Some Thoughts on the (Problems of) Trotskyism

"America....

When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?"

-Allen Ginsburg (full text)



I'm posting this today to balance out yesterday's criticism of Anarchism. The deal with Trotskyism is this: The stuff Trotsky wrote is good and makes sense... Stalinism is clearly totally screwed up but that doesn't mean the revolutionary overthrown of capitalism is necessarily a bad idea. After all, how many hundred years of partially successful and failed bourgeois revolutions did it take to even establish today's basic capitalist democracies?

If this is the case, that "Trotskyism" represents a theoretical bridge to the pre-WWI generation of revolutionary socialists and attempts better than any one else to save it from the slander and lies of both Stalinist and Reformist "perversions" of marxism, then...

Why the hell is it that after all these years Trotskyist groups are still so small?

Why do they seem to split and quarrel with each other all the time?

Why have some "Trotskysists" been supportive of various clearly non-socialist, authoritarian governments?


"Trotskyism After Trotsky" is a good short book that was written by British socialist Tony Cliff in the late 1990s which attempts to answer these questions. It's a historical analysis of some of the problems this political tendency was from its inception beset with, which in many cases was never able to break out of.

"Trotskyism After Trotsky"

Start with the first, probably most important chapter: Chapter One: Recognizing the Problem


The Fourth International was founded just before the outbreak of World War Two as a revolutionary marxist association that opposed both Stalinism and Capitalism. However its membership was from the start confined to relatively small groups of people, as most socialist-minded workers and activists of the day were generally drawn to the larger and then-more prestigious Communist International (affiliated with "soviet" Russia) as well as Social-Democratic (reformist) parties of the day.

A major theoretical problem for this tendency presented itself immediately after the war when the economic collapse predicted by Trotsky did not occur, and regimes identical in structure to the Stalinist Soviet Union formed in the Russian- occupied, "Eastern Bloc" countries. Despite his harsh criticism of the tactics and rule of the Russian bureaucracy, Trotsky maintained to his death the hope that the Soviet Union could be reformed by a resurgence of worker militancy. The type of government represented by "Stalinism" was considered by him to be a "degenerated workers' state". Clearly, no bourgeoisie existed, so what else could it be called?

This ambiguous terminology was inadequate to describe the new societies in Eastern Europe. No workers' revolution had taken place... there was no "socialist" basis from which to degenerate. The Fourth International, a collection of various tiny groups, largely consisting of politically isolated individuals, and prone to splits and factionalism, was unable to come up with a solution to this theoretical problem.

Tony Cliff's political contribution was to write a book in 1948 called "The Class Nature of Stalinist Russia", which was later republished as "State Capitalism in Russia". Using a wealth of economic and social data, he argued that the bureaucracy collectively owned capital and related to the Russian working class in much the same way that individual Western capitalists related to their own workers.

An alternate theory that developed around the same time was that of Bureaucratic Collectivism. I read Cliff's book and it makes more sense to me than the Bureaucratic Collectivism theory does. How important is it to know which is a better theory? I'm not really sure. If you want to get all theoretical we could go to our books people wrote 50 years ago and pick up points and quote them... Though I'm not totally sure I care all that much about splitting hairs between the two to be honest.

Anyways, Cliff broke with the Fourth International and founded a small group around a newspaper in England, called the "Socialist Review" group. That went on to become the International Socialist Tendency which established branches in several different countries. The IST was able to enlarge itself during the 1960s and from the 1970s to the present, while much of the 60's Maoist and "Orthodox Trotskyist" groups have declined, the "International Socialists" actually grew (albiet modestly).

This all seemed fine and well.

But then, suddenly, the curse of Trotskyist splittery struck again. In the early 2000s there was a bit of a faction fight within the IST. The leading (British) group, the Socialist Workers' Party, felt that we were now in a period of "anticapitalist" upsurge. My understanding is they felt this meant it was time for socialists to throw themselves into the movement, with the task of building a separate socialist organization taking a backseat. The American member group, the International Socialist Organization, was expelled because it disagreed with this approach. A group called "Left Turn" split from the ISO and affiliated with the IST... and then quickly descended into a kind of amphorous, anarchisty, activist-movement magazine that lacked any definable ideological pedigree.

At the time of its writing the word "marxism" is absent from the Left Turn website. The British SWP seems to be in a bit of a crisis and has lost a lot of members, and the American ISO seems to have ridden up and down the past few years (membership wise) the same roller coster as the rest of the far left in this country. But they can consistently get over a thousand people to a great conference in Chicago each summer, and their publications, Socialist Worker, The International Socialist Review, and Haymarket Books look good and seem to be getting good distribution.

Personally my whole take on the "anticapitalism" thing is a bit ticked off. Why the heck did some British Trotskyists spend years of their lives building a modest but inviting and theoretically sound international grouping just to piss it away in a dumb disagreement on perspectives? That's crazy. Maybe they got old and were going to die soon so they substituted "wishful thinking" for a clear analysis of things. I don't know.

Do I think the "anti-Globalization" movement that got really visible with Seattle in 1999 was "anti-capitalist"? Heck no I don't. For starters if there are so many "anti capitalists" out there well where are they because I'd like to meet them! There were people in the anti-globalization movement who had an analysis of Capitalism and opposed it but they were a minority within a much broader movement consisting mostly of reformist NGOs, trade unions, and community groups. The organizations built by this movement seemed to almost completely disintegrate into silence in the face of the post 9-11 jingoism that swept the country. Pretty much the entire organized (and non) US left supported John Kerry in 2004 and more recently, Barak Obama in 2008. These were both pro-free market capitalist politicians who are just fine with imperial invasions of other countries. How is any of this evidence of a specifically "anti-capitalist" new mood?

Individual radicals exist who oppose capitalism, and with the economic crisis their numbers are increasing. But they are geographically and organizationally isolated and theoretically all over the place. One guy wears a "che" shirt, smokes pot, and protested the Democratic National Convention. Another protested Pelosi's votes for war but also gave money to Obama. A third starts a local zine on organic food production, while a fourth opens a "fair trade" coffee shop that can't afford to provide health insurance to its employees. Here and there small groups in different cities gather together to read some literature or discuss the economy... A new info shop or indymedia site appears and an art gallery has a "political" exhibit... Next week is perhaps the monthly meeting of the Green Party or Iraq Veterans Against the War...

There may be an "anti-corporate mood" now that is much wider than it was in 2000... but how deep is it? How many people today who are pissed off at AIG and the bailouts just think "greed" or underregulation, rather than the logic of capitalism itself, is The Problem? How many well meaning American reformers have no notion or care at all for the past 200 years of socialist ideological development and still look- much like the French Sans Coulettes- to the small businessman and the "middle" class (rather than the proletariat)- as society's potential savoirs?

That's not a movement. It's a broad ideological milieu for whom sustained activism on any campaign for any length of time is exceptional. It's a potential force that's currently unable to run candidates, or even compete with the corporate media for the "battle of minds", on anything more than a sporadic, local level.

Trotskyism is relevant because the idea of revolutionary parties is relevant. It's workers and owners, and right now the owners run the government, and they use it to send the workers to a lot of stupid, endless wars, and give tax payer money to bail out their rich corporate friends when their own greed explodes in everyone's face. At the same time they tell us that it's "too costly" to provide health care to people who need it.

A revolutionary restructuring of power makes sense. Greed has two political parties, a big state with a lot of prisons and weapons, and a media that always has their interests setting the agenda. We're going to need to take politics and organization seriously if we are to have any chance at all against it. For this reason Trotskyism is relevant today- despite the best efforts of so many Trotskyists to scare everyone else away from it!



Trotskyist groups in the US I like are the

International Socialist Organization

and

Solidarity

I also like this French one:

New AntiCapitalist Party

It's a merger between the Trotskyist "League Communiste Revolutionare" and other forces on the left.