Devrim
6th November 2009, 06:46
From International Review, the theoretical magazine of the ICC, published in eight languages:
We are publishing two articles from Internationalisme, organ of the Gauche Communiste de France[1] dedicated to the question of Trotskyism and written in 1947. At this time, Trotskyism had already abandoned proletarian internationalism by participating in the Second World War, unlike the groups of the communist left[2] who, in the 1930s, had resisted the gathering wave of opportunism engendered by the defeat of the worldwide revolutionary upsurge of 1917-23. Among these groups, the Italian left around the review Bilan, founded in 1933, had correctly defined the tasks of the hour: faced with the march towards war, don't betray the elementary principles of internationalism; draw up the balance-sheet ("bilan" in French) of the failure of the revolutionary wave and of the Russian revolution in particular. The communist left fought against the opportunist positions adopted by the degenerating Third International, in particular the position defended by Trotsky on the United Front with the Socialist parties, which threw overboard all the clarity so dearly acquired regarding the transformation of the latter into parties of capital. On numerous occasions it had to confront its political approach with the very different one of the current formed around Trotsky's positions - which was still proletarian at that time - in particular in the attempts to reunify the various groups opposed to the policies of the Communist International and the Stalinised CPs.[3]
It was with the same method as Bilan that the Gauche Communise de France analysed the basic premises of Trotskyist politics, which were not so much "the defence of the USSR", even if this question most clearly showed how far it had strayed from the rails, but the attitude towards imperialist war. As the first article, "The function of Trotskyism" shows, Trotskyism's involvement in the war was not in the first instance determined by the defence of the USSR, as proved by the fact that certain of its tendencies, which rejected the theory of the degenerated workers' state, had also participated in the imperialist war. What was even more crucial was the idea of the "lesser evil", of joining the struggle against "foreign occupation" and for "antifascism". This characteristic of Trotskyism is exposed in particular in the second article, "Bravo Abd el-Krim or a little history of Trotskyism", which notes that "the whole history of Trotskyism revolves around the ‘defence' of something' in the name of the lesser evil, this something being anything except the interests of the proletariat". This trademark of Trotskyism has not at all altered with time, as witness the numerous expressions of contemporary Trotskyist activism, and its promptness in choosing one camp against another in the multiple conflicts that ravage the planet, including those that have come after the disappearance of the USSR.
At the roots of this tendency in Trotskyism we find, as the first article says, the attempt to attribute a progressive role "to certain factions of capitalism, to certain capitalist countries (and as the Transitional Programme expressly puts it, this applies to the majority of countries)". In this conception, as the article puts it, "the emancipation of the proletariat is the not the result of a struggle which places the proletariat as a class against the whole of capitalism, but is the result of a series of political struggles in the narrow sense of the term, and in which the working class, allied in succession to diverse political factions of the bourgeoisie, will eliminate certain other factions and by stages and degrees will succeed in gradually weakening the bourgeoisie, in triumphing over it by dividing it and beating it in separate bits". In all this there is nothing left of revolutionary marxism.
Continue with the articles:
http://en.internationalism.org/ir/139/trotsykism
I preferred the second one myself.
Devrim
We are publishing two articles from Internationalisme, organ of the Gauche Communiste de France[1] dedicated to the question of Trotskyism and written in 1947. At this time, Trotskyism had already abandoned proletarian internationalism by participating in the Second World War, unlike the groups of the communist left[2] who, in the 1930s, had resisted the gathering wave of opportunism engendered by the defeat of the worldwide revolutionary upsurge of 1917-23. Among these groups, the Italian left around the review Bilan, founded in 1933, had correctly defined the tasks of the hour: faced with the march towards war, don't betray the elementary principles of internationalism; draw up the balance-sheet ("bilan" in French) of the failure of the revolutionary wave and of the Russian revolution in particular. The communist left fought against the opportunist positions adopted by the degenerating Third International, in particular the position defended by Trotsky on the United Front with the Socialist parties, which threw overboard all the clarity so dearly acquired regarding the transformation of the latter into parties of capital. On numerous occasions it had to confront its political approach with the very different one of the current formed around Trotsky's positions - which was still proletarian at that time - in particular in the attempts to reunify the various groups opposed to the policies of the Communist International and the Stalinised CPs.[3]
It was with the same method as Bilan that the Gauche Communise de France analysed the basic premises of Trotskyist politics, which were not so much "the defence of the USSR", even if this question most clearly showed how far it had strayed from the rails, but the attitude towards imperialist war. As the first article, "The function of Trotskyism" shows, Trotskyism's involvement in the war was not in the first instance determined by the defence of the USSR, as proved by the fact that certain of its tendencies, which rejected the theory of the degenerated workers' state, had also participated in the imperialist war. What was even more crucial was the idea of the "lesser evil", of joining the struggle against "foreign occupation" and for "antifascism". This characteristic of Trotskyism is exposed in particular in the second article, "Bravo Abd el-Krim or a little history of Trotskyism", which notes that "the whole history of Trotskyism revolves around the ‘defence' of something' in the name of the lesser evil, this something being anything except the interests of the proletariat". This trademark of Trotskyism has not at all altered with time, as witness the numerous expressions of contemporary Trotskyist activism, and its promptness in choosing one camp against another in the multiple conflicts that ravage the planet, including those that have come after the disappearance of the USSR.
At the roots of this tendency in Trotskyism we find, as the first article says, the attempt to attribute a progressive role "to certain factions of capitalism, to certain capitalist countries (and as the Transitional Programme expressly puts it, this applies to the majority of countries)". In this conception, as the article puts it, "the emancipation of the proletariat is the not the result of a struggle which places the proletariat as a class against the whole of capitalism, but is the result of a series of political struggles in the narrow sense of the term, and in which the working class, allied in succession to diverse political factions of the bourgeoisie, will eliminate certain other factions and by stages and degrees will succeed in gradually weakening the bourgeoisie, in triumphing over it by dividing it and beating it in separate bits". In all this there is nothing left of revolutionary marxism.
Continue with the articles:
http://en.internationalism.org/ir/139/trotsykism
I preferred the second one myself.
Devrim