Lenny Nista

Just because revolutionary Marxists do not support or join bourgeois parties (like Cárdenas's PRM), it does not therefore follow that we must support and join workers parties like Labour, whatever their politics, whatever the circumstances! Did Lenin or Trotsky insist at all times that German workers support their traditional party, the SPD? No, in fact one of the causes of the failure of the German revolution was that the revolutionaries broke too slowly and incompletely from the Social Democrats. What you are proposing is to take a rather exceptional case, where Trotsky was trying to work out a tactic for his very disorganized supporters in Britain to split Labour and form a Communist party, and transform it into a supposed law for all countries and all times, of "tactical electoral support" to class traitors. This is labourism disguised as Trotskyism.

But during Trotsky's tragically shortened life, voting for the British Labour party was the "stupid" (Trotsky's term!) way that the workers expressed their crudely defined class opposition to Chamberlain's bourgeois Tories. That's why Trotsky told the very weakly organized British 4th Internationalists to enter the Labour party like the French had done in the SFIO and the Americans had done in the SP, to be in a position to intersect this trend and to begin to break the masses away from the Labour Party and labourite reformism. This was a tactical, conjunctural assessment. It wasn't decided on the formal control of the LP apparatus by some bourgeois labor fakers -- that road leads toward what you call the IMT's "entryism sui generis," which is really just the most consistent expression of the labourite opportunism that infects nearly the entire British left (see the article "Her Majesty's Socialists in Bed With the Police" in The Internationalist no. 29).

The IG doesn't call for a "workers party" but for a revolutionary workers party. This was the advice Trotsky gave to the SWP. Now if a reformist workers party were to be formed, our orientation to it would be based on similar calculations as Lenin and Trotsky made toward some "traditional" workers parties in their time: what is the best way to win advanced workers to a Communist party. Thus we might critically campaign for such a party in the U.S., only if it would be a vote for class independence, not a party of the popular front. We would point out the contradictions between the party's gestures toward independence and its reformist program. The ICL did this in France in the 80s when the CP said that it would not be part of the popular front. They launched a campaign of critical support, conditional on maintaining independence from the popular front. Then they publicly withdrew their support when CP candidates attacked immigrant housing.

Lenin and Trotsky advocated critical support to the British Labour party when it was exploding in membership as the (deformed) political expression of a potentially revolutionary upsurge in the workers movement. Later, Trotsky supported temporary entry into the parties of the 2nd international to intersect and draw out of them a layer of radicalized youth and workers. Both of these were contingent on particular historic circumstances, not on the more general definition of certain parties as "traditional" working class parties.

Hi, for a recent article that covers this topic see "Socialists in Bourgeois Electionland" (The Internationalist no. 28, March-April 2009). Towards the end of the article there is a brief summary of the IG's position. Most socialists offer "critical support" to any nominally "socialist" candidate, or to the most leftist candidate if there are a number of options. Thus they see elections as a sort of "united front" protest. But election campaigns are propaganda, and voting itself doesn't fundamentally change anything. So the IG, and the Spartacist League/ICL when it was a revolutionary organization, would not offer "critical support" to most "socialist" or Labor candidates, but would critically and "conditionally" support workers' candidates only if a vote for them would represent a significant move towards class political independence.