{"id":589,"date":"2019-09-05T13:50:57","date_gmt":"2019-09-05T11:50:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marxistworkersparty.org.za\/?page_id=589"},"modified":"2019-09-05T14:33:58","modified_gmt":"2019-09-05T12:33:58","slug":"chapter-two","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/marxistworkersparty.net\/?page_id=589","title":{"rendered":"Chapter Two"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Rise of Stalinism<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

On October 25, 1917, the Provisional Government was overthrown in\nPetrograd. The Russian working class took state power. The Congress of Soviets\nof Workers’ and Soldiers Deputies, highest organ of workers’ democracy, was in\nsession in the capital.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following Lenin, Trotsky spoke there: “We rest all our hope on the\npossibility that our revolution will unleash the European revolution. If the\ninsurrectionary peoples of Europe do not crush imperialism, then we will be\ncrushed.” (History of the Russian\nRevolution<\/em>)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The delegates, wrote an observer,\n“greeted him with an immense crusading acclaim, kindling to the daring of\nit, with the thought of championing mankind.” (John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“At any rate”, remarked\nTrotsky later, “it could not have entered the mind of any Bolshevik at\nthat time to protest against placing the fate of the Soviet Republic, in an\nofficial speech in the name of the Bolshevik Party, in direct dependence upon\nthe development of the international revolution”. (HRR<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The capitalist class through\nEurope launched a furious struggle against the workers’ state, by sabotage, boycott,\nand war. A civil war raged, with peaks and intervals, pitting not only the\ninternal reaction but 17 imperialist armies against the revolution from 1918\nuntil the spring of 1921. Trotsky was responsible for the organisation of the\nRed Army which defeated the military counter-revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it was not only the heroic\nresistance of the Russian masses spearheaded by the Red Army which held off\ncounter-revolution. Splits among the imperialists were skilfully exploited by\nthe Bolsheviks. Above all, there was a revolutionary upsurge of the working\nclass through Europe \u2013 as a combined result of the burdens heaped on the masses\nby the First World War and the inspiring example of the Russian revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The post-war revolutionary wave<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A strike by Hungarian munitions\nworkers in January 1918 spread like wildfire through Germany, involving over\ntwo million workers. Then, on 4 November 1918 mutiny broke out at the German\nmilitary base of Kiel and ignited revolution. Within days, every city in\nGermany was in the hands of workers’ councils: soviets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mass strikes and army mutinies\nsmashed the imperial Austro-Hungarian regime, bringing the disintegration of\nthe empire. A revolutionary soviet government took power in Hungary in March\n1919.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

France was swept by mass strikes\nand naval mutiny. British soldiers mutinied, and the Red Flag was hoisted in\nthe industrial heartland of Scotland. Ireland was in armed revolt against\nBritish rule. In Italy in 1920 there was a wave of factory occupations. Strikes\ninvolving four million workers convulsed the USA in 1919.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bolshevik propaganda appealed to\nthe troops of the invading armies and to the working class across Europe, to\nsupport and take forward the Russian revolution. The old parties of the Second\nInternational split, with big sections, sometimes majorities, rallying to the\nbanner of the Third (Communist) International launched by the Bolsheviks. It\nhad nearly 3 million members by 1921.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This revolutionary wave forced\nthe imperialist powers to call a halt to their military intervention against\nthe revolution. But the West European working class was not able to hold on to\nits early gains. While not finally crushed, the revolutionary wave was turned\nback.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Primarily responsible for this were the reformist leaders of the Second\nInternational, who used the authority they still retained to prop up capitalism\nand its state power.<\/strong> The Communist Parties were still too weak and\ninexperienced to take advantage of this situation, as the Bolsheviks had been able\nto against the Mensheviks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The treacherous role of the\nreformist leadership in the 1918-1920 revolutionary wave is summed up in one\nincident. On November 10, with the imperial regime in Germany on its knees, and\npower in the hands of the workers and soldiers, Noske, Scheidemann and Ebert of\nthe Social-Democratic Party (SPD) were included in a new republican coalition\ngovernment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That night Ebert was phoned by a\nsenior general. “What do you expect of us?” asked Ebert. “Field\nMarshal Hindenbcrg expects the government to support the officer corps in\nmaintaining strict discipline and strict order in the army.” “What\nelse?”, replied Ebert. “The officer corps expects that the government\nwill fight against Bolshevism and places itself at the disposal of the government\nfor such a purpose.” Ebert asked the general to pass on “the government’s\nthanks to the Field Marshal”! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mass of workers and soldiers\nregarded the SPD as their party. But its leaders were conscious agents of\ncounter-revolution. Rather than organising the over-throw of the capitalist\nstate, and establishing a new state based on the power of the working class,\nthey induced the masses to accept the authority of a capitalist parliament \u2013 while\nthey set about rebuilding the armed forces to break the revolutionary movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similar obstacles faced the\nrevolutionary working class movement in every country in Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A revolutionary situation erupted\nagain in Germany in 1923, but the German Communist Party failed to lead it to\nsuccess. For all the efforts of the Bolsheviks, the Russian revolution remained\nisolated. This was to have terrible consequences for its fate, and the fate of\nworkers’ revolution worldwide for a whole period. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Bolshevik internationalism<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dialego, in his “What is\nTrotskyism?”, ridicules Trotsky’s: “astonishing argument that\nrevolution could only succeed in Russia if it is ‘united with the socialist\nproletariat of Western Europe.’ ” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Revolution within a\n‘national framework’ is doomed”, was, he claims, Trotsky’s position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On its own it will collapse. Only world revolution is possible. It is not difficult to see why this analysis made it almost impossible for Trotsky to contribute constructively to tackling the problems of post-revolutionary Russia \u2013 once it had become clear that revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries (despite the uprisings in Germany and Hungary) were not going to succeed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The need for workers’ revolution\nin Europe to ensure the survival of the revolution in Russia was, as we have\nseen, not some idiosyncratic notion of Trotsky’s, but the perspective of\nBolshevism as a whole. In turn, Dialego’s dismissal of this idea is a rejection\nnot of “Trotskyism”, but of proletarian internationalism. It abandons\nany Marxist understanding of what is needed to achieve socialism. It is\ninfected with the contagion of Stalinist ideas of “socialism in one\ncountry”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lenin believed that not even a democratic dictatorship of the\nproletariat and the peasantry on a capitalist basis<\/strong> could be sustained in\nRussia unless the working class overthrew capitalism in the West. In 1905 he\nwrote: “the Russian revolution can achieve victory by its own efforts, but\nit cannot possibly hold and consolidate\nits gains by its own strength. It cannot do this unless there is a revolution\nin the West<\/strong>.  (Two Tactics<\/em>. Our emphasis.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After 1917, Lenin again and again\nemphasised the need for workers’ revolution in the West. “It is absolutely\ntrue”, he declared in March 1918, “that without a German revolution\nwe will perish…. under all possible or conceivable eventualities, if the\nGerman revolution does not begin, we perish…. International imperialism…\nwhich represents a gigantic actual power…could in no case and under no\nconditions live side by side with the Soviet Republic. Here a conflict would be\ninevitable. Here… is the greatest historic problem… the necessity of evoking\nan international revolution”. (Quoted in History of the Russian Revolution<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By July 1921 the civil war had\nbeen won, but Lenin resisted any complacency: “We have got a certain\nequilibrium, although extremely fragile, extremely unstable, nevertheless such\nan equilibrium that a socialist republic can exist \u2013 of course not for long \u2013 in\na capitalist environment.” (Quoted in ibid<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky had always put forward a\nsimilar position. In 1909, for example, he wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The revolutionary authorities [i.e. a workers’ government in Russia] will be confronted with the objective problems of socialism, but the solution of these problems will, at a certain stage, be prevented by the country’s economic backwardness. There is no way out from this contradiction within the framework of a national revolution.<\/p>

The workers’ government will from the start be faced with the task of uniting its forces with those of the socialist proletariat in Western Europe. Only in this way will its temporary revolutionary hegemony become the prologue to a socialist dictatorship. Thus permanent revolution will become, for the Russian proletariat, a matter of class self-preservation. If the workers’ party cannot show sufficient initiative for aggressive revolutionary tactics, if it limits itself to the frugal diet of a dictatorship that is merely national and merely democratic, the united reactionary forces of Europe will waste no time in making it clear that a working class, if it happens to be in power, must throw the whole of its strength into the struggle for a socialist revolution.<\/p>“Our differences”, reprinted in 1905<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This is the passage which Dialego\nrefers to when describing Trotsky’s “astonishing” arguments. In the\ncourse of ‘paraphrasing’ it, Dialego, to say the least, loses some of its\nmeaning! Trotsky does not say revolution could only succeed<\/strong> in Russia if it is united with the socialist proletariat in\nWestern Europe \u2013 but that a workers’ government, i.e. a successful revolution,\nwould need to unite with the Western proletariat in order to survive indefinitely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky nowhere says “Only\nworld revolution is possible”! What he warns is that a revolution in\nRussia would, “at a certain stage” run up against imperialist-backed counter-revolution<\/strong>,\nand Russia’s backwardness<\/strong>. His\nperspective of 1909, far from being “astonishing”, was of course\namply borne out by what took place after 1917.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Warming to his theme,\nnevertheless, Dialego continues with his lecture:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Trotsky’s all-or-nothing approach to world revolution reflected more than naive optimism. It stemmed from his failure to get to grips with the national question. Class struggle, as the Communist Manifesto<\/em> emphasises, is international in substance, but national in form. It is precisely because socialism arises through the struggle for democracy that the working class must represent the interests of the nation as a whole. Winning ‘the battle of democracy’ as a prelude to the struggle for socialism is only possible if the proletariat becomes ‘the leading class of the nation’.<\/p>

“Ignore the democratic revolution and you ignore the national framework within which every class struggle necessarily occurs. This is the point which Trotsky and his followers have never understood. The proletariat of each country must first settle accounts with its own bourgeoisie….In theory Trotskyists should stand aloof from the struggle for national liberation since the logic of their position asserts that unless revolution is socialist in character and worldwide in scope, betrayal and defeat is the inevitable consequence.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

It is, of course, quite rich of\nDialego to lecture Trotsky, (who, with Lenin, led the working class to power in\nRussia) that “the proletariat of each country must first settle accounts\nwith its own bourgeoisie”!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But underneath this, and some\nother apparent “commonplaces” \u2013 that the proletariat strives to\nbecome the leading class of the nation, that socialism is impossible without\ndemocracy \u2013 Dialego here puts forward essentially reactionary<\/strong> ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is, for example, a complete\ndistortion of the Communist Manifesto<\/em>,\nand of Marxism, to assert that “every class struggle necessarily occurs…\nwithin a national framework”. Lenin himself long ago replied to such an\nargument and labelled it for what it was: opportunism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Manifesto<\/em> states that the working class “must constitute\nitself the nation”. Regarding this, Lenin commented:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

the opportunists distort that truth by extending to the period of the end of capitalism that which was true of the period of its rise. With reference to the former period and to the tasks of the proletariat in its struggle to destroy, not feudalism but capitalism, the Communist Manifesto<\/em> gives a clear and precise formula: ‘the workingmen have no country’. One can well understand why the opportunists are so afraid to accept this socialist proposition, afraid, even, in most cases, openly to reckon with it.<\/p>

The socialist movement cannot triumph within the old framework of the fatherland. It creates new and superior forms of human society, in which the legitimate needs and progressive aspirations of the working masses of each nationality will, for the first time, be met through international unity, providing existing national partitions are removed.<\/p>“The Position and Tasks of the Socialist International”, 1914, Collected Works<\/em>, XXI<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

“The socialist movement\ncannot triumph within the old framework of the fatherland. It creates new and\nsuperior forms of human society” \u2013 this is the essential point which\nDialego is also afraid “openly to reckon with”. His caricature of\nTrotsky’s internationalism reflects his own nationalist narrow-mindedness<\/strong>, the “socialism in one\ncountry” mentality of Stalinism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He stands with the Mensheviks and\nSocial Revolutionaries \u2013 those who could not complete the democratic revolution\nin Russia, and who, in 1917, also opposed the “astonishing argument”\nof Bolshevik internationalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These “leaders” were\nscandalised, in the words of one of them, at the idea of putting out “the\nfire of the capitalist war by converting the revolution into a socialist and\nworld revolution”. Kerensky himself, shortly before his government was\noverthrown by the working class, wailed: “There is no more dangerous enemy\nof the revolution, the democracy and all the conquests of freedom than those\nwho… under the guise of deepening the revolution and converting it into a\npermanent social revolution are perverting, and it seems have already perverted\nthe masses.” (History of the Russian\nRevolution<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course Marxism does not say\n“only world revolution is possible…. an all-or-nothing approach…\nunless revolution is socialist in character and worldwide in its scope,\nbetrayal and defeat is the inevitable consequence”. That is a typical\nStalinist caricature. Dialego tries to convert the Marxist realism of Trotsky\nsimultaneously into utopianism and defeatism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky replied to such a silly\npoint long ago:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That the international revolution of the proletariat cannot be a simultaneous act, of this there can of course be no dispute at all among grown-up people after the experience of the October Revolution, achieved by the proletariat of a backward country under pressure of historical necessity, without waiting in the least for the proletariat of the advanced countries ‘to even out the front’.<\/p>The Third International After Lenin<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

When Trotsky set out the relation\nbetween ‘national’ and ‘international’ in the socialist revolution, he did so\nvery precisely: “The socialist revolution begins on national\nfoundations”, he wrote in Permanent Revolution, “but it cannot be\ncompleted within these foundations…a national revolution is not a\nself-contained whole; it is only a link in the international chain. The\ninternational revolution constitutes a permanent process, despite temporary\ndeclines and ebbs”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this, he, with Lenin and the\nBolsheviks, merely carried forward the ideas of Marx and Engels, who had\nexplained in 1850, that it was the task of the working class to “make the\nrevolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been\ndriven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has progressed\nsufficiently far \u2013 not only in one\ncountry but in all the leading countries of the world<\/strong> \u2013 that competition\nbetween the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive\nforces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers.” (Our\nemphasis)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The socialist revolution is a\nworld revolution not for sentimental or idealistic, but material reasons.\n“Internationalism is no abstract principle but a theoretical and practical\nreflection of world economy, of the world development of productive forces and\nthe world scale of the class struggle”, explained Trotsky (The Permanent Revolution<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Socialism, as he put it in his History of the Russian Revolution<\/em>,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

is the organisation of a planned and harmonious social production for the satisfaction of human wants. Collective ownership of the means of production is not yet socialism, but only its legal premise. The problem of a socialist society cannot be abstracted from the problem of the productive forces, which at the present stage of human development are world-wide in their very essence. The separate state, having become too narrow for capitalism, is so much the less capable of becoming the arena of a finished socialist society. The backwardness of a revolutionary country, moreover, increases the danger of being thrown back to capitalism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The reasoning is the same as\nLenin’s: “The socialist movement cannot triumph within the old framework\nof the fatherland. It creates new and superior forms of human society.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was why the Bolsheviks\nstruggled to defend the Russian revolution by spreading it internationally. The\nmilitary intervention between 1917 and 1921 was the most immediate threat. But\nit was, as Trotsky explained, “merely the most acute expression of the\ntechnical and industrial predominance of the capitalist nations”. (ibid<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The isolation and backwardness of\nthe Soviet Union \u2013 particularly after the defeat of the German revolution in\n1923 \u2013 prepared the way for the rise of the bureaucracy headed by Stalin,\ncarrying through a political counter-revolution and usurping power from the\nworking class in this, the first workers’ state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The rise of the bureaucracy<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The civil war inflicted heavy\ncosts on the Soviet Republic. By 1920, the output of large-scale industry was\nonly 14% of the 1913 level. Outbreaks of famine resulted in 5 million deaths in\n1921-22 alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The industrial working class,\nbackbone of the revolution, was decimated. The number of industrial workers\nfell by half between 1917 and 1920. Most of the revolutionary cadres of the\nfactories perished fighting in the civil war. The imperatives of sustaining\nproduction forced long hours of work. The masses were gripped with exhaustion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the summer of 1917, in the\nmiddle of the revolution, Lenin had written a major theoretical re-examination\nof the Marxist theory of the state: his classic work State and Revolution<\/em>. It was directed principally against the\ndistortion of Marx’s and Engels’s writings which had crept into the ideas of\neven the most left of the reformist leaders of the Second International. It was\ndirected to working out how the working class should govern when it took power\nin Russia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Trotsky summarised Lenin’s\nposition:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Lenin, following Marx and Engels, saw the first distinguishing feature of the proletarian revolution in the fact that, having expropriated the exploiters, it would abolish the necessity of a bureaucratic apparatus raised above society \u2013 and above all, a police and standing army. The proletariat needs a state \u2013 this all the opportunists can tell you,’ wrote Lenin in 1917, two months before the seizure of power, ‘but they, the opportunists, forget to add that the proletariat needs only a dying state \u2013 that is, a state constructed in such a way that it immediately begins to die away and cannot help dying away.’ \u201d \u2026<\/p>State and Revolution<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The social demand for a bureaucracy arises in all those situations where the sharp antagonisms require to be ‘softened’, \u2018adjusted\u2019, ‘regulated’ (always in the interests of the privileged, the possessors, and always to the advantage of the bureaucracy itself). Throughout all bourgeois revolutions, therefore, no matter how democratic, there has occurred a reinforcement and perfecting of the bureaucratic apparatus. ‘Officialdom and the standing army \u2013 ‘ writes Lenin, ‘that is a ‘parasite’ on the body of bourgeois society, a parasite created by the inner contradictions which tear this society, yet nothing but a parasite stopping up the living pores.’<\/p>

Beginning with 1917 \u2013 that is, from the moment when the conquest of power confronted the party as a practical problem \u2013 Lenin was constantly occupied with the thought of liquidating this \u2018parasite\u2019. After the overthrow of the exploiting classes \u2013 he repeats and explains in every chapter of State and Revolution<\/em> \u2013 the proletariat will shatter the old bureaucratic machine and create its own apparatus out of employees and workers. And it will take measures against their turning into bureaucrats \u2013 ‘measures analysed in detail by Marx and Engels: (1) not only election but recall at any time; (2) payment no higher than the wages of a worker; (3) immediate transition to a regime in which all will fulfil the functions of control and supervision so that all may for a time become ‘bureaucrats’, and therefore nobody can become a bureaucrat. You must not think that Lenin was talking about the problems of a decade. No, this was the first step with which ‘we should and must begin upon achieving a proletarian revolution.’<\/p>

The same bold view of the state in a proletarian dictatorship found finished expression a year and a half after the conquest of power in the program of the Bolshevik Party, including its section on the army. A strong state, but without mandarins; armed power, but without the Samurai! It is not the tasks of defence which create a military and state bureaucracy, but the class structure of society carried over into the organisation of defence. The army is only a copy of the social relations. The struggle against foreign danger necessitates, of course, in the workers’ state as in others, a specialised military technical organisation, but in no case a privileged officer caste. The party program demands a replacement of the standing army by an armed people.<\/p>

The regime of proletarian dictatorship from its very beginning thus ceases to be a ‘state’ in the old sense of the word \u2013 a special apparatus, that is, for holding in subjection the majority of the people. The material power, together with the weapons, goes over directly and immediately into the hands of workers’ organisations such as the soviets. The state as a bureaucratic apparatus begins to die away the first day of the proletarian dictatorship. Such is the voice of the party program \u2013 not voided to this day.<\/p>The Revolution Betrayed<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This was the nature of the\nworkers’ democratic state which the Bolsheviks sought to build in the Soviet\nRepublic. But social backwardness, combined with the hardships of the civil\nwar, meant that reality increasingly diverged from the program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With an over-worked and exhausted\nworking class, increasingly depleted of the cadres of 1917, the soviets\ngradually dwindled and ceased to function as organs of working class power.\nAdministration passed into the hands of state officials, increasingly unchecked\nby the working class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Bolsheviks tried to fill\npositions of government with dedicated cadres, but there were far too few,\nabove all far too few with the necessary skills of administration and literacy,\nto occupy the hundreds of thousands of posts required. The state was\n“filled out” with officials from the old Tsarist apparatus,\nrepresenting the outlook of more privileged elements of society. “Thus on\nall sides”, wrote Trotsky later, “the masses were pushed away\ngradually from actual participation in the leadership of the country”. (The Revolution Betrayed<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, above all, it was the\nbackwardness of Russia that was the problem. “The basis of bureaucratic\nrule” \u2013 Trotsky was to explain \u2013 “is the poverty of society in\nobjects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When\nthere is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want\nto. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line.\nWhen the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep\norder. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy.”\n(Ibid<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The officials of the state exploited\nthe conditions of backwardness, illiteracy, and shortage of skills to extort\nprivilege for themselves. “We took over the old machinery of state,”\ndeclared Lenin in 1921, “and that was our misfortune. Very often this\nmachinery operates against us… We now have a vast army of government\nemployees, but lack sufficiently educated forces to exercise real control over\nthem.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bureaucracy was reinforced by\nthe economic retreats the Bolsheviks were forced to make in 1921. Regimentation\nof production during the civil war had disrupted the exchange of goods between\ntown and country, and was threatening to alienate the peasantry from the\nrevolution. The “New Economic Policy” (NEP) provided some concessions\nto capitalists and richer peasants to step up production for the market as a\nmeans of feeding the towns and reviving industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These privileged layers provided\na social support for the bureaucracy, as indeed did the peasantry as a whole.\nAs Lenin put it, “While we continue to be a country of small peasants, there\nis a more solid basis for capitalism in Russia than for communism”.\n(Quoted in Platform of the Joint\nOpposition<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Communist Party was also\naffected. Its revolutionary cadre became diluted by an influx of ex-Mensheviks,\nbureaucrats, so-called “NEP-men” etc. \u2013 those who wanted to use the\nparty to promote their individual interests rather than to serve the\nrevolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joseph Stalin, a long-time party\nmember, no theoretician but a good organiser, was appointed to a body to fight\nbureaucracy and corruption in the Party \u2013 and then, in 1922, was made General\nSecretary. But he used these positions to strengthen the bureaucratic tendency\nin the party and the state. As Trotsky put it, “The entire effort of\nStalin…was thenceforth directed to freeing the party machine from the control\nof the rank-and-file members of the party… The petty bourgeois outlook of the\nnew ruling stratum was his own outlook. He profoundly believed that the task of\ncreating socialism was national and administrative in its nature.” (The Revolution Betrayed<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lenin was seriously ill by the\nend of 1922. He was never again able to play a full role in political life.\nBut, from his sick bed, he grew increasingly concerned about the bureaucratic\ndistortions which were developing, and combatted them in his writing. In a\nbrief note, later to be known as his “Testament”, Lenin even\nrecommended that Stalin be replaced as General Secretary (a document which,\nneedless to say, was suppressed by the bureaucracy after Lenin’s death.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lenin entrusted Trotsky with the\njob of taking Stalin to task at the Party Congress in April 1923 for his incorrect\nand bureaucratic handling of the national question in Georgia. Stalin,\nunwilling to force confrontation with Lenin still alive, backed down. But, in\nthe following months, the erosion of democracy in the Party became of\nincreasing concern to its anti-bureaucratic, Bolshevik wing. Trotsky took a\nleading role in combatting Stalin and his allies on the question of workers’\ndemocracy, as well as of economic policy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

“Socialism in one country” against Marxism<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of Dialego’s charges against\nTrotsky is that because he believed “only world revolution is\npossible” it was “almost impossible for Trotsky to contribute constructively\nto tackling the problems of post-revolutionary Russia \u2013 once it had become\nclear that revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries (despite the\nuprisings in Germany and Hungary) were not going to succeed”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea is a nonsense, as anyone\nwho has read Trotsky’s voluminous writings on electrification, heavy industry,\nthe relation between town and country in the Soviet Union, voluntary\ncollectivisation of agriculture, etc., would know. In fact Trotsky and his\nsupporters, who became known as the Left Opposition, continued to provide the\nmost realistic and constructive policies for the defence of the workers’ state,\nnot only on international questions, but on the economic and political tasks\nposed within the Soviet Union itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Trotsky put it, “so long\nas the Soviet Union remains isolated, and, worse than that, so long as the\nEuropean proletariat suffers reverses and continues to fall back, the strength\nof the Soviet structure is measured in the last analysis by the productivity of\nlabour”. (The Revolution Betrayed<\/em>)\nThe economic policies he advocated were intended to promote this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In contrast, on both national and\ninternational questions, the bureaucracy swung through a series of bewildering\nand damaging empirical zigzags through the 1920s and 1930s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the Party Congress in 1923,\nTrotsky drew a balance sheet of NEP, showing a dangerous lag in industrial production,\nand a tendency for agricultural prices to fall and industrial prices to rise,\nwhich threatened to alienate the peasantry from the revolution. The Congress\naccepted his arguments for a turn to development of the state sector on the\nbasis of a central plan and the expansion of industry, to eventually absorb and\neliminate the private sector.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, under the influence of the\nbureaucracy, bound to the “private sector” by ties of common\nprivilege, the policy remained a dead letter. It was denounced by the\nright-wing of the bureaucracy as “super-industrialisation”. (Six\nyears later, swinging on a zig-zag to the left against a looming danger of\ncapitalist restoration, Stalin was to implement a version of the Left\nOppositions’ proposals, though by grossly distorted and repressive means which\nwere far from what Trotsky envisaged.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the same period Trotsky led a\nstruggle against bureaucratic domination in the Party, including an open letter\naddressed to Party members calling on the rank and file, particularly the\nyouth, to “regenerate and renovate the party apparatus”. This was\nreceived with tremendous enthusiasm by party workers, but was naturally taken\nby the bureaucracy as a declaration of war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Dialego, no doubt, Trotsky’s\n“differences” with the leadership on economic policy and his defence\nof workers’ democracy against bureaucratic degeneration represents an\n“inability to contribute constructively to tackling the problems of\npost-revolutionary Russia”! So debased, so monolithic, has the knee-jerk\nmentality of Stalinism become!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1923-24 marked a turning point in\nthe consolidation of the power of the bureaucracy. In the midst of these\nstruggles in the Party the 1923 German revolution was defeated. Then, in\nJanuary 1924, Lenin died. Both these setbacks had a hugely demoralising effect\non the working class. The position of the bureaucracy was enormously\nstrengthened \u2013 and it chose the time to consolidate its power against the Party\nopposition and Trotsky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the next Party Congress, in\nJanuary 1924, the bureaucracy resorted to vote-rigging to almost completely\nexclude representatives of the opposition. From then on, Party Congresses were\nheld far less regularly, and ceased to be genuine forums of democratic debate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, as a “tribute” to\nLenin, they opened the doors of the Party to hundreds of thousands of raw\nrecruits who, though workers, would, without familiarity with the issues\ninvolved between the leadership and the opposition, be inclined to follow the\nestablished leadership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In December 1923 the term\n“Trotskyism” was coined by the bureaucracy. Trotsky had enormous\nauthority as a theoretician and as co-leader of the October Revolution. It was\nnecessary to rewrite history to try to cover his name in mud. The tactic was to\nrake up every past difference between Lenin and Trotsky to try to insinuate\nthat Trotsky had “always” been opposed to Bolshevism. Dialego’s\naccount of “Trotskyism” follows faithfully in this tradition, being,\nif anything, rather cruder and more childish. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

From 1924 Stalin decisively\nturned his back on the ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin when he proclaimed that\nsocialism could be achieved in Russia on its own. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The party” he declared in November 1926, “always took as its starting point the idea that the victory of socialism in one country means the possibility to build socialism in that country, and that this task can be accomplished with the forces of a single country.<\/p>November 1926<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Yet, as late as February 1924\nStalin had still been putting forward \u2013 in his own mechanical way \u2013 the commonly-accepted\nstandpoint of Bolshevism:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

can the final victory of socialism in one country be attained, without the joint efforts of the proletariat of several advanced countries? No, this is impossible… for the final victory of socialism, for the organisation of socialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of such a peasant country as Russia, are insufficient. For this the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries are necessary.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Such was the fundamental\nabout-face on the question of proletarian internationalism which followed from\nthe rise to power of the bureaucracy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Germany in 1923<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1923, Trotsky had examined the\ndefeat of the German revolution, identifying errors of the leadership of the\nGerman Communist Party for which Stalin and his allies were in part\nresponsible. But the retreat of Stalin into the “theory” of\n“socialism in one country” led to greater disasters internationally.\nThe defeat of workers’ revolution in China in 1927 was another decisive turning\npoint in the fate of the socialist revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky, charges Dialego,\n“greatly exaggerated the prospects of revolutionary change in Germany in\n1923 and in Britain during the general strike of 1926. He condemned Bolshevik\nstrategy in China…” These claims are part of the age-old litany of\nStalinism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The revolutionary crisis which\nerupted in Germany in 1918 was not conclusively resolved until Hitler took\npower in 1933. Between those years, the period of the Wiemar Republic, the tide\nof revolution ebbed and flowed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dialego’s hidden insinuation that\nTrotsky was an ultra-leftist seeing revolution on the agenda every day is\nwholly unfounded. At the 1921 Comintern Congress, for example, Trotsky and\nLenin were in a minority in the Russian Party leadership in arguing that the\ndefeats the German revolution had already suffered meant that a temporary\nretreat by the working class was inevitable. They were dubbed the ‘right wing’.\nTrotsky criticised the leadership of the German Communist Party (KPD) for\nultra-leftism, especially their March 1921 call for a general strike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lenin and Trotsky maintained that\nthe KPD should campaign for a united front with the German Social Democratic\nParty (SPD), which still had majority support among the workers. By calling\nfor, and organising, joint campaigns of action in which the KPD members could\nstruggle side by side with the rank-and-file of the SPD, possibilities would open\nup of splitting them from their reformist leadership and winning them to see\nthe need for a revolutionary struggle for power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this time opponents of Lenin\nand Trotsky argued that they had “written off” the revolutionary\npotential of the German working class and “capitulated to reformism”!\nBut of course, Lenin and Trotsky were confident that the working class would\nreturn to the revolutionary offensive. The tactics of the united front were\ndesigned to ensure that, unlike in 1918, the KPD entered the new revolutionary\nsituation with the largest possible forces of the class already united under\nits banner. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Revolutionary crisis did indeed\nagain engulf Germany in 1923. Underlying it was chronic economic collapse,\nreflected in staggering inflation. The price of a loaf of bread, for example,\nrose from less than 1 mark to 201 billion marks in ten months! The working\nclass swung sharply to the left. A general strike took place in May. In August\na general strike forced the resignation of the national government. Workers’\nmilitias were being formed. The KPD membership was growing by tens of\nthousands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contrary to what Dialego would\nhave us believe, all the leaders of the Comintern were agreed that a revolutionary\nsituation was opening up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the KPD proved unable to meet\nthe challenge. Its leadership was divided. Brandler, head of the Party, trying\nto “correct” the ultra-left mistakes of 1921, erred grossly on the\nside of caution. Fundamentally, the KPD failed to use the opportunities to\nprepare the workers to take power. In October, belatedly, they launched a plan\nfor insurrection, then called it off at the last moment, leaving the KPD\nworkers of Hamburg, through a bizarre error, to hurl themselves alone against\nthe forces of the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky was notable for the\nhonesty with which he drew the lessons of those events. Russian Comintern\nleaders allied with Stalin, such as Zinoviev and Bukharin, made a scapegoat of\nBrandler. But, rather than criticising his irresolution, they reversed their\nanalysis of the objective situation, and argued that Brandler and the KPD had\n“over-estimated” the possibilities of revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky would have none of this.\nAs he put it later:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why didn’t the German revolution lead to a victory? The reasons for it are all to be sought in the tactics, and not in the existing conditions. Here we had a classic example of a missed revolutionary situation. After all the German proletariat had gone through in recent years, it could be led to a decisive struggle only if it were convinced that this time the question would be decisively resolved and that the Communist Party was ready for the struggle and capable of achieving the victory. But the Communist Party executed the turn [to insurrection] very irresolutely and after a long delay. Not only the rights but also the lefts [in the KPD]… viewed fatalistically the process of revolutionary development up to September-October 1923.<\/p>The Third International after Lenin<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Speaking to workers in Georgia in\nApril 1924, he said:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The future favours us. But the past must be analysed correctly. The turn about this past year, in October-November, when German fascism and the big bourgeoisie came to the fore, was an enormous defeat. We must record it, evaluate it, and fix it in our memories that way, in order to learn from it. It is an enormous defeat. But from this defeat the German party will learn, become tempered, and grow. And the situation remains, as before, a revolutionary one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In Britain, the general strike of\n1926 provoked a profound social crisis. The small Communist Party had an\nopportunity to lead hundreds of thousands of workers in opposition to the\nreformist TUC (Trades Union Congress) leadership, and take big steps forward in\npreparing the working class for power. But Stalin and the bureaucracy were tied\ninto an opportunistic alliance with “lefts” on the TUC Council. The\nTUC right wing betrayed the strike at the first opportunity. Stalin’s\n“left” allies offered no resistance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After ten days, with the strike\nstill spreading, the TUC General Council unanimously called it off. This was\nsheer capitulation to the capitalist class. It condemned the working class in\nBritain to a historic defeat. Stalin and the Comintern were wholly complicit in\nit. Trotsky and the Left Opposition correctly sought to draw the widest attention\nto the consequences which the bureaucracy’s policies of “socialism in one\ncountry” were having for the working class internationally. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

China<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As serious as these defeats was\nthe defeat of the Chinese revolution in 1927. It was, indeed, the more serious\nin that it followed from the deliberate abandonment by Stalin and the Comintern\nof the fundamental program which had guided the working class to power in\nRussia in 1917.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dialego tells us Trotsky\n“condemned Bolshevik strategy in China”. In reality, what Trotsky\ncondemned in China was the Comintern’s failure to put forward Bolshevik\npolicies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

China, then as now, was the most\npopulous country on earth. The overthrow of the Imperial regime in 1911 ushered\nin a period of huge instability. China fragmented under the rule of feudal warlords.\nThe weak semi-colonial governments at the centre were totally incapable of\ntackling the tasks of “bourgeois revolution” \u2013 the liberation of the\npeasantry from the landowners, ending imperialist domination, securing\ndemocratic rights, and uniting the nation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The conditions were a classic\nconfirmation of the theory of permanent revolution \u2013 that, to carry out these\nbourgeois-democratic or national-democratic tasks, the working class needed to\nplace itself at the head of the nation, take power, and establish a workers’\nstate with the support of the peasantry and other oppressed layers in society.\nThe program of the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 was revealed to be just as\nvital in every under-developed country dominated by imperialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From 1920 there was a rising tide\nof strikes, uprisings and land seizures among the workers and the peasants. The\nmembership of the trade unions doubled and doubled again in three years,\nembracing nearly 3 million workers by 1927. Peasant leagues in the southern\nprovinces organised ten million peasants. The Chinese Communist Party, formed\nin 1921 grew to 60,000 members, with a far wider influence among the masses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Bolshevik policies, the\nChinese Communist Party could have united the working class and peasantry in a\nstruggle for power. Instead, the “Bolshevik” leaders of the Stalinist\nComintern urged the Chinese Party to join the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT)\nparty of Chiang Kai Shek as individual members, to abandon<\/strong> any independent program, to dissolve their independent\npress \u2013 even to hand over a list of\nmembers to the KMT leadership<\/strong> \u2013 and unswervingly to support their policies\nof anti-imperialist and national democratic revolution within the framework of capitalism<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Kuomintang, proclaimed\nStalin’s Comintern, was “a revolutionary bloc of the workers, peasants,\nintellectuals, and urban democracy [i.e. the petty bourgeois and bourgeois] on\nthe basis of a community of class\ninterests<\/strong> … in the struggle against the imperialists and the whole\nmilitarist-feudal order”. (Resolution\nof Executive Committee of the Comintern<\/em>, March 1926. Our emphasis)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky and the Left Opposition\nwarned that the Kuomintang was a bourgeois<\/strong>\norganisation, and, like the bourgeois parties in Russia, incapable of serious\nstruggle against imperialism and feudalism, or for democracy. Chiang Kai Shek\nwas not a representative of a “progressive national bourgeoisie”, but\na reactionary. The policy of the Comintern, they insisted, was a reversion to Menshevism<\/strong> \u2013 the subordination of the\ninterests of the working class (and peasantry) to those of the bourgeoisie, and\nof the landlords and imperialism also.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, these policies were a\ncaricature even of Menshevism. The bourgeois Kuomintang was welcomed by Stalin\ninto the Comintern as a sympathising section! Chiang Kai Shek was covered with\nthe mantle of world communism. It was a recipe for disaster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky’s warnings were only too\ntragically confirmed. When the workers of Shanghai, largest industrial city,\nrose up in 1927 and, led by Communist militants, established a form of soviet\npower, Stalin and the Comintern urged them to hand power back to Chiang Kai\nShek! Chiang chose his moment to turn on the politically disarmed working\nclass, and to drown the revolution in an orgy of slaughter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kornilov had failed to carry\nthrough counter-revolution against the working class in Russia. Chiang Kai Shek\nsucceeded in China. This was the measure of the difference between the policies\nof Bolshevism and the Menshevik policies imposed by Stalinism on the Chinese\nCommunist Party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Comintern, after flirting\nwith a “left” rival of Chiang in the Kuomintang, resulting in further\ndefeats for the Chinese masses, then swung to an ultra-left course and, with\nthe revolutionary tide on the ebb, tried to engineer an insurrection in the\nother main industrial centre of Canton, which was also drowned in blood. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The bureaucracy consolidates its power<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The panicky retreat of the\nGerman Communist Party [in 1923]”, explained Trotsky, “was the\nheaviest possible disappointment to the working masses of the Soviet Union. The\nSoviet bureaucracy straightway opened a campaign against the theory of\n‘permanent revolution’, and dealt the Left Opposition its first cruel blow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the years 1926 and 1927 the population of the Soviet Union experienced a new tide of hope. All eyes were now directed to the East where the drama of the Chinese revolution was unfolding. The Left Opposition was recruiting a phalanx of new adherents. At the end of 1927 the Chinese revolution was massacred by the hangman, Chiang-kai-shek, into whose hands the Communist International had literally betrayed the Chinese workers and peasants. A cold wave of disappointment swept over the masses of the Soviet Union. After an unbridled baiting in the press and at meetings, the bureaucracy finally, in 1928, ventured upon mass arrests among the Left Opposition.<\/p>

To be sure, tens of thousands of revolutionary fighters gathered around the banner of the Bolshevik-Leninists. The advanced workers were undubitably sympathetic to the Opposition, but that sympathy remained passive. The masses lacked faith that the situation could be changed by a new struggle. Meantime the bureaucracy asserted: ‘For the sake of an international revolution, the Opposition proposes to drag us into a revolutionary war. Enough of shake-ups! We have earned the right to rest. We will build the socialist society at home. Rely upon us, your leaders!’ This gospel of repose firmly consolidated the apparatchiki and the military and state officials and indubitably found an echo among the weary workers, and still more the peasant masses.<\/p>The Revolution Betrayed<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

“After Lenin’s death”,\nDialego tells us, “Trotsky became a bitter critic of Stalin’s\nleadership… [in 1929] he was sent into exile after leading street\ndemonstrations against the Soviet government”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is, of course, remarkable,\nthat the great “democrat” Dialego finds nothing in the slightest\nstrange about someone being deported from his country for leading\ndemonstrations against its government! Such is Dialego’s uncritical adulation\nof Stalinism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reality is that the\nbureaucracy had no political answer to the ideas that Trotsky and the Left Opposition\nwere putting forward \u2013 for revival of the soviets, the restoration of workers’\ndemocracy, a bold program of “industrialisation, electrification and\nrationalisation, based upon increasing the technical power of the economy and\nimproving the material condition of the masses”, and of building the\nCommunist International as a mass revolutionary force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead the bureaucracy launched\na vicious campaign of intimidation \u2013 a witch-hunt. Spokespersons of the Left\nOpposition were sworn at and howled down when they tried to speak, on the\nCentral Committee, and throughout the Party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Already, in 1926, Lenin’s widow\nKrupskaya had remarked: “If Ilyich [Lenin] were alive, he would probably\nalready be in prison”. In 1928 the old Bolshevik leader Bukharin, in a\nsecret conversation with his comrade Kamenev, remarked of Stalin: “What\ncan we do in the face of an adversary of this sort, a debased Genghis\nKhan?” That was the atmosphere that was now developing in this state in\nwhich the working class had achieved its greatest victory in history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the tenth anniversary of the\nOctober Revolution, in the face of the witch-hunt against them, the Opposition\norganised mass demonstrations in Moscow and Leningrad, with the slogans\n“Let us turn our fire to the right \u2013 against the kulak [rich peasant], the\nNEPman, and the bureaucrat!”, “Let us carry out Lenin’s\nTestament!”, “Against opportunism, against a split, and for the unity\nof Lenin’s party!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bureaucracy broke up the\ndemonstrations by force, and followed this with mass expulsions of Opposition\nsupporters from the Party. Trotsky was expelled and deported to Central Asia \u2013 and\nthen, because he remained a focal point for the Opposition \u2013 deported from the\nSoviet Union early in 1929. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marxist opposition to the rule of\nthe bureaucracy continued, but from this point driven underground. Through the\n1930s, Stalin, veering this way and that to consolidate his personal position,\nlaunched waves of repression not merely against Marxists, but supporters of\nopposing tendencies in the bureaucracy. By the early 1930s, expulsions from the\nParty ran into hundreds of thousands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From 1928-9, with opposition to\ntheir rule growing among the kulaks and threatening a restoration of capitalism,\nStalin and the bureaucracy made a huge lurch to the “left”,\ndomestically and internationally. At the cost of millions of lives, agriculture\nwas forcibly collectivised, and industrialisation forced ahead. Forced labour\nwas used on a massive scale. All this spurred on greater bureaucratic\ncentralisation and repression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Internationally, Stalin’s now\nbureaucratically-controlled Comintern promoted the wildly ultra-left policy of\ndenouncing Social Democratic reformism as “the moderate wing of\nfascism…They are not antipodes but twins”. The fatal consequence \u2013 for\nwhich the Comintern bears the full responsibility \u2013 was a crushing defeat for\nrevolution in the key country of Germany, and the conquest of power by Hitler\nin 1933. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The victory of Hitler<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regarding Trotsky’s political\nstandpoint in the 1930s, Dialego writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is true that in exile Trotsky was critical of the sectarian positions taken by the international communist movement (the Comintern) between 1929 and 1933… Nevertheless he was (it would seem even more) vehemently opposed to the democratic Popular Front strategy which the Comintern had adopted by 1935 as a way of tackling these political weaknesses…Although the Popular Fronts played a key role in the struggle against fascism (particularly in Spain and France), they were denounced by Trotsky and his International as one of ‘the political resources of imperialism in the struggle against proletarian revolution.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The recognition that Trotsky was\ncorrect in opposing the ultra-leftism of Stalin’s Comintern during 1929-1933 is\none of the few positive things Dialego has to say about him. But Dialego fails\nto mention that Trotsky was denounced by the Comintern as “counter-revolutionary”\nfor making these criticisms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moreover Dialego totally ignores that the fatal consequence of the\nComintern’s ultra-leftism in this period was the victory of Fascism in Germany.<\/strong>\nThis was the worst defeat of the period for the working class internationally.\nMore than any other single event, it prepared the way for World War II, the\ninvasion of the Soviet Union by Hitler at huge cost to the Soviet people, and\nthe extermination of 6 million Jews. In Trotsky’s eyes, the role of the\nComintern in preparing the way for this sealed its death-knell as an instrument\nof international proletarian revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The collapse of the New York\nStock Exchange in October 1929 led to worldwide capitalist depression. Germany,\nin particular, was devastated. There was a polarisation of the classes between\ncounter-revolution and revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hitler’s Nazi gangs \u2013 financed by\nbig business \u2013 played on the fears of the middle class and the despair of the\ngrowing numbers of unemployed to build support. But the German labour movement\nwas the most powerful in the capitalist world, and, among the organised\nworkers, there was almost no support for Hitler. However a majority of the\nworkers still followed the SPD leaders, who futilely hoped that Hitler could be\nkept from power if they supported more “moderate” bourgeois governments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky poured scorn on the\ncowardly betrayal of the workers by the SPD leaders \u2013 whose hands were already\nstained with the blood of collaborating with the armed forces in crushing the\nrevolution of 1918.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Against one of them, Hilferding,\nwho argued that the working class had no possibility of taking power in Germany,\nhe thundered:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Hilferding, in Germany today, where the proletariat composes the majority of the population and the deciding productive force of society, the united front of the Social Democracy and the Communist Party could not place the power in the hands of the proletariat! When is the precise moment, then, that the power can pass into the hands of the proletariat?<\/p>

Prior to the war was the perspective of the automatic growth of capitalism, of the growth of the proletariat, and of the equal growth of the Social Democracy. This process was cut short by the war, and no power in the world will restore it. The decay of capitalism means that the question of power must be decided on the basis of the now existing productive forces.<\/p>

By prolonging the agony of the capitalist regime, the Social Democracy’ leads only to the further decline of economic culture, to the disorganisation of the proletariat, to social gangrene. No other perspectives lie ahead; tomorrow will be worse than today; the day after tomorrow worse than tomorrow. But the leaders of the Social Democracy no longer dare to look into the future. Theirs are all the vices of the ruling class doomed to destruction; they are light-minded, their will is paralysed, they are given to blubbering over events and hoping for miracles.<\/p>The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

But Trotsky was equally harsh on\nthe leaders of the German Communist Party (KPD), who, on instructions from\nMoscow, were isolating their membership from the rank-and-file of the SPD by\nbranding Social Democrats as “social fascists” \u2013 and even joining the\nNazi stormtroopers in breaking up SPD meetings. Some KPD leaders were even\narguing that the best possibility would be for Hitler to take power, so that\nFascism would “exhaust” itself, and prepare the way for workers’\nrevolution!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky explained that the\nworkers in the SPD remained there, not so much out of confidence in their\nleaders, but lack of confidence in an alternative. Polarisation between the\nleadership and the membership was inevitably sharpening. Fascism threatened to\natomise the proletariat: it was a direct threat to every worker and workers’\norganisation. The task for the German Communist Party was to implement the\npolicy of the united front \u2013 calling for joint campaigns of action by the KPD and\nSPD against the Nazi menace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It is necessary”,\nTrotsky wrote, “without any delay, finally to elaborate a practical system\nof measures \u2013 not with the aim of merely ‘exposing’ the Social Democracy\n(before the Communists) but with the aim of actual struggle against fascism.\nThe question of factory defence organisations, of unhampered activity on the\npart of the factory councils, the inviolability of the workers’ organisations\nand institutions, the question of arsenals that may be seized by the fascists,\nthe question of measures in the case of an emergency, that is, of the\nco-ordination of the actions of the Communist and the Social Democratic\ndivisions in the struggle, etc., etc. must be dealt with in this program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the struggle against fascism, the factory councils occupy a tremendously important position. Here a particularly precise program of action is necessary. Every factory must become an antifascist bulwark, with its own commandants and its own battalions. It is necessary to have a map of the fascist barracks and all other fascist strongholds, in every city and in every district. The fascists are attempting to encircle the revolutionary strongholds. The encirclers must be encircled. On this basis, an agreement with the Social Democratic and trade union organisations is not only permissible, but a duty. To reject this for reasons of ‘principle’ (in reality because of bureaucratic stupidity, or what is still worse, because of cowardice) is to give direct and immediate practical aid to fascism.<\/p>

If the KPD adopted a fighting united front policy\u201d, Trotsky continued: “instead of the articles and speeches which are convincing only to those people who are already convinced without them, the agitators will find a common language with new hundreds of thousands and millions of workers. The differentiation within the Social Democracy will proceed at an increased pace. The fascists will soon feel that their task does not at all consist merely of defeating Bruening, Braun, and Wels [bourgeois government ministers], but of taking up the open struggle against the whole working class. On this plane, a profound differentiation will inevitably be produced within fascism. Only by this road is victory possible.<\/p>Ibid<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Through the united front, in\nother words, the workers in the SPD could be won away from their reactionary\nleaders and united under the revolutionary banner of the KPD. This\nrevolutionary unity would divide and weaken the fascists and prepare the way\nfor workers’ revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky’s advice and warnings\nwent totally unheeded by the KPD leadership. The workers’ movement had defence\nguards (the Reichsbanner and Red Front) with over a million armed members. But\nthe failure to achieve unity in action \u2013 a\nresult of Stalin’s Comintern’s disastrous policies<\/strong> \u2013 allowed Hitler to come\nto power, in his own words, “without a pane of glass being broken”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This disaster, prepared by Stalin\nand the bureaucracy, was never seriously analysed in any of the Communist\nParties of the world. Stalin and the Comintern leadership never openly\nacknowledged that their mistakes had led to it. Hitler’s victory was even passed\noff for a time as a triumph for the workers’ movement on the incredible grounds\nthat it would ‘spark’ a revolution! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The defeat of the Spanish revolution<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

After this disaster, Stalin’s\nregime went through another erratic zigzag, veering to the right, domestically\nand internationally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky, Dialego concedes, was\ncritical of the Comintern’s sectarianism between 1929 and 1933. But, he adds:\n“Nevertheless he [Trotsky] was (it would seem even more) vehemently\nopposed to the democratic Popular Front strategy which the Comintern had\nadopted by 1935 as a way of opposing these political weaknesses.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is completely wrong to present\nthe “Popular Front” strategy as a “solution” to the\nsectarianism of 1929-33. The victory of fascism in Germany intensified the imperialist\nambitions of German capitalism, posing a renewed threat of military\nintervention of the Soviet Union. Against this danger, a Bolshevik policy would\nhave been to build, through the Comintern, a revolutionary alliance of the working class internationally<\/strong> against\nFascism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead Stalin sought\n“anti-fascist” alliances with Germany’s bourgeois<\/strong> imperialist rivals: in particular, France and Britain. For the first time the Soviet bureaucracy\nturned to deliberate alliances with capitalist powers and with the bankers of\nNew York, Paris and London.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The policy of the Popular Front\nwas forced on the Parties of the Comintern as a consequence of these diplomatic\nmanouevres. The working class must “ally with”, i.e. imprison itself\nin subordination to, the “anti-fascist” sections of the bourgeoisie,\nand abandon any thought of socialist revolution. The programme of the workers’\nparties must be watered down to win the “approval” of the bankers,\nindustrialists and capitalist politicians. Yet\nit was in defence of the capitalist system that the threat of Fascism had been\nunleashed!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Popular Front was a policy of\nclass-collaboration \u2013 even more outrightly Menshevik than the policies pursued\nby the Comintern in China in the 1920s. It\ndid not protect democracy.<\/strong> Pursued in conditions of sharpening class\npolarisation, it led to new disasters for the working class \u2013 particularly in\nSpain. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The overthrow of the monarchy in\n1931 unleashed a period of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary turmoil in\nSpain, a backward European country. Again and again the workers and peasants\nlaunched themselves against their class enemies \u2013 the capitalists and landlords\n\u2013 in a struggle to transform society. With Bolshevik leadership and the program\nof the permanent revolution, as Trotsky put it, the working class would have\nhad some ten opportunities for taking power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1936 the Spanish masses\nelected a “Popular Front” government \u2013 and, along with this, set out\nto implement its program of social change through strikes, land seizures, and\nstruggle from below. But the leadership of the Popular Front insisted that the\naims of the struggle must be confined to the establishment of a democratic\nRepublic on a capitalist basis. Spain was a backward country: conditions were\nnot “ripe” for socialism. It was a “bourgeois revolution”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stalin’s Comintern presented the\nPopular Front as an alliance of the working class with a “progressive bourgeoisie”.\nBut the Spanish capitalists to a man\nvehemently opposed this “Popular Front”.<\/strong> It was, in Trotsky’s\nwords, an alliance merely with the “shadow of the bourgeoisie” \u2013 with\nbourgeois politicians, resting on support among the middle classes, who wanted\nto defend capitalism. In power, the Popular Front propped up the existing capitalist\nstate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Months into the Popular Front\ngovernment, General Franco led the bulk of the armed forces into revolt. Civil\nwar broke out between Franco and the Republic. Trotsky immediately wrote (July\n30, 1936) to outline the disastrous consequences of Popular Front policies: “the ‘republican’ army took the field\nagainst the people. Thus it became clear that the Popular Front government had\nmaintained the military caste with the people’s money, furnished them with\nauthority, power, and arms, and given them command over young workers and\npeasants, thereby facilitating the preparations for a crushing attack on the\nworkers and peasants.\u201d<\/strong> (“The Lesson of Spain”, The Spanish Revolution<\/em>. Our emphasis)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Against Franco’s uprising, the\nworkers of Madrid and Barcelona seized arms from the barracks and formed militias\nto defend the Republic. But the response of the Popular Front, egged on by\nStalin and the Spanish “Communist” leaders, was to disband the\nmilitias and force the workers into the Republican army commanded by bourgeois\ngenerals, some of whom had dabbled in intrigues against the Republic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even now, in the midst of civil war”, continued Trotsky in the same article, “the Popular Front government does everything in its power to make victory doubly difficult. A civil war is waged, as everybody knows, not only with military but also with political weapons. From a purely military point of view, the Spanish revolution is much weaker than its enemy. Its strength lies in its ability to rouse the great masses to action. It can even take the army away from its reactionary officers. To accomplish this, it is only necessary to seriously and courageously advance the program of the socialist revolution.<\/p>

It is necessary to proclaim that, from now on, the land, factories and shops will pass from the hands of the capitalists into the hands of the people. It is necessary to move at once towards the realisation of this program in those provinces where the workers are in power. The fascist army could not resist the influence of such a program for twenty-four hours; the soldiers would tie their officers hand and foot and turn them over to the nearest headquarters of the workers’ militia.<\/p>

But the bourgeois ministers [in the “Popular Front” government] cannot accept such a program. Curbing the social revolution, they compel the workers and peasants to spill ten times as much of their own blood in the civil war. And to crown everything, these gentlemen expect to disarm the workers again after the victory and expect them to respect the sacred laws of private property. Such is the true essence of the policy of the Popular Front. Everything else is pure humbug, phrases, and lies!<\/p>

Many supporters of the Popular Front now shake their heads reproachfully at the rulers of Madrid! Why didn’t they foresee all this? Why didn’t they purge the army in time? Why didn’t they take the necessary measures?…<\/p>

It is naive to claim that the Spanish republicans or the Socialists or the communists foresaw nothing, let something slip. It is not at all a question of the perspicacity of this or that minister or leader, but of the general direction of the policy. A workers’ party that enters into a political alliance with the radical bourgeoisie by that fact alone renounces the struggle against capitalist militarism.<\/p>

Bourgeois domination, that is to say, the maintenance of private property in the means of production, is inconceivable without the support of the armed forces for the exploiters. The officers’ corps represents the guard of capital. Without this guard, the bourgeoisie could not maintain itself for a single day. The selection of the individuals, their education and training, makes the officers as a distinctive group uncompromising enemies of socialism. Isolated exceptions change nothing. That is how things stand in all bourgeois countries.<\/p>

The danger lies not in the military braggarts and demagogues who openly appear as fascists; incomparably more menacing is the fact that at the approach of the proletarian revolution the officers’ corps becomes the executioner of the proletariat. To eliminate four or five hundred reactionary agitators from the army means to leave everything basically as it was before.<\/p>

The officers’ corps, in which is concentrated the centuries-old tradition of enslaving the people, must be dissolved, broken, crushed in its entirety, root and branch. The troops in the barracks commanded by the officers’ caste must be replaced by the people’s militia, that is, the democratic organisation of the armed workers and peasants. There is no other solution.<\/p>

But such an army is incompatible with the domination of exploiters big and small. Can the republicans agree to such a measure? Not at all. The Popular Front government, that is to say, the government of the coalition of the workers with the bourgeoisie, is in its very essence a government of capitulation to the bureaucracy and the officers. Such is the great lesson of the events in Spain, now being paid for with thousands of human lives…<\/p>

The political alliance of the working class leaders with the bourgeoisie is disguised as the defence of the ‘republic’. The experience of Spain shows what this defence is in actuality. The word ‘republican’, like the word ‘democrat’, is a deliberate charlatanism that serves to cover up class contradictions. The bourgeois is a republican so long as the republic protects private property. And the workers utilise the republic to overthrow private property. The republic, in other words, loses all its value to the bourgeois the moment it assumes value for the workers… <\/p>Ibid<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

“The Popular Fronts played a\nkey role in the struggle against fascism (particularly in Spain and\nFrance)”, claims Dialego. Trotsky was “vehemently opposed to the\ndemocratic Popular Front strategy”. Trotsky’s indictment was that the Popular\nFront could not<\/strong> defend democracy.\nCapitalism in Spain could not afford democracy. It “tolerated” the\nPopular Front only to prepare the ground for fascist reaction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The leaders of the Popular Front\nrefused to mobilise revolutionary action by the workers and peasants to break\nthe armed forces of the capitalist state and replace them by the power of the\narmed people \u2013 as the Bolsheviks had done in the far more backward conditions\nof Russia. By that fact, the leaders of the Popular Front, far from defending democracy, prepared the ground for the rise of the\ncounter-revolution.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

“A workers’ party that\nenters into a political alliance with the radical bourgeoisie by that fact\nalone renounces the struggle<\/strong> against\ncapitalist militarism” \u2013 that was Trotsky’s indictment of the strategy of\nthe Popular Front. “The Popular Front government, that is to say, the government\nof the coalition of the workers with the bourgeoisie, is in its very essence a\ngovernment of capitulation<\/strong> to the\nbureaucracy and the officers.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Stalinists in the 1930s also\naccused Trotsky of “jumping stages” in the Spanish revolution. As\nTrotsky paraphrased their arguments: ” ‘What kind of revolution do you\nhave in mind’, the philistines of the Popular Front demand of us, ‘democratic\nor socialist? The victory of [the Republican]… army over Franco’s would mean\nthe victory of democracy over fascism, that is, the victory of progress over\nreaction.’ “<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To this Trotsky replied:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One cannot listen to these arguments without a bitter smile. Before 1934 we explained to the Stalinists tirelessly that even in the imperialist epoch democracy continued to be preferable to fascism; that is, in all cases where hostile clashes take place between them, the revolutionary proletariat is obliged to support democracy against fascism.<\/p>

However we always added: We can and must defend bourgeois democracy not by bourgeois democratic means but by the methods of class struggle, which in turn pave the way for the replacement of bourgeois democracy by the dictatorship of the proletariat [i.e. proletarian democracy]. This means in particular that in the process of defending bourgeois democracy, even with arms in hand, the party of the proletariat takes no responsibility for bourgeois democracy, does not enter its government, but maintains full freedom of criticism and of action in relation to all parties of the Popular Front, thus preparing the overthrow of bourgeois democracy at the next stage.<\/p>

Any other policy is a criminal and hopeless attempt to use the blood of the workers as cement to hold together a bourgeois democracy that is inevitably doomed to collapse regardless of the immediate outcome of the civil war….<\/strong><\/p>

The government of Stalin-Caballero tries with all its might to imbue its army with the character of a ‘democratic’ guard for the defence of private property. That is the essence of the Popular Front. All the rest is phrasemongering. Precisely for that reason, the Popular Front is preparing the triumph of fascism. Whoever has not understood this is deaf and blind.<\/p>Ibid<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

And it was in this sense that\nTrotsky correctly regarded the Popular Front, in the phrase quoted by Dialego,\nas one of “the political resources of imperialism in the struggle against\nproletarian revolution”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky’s warnings were again\ntragically borne out. The false policies of the Popular Front leaders increasingly\nexhausted and disillusioned the masses. In 1937 these “democratic”\nleaders of the Popular Front turned on the masses themselves, crushing an uprising\nof the workers of Barcelona. Meanwhile, the capitalists, who the Popular Front\nhad hoped to win to the side of “anti-fascism” through their\n“moderation”, continued to bank-roll Franco’s counter-revolution. The\nFascist Franco defeated the revolution in Spain in 1937, and held power until\nhis death in 1975.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Russian bureaucracy and the\nSpanish Stalinists are forever stained with the blood of the militant Spanish\nworkers who they led to the slaughter and butchered in their thousands in a\nvain attempt to prove to the capitalists their fitness to rule on their behalf.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

A river of blood<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The forward thrust of revolution\nin Spain in 1936 had, however, revived the morale of the working class in Russia\n\u2013 and internationally. The bureaucracy in Russia regarded this new confidence\nof the working class as a danger. It was provoked into evermore bizarre\nrepression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1936-7 virtually every\nremaining “Old Bolshevik” leader of 1917 was put on trial in the\nso-called “Moscow Trials”. Broken in prison, blackmailed and cowed,\nwith their “confessions” dictated by Stalin’s secret police \u2013 they\nwere accused of murder, sabotage, terrorism \u2013 any fantastic crime to discredit\nthem and terrorise others. With one or two token exceptions, they were all condemned\nto be shot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though not supporters of the Left\nOpposition, they were all accused of “Trotskyism” \u2013 of conspiring\nwith Trotsky, now vilified as an “agent of capitalism”, an\n“agent of fascism”, and a “German spy”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even the London Times<\/em> correspondent in Russia admitted:\n“The root of the matter is that Stalin never completely won the battle\nbetween his own policy and Trotsky’s internationalist policy. Nor can final\nvictory ever be his… Communism remains an international creed.”\n(21\/8\/1936)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every one of the accusations in the Moscow Trials, every murder, was\nadmiringly reported and defended by the Communist Parties around the world,\nincluding Dialego’s SACP.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Moscow Trials were the tip of\nthe iceberg of what Trotsky described as a “one-sided civil war of the bureaucracy\nagainst the Bolshevik Party”. Arrests followed arrests. Left\nOppositionists in Siberian labour camps were taken out in groups to be shot.\nAltogether, tens of thousands, the cream of the Bolshevik Party, were wiped\nout. Of some one and a half million Communist Party members in 1939, only 1,3%\nhad been members at the time of the October Revolution. Of Lenin’s Central\nCommittee of 1917, only Stalin survived as a leader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The total death toll under Stalin\nin the 1930s is estimated as at least 12-15 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A last surviving leader of 1917,\nRaskolnikov, ambassador to Bulgaria during the 1930s, was recalled in 1938 to\nMoscow for “promotion” (i.e. to be shot), and instead fled into\nexile. He wrote to Stalin:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the help of dirty forgeries, you staged false trials and made up accusations which are more ridiculous than the witch trials of the Middle Ages…Inert pulp writers glorify you as a semi-deity born of the sun and moon and you, like an Eastern despot, enjoy the incense of crude flattery. You mercilessly exterminate talented writers who are personally displeasing to you… Sooner or later, the Soviet people will put you on trial as a traitor to socialism and the revolution.<\/p>Published for the first time in the USSR in the magazine Ogonyok<\/em> in June 1987<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Stalin’s reign of terror was not\nmere personal dementia, individual power-hunger, or the result of the\n“cult of the personality”. It\nwas the culmination of a political counter-revolution against the working class,\nwhich nevertheless rested itself on the change in property relations which had\nbeen won by the working class in the 1917 revolution.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last vestiges of the\nBolshevik Party were wiped out. A river of blood now flowed between Marxism and\nthe regime in Russia. On August 20, 1940, Trotsky himself, now in exile in\nMexico, was assassinated by an agent of the secret police on the orders of\nStalin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Until his death in\n1940,” \u2013 Dialego tells us \u2013 \u201cTrotsky remained hostile to the Comintern,\nand continued to agitate vigorously for the overthrow of the ‘counter-revolutionary\nbureaucracy’ (i.e. the government!) of the USSR.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dialego, of course, is here\ninsinuating that Trotsky was himself a “counter-revolutionary”.\nTrotsky stood for the restoration of workers’ democracy in Russia. At first he\nbelieved this could come about by the reform of the Soviet Communist Party and\nthe Comintern. But the responsibility of Comintern policy for the victory of\nHitler, and its refusal to acknowledge its bankruptcy, was a decisive\nturning-point. The political counter-revolution was complete. The Soviet\nworking class would now have to restore workers’ democracy by overthrowing the\nbureaucracy in a political revolution. A new workers’ international would need\nto be built.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, Trotsky\nrecognised that the Russian working class would not move against the\nbureaucracy if they believed this would\nopen the way for a capitalist counter-revolution.<\/strong> Contrary to Dialego’s\ninsinuations, Trotsky stood wholly with the Russian masses against capitalist\ncounter-revolution or military invasion. Until his death he defended the gains\nof the October Revolution \u2013 the gains of nationalised and planned economy \u2013 and\ninsisted that the bureaucracy itself defended those gains, though in its own\nways, and in its own interests. It would be not only conditions within Russia,\nbut on an international scale, which would determine the possibilities for\nrestoring workers’ democracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dialego insinuates that Trotsky\nwas a “counter-revolutionary”. He makes no mention of the fact that\nStalin signed a “peace” agreement\nwith the Fascist Hitler<\/strong> in 1939 in a futile attempt to hold off invasion of\nthe Soviet Union. Hitler nevertheless chose his time, and invaded in 1941.\nStalin had failed to prepare against this. He had “purged” not only\nthe best generals in the army, but a\nquarter of a million of the officer corps!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bureaucracy’s policies,\ninternationally and at home, all but prepared the way for the defeat of the\nRussian revolution. This was prevented only by the enormous heroism and\nsacrifice of the Soviet people in the war against Hitler.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“While most communists today\nwould no longer accept the view (current during the Stalin period) that Trotsky\nwas ‘an agent of fascism’, few would deny that throughout his life Trotsky\nhindered rather than helped the struggle for socialism.” This is the petty\n“final judgement” which the Stalinist Dialego now delivers on\nTrotsky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trotsky does not need exoneration\nby Dialego from the charge of being “an agent of fascism”. Rather,\nDialego needs to explain why a regime that he still regards as\n“socialist” criminally persecuted and murdered not just Trotsky, but\nhundreds of thousands of people on that false basis. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The truth is that, despite all\nthe levers of state power in the hands of the bureaucracy, Trotsky and the Left\nOpposition were a deadly terror \u2013 because they sustained the genuine ideas of\nMarxism, workers’ democracy, and socialism, which, taken up by the working\nclass, would spell the end of the rule of the bureaucracy and re-open the way\nto socialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leopold Trepper was a loyal\nCommunist Party member in the 1930s who, with a post in Russian Military Intelligence,\nwas in a position to see the conduct of the Left Opposition under persecution. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Breaking later with Stalinism, he\nwrote in his memoirs: “The Trotskyites… following the example of their\nleader, who was rewarded for his obstinacy with the end of an ice axe… fought\nStalinism to the death and they were the only ones who did. By the time of the\ngreat purges, they could only shout their rebellion in the freezing wastelands\nwhere they had been dragged in order to be exterminated…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, the Trotskyites have a right to accuse those who once howled along with the wolves. Let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism. <\/strong>They had something to cling to in the midst of their profound distress at seeing the revolution betrayed. They did not ‘confess’ for they knew that their confession would serve neither the party or socialism.<\/p>The Great Game<\/em>. Our emphasis.<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Tragically, criminally, it is the\nrule of Stalinism \u2013 and the base servility of Communist Party leaders around\nthe world who have supported it \u2013 which, since the 1920s, has “hindered\nrather than helped the struggle for socialism”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For preserving, developing, and struggling for the legacy of Marxism, the name of Trotsky will endure so long as humans live on this planet, and when all those who preached and practised Stalinism are forgotten with contempt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Continue to Chapter Three<\/a><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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