Weekly Worker 221 Thursday December 18 1997
Letters
Political inventions
I agree with comrade James D’Souza that the CPGB’s Draft programme makes a “refreshing change to much of what is available from the left anywhere in the world”. The comrade comments at the end of his letter about the Draft programme: “I noticed you said that socialism is one country was not possible. This is similar to the line adopted by the Trotskyists. My question concerns where you stand with regard to Leon Trotsky” (Letters, December 11).
I am not a member of the CPGB, but I think I have some sort of understanding of the comrades’ position. ‘Beware of labels and suffixes’ should be the first law of (Marxist) political science. The idea of the impossibility of socialism in one question is hardly an invention of the Trotskyists or even Leon Trotsky - as the ‘Old Man’ pointed out on countless occasions. Quite reasonably, he rejected the term ‘Trotskyist’, since it was an invention of his political enemies. Since then, for good or for bad, like all ‘isms’, it has taken on a life of its own. Of course, exactly the same went for ‘Marxism’, ‘Leninism’, ‘Christianity’, etc - all these accusative, and originally negative, terms were flung by opponents and doubters.
After all, Marx denounced the very idea of ‘local’ or ‘national’ communism, saying they would produce “freak” societies where “want” would be generalised - an equality of poverty. Read The German ideology and the 1844 manuscripts. Does that make Karl Marx the first Trotskyist?
Comrade D’Souza may be aware that it was fashionable in ‘official communist’ circles - particularly in the Soviet Union - to ascribe the views outlined above to the so-called ‘young Marx’, and to claim that the so-called ‘mature Marx’ grew up and left these idealistic follies behind him. He made the transition from ‘Trotskyism’ to ‘Stalinism’ perhaps?
But nobody with a shred of intellectual rigour or honesty takes that seriously. Some of us happen to think that ‘official communist’ intellectuals like Althusser - the main perpetrator of this scholastic idiocy - prostituted their services in order to cover up, and excuse the treachery, conservatism and crimes of the Soviet bureaucracy.
However, if Marx is not sufficient authority for comrade D’Souza, there is always Lenin. He ridiculed the idea that “full” socialism - ie, an advanced transitional society between capitalism and communism - could be built in one country: hence his “banking” on world revolution. Sounds dangerously ‘Trotskyist’? Try this as well: “Complete victory of the socialist revolution in one country is inconceivable and demands the most active cooperation of at least several countries” (VI Lenin CW Vol 28, Moscow 1977, p151).
There is confusion sometimes over words and phrases. When Lenin refers in his writings to the “socialist revolution” in Russia, he means the coming to power of the working class in a national dictatorship of the proletariat over a backward capitalism - which cannot be socialism in the ‘classical’ sense. Was there socialism under the Paris Commune? I hardly think so. Or was there ‘socialism’ under the grinding poverty and backwardness of ‘war communism’ in the Soviet Republic? A revolution doth not necessarily socialism make. Lenin was fully aware of the ambiguities and complexities of the term ‘socialism’, and deployed it in various ways, at various times, in different polemics. But he was always ‘orthodox’ in his Marxism.
If we really accept the absurd notion that a belief in world revolution (and conversely, dismissal of the idea of socialism in one country) makes one a ‘Trotskyist’, then it is surely indisputable that the entire Bolshevik Party up to at least 1924 was ‘Trotskyist’ - including JV Stalin himself. In his April 1924 pamphlet, Foundations of Leninism, Stalin wrote, quite correctly: “For the final victory of socialism, for the organisation of socialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of a peasant country like Russia, are insufficient; for that, the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries are required.”
Mysteriously, after less than year, a new edition appeared with the above passage deleted. Stalin now announced that it was possible to build socialism without the “efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries”. To hold to Stalin’s former position was enough to be branded a ‘Trotskyist’ - with all the bloody consequences that implied.
As we know, Stalin went on to declare that it was possible to build communism in one country, as did Nitika Khruschev after him - and Shining Path in Peru and Pol Pot in Kampuchea. This would have been mind-boggling apostasy for Marx.
As regards Leon Trotsky himself, I would tell comrade D’Souza without hesitation that he was one of the mightiest revolutionaries of the 20th century - and a genius. No doubt. But even geniuses are flawed, and adopting Trotskyism as a credo or world-enveloping ideological system is deeply problematic. One only has to think of his theory of ‘degenerate workers’ states’ - or the implication in his later works that nationalisation somehow equals socialism - to realise this. I believe these are just some of the many reasons why the CPGB does not regard itself as a Trotskyist organisation - indeed, is highly critical of Trotskyism as a whole. Not that Trotsky and Trotskyism are necessarily the same thing of course.
Having said that, to be denounced as “Trotskyist” by the political sociopaths in organisations like the Stalin Society or the Economic and Philosophic Science Review - or for that matter by a bourgeois newspaper - can only be taken as a compliment. You must be doing something right, is what that says.
John Dart
Bristol
No substitute
I do sometimes think that comrades get over-precious about phrases and slogans. The danger of fetishising slogans, for instance, is that they run the danger of become meaningless truisms - or even turn into their opposite. Learning slogans by rote is no substitute for political understanding.
Both the Scottish comrades (Mary Ward, Nick Clark) and comrade Tom Winters (Letters December 11) object to idea that “Fight for what is possible and necessary is our slogan” - a reference to the possibility of a mass upsurge in Scotland prior to the September 11 referendum. Instead of examining the concrete circumstances the comrades responded in a knee-jerk reaction against the phrase itself. Just because bourgeois politicians and opportunists love to talk about ‘politics being the art of the possible’, does not therefore mean that revolutionaries demand the impossible.
For instance, as far as I am aware, the CPGB’s Draft programme does not promise to colonise/terraform the planets Venus and Mars. For all I know, this may well be necessary for the long-term survival of the human race. But as this is not possible - either now or in the immediate future - it would not be a very wise slogan or demand.
It is all a question of how you define ‘possible’ - and, more importantly, about who defines what is possible or not.
Frank Vincent
East London
