Chapter 8: Political Consciousness and International Unity

  1. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    [Since comrade Zeus the Moose has skipped ahead, here is Chapter 8]

    [FONT=Times New Roman]It has already been a running undercurrent in this book that the class struggle between capitalist and proletarian is international in character and therefore requires the proletariat to organise as a class internationally.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The point surfaced in chapter one in the form of Marx and Engels’ criticisms of the Gotha unification. It reappeared in chapter two: the commitment of the coalitionist right in the Second International to managing the capitalist nation-state involved them in the logic of attacks on the working class for the sake of ‘national competitiveness’; and in chapter three: the Kautskyan centre’s national horizons ultimately led it to support feeding the European working class into the mincing machine of World War I.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The question of internationalism as an element of working class strategy was also critical in understanding the split in the Second International, in the subsequent chapters: fighting for unity of the workers as an international class unavoidably involved splitting with the coalitionist right, which placed (and places) loyalty to the nation-state before loyalty to the working class.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The Comintern characterised the Second International’s collapse in the face of 1914 as resulting in part from its failure to organise real international unity, and proposed as an alternative a much more tightly centralised and disciplined international. Yet the Comintern was dissolved in 1943, leaving behind the looser Cominform of communist parties which, like the socialist parties, were fundamentally nationalist in their strategic horizons.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The Trotskyists founded their ‘Fourth International’ in 1938 as a “world party of socialist revolution” - something in theory even more centralised than the Comintern. In 1953 this “world party” broke up into two competing organisations, the International Secretariat of the Fourth International (ISFI), the predecessor of today’s Mandelite Fourth International, and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The European core of the ISFI has remained relatively stable as an international organisation (the same cannot be said for its politics). The current Mandelite FI has become unequivocally an organisation like the Second International. That is, it is a loose coordination of national parties (in this case, mostly grouplets), whose leaders meet periodically and pass diplomatic resolutions.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The ICFI ‘tradition’ has given rise to a bewildering range of ‘internationals’ - Healyite and sub-Healyite variants, Lambertiste and sub-Lambertiste, Lorista and sub-Lorista, Morenista and sub-Morenista, Spartacist and sub-Spartacist, and so on. Almost all of these ‘internationals’ are the international fan clubs of national organisations in the main historic centres of Trotskyism: France, the US, Britain and Argentina.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]Meanwhile, Trotskyist organisations that were originally purely national in character, such as the French Lutte Ouvrière, the British Militant (both Grantite and Taaffeite wings) and the British Socialist Workers Party and Workers Power, have created their own ‘internationals’ or ‘international tendencies’.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]This plethora of international sects has had the effect among broad layers of activists of discrediting the entire idea of an organised workers’ international political movement. ‘Internationalism’ has as a result become reduced to two elements. The first is efforts to promote and/or reform the United Nations and the ‘international rule of law’. Whatever their intentions, these actually serve to give political support to the global, US-led, capitalist system of nation-states.[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman]106[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The second is fundamentally liberal ‘international solidarity campaigns’ around hot spots in global politics, based on moral hatred of suffering and injustice rather than on a positive strategy for international action of the working class. These campaigns do some useful work but lead nowhere and rarely reach deeply into the working class.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]To the extent that there is a ‘strategy’ involved in ‘anti-imperialist internationalism’ of this sort, it is the Maoist/third-worldist idea of ‘surrounding the cities’: ie, that revolution in the colonial world can overthrow the imperialist world order. The present character of the Chinese and Vietnamese regimes - and all the other formerly radical third-worldist regimes - all too clearly shows the falsity of this strategy.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]Around the year 2000 there appeared to be a small glimmer of hope for a renewed broad international movement in the anti-globalisation movement and the World Social Forums. But the bureaucracies of the major national parties and unions and the NGOs supporting this movement have combined with the dominance of anarchistic ‘movementist’ ideas in the ranks to produce a series of, no doubt interesting, periodic talking shops.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The ‘direct action’ alternative in the anti-globalisation movement largely represents merely an opportunity for some youth to have a barney with the police. After the first media shocks of the 1990s, this has had about as much practical political effect as if the same militants were to expend the same energy fighting the police after football matches.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] The root of this catastrophe is that the Second, Third and Fourth Internationals shared a common false conception of the role of the international action of the working class in revolutionary strategy, and that the Third and Fourth superimposed on this error a particular variant of the Comintern’s Bonapartist centralism, the idea of the “general staff of world revolution”. The result has been to produce international sects on the one hand, and a reaction away from proletarian internationalism and international organisation in negative-dialectical response to the international sects.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] The Communist League that issued the Communist manifesto was a small group, mainly composed of migrants, together with some supporters among Paris artisans and a section of the left wing of the British Chartist movement. “Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages” (Communist manifesto). The migrant core of the League, and Marx’s and Engels’ combination of “German philosophy, French socialism and English political economy” reflected the international character of the larger democraticmovement of which this was part.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] The voice of this tendency was to be amplified by the 1848 revolution in Germany, albeit the actual Communist League did not survive the defeat of this revolution. This revolution in turn was part of a European revolutionary wave extending from France to Hungary which from beginning to end took place within the space of a couple of years.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] The First International was launched on the back of the campaigns of British radicals and the workers’ movement in 1862-63 to prevent Britain intervening on the side of the slaveowner Confederacy in the American civil war. The immediate moment of its launch in 1864 was an appeal by London trade union leaders to Paris workers’ leaders for joint action in support of the Polish struggle for independence. Its activity consisted of a combination of international strike support - both financial and through urging secondary action - with political interventions against national oppression (Poland, Ireland) and against threats of war.[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman]107[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] The Second International was prepared by attempts in the early 1880s to unite European socialists, but took its real impetus as a movement from the Chicago Haymarket massacre of 1884 and the consequent struggle for May Day as an international workers’ festival. The International was formally founded in 1889 and made the struggle for May Day a symbolic centre of its work.[/FONT]

    [FONT=Times New Roman]An international of symbols[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The Second International remained until 1900 merely a series of socialist congresses that passed resolutions, without a leading body equivalent to the general council of the First International which could respond rapidly to events or organise strike solidarity. In 1900, the International Socialist Bureau was established. The online catalogue of the archives held in Amsterdam by the International Institute of Social History suggests - although the IISH’s holdings may well be defective - that the ISB was, proportionately, considerably less active than the general council of the First International had been.[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman]108[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The First International had been an international of practical tasks; the Second International was, starting with May Day, mainly one of symbols. Why? The fundamental explanation is that its leaders thought that the struggle for workers’ power was one conducted within the boundaries of single countries: following Marx and Engels, that “the proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie” (Communist manifesto).[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]It is not clear how far Marx and Engels still believed this in their later lives. After all, the 1864 ‘Inaugural address’ of the First International had asserted that: “Past experience has shown how disregard of that bond of brotherhood which ought to exist between the workmen of different countries, and incite them to stand firmly by each other in all their struggles for emancipation, will be chastised by the common discomfiture of their incoherent efforts.”[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman]109[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]And Engels, in his 1875 letter to Bebel criticising the Gotha programme, had commented that the German party should be “conscious of its solidarity with the workers of all other countries and will, as before, always be ready to meet the obligations that solidarity entails. Such obligations, even if one does not definitely proclaim or regard oneself as part of the ‘international’, consist, for example, in aid, abstention from blacklegging during strikes, making sure that the party organs keep German workers informed of the movement abroad, agitation against impending or incipient dynastic wars and, during such wars, an attitude such as was exemplarily maintained in 1870 and 1871, etc.”[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman]110[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] However, after the split with the Bakuninists, Marx and Engels had supported the move away from maintaining the International as such in favour of building national parties that organised working class political action at national level.[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman]111[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman] The logic of this policy was, as we have already seen, to place the major emphasis on the growth and strength of these national parties, ultimately if necessary implying the pursuance of a revolutionary-defencist policy in war (chapter three).[/FONT]

    [FONT=Times New Roman]Strategic problem[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]Marx and Engels did not much discuss the relation between the national revolutions supposed by the claim that “the proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie” and the international character of the workers’ movement posed by the Communist League and the First International.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]Nor did Marx, in his critique of the Gotha programme, draw out the strategic implications of his comment that “the ‘framework of the present-day national state’ - for instance, the German empire - is itself, in its turn, economically ‘within the framework’ of the world market, politically ‘within the framework’ of the system of states. Every businessman knows that German trade is at the same time foreign trade, and the greatness of Herr Bismarck consists, to be sure, precisely in his pursuing a kind of international policy.”[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman]112[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]It is commonly said that generals tend to plan to fight the last war. 1848 was an international revolutionary wave in which more or less simultaneous national upsurges were obviously part of a common international movement. Marx and Engels fairly clearly saw this experience of their youth as a model for the future revolutionary moment.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]It did not appear. Instead, the period was dominated by a series of national movements and short European wars: the Crimea in 1854-56, the Franco-Austrian war (1859) and unification of Italy (1860), the Austro-Prussian war (1866) and the Franco-Prussian war (1870), which led to the Paris Commune.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The defeat of the Commune in 1871, the split in the International with the Bakuninists in 1872, and the defeat of the Spanish revolution in 1873 shifted at least Engels’ thinking towards what was to become Kautskyism: the patient work of building up the organised forces of the working class, carried on mainly through national politics. In the parties of the Second International, this evolved into a clear conception that the working class could take power in individual countries as the conditions in these countries became ‘ripe’ for socialism.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The logic of this evolution was to be most fully brought out in Kautsky’s Preparations for peace (October 1914): “Democracy can only find its best expression in a state which consists of one nation, speaking one language. Modern production brings the people ever into closer touch with each other. The more the inner divisions fall away, the more all the members of the state speak the same language, the more intensively can economic, intellectual and political life proceed. And within this method of production is arising the cooperation of the lower classes’ intellectual and political life, which means additional strength to every nation. In a national state both these tendencies combine and strengthen one another. In a state of various nationalities they come into hostile collision with each other, and have a paralysing effect on the economic and political process, all the stronger as development progresses.”[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman]113[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The nation-state is here made not only the present which the workers’ movement has to face, but also the necessary future of humanity.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]We have already seen the underlying problem with this approach. Capitalism is from the beginning an international social formation, and the nation-state is, in relation to the world market, merely a firm. The state-firm retains liquidity by borrowing on financial markets. These, if they are national in form, are international in substance: this was already true of the 17th century Amsterdam and 18th century London financial markets. An attempt in a single country to break with capitalist rule - or even to significantly improve the position of the working class - will thus be met with withdrawal of credit by the capitalists, leading to an immediate crisis of state liquidity and more general economic dislocation.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] If a socialist government responds by expropriations, the immediate effect is to break the incentive structure of the capitalist market in the country and increase economic dislocation. In addition, the response of international capital will then take the form of blockade and war. It thus becomes immediately necessary to move to generalised planning under economic autarky. This was the situation of the Bolsheviks in 1918-19; it has been repeated with varying results - usually the collapse of the socialist government - many times since.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] The result is, in fact - as it was in the former tsarist empire - economic regression. Hence the socialist party loses its majority support and is forced - if it is to continue its course - to minority dictatorship and increasingly systematic repression. In countries that are not self-sufficient in food, energy and raw materials - ie, most advanced capitalist countries - the result would be mass starvation. The socialist government would collapse into a capitalist government far more rapidly than happened in Russia and China.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] The exception that proves the rule is the outcome of World War II, the effects of which stretched down to the 1980s. The deep global crisis of British world hegemony, culminating in World War II, and the particular form which that war took, yielded the result that the USSR was massively strengthened while remaining under bureaucratic rule. In the ensuing ‘cold war’ there could appear to be a series of ‘national revolutions’. But in reality these were possible because the countries involved (most clearly Cuba) were brought into and subsidised by the autarkic, bureaucratic ‘planning’ system of the Soviet regime. Equally, the US, now hegemonic over the capitalist countries, consciously encouraged social democratic and nationalist reform in capital’s front-line states as an instrument to secure them from being added to the ‘Soviet empire’: part of the policy of ‘containment’.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] The offensive of the working class in the late 1960s and early 1970s destroyed the policy of containment and led the US to turn to a global policy of aggressive ‘roll-back of communism’ under the banner of ‘human rights’. The fall of the USSR has finally destroyed the foundations of the policy of concessions for the sake of containment. The exception is now over. It still proves the rule because it was international events and dynamics - World War II and the cold war - that enabled the supposedly ‘national’ revolutions and reforms. Capitalism is an international system and it is international events and movements that enable radical change in individual nation-states.[/FONT]

    [FONT=Times New Roman]The importance of symbolic unity[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The Second International offered mainly symbolic unity of the international workers’ movement. But this symbolic unity was profoundly important to the development of workers’ parties in the individual countries.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]This point is clearest at the fringes. In Britain and the US, May Day became, in the 1890s, the focus of the early stages of development of class political consciousness after the later 19th century slough of ‘pure trade unionism’; and in the early 20th century the connection to the Second International pushed the more advanced trade unionists towards politics, and the socialist groups towards unity.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]Similarly, relations to the international movement pushed the French, Italian and Russian socialist groups towards unity in a single party, actively encouraged by the Kautskyan leadership; and the single party then advanced class political consciousness at a level that the divided socialist groups could not. There are no doubt other examples.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]In fact, the same is true in Germany itself. In 1875 Liebknecht wrote a ‘Lassallean’ programme for Gotha, perhaps imagining that this was necessary to achieve unity. In reality, the Lassallean General Association of German Workers was desperate for unity and would have accepted it on any terms. It had been losing ground to the ‘Marxist’ Eisenachers because of its hostility to broad trade unions, its dictatorial internal regime and the Eisenachers’ clear opposition to the imperial state, which had been expressed by their MPs’ refusal to vote for war credits in 1870.[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman]114[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman] The Eisenachers’ roughly democratic character, support for trade unions and internationalism were all legacies of the First International.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The working class is an international class. It can only attain full political consciousness of its character as a class - become a class ‘for itself’ - if this character is expressed in international unity of the workers’ class movement. The symbolic unity offered by the Second International was less than was needed for the proletariat to take power, but still necessary for the proletariat to get as far as it got in the run-up to 1914.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] We can see the same phenomenon in the fate of communist and Trotskyist parties/groups after the dissolution of the Comintern. The allegiance of the ‘tankies’ to the USSR and its leadership was a deformed and bastardised internationalism, but it was a form of internationalism nonetheless. The Eurocommunists, as they lost their internationalism, also lost their ability to promote any sort of class politics and became, if anything, more liberal than the social-democrats.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] Among the Trotskyists, in the split of 1953 the ‘Pabloite’ ISFI prioritised the unity of the international movement, while the ‘anti-Pabloite’ ICFI prioritised the organisational independence of their national parties. The result was that the ISFI and its successors remained more open and democratic than the successors of the ICFI, which universally wound up creating Stalinist internal regimes and Cominforms round their national ‘parties’. As the ISFI’s successors in the 1980s began to theorise the idea that only the sovereign national parties, not the ‘international’, should act as parties, they also moved more generally towards Eurocommunist non-class politics.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] Even in distorted forms, then, the struggle for international unity of the working class and the struggle for working class political independence stand and fall together.[/FONT]

    [FONT=Times New Roman]The Russian question[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]If the policy of the Second International was fundamentally one of separate national revolutions, there was an undercurrent that suggested a repeat of 1848. This was expressed in Marx and Engels’ responses to the Russian Narodnaya Volya, and became current among Russian Marxists - most explicitly in Trotsky’s Results and prospects, but also in Lenin’s Two tactics. The idea was that the fall of the tsarist regime would rapidly trigger a European-wide workers’ revolution - an 1848 on a higher level.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]This was a view held by Marx and Engels at the time of the Crimean War, and the correspondence with the Narodniks and Russian prefaces to the Manifesto revived it. It was, in fact, a reasonable but mistaken response to the defeat of 1848. Russian intervention had played an important part in 1848 in defeats in Poland and Hungary, and the tsarist regime was one of the principal guarantors of the European regime of the Congress of Vienna and the Holy Alliance that backed it. Knocking Russia out of the picture should, therefore, let loose the national-democratic movements in central Europe (Poland, Hungary, etc). This would bring down the Austro-Hungarian and German regimes and trigger European-wide revolutionary aspirations in the style of 1848.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]It was a mistake because 1815 was fundamentally a British-sponsored settlement placing a pressure-lid on continental politics for the benefit of Britain. True, the tsar, the king of Prussia and the emperor of Austria had provided most of the soldiers to defeat France; but the money that funded their armies had been raised and mobilised through London at the behest of the British government.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The 1847 economic crisis led to the British-imposed lid being blown off all across Europe in a revolutionary explosion. The primary change that ensued - the regime of Louis Napoleon in France - freed French capital from the British-imposed chains of 1815, so that the French state could begin to compete on the military-international level with Britain.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]As a result, in the ensuing period Germany and Italy were driven towards unification in order to emulate France, and governments began to use (or returned to using) war and imperialism as a means to bleed off the internal contradictions of domestic politics and economics. Hence after the Crimean war, the idea that the tsarist regime in any strong sense guaranteed European political stability or was the policeman of Europe was illusory.[/FONT]

    [FONT=Times New Roman]In 1914-18 the point was emphatically demonstrated. Far from the Russian Revolution triggering the European revolution, the European war triggered the Russian Revolution. The central European national movements then proved to be a bulwark first of German, then of Entente, policy against the Russian Revolution. The Russian Revolution did, at one remove, trigger revolutionary movements in Hungary, Germany and Italy. It did so not by the route envisaged by Marx and Engels, that the removal of fear of Russian intervention in central Europe would open the way to a revolutionary movement which would spill westwards. Nor did it do so by the route projected by Trotsky in Results and Prospects, that the Russian Revolution would spill over into Germany and/or trigger a collapse of the London and Paris financial markets. Rather, the perception of the revolution as a workers’ revolution triggered an international radicalisation of the workers’ movement. This radicalisation reached its highest points in the countries which could not see themselves as victors in the war: Germany, Austria-Hungary and (in a slightly different way) Italy. Advanced workers in these countries saw a possibility of workers’ revolution as a result of 1917. They could see this possibility because of the prior symbolic international unity of the workers’ movement in the form of the pre-war Second International. [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]At first, October 1917 seemed to show that the working class could take power. This image promoted revolutionary attempts elsewhere. But the impulse rapidly ebbed. As disturbing news began to filter west, even Luxemburg, in prison, was hesitant. As the character of the Soviet regime was rendered more explicit in the theses of the 1920 and 1921 Comintern Congresses, the ban on factions and the Kronstadt events, the majority of the existing militant left activists of the workers’ movement in western Europe took their distance from the Bolsheviks. This was reflected in the 1921 splits from the Comintern of both the larger part of those among the left of the Kautskyan centre who had flirted with it, and the ‘left communists’ (larger then than they later became).[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]These splits foreshadowed the future: the nature of the Soviet regime was to become a primary political obstacle to any attempt of the working class to take power into its own hands in western Europe, and ultimately to international class-political consciousness more generally.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The image of an international chain of national revolutions starting with Russia was, nonetheless, to be the governing idea of Comintern international strategy and, after it, that of the Trotskyists.[/FONT]

    [FONT=Times New Roman]Comintern and the Trotskyists[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The idea that became the Communist International began, as we have already seen in chapter four, with the anti-war wing of the Second International and with Lenin’s and Zinoviev’s struggle within this left for an international split. Comintern was able to emerge because of the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in October 1917 and the survival of the revolutionary regime into 1919, when the 1st Congress of Comintern met.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The result was that Comintern had a double character. On the one hand, it was an International of the anti-war left, attempting to redeem the honour of socialism after the ignominious political collapse of the Second International. On the other, it was a fan club for the Russian Revolution and its leaders.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The fan-club aspect became more prominent with the defeat of the Hungarian and (especially) the German and Italian revolutionary movements. On the one hand, the Russians had the prestige of victory and the material resources of state power. On the other, the Germans had lost some of their most eminent leaders - and the westerners in general had failed where the Russians had succeeded. It was natural for Comintern in these circumstances to become a body that propagated the idea of the Russian Revolution as a universal model.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]In international strategy, this had two aspects. The first was that defence of the Soviet regime was the central touchstone of the communist parties’ internationalism. The idea that it might be appropriate to admit the defeat of a proletarian socialist policy in the face of the defeat of the western revolutionary movements of 1919-20 and of peasant resistance in Russia, and carry out a controlled retreat to capitalism, was literally unthinkable to Comintern.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]Whether such a retreat was a possible option is doubtful; but the inability of the communist parties to think it probably contributed to the fact that the degeneration of the Soviet regime into open tyranny brought the communist parties down with it. It also produced among the Trotskyists a bizarre body of competing theological dogmas about the Stalinist regime that provided ideology for the Trotskyists’ endless splits.[/FONT]

    [FONT=Times New Roman]Back to separate national revolutions[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The second aspect was a political retreat to the idea of a series of discrete national revolutions. This was a retreat in the first place because, as we saw in chapter four, Lenin’s and Zinoviev’s policy of dual defeatism supposed a struggle by an organised international movement to bring down the belligerent states simultaneously.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]It was a retreat secondly because it was quite clear to the Russian leadership that the proletariat could not hope to hold power in Russia for long - how long was uncertain - unless the western workers’ movement came to their aid. October 1917 was thus a gamble on the German revolution. By 1919, with German social-democracy in the saddle, this gamble had failed; it was only gradually that the possibility of ‘hanging on and waiting for the Germans’ for a year or two was transmuted into the idea of a prolonged period of isolation of the Soviet regime, and from there in turn into ‘socialism in one country’.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]In the third place, Comintern at the outset and down to 1921 expected a generalised European civil war in the short term, and in the civil war in Russia and the 1920 invasion of Poland the Russian CP had been willing to ride roughshod over national self-determination to carry the arms of the Red Army to the borders of the former tsarist empire. In 1920 they hoped to carry them to the eastern border of Germany, ready to intervene if the German communists could provide the casus belli.[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman]115[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman] Only military defeat held them back here (and in Finland and the Baltic).[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]By 1921 this policy was effectively over. This fact was signalled both by the retreat in Russia represented by the New Economic Policy, and the turn to the struggle to ‘win the masses’ urged on the communist parties at the 3rd Congress.[/FONT]

    [FONT=Times New Roman]‘Do what the Russians did’[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The shift into a policy of separate national revolutions - even if these might turn out to be close together in time - carried with it an increased emphasis on copying the Russian Revolution. The struggle for soviets; intervention in the bourgeois parliaments; the struggle to win the trade unions; the worker-farmer alliance; ‘Bolshevising’ the organisational norms of communist parties; the united front; the workers’ government; the policy of the right of the self-determination of nations; and what became ‘transitional demands’. All these were justified primarily on the basis that they were validated by the victory of the Russian Revolution, and only secondarily (and sketchily) on more general, theoretical grounds. There was only one example of a successful revolution - Russia - and socialists everywhere had to copy it.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]If it were not for the immediate context of defeats in Hungary, Germany and Italy, and the general belief that revolutionary crisis and civil war were on the agenda in the immediate term in the west, this claim would have been utterly extraordinary. Russia was a country in which the proletariat was a small minority. Communications in the Russian countryside were highly patchy, and in many areas the technology in use in agriculture and the density of market towns was more comparable to the west European 12th century than to the 16th (let alone the early 20th).[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]Trade unions and political parties alike had existed in Russia before the revolution illegally and on a small scale. The German Reichstag had limited powers, but looked more or less like a French or Italian chamber of deputies; the Russian duma was far more limited. There was little reason to suppose that the tactics that had brought down the fragile and not very democratic regime of the 1917 provisional governments and the shallowly rooted Kadet, Menshevik and Social Revolutionary parties would work on the far more deeply entrenched and experienced political parties of western Europe, the US or even Latin America.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]Imitating the Russians was not utterly disastrous, in the same way attempts to imitate the Maoists in more developed countries were in the 1960s and 1970s. This is attributable to the fact that most of what the Russians endeavoured to teach the Comintern in 1920-23 was in fact orthodox Kautskyism, which the Russians had learned from the German SPD. But there were exceptions. The worker-peasant alliance was utterly meaningless in the politics of the western communist parties before 1940, and after 1945 was a force for conservatism, as the European bourgeoisies turned to subsidising agriculture.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The ‘Bolshevisation’ of the communist parties, and the savage polemics against Kautsky and others over “classless democracy”, which became part of the common inheritance of ‘official communism’, Maoism and Trotskyism, deeply deformed these movements. In the end, the Bonapartist-centralised dictatorship of the party bureaucracy produced kleptocrats in the USSR and the countries that copied it. In the western communist parties and the trade unions associated with them, it produced ordinary labour bureaucrats with more power to quash dissent than the old socialist bureaucracy had deployed (a feature gratefully copied by the social democratic right). In the Trotskyist and Maoist groups it produced petty patriarchs and tinpot dictators whose interests in holding onto their jobs and petty power were an effective obstacle to unity. It thus turned out to be in the interests of … the capitalist class.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman][FONT=Times New Roman]Moreover, casting out “the renegade Kautsky” cut off the communists from the western European roots of their politics. Lenin and his co-thinkers’ transmission of the inheritance of the Second International into Russian politics became Lenin’s unique genius on the party question, feeding into the cult of the personality of Lenin (and its successors …). Perfectly ordinary western socialist political divisions, pre-existing the split in the Second International, had to be cast in Russian terms. Communists began to speak a language alien to their broader audiences, the language that has descended into today’s Trot-speak.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The ‘general staff of world revolution’[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]Trotsky described Comintern as the “political general staff of the world revolution”, and the phrase to some extent stuck.[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman]116[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][FONT=Times New Roman]The idea of a ‘general staff’ was, in fact, taken from the German imperial armed forces: the Prussian Grosser Generalstab had been the first such institution, and the imperial version had conducted the strategic planning that was put into effect in 1914. It carried with it a very centralised concept of command: the imperial general staff to a considerable extent micro-managed the particular fronts. In the latter part of World War I the imperial general staff headed by Hindenburg and Ludendorff became the effective government of Germany.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]This background in Prussian military thought carried with it a willingness in Comintern’s leadership to micro-manage the national parties. At the very beginning of the Comintern, the Russians pressed their closest German co-thinkers for an early split with the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), a decision the German leaders regretted. The ECCI had no hesitation in issuing instructions to the French Communist Party (PCF) about, for example, the composition of its leadership and the reorganisation of its Seine federation, and pressed the German Communist Party (KPD) in 1923 to make military preparations for an insurrection.[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman]117[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]So far this point is familiar from the Eurocommunists’ and their followers’ attacks on Comintern and on Trotskyism. It is important, however, to be clear that the “general staff of world revolution” was not simply ‘wrong’.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]If it had been the case that Europe was on the verge of generalised civil war, the creation of a European-wide military command structure capable of giving orders to the national movements would have been entirely justified. In war that is to go beyond guerrilla harassment of the enemy to take and hold territory, it is necessary to have a centralised command. It is also sometimes necessary for units to sacrifice themselves in diversionary attacks that will enable victory elsewhere (or, for that matter, in attacks that will lead to breakthroughs by attrition).[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]It might thus have been justified to wager the KPD on the possibility that a breakthrough in Germany would bring down the whole European state system. Trotsky certainly went on thinking so for the rest of his life, blaming the KPD leadership for fumbling the crises of 1923.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]There were two underlying problems. The first is that “war is the continuation of politics by other means” (Clausewitz).[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman]118[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman] War is not reducible to politics, nor politics to war. Creating a top-down military command structure in the Russian Communist Party, Comintern and the other communist parties tended to eliminate or subordinate the local and sectoral mediations that link a workers’ party to its broader working class constituency and feed back on the centre the political ideas and mood current in this constituency. It thus reduced both the communist parties’ and the Comintern’s ability to form the political judgments that necessarily underlie decisions for military action.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]Second, the communists were nowhere near having political majority support in Europe or even in Germany. The task of the communists once the revolutionary wave of 1919-20 had ebbed was - as Comintern recognised at the 3rd and 4th Congresses - to win a political majority. It was not to launch a civil war. A “general staff of world revolution” was therefore inappropriate.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] The military-centralist character of Comintern had the practical effect of making the leaderships of the communist parties dependent on the Comintern centre in Moscow. This took the form of material dependence in the case of the small communist parties - such as the CPGB - which received subsidies from Moscow, and equally in those parties that were illegal, so that the party leadership was located in Moscow.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] But it was equally present in the stronger communist parties such as the KPD and PCF. The ‘democratic centralist’ character of Comintern - within the terms of the 1920-21 idea of ‘democratic centralism’ - had the effect that the leaders of these parties were answerable to and removable by the Comintern centre. They could not both be in this position and be answerable to and removable by their own membership.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] The problem was accentuated by the fact that the relation to the Comintern centre in Moscow was necessarily clandestine. In the first place, if the KPD (or the CPGB) openly took orders from Moscow, prosecution could follow, all the more if (as in Germany in 1923) the orders were to prepare for and launch an insurrection. Second, because it was based in Moscow, the Comintern centre lacked the sort of legitimacy that had been possessed by the general council of the First International or by the congresses of the Second. It was all too easy to accuse it of being merely an instrument of the Russian state.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] Clandestinity meant secrecy, and secrecy meant that the members had even less chance of holding the leaders to account than would have been the case if there had been open and transparent subordination of the leaderships of the communist parties to the international centre. There was no chance, in this regime, of the western communist parties resisting the development of open bureaucratic tyranny in the USSR and the accompanying degeneration of Comintern.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] In 1919-20 there was a West European Bureau of the Comintern, based in Amsterdam. It turned out that the Left Communists had a majority, and their split brought it to an end. The bureau was overlapped with and was succeeded by an equally short-lived Western European Secretariat, based in Berlin, involving (at least) Radek and Levi. A Central European Secretariat was slightly more long-lasting.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] The short life of these organisations reflected the fact that the military or Bonapartist character of the centralism of 1921 was counterposed to them. Horizontal connections between neighbouring parties, and sub-centres, would inevitably compromise the pure centralism of the International. There were to be the national parties and the international centre.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] This structural form reinforced the idea of separate national revolutions. Formal horizontal collaboration might identify concrete common political features, or common tasks. The same would be true of intermediary levels of organisation, such as European (or, by analogy, Latin American, or Pan-African) conferences and leading committees. Within nationalparties such intermediary structures are common, although bureaucratic centralism tends to close them down or turn them into mere transmission belts for the centre. Channelling everything through Moscow had the effect, in contrast, that there could only be national tasks and global tasks - and global tasks were defined by the view from Moscow.[/FONT]

    [FONT=Times New Roman]Trotsky’s call for the Fourth International[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]This background character of Comintern helps to explain the peculiar character of Trotsky’s decision in 1933 to denounce it as dead for the purposes of world revolution and call for a new, fourth, International. The peculiarity of this decision is the fact that Trotsky denounced the Third International on the basis of events in a single country (Germany).[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The First International had been founded on the explicit basis of the international tasks of the proletariat as a class; the Second, more indefinitely, on the basis of the international common character of the proletariat’s interests and struggles. The Third, at least formally, had been founded on the failure of the Second in World War I. To denounce the Comintern and call for a new international on the basis of a defeat in a single country was therefore something quite new - even if the country, Germany, had been the historical centre of the Second International and home to one of the strongest communist parties.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]Trotsky seems to have imagined that the Comintern would be defined for ever by the disaster in Germany, as the Second International was defined for ever by August 1914. The choice to support the existing states in war did indeed turn out to be a permanent choice that defines Labourite and socialist parties to this day.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]But 1933 was not comparable to August 1914. By 1935 the Comintern had abandoned the sectarian ‘third period’ politics that led to the disaster of 1933 and turned to the people’s front policy.[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman]119[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman] In spite of a brief return to the ‘third period’ during the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939-41, the people’s front was to be the main strategic line of ‘official communism’ permanently (and still is today). The ‘third period’ and its role in the disaster in Germany has become a matter of interest to historians and Trotskyists.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The 1933 call for a Fourth International was therefore plainly premature. It was only with the people’s front turn, as the communists more and more plainly abandoned both working class political independence and criticism of the social democrats, that the Trotskyists’ project began to win broader support. Even then, the growth was limited: the ‘Fourth International’ founded in 1938 could account for about 7,500 organised militants worldwide.[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman]120[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]Part of the explanation for Trotsky’s premature call for the Fourth International is that - as can be seen from his writings in the 1930s - he had become fully convinced that Lenin was right and he was wrong between 1903 and 1917. He was therefore determined not to do anything that could amount to conciliationism or postponing the necessary struggle to create a new party and a new international.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]Cominternism[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]There is, however, another and in some ways more fundamental aspect. Trotsky’s conception both of the International Left Opposition (ILO), formed in 1930, and of the projected Fourth International, was that they were to be a revival and continuation of the Comintern of 1919-23. The documents of the first four congresses of the Comintern were part of the ILO’s platform and of its successor’s, the International Communist League.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]This unavoidably meant that the ILO, ICL and ‘Fourth International’ carried in their roots the ideas of a chain of national revolutions (starting, now, perhaps somewhere other than in Russia) and of an international whose tasks were mainly to create parties of the ‘Bolshevik type’ in every country. On the one hand, this meant that defeats and disasters in single countries formed the real basis of the critique of the Comintern - and of the critique of those, such as the Spanish POUM and French PSOP, with whom the Trotskyists broke on the road to the ‘Fourth International’.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]On the other, the idea of tasks of the International as such in constructing international unity of the working class in action had no strategic ground in the Trotskyists’ ideas. A tiny group, of course, could do little practical along these lines. But the ‘Fourth International’ was bound to appear as a micro-miniature Comintern with a leftist version of Comintern strategy.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The ‘Fourth International’ also inherited from the Third the utter centrality of the defence of the Russian Revolution and hence of the USSR in wars with capitalist states to its identity and programme . In 1939-40 this position was to split it down the middle over the Russo-Finnish war and the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, with Trotsky insisting that the minority (in the US and elsewhere) should not have the right to express its views in public. The minority took a third of the membership of the US Socialist Workers Party, the largest group represented at the 1938 congress, and half of the ‘international executive committee’ elected at that congress.[/FONT]

    [FONT=Times New Roman]Bureaucratic centralism[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The refusal to accept public factions in 1940 was in contradiction with the Trotskyists’ own history. The Trotskyist movement had originated in the 1920s as an illegal public faction of the Russian Communist Party, and the ILO launched in 1930 had been an illegal public faction of Comintern. The Russian oppositions, indeed, had had as part of their core politics a critique of bureaucratism, albeit one that was cautious and imperfectly articulate.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]Part of this critique survived in the culture Trotsky sought to create in the ILO and ICL. The 1933 resolution, ‘The International Left Opposition, its tasks and methods’, said that: “The foundation of party democracy is timely and complete information, available to all members of the organisation and covering all the important questions of their life and struggle. Discipline can be built up only on a conscious assimilation of the policies of the organisation by all its members and on confidence in the leadership. Such confidence can be won only gradually, in the course of common struggle and reciprocal influence …[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]“The frequent practical objections, based on the ‘loss of time’ in abiding by democratic methods, amount to short-sighted opportunism. The education and consolidation of the organisation is a most important task. Neither time nor effort should be spared for its fulfilment. Moreover, party democracy, as the only conceivable guarantee against unprincipled conflicts and unmotivated splits, in the last analysis does not increase the overhead costs of development, but reduces them. Only through constant and conscientious adherence to the methods of democracy can the leadership undertake important steps on its own responsibility in truly emergency cases without provoking disorganisation or dissatisfaction.”[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman]121[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]These statements are a standing rebuke to the post-war Trotskyists.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The aspirations of the 1933 resolution were at least partly reflected in the conduct of the international secretariats of the ILO and ICL and in Trotsky’s correspondence. [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The secretariats were willing to accept partial splits and public fights in the sections, and Trotsky urged the creation of horizontal relations between the sections (ie, that their debates should be carried into the other sections) as well as vertical section-secretariat relations.[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman]122[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]However, Trotsky’s response to the 1939-40 minority that rejected Soviet-defencism was bureaucratic centralist, and it drew on the idea of splits as purging and proletarianising the movement that had been initiated in the split in the Second International, as we saw in chapter five. [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]Trotsky was assassinated in 1940. His writings on the US 1939-40 split thus left, as his last legacy to the post-war Trotskyists, bureaucratic centralism and the idea of the ‘proletarianising’ and ‘purging’ split.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman] [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]Two, three, many internationals[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]In the world between the opening of the cold war in 1948, and the beginning of the open political crisis of the USSR in the 1980s, ‘official communism’ appeared to be a strategic way forward for the global working class, and apolitical trade unionism and social democratic coalitionism appeared to be a strategic way forward for the working class in the imperialist countries.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]Although Comintern had been wound up in 1943, the ‘official communists’ had a form of international, the Cominform: the CPSU had discovered that a ‘consultative’ international secured freedom from accountability as effectively as an open bureaucratic dictatorship and with fewer overhead costs.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]This situation posed to the Trotskyists the question: what was their international for? In 1953, they split between the majority ‘Pabloite’ advocates of a tactic of large-scale fraction work in the communist parties, and their ‘anti-Pabloite’ opponents, who insisted on building parties organisationally separate from the ‘official communists’ among the milieux of the French socialists, British Bevanites and Rooseveltian Democrat trade unionists.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The split was characterised by bureaucratic centralism on both sides, as first the international executive committee expelled the majority of the French section, and then the US SWP and British section expelled minorities in their organisations that supported the ‘Pabloite’ international majority.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The minority formed an ‘international committee’, but turned out to be unable to produce anything more than occasional liaison meetings between the French, British and US full-timers. In due course the national components went their separate ways, with the usual round of expulsions. Each created an openly bureaucratic centralist ‘Trotintern’, or a formally ‘consultative’ ‘Trotinform’, with its own party in the role of the CPSU.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]This was the legacy of Comintern’s ‘chain of revolutions’ idea and the ‘leading role’ in Comintern of the ‘most advanced’ party, with the American , British and French each imagining that they were the ‘most advanced’.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The ‘Pabloites’ (after 1960, the Mandelites) did a little better: they preserved the forms of an international organisation with centre, leadership, international congresses and press, and a degree of internal democracy in their organisation. In the early 1970s, they even began to develop continental perspectives and centres, and horizontal relations between sections. But if you asked them what their international was for, the only answer they could give was to be a “centre where the international experiences of the mass movement and of the revolution are progressively assimilated”.[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman]123[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]At the end of the day this is to say no more than the Fourth International must exist because it must. Their international had become the Mandelites’ sectarian shibboleth, which distinguished them from their Trotskyist competitors in individual countries.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The insistence of the Mandelites that no-one could be a Trotskyist without the Fourth International pressed the national groups (even quite large ones such as the French Lutte Ouvrière,British Militant and SWP) to create their own. The 1953 split and - all the more - the 1971 split between the British and French anti-Pabloites had the effect of legitimising multiple ‘internationals’ among Trotskyists. At this point we have arrived at today’s world of Trotskyist sect ‘internationals’, although the full baroque elaboration was not to arrive until the 1980s.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The ‘Trotinforms’ are, like the Cominform, just as much creatures of bureaucratic centralism as Comintern and the ‘Fourth International’ in its most centralist period. For example, the British SWP’s International Socialist Tendency is not formally ‘democratic centralist’ (ie, bureaucratic-centralist), but this ‘tendency’ can nonetheless expel the US International Socialist Organization for … supporting a minority faction in Greece in 2003.[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman]124[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]

    [FONT=Times New Roman]Fight for an international[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The need for an international is posed because the working class has concrete, immediate, practical international tasks. These are tasks of class solidarity - because the bourgeoisie uses national divisions in the working class to defeat strikes, etc. They are also tasks of formulating an independent class perspective on world affairs. These were the lessons of the First International.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The need for an international is also posed because the working class can only really understand its own strength and become conscious of itself as a ‘class for itself’, by becoming conscious of itself as an international class. This was the lesson of the symbolic role of the Second International.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]In the third place, the need for an international is posed because the working class cannot take power in a single country and wait for the proletariat of other countries to come to its aid. This is the fundamental lesson of the degeneration and collapse of Comintern and the eventual fall of the ‘socialist countries’. It was a lesson that was not learned by the Trotskyists.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The strategic task that this lesson poses for an international is an internationally united struggle of the working class for political power.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]It should be apparent that the objective political conditions do not yet exist for such a struggle. But they do exist for continental united struggles for political power, which fight for continental unification: a Communist Party of Europe, a Pan-African Communist Party, and so on. A dynamic towards the continental unification of politics is already visible in bourgeois politics, not just in Europe, and in the Latin American Chávista ‘Bolivarians’. It is even present in an utterly deformed and reactionary manner in the islamist movement in the Middle East.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]Comintern was not sterilised by the decision to split from the social democrats. It was sterilised by bureaucratic centralism, the idea of a chain of national revolutions and the idea of Comintern as a fan club for the Russians. Its failure was about the inability of Comintern to think of international tasks except either as immediate civil war, which called for a general staff, or making the national communist parties copy the Russians as the road to victory in a single country.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The Trotskyists’ 1933 call for a new international was premature. But it was not this premature split that turned their project into a swarm of malignant international sects. Rather it was their too great faithfulness to the ideas of the early Comintern, which committed them to the same bureaucratic centralism and the same idea of a chain of national revolutions. This in turn produced the ‘anti-Pabloite’ ‘Trotinterns’ and ‘Trotinforms’ on the one hand, and the Mandelite empty form of an international without political tasks on the other.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman]The struggle for an international is a present, concrete task of communists. It is clear, however, that this struggle cannot be carried on by creating yet another micro-‘international’. It has to be carried on by fighting, on every occasion that allows, against bureaucratic centralism and the nationalism that goes hand in hand with it, and for the concrete tasks of an international: the global struggle for solidarity in the immediate class struggle, for the symbolic unity of the working class as an international class; and the continental struggle for working class political unification and political power.[/FONT][/FONT]
    [/FONT]
  2. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    I must reluctantly agree with Paul Cockshott when he wrote this:

    "Macnair devotes a perhaps excessive critical attention to the Trotskyite international, in view of the latter’s limited influence."
  3. Q
    Q
    I must reluctantly agree with Paul Cockshott when he wrote this:

    "Macnair devotes a perhaps excessive critical attention to the Trotskyite international, in view of the latter’s limited influence."
    Well, to be frank, who else upholds the ideas of internationalism these days? It is mostly the Trotskyist scene, despite the limitations.
  4. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    But what about the usual meetings or conferences of "Communist and Workers Parties" (to use the Official Communist jargon)? Macnair doesn't cover these at all. There are also the "Anti-Revisionist" internationals:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interna..._Organizations

    I would say both Trotskyists and Official Communists are guilty of symbolic internationalism, but at least the latter aren't "fan clubs."
  5. Q
    Q
    Does anyone know the ICMLPO actually exists, besides the directly involved and freaks like ourselves?

    Besides, it isn't much more then a conference every two years, at least that's my impression of it.
  6. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    That's true.

    I suppose this would be the appropriate thread in which to discuss the proposed "Bolivarian" fan club (unless big bourgeois workers' parties like Die Linke and the Japanese Communist Party join in).
  7. AmericanRed
    AmericanRed
    I must reluctantly agree with Paul Cockshott when he wrote this:

    "Macnair devotes a perhaps excessive critical attention to the Trotskyite international, in view of the latter’s limited influence."
    Macnair was once in the International Marxist Group, no? He writes of what he knows.
  8. Q
    Q
    Macnair was once in the International Marxist Group, no? He writes of what he knows.
    That and the Trotskyist movement is relatively and historically strong in the UK.
  9. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    ... a single country? Even though the victory of fascism in Germany cannot be regarded the only valid reason for the demise of the Third International; fact is that in other countries the Third International was also making big mistakes. The problem was not the defeat itself. According to Trotsky it was what caused such defeats: the Soviet Bureaucracy. That was the problem. Political revolution, anyone?

    -
    [FONT=Verdana]It has to be carried on by fighting, on every occasion that allows, against bureaucratic centralism and the nationalism that goes hand in hand with it, and for the concrete tasks of an international: the global struggle for solidarity in the immediate class struggle, for the symbolic unity of the working class as an international class; and the continental struggle for working class political unification and political power.[/FONT]
    A rare nuance you wont read often. Rather than formal internationalism (c.f. an international secretariat) it's this so called symbolic internationalism (i.e. solidarity in the immediate class struggle) which creates the conditions for unity across borders. Once such organization is created the political struggle for continental or global power is on the agenda.
  10. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    Actually, Mike Macnair was expressing an internationalist-continentalist position, as opposed to a transnational position like mine.

    He should have put the second, shorter point as his second and vice versa to make things clearer. The "continental struggle" goes hand in hand with "international symbolic unity" (like North American and European "brotherhood of the peoples," which he more or less implied in a past article by saying "moral support" or something like that).

    Whenever he doesn't mention the continental struggle, "internationalism" is the same as Lassalle's "brotherhood of the peoples."

    EDIT: Without further adieu, here's an attempt at international unity:

    http://www.revleft.com/vb/group.php?groupid=396