a willingness to accept their words in good faith beyond necessary limits.    Also, for the first time, communist participation in governments in bourgeois states (not in states in the process of dissolution, as indicated by the ‘Workers’ Government’ formula of the early Comintern) was discussed.[lxxxvii]

Finally, there was a total reappraisal of the question of war. The indefatigable Manuilsky said, in course of a single speech: “Many people believe that by our attitude to the united front with the social-democrats we are …. Deviating from Stalin’s theory that fascism and social-democracy are not antipodes but twins …. By its entire policy of class collaboration social democracy paved the way for fascism and demonstrated the correctness of the thesis …. Now the threat of war divided all classes, peoples and states into two camps – the camps of war and of peace.[lxxxviii]

On August 23, 1935, Trotsky wrote for the Byulleten Oppozitsii the article ‘The Comintern’s Liquidation Congress.’[lxxxix] The main lessons that he tried to highlight were the need for a separate revolutionary party, the need to oppose campism, the distinction between a proletarian united front and a multi-class bloc with the “democratic” bourgeoisie. Harking back to the split with the Second and the foundation of the Third International, he wrote: “To achieve a militant alliance of the proletariat with the petty bourgeoisie, he [Lenin] considered it necessary in the first place to purge the workers’ ranks of reformists, and secondly to free the small people of town and country from the influence of bourgeois democracy. A parliamentary coalition of the Social Democracy with the bourgeois democrats meant for Lenin marking time and thereby preparing the way for the most reactionary dictatorship of finance capital.”[xc]

On the question of war he wrote that in repeating that the source of the war danger was German fascism, the Comintern was returning to the official doctrine of the Entente in 1914-18.[xci] Moreover, in place of the extension of world revolution, “reformist and pacifist cooperation with the “left” bourgeois parties and with all the “friends of peace” in general”[xcii] had come to the fore.

On the question of party unity, Trotsky wrote: “Twenty-one years ago Lenin proclaimed the slogan of a break with reformism and patriotism. Since then, all the opportunist and intermediate, so-called centrist leaders have imputed to Lenin above all the guilt of sectarianism…. The Seventh Congress has arrived at the conclusion that sectarianism was the source of all the subsequent great defeats of the proletariat. Stalin is thus correcting the historical “error” of Lenin, and correcting it radically: Lenin created the Communist International; Stalin is abolishing it.”[xciii]

So far as Trotsky’s criticisms go, particularly the one cited above, his critics hardly dispute him, merely putting a plus sign where he puts a minus, and vice versa. Thus, Degras in her introduction writes: “It can indeed be argued that with the adoption of the united front policy the Comintern abandoned not only its original strategy but the very principles underlying its existence, formulated in the belief that other countries besides Russia were ripe for revolution.”[xciv]

What marked off Trotsky was not merely his appraisal of the retreat of the Comintern but his bitter hostility to the Popular Front. It was not, as remarked earlier, the Workers’ united front. It differed in four ways from the united front. First, the united front was a front of parties based on the working class, whereas both the French, and subsequently the Spanish popular fronts included “left” bourgeois parties.

Secondly, the united front had been intended as a tactic, however important, not an overall strategy. The Comintern however, seemed to turn the Dimitrov version of the united front into a generalised strategy. Though applied all over the world, the French and the Spanish cases are most instructive, and brought forth clarifications and biting attacks from Trotsky.

Third, the united front had meant making practical agreements to fight for specific objectives, like defence of living conditions, the struggle for wages, the defence of workers’ organisations from fascist attacks, etc. The popular front was to involve a common electoral programme and the support for those bourgeois governments which were ‘friends of peace’.

Finally, unlike the united front with its firm insistence on the independence of the Communist Party, the popular fronts presupposed an alliance of a kind that limited or even halted communists’ ideological political struggle with the reformists.

Trotsky commented, in the case of France, that “if in spite of all the objective indications … the coalition government of the left bloc nevertheless comes about, it is possible, without being a prophet, to say in advance that it will be merely a brief episode, and that, when it itself falls, it will bring down the “People’s Front”. We shall be very fortune if it does not only bury in its ruins the remnants of French democracy.”[xcv]

There exists a kind of leftist politics that hails Trotsky’s criticisms of the Comintern’s 1928-34 line, but sees sectarianism in his line of 1934 onwards. There also exists the opposite line, which assumes that his criticism of Stalinist reformism was more important than his condemnation of the previous ultraleftism.[xcvi][xcvii] In opposing Popular Frontism, Trotsky fought for class independence. As Mandel wrote elsewhere, “the task of a proletarian revolutionary is not to ‘take power’ by any means, under any conditions; it is to take power in order to implement a socialist programme. If ‘power’ can be won only under conditions which drive one away from the realization of that programme, instead of bringing one nearer to it, it is a thousand times preferable to stay in opposition.”[xcviii] This is evidently not recognised even by many who swear by Trotsky and Mandel and write about their legacies. Mandel’s brief statement is much more balanced, when he says: “Now, class independence is as important a condition as class unity for successful resistance against fascism.”

Stalinist insistence that Popular Fronts should not go beyond the bourgeois level had a terrible effect in Spain, where a living revolution was crushed by Stalinism, and then handed over to Franco. As Trotsky noted, “Politically most striking is the fact that the Spanish Popular Front lacked in reality even a parallelogram of forces. The bourgeoisie’s place was occupied by its shadow…. Political attorneys of the bourgeoisie but not the bourgeoisie itself.”[xcix]

In his opposition to Popular Frontism, Trotsky was not suggesting that the working class, or its left wing, should remain isolated. But he insisted that making alliances with parties possessing petty bourgeois bases did not constitute valid worker-peasant, or worker-petty bourgeois alliances, and certainly not alliances directed towards revolution.[c]

V.      The Foundation of the Fourth International :

The foundation of the Fourth International came about through a series of steps. In 1933, after the fall of the Weimar Republic a number of left socialist and dissident communist groups came together. Four of these, the ILO, the German SAP, and two Dutch organisations, the OSP and the RSP, issued a declaration, known as the ‘Declaration of Four’ (On the Necessity and Principles of a New International). This was followed in 1935 by an ‘Open Letter to Revolutionary Groups’, among whose signatures was Trotsky – indeed, he drafted both documents.

Between mid-1933 and 1936, Trotsky made a number of attempts to break out of the isolation, to proletarianise the ILO/ICL. At the Paris Conference of Left Socialist and Communist organisations, the ILO’s declaration called for a simultaneous break with Stalinism and reformism.[ci]

The Declaration of Four put forward an “point programme on which to unify the revolutionary left. This summed up the major lessons of 1914-1933 – the necessity of internationalism, the role of the party, the need to fight for power without “waiting” for other countries, the united front, the class nature of the USSR and the question of Stalinism, the necessity of party democracy, etc.[cii]

Therefore, especially from 1934, as fresh ranks of millitant workers joined the left social democratic currents, Trotsky sought a bridgehead to them. Out of this there developed the ‘French turn’.[ciii] This was an attempt at entering the socialist parties carrying out sharp ideological struggles, and tearing the healthy proletarian elements away. Though initially a plan for the French Bolshevik-Leninists, it was soon generalised. But only in the USA did it lead to an appreciable gain, as a sizeable number of cadres were recruited from the Socialist Party of Norman Thomas, and especially its youth wing, the YPSL. Generally, “Entry …. does not include a long term perspective. It is only a stage which under certain conditions can be limited to an episode.”[civ] The generally rightward swing in the workers’ parties, and the workers’ desire for unity made victory in such operations a remote prospect but entryism did lead to an important gain, as did the unity talks with the SAP, the British ILP, and so on. Entryism meant getting inside a mass party and attempting to win over cadres by combining mass work and theoretical clarification. Personal squabbles, petty bourgeois intrigues, and sectarian fears of being contaminated by impure mass movements were revealed and cut off as the French League turned to the SFIO. Two whole series of articles came from Trotsky in this period, against centrism and against sectarianism.

All this was theoretically correct, and of some use practically. But overall, the ICL remained a weak organisation even when the 1935 ‘Open Letter’ was written. In the ‘Open Letter’, the following arguments were put forward : Oppositionist moods bore a predominantly centrist character. The centrists and the reformists urged “unity”, regardless of programmes. “Genuine unity of the International and of its national sections can be assured only upon the revolutionary Marxist foundation …..”[cv]

The main argument was: “During the year and a half that has elapsed since the publication of the first program of the Fourth International, the struggle for its principles and ideas has not abated for a single day. The revolutionary national sections and groups have grown in number: some of them extended their ranks and influence, others attained a greater homogeneity and cohesion …. All this labour will indubitably proceed much better if correlated and unified on a world scale under the banner of the Fourth International. The impeding war danger does not brook a delay in this task for even a single day.

“The new parties and the new International must be built upon a new foundation: that is the key with which to solve all other tasks. The tempo and the time of the new revolutionary construction and its consummation depend, obviously upon the general course of the class struggle, the future victories and defeats of the proletariat…. The conditions are difficult … [but] Only in the socialist revolution is there salvation for mankind.”[cvi]

There are two sides to this argument. Taken on a historical time scale, Trotsky was absolutely correct. Without building an international organisation, it was not possible to ensure revolutionary continuity. But on a shorter time-scale, the whole tenor suggested a kind of rapid growth that was never to materialise.

Trotsky was calling for a transition from the intermediate status as early as 1935-36. Between 1933 and 1936, he engaged in debates with the SAP, the POUM, and the ILP. In all three cases, only small groups (or even individuals) were recruited, while the organisations refused to take the path of the Fourth International. Why did he then insist on the new organisation? It was precisely because of the negative balance sheets that he felt further delay to be unwarranted.

Basically, the answer given to two questions decided the orientation. First, were fascism and Stalinism passing phases within a long-term era of proletarian revolutions, or did they signify a general decline of socialism, and even bourgeois parliamentary democracy? Second, how important was the role of the revolutionary party in successes and failures alike? If one answered that yes, the epoch was one of revolution, then the role of leadership of course became more important. For while in an age of capitalist stabilisation, even the most revolutionary and the most far-sighted leadership could do little more than hold on and gradually build, in an era of sharp ups and downs, the leadership could influence events much more strongly. In a sharp attack on the SAP, Trotsky wrote: “…. We read [in the SAP’s document]: “This International will be the result of the historic process, and it will be able to take form only through the action of the masses.” Very well! But why then do you butt into somebody else’s business; you haven’t been given the power of attorney for this either by the “historic process” or by the “masses”, have you? …. The policies of the SAP … are a downright mockery of the fundamental demands of the revolutionary education of our successors!”[cvii]

This is essentially where his critics diverged. For the centrist parties that he was criticising, the task was not to create a new, revolutionary International, but to try to unite the two existing ones. For Isaac Deutscher, the author of the main opposition, within the Movement for the Fourth International of the turn to openly proclaiming the Fourth International, the “only dignified attitude the intellectual ex-communist can take is to rise au-dessus de la melee. He cannot join the Stalinist camp or the anti-Stalinist Holy Alliance without doing violence to his better self. So let him stay outside any camp. Let his try to regain critical sense and intellectual detachment.”[cviii] Thus, Deutscher categorically givers up the option of a proletarian anti-Stalinist struggle.

Another critic of Trotsky on this score is Molyneux, who believes that while Trotsky ought to have organised his co-thinkers, he should not have called it the Fourth International. There is a grain of truth in this criticism, in as much as the “proclamation” could and did have unwarranted effects. Thus, in the speech cited earlier, Trotsky made a wild claim: “Permit me to finish with a prediction: During the next ten years the program of the Fourth International will become the guide of millions and these revolutionary millions will know how to storm earth and heaven.”[cix] Even if such claims are discounted there exists the reality that small groups, weakly implanted in the class struggle (only two Trotskyist groups had Trotsky’s unqualified admiration – the Charleroi group in Belgium and the Minneapolis group in the USA – for their proletarianization)[cx] could not adequately internalize the lessons of the class struggles nationally and internationally, and provide a comprehensive theory. To call a united network of such small groups the International ran the risk of ossifying doctrine and of creating illusions of grandeur among the groups.

However, Trotsky did not bank on an immediate overthrow of capitalism. What is necessary, here, is to distinguish, in so far as it is possible, between analysis based on serious theoretical work, and claims based on hopes. Thus, in conversation which C.L.R. James, he said: “We are not progressing politically. Yes, it is a fact, which is an expression of a general decay of the workers’ movement in the last fifteen years. It is the more general cause. When the revolutionary movement in general is declining, when one defeat follows another when fascism is spreading over the world, when the official ‘Marxism’ is the most powerful organisation of the deception of the workers, and so on, it is an inevitable situation that the revolutionary elements must work against the general historic current, even if our ideas, our explanations, are as exact and wise as one can demand. But the masses are not educated by prognostic conception, but by general experiences of their lives. It is the most general explanation – the whole situation is against us.”[cxi]

And yet, unlike in the days of Marx, when the events after 1850 showed that revolution and workers’ power could not, for some time, be on the agenda, now the world was ready for socialist revolution. Therefore, come what may, a revolutionary leadership had to be built. This was the conception that Trotsky made the basis of the Fourth International.

VI.     The Political Basis

A number of programmatic documents were written by Trotsky in the period 1933-40. The most important, historically, was ‘The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International’. He did not expect that a few thousand people, inspired by these documents, would change history. But he did expect that revolutionary action could succeed to the extent it corresponded to social needs. Hence a scientific analysis of historical reality was needed. To change the world, a correct interpretation was required.

The Fourth International was not founded on only the experience of its living cadres. It was also founded by assimilating to work of its cadres the historical experience of socialism/workers’ power from the days of the French Revolution to the victory of Hitler. This work of assimilation had to be done by a class leadership. Such a leadership could not be created ad hoc. It had to grow consciously. Without practice, on however small a scale, it was not possible to maintain revolutionary continuity. It was from this final consideration that Trotsky stated the basic reason for founding the Fourth International: “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat”, and again, “The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.”[cxii]

These two statements are highly compressed ones. There is a claim about a historical crisis of humankind. Its existence is testified in a thousand ways. The problem of wars, of famines and starvation deaths, of nuclear disasters and innumerable damages to the eco system all are aspects of this crisis, where human social relations fail to cope with economic and technological changes. This crisis is not a crisis where proletarian militancy has steadily declined. Nor is it indicative of a decline of the productive forces. Nor has the working class become so integrated to bourgeois society, so progressively disalienated that revolution disappears from the agenda.[cxiii] Finally, as some East European experiences show, there exists a third option to capitalist exploitation and bureaucratic oppression. But to develop the option, there has to be a world organisation, capable of assimilating various experiences. Otherwise, national, self-centred organisations will give rise to nationalism or its extension (big power outlook, Eurocentrism etc.) and programmatic inadequacies.

Trotsky was aware of both sides of the problem. It is enough to look at the programme. He did not call for a programme in the way of Comintern had a programme, because such a finished programme was impossible without a world party of considerable strength. What he put forward was a transitional programme.

The programme of revolutionary Marxism is one that by definition cannot be simply taken from outside to millions of workers and explained to them one at a time. Even when the revolutionary organization is present, it can win over the masses only by the method of the transitional programme. It is based on the concept of self-emancipation, aimed at bridging the gap between the workers’ given consciousness and that level which made them partisans of the struggle for power. It was a set of demands which in their totality organise the proletariat and constitute the stages of the struggle for the rule of the working class and its allies. Each specific demand expressed an urgent need of the broad masses, and thus aimed to draw in those who were not consciously fighting for workers’ power. But this does not mean that the programme kind of planned to con the workers into supporting a revolution. Rather, it was felt that by fighting for those specific demands the workers would become more conscious, and eventually fight for class power.

In that sense, the prototype for the 1938 programme was the 1934 ‘Program of Action for France’. It called for ‘Abolition of “Business Secrets”; ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Control over Banks, Industry and Commerce’; a set of measures for workers like the 40 hours week, social security, equal wage for equal work, anti-racialism, etc., nationalisation by the workers of banks, big industry etc.; the monopoly of foreign trade so that consumers’ interests were cared for; specific slogans that made workers-peasant alliance a reality; a series of political calls including political rights for soldiers, dismissal of fascist officers, freedom for the colonies, and a democratisation of the constitution, the state apparatus, by breaking the bureaucratic structure.[cxiv]

The slogans corresponded to needs of the day. It was expected that if a mass revolutionary party took them to the working class, the dynamic of class struggle would go in favour of the proletariat.

Now, to be effective, any transitional programme has to be concrete. And that makes it dated at a later time. The 1938 programme ran the risk of absolutising some of the conjunctural issues. But if this is picked out and inflated out of proportion, one runs the opposite risk of glorifying capitalism of the late twentieth century. Trotsky did not argue that unless a revolution would be started next week, one would miss the bus forever. “The capitalist world has no way out, unless a prolonged death agony is so considered. It is necessary to prepare for long years, if not decades, of war, uprising, brief interludes of truce, new wars, and new uprisings. A young revolutionary party must base itself on this perspective. History will provide it with enough opportunities and possibilities to test itself, to accumulate experience, and to mature. The swifter the ranks of the vanguard are fused the more the epoch of bloody convulsions will be shortened, the less destruction will out planet suffer. But the great historical problem will not be solved in any case until a revolutionary party stands at the head of the proletariat. The question of tempos and time intervals is of enormous importance; but it alters neither the general historical perspective nor the direction of our policy.”[cxv] This was the resolution, ‘Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution’, adopted by the 1940 Emergency Conference of the Fourth International. What Trotsky is arguing here has not been proved positively. But it has been (repeatedly) proved negatively. With less than clear programmes, power has been seized. But the ultimate result has been bureaucratization and/or the fall of the regime, with monotonous regularity. The working class can fight instinctively, but it must learn to organise its rule consciously. If this conscious organisation is not democratic, then the instinctive battles of the working class are appropriated by those who would like to create cliques and bureaucratic power structures.

Nor did Trotsky, despite occasional confused utterances, have a ‘model of society’ where the working class was always straining at the leash, held back by treacherous leaders. Our discussion in chapter 4 should dispel the notion that Trotsky showed “a systematic blindness to the actual consciousness and concerns of the working class.”[cxvi]

The method of the transitional programme had been obscured not only by Stalinism, but also by Zinoviev’s ‘left’ line. Trotsky wrote of this leftism in his critique of the Comintern : “Each party … fell a victim of the false points of departure [foisted by the 5^th Comintern Congress]. Each chased after phantoms … transformed revolutionary slogans into noisy pharases … [there flourished] … a purely mechanical “left” conception [that] … there existed always and unalterably only the social democracy that was “disintegrating”, workers who were becoming “radicalised”, communist parties that were “growing” and the revolution that was “approaching”. And anybody who looked around and tried to distinguish things was and is a “liquidator”….”[cxvii] This was the basic standpoint of Trotsky, the basic meaning of the transitional programme.

Nevertheless, the compressed first sentence of the Transitional programme requires some further elucidation. It was the effort of classical Marxism to reassert itself against both Social Democracy and Stalinism. At the time the document was written, it was correct, to argue that the hundreds of thousands of workers flocking to the communist and the Socialist parties were in fact radicals who were seeking a way out of the mess capitalism had created. The masses of the workers were still committed to socialism, as shown, for example, by the fact that despite heavy repression, even in the 1933 elections, two out of every three Berlin worker voted either for the Communist party or for the Social Democratic party. At that time, as war loomed ahead, it was in fact possible to think of creating a revolutionary nucleus that might win over a significant part of this vanguard to a fresh initiative to rebuild a revolutionary Marxist party. But if, as some Trotskyist groups do, oe treats the Transitional programme as a holy writ, then the real evolution of the international working class and its implications would be ignored.

VII.    The Heritage

The great achievement of Trotsky was that in the face of extreme adversity he was able to maintain some links between theory and practice. Nevertheless, it was a flawed heritage that he bequeathed.

Its strengths, often inadequately appreciated, can be enumerated first. From the mid 1930s, Trotskyism appeared as the sole political force reasserting the basic principles of classical Marxism. In building the International and preparing elements of a programme, Trotsky developed the concept of the political revolution, the transitional method, and refined the united front tactic. He also affirmed the need to combine soviets and pluralism. In so far as revolutionary Marxism survives today, the Fourth International has played a vital role in it. Few things show the power of Trotsky as the last significant standard bearer of classical Marxism and proletarian internationalism as his position on the question of the war. On behalf of the International Secretariat of the International Communist League, he wrote “War and the Fourth International” in 1934. Trotsky sought to inoculate the cadres of the Fourth International from the inevitable onrush of chauvinism. “Only by realising fully the objectively reactionary role of the imperialist state can the proletarian vanguard become invulnerable to all types of social patriotism. This means that a real break with the ideology and policy of “national defense” is possible only from the standpoint of the international proletarian revolution.”[cxviii]

Trotsky demolished the slogan of national defence, not by an abstract reference to the workers’ not having nations, but by saying that “The working class is not indifferent to its nation. On the contrary, it is just because history places the fate of the nation in its hands that the working class refuses to entrust the work of national freedom and independence to imperialism for the sake of the interests of an insignificant minority of exploiters.”[cxix]

At the same time, he showed that national struggles in the colonies and semi colonies were “doubly progressive”, for “The national problem merges everywhere with the social. Only the conquest of power by the world proletariat can assure a real and lasting freedom of development for all nations of our planet.”[cxx]

Against the claim that democracy was being defended by the Western powers, he wrote that “A modern war between the great powers does not signify a conflict between democracy and fascism but a struggle of two imperialisms … in both camps will be found fascist (semifascist, Bonapartist, etc.) as well as “democratic” states …. “The struggle for democracy” [means] … above all, the struggle for the preservation of the workers’ press and of workers’ organisations against unbridled military censorship and military authority. On the basis of these tasks, the revolutionary vanguard will seek a united front with other working-class organisations – against its own “democratic government – but in no case unity with its own government against the hostile country.”[cxxi]

Trotsky anticipated the Stalinist and ‘post-Stalinist’ criticism, repeating the essentially social democratic/Menshevik standpoint, about the West being preferable to Hitler: (a) because it was democratic; (b) because it was, from 1941, allied to the USSR. He wrote: “And if we remain in irreconcilable opposition to the most “democratic” government in time of peace, how can we take upon ourselves even a shadow of responsibility for it in time of war when all the infamies and crimes of capitalism take on a most brutal and bloody form?”[cxxii]

As to the question of Soviet participation, Trotsky’s position was firm: “The international proletariat will not decline to defend the USSR even if the latter should find itself forced into a military alliance with some imperialists against others. But in this case, even more than in any other, the international proletariat must safeguard its complete political independence from Soviet diplomacy and, thereby, also from the bureaucracy of the Third International …. The proletariat of a capitalist country that finds itself in an alliance with the USSR must retain fully and completely its irreconcilable hostility to the imperialist government of its own country …. But in the nature of practical actions, considerable differences may arise …. For instance, it would be absurd and criminal in case of war between the USSR and Japan for the American proletariat to sabotage the sending of American munition to the USSR. But the proletariat of a country fighting against the USSR would be absolutely obliged to resort to action of this sort --- strikes, sabotage, etc.”[cxxiii]

In the long run, Trotsky stressed, a military alliance of the USSR with an imperialist country was fraught with danger. Only the overthrow of imperialism and the workers’ seizure of power could save the USSR from crisis.

As war approached, the issues were further concretised. ‘Imperialist War and World Revolution’, the main resolution of the 1940 Emergency Conference, reaffirmed the fundamental principles. But it also went on to discuss the question of defence of the USSR, the nature of Stalinism and the Soviet state, etc. Once more, Trotsky’s response combined a correct analysis with a faulty sense of time. The essential argument that his critics put forward was that the Nazi-Soviet pact and the partition of Poland showed the need to reassess Stalinism and the USSR.

Trotsky explained that the slogan defence of the USSR by no means meant giving up the world revolution. “The defence of the USSR coincides in principle with the preparation of the world proletarian revolution …. Only the world revolution can save the USSR for socialism. But the world revolution carries with it the inescapable blotting out of the Kremlin oligarchy.”[cxxiv]

The debate in 1939-40 spilled over into the nature of the USSR. Trotsky’s opponents gradually came to believe that the bureaucracy constituted a class. Trotsky replied that in so far as the programme of revolution was concerned, the tasks of the revolutionaries changed not a whit by calling it a ‘social’ rather than ‘political’ revolution. Had this been all, he wrote, it would be “a piece of monstrous nonsense to split with comrades who on the question of the sociological nature of the USSR have an opinion different from ours ….”[cxxv]

But, he realized matters actually went deeper. If the Stalinist bureaucracy constituted a new ruling class, then one had to ask whether capitalism was to be replaced by workers’ rule and socialism, or by a new exploitative state and class ? Theorists of the new class were at the greatest disadvantage when such a broad generalization had to be made.[cxxvi]

Nevertheless, while his opponents were indubitably wrong, Trotsky was not always right. While in the Emergency Conference resolution he implied that decades might pass, in other articles the conflicts and the resolutions were made too dependent on the events of the next few years, or even months. Thus, in ‘The USSR in War’, he wrote that “Twenty-five years in the scales of history … weigh less than an hour in the life of man.”[cxxvii] Yet in the same debate, only a little earlier, he had written: “Might we not place ourselves in a ludicrous position if we affixed to the Bonapartist oligarchy the nomenclature of a new ruling class just a few years or even a few months prior to its inglorious downfall?”[cxxviii]

That he was shaken, and that as a result his footing was less firm, comes out in the same essay, where he says that if the bureaucracy becomes a new exploiting class,  “nothing else would remain except only to recognize that the socialist program … ended as Utopia.”[cxxix] Even in such a case, he was to place himself, not with the rising star of bureaucratic collectivism but with the working class: “It is self-evident that a new “minimum” program would be required ---  for the defence  of the interests of the slaves of the totalitarian bureaucratic society.”[cxxx]

There existed another alternative --state capitalism. Though it was not raised in 1939 – 40, Tony Cliff, Raya Dunayevskaya, CLR  James, etc. were all Trotskyists who later split from the Fourth International by developing state capitalist theories. This theory had a number of advantages. First, it avoided the notion of a tripolar world, retaining the bourgeoisie/ working class antagonism as the basic antagonism everywhere, and thereby enabled its adherents to avoid having to choose between the USSR and the USA, a choice that Burnham, Schactman, and other theorists of bureaucratic collectivism could seldom duck.

Secondly, the theory of state capitalism required less  (though by no means absolutely nil) mangling of Marxist theory.[cxxxi] Marx observed in the Gurndrisse that ‘Capital exists and can only exist as many capitals, and its self-determination therefore appears as their reciprocal interaction with one another”.[cxxxii]universal capital … is therefore a non-thing.”[cxxxiii] And so, “A

In Capital, Marx did accept the theoretical possibility of a single capitalist corporation in one country.[cxxxiv][cxxxv] Thus stray references to Marx hardly improve the situation. But Cliff’s theory, as developed by his followers, stands Marx on his head by arguing that competition confers, the character of commodities on products, rather than the conflict of capitals and commodity production entailing competition.

Trotsky was responsible for this whole confusion only to a small extent, but that was important.  By insisting that the coming war would either lead to a clear-cut proletarian revolution or an immediate transformation of the USSR, he took an undialectical position, and miseducated his followers. On one hand, many Trotskyists therefore succumbed to extreme Stalinophobia after the war. On the other hand, groups, in the USA, in Britain and elsewhere left the Fourth International for the Stalinist parties.

At the same time, in Trotsky’s writings, there were important caveats.  He warned that while the bureaucracy was not invested with any historic mission, it could still, conjuncturally, be forced, while defending its own interests, to partially negate or oppose capitalism.  If in territories occupied by its, Moscow carried out statification and expropriations, that would be not because of socialist aims but because  “it is neither desirous nor capable of sharing the power … with the old ruling classes  …”[cxxxvi] But   “the primary political criterion for us is not the transformation of property relations …  however important these may be in themselves [i.e., these could be very important – K.C.], but rather the change in the consciousness and organization of the world proletariat ….From this one, and the only decisive standpoint, the politics of Moscow …retains its reactionary character and remains the chief obstacle on the road to the world revolution.  Our general appraisal … does not, however, alter the particular fact that the statification  …is in itself a progressive measure…. But its progressiveness it relative … [The bureaucratic autocracy] by far outweighs the progressive content of Stalinist reforms in Poland.  In order that nationalized property … becomes a basis for …socialist development, it is necessary to overthrow the Moscow bureaucracy.”[cxxxvii]

Failure to grasp the complexity of his ideas led, in some cases to a hierarchy -- anti-imperialism is superior to the anti-bureaucratic struggles --or to a transformation of the “defence of the “USSR” slogan into  opposition to actual workers’ struggles, as with Isaac Deutscher,[cxxxviii] or a passive support  for bureaucratic reformism, as with Tariq Ali’s response to Gorbachev and Yeltsin’s early phase (i.e., when Yeltsin seemed to be still a “dissident Communist”.[cxxxix]

Nevertheless, it can be argued that Trotsky’s Marxism, including and upto the programme that he helped to develop for the Fourth International in 1933 – 40, remains the most advanced outpost of classical Marxism.  His uncompromising proletarian internationalism ensured that there would be few nationalist or ‘democratic’ defections during war. Despite tremendous repression world wide, the cadres of the Fourth International came out of the war more proletarianised, and with an unshaken faith in the future.[cxl] This would once again be a contentious claim. Ian Thatcher’s book has a clearly different claim. Citing the then Bukharinist on the road to Social Democratism (and later a rabid anti-communist) Bertram Wolfe’s review of Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, Thatcher asserts that the Fourth International had the same bureaucratic tendency as the Third, and was dominated by the “Russian faction” and was a one-man show.[cxli] In view of some of the facts already discussed, such as the difficulty Trotsky had in getting others to agree to the proclamation of the Fourth International, it is surprising to find the charge that the Fourth International was a one-man show.     It is true that in the post-war world, there have been many pressures, many new forces have come up, and few of the Trotskyist trends have been able to cope with them all. Unless it can be shown that the heritage of classical Marxism could have survived fascism, Stalinism, and World War II without organisational forms, the foundation of the Fourth International, with all its flaws, remains among the most signal of Trotsky’s achievements -- an achievement made possible by his insight into the relationship between Marxist theory and the organisation.

But this achievement itself, as we saw, created an orthodoxy. Between 1951 and 1954, that orthodoxy blew up, and several splinters developed from the Forth International.  The role of Chinese poor peasants, the meaning of nuclear weapons for the Marxist slogan about the imperialist war and its conversion into civil war, and all manner of new issues knocked at the door. The most “orthodox” retreated to the position of checking everything against Trotsky’s utterances. But even others moved slowly.  On the question of permanent revolution and the possibility (incidentally foreseen by Marx) of peasants in different types of societies playing a positive role in such a revolution, Trotsky’s brief hint was not developed till the 1980s. And when it was done, it was often for opportunist reasons, such as supporting the decision of Philippine communists in their decision to support bourgeois anti-Marcos forces electorally. On issues about which classical Marxism had had faulty vision, notably feminism and the ecology question, shifts were equally slow. In fact, much of classical Marxism shares a productivist bias. Though Trotsky, and the Fourth International, corrected this in the case of industrialisation (rejection of the Stalinist model, emphasis on production and social relations, etc.), it can be argued that the belief, found even in The Revolution Betrayed, that under communism  “man” will  “control nature”, or that socialism will liberate women by providing legal equality and a productive role, are today questionable ideas.[cxlii] Thus, even the main Trotskyist current, the Fourth International (United Secretariat), could adopt a resolution on ‘Women’s Liberation and the Socialist Revolution’ as late as 1979 (11^th World Congress),  while a resolution on ecology,  including a self critical balance sheet had to await 2003 (15^th World  Congress).

 

For all this, Trotsky’s Marxism does not provide any ready-made answer. True, there are hints, comments, and part solutions even. But above all, what Trotsky’s revolutionary politics offers, in opposition to Stalinism, Maoism, and all other variants of similar ‘socialism from above’, is the sole certainty, that workers and working people, fighting for themselves, alone provide the road to human liberation, and the possibility of building an order where all other contradictions can be pursued and (hopefully) resolved without the oppressors’ and exploiters’ central apparatus, the state, bearing down, and without, above all, the power  of  capital holding down all the oppressed and exploited. The splits in the Fourth International, originally caused by “the Russian question”, continued. This had the ill-effect of creating several Trotskyist sub-currents, whose differences are often small enough for others on the left not to realise why they cannot exist within one democratic organisation. The Fourth International (United Secretariat), remains the largest, the most international (with affiliates in some 43 countries) and the most democratic. But it unites within it only a minority of the Trotskyists.Other currents of significance, as well as other powerful individual parties exist, taking Trotskyism as one of their key reference points, such as the British SWP and its International Socialist Tendency, the CWI, the Labour party of Pakistan, the Partido Obrero of Argentina and its international current, the Movement for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International, and so on. Even excluding the inevitable lunatic fringe of any movement (currents which do have a guru and a totally sectarian and idealistic viewpoint about the unfolding class struggles), the main problem for Trotskyism has been this many-way split, which was a key factor in its inability to politically mobilise enough around 1989-91, when the Stalinist certainties came tumbling down. Nevertheless, despite all its shortcomings, it remained the only significant internationalist, revolutionary current implanted in all sectors of the world.

Condemn the Arrest of Naba Dutta

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Published on Thursday, 19 August 2010 18:09

Press release issued by Kirity Roy of the Banglar Manabadhikar Suraksha Mancha (MASUM) and Programme Against Custodial Torture & Impunity (PACTI).

Mr. Naba Dutta along with his 3 companions; Ms. Progna Paromita Dutta Roy Chowdhury, Mr. Gautam Ghosh and   Mr. Dipankar Mazumdar all attached with Nagarik Mancha, a civil society organization mainly focused on environmental and labor issues  proceeded for a preannounced programme of sit- in;  front of the Block Development Officer’s office at Narayangarh block of West Midnapur. The programme was organized by Lodha Shabar Vumij Kalyan Smiti. Mr. Naba Datta and his companion started from Kolkata by a vehicle (Toyota – Quallis 2.4D Model) with registration number WB-02M-8565. After reaching the place they peacefully completed the meeting and started for Kolkata by the said vehicle only. The driver of the car Mr. Ashok Midhya and Mr. Joydeb Singh of Lodha Shabar Vumij Kalayan Samiti was also in the car with the abovementioned activists of Nagarik Mancha. While Mr. Naba Datta and his associates with the driver (names mentioned above) were on their way to Kolkata, one police vehicle intercepted them and asked to follow their vehicle without showing any reasons. While asked about the reason of such illegal act the police personnel who made the said persons captive replied as, ‘we are taking you at Narayangarh Police Station’. Mr. Naba Dutta’s car followed the police vehicle without making any further argument. All the police personnel who taken the persons in hostage were not in police uniform but using a police car being plain clothes. When the cars crossed the Narayangarh Police Station, Mr. Naba Dutta and his companions sensed some foul and asked the police personnel about their actual motive and where they want to take them off but those police personnel denied to give any answer and told the driver of Naba Datta’s car only to follow their vehicle.

After a long drive the police personnel stopped in front of Sadatpur Investigation Centre under Jhargram Police Station and asked Mr. Naba Dutta and his associates to halt. After few minutes Mr. Naba Dutta was taken alone to Manikpur Beat House under Jhargram Police Station. By this time, except Mr. Naba Dutta all his other colleagues i.e. Ms. Progna Paromita Dutta Roy Chowdhury, Mr. Gautam Ghosh, Mr. Dipankar Mazumdar of Nagarik Mancha and  Mr. Joydeb Singh of Lodha Shabar Vumij Kalayan Samiti with the driver, Mr. Ashok Middhya of Car no. WB-02M-8565 was released from police custody after submitting PR (Personal Release) Bond.

Thereafter Mr. Naba Dutta was taken to one police car no. WB 34N 0011.

As we informed by our sources that from Manikpara Beat House Mr. Naba Dutta was taken to Sadatpur Investigation Centre again, which is around 90 km from the Manikpara Beat House, where he was stationed till 9.30pm.

The police personnel arrested Mr. Naba Dutta and his associates were in plain clothe, which is sheer violation of the guidelines laid down by the apex court of India in DK Basu case (AIR 1997 SC 610) regarding procedure of arrest. The family members of Mr. Naba Dutta should be informed about his whereabouts and charges framed against him at the utmost. While arresting them they not even prepared memo of arrest at the place of arrest, which is again a violation of the said guideline and Criminal procedure Code.

The whole episode was not only illegal but proving the whims of police and district authorities. Misdeeds of police again establish the fact that rule of law is in verge of collapse, where every dissenting voice is going to maim by authoritarian approach of the state and its machinery.

We are deeply concern about the physical and psychological integrity of Mr. Naba Dutta, a renowned human rights activist and apprehending that his personal security is in risk.

We demand immediate unconditional release of Mr. Naba Dutta as it is a violation of guideline set up by the National Human Rights Commission om Human Rights Defenders.

We also demand that the state authority should immediately impart his whereabouts in public and ensure his wellbeing.

We strongly condemn the very act of the police and the West Bengal Government which shows that they are not willing to follow the rule of law.

The Maoist insurgency in India: End of the road for Indian Stalinism?

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Published on Sunday, 08 August 2010 18:17

An interview with Jairus Banaji

Spencer A. Leonard and Sunit Singh

Given the considerable international interest in the progress of Naxalism on the Indian subcontinent, particularly in the wake of the 2008 Maoist revolution in Nepal, we are pleased to publish the following interview with Marxist and historian Jairus Banaji conducted on June 28, 2010.

Spencer Leonard: The immediate occasion for our interview on the Naxalites or Indian Maoists is Arundhati Roy’s widely read and controversial essay, “Walking With the Comrades,” published in the Indian magazine Outlook. There Roy speaks of “the deadly war unfolding in the jungles of central India between the Naxalite guerillas and the Government of India,” one that she expects “will have serious consequences for us all.” Is Roy’s depiction of the current situation accurate? If so, how have events reached such a critical state? How, more generally, does Roy frame today’s Naxalite struggle and do you agree with this framing? Does the “main contradiction,” as a Maoist might say, consist in the struggle between the Naxalite aborigines on the one side, and, on the other, what Roy refers to as the combination of “Hindu fundamentalism and economic totalitarianism”?

Jairus Banaji: There certainly is a Maoist insurgency raging in the tribal heartlands of central and eastern India, much of which is densely forested terrain. The tribal heartlands straddle different states in the country, so at least three or four major states are implicated in the insurgency, above all Chhattisgarh, which was hived off from Madhya Pradesh in 2000. To the extent that there has been a drive to open up the vast mineral resources of states like Chhattisgarh and Orissa to domestic and international capital, there is the connection Roy points to. As a definition of the “conjuncture” that has dominated the conflict since the late 1990s, she is clearly right.

 

 

But the Naxal presence in these parts of India has little to do with the factors she talks about. Naxalism, or Indian Maoism, goes back to the late 1960s. What distinguishes it as a political current from other communists in India is the commitment to armed struggle and the violent overthrow of the state. It is not as if the perspectives of Naxalism flow from the circumstances one finds in the forested parts of India. The question is why, after its virtual extinction in the early 1970s, the movement was able to reassemble itself and reemerge as a less fragmented and more powerful force in the course of the 1990s. To account for that we have to look to different factors than those Roy identifies.

The Naxalites have always seen the so-called “principal contradiction” as that between the peasantry or the “broad mass of the people” on one side and “feudalism” or “semi-feudalism” on the other. They have never abandoned this position since it was evolved in the late 1960s. The revolution has always been seen by them as primarily agrarian, except that now “agrarian” has come to mean “tribal,” since their base is on the whole confined to the tribal or adivasi communities.

Sunit Singh: Please explain the confluence that led to the formation of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in September 2004, which united the Naxalite splinters, the People’s War Group, and the Maoist Communist Center? What explains the dramatic revivification of Naxalism after its decimation in the early 1970s and how do we understand the CPI (Maoist) as a political force today? To what extent has today’s Naxalism changed from its predecessor, the original CPI (Marxist–Leninist) (CPI (M–L))?

JB: The key fact about the Naxals in the late 1990s and 2000s is that they began to reverse decades of fragmentation through a series of successful mergers. The most important of these was the merger in 2004 between People’s War, itself the result of the People’s War Group fusing with Party Unity in 1998, and the Maoist Communist Centre of India (MCCI). That 2004 merger, which resulted in the formation of the CPI (Maoist), reflected a confluence of two major streams of Maoism in India, since People’s War was largely Andhra-based and the MCCI had its base almost entirely in Jharkhand—the southern part of Bihar which also became an independent state in 2000. To explain the successful reemergence of Naxal politics in the 1990s, we have to see the People’s War Group (PWG) as the decisive element of continuity between the rapturous Maoism of the 1960s–70s, dominated by the charismatic figure of Charu Mazumdar, and the movement we see today. The PWG was formally established in 1980 after some crucial years of preparation that involved a unique emphasis on mass work, the launching of mass organizations like the Ryotu Coolie Sangham, which was like a union of agricultural workers, and a “Go to the villages” campaign that sent middle-class youth into the Telangana countryside. Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, its founder, was able to attract the younger elements because he was seen as more militant because, among other things, he refused to have anything to do with elections. Following a dramatic escalation of conflict in Andhra Pradesh from 1985, PWG was able to build a substantial military capability and a network of safe havens for its armed squads (dalams) across state borders, in Gadchiroli in Maharashtra, directly north of the A.P. border, and in the undivided region of Bastar or southern Chhattisgarh to the north and east. Regis Debray in his Critique of Arms points out that no guerrilla movement can survive without rearguard bases, by which he means a swathe of territory which it can fall back on with relative security in times of intensified repression. This is exactly what happened with the squads that had been trained and built up in Andhra, or more precisely in Telangana, the northern part of the state, in the 1970s and 1980s. The recent flare up of conflict in Chhattisgarh is largely bound up with the intensified repression of 2005 that drove even more fighters into the Bastar region.

SL: In “Walking with the Comrades,” Roy sidesteps the question of Naxalite politics in favor of siding with a marginalized group, in this case “the tribals.” Thus she states that “[some] believe that the war in the forests is a war between the Government of India and the Maoists… [they] forget that tribal people in Central India have a history of resistance that predates Mao by centuries.” But she also wants to have it the other way around. For instance, this is what she says of the Naxalite leader and theoretician who first founded the CPI (M-L): “Charu Mazumdar was a visionary in much of what he wrote and said. The party he founded (and its many splinter groups) has kept the dream of revolution real and present in India.” What do you make of this curious political ambivalence respecting the actual Maoism (and the Marxism) of the Maoists? How do you understand Roy’s anti-Marxist, tribal revolutionary romance?

JB: The idea that the tribals and the CPI (Maoist) share the same objective is ludicrous! What the tribals have been fighting against is decades of oppression by moneylenders, traders, contractors, and officials of the forest department—in short, a long history of dispossession that has reduced them to a subhuman existence and exposed them to repeated violence. A large part of the blame for this lies with the unmitigated Malthusianism of the Indian state. By this I mean that the adivasis have been consigned to a slow death agony through decades of neglect and oppression that have left them vulnerable to political predators across the spectrum, including the Hindu Right. As Edward Duyker argued in Tribal Guerrillas, the Santals whom the Naxal groups drew into their ranks in the late 1960s “fought for specific concessions from the established rulers, while the CPI (Marxist–Leninist) fought for a new structure of rule altogether.” There is a big difference between those perspectives! The tribal aim is not to overthrow the Indian state but to succeed in securing unhindered access to resources that belong to them, but which the state has been denying them. The tribal struggle is for the right to life, to livelihood and dignity, including freedom from violence and from the racism that much of India exudes towards them. The massive alienation of tribal land that has gone on even after Independence was something the government could have stopped if it had the will to do so. Today the huge mineral resources of the tribal areas are up for grabs as state governments compete to attract investment from mining and steel giants. But whatever the CPI (Maoist) might think, the vast majority of the tribals in India have no conception of “capturing state power,” since the state itself is such an abstraction except in terms of harassment by forest officials, neglect by state governments, and violence from the police and paramilitary.

SL: In online comments on Roy’s article posted on kafila.org, you responded to the preoccupation with tribals and Naxalites with a series of rhetorical questions:

Where does the rest of India fit in? What categories do we have for them? Or are we seriously supposed to believe that the extraordinary tide of insurrection will wash over the messy landscapes of urban India and over the millions of disorganized workers in our countryside without the emergence of a powerful social agency… that it can contest the stranglehold of capitalism… without mass organizations, battles for democracy, struggles for the radicalization of culture, etc.?

To this you add, “in [Roy’s] vision of politics, there is no history of the Left that diverges from the romantic hagiographies of Naxalbari and its legacies.” Thus you contend that Roy’s thinking is impeded by a kind of amnesia. How precisely does Roy’s lack of awareness of and confrontation with the history of the Left compromise her ability to think through what it would mean to stage an emancipatory politics today? How does awareness of the history of the Left in the sense you intend differ from simply knowing the Left’s past? What are the consequences we face because of the Left’s widespread failure to work through its own history, a failure of which Roy is but a recent and prominent instance?

JB: Roy lacks any grasp of the history of the Maoist movement in India, which is why she can make that silly statement about Charu Mazumdar being visionary, when the bulk of his own party leadership denounced his “annihilation” line as pure adventurism and a whole series of splits fragmented the movement within a year or two. Mazumdar also played a disastrous role in splitting the movement in Andhra through a purely factional intervention. Roy’s background is clearly not the Left or any part of it, including the Maoists. What she does reflect is the disquiet generated, beginning in the 1990s, by the opening up of India to the world economy and the drive to create a globally competitive capitalism regardless of the costs this would inflict on workers and the mass of the population.

The Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), the campaign to halt the project to build a hydro-electric dam on the river Narmada, was the best example of the kind of “new social movements” that emerged in India in response to issues that the party left simply failed to take up. It was not led by any party, was related to a major single issue, and had roots very different from those of the organized left. It involved large-scale mobilization of the communities uprooted by the dam, but the NBA of course was eventually defeated in the sense that it failed to stop the dam from being built despite massive resistance. The defeat of the NBA generated a profound disillusionment with the state of Indian democracy, which is strongly reflected in Roy’s work—a kind of “democratic pessimism.” The most extreme expression of this is the idea that India has a “fake democracy,” whatever that is supposed to mean.

But, let’s get back to Roy’s bizarre reference to Charu Mazumdar as a “visionary” who “kept the dream of revolution real and present in India.” The fact is that the “annihilation” line had led to such disastrous results by the end of 1971 that the majority of his own Central Committee denounced him as a “Trotskyite” and expelled him from the party! Indeed, the majority of a twenty-one member Central Committee had withdrawn support from him by November 1970, and Satya Narayan Singh, who was elected the new general secretary, described his line as “individual terrorism.” Even when the AICCCR (All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries) transformed itself into a party in April 1969, leading figures of the early Maoist movement in India were unhappy with the decision and many stayed out.

SS: Elaborate, if you will, on the exact form of struggle that Charu Mazumdar is associated with. What was the “annihilation line,” exactly?

JB: Like all Maoists, Mazumdar believed that the key social force in the revolutionary movement in India would be the peasantry. He adhered to the strategy mapped out in the deliberations between the CPI leadership and Stalin at the end of 1950, one product of which was a document known as the Tactical Line, which spoke of a two-stage revolution starting with a People’s Democratic State that would be ushered in by an armed revolution. Of course, by then Liu Shao-ch’i was already recommending the Chinese revolution as a model for all colonial and “semi-colonial” countries in their fight for national independence and people’s democracy. This would have to be an armed revolution based on the peasantry and “led by” the working class. The reference to the working class was purely rhetorical, since the leading class force in the revolution was the peasantry and the leadership of the working class existed in the more metaphysical shape of the party. The distinctiveness of Mazumdar’s politics was that he seriously believed it would be possible to arouse revolutionary fervor among the “masses” by annihilating “class enemies” such as the jotedars or larger landowners of Bengal, by forming small underground squads that would selectively target landlords, state officials, and other representatives of the exploiting class and state apparatus. Such shock attacks, he felt, would create a decisive breach and unleash a mass response. Mazumdar believed that the revolution in India could be completed in this manner by 1975! The idea was that the masses were simply bursting with revolutionary zeal and only needed a catalyst. As I said, the line generated considerable dissent, not least because it abandoned any notion of mass work.

 

SS: So, when the Mazumdar faction constituted itself as the CPI (M–L) in April of 1969, what followed? Were other factions loyal to Peking folded into the new party? What happened to Mazumdar’s Maoist critics, those who argued that their M–L comrades had substituted terrorism for mass organizations such as trade unions and kisan sabhas?

JB: The Chinese Communist Party backed away from the Naxals pretty early when they realized that they were talking about different things. There was a distinct loss of enthusiasm from Peking, and Mazumdar faced increasing criticism. Parimal Dasgupta, a prominent union leader, advocated the building of mass organizations among workers, and criticized the neglect of urban work by Mazumdar’s followers. He disapproved of the idea of a clandestine party organization because it would mean abandoning any effort to build broader class-based organizations. Another leading figure, Asit Sen, split on similar grounds. T. Nagi Reddy, the leading communist in Andhra Pradesh, disagreed with squad actions that were isolated from any mass struggle and simply substituted for it. He wanted a period of preparation and mass work before the armed struggle, but the group around him was disaffiliated from the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR), the body that transformed itself into the CPI (M–L) in April 1969. Even people who were otherwise close to Mazumdar like Kanu Sanyal and [Vempatapu] Satyam, a leader of the Srikakulam Movement, disapproved of individual assassinations based on conspiratorial methods by small underground squads. As Manoranjan Mohanty shows in his book Revolutionary Violence (1976), a unified M–L was already in decline by the middle of 1970, roughly a year after the party was proclaimed.

SS: How should we view the embrace of revolutionary violence as a tactic by the Naxalites, both in its moment of inception in the late 1960s and in the present day by groups such as the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army? Does this zealousness signal radicalism, or helplessness? Can it be seen as the outcome of the defeat of the Left in previous decades, the consequence of the abandonment of a politics seeking to abolish alienated labor or, indeed, the abandonment of any explicitly labor-based politics?

JB: When the CPI (M–L) was formed in 1969, its key function was seen as “rousing” the peasant masses to wage guerrilla war. Mazumdar believed that the killing of landlords would “awaken” the exploited masses. This, classically, was what Debray calls a “politics of fervor,” a politics in which revolutionary enthusiasm substitutes for ideas rooted in mass struggle and for the class forces that conduct those struggles. But there were tendencies in Andhra that rejected this line and even went so far as to argue that, if the armed struggle were waged as a vanguard war, the people would become passive spectators. One writer quotes Nagi Reddy as saying, “Their [the people’s] consciousness will never rise. Their self-confidence will suffer.”

Today we can see that this is a vanguard war trapped in an expanding culture of counterinsurgency, and the most the CPI (Maoist) can do is flee across state boundaries and regroup in adjacent districts. What they have not been able to do and cannot do, given the nature of their politics, is consolidate enduring mass support in their traditional strongholds. In Andhra, where the fight against the Naxals has been most successful, from the state’s point of view, the backlash has been ferocious and beyond all legal bounds. The state there has institutionalized “encounter” killings, India’s term for extra-judicial executions, on a very large scale, and trained special counterinsurgency forces to hunt down the Maoists. In Chhattisgarh the state has sponsored (armed and funded) a private lynch mob called the Salwa Judum, or “Purification Hunt” in Gondi, the local language, that has emptied hundreds of villages by forcing inhabitants into IDP (internally displaced persons) camps where they can be easily controlled. In Chhattisgarh both sides have recruited minors. Both states have seen staggering levels of violence, with a pall of fear hanging over entire villages in Telangana, and the atomization of whole communities in Dantewada. We should remember that it was successive waves of repression in Andhra Pradesh that drove the PWG squads into regions like Bastar and southern Orissa in the first place.

One consequence of the massive escalation of conflict from the late 1980s was a substantial weapons upgrade, a major increase in lethality. The Naxals have used land mines on an extensive scale, using the wire-control method, and inflicted heavy losses on the paramilitary. The crucial result of this conflict dynamic is a wholesale militarization of the movement, a major break with the pattern of the late 1970s when they built a considerable base through mass organizations, in Telangana especially. The civil liberties activist K. Balagopal, who saw the movement at close quarters, became progressively more disillusioned as the military perspective took over and reshaped the nature of the People’s War Group. In 2006, a few years before he died, he described the CPI (Maoist) as a “hit and run movement,” underlining precisely these features.

SS: What kinds of affinities do the Naxalites share with other militant New Left groups?

JB: I would hardly call them “New Left.” I think the best comparison for the CPI (Maoist) is Sendero Luminoso in Peru. Abimael Guzmán’s idea that the countryside would have to be thrown into chaos, churned up, to create a power vacuum, is a mirror image of the CPI (Maoist) strategy. Guzmán called it Batir el campo—“hammer the countryside.” The idea was to generate terror among the population and demonstrate the inability of the state to guarantee the safety of its citizens. That is how Nelson Manrique has described the strategy. In the end it meant the assassination of village heads and increasing violence against the peasantry (from the Senderistas) that brought about their rapid downfall. A key element of the Batir el campo strategy was the systematic destruction of infrastructure with the aim of isolating whole areas of countryside from the reach of the state. The idea was that, effectively, these would become “liberated zones.”

The CPI (Maoist) have been pursuing a very similar strategy. The role they played in sabotaging the movement in Lalgarh bears a striking resemblance to the Sendero’s interdictions against all forms of autonomous peasant organization. The drive of the CPI (Maoist) to isolate the areas under their control from the rest of the country, to impose an enforced isolation on the tribal communities, is similar to the way the Senderistas worked in Peru. This is the deeper meaning of forced election boycotts. During elections the threat of violence is palpable. Sabotaging high-tension wires, goods trains, railway stations, roads, and bridges is simply the physical analogue of the election boycott. Interlinked with this is the continual execution of “informers,” a kind of exemplary punishment that is clearly designed to bolster a culture of fear in the CPI (Maoist) “base,” which breeds the kind of resentment that creates more informers. Balagopal was a powerful critic of these practices that, I suspect, were largely a product of the new leadership that took over the PWG in the early 1990s, when Kondapalli Seetharamaiah was driven out of the party.

A movement like this will obviously tolerate no dissent. There have been repeated instances of the different armed struggle groups murdering each other’s cadre, sometimes over the course of years and on quite a large scale. Indeed, at least one reason for the merger between the PWG and the MCCI was the turf war between them in the years before 2004, when on one estimate they killed literally hundreds of each other’s supporters. Left parties like the CPI (Marxist) have also seen their party activists being murdered, as if this is what the People’s Democratic Revolution needs and calls for! I should add that the CPI (Marxist) is hardly blameless, either, since they have their own vigilante groups or terror squads called the “harmads.”

SS: It seems to me that the perspectives of the Maoists do not arise from the circumstances of those they claim to represent, but are rather static in and of themselves. Party documents and Maoist “theorists” seem capable of little more than the recycling of desiccated fragments of ideology.

JB: Maoist theory has a timeless quality about it. It deals with abstractions, not with any living, changing reality. The abstractions stem from the debates and party documents of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the agrarian line emerged as an orthodoxy for the Left in countries like India. The Chinese Revolution was an incorrigible template and everything about India had to be fitted to that. Within India itself this generated what were called the “Andhra Theses.” As I said, the deliberations with Stalin generated a series of documents that all factions of the undivided Communist party accepted to one degree or another. The Tactical Line mapped out the outlines of a strategy that flowed straight into the Naxalism of the late 1960s. Some of the terminology was changed, such that “People’s Democracy” became “New Democracy,” but these shifts in rhetoric marked no crucial differences. So there is a sense whereby the Naxalite split from the CPI (Marxist) did not represent a total break with orthodoxy within the Indian movement. It was the CPI (Marxist) that was poised ambiguously between the USSR and China.

SL: Embedded in this refusal of reality, this insistence upon rehashing empty abstractions, there seems an unmistakable retreat from the very project of Marxism. Am I wrong to see an elective affinity between Roy’s insistence that the tribal people’s impetus to resist comes from outside of capitalism, on the one hand, and on the other, the rhetoric popularized by Charu Mazumdar, which identifies the peasantry as the primary revolutionary class? Roy and Mazumdar seem to share the idea that the old anti-feudal struggle was and remains viable. Both exhibit a lack of interest in the question, What dynamics within capitalism point beyond themselves? While I agree that Arundhati Roy lacks any grounding in the history of the Left, there does seem to be common ground between the Naxals’ nihilism and her romantic anti-capitalism.

In earlier comments you argued that Roy’s “democratic pessimism,” as you referred to it, has led her to argue that the ongoing Naxalite insurgency “is the best you can hope for.” Similarly, with respect to Maoists, you have suggested that, at bottom, they view those whom they claim to represent as “cannon fodder,” so that “it is not hope but false promises that will lie at the end of the revolutionary road, aside from the corpses of thousands.” To begin to understand what has brought together these two political streams­—the new social movements and late Stalinism—is it fair to say that both, as expressions of political defeat and despair, are equidistant from what you have called “the vision of the Communist Manifesto,” in which Marx argues that the task of the Communists is, as you put it, “not to prevent the expansion of capitalism but to fight it from the standpoint of a more advanced mode of production, one grounded in the ability of masses of workers to recover control of their lives and shape the nature and meaning of production”?

 

JB: There are different strands here. One is Roy’s tendency to see Maoism as the passive reflection of a tribal separatism that is rooted in decades if not centuries of oppression of the adivasis. The trouble with this is that it makes the Maoists purely epiphenomenal. It is a reading that has little to do with politics in any sense. More to the point, Maoism simply is not a continuation or extension of tribal separatism. It is a political tendency committed to the armed overthrow of a state that is both independent (not “semi-colonial”) and democratic in more than a formal sense. Millions of ordinary people in the country have immense faith in democracy, despite the devastation that capitalism has inflicted on their lives—and when I say capitalism here I include the state as an integral part of it. The other strand relates to the way the Left has reacted to “globalization” and the isolationist stances that have flowed from that. This is not peculiar to the M-L groups—it is the soft nationalism of the whole Left and stems from the inability to imagine a politics that is both anti-capitalist and internationalist in more than purely rhetorical ways. The rhetoric of anti-globalization, which opposes the reintegration of India back into the world economy, forms the lowest common denominator of the entire Left in this country. The Indian Left today cannot conceive revolutionary politics apart from national isolationism. Everything is reduced to defending national sovereignty against the forces of international capitalism. But modern capitalism is not an aggregation of national economies, however much the working class is divided by country and in numerous other ways. It is hard to see how the movement in any one country, even one as big as India, can overthrow capitalism as long as it survives in the rest of the world. Paradoxically, it is the smallest countries, like Cuba and probably Nepal after the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) takeover, that survive best in these conditions!

SS: In its 1970 program, the CPI (M-L) claimed that “India is a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country…. the Indian state is the state of the big landlords and comprador-bureaucrat capitalists…. and its government is a lackey of US imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism.” What are the limitations of such a vision of anti-imperialism and of what might be referred to as the “semi-feudal” thesis of capitalist development in India?

JB: The Naxalites haven’t substantially modified their positions except to the extent that they realize that the forces they are up against today have more to do with capitalism than feudalism. So, if you read any of the interviews that they give to various publications like Economic and Political Weekly , there are more references to capitalism than there used to be back in the 1970s. Back then it mattered much more whether you defined the social formation as mainly “capitalist” or mainly “feudal.” Today it doesn’t seem to matter as much, since it is obvious to everyone that India is capitalist. Perhaps this wasn’t so obvious forty years ago.

Most Naxalite groups still accept the four-class bloc, and the “national bourgeoisie” is part of that alliance. This position derives from the “semi-colonialism” line, and its only practical function today is that it can help the Naxalites justify a whole nexus of relationships necessary for the party to fund itself, largely by means of the tax imposed on traders and contractors. For example, in Jharkhand it is said that the Naxalites demand (and are paid) 5 percent of all large, government-funded projects in the rural areas. If “national bourgeoisie” is supposed to refer to the smaller layers of capital, those are of course among the worst exploiters of labor, as the appalling conditions in small-scale industry and so much of the caste violence in the countryside show. As for “semi-feudalism,” the irony is that the Naxalites’ survival in the late 1970s and 1980s depended precisely on creating a base of sorts among the dalits and adivasis, the vast majority of whom have always been wage laborers. Indeed, the bulk of the population in India comprises the wage laboring and salaried classes, and a political culture that does not start from there—that does not start from the right to livelihood, the right to organize, and the aspiration to control resources and production collectively—is not going to make the least bit of difference. To keep referring to the land-poor and landless as a “peasantry” shows how much one’s political thinking is defined by dogma as opposed to reason.

SL: Earlier you spoke of how the Naxals, like the Sendero Luminoso, created a kind of ghetto around themselves. Is this the endgame of the politics launched in the 1960s and 1970s, which itself represented an inadequate response to what had become an increasingly bureaucratic and opportunistic Stalinism in India? How can the left politics that now trails this long legacy of failures reconstitute itself? But what about the larger question of intersecting the Naxalites, since many of these groups have been attracting some of the brightest young minds in India and, in this respect as in others, they represent a major impediment to the reemergence of the Indian Left? How do we break the appeal of political nihilism?

JB: As I said, the vast mass of India’s population are wage laborers. They work in very different sorts of conditions from each other. So it’s not as though we are dealing with a homogenous or unified class. One way forward as far as I can see is through the unions. Unions have been a stable feature of Indian capitalism and always survived despite repeated attacks. As a small but significant example of the kind of left politics we should be concentrating on, the New Trade Union Initiative (NTUI), which was formed around 2005, is an attempt to organize a national federation of all independent unions in the country, regardless of which sector they belong to. This started as an initiative of the unions themselves and it has seen slow but steady expansion all over the country and includes, for example, the National Federation of Forest Workers and Forest Peoples. There is also a great deal of rethinking on the Left, both against the background of the public relations disasters of the CPI (Marxist) in Singur and Nandigram and of course the violent internecine conflicts within the party left. There is a whole layer of the Left in India that can be called “non-party,” which is for that reason both more dispersed and less visible perhaps. It includes numerous organizations active in areas like caste discrimination and atrocities, communal violence, civil liberties, women’s liberation, child labor, homophobia, tribal rights (e.g., the Campaign for Survival and Dignity), the Right to Food Campaign, campaigns against nuclear weapons and nuclear power, and many others. Dozens of Right to Information activists have been murdered, and there are numerous movements against displacement throughout the country. All of this reflects a different political culture from that of the left parties, more specialized and professional, also more autonomous, and the true agents of the churning of democracy that India is currently witnessing.

SL: How do you imagine the potential political expression of that? Does this take a party political form? How does it intersect parliamentary politics?

JB: If India could establish a workers’ party on the Latin American model, then much of this non-party left would gravitate to that as its national political expression. But the culture of such a workers’ party would have to be radically different from the sterile orthodoxies of the old left parties. It would have to be a massive catalyst of democratization both within the Left itself and in society at large, encouraging cultures of debate, dissent, and self-activity, and contesting capitalism in ways that make the struggle accessible to the vast mass of the population. The fact is that the bulk of the labor force still remains unorganized into unions and a workers’ party could only emerge in some organic relation to the organization of those workers.

SL: What you are arguing then is that the Naxalites constitute a major impediment to the reinvention of the Left?

JB: Absolutely! That would be an understatement. The militarized Maoism of the last two decades is a politics rooted in violence and fear. Those in positions of leadership refuse to do any “hard thinking” in Mao’s sense. You cannot build a radical democracy, a new culture of the Left, on such foundations. The recent beheading of a CPI (Marxist) trade-union leader who refused to heed the bandh (strike) call of the CPI (Maoist) is a spectacular example of how profoundly authoritarian the Naxal movement has become under the pressure of its overwhelming militarism. When actions like that damage their credibility, they are explained away as “mistakes.” But these continual “mistakes” fall into a disturbing pattern. As a friend of mine wrote in Economic & Political Weekly, “the CPI (Maoist) is as little concerned about the lives of non-combatants as is the state.” | P

This originally appeared in The Platypus Review
http://platypus1917.org/2010/08/06/the-maoist-insurgency-in-india-end-of-the-road-for-indian-stalinism/
And is reproduced with permission of Jairus Banaji

A Brief Report of the proceedings of the Sit-In on the evening of 7 August 2010 against the crimes of Indian State on the people of Kashmir

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Published on Sunday, 08 August 2010 08:20

The evening of 7 August 2010 witnessed after a long long time voices of freedom from the people of Kashmir. Despite the heavy repression and the draconian laws to maim and incarcerate the people of Kashmir, to subjugate their indomitable spirit for Azadi, the evening of August 7 at the heart of Delhi just half a kilometre away from the parliament witnessed unprecedented scenes of assertion of the political will not to say genuine desire of the Kashmiri people for freedom from the exploitative and oppressive rule of the Indian State. Around six to seven hundred people had gathered including people from various peoples organisations in Delhi to protest against the increasing repression of the Kashmiri people.

SAR Geelani, Faculty of Delhi University conducted the proceedings of the evening. Every Kashmiri—students, teachers, journalists, working people—who spoke in the meeting was unequivocal about their demand for Azadi which set the tone of the proceedings as the dharna cite reverberated with slogans against India’s occupation of Jammu & Kashmir and the demand for Azadi. Various people’s organisations from Delhi which participated in the meeting expressed their unconditional solidarity to the struggle for freedom of the Kashmiri people. Revolutionary poet Vara Vara Rao who was also an emissary of the present CPI (Maoist) party in their early talks with the government of Andhra Pradesh asserted that the people of Kashmir are not alone in their struggle against Indian occupation. He pointed out that the fighting masses of Dankaranya, Orissa, West Bengal, Bihar and Jharkhand are with the struggle for freedom of the people of Kashmir. He said that the enemy of the both the oppressed people of Kashmir and the poorest and the wretched in India is the Indian ruling class which is a prop of US and other imperialist forces and the struggling people of Kashmir and India should join hands for the realisation of the freedom of both. Noted film maker Sanjay Kak pointed out that the Kashmiris should stop looking at themselves as victims. While it was important for the Kashmiri people to be emotional in their struggles braving the repressive machine of the Indian State it was also necessary to have a political temperament to see the light at the end of the arduous struggle. Mrigank from the Nav Jawan Bharat Sabha expressed his solidarity for the movement of the people of Kashmir. Narender from the Popular Front expressed his organisation’s support for what he termed as the “complete independence” of the people of Kashmir. Kavita Krishnan from the CPI (ML) (Liberation) talked about the scores of atrocities committed by the Indian army on the people of Kashmir as well as the need for a meaningful dialogue for which the Indian government should be made accountable. GN Saibaba of the Revolutionary Democratic Front pointed out that the rising struggle for freedom of the Kashmiri people will usher in the death knell of US imperialism. He also stressed that the liberation of the people of Kashmir is in the interest of the people of India who are also fighting for revolutionary transformation. Sharmila Purkayastha from the PUDR, former Ambassador Madhu Bhaduri, Karen Gabriel from Delhi University, Banojyotsna Lahiri from DSU JNU, Om from AISA JNU, Tara Basumatary from DU also spoke expressing their solidarity for the struggle of the Kashmiri people for Azadi. Members of the progressive cultural organisation Prathidhwani sang songs while some of the Kashmiri participants read out the poems of well known Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali. Later in the night at 10 the meeting ended at a high note amidst thundering slogans for Azadi, Demands to resolve the Kashmir issue, condemning the fake Indian Democracy, to stop the Genocide in Kashmir, when one of the young Kashmiri thundered: “the Indian government terms our struggle anti-national. They brand us anti-national. I want to ask: How can you call us anti-national. We are not part of your nation. We were never. We are Kashmiri nationalists fighting for our freedom. We want Azadi!”

 

In Solidarity and Struggle,

SAR Geelani,

Supreme Court quashes defamation case on activists by Association of Pesticide Manufacturing Companies

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Published on Thursday, 05 August 2010 04:35

Rohit Prajapati and Trupti Shah

4th August, 2010, Warangal and New Delhi


A two Judge bench of the Indian Supreme Court of India, on 20th July, 2010, quashed[1] the  criminal defamation case against 11 activists initiated by the Crop Care Federation (formerly Pesticides Associations of India, a consortium of pesticide manufacturing companies)). The chemical consortium had filed the case against the activists in the Magistrate's Court of Warangal for publishing a report titled "The Killing Fields of Warangal" in 2002. The report which was a preliminary investigation of the impacts of pesticides use in the cotton belt of Warangal district of Andhra Pradesh (India) was termed defamatory by the largest and most powerful pesticide companies in the country.


In its judgement on 20th July 2010, the Honourable Court observed that “The general tenor of the report indicates that the report meant to focus the harmful effects of exposure to pesticides. It is quite evident from the report that it was not meant to harm, hurt or defame any individual or the manufacturing company”. The ruling marks a landmark judgment favouring freedom of speech, and transparency and was fought by very well known Indian environmental lawyer, Mr. Raj Panjwani.


This SLAPP type litigation (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation), brought upon by one section of pesticide industries, would have resulted in a continued long and expensive trial for the activists, which had already begun over 5 years ago. The Warangal court had also issued non-bailable arrest warrants against some of the 'accused' in 2007, after Andhra Pradesh High Court had dismissed the appeal to quash the proceedings


The list of  those who were charged included: Dr. Rajan R Patil (Epidemiologist), Ms. Madhumita Dutta (Corporate Accountability Desk – The Other Media), Mr. Ravi Agarwal (Toxics Link), Dr. D. Narasimha Reddy, Mr. P. Damoder (Sarvodaya Youth Organisation), Mr. Rajesh Rangarajan (formerly with Toxics Link),  Ms. Abitha Anand (independent Journalist), Salil Chaturvedi (Splash Communications), Kishore Wankhade (formerly with GGF) and others.


We, as the members of the fact-finding team and others associated with this report, condemn such harassment of environmental and public interest activists. We decry pesticide industry's intimidating tactics to suppress public voice, deny access to information and to put profits before farmers’ health.


We, as the members of the fact-finding team and others associated with this report, humbly declare our commitment to the following:


·         Bring to the attention of the people, farmers and policy makers in the country and the world about increasing hazards of pesticides to farmers and growing scientific evidence about the hazards of these chemicals and the grassroots level use of pesticides.

·         Work for rational/ethical policies of use and distribution of pesticides with an unequivocal emphasis to phase out toxic substances and chemicals used in their manufacture.

·         Declare our commitment to non-chemical method of agricultural production. Help prevent harassment of public-spirited individuals and activists fighting for similar causes.


We, as members of the fact-finding team call upon state and national governments to actively work towards eliminating the threats posed by hazardous agrochemicals for the well-being of farmers and the agricultural environment.



NOTE:

Background


The fact finding team consisted of representatives of diverse organizations that are involved with agricultural issues in rural areas, sustainable development, environmental protection and related public health issues. This included representatives of Toxics Link (New Delhi), Community Health Cell (Bangalore) and Sarvodaya Youth Organization (Warangal).


The findings of this team were published in an indicative report which aimed to be a transparent and account of indicative evidence that has been collected methodically and released for public debate to help in devising a rational and ethical pesticides policy in the country.


The Cropcare Federation of India (formerly Pesticide Association of India), a consortium of manufacturers of agrochemicals has criticized this report and has claimed to be defamatory in nature. The Federation initiated criminal proceedings against the members of the fact-finding team and others associated with the publishing of the said report stating that the report is a malicious and defamatory attempt by the members of the team to defame the pesticide manufacturers and traders among the general public, thereby affecting their credibility and their business.


Subsequently, the organizations and the individuals were engaged in a legal battle at the Warangal Metropolitan Magistrate's Court where the case had been filed. Members of the fact-finding team and others associated with this report denied all the allegations as false, misconstrued and out of context of the report. This indicative report was based on findings of the fact finding team after:


a)      Visits to a number of villages in Warangal district;

b)      Discussions with farmers and their relatives in the district;

c)      Discussions with members of the medical profession and the Indian Medical Association in the area who were involved in the treatment of patients affected by spraying of pesticides;

d)      Discussions with officials in the district including joint director- agriculture, and

e)      Dialogue with other stakeholders in the district.


Driven by the primary objective of protecting the health of farmers, the indicative study was done in a transparent manner, with all the data, the methods used and the sources publicly announced in a spirit of accountability. It called for a larger investigation into the issue. The objective clearly was neither against any industry, nor against any particular association. The concern was about human health and ecology as a whole.


The final recommendations of the fact finding team state that:


1.       Initiation of education and counselling programmes for farmers and farm labourers in Warangal district on organic agriculture (especially cotton) in association with civil society and government institutions.

2.       A detailed investigation into similar experiences elsewhere in the country and a formulation of a comprehensive national pesticide policy that would focus on rational use of pesticides, control and strict monitoring of accessibility to such dangerous chemicals and gradual phase-out of chemical pesticides.

3.       A larger investigation into the issues raised in the report.






[1] Reference: Supreme Court of India, Special Leave Petition, 3700 of 2008, Rajesh Rangarajan vs M/S Crop Care Federation of India and ANR, arising from CPLP 4155/06, subject CRIMINAL MATTERS - MATTERS FOR/AGAINST QUASHING OF CRIMINAL PROCEEDINGS, http://courtnic.nic.in/supremecourt/causedisp.asp