This article is translated from the pamphlet Trotsky Marxiste, published in Paris as No. 2 in the series Marx ou Crève (Maspero, 1971). Part 1 appeared in our last issue.
PROLOGUE
'Trotsky came to Lenin as to a teacher whose power and significance he understood later than many others, but perhaps more fully than they.' — Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, p. 814
'Lenin unstintingly paid tribute to Trotsky, saying that since he had broken with the Mensheviks there was no better Bolshevik.' — Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, p. 259
It took the October Revolution to iron out all the ambiguities in Lenin's and Trotsky's theories, and to show that there was no basic contradiction between Trotsky's perspectives for revolution and the strategic line of Bolshevism. Mandel, polemicising with Nicolas Krasso on the subject of 'Trotsky's Marxism' in New Left Review 47, has summed up this meeting of the ways, in theory and practice, as follows: 'The victory of the October Revolution resulted from a historical combination of Lenin's theory and practice of the revolutionary vanguard party and Trotsky's theory and practice of the permanent revolution.' This does not mean that the revolution magically resolved the problems, but it did require Lenin to make a basic review of his theories and Trotsky to revise his organisational practice. It is with this in mind that we now turn to examine the body of Trotsky's theory and practice after 1917 in the light of the advance of the revolution.
Krasso shows that Trotsky's Marxism 'forms a consistent and characteristic unity, from his early youth to his old age.' But his conclusion, like that of the worst period of Stalinist falsification, is that Trotsky's early errors determined those he made later, and that the cardinal sin of his youth, his failure to understand the Leninist theory of organisation, was the basic weakness of his struggle against Stalinism, and of his analysis of the new period opened up by October. I intend to show that, on the contrary, Leninism and Trotskyism were fused in Bolshevism after October on the theoretical basis of the theory of permanent revolution and the relationship between economics and politics underlying it. It was precisely with the ideas first set out in Results and Prospects that Trotsky was able to grasp the dialectics of world revolution and the objective and subjective reasons for its setbacks and, what is more, to grasp the basic ideas of Leninism. I do not wish to underestimate the political mistakes he made after Lenin's death; but I shall show that what some people are pleased to call 'the course of history' in no way invalidated his theories. Rather, for a whole period they have been tragically proved correct; and today the revolutionary processes in the third world and the advanced countries, the dialectical relationship between them, and the repercussions they have on the 'socialist' countries can only be understood in terms of the shattering of Stalinist hegemony.
The basic unity of Trotsky's theoretical and political thought before and after October can thus in no way be adduced as proof that he never 'corrected his mistakes', or that an inability to re-evaluate general perspectives led him into political fantasy, into insoluble contradictions between reality and what might have been, or in Deutscher's words, between 'the power and the dream'. I shall attempt to show that, once Trotsky had understood the correctness of Lenin's theory of organisation, he was the most important exponent of Marxism in our time.
We have examined Lenin's and Trotsky's theories as they were formed in the struggle over the theoretical and practical problems facing Russian Marxists in a situation whose essentials were not foreseen by Marx and Engels: the preparation of proletarian revolution in a country still not completely subjected to the capitalist mode of production, before it had taken place in the most advanced capitalist countries. Only in this way can we understand the extent of their differences, and show that Stalin's revival of their polemics lacked objective foundation. Everything Trotsky says in Permanent Revolution about his relations with Lenin before 1917 tends to confirm that the basic reason for their long-standing variance was their difference in perspectives. Each betrayed theoretical or political weak points or unclarity, stemming from two forms of thought which tended to converge but were not identical; as expressed in the sphere of political struggle and theoretical development, they were structured differently according to their understanding of Marxist methodology.
Lenin and Trotsky faced the same reality and shared the same perspective of the actuality of proletarian revolution. Once this revolution was carried out, therefore, their antagonism faded before a basic unity of perspective. Lenin saw, in Lukacs's words, that 'the real revolution is the dialectical transformation of the bourgeois revolution into the proletarian revolution... in other words, the remaining relevant demands of the bourgeois revolution can only be realised within the framework of the proletarian revolution, and the consistent realisation of these demands leads necessarily to a proletarian revolution.' [27] From that moment there was no unbridgeable gulf between Trotskyism and Leninism.
It was, in the last analysis, what Trotsky had always said. When he argued that it was necessary to prepare directly for the dictatorship of the proletariat, he did not, as Lenin thought, mean that the revolution would be socialist at the outset. Trotsky was not unmindful of the importance of the agrarian question, which would have to be resolved before proceeding to 'purely' socialist tasks; he simply argued that this could only be done in the first stage of the proletarian revolution. Hence Lenin's theory of revolution by stages fused with Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution without Lenin at first being aware of it. The step Trotsky had to take was bigger and more difficult. But it should not be forgotten that he had never rejected the principles of democratic centralism and the selection of members; and we may therefore say that he joined the Bolsheviks not simply over the political questions on which he split with the Mensheviks, but on the basis of a full assimilation of Lenin's theory of the building of the party and the role it had to play. In analysing imperialism Lenin came to ground his internationalism, which had until then been of an abstract character, on the objective world situation. The unleashing of imperialist war was producing a revolutionary situation on an international scale, and the Russian revolutionary process could no longer be viewed in isolation from the revolutionary perspectives for the Western countries. Lenin argued that the imperialist war must be transformed into an international civil war, and saw the Russian proletariat only as a fraction of the world proletariat which had everywhere to enter into struggle against the world bourgeoisie. The perspective of proletarian revolution in the West cast more doubt on the need for a democratic stage in Russia. At least it would more quickly grow over into the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin was gradually growing closer to Trotsky's point of view.
But only the October Revolution united them in struggle. Trotsky saw the April Theses as a recognition by Lenin of his own views. But he also saw that the Mensheviks had gone too far down the road of opportunism, and that it would endanger the future of the revolutionary struggle to retain any connection with them. Contrary to what Nicolas Krasso claims, it was precisely this that convinced him that only Bolshevism could, by the firmness of its principles, rally all the really revolutionary elements among the old intellectuals and the advanced sections of the working class; and that only because it had been able to build a compact revolutionary organisation could it advance at once from the position of democratic revolution to the perspective of socialist revolution. 'Trotskyism', then, was developing into a rigorous system of theory. Trotsky had understood that only an organisation of the Leninist type could both lead the fight of the revolutionary masses and ensure that the proletariat would remain in power after victory, the point at which all previous revolutions had failed. Lenin awakened the old Bolsheviks living in Russia from their slumber of dogmatism, and Trotsky joined the Bolshevik Party: and the misunderstanding which had divided their forces for so long was at an end. Later there were many points at which friction arose between them — for example, over the Brest Litovsk treaty and the trade union question — but never on the scale of their previous polemics; for what mattered now was the solution of concrete problems within the same theoretical and political perspective, based on the theoretical fusion of Leninism and Trotskyism.
The paradox of the February revolution, the compromise between the Petersburg Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, which held power de facto, and the bourgeoisie, which formally held power, convinced Lenin that the democratic stage was over in Russia. The proletariat would have to pursue its struggle directly if it was not once more to be crushed by reaction. The analysis he made in the course of these events is less decisive than Trotsky's post facto account in History of the Russian Revolution. He still located the revolutionary process unfolding in Russia after the February revolution within the theoretical framework of revolution by stages; but the speed with which the situation was changing persuaded him that a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry such as he had foreseen was impossible. He could still grasp the unfolding of the revolution by means of the theory of the direct growing over of the bourgeois stage into the proletarian revolution, but the theory of permanent revolution made it possible for Trotsky to understand the mechanism much more clearly on a world scale by October, the only possible perspective for the struggle to overthrow imperialism.
From his exile, Lenin urged the Petersburg Soviet and the Bolsheviks not to allow any compromise with Kerensky, who proposed to put the monarchy back in control and continue the imperialist war, as a bourgeois state in alliance with French and British capitalism. 'The proletariat', he wrote, 'utilising the peculiarities of the present transition situation, can and will proceed first to the achievement of a democratic republic and complete victory of the peasantry over the landlords, instead of the Guchkov-Milyukov semi-monarchy, and then to Socialism, which alone can give the war-weary people peace, bread and freedom.' He was to go further still. In April he showed the Bolsheviks, who were still thinking in terms of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, that this already existed, in a form he had not foreseen, and that the formula was now irrelevant or at least did not correspond to the real perspective of struggle. It had been achieved in the Petersburg Soviet, whose executive committee had given up power to the bourgeoisie. He went on to say that the watchwords of the Bolsheviks as a whole had been entirely confirmed by history, but that in their actual carrying out things had developed differently from what he or anyone else had anticipated. The ambiguities in Lenin's view of the revolution are here expressed for the last time; he still did not accept the need to reject the theory which had guided him in struggle, although his perspectives had proved inadequate to the course of the revolution. He had defined theory as an idea approximating to the complexities of life, and he was thus able to say that the democratic perspective had not been completely wrong, only carried out in other forms. In fact, from 1905 Trotsky had 'foreseen' that the peasantry, under the leadership of the Social Revolutionaries, could only take the side of the bourgeoisie. But by preparing the party and the proletariat for taking on the dictatorship, Lenin showed in practice that his prognosis had been wrong. He stressed that contrary to the ideas of the old Bolsheviks, who had been unable to discard previous theories to the museum of history, the preparation of the proletarian revolution did not mean 'skipping over' an unachieved democratic stage; and at the same time he implicitly acknowledged that February showed the impossibility of either a bourgeois revolution proper or a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. It was necessary to break with the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries who had taken over the Soviets and were being forced by their class positions to liquidate the embryo of the democratic stage, to stop it being used as a springboard to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The nature of the October Revolution was the final confirmation of Trotsky's theories. At the first congress of the Third International in March 1919, Lenin declared that 'when, in capitalist society, the class struggle on which it rests becomes more acute, there is nothing between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat.' Only the dictatorship of the proletariat could ensure real democracy, in both advanced and backward countries. In Russia the slogan of the Constituent Assembly had been abandoned because it was no longer relevant to the needs of the moment. Only the dictatorship of the proletariat could resolve the agrarian question, but in this respect it was in the initial stages a bourgeois revolution. At the same Congress, Lenin said: 'In October 1917 we seized power together with the peasantry as a whole. This was a bourgeois revolution...' Trotsky, explaining this position in Permanent Revolution, goes on: 'Lenin himself estimated the October Revolution — its first stage — as the true realisation of the democratic revolution, and by that also as the true, even if changed, embodiment of the strategic slogan of the Bolsheviks.' The 'bourgeois' revolution of October was only transformed into a socialist revolution once the class struggle was taken into the villages. Once the immediate tasks of a bourgeois revolution — the agrarian programme of the Social Revolutionaries, corresponding to the needs of the peasant struggle — had been carried out, the dictatorship of the proletariat was transformed into the socialist revolution, with a complete reorganisation of the economic structure. The growing over of which Lenin had written was not the dialectical transformation of the democratic stage into a bourgeois stage, but more precisely this transformation within the dictatorship of the proletariat itself.
From then on any discussion of Leninism had to take the revolutionary process in Russia in 1917 as its point of reference. Trotsky strongly denounced the Stalinist method of approaching new historical problems not in the light of the revolutions which had been achieved, but in terms of quotations to show how the revolutions had been envisaged beforehand. Stalin and his 'theoreticians' forgot on the one hand that for Lenin theory was only a guide to action, and there should be no hesitation about changing it according to need, and on the other hand that Leninism was clarified retrospectively by the experience of the October Revolution. Trotsky, who embraced Leninism through the theory of permanent revolution, and separated it from the national standpoint which had led Lenin to impose democratic limitations on the struggle of the proletariat, in a sense gave Leninism its most complete theoretical expression. Lukacs achieves something similar in Lenin: by retrospectively grasping Leninism in terms of the perspective of the actuality of the revolution he leaves the ambiguities aside and takes up the basic ideas, and in doing so makes a synthetic interpretation which confirms that correctly formulated by Trotsky after October.
This is the starting point for our analysis of the underlying unity of Trotsky's thought in his analysis of the period opened up by the Russian revolution. In the 1929 preface to The Third International After Lenin, he wrote that he had not for a moment let slip the threads of the ideological heritage of communism. This was not simply a 'moral' stance: it meant that 'objective conditions' on a national and international scale made it possible in practice to carry out the Bolshevik programme. 'Trotskyism' was neither a 'romantic myth' nor a 'symbol' as Nicolas Krasso writes. Still less was it the expression of a 'rosy optimism', but rather the true understanding of the nature of the historical epoch opened [illegible].
II. THE AGE OF PERMANENT REVOLUTION
'The present epoch is the epoch of the disintegration and collapse of the entire capitalist world system, which will drag the whole of European civilisation down with it if capitalism with its insoluble contradictions is not destroyed.' [28]
This was the objective basis for the foundation of the Third International. It was not simply a conjunctural analysis, the political expression of the ruin of the capitalist economy brought about by the war, but the theoretical framework within which to view the new historical epoch beginning with the October Revolution. 'Socialism or barbarism' was not a catastrophist perspective, but the fundamental tendency of the epoch, signifying that the most urgent task of the period was the preparation of the revolutionary forces and their vanguard for the resolution of the contradictions in which capitalism was rotting. It did not mean, as Lukacs explains, that capitalism could no longer find any 'purely economic' way out; 'For capitalism, then, expedients can certainly be thought of in and for themselves. Whether they can be put into practice depends however on the proletariat... Admittedly, the fact that the proletariat obtains power at that moment is due to the "natural laws" governing the economic process. But these "natural laws" only determine the crisis itself, giving it dimensions which frustrate the "peaceful" advance of capitalism. However, if left to develop (along capitalist lines) they would not lead to the simple downfall of capitalism or to a smooth transition to socialism. They would lead over a long period of crises, civil wars and imperialist wars on an ever-increasing scale to the "mutual destruction of the opposing classes" and to a new barbarism.' [29]
The International called on the world proletariat to take on the decisive struggle against the imperialist conspiracy of capital, for the International Republic of Workers' Soviets. This was no voluntarist slogan: even though the capitalist system had obtained a respite following the failure of the European insurrections, the struggle for world socialist revolution was still the only correct political perspective, as the contradictions of capitalism were bound to grow more acute. The October Revolution was only meaningful and legitimate in the context of the general failure of the capitalist system, and represented the first victorious attempt to subvert it. The building of socialism in Russia could only be undertaken once the enemy had been beaten and the first objective, the overthrow of capitalism, reached — at least in the most advanced countries. It was Pyatakov who declared, at the end of 1917, that the fate of the Russian proletariat depended completely on the advance of revolution in the West, and that the phase of permanent revolution had now begun. The revolution was permanent because the international development of the productive forces was 'ripe', and it was permanent in Russia because the building of socialism there depended on the course of world revolution. The world party of the proletariat was now the decisive element of the epoch.
The self-development of the productive forces had led to the October Revolution and the general crisis of the capitalist system. There was no longer any such thing as absolute economic determinism: mankind was moving from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. As Lukacs wrote: 'What is novel in the present situation is merely — merely!! that the blind forces of capitalist economics are driving society towards the abyss. The bourgeoisie no longer has the power to help society, after a few false starts, to break the "deadlock" brought about by its economic laws. And the proletariat has the opportunity to turn events in another direction by the conscious exploitation of existing trends. To desire this consciously is to desire the "realm of freedom" and to take the first conscious step towards its realisation.' [30]
It was now possible to overthrow the capitalist relationship of politics to economics on an international scale. The October Revolution only began the concrete realisation of this task, and for the first time signalled the leap from pre-history to a history made by humanity. It was the first concretisation of Engels' formula in Anti-Duhring whereby: 'The laws of his own social activity which have hitherto confronted him as external, dominating laws of nature, will then be applied by man with complete understanding, and hence will be dominated by man.' But in Russia itself, until the revolution was carried throughout the world, this task could only be begun. The basic task was that of stimulating the world revolution and only with that perspective of 'holding on' in Russia.
Capitalism had reached the stage of embarking on a phase of long term stagnation; which is not to say that there was absolutely no possibility of development of the productive forces within it. It meant that relative to the possibilities of rational development into a planned economy, the forces of production had stopped growing. This was the theoretical framework of Trotsky's tireless struggle against Stalinism; and even after the failure of the struggles of the European proletariat in 1919-1920, there was never any ground for doubting it.
1. Holding on until the appearance of the generalised socialist revolution
The question at stake is not whether Russia is able, with her own resources, to build socialism. For Marxism there is no such question.' So Trotsky wrote in 1929. But the war had not resulted in the victory of the revolutionary forces in the West: in particular the German revolution, in which the Bolsheviks had placed all their hopes, was defeated. The European proletariat was driven into a retreat of indeterminate duration, leaving Soviet Russia to her own devices. The problem was now that of maintaining proletarian power in an isolated country; and most of the old Bolsheviks proved unable to accept that without a revolution in the advanced countries, the first dictatorship of the proletariat was doomed. The theory of socialism in one country appeared to be the answer to an actual situation, while the failure of revolution in Europe was similarly taken as evidence that it was impossible. Yet they had all accepted that capitalism itself had broken national frontiers, which were now incompatible with the development of the productive forces. A national economy would therefore be a step backwards relative to the development of the international division of labour within capitalism. Moreover a proletarian revolution had come about in Russia not because the economy was ripe for socialism, but because it could no longer develop along capitalist lines in the same way as the economies of the advanced countries. An essentially peasant country, Russia in isolation did not possess the material prerequisites of socialism. It could even be said that Russia was the least suitable country for building socialism, with a rate of growth incomparably lower than that of the European countries, let alone the United States. In The Third International after Lenin, Trotsky wrote that because the Russian proletariat [illegible] in the last analysis the limits of the socialist transformation were determined by economic and political conditions at a world level. However great the enthusiasm of a country, it was not possible to overtake the whole globe. As Lenin said, the complete victory of the socialist revolution required at least the collaboration of several of the advanced countries, together with Russia.
The need for a strong injection of capitalism, which became apparent towards the end of 1920, was the first solid evidence that the dictatorship of the proletariat would have to accept major retreats in order to survive in a capitalist environment. This did not mean throwing away the basis of a socialist society, only that such a state of society could not be attained as long as the proletarian revolution was not extended into the advanced capitalist countries.
In his work on the Russian peasantry during the great left turn of 1928-1930, Moshe Lewin explains that the New Economic Policy was the first result of the incompatibility of the interests of the two allies of the revolution. October had combined the democratic agrarian and proletarian socialist revolutions, the peasantry following the Bolsheviks as their liberators. Their only interest, however, was to complete the destruction of serfdom; but isolation and the civil war forced the Bolsheviks to take the class struggle into the village too soon, and immediately take radical measures. The alliance was heavily compromised, and there was a separation of the two sides of the revolution which threw the regime into a crisis situation. The worsening standard of living of the peasantry convinced them that the disadvantages of a revolution outweighed the gains. After the seizure of power it was necessary for the Bolsheviks, while they still hoped for the imminent victory of the European proletariat, to undertake the reorganisation of the country. But they soon had to give up the attempt to introduce a socialist economy by degrees, initially through workers control of production. Lenin wrote that it was hunger that obliged them to take a 'purely communist' action, establishing straightforwardly communist relations of production, requisitioning agricultural produce and taking steps against the kulaks. But the Bolsheviks allowed themselves to go too far in this; while the appalling difficulties and hardships of the war left the military course as the only possible solution to economic problems, Lenin noted that they went further than was theoretically or politically desirable.
The political error of thinking that socialism could at once be built in Russia was to be explained by the fact that the European insurrections had not yet been crushed; the Bolsheviks still counted on the forthcoming support of the Western proletariat. Their failure was the first concrete confirmation of the impossibility of building socialism in one country, as the Bolsheviks were forced to do in the extremely critical situations thrust upon them. It had been necessary to sign the Brest-Litovsk treaty in order to maintain Soviet power. Now that the world revolution had been set back, the demands of the internal ally of the dictatorship had to be satisfied, to avoid at any cost a break with the countryside which would be the death-knell of the regime. But re-establishing a free market for the surplus production of the peasantry meant reviving capitalist social differentiation, and even raised the spectre of dual power. Lenin argued that without satisfying the economic needs of the middle peasants and allowing free exchange, it would be economically impossible to maintain proletarian power in Russia; the problem was whether the peasantry would accept the lead of the proletariat in its endeavour to build socialism, or that of the capitalists calling on them to turn back from the dangers of socialism. While Russia remained isolated, the most that could be achieved through political power was somehow to prevent the transition towards socialism — cut short by war communism — from being turned back along the capitalist road. The economic policy of the early years of the revolution had failed to stimulate the development of the productive forces which was its most urgent task. The measures the Bolsheviks had been forced to take, the sacrifices they had been obliged to exact from the workers, had cut them off from the social base of 'their' power. The 'immediate construction of socialism' had to be abandoned in favour of the primitive accumulation Russia required as the material basis for socialism. They had to provide the prerequisites elsewhere supplied by capitalism itself on their own and in the most difficult conditions; and they had to avoid a break with the peasantry, now the obsession of the regime.
For the first time the class holding political power was the producing class, and the workings of the economy were in principle no longer independent of the will of social classes as in the capitalist mode of production. The class in power became the conscious instigator of economic development. In The New Economics, Preobrazhensky wrote, 'as, in the sphere of economic reality, the commodity of the capitalist mode of production is replaced in the planned economy by the product, value by the measurement of labour time, the market (in its capacity as the sphere in which the law of value manifests itself) by the book-keeping of planned economy, surplus value by surplus product, so in the sphere of science, political economy gives place to social technology, that is, the science of socially organised production.' What characterised the phase of transition which began in Russia with the NEP was the conflict between the law of value and the planning principle within a single economic organism, in the form which Preobrazhensky put forward as a new law of economics, the law of primitive socialist accumulation. From Russia's need to go through a phase of primitive accumulation similar in principle if not in form to that of the capitalist mode of production, he once more drew economic determinist conclusions of the kind developed by Marx, and did so moreover on a national level. The implication of his book was that such a task could be carried out by an isolated workers state, and in this respect he did not have such great differences with the theory of socialism in one country. His support for Stalin, whom he saw as the instrument of new economic needs, was therefore implicit in his work on the new economics. His position on economics led him to conceive of state policy as nothing but the result of the struggle between the two economic systems coexisting in NEP, a dangerously mechanistic way of viewing the problem.
Economic constraints would of course only disappear in classless society, with the withering away of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Trotsky was well aware that Russia had a combined economy, which placed certain limits on political power; but this was in no sense the kind of economic determinism operating in the capitalist mode of production. Once again, it seems that it was no accident that Trotsky did not write economic theory. Even during the transitional period, economic problems were directly political. Preobrazhensky's 'error' was perhaps that he tried to do for this new period of history what Marx had done for capitalism. There was of course an economic struggle in Russia, and one of the two sectors would have to triumph, but the final victory would in the last analysis depend on the strategy of the ruling power. The greatest possible development of the state sector must be ensured, so that the national capitalist sector, at whose expense primitive accumulation was to take place, could be rapidly re-absorbed. Trotsky therefore supported Preobrazhensky against Bukharin's unconditional peasant policy. Although he tended to let the costs of primitive accumulation fall much more heavily on the working class than did Preobrazhensky, he understood that they must so far as possible be able to appropriate the surplus of the private sector, in other words of the peasantry. But he refused to accept all the implications of Preobrazhensky's problematic, to imagine that Russia's economic problems could be solved by autarchy, and above all to restrict theory to the alternative of isolation. Preobrazhensky, viewing the development of the productive forces in a national perspective, was repeating Lenin's mistake of 1898. In 1929 Trotsky wrote that the economic problems of the Soviet republic more than ever called for a political solution. This was the basis of the struggle he conducted in the Left Opposition from 1923 onwards. His economic strategy is summed up in the three basic themes of industrialisation, the gradual collectivisation of the rural economy, and a single plan for the whole economy. He was conscious that the economic problems expressed in conflicts of varying intensity between the proletariat and peasantry had serious repercussions on the social composition of the party and on its policy. But until the Opposition was completely decimated, he refused to regard this as the inevitable corollary of 'objective conditions'. He always stressed that the Stalinists had a share in the political responsibility for the 'stabilisation' of Western capitalism, which intensified still further the internal contradictions of the Soviet regime. He wrote on the twelfth anniversary of the October Revolution that the basic causes of the contradictions within Russia stemmed from the objective situation of an economically backward country forced to be the first to undertake the dictatorship of the proletariat and the building of socialism, and above all from the fact that Russia was cut off from the international division of labour; though it was nonetheless true that the secondary causes included the incorrect policies of a leadership under the influence of the petty bourgeoisie, incapable of taking the situation in hand and making use of the economic and political resources of the dictatorship. Trotsky's economic strategy was not in the least idealist, nor as Nicolas Krasso asserts, a 'purely theoretical' solution. Still less was it demagogic, as Trotsky's economic perspectives required much greater effort from the working masses than Stalin's before 1927. Had they been applied in time they would undoubtedly have prevented many mistakes, especially the brutal liquidation of the NEP carried out by Stalin in 1928.
In 1923, faced with the acute problem of the 'scissors' between agricultural and industrial prices, Trotsky wrote that the only solution to the danger of a rupture with the peasantry was to speed up industrialisation: a turn to the countryside did not mean turning one's back on industry, but turning industry to the countryside, for the peasants had little to hope for from a state deprived of industry. Only industrialisation, and a single plan for the whole economy, would make it possible to replace NEP by a new, socialist economic policy. Bukharin, in encouraging peasant prosperity, blinded himself to the fact that his policy went against his avowed intention of preserving the alliance at all costs. Finding that the State, as a client, was not responsive to their immediate interests, the peasantry stored up their corn or got rid of it on the open market. Bukharin's policy only aggravated the problem of preserving the alliance. This was the real meaning of the need for a fair economic policy, which could be adapted to the economic process as a whole without being at its mercy. Instead of adopting a general economic plan which would not impose absolute constraints but would harmonise production and allow for necessary corrective measures, Stalin and his allies of the moment chose the perspective of building socialism in one country, at a snail's pace if necessary, though time was of the essence. Isolation reduced the combined [illegible] of the October Revolution to the problematic of the socialist or the capitalist road. Trotsky and Bukharin were at either political extreme emerging from the October Revolution, Trotsky struggling to maintain and consolidate the position of the proletariat, Bukharin becoming the spokesman within the party for the reactionary forces produced by NEP, despite his avowed intention of leading the peasantry gradually towards socialism.
[illegible] in 1925 that Trotsky raised the question of the writers and politicians who saw NEP as proof of the impossibility of a socialist type of economy. He showed that the economic results demonstrated the superiority of the state sector over the private sector, while pointing out the political measures which would be necessary to maintain such a balance. He did not consider it theoretically excluded that capitalism might be restored, but this could only be as [illegible] greater development in agriculture in state industry. Bukharin had unilaterally declared for the peasantry, saying that the kulaks themselves must be involved in the socialist reorganisation of the economy through economic competition between the state and private sectors. He denounced Trotsky as a 'super-industrialiser', who scorned the demands and interests of the peasantry — surely a constant element of 'Trotskyism', as his polemics with Lenin before the revolution showed? — and who wanted to liquidate the NEP. Trotsky in fact never opposed the NEP, and saw the need for it long before it was initiated as he patrolled the front in the civil war; he was simply concerned not to open the door to the economic and political hegemony of the peasantry over the proletariat.
Bukharin aimed, by gaining an exact knowledge of market conditions and by taking the correct economic measures, to bring state industry into harmony with agriculture in line with a prepared plan. He failed. The peasantry had only profound distrust for a regime which could not provide the goods they needed. The party, whose rural units they had taken over for their own ends, and which had unwittingly become the agent of their economic development, proved incapable of fully satisfying them, and was soon faced with the major crisis of 1928. Radical measures were required against the peasantry's 'spontaneous Bukharinism', which had the support of the right wing of the party. The economic measures advocated by the Left Opposition were taken over in their entirety. Without any political preparation, and without the necessary material basis, the collectivisation of all the means of production was imposed on the peasantry, together with forced industrialisation on the working class. The result was an enormous wastage of the productive forces. From being a 'Menshevik in economics', Stalin took an abrupt ultraleft course, aiming to 'catch up with and overtake' the advanced capitalist countries in a very short space of time on the basis of a completely unachievable maximalist programme. The situation was certainly saved, but if Trotsky saw Stalin's new economic policy as the confirmation of the positions of the Left Opposition in that respect, he refused to follow many of his supporters in capitulating to it. The party had been confronted with a fait accompli, and the campaign against 'Trotskyism' became all the more virulent the more Stalin adopted its economic theses. There had to be an understanding of the change in which Stalin, controlling as he did the party and state apparatus, was able simply to throw over the previous perspective of building socialism at a snail's pace. There had to be a denunciation of the incorrect theory of the liquidation of the private sector as crossing the threshold to socialism.
The Platform of the Left Opposition had never advocated the brutal elimination of NEP, but its gradual disappearance and the extension of the state sector. Above all, economic measures were not distinct from political measures, and 'Trotskyist' economic policy was based on the restoration of proletarian democracy. The Left Opposition argued that only the co-ordination of the three axes of state planning, the market, and soviet democracy could ensure that the economy would be properly run during the transitional period. While it would be utopian to imagine that imbalances could be rectified within a few years, they would be diminished and the bases of the dictatorship of the proletariat simplified until the time when new revolutionary victories would widen the arena of socialist planning and reconstruct the system. This is why Trotsky did not recognise his own work in the distorting mirror of the new Stalinist policy. He looked for the basic causes of it and found them in the nature of the party. The co-existence on a world scale of the capitalist mode of production and an embryonic socialist economy was reproduced within Russia in the fact that the law of value governing the capitalist system had still not been replaced by the planned production of use values. Trotsky and the Left Opposition were engaged in a struggle to prevent the autonomy of politics from being too drastically curtailed by it. Stalin, having subordinated his policy to capitalist development in agriculture, then violated the course of economic development with political measures directly opposed to those he had previously taken in line with Bukharin's thinking. He never really understood the relationship between politics and 'objective conditions', and therefore always swung between opportunism and adventurism in national and international politics. The degeneration of the party and the state apparatus gave the Stalinist faction absolute power, and political power was completely separated from the base of the dictatorship. Passing out of the control of the working class, it became exposed to the influence of the petty bourgeoisie and at the mercy of their ambitions. At the same time, as the aspirations of the petty bourgeoisie came to be incompatible with the interests of the ruling caste, this caste was obliged to turn against its previous base. The relationship between economics and politics established by Stalinism was not dialectical but mechanical, and it is for this reason that Stalin was able simply to take over the economic positions of the Left Opposition wholesale, without also taking the concomitant political measures [illegible]. The [illegible] which remains is to establish why the Opposition was defeated. Trotsky's explanation of the 1928 left turn was the only valid one, and it made it impossible for him to support Stalin. The apparatus, becoming [illegible] bureaucratic, [illegible] and the bureaucracy, divorced from proletarian control, had turned for support to the kulaks who in the early period ensured the development of the productive forces necessary to the survival of the regime. It had turned the party into the unconscious agent of the capitalist development of the [illegible], which had turned the Communist units in the countryside to their own use. But the deepest roots [illegible] of the bureaucracy lay in the state sector, and therefore with the working class. The ambitions of the kulaks, driving the regime to make more and more concessions, therefore had to be curbed. Bukharin had even begun to speak of a neo-NEP. Hence Stalin's left turn, which ensured that at the cost of innumerable unnecessary sacrifices, as Trotsky [illegible], the basic gains of October were preserved. The phenomenon of the bureaucracy is the key element in Trotsky's understanding of the nature and direction of Stalinist policy. It enabled him further to understand why [illegible] Stalin was defeated. A new problem then came up: how had the wheel turned so far in favour of the bureaucracy that Stalin was able to take over the economic positions of the Left Opposition without restoring party democracy?
This reveals the basic weakness of Trotsky's political practice in the years 1923-1930. It is easy to declare after the event that Trotsky's programme was unrealistic, since it was never realised. It is incorrect to counterpose Stalin's 'realism', as Krasso does, to Trotsky's utopianism; it is in any case no argument against his positions to say that he 'paid dearly' for his views. He made certain political mistakes, but in a sense these tend rather to prove that his programme could have been carried out. The basis of Trotsky's political practice was that he never separated political and economic problems, hence his position that in the last analysis everything depended on having the right political line. It was not that Stalin, as some say, made a few 'mistakes' of varying enormity; his whole political line was wrong. It was because Trotsky always approached Russian problems as an Internationalist that he alone was able to analyse the basis of the 'objective conditions' impeding the socialist transformation of the USSR. We now turn to analyse the development of Trotsky's problematic of the bureaucracy in this light.
2. Trotsky and the course of history
The proletariat, Engels said, takes state power and makes the means of production state property. But by this act it ceases to be a proletariat, and [illegible] the dictatorship of the proletariat is no more than a state form whose nature is to perish or wither away.
But just as the reorganisation of the economy and the building of socialist society can only be completed on an [illegible], the perpetuation of the isolation of Soviet Russia had created a new situation for which the Bolsheviks were unprepared. The dictatorship had to be strengthened in order to preserve the regime against the assault of imperialism. But must it become the 'unprecedented instrument of coercion' which Stalin made it? Twenty years after the October Revolution, Trotsky wrote that even in the loftiest flights of fancy it would be difficult to find a more striking contrast than that between Marx, Engels and Lenin's concept of a workers state and that of which Stalin was the head. What part did 'objective conditions' play in this degeneration, and how much was due to political mistakes? Was Trotsky doomed by the 'course of history' to be no more than a 'prophet unarmed', tending to put forward abstract perspectives, unable to influence the course of events — and more importantly still, was the rise of [illegible] his theories? [illegible], in The Revolution Betrayed, 'during the first ten years of its struggle, the Left Opposition did not abandon the programme of ideological conquest of the party for that of conquest of power against the party. Its slogan was: reform not revolution. The bureaucracy, however, even in those times, was ready for any revolution in order to defend itself against a democratic reform. In 1927, when the struggle reached an especially bitter stage, Stalin declared at a session of the Central Committee, addressing himself to the Opposition: "Those cadres can be removed only by civil war!" What was a threat in Stalin's words became, thanks to a series of defeats of the European [illegible] a fact. The road of reform was turned into a road of revolution.' Such was Trotsky's view of the evolution of the dictatorship of the proletariat under Stalin's leadership. He came to believe that the struggle of the Opposition had been a hopeless one, since if the revolution was not extended into the world arena on a proletarian basis, it would inevitably begin to retreat behind national boundaries on a bureaucratic basis. In determining whether such a view contradicted what he had at first thought, the fact that the Opposition failed is in the last analysis secondary. The question here is whether that failure stemmed from a theoretical error, and whether it casts doubt on the principles underlying his analysis of the inter-war period.
Deutscher and Moshe Lewin, who differ in their analysis of the possibilities facing the Soviet regime after 1923, reach similar conclusions about the possibilities for Trotsky. According to Deutscher, the Bolsheviks were caught during Lenin's illness in a contradiction which even he would have found insoluble. The revolution in the West had failed, and the old Bolsheviks refused to accept that this might mean the condemnation of their own revolution. Retreating into its national shell, the Soviet Union would have had to establish an 'iron dictatorship' in order to survive, the more so because the proletariat had been decimated by the war and the building of the state and party apparatus. Theoretically, it might as Trotsky claimed have been possible to restore the democratic source of the dictatorship without endangering the regime, but in fact the tendency to make the party substitute for the proletariat proved irreversible. Lenin struggled to maintain the balance between democracy and dictatorship, but, as Deutscher puts it, the tendency was too strong for him, and could not be reversed, let alone eliminated. Had Lenin lived longer, he would have had to choose; but the working class could not provide sufficient democratic support to enable the party to undertake the restoration of proletarian democracy. Lenin would himself have become an autocrat; and after his death Stalin was the man of the hour. Moshe Lewin's conclusion is more subtle: more correctly, he stresses that the choice was not between democracy and dictatorship but between the type of dictatorship Lenin might have been able to establish and that which Stalin actually installed. But in the last analysis he agrees with Deutscher. Had Lenin lived, he writes in Lenin's Last Struggle, he would have been able to establish 'a rational dictatorial regime, with men of integrity at its head and efficient institutions working consciously to go beyond both underdevelopment and dictatorship' — by no means a utopian goal in itself. He would not have won at one blow, but 'what may be said with certainty is that he would have done his utmost to combat the processes that were to make the Stalinist period what it was'. He would have struggled tirelessly against '"administrative methods"', and the insufficiency of the bureaucracy, and against Russian nationalism', which had combined in the Georgian affair to show him the extent of the infirmity of party and State. Trotsky on his own could not carry on this struggle; says Lewin: 'He succumbed to a fetishisation of the party, to a certain legalism and to scruples that paralysed him and prevented him from reacting unhesitatingly, as Lenin would have done, to what his enemies were doing against him.' With Lenin dead, Stalin's victory was assured.
It is true that Trotsky was silent at the decisive moment. He did not wish to endanger party unity by provoking a split which would have been catastrophic for the future of the regime, given the difficulties of the period. Lenin, on the other hand, would not have hesitated to unleash the thunderbolt he had prepared against Stalin, which could have changed the course of history. Trotsky accepted that in the last analysis the party was always right, being the only instrument the working class had to carry out its historic tasks, and he bowed to the verdict of the Stalinists, who took advantage of the respite he gave them by declaring that he would not demand Stalin's dismissal if he changed his policy. The question is whether this constitutes proof that he slid back into the same view of party unity that made him, prior to the revolution, the objective ally of the Mensheviks; that he had not understood the Leninist theory of organisation. 'Subjective' problems aside (Trotsky did not have Lenin's prestige with the Old Guard, who still regarded him as an upstart in the Bolshevik Party; and he refused to have anything to do with Stalin's intrigues), Trotsky does seem to have made some mistakes in tactics and assessment; but they do not lead to the conclusion that he had failed to assimilate Lenin's organisational principles. In the 'obscure turn' (to use Victor Serge's expression) which was to decide the fate of the dictatorship, it was necessary to see beyond the internecine party struggle to the social forces it reflected, and it was in this respect that Trotsky was weak. He had still not assessed Stalin's importance, nor gone to the roots of the bureaucratisation of the party and State he was carrying out. This is not to say that objective conditions inevitably dragged the regime down into Stalinism; but without measuring the deep-rooted nature of the phenomenon of bureaucracy — which Lenin himself said he had not had enough time to study — Trotsky could not develop a policy to reverse the process which was to drive him out. Trotsky, like Lenin, thought it possible to reorganise the party from within; but they only saw the external manifestations of the bureaucratisation of State and party, and therefore thought energetic measures would be sufficient. The reorganisation had to go much deeper. The setback to the revolution made this an extremely difficult task, but it was not impossible. At the end of his life Lenin understood that Trotsky was right over economic strategy, and that the single plan he had at first rejected as utopian and unnecessary would in the present situation be an indispensable means of struggling against the degeneration of the regime, as the strengthening of industry and control over capitalist development would make it possible to strengthen the position of the proletariat in the economy and in the party. In this sense political and economic measures were as one to Trotsky. The regenerated dictatorship of the proletariat alone could carry out the economic tasks, and this would be the best guarantee of the possibility of restoring proletarian democracy.
Trotsky's policy after the death of Lenin was not then a 'moral' one intended only to preserve the theoretical gains of Bolshevism. Trotsky's proposals were part of a strategy applied to Russian conditions, and theoretically justified as such. Trotsky struggled untiringly against Stalin, although he let slip the moment at which a correction of the political line could have led to a more rational construction of the foundations of socialism. Trotsky's analyses of the Soviet state between 1923 and 1936 may seem contradictory: for example, in elaborating a new strategy (that of the Fourth International) for the world revolution and the Soviet Union, he seemed to discount the previous struggle of the Opposition, not because of its tactical errors, but because the objective conditions allowed the bureaucracy to take power. He blamed the international situation and the actions of the bureaucracy for this defeat. In explaining Stalin's victory in The Revolution Betrayed he wrote: 'A political struggle is in its essence a struggle of interests and forces, not of arguments. The quality of the leadership is, of course, far from a matter of indifference for the outcome of the conflict, but it is not the only factor, and in the last analysis is not decisive.' In the battle of 1923-1928 the Opposition, which 'more truly foresaw' the processes taking place, was defeated by a less clear-sighted faction, Stalin being only the spokesman for the all-powerful interests of the bureaucracy. 'It would be naive to imagine that Stalin, previously unknown to the masses, suddenly issued from the wings fully armed with a complete strategical plan. No indeed. Before he felt out his own course, the bureaucracy felt out Stalin himself.' Trotsky adds: 'The new ruling caste soon revealed its own ideas, feelings and, more important, its interests.' Had Lenin lived longer, he could only have contained the tide of bureaucracy, but it is doubtful whether he could long have withstood the current of history. Trotsky here seems to be putting forward Deutscher's position; but what was 'the course of history' in his view?
The defeat of the Left Opposition and the constant deterioration of the Stalinist regime in Russia induced Trotsky to go back to the basis of his analysis of the Soviet state. The ambiguity in his thinking lies in the fact that he had no evaluation of his own share in the responsibility for the evolution of the regime. Nonetheless, it was true that the process of degeneration of the State and the party had gone too far to be corrected from within. Trotsky's analysis of the historical origins of what he perhaps misleadingly called the 'Soviet Thermidor' shows an understanding that 'objective conditions' had been much more decisive in framing Stalinist policy than he had thought up to 1927. He considered that the social process the Opposition had tried to fight had been much too strong for them to succeed. But nonetheless there was a political solution to the Soviet problem, and therefore the general theoretical framework of his approach to the domestic situation in Russia and the international situation was not in question. What had to be analysed was the nature and basis of the 'objective conditions' which had in the end determined his failure. He could not simply proceed on the same lines of analysis, but was forced to re-examine the basis of the problem and make a more thorough study of the bureaucratic phenomenon. Constantly developing his analysis of the internal and the international situation, he came to change the orientation of his political perspectives, though only after weighing their implications for a long time.
The Platform of the Left Opposition had drawn up in a programme the ideas advanced by Trotsky in 1923 and the need for a new party orientation. With the end of the civil war, the party embarked on a new historical period which made the old party methods obsolete, for it had come of necessity to substitute itself for the proletariat, and establish what Moshe Lewin calls a 'dictatorship in the void'. In peacetime, measures which were indispensable to war communism could be harmful; and the basic sources of bureaucratisation were the authority the Old Guard wished to preserve unchallenged, the infiltration of the administrative methods of the state apparatus into the party, and its unfavourable social composition. The 'Bolshevik tradition' did not arm the Old Guard against deviations and conservatism; and the only guarantee against both bureaucracy and factionalism, as well as the only way of avoiding deviations in a party forced to monopolise political life, was the gradual restoration of inner-party democracy, for the party had come to be divided in two between those who decided and those who carried out decisions. This was all the more necessary when the reintroduction of capitalism revived social differentiation and gave rise to social interests which were not easily reconciled. In 1927 the deformation of the party was much worse, but the Opposition was still confident that it could be combatted without endangering party unity. It was however too late to restore the party from within, either from above as Lenin intended, by purging and reorganising the apparatus, or from below, by proletarianising the party and its leading bodies. The working class remained indifferent to the storms shaking the party, and the grip of bureaucracy was too tight. The strategy had to be changed, and the Opposition had to find a way out of the impasse in which it had become the prisoner of party discipline. A new course had to be found, but for Trotsky there were certain theoretical prerequisites. The problem was no longer whether it was possible to struggle against the bureaucracy by vigorous inner-party measures, but the class nature of the Soviet state, and what that implied for the kind of fight to be waged.
Trotsky set himself to discover the basic reason for the disjuncture between principles and reality, for the bureaucracy's triumph not just over the Opposition but over Lenin's programme and party; and how the 'tail of the revolution' had proved more weighty than its head. The Soviet state, as a bridge between capitalism and socialism, was of a dual nature: 'socialist' in so far as it defended the collective appropriation of the means of production, and 'bourgeois' in so far as the distribution of goods was organised according to capitalist standards of value, with all the consequences that entailed. Such a 'bourgeois state without a bourgeoisie' proved incompatible with authentic soviet democracy. It was able to defend socialist ownership against the attacks by the counter-revolutionary forces, but failed to resolve the problem of inequality in consumption. If the State, instead of withering away, became more and more despotic, and the representatives of the working class more and more bureaucratic, it was, said Trotsky, because of the unfailing need to maintain a privileged minority so long as real equality could not be secured. The more backward the society, the more inevitable the process. Marx himself had written that without the development of the productive forces, the indispensable base of communism, there would only be socialisation of want, and the old evils would reappear. Purely political inner-party measures against 'bureaucratic deformations', advocated first by Lenin and then by the Left Opposition, could only have been carried out in the context of international revolution; in isolation, the main problem was the backwardness of the country. The truce social democracy had granted the bourgeoisie, together with the policy of the Stalinist International, had created a new historical period, and the State was strengthened to guarantee the privileges of the ruling social caste. 'The bureaucracy struck while the iron was hot, exploiting the bewilderment and passivity of the workers, setting their more backward strata against the advanced, and relying more and more boldly upon the kulak and the petty bourgeois ally in general. In the course of a few years, the bureaucracy thus shattered the revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat.'
The basic historical reason for the failure of the Opposition and the aggravation of the contradiction between the spheres of production and distribution was therefore the setback of the world revolution. Because Trotsky never abandoned internationalism, he did not fall into either the positions of those who turned their backs on the Soviet Union when it fell short of their 'norms', to become the disenchanted peddlars of bourgeois 'pessimism' about the impossibility of socialism; or the positions of those who abstained from all sacrilegious criticism or ended by supporting Stalin, on the grounds that the Soviet state was the product of the October Revolution. He was able to attack Stalin's political line without erring on the side of fatalism, or revisionism, which produced the deviant theory of socialism in one country. His writings are the only Marxist interpretation of the process which took Soviet Russia so far from the 'ideal' of classless society: the Stalinist theoreticians, for their part, slid into deeper and deeper contradictions.
In 1926, the Smirnov group took the position that the Soviet Thermidor was complete: industrial backwardness, the rise of the kulaks and the Nepmen, and their links with those in power, together with the degeneration of the party, had gone so far that after the crushing of the Opposition there was no possibility of returning to a socialist course without a new revolution. In 1926 Trotsky rejected this: Thermidor was a threat, a possibility, but had not yet arrived. In the 1930s, he said that Thermidor had begun in 1924, and a new kind of bonapartism was now emerging. This was not in fact so contradictory as it seems: what the Smirnov group meant was a return to capitalism, which they said was well underway with Bukharin's right course. Trotsky never abandoned the position that there was no more possibility of a peaceful return to capitalism than there was of a peaceful road to socialism: bureaucratic power would not 'grow over' into bourgeois power without violent counter-revolution, and to say that the Soviet state had gradually turned into a bourgeois state was simply winding the film of reformism backwards.
In what sense was there then a Thermidor? In the historical analogy of France in 1794, the power emerging from the revolution shifted to the right; but it was not a counter-revolution, as the development of the productive forces within capitalism was only just beginning, and it was necessary for the bourgeoisie to consolidate political power. Thermidor was an advance in the dictatorship of capital, not a return to feudalism. It was a mistake to see the right turn of 1924-1926 as a counter-revolution. But the 'Soviet Thermidor' was a highly ambiguous term. The reaction which began with the rise to power of the bureaucracy was not simply a shift to the right; the economic and social base was quite different, and Trotsky realised that the analogy had only obscured the debate. The Soviet Thermidor only represented reaction within the economic and social framework produced by the revolution. If there had not been a return to capitalism — and Stalin's left turn confirmed that there had not — what was the nature of the political and social regime of the USSR?
Despite a monstrous bureaucratic degeneration, Trotsky argued, the Soviet state was still the historical instrument of the working class, as it ensured that the economy and culture would develop on the basis of the nationalisation of the means of production, and prepared the conditions for a real emancipation of the workers by the liquidation of the bureaucracy and of social inequality. By developing the productive forces on the basis of the collective appropriation of the means of production, and so strengthening the proletariat, the bureaucracy was digging its own grave. The revolution which was now inevitable in the USSR would therefore be a political and not a social revolution, as socialist relations of production were already in existence. The bureaucracy was based on the backwardness and isolation of the country, the product of the social contradictions between the town and countryside, between proletariat and peasantry, Soviet economy and the capitalist environment; it had overcome these contradictions by climbing up on the backs of the masses to ensure its own political domination, but its very power was based on the relations of production resulting from October. Stalin had been able to exploit the internal divisions of the bureaucracy and make himself dictator, but his dictatorship did not negate the dictatorship of the proletariat. In spite of the economic success of the state sector, the bureaucracy remained the product of contradictions peculiar to the transitional period in an isolated, backward state. To the extent that the basic gains of October had after all been preserved it could not be said that the dictatorship of the proletariat was moribund. The bureaucracy had expropriated the proletariat politically, but without attacking the basis of proletarian power, which was the key point.
The dictatorship of the proletariat therefore found a distorted but undeniable reflection in the dictatorship of the bureaucracy. This was only one of the manifestations of the law of the uneven development of history. The dictatorship of the proletariat should have secured the real political rule of that class, by effecting as much participation as possible in the affairs of state. Unforeseen historical circumstances had given it a new, equally unforeseen form. There was no call for 'Kantianism' or holding that the dictatorship of the proletariat had only existed in its 'purest form' in the Paris Commune and in Russia before Brest-Litovsk. The bourgeois tasks had to be faced even more than in the early years of the revolution. The dictatorship of the proletariat could not be examined through the lens of idealism. The facts had to be correctly interpreted: to say that the restoration of capitalism had begun in the USSR would mean that the bureaucracy was a new incarnation of the bourgeoisie. A class is defined in relation to the means of production; and the economic regime of the USSR was not state capitalism, since the forces of production in Russia had been developed by socialist means. Classes are defined not only by the distribution of the national income, but by their independent role in the general structure of the economy. The bureaucracy did not own the means of production: indissolubly bound up with the economically dominant class, it endured or fell with it. Only with the correct theoretical understanding of the situation was it possible to advance a correct political line. Bureaucratic rule was contradictory, creating the conditions for its own overthrow. Two kinds of outcome were possible: a return to capitalism by violent counter-revolution, or the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the fullest sense. In either case there would be an end to the bureaucracy as a privileged caste wielding political power. Stalin's policy clearly aided the possibility of a victory for the forces of capitalism, but the situation was not yet desperate. The issue must be argued in terms of historical perspectives, not catastrophism. Above all the international situation had to be taken into account in the working out of a theoretically and politically correct strategy. The removal of the monstrous excrescence of the bureaucracy involved a dual task: the creation of a revolutionary Marxist party in the USSR, since the Russian CP had become a police organisation in the pay of Stalin and was now an impediment to the struggle; and above all, the creation of a new International, the fluctuations of the Soviet regime having always been a part of the international development of the revolution. The best guarantee of the re-awakening of the Russian working class, since the grip of Stalinism had stifled its revolutionary instincts, was the victorious development of the world revolution. In 1933, Trotsky defined the essential tasks as merciless criticism of the Stalinist bureaucracy; the education of the cadre of the new International; and the regeneration of the capacity for struggle of the world proletarian vanguard. Is this further proof of Trotsky's 'sociologism', resulting in 'voluntarism' because the 'subjective' conditions of advanced political consciousness of the world proletariat were not ripe any more than they were during Trotsky's struggle in the Left Opposition? Did he not underestimate the objective basis for the stabilisation of capitalism, the apathy of the working class in Russia and throughout the world? Trotsky, like Marx before him, was wrong about the duration of the delay, but the question is whether it was for the same reasons, and whether it proves the incorrectness of his theories. It is my belief that with such arguments it is impossible to understand Stalinism and the inter-war period and, above all, the current resurgence of 'Trotskyism'. Trotsky and the Left Opposition were crushed by the political and economic dynamic which brought the Stalinist faction to power. The sombre warning against the degeneration of the party in the 1904 pamphlet had been fulfilled in a way neither Trotsky nor Stalin himself could have imagined. But the cause did not lie in either the Leninist type of organisation or the Bolshevik programme. With his understanding of that, Trotsky could offer a correct perspective even at the very height of Stalinist reaction. Above all he understood that in the last analysis the deterioration in the 'objective conditions' was rooted in the basically incorrect policy of the Stalinist International; and he therefore always refused to take the 'historical tendency' manifest in the appearance of Stalinism as inevitable, or to bow down to it.
Why the Fourth International?
'The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership.'
Nicolas Krasso takes this formulation from the Transitional Programme as flagrant proof of Trotsky's idealism and his refusal to take into account the economic, social and political problems of the 1930s. I shall endeavour to show that in fact Trotsky was well aware of these, and that the measures he advocated for re-building the vanguard did not go beyond the bounds of objective conditions. His struggle in the Fourth International does in retrospect seem as vain as the struggle of the Left Opposition in the 1920s. But it seems strange that Krasso could conclude that the struggle for a new International had no results in the Western countries, whereas Lenin's party had secured the victory of the Russian Revolution, and that Trotsky had never fully assimilated the Leninist theory of organisation. Surely it is Krasso who is forgetting 'objective conditions', which he scarcely brings into the picture here. This chapter will analyse the basic reasons for the building of a new world party of the proletariat, and show more fully Trotsky's political thought as a totality in some ways on a higher level even than Lenin's. The building of the Fourth International is the highest expression of the 'overdetermination' of politics characteristic of Trotsky's thought, from beginning to end of his writings. The Third International had been built under the banner of the revolutionary offensive. The dissolution of the capitalist economy produced by the war had to be exploited to the hilt, and the European proletariat urgently prepared for the struggle for power by the development of revolutionary leaderships which had broken from social democratic ideology, so treacherous to the workers movement during the war. The struggle for international revolution was the most important task of the first dictatorship of the proletariat, and this was the only basis for 'holding on' in Russia, since only the victory of the European proletariat would make it possible to build socialism in Soviet Russia. The International took as its task to generalise the revolutionary experience of the working class, to rid the movement of the impurities of opportunism and social patriotism, to unite the forces of all the genuinely revolutionary parties of the world proletariat, and by that very means to aid and hasten the triumph of communist revolution throughout the world. The only parties which could be admitted as sections of this world party, the international expression of Lenin's organisational principles, were workers parties which had purged their ranks of all reformists and opportunists who thought it possible to reach socialism via the parliamentary road.
The first two congresses took place in an atmosphere of expectation of the imminent triumph of the revolution. This did not mean that such a triumph was guaranteed, but that intensive work of organisation and education had to be carried out to create a strong enough vanguard to lead the revolutionary struggle and ensure the seizure of power. This had to include a constant denunciation of the reactionary illusions propagated by the social democrats, showing that there was no middle way between the dictatorship of the proletariat and bourgeois democracy, which had revealed its real nature with the assassination of Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The Third Congress, however, had to take note of a turn in the revolutionary struggle: the first insurrections had been defeated, and the bourgeoisie had sufficiently recovered from the great fear to fortify itself. A new strategy was called for, but first there was a theoretical problem to be solved: did this failure mean that the programme of the International was wrong, and was there now a new period of organic development of capital? In other words, was the defeat of the European proletariat economically determined as in 1848? If capitalism had not yet run its course, and there was room for a new growth of the productive forces, the October Revolution would in the short term be doomed by economic necessity because it had taken place in advance of the decisive decline of the capitalist system of production. But if in the last analysis the reason for the crushing of the European insurrections was political, the direct attack on imperialism would have to be abandoned in favour of the preparation of future struggles, though without it being necessary to revise the basic premises of the activity of the International. Such was the choice. Lenin never saw it as the 'building of socialism in one country' in a capitalist environment. It was within this theoretical framework that Trotsky undertook the construction of the Fourth International: the capitalist system was in its death agony, and it was up to the proletariat to put an end to it under penalty of disappearing with it in an unprecedented world cataclysm. The basic task was therefore the education of the working masses and the construction of the vanguard.
At the Third Congress of the International in 1921, Lenin and Trotsky were accused of pursuing a right-wing policy, of conciliation, and of sacrificing the revolutionary struggle to the same considerations that lay behind the NEP. In fact, what they had learned was that heroic struggle was not enough, it was necessary to win, and that the new offensive must therefore be carefully prepared. This involved the denunciation of social democratic illusions, winning the majority of the proletariat to Bolshevik ideas with a new strategy in the trade unions for transforming economic struggles into political struggles. The Third Congress became a 'school of revolutionary strategy'. The material prerequisites of revolution were there: but it was necessary to learn the lessons of the defeats of 1919-1920, due largely to the fact that the Communist Parties were at that time more like tendencies than formed, recognised vanguards; and to learn the art of struggle. The working class could only conquer if it was headed by an organisation representing its living historical experience, generalised in theory, and giving practical leadership in every struggle. Trotsky's only 'error' was that he never went back on these principles, which he worked out together with Lenin in the first four years of the Communist International.
Conditions had of course changed by 1938 when Trotsky, after much hesitation, embarked on the building of the new International. I intend to demonstrate the theoretical justification of this new orientation, even though for a long time it was a 'labour of Sisyphus', to use Deutscher's expression. In the Transitional Programme, Trotsky wrote that the objective prerequisites for socialism were not only ripe, they were rotten ripe. In 1921, after the defeat of the European proletariat, the Bolsheviks had demonstrated that the immediate post-war recovery of the capitalist economy was artificial, as the 1920 crisis had shown, affecting even the USA which had taken advantage of the war to assume a key position in the world capitalist economy. The stock exchange crisis of 1929, and the approaching Second World War, confirmed that capitalism was far from having overcome its contradictions — crises now immediately assumed international proportions, the basic contradictions were growing sharper, and the political solutions advanced by the bourgeoisie could achieve nothing. Neither the New Deal nor the Popular Front offered a way out of the economic impasse: still less did fascism, the bourgeoisie's last card, which in fact drove it nearer to catastrophe. The Stalinist International, not understanding this, led the world proletariat into defeat after defeat. This did not mean that world capitalism had no immediate way out. It meant that the system as a whole could not advance. In 1929 Trotsky had written in The Third International After Lenin that 'the role of the subjective factor in a period of slow, organic development can remain quite a subordinate one', while there can be no 'leaping over stages'; 'but as soon as the objective prerequisites have matured, the key to the whole historical process passes into the hands of the subjective factor, that is, the party.' Since 1923 the situation had radically changed: it was no longer just the proletariat but the whole Communist International which had suffered defeats, for its policy had come to dominate all other questions. He demonstrated that this was so in the case of all the abortive revolutionary crises (Germany, China, Spain, France). Was this imposing an arbitrary schema on very varied situations, or denying the 'objective conditions' peculiar to each case?
The second basic element in Trotsky's policy during the 1930s was therefore the close connection he demonstrated between the stabilisation of imperialism and the policy of the International. Every position lost for the proletariat was a foothold gained by the bourgeoisie. 'Politics considered as a mass historical force always lags behind economics.' [31] The realisation of the basic economic conditions for revolution did not mean that the bourgeoisie would abdicate power. On the contrary, it strengthened its powers of repression at any cost, in the military, ideological and political fields, in order to ward off the proletarian threat first concretised in the USSR. The subjective conditions did not directly follow economic conditions: the different aspects of the historical process — economics, politics, the State, the struggle of the working class — did not advance simultaneously. The consciousness of the working class did not grow parallel with the productive forces, the bourgeoisie did not decline as the proletariat advanced. The different aspects were linked not schematically or simplistically but dialectically: the scholastics could not recognise that between mechanical determinism and arbitrary subjectiveness there lay the materialist dialectic. Stalin's domestic and international policy constantly oscillated between the two. If Trotsky's prognoses were often wrong, he was nonetheless able to give the clearest illustration of the interaction of economics and politics in a period in which the subjective factor was decisive.
A good example is his analysis of China after the tragedy of 1927. As long as capitalism remained undefeated, it would go on developing as well as it could, the most important conclusion being the clarification of the political consequences of the law of uneven and combined development. China was a much more backward peasant country than Russia: but the law of combined development crushed even the embryo of a democratic stage which Russia had experienced. To be more precise, the only possible democratic dictatorship was that of the Kuomintang which had hastened to liquidate the communist forces, subordinated to it on the pretext of the need for a stage of the 'bloc of four classes'. Trotsky wrote, 'those objective socio-historical causes which pre-determined the "October" outcome of the Russian revolution rise before us in China in still more accentuated form.' The opportunist policy was rooted in a failure to understand 'economic determinism' and its relationship to politics; but also in left adventurism. The Canton insurrection, which was drowned in blood, was the corollary of the previous policy of alliance with the Kuomintang, which had been given every opportunity to strengthen itself at the expense of the revolutionary forces supposed to be marching with it to 'democracy'. With China, as with Russia before 1917, the problem was not whether the country was ripe for socialism (it was clearly no more so than backward Russia) but whether it was ripe for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Stalin's basic error was to confuse national economic considerations with political considerations. The law of combined and uneven development had 'overdetermined' the relationship between politics and economics which was the necessary starting point. This relationship was only meaningful on an international scale, the scale of the struggle of the world proletariat against imperialism. At this level, the defeat of the Chinese revolution under the directives of the International was a tragic confirmation of the Bolshevik position.
Only an internationalist understanding of the relationship of objective and subjective conditions made it possible to understand the dialectic of periods of rise and ebb of the world revolution. The fact that the age of world revolution had begun did not mean that subjective conditions were automatically ripe for it. The Stalinists' basic failure to grasp this relationship made them unable to decide on the moment for insurrection. In Germany in 1923 the defeat was due to the party's hesitation at the decisive moment. By the time insurrection was decided on the masses were no longer ready for it. A similar process produced the defeat of Canton. A sudden turn was imposed on the Chinese masses without preparing them for it or giving them a real revolutionary leadership. A revolutionary leadership could only be formed on the basis of an understanding of the epoch and its sudden turns. No-one understood this better than Lenin, as he showed in July during the Russian Revolution, and even more at the Third Congress of the International, when he did not hesitate to take a 'rightist' position, arguing that subjective conditions were not yet ripe for an all-out attack on capitalism. But should a real revolutionary situation develop, the opportunity would have to be seized. Lenin's flexibility over tactics was evidence of an ability to formulate strategy for a specific situation without losing sight of the final goal of proletarian revolution. His 'realpolitik' had nothing in common with Stalin's so-called 'realism', which led logically to 'peaceful coexistence' after the Second World War when the stabilisation of capitalism seemed to be confirmed. Lenin and Trotsky acted on the basis of a correct theoretical understanding of the basic tendency of the epoch. Reality is hard on theoretical mistakes, and without the guidance of strict proletarian principles Stalin veered from left to right according to circumstances. For him theory was not a 'guide to action' but a means of justifying a particular political orientation. 'At the present time', wrote Trotsky in 1929, 'the ideology of the Comintern is not guided but manufactured to order. Theory, ceasing to become an instrument of knowledge and foresight, has become an administrative technical tool.'
This was how the theory of 'socialism in one country' and the stages theory were used whenever the opportunist course of Comintern policy had to be justified. Empiricism in theory only reflected the internal contradictions of the isolated Soviet regime. But the grip of the bureaucracy over the Communist Parties everywhere made it also the most suitable ideological weapon for weaning the masses from revolutionary struggle. An International at the service of 'socialism in one country' was a contradiction in terms. No longer a revolutionary force, it was the most powerful guarantee of the impasse in which the Russian Communist Party was locked. By serving that party's immediate interests it undermined its base in the long run, as the Soviet state could only emerge from its contradictions when the socialist camp was extended. The Comintern became the direct political agent of the stabilisation of capitalism. The United States had gained a hegemonic position within world imperialism. But the stabilisation was only on the surface, and was the result not of economic necessity but of political error. It was therefore not in the least 'idealist' to define the crisis of mankind as the crisis of revolutionary leadership. The building of a new International was theoretically justified. In 1929 Trotsky still refused to begin this task. He was well aware that a new banner and new slogans were not all that were needed to create a revolutionary pole of attraction, and that the world proletariat still recognised the International founded by Lenin, even if it had turned away from its goals. The decisive historical event which led him to proclaim the idea of the Fourth International was Hitler's accession to power in 1933. In 1928 the Comintern had decreed a new revolutionary period, with the crisis of capitalism sounding the death-knell of 'stabilisation'. The Communist Parties were ordered to return to the offensive, and in Germany that meant the denunciation of social democracy as the main enemy. The rise of Nazism, which Trotsky called the expression of 'counter-revolutionary despair', was from then on assured. The Comintern did not recover from its amazing blindness even after the defeat of 1933. Trotsky issued warning upon warning. When the Comintern declared Hitler's electoral victory meaningless, and refused to recognise that this strategic defeat would leave the German working class prostrate and paralysed for many years, Trotsky decided that in the face of such a betrayal of the revolution the time had come to rebuild the International on a new basis. After the event, it was too late to talk of a united front. The new International would have to be built in the most difficult conditions, but it was the only way forward.
There was nothing voluntarist about this decision of Trotsky's. The analysis he developed in the 1930s was extremely complex. He was able to show that the failure of Stalin's International did not mean that the USSR had ceased to be a workers state which had to be unconditionally defended against attacks by the counter-revolution. It was the social basis of October, not the bureaucracy, which was to be defended. He never departed from this position. His situation was extremely difficult. On the one hand, the combined influence of Stalinism and reformism had turned the masses away from their goal. On the other, his position had been considerably weakened when most of the Oppositionists went over to supporting Stalin. The Stalinist bureaucracy had been able to present itself as the faithful heir of Marxism-Leninism, and it took a thoroughly dialectical grasp of the situation to follow all the subtleties of Trotsky's analysis and break with the existing CPs and the Comintern in such a complex period: the more so since Trotskyism was portrayed as the enemy of the USSR and therefore of communism. Trotsky experienced the separation of the vanguard from the masses much more intensely than Lenin. When Lenin was fighting to build the Bolshevik Party he had to free the working class of Russia from petty bourgeois influences and turn its spontaneous class consciousness into political consciousness. When, after dwelling on every aspect of the problem at length, Trotsky embarked on the building of the Fourth International, the masses were steeped in Stalinist ideology, which was much more difficult to struggle against than direct bourgeois ideology. The bureaucracy, divorced from the control of the base, had developed an objectively counter-revolutionary ideology, but played on its position as the guardian of the social heritage of October and on the ignorance of the masses to maintain its own position, subjecting them completely to its domination. The new vanguard had a dual role: to struggle against the influence of social democracy, whose reformism made it the guarantor of bourgeois rule; and to fight Stalinist ideology, which appeared as the bearer of a canonised version of Leninism. The consequences of the successive defeats of the working class in Germany, Spain and France made it still more difficult for the exhausted masses to understand the need for a basic revision of all the 'theories' with which they were lulled. The evaluation of the nature and policies of the USSR was what made it difficult to build a strong revolutionary pole. Trotsky did not want to rally the disillusioned, but people capable of understanding the contradictions of the epoch without schematism. The Fourth International had no mass audience, and this was the basic reason for its weakness, for the moment of separation, if prolonged, would become a source of conservatism. But this in no way proves Trotsky's alleged 'sociologism'; he more than anyone clarified the dialectical process of the emergence and disappearance of the 'subjective conditions' for insurrection. The aim of the Fourth International was not the immediate subversion of the existing order but the preparation of a vanguard capable of winning the masses to the international revolution against the directives issuing from Moscow. The new organisation had to join in the daily struggle of the masses while preparing them at the same time for a revolution urgently called for by 'objective conditions'. This is why Trotsky put forward a programme of transitional demands with the objective of preparing the proletariat for political struggle through trade union demands. Lukacs had written that the marked organisational preparation of the conscious vanguard and the broad masses is only a moment in the united, dialectical process of evolution of the whole class and its consciousness. The objective basis of the Fourth International was the failure of the Stalinist International which had led the proletariat into defeat after defeat. It was not an artificial creation. But the bureaucratic and ideological hold of Stalinism was so strong that it was even more difficult than Trotsky had thought to take the new organisation into the working class. Recent events nonetheless tend to show that if Trotsky's precise prognosis was wrong, his historical, theoretical perspective was basically correct... Internationalism was, as Deutscher said, the very stuff of Trotsky's thought: it was the basis of his conception of the new organisation, which he struggled to build from the outset on an international scale. The internal relationship of forces, in the economic and political fields, changed as a result of the failure of Stalinist policy, itself the product of the contradictions which rose up to confront the proletariat in a backward country which was the first to achieve a proletarian revolution. The weakness of the working class and its revolutionary leadership was in the last analysis responsible for Russia's continued isolation. Nonetheless, if the USSR survived the inter-war period, it was because the capitalist system staggered from crisis to crisis. The situation was still objectively revolutionary. The only way out of the impasse was therefore the development of a strategy to take account of the new international situation, and a new world organisation to carry it out. The fact that this organisation remained weak for a long time is secondary relative to the theoretical analysis on which its creation was based. As Trotsky wrote in 1929, stabilisation had not fallen from the sky, nor was it the result of an automatic change in the conditions of the world capitalist economy, but the fruit of an unfavourable change in the political relationship of forces between the classes. The building of the Fourth International was the direct political corollary of this basic thesis.
CONCLUSION: The theoretical advance of Trotskyism
'The category of the totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts, is the essence of the method which Marx took over from Hegel and brilliantly transformed into the foundations of a whole new science.' [32]
What distinguishes Trotsky from all the Marxists of his time, including Lenin, is that he directly expressed international reality through this category. The concept of the totality structures the whole viewpoint of Trotsky's theory, much more than it does in Marx or Lenin. He produced theories with which the actuality of the world revolution can be understood much more concretely than Marx or even Lenin were able to do. 'Linking up countries and continents that stand on different levels of development into a system of mutual dependence and antagonism, levelling out the various stages of their development and at the same time immediately enhancing the differences between them, and ruthlessly counterposing one country to another, world economy has become a mighty reality which holds sway over the economic life of individual countries and continents.' [33] It is in Trotsky's writings that we find the clearest theoretical expression of imperialism as the organic international reality of the capitalist mode of production, as a totality in which the whole conditions the parts. It appears in the law of combined development. The basis of the international policies of the Stalinist school was a fetishisation of the law of uneven development, both in the theory of socialism in one country and in the stages theory of revolution. It was claimed that Trotsky held the position that because conditions were everywhere 'ripe' there had to be simultaneous revolution in every country, which was clearly impossible. The dialectical armoury of Trotsky's thought is revealed in all its complexity precisely in the theory of permanent revolution. 'The entire formulation of the questions as outlined above flows from the dynamics of the revolutionary process taken as a whole. The international revolution is regarded as an interconnected process which cannot be predicted in all its concreteness, and, so to speak, in its order of occurrence, but which is absolutely clearcut in its general historical outline. Unless the latter is understood, a correct political orientation is entirely out of the question.' [34] The capitalist mode of production, going beyond the framework of national boundaries, had spread the various forms of its basic contradictions throughout the world. Trotsky understood this process of economic unification and so became the theorist of world revolution. The world revolution was dialectical in time and space, for an advance or a revolution in any sector took the whole system forward. Similarly any error in revolutionary strategy had implications for the whole world.
With the whole imperialist system entering the stage of its death agony and decline, and with the vital interdependence it had created among all countries — though by such a contradictory process that the unification and levelling out of the world economy was proceeding with more violence and convulsions than in any previous epoch — the age of world revolution had begun. Trotskyist theory therefore became an overall political position. In the imperialist stage the dialectics of economics were directly expressed in the dialectics of politics. It was because he viewed world reality from the standpoint of the totality that Trotsky was able to demonstrate the primacy of politics in the new historical era which had begun for mankind. This was why he was able to disentangle the body of Marxist theory from all the gradualist, positivist and mechanistic deviations which had gathered around it — and to which even Lenin still subscribed in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Trotsky's conception of combined development made it possible for him to explain the relationship of objective and subjective conditions as being mediated through the interaction of the different sectors of the capitalist mode of production, and what is more through the revolutionary process itself. His understanding of the dialectical movement of history over time and space enabled him to write that 'history does not repeat itself'. Each new historical event was conditioned by the totality of previous history and by circumstances. There could no longer be a democratic stage, both because world economic development made it redundant, and because the bourgeoisie knew that it would be historical suicide to form an alliance with the revolutionary proletariat and peasantry, should they be hegemonic.
Trotsky's political theory forms the living body of the revolutionary theory and practice of the period which began with October. There is still nothing to challenge it. It is no longer possible to base a political perspective on a priori positions on economics. Politics is the direct expression of international economic and social contradictions. Trotsky's greatness was that he developed and gave theoretical expression to the principles of Marxism and Leninism. It was because of this that he could write in his Diary in Exile in 1935 that it was then, at the height of Stalinist degeneration, that he was indispensable. 'Had I not been present in Petersburg, the October Revolution would still have taken place — on the condition that Lenin was present and in command.' The same was true for the difficult period of 1917-21. But after Lenin's death, only he could 'carry out the mission of arming a new generation with the revolutionary methods over the heads of the leaders of the Second and Third Internationals'. He added: 'I need at least about five years of uninterrupted work to ensure the succession.' It appears, then, that Trotsky was under no illusions about the difficulties awaiting him in his new undertaking. The persecution against him made it impossible to dedicate himself to the task as fully as he would have liked. But despite the difficulties of his situation he not only upheld the gains of Bolshevism but even developed them in the light of new situations, and began the work of putting them into practice. He survived the objective and subjective conditions which had defeated him without negating his principles; on the contrary he used them to explain his experience, whereas much less dangerous situations had been the undoing of such eminent theoreticians as Bernstein, Kautsky and Plekhanov. With the exceptions of Lukacs and Gramsci, Trotsky made the last decisive contribution to Marxist theory, and it has not progressed since his time. Trotsky developed the elements which offer a way out of this poverty of theory. It is extremely interesting that the 'theoreticians' who have been unable to detach themselves from Stalin's revisionism have abandoned low slanders for the higher ground of 'theoretical' polemics. Leo Figuéres' work on 'Trotskyism, the anti-Leninism' has nothing much new to say. It remains at the level of the old accusations about 'skipping over a stage, underestimating the peasantry...' But if they attempt to set Lenin and Trotsky into conflict over principles, the epigones of the decline of Stalinism will find themselves in trouble. The resurgence of basic 'Trotskyist' ideas is no accident. If the new vanguard recognises Trotsky as its mentor, it is because only his problematic offers an explanation for the violent death agony of imperialism, the rise of the 'Third World' revolutions, the delay of revolution in the advanced countries, and Stalinism itself. The historical failure of the Stalinist experience has affected the whole of the workers movement. Theory did not escape the debacle: Stalinism turned Leninism into obscurantism, replacing it with a grossly distorted, schematised body of theory, so that the professional intellectuals employed to raise it to the level of eternal truths now have their work cut out to explain the basic tendency of our epoch. Stalinist theory, built on infallible dogmas and abstract references taken out of context, boils down to vulgar, mechanistic Marxism, usurping the name of dialectics and resting on the weakest texts in Marxist theory: for example, the thread which runs through Engels' Dialectics of Nature and Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, culminating in Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism by Stalin and Chairman Mao's supreme efforts. On a world scale, the social and political relationship of forces has turned again in favour of revolution; in terms of economic necessity it always was. But with the dissolution of the political and theoretical edifice of Stalinism, 'subjective conditions' can potentially be transformed into revolutionary forces. All revolutions since the Second World War have taken place against the directives of Stalin and his successors: the Chinese revolution for one. The Cuban revolution and the struggle in Latin America have also defied the policies of the CPSU on a basis closer to ours. Conditions are therefore right for the theoretical as well as the historical 'rehabilitation' of Trotsky. More than ever, the theory of permanent revolution is the necessary theoretical framework for understanding the dialectical complexity of the period. Trotsky's work was not an illusion or a symbol, and was not carried out in vain. The rise of the revolutionary forces throughout the world is the most dramatic confirmation of his positions. Those who would denigrate Trotskyism as an old theory, an ideology belonging to the past, as much as those who think it wrong, are unable to understand the meaning of a theoretical tradition and its relationship to history. They forget that, like revolution, theory must sometimes burrow underground for a long time. But theory too is like our old friend the mole.
FOOTNOTES
27. [illegible]
28. Degras, Documents of the Communist International, Vol.1, p.1
29. George Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, London (Merlin) 1948, p.306
30. Ibid., pp. 313-4
31. The Third International After Lenin, New York (Pioneer) 1967.
32. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 27
33. The Third International After Lenin, p.5
34. Ibid., p. 16