Comrade Mandel's final meeting of his British tour at the Conway Hall in London attracted the encouraging figure of 400 people. He was debating Monty Johnstone of the CP and his meeting there followed hard on the heels of an afternoon meeting at the LSE, which had ended in a heated dialogue between Ernest Mandel and three proponents of the State Capitalist theory, Nagliatti, Marks and Harman. Ernest Mandel spoke first at the evening meeting. He began by telling the meeting what Trotskyism was not. It was not a defeated tendency, nor was it an agent of counter-revolution. The CP would not have been bothering to debate him had either of these been the real situation. Monty Johnstone was there that night because of the growing strength of Trotskyist ideas and the Trotskyist movement among the vanguard of students and young workers. Mandel began by talking of the underdeveloped countries and the reasons why Trotskyism could not but gain cadres there. It was because Trotskyism stood for the theory of the Permanent Revolution and not for the Menshevist, two-stages theory advanced by the Stalinist CPs. It was these Menshevist theories that had been responsible for the deaths of many communists in Indonesia and for smaller disasters in Brazil and Iraq. Mandel drew his examples for the validity of the Permanent Revolution hypothesis from present day politics, but this kind of discussion always leaves CP supporters in a somewhat difficult position. Mandel had wisely said that he did not intend to go into a blow-by-blow account of Trotsky's history—it was the living embodiment of Trotskyist ideas among the new rising youth vanguard that was the interesting thing to be explained. It will always be in the interests of a CP supporter, however, to treat Trotskyism as basically a moral judgement of Trotsky himself, and therefore to delve very precisely into the history of Trotsky's relations with Lenin and Stalin. To argue on the basis of present-day politics leaves the CP in the invidious position of having to admit that Trotskyism is a movement, the ideas of the man are more important than the man. To argue in present-day politics would be to have to admit that there are other lines apart from the orthodox CP line and to introduce the awful possibility that it might be that in these other theories was contained the living spirit of Marxism in our age. It is only this latter approach, however, that would make a really political debate possible. Although Johnstone was prepared to debate on France 1968, he avoided the question of the thesis of permanent revolution in our age and chose to return to the Russian revolution. He said that Trotsky had admitted that on all essential points Lenin had been right, and presented a picture of a Lenin deflected almost against his will from the path of peaceful revolution. As John Palmer of the International Socialist group so rightly said, this distortion was a manifestation of the degeneration of the CP as a revolutionary party. How could this be said of a Lenin who realised full well the precarious and temporary nature of the situation of dual power prevailing in Russia between April and October 1917 and knew that the state was nothing other than a group of armed men? Mandel drew the distinction between the stage of a revolution, the class dictatorship and the tasks to be fulfilled by that dictatorship. Lenin had implicitly accepted Trotsky's ideas on the Permanent Revolution in his April Theses. February 1917 did indeed usher in the era of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in Russia, but it was the precarious nature of that dictatorship and its inability to fulfil the democratic tasks of freeing the peasantry that made the October revolution necessary and indeed possible. In the industrialised countries Mandel said Trotskyists stood not for putschism or adventurism, but did believe in the existence of objective conditions regularly and without the volition of any groups bringing about pre-revolutionary situations. It was in these situations that the vanguard and the class could intervene to bring about a revolution. Lenin had defined these situations extremely carefully. The level of working class activity must be considerably increased, the ruling class must be unable to carry on as before without changes and the sufferings of the working class must be more acute than usual. Mandel said that France in May 1968 fell without doubt into this definition of a pre-revolutionary situation, and along with speakers from the floor condemned the failure of the CP to play a real revolutionary role then as it had failed before in 1936 and 1945. Johnstone argued against there being a pre-revolutionary situation in France in 1968. As proof he quoted the elections in which de Gaulle had been returned to power. The CP vote had decreased and had not gone to the PSU, whose vote in the working-class neighbourhoods had also decreased. Johnstone compared this use of election statistics to the use made by Lenin of the October elections to the Constituent Assembly. It was a guide to the political maturity of the working class. Mandel in his summing up said that he had not said that May would necessarily have led to a successful revolution in France, an immediate victory. The important question of course was what use the CP made of the situation at all, to what use the CP was putting the statistics, whether they represented a genuine guide or a rationalisation for doing in fact very little of a revolutionary nature. The deformations of the Parliamentary orientation of the CP became apparent when Monty Johnstone spoke of the revolution having to wait until it was acceptable to the majority of the population without reference to which sector, without a mention of the majority of the toilers. His perspective for Britain was not one of how to build the vanguard party, but the gradualist one of securing parliamentary victory, and then, but only then, being prepared to defend that victory against minority encroachment by force.
Mandel said that Trotskyism stood for the preparation of revolutionary demands and attempting to fuse these demands with the day-to-day struggles of the working-class even when the situation was not revolutionary. This was absolutely necessary, for otherwise these demands would appear alien and imposed from the outside in the pre-revolutionary situation. The workers would not automatically know what to do if careful preparation had not been made. This was yet another area where the CP had failed. Monty Johnstone quoted the programme of the French CP in his reply, claiming that it contained such demands as workers' control. Once again of course this was just a programme containing a list of ideals and it was the vital missing link of the actualising of the ideals by implanting in the day-to-day struggle by a series of partial struggles, this was the perspective that was missing from Monty Johnstone's speech.
Finally Mandel spoke of socialist democracy. The action of the Russians in invading Czechoslovakia had been a crime because it had re-identified socialism with censorship against the working class in the minds of workers throughout the capitalist world. The achievement of workers' democracy in the workers' states was one of the main historical tasks still to be achieved in those states. The absence of this democracy was one of the biggest stumbling blocks to the easy acceptance of Socialism and Marxism by the western proletariat.
Monty Johnstone never really did come to grips with what Trotskyism was. His statements never had the power of totalisation. The new Youth Vanguard he prepared to ignore. He could not answer such statements as why it was that such a large CP as the Italian party had a negligible and declining youth section. The discussion on Permanent Revolution evoked some good contributions from the floor, notably from IMG comrades. Johnstone's replies were very poor. On the developed countries the debate was better, in that Johnstone did defend the line on France and did it by reference to the actual situation, which gave the ground for a real political argument. When he began to talk of the accusation of missed opportunities in the past, especially with regard to Spain, he became much less coherent. Contributions from the floor were made by various of the groups, with the notable exception of those redoubtable smashers of Stalinism, the SLL. One of the drawbacks of this type of meeting of course was that the structure of a debate, while allowing for these contributions, at the same time restricted the discussion of the main speakers, who need to come back on each other's points more than the one-time reply which the debate structure allows, for a really fruitful dialogue to develop.
(A full transcript of Mandel's speech can be found in the first edition of the Marxist Youth Journal and a shortened precis report of the debate in Black Dwarf no. 25).