The Partisan is republishing this article from the series “A Worker’s Guide To”
originally published on New Labor Press. These articles outline basic
principles of organizing work for activists to successfully mobilize,
politicize, and organize the working and oppressed masses. We encourage
all readers to study these articles and apply them to their work, in
order to further the development of class struggle in their work.
There are people promoting ideas of all
sorts in the labor movement. By far the dominant ideology is
labor-liberalism: all the state unions spend massive amounts of money
and man-hours on the Democratic Party and take up jobs in the government
and party. The second most prominent ideology is Trotskyism—it is the
Trotskyists who established groups such as Teamsters for a Democratic
Union which have functioned as a crucial pillar propping up the decrepit
state unions over the last few decades. It is therefore important to
lay out the basic features of Trotskyism in the labor movement and in
general as well as some specific experiences with Trotskyism.
Trotsky and the Origins of Trotskyism
Trotskyism as an ideology gets its name
from the Soviet defector Leon Trotsky. Trotsky had a lengthy record of
vacillating between the different political trends in Russia, to the
point that Lenin referred to him as “Judas Trotsky” and Stalin aptly
said, “But it is precisely to such depths [preparing for civil war
against the Soviet state] that the Trotskyists have sunk—once a faction
within the Party, they have now become an underground anti-Soviet
organisation” [They Have Sunk to New Depths, 1929]. As a
historical figure, Trotsky’s record is abysmal. He took a centrist stand
between Mensheviks (representatives of the Russian liberal bourgeoisie)
and Bolsheviks (revolutionary workers and peasants) in Russia. He
temporarily sided with the Bolsheviks to try to wreck the Brest peace
accords which ended Russian involvement in WW1 (more on the “theory”
that justified this later), then went on to propose turning the Soviet
Union into a fascist dictatorship by imposing military discipline in the
trade unions and “turning the screws” on the poor peasants who he
claimed were incapable of building socialism, while opposing the
expropriation of the rich peasants. (This process, which included harsh
repressive measures, is more commonly known as “dekulakization”.) When
the entire Soviet people including the Communist Party rejected this, he
took to factionalism (which is what Trotskyists are most known for
today) for the purpose of sabotaging the Soviet government and economy,
and fled the country. In the US he agreed to testify in front of the
Dies Committee against the Soviet Union and ultimately took a centrist
position on fascism: “Being an irreconcilable opponent not only of
fascism but also of the present-day Comintern, I am at the same time
decidedly against the suppression of either of them” [Trotsky, Why I Agreed to Appear Before the Dies Committee,
1939]. Trotsky was thus the figurehead of centrism from the beginning
to the end of his career, starting with a compromise with Russian
liberalism (known as the August bloc) and ending with a compromise with
Hitlerite fascism, which Trotsky saw as a lesser evil to Stalinism. (“No
one, not excluding Hitler, has dealt socialism such deadly blows as
Stalin” [Trotsky, The Beginning of the End, 1937]).
Trotsky was only one person, and not even a
particularly talented one at that. Nevertheless Trotskyism has become a
global phenomenon, with many Trotskyist parties acquiring posts in
different governments. This is to be explained by the fact that
Trotskyism as an ideology is extremely appealing to the middle classes,
who theoretically should want and would benefit from a revolution, but in fact
constantly flip-flop and practically reject the proletarian revolution
and everything that is required to carry it out successfully. As
Moissaye Olgin, a Ukrainian Jew who fled Eastern Europe and joined the
CPUSA, wrote in 1935:
“Trotskyism is being reborn on every stage
of the revolutionary movement because it is the expression of the
attitude of a certain class, namely, the petty bourgeoisie. Of this
class Karl Marx once said that it is ‘a transitional class in which the
interests of two classes are simultaneously blunted’. The petty
bourgeoisie finds itself between the proletariat and the large-scale
bourgeoisie. It strives to rise to the position of the large-scale
bourgeoisie, but the latter, using the power of concentrated and
centralized capital, continuously drives it down to the position of the
proletariat. The petty bourgeois, subjectively, wishes to become rich,
to attain to the heights of capitalist economic power; objectively,
however, his interests lie with the struggle against capitalism because
capitalism removes the ground from under his feet and because only under
a Socialist system will the petty bourgeois of today become a free
member of society, unafraid of the future, since under Socialism he will
be transformed into one engaged in useful productive labor. The petty
bourgeoisie as a class, therefore, is wavering. The interests of two
classes, said Marx, are ‘simultaneously blunted’ in it. That means that
the petty bourgeoisie cannot be as consistently counter-revolutionary as
the big bourgeoisie, but it cannot be as consistently with the
revolution, as is the proletariat. The petty bourgeoisie is afraid of the big bourgeoisie but it is also afraid of the revolution” [Trotskyism: Counter-revolution in Disguise].
These are the historical facts and the
social basis of Trotskyism. Theoretically, the main ideas of Trotskyism
are “permanent revolution” and “transitional programs”. “Permanent
revolution” is the theory that socialism cannot be built in one country.
This “theory” is in part how the Trotskyists justify their unprincipled
behavior. If socialism is impossible to develop in one country, then it
logically follows that wrecking socialism is also impossible in one
country, because such a process was impossible to begin with. Thus the
betrayals of Trotsky and the Trotskyists are completely erased! The
ideological premise of “permanent revolution” taken to its conclusion
means alliance with the labor-liberals. (See Lenin’s On the Two Lines in the Revolution for more on this.).
