The Trotskyist split of 1939-40 Workers’ Liberty Volume 3 No 41 August 2013 £1 www.workersliberty.org Reason in revolt Hitler, Stalin, and the Trotskyist split of 1939-40 The Trotskyist split of 1939-40 From 1935: the official Communist Parties across the world, and Stalin’s Russian government, agitate for an alliance of “the democracies” (taken to include Reclaiming our history Russia) By Sean Matgamna Yugoslavia, and looked to the USSR, under the Stalinist bu - 23 August 1939: “Hitler-Stalin pact” signed between reaucracy, to lead a great world-wide revolution against cap - Nazi Germany and Russia. George Santanyana’s aphorism, “Those who do not learn italism in the course of the World War 3 which they saw as from history are likely to repeat it”, is not less true for having inevitable. The Trotskyists had become “Brandlerites”. 1 September 1939: Germany invades Poland. Russia become a cliché. And those who do not know their own his - In the 1960s the British SWP prided itself on not being will invade from the east on 17 September. Hitler and tory cannot learn from it. Leninist, which it explained as not being like the Healy or - Stalin agree to partition Poland The history of the Trotskyist movement — that is, of or - ganisation. In the 1970s it was transformed into a “Leninist” ganised revolutionary Marxism for most of the 20th century organisation and into an organisation more like the Healyites 3 September 1939: Britain and France declare war — is a case in point. To an enormous extent the received his - of the 1960s than its old self. against Germany: World War 2 begins Take the following as an example of how much of the his - tory of that movement is not “history” but the all-too-often From 18 September: sharp debate in the US Trotskyist mendacious, and always tendentious, folklore generated by tory of the Trotskyist movement has been shaped and mis- competing sects over many decades. shaped. group (SWP: no relation to today’s British SWP) over The folklore infects much of what academic history there is In 1944 some leaders of the British Trotskyist organisation, attitudes to the Russian invasion of Poland. Majority the RCP, were jailed for their involvement in helping a strike on the movement, for instance, Robert Alexander’s enormous says that the attitude to the invasions of Poland and volume on “International Trotskyism”. His accounts of Trot - by engineering workers. There was a big outcry against the jailing, and they served a mere few days in prison. This inci - Finland should be shaped by the old slogan “defence skyism in the two countries I know something about, because of the USSR”. Minority denounce the invasions I have been a participant in the Trotskyist movements there, dent has been enshrined in the folklorist histories because a the UK and Ireland, are full of errors. His account of early number of different tendencies (SP, SWP, the Healy organi - unequivocally but at this stage do not reject the ideas Irish Trotskyism is downright nonsensical, a mere rehash of sation...) trace their roots to the RCP. that the USSR is a “degenerated workers’ state”, and In 1959 Brian Behan, a leading militant building worker in a short document written from very selective memory and that socialists should side with it if it is attacked by a factional fantasy by a Mandelite. London, and at that time “chairman” of the Healy organisa - tion, the SLL, was given six weeks in jail for his activities in major power. The debate resonates internationally All history is, as someone said, “a tale agreed upon”. The importance because the US Trotskyist group is the “tale” may be constructed from documents, archaeological the building industry. Who remembers that? Where is it digging, memoirs, personal memory. It may be very “solid”, recorded outside the files of old newspapers? It isn’t. world’s biggest and most experienced Why? Shortly after his jailing, Behan was expelled by the built on “facts” as hard as such facts can be. 30 November 1939: Russia invades Finland. Unlike in It is nonetheless a “story”, a construction, a narrative, SLL and thereafter demonised. He became an anarcho-syndi - agreed upon. The angle, the perspective, varies from period calist, and soon after that dropped out of politics. (I don’t Poland, this invasion meets strong resistance. The to period, time to time. And of course from class to class. know if he ever “returned”). He became a historical “un-per - dispute among the Trotskyists sharpens The unfolding of history itself creates a perpetual shifting son”. of perspective, and produces a “permanent revolution” in The “Shachtmanites”, in the handed-down history of the April 1940: The US Trotskyists hold a conference. revolutionary movement after the death of Trotsky, have in historiography. On one level history is an ever-changing Late 1940: The expelled minority, now called the palimpsest. my opinion suffered worst from these processes. That is very The history of the revolutionary socialist — Trotskyist — important because in the 1940s and 50s they continued and Workers’ Party, shift to the conclusion that the USSR movement involves all the difficulties of any history, and elaborated an alternative strain of Trotskyism from that of has become a new form of class society (“bureaucratic then some of its own. “The documents” are all tendentious, the Cannon tendency, to which most Trotskyists today owe collectivism”) — no sort of workers’ state. selective, designed to prove or sustain a political point, jus - their essential politics on many things. tify a political position, or damn, discredit, and disqualify an ROOTS 22 June 1941: Germany invades the USSR. Stalin will opponent or competing organisation. Examination of one’s The task of understanding and learning the history of the rev - side with Britain and its allies for the rest of the war. own mistakes, including previous ignorance, is regarded as olutionary movement is a necessary and enormously impor - an organisational weakness. tant part of politically regenerating and reorganising a This is true of smaller things, and also of the whole history revolutionary movement for our own time. of organisations, or of socialism and communism across the Drucker’s biography of Shachtman, and our own collection 20th century. As with Lenin’s work on State and Revolution , the refurbish - of Workers’ Party text have shifted this quite a bit in the last The level of scrupulousness and of aspiration to truthful - ing of revolutionary Marxism requires that we dig down into two decades. ness varies enormously from document to document. In the our own roots. A very tendentious selection of texts by Trotsky, put to - passions generated by controversy, by the strong emotional The 50% of Trotskyists in the USA who in 1940 split with gether by Cannon and his comrades in 1942 under the title In desire for something to be so, or to have been so, something Trotsky — four months before his assassination — rejected Defence of Marxism, has frozen the image of the Shachtman - not far off the intellectual morality of medieval monks can Trotsky’s position that “unconditional defence” of the USSR ites as given in those polemical texts. It cut off generations of develop — for whom it was doing God’s work for the scribe against imperialism required siding with Russia in the Trotskyists from the ideas of “the other Trotskyists” — and to invent appropriate incidents, interpolate into old texts Finnish-Russian war of November 1939 to March 1940. from many ideas of Trotsky himself, major aspects of whose whatever would strengthen a dogma or to enhance a saint. In the polemics of the time, Trotsky conceded that Russia thinking were continued and developed by the WP/ISL, and Lying and wilful and tendentious misconstruction are was “imperialist”, one of the different sorts of imperialism in jettisoned by the Cannonite “orthodox Trotskyists”. commonplace, not only in the once voluminous literature of history ( Again and Once More ). The first big political shift in The texts here demonstrate how important that was. Max a very degenerate organisation like the old Workers’ Revolu - the Trotskyist movement towards that view had been Trot - Shachtman’s picture of the USSR and his premonition of the tionary Party of Gerry Healy, and not only in the crudest sky’s mid-1939 shift to advocating independence for Ukraine, development of the Russian imperialism that would be the form. and implicitly for the other oppressed nations who formed a second power in the world for the next half-century was soon majority of the USSR’s population, oppressed by the Great vindicated by developments. SELECTIVE Russians. There were Trotskyists at the time — the Oehlerites The document Where is the petty-bourgeois opposition? is a There are a myriad forms of selectiveness, each tendency — who denounced Trotsky for thereby abandoning “defence refutation of charges against and criticisms of Max Shacht - making its own, and remaking it, eliminating and emphasis - of the USSR”. man and his comrades that have been kept in circulation by ing, glorifying and ignoring. Trotsky in September 1939, in The USSR in War, accepted the factionalism-blinded official historians of post-Trotsky for the first time the theoretical possibility that the USSR, ex - Trotskyism. Part of it has been available for a couple of years Bigger than all those things, however, is the radical shifts on the Marxist Internet Archive. Otherwise it has been buried and transformations in the Trotskisant organisations which actly as it was, might be re-conceptualised as a new form of exploitative society. He said it was too soon, on the eve of the in archives for 70 years. are then glossed over with hindsight.