HIMA 13,4_334_f13_302-330II 11/5/05 1:33 PM Page 303
Review Articles
La véritable histoire de Lutte Ouvrière ROBERT BARCIA alias HARDY Paris: Denoël, 2003
Les trotskysmes DANIEL BENSAÏD Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002
Une lente impatience DANIEL BENSAÏD Paris: Stock, 2004
Histoire générale de l’ultra-gauche CHRISTOPHE BOURSEILLER Paris: Denoël, 2003
Les lambertistes PHILIPPE CAMPINCHI Paris: Balland, 2001
Histoire de l’extrême gauche trotskiste FREDERIC CHARPIER Paris: Editions 1, 2002
Sur le pont ANDRE FICHAUT Paris: Editions Syllepse, 2003
Itinéraires DANIEL GLUCKSTEIN & PIERRE LAMBERT Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 2002
Le trotskysme: une histoire sans fard MICHEL LEQUENNE Paris: Editions Syllepse, 2005
Le trotskysme et les trotskystes JEAN-JACQUES MARIE Paris: Armand Colin, 2002
Historical Materialism, volume 13:4 (303–330) © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005 Also available online – www.brill.nl HIMA 13,4_334_f13_302-330II 11/5/05 1:33 PM Page 304
304 • Ian Birchall
Les trotskistes CHRISTOPHE NICK Paris: Fayard, 2002
La dernière génération d’octobre BENJAMIN STORA Paris: Stock, 2003
Reviewed by IAN BIRCHALL
So-called Trotskyism has been among the most trivial of movements. It transformed into abstract dogma what Trotsky thought in concrete terms at one moment in his life and canonized this. It is inexplicable in purely political dimensions, but the history of the more eccentric religious sects provides revealing parallels.... But I doubt if it is possible to lay Trotsky’s ghost so easily.1
Capitalism tends to transform everything within its reach into a commodity. By a dialectical twist, it now turns out that – at least in France – Trotskyism, the sworn enemy of capitalism, sells books and magazines. The eleven volumes listed above are only a small sample of the flood of books and articles published in France in the last few years.2 Nobody – and certainly not the present reviewer – could read all the relevant literature, while at the same time continuing with the paper sales, meetings, electioneering, street-fighting and perusal of factional documents which make up the daily life of any good Trotskyist. The reason why Trotskyism is suddenly boosting publishers’ profits is clear. In the first round of the presidential elections in 2002, the three Trotskyist candidates took over ten per cent of the vote. Meanwhile, the Socialist Party candidate, Lionel Jospin, had to face a succession of revelations – whose significance Jospin magnified by foolish denials3 – about his former involvement with a Trotskyist organisation. The Trotskyist electorate – even at its more normal level of 4–5% – is large enough to swing elections in many constituencies, while Jospin’s misadventures constituted an original and recondite form of sleaze. While the French are generally unimpressed by sex scandals, it seemed briefly as if there might be the bizarre twist of a ‘no-sex’ scandal. Two members of Lutte Ouvrière (LO)4 were apparently expelled for a moment of illicit pleasure during a summer
1 MacIntyre 1971, p. 59. 2 I am grateful to Sebastian Budgen for pointing me in the direction of several of the books under review, and to Edward Crawford and Jim Wolfreys for commenting on a first draft. 3 Raffy 2001, pp. 419–22. 4 The three main Trotskyist organisations in France since 1968 have been Lutte Ouvrière (LO), the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) and the group led by Pierre Lambert since his split with Bleibtreu in 1955. This organisation has had several names over the years, so the term ‘Lambertist’ is the most convenient label to use.