£1 if sold separately Volume 3 No. 11 April 2007 workers’ liberty reason in revolt 1917: revolution for freedom and equality The Russian revolution, the Stalinist counter-revolution and the working class workers’ liberty ii Introduction: What is Trotskyism? Our fragmented tradition the allies of the Whites, the invading armies of no fewer than 14 But those were mere episodes only, not a part of, nor the By John O’Malony countries. harbingers of, a great socialist movement. At the end of the The dying Lenin, in the first place, and then the Left Second World War Stalinism loomed in the world as a great 9TH and 20th century socialism is a house of many rooms, Opposition founded in Moscow in October 1923, whose leaders power. cellars, attics, alcoves, and hidden chambers (not to speak were Trotsky and Rakovsky, had fought the Stalinist counter- The USSR in 1939 had made up a sixth of the world. At the 1of private chapels and “priest-holes”.) revolution that overthrew the workers' state. Fought it to the end of a big expansion that, though it would not end until the There are in it the utopian socialists of our pre-history death of vast numbers, almost all their number in Stalin's Russian defeat in Afghanistan (1979-89), reached its peak with reformists and revolutionists, parliamentarians and insurrection- concentration camps, jails, and homicide chambers. the proclamation of the Stalinist People's Republic of China in ists, “direct action” anarchists and union-building syndicalists, We are not here talking about apostolic succession, of a line October 1949, Stalinism controlled one-third of the surface of council communists and kibbutz-building utopian Zionists. of infallible popes culminating in Trotsky. All such notions are the earth. And then fascists sometimes proclaimed themselves social- alien to this tradition. It had mass parties, which were the main parties of the work- ists (national-socialists). So did many Third World political Leaders with acquired authority and prestige, yes; Catholic or ing class, in a number of capitalist countries, France, Italy, formations, often more fascist than socialist, such as the “Ba’th Stalinist popes, no. Indonesia, etc. Arab Socialist Parties” of Iraq and Syria. Every member of Lenin's Bolshevik party committee in For a whole historical epoch, authentic socialism, and the And Stalinism. The political reflections and tools in the October 1917 had opposed him at some previous turning point Marxism of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky, labour movements of the Russian Stalinist ruling class or another, some of them even on the October insurrection. were almost everywhere banished to the margins of the work- proclaimed themselves “communists” and “socialists”, and for Trotsky too found himself opposed by all his close comrades at ing-class movements almost everywhere. much of the 20th century were accepted as the main force of one point or another. Most “reform socialists” — but now, the socialists who communism and socialism, in bourgeois propaganda as well as This was a living movement of self-respecting, experienced wanted to replace capitalism were not too numerous among their own. militants, which conducted its affairs according to reason; reformists — rallied to the anti-Russian side of the two blocs The great names of real socialism are numerous, and are far which took it for granted that honest differences of opinion into which the world was divided. from being at one with each other: Gracchus Babeuf, Charles inevitably arise even among very like-minded people honestly Against that background, the defeated and depleted Trotskyist Fourier, Robert Owen, Etienne Cabet, Karl Marx, Frederick pursuing the same goals, and that they can only be resolved by current, always small, shrank in the 1950s to being very little Engels, Auguste Blanqui, Mikhail Bakunin, Ferdinand Lassalle, reason, discussion, and democratic decision-making. even miniscule. In its time the gap between its ideological riches Louis Michel, Wilhelm Liebknecht and his son Karl, August All extant kitsch-left notions of socialist and communist and its small forces had been one of its most characteristics Bebel, George Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich, Jules Guesde, Jean popes possessing infallibility — and the power of coercion to features. Now, in terms of its ideas, too, it shrank Jaures, Victor Griffuelhes, Paul Lafargue, Laura Lafargue, compel compliance — arose in the era of triumphant Stalinist The major surviving Trotskisant current, the so-called “ortho- Eleanor Marx, Pavel Axelrod, Peter Kropotkin, James Connolly, and bourgeois reaction. This is how Lenin, writing in 1907, dox Trotskyists”, organised in the “Fourth International” of Daniel De Leon, Jim Larkin, Eugene Debs, Christian Rakovsky, defined the relationship between party democracy and majority James P Cannon, Michel Pablo, and Ernest Mandel and its Henry Hyndman, Ernest Belfort Bax, William Morris, Keir rule in action. splinters, sided with the Stalinist camp in the world polarisation Hardie, Klara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, Sylvia Pankhurst, Karl “The principle of democratic centralism and autonomy for into two blocs. They were “critically”, but “unconditionally”, Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin, Vladimir local Party organisations implies universal and full freedom to for the “defence” of the Stalinist bloc against the other bloc and Shliapnikov, Leon Trotsky, Chen Duxiu, Antonio Gramsci, criticise, so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite all its full and partial partisans. The expansion of the Stalinist Leon Sedov, James P Cannon, Leon Lesoil, Pantelis action... Criticism within the basis of the principles of the party bloc was they insisted the World Revolution advancing, to be Pouliopoulos, Abram Leon, Ta Thu Thau, Henk Sneevliet, Max programme must be quite free... not only at party meetings but sure advancing in unexpected and uncongenial (“deformed”) Shachtman... also at public meetings.” ways. The Communist International picked up and subsumed many By the time of Trotsky’s death at the hand of Stalin’s assassin For the USSR and the East European satellite states they of the threads of earlier socialism, and wove them into a more on 21 August 1940, this great socialist tradition had dwindled advocated Trotsky's programme of working-class revolution. or less coherent strategy of working-class struggle for power — down to a few tiny organisations in, perhaps, a couple of dozen Following Trotsky, they called what they advocated a “political the direct action of the French and American syndicalists, the countries. It would dwindle further. revolution”, but in fact what they advocated was a profound political “syndicalism” of the De Leonites, the revolutionary The fundamental reason for that was the rise of Stalinism, social revolution, the destruction of the Stalinist state power and parliamentarianism of Liebknecht, the sometimes acute criti- which for most of the 20th century dwarfed and overshadowed its replacement by a working-class regime based on workers' cism by communist-anarchists of the parliamentarians of the socialism. councils. That meant a fundamental transformation in property, pre-1914 Socialist International, the concern with national liber- A bureaucracy collectively “owning” the state had expropri- from ownership by the totalitarian state which owned by the ation of such as James Connolly, and all that was healthy in ated the workers in the USSR, depriving them of all rights and Stalinist autocracy to ownership by a democratic working-class previous socialist activity and theorising. using them far worse than the workers in any capitalist countries quasi-state. They denounced bourgeois democracy and parliamentarism worse, even than in Nazi Germany. It turned them into slaves or For the countries in which Stalinist guerrilla armies had won in the name of the fuller democracy of workers' councils — and (as Trotsky wrote in 1939) semi-slaves. power in civil wars and made their own Stalinist states, the their criticism of bourgeois democracy would later, like so much The new ruling class continued to call itself communist and “orthodox Trotskyists” tended to advocate not revolution but else, be annexed and put to its own pernicious uses by totalitar- Marxist; it defined and camouflaged its own savage rule over reform as the way to working-class democracy. ian Stalinism. the working class as the rule of the working class over society; In this their politics were a hybrid of Trotsky's and those of The Russian working class, in their unprecedented creativity it presented its anti-socialist and anti-working class revolution the pre-war Brandlerite “Right Communists” or “liberal — for instance, in creating soviets (workers' councils) — and as the living continuity of the October revolution. Stalinists”. The influential writer Isaac Deutscher, though he the Bolsheviks who led them to victory had in life found solu- By repeated purges, ideological bamboozlement, by bribery, had been a Trotskyist from 1932 until 1940, was after that a tions to many of the problems that had perplexed earlier social- and corruption, they took control of the Communist Brandlerite in his ideas. Brandlerite politics and assessments ist thinkers. International, the powerful international network of revolution- suffuse his very widely read three-volume biography of Trotsky, What had all the different strands of socialism in common? ary working-class organisations made up of people who had and his biography of Stalin. What, with their different