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The U.S. left in the last months of 1972 saw the revival in a sharp form of a debate that has been an undercurrent throughout its history.
The issue was Trotskyism and the focus was its ideological and practical role within the revolutionary movement. The immediate occasion of the debate was the political, military and diplomatic offensive of the Vietnamese people. The struggle culminated in their pressing of the nine-point peace treaty on the Nixon administration, demanding the signing of the agreement, the cessation of bombing and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam.
The Vietnamese liberation fighters issued a call to all progressive forces in the world to bring to the forefront and rally behind the demand that Nixon “Sign the Treaty Now!” After initially indicating agreement, the U.S. balked, stalled for several weeks and then unleashed the terroristic Christmas bombing of North Vietnam.
Nixon’s genocidal deeds failed to intimidate the Vietnamese. What is more the worldwide fury provoked by bombings and given direction by the political strategy of the Vietnamese leadership utterly isolated the Nixon administration and its Saigon henchmen before world opinion.
The demand to sign the treaty was the cutting edge of the struggle. On one side stood the Vietnamese people, the Indochinese united front, the national liberation movements, the socialist countries, the revisionist countries, the working class and democratic movements in the capitalist countries, a number of capitalist governments “allied” with the U.S. and even a section of the U.S. bourgeoisie itself.
On the other side stood the Nixon administration and the Saigon puppets.
But Nixon had one additional ally to set against this dramatic example of the international united front against U.S. imperialism – almost the entire Trotskyist movement.
The Trotskyists, too, were opposed to demanding that Nixon sign the treaty, urged that the agreement be scrapped and claimed that it would violate the “right of self-determination” of South Vietnam. They organized opposition to the demand within the U.S. antiwar movement, carried article after article in their press indicating that the treaty was a “sellout” and “betrayal” of Vietnam’s national rights and threatened to organize separate protests if the demand was made the principal slogan of the planned mass mobilizations in January.
The Trotskyists believe that their position flows from a “revolutionary” analysis of the world situation and proceed to embellish their conclusions with “left” phraseology. What they actually demonstrate in practice, however, is the validity of the traditional Marxist-Leninist appraisal of the Trotskyist movement: that they are “left” only in form, but are thoroughly rightist in actuality.
Opposing the “sign the treaty” demand and counterposing it to the demand for immediate withdrawal is not simply an aberration of otherwise legitimate Trotskyist views on revolutionary questions. On the contrary, this disruptive line flows inevitably from the fundamental views of Trotskyist theory, their strategic approach to revolution and the characteristic features of their movement.
What has only begun to become clearer to the emerging revolutionary forces in the U.S. is exactly what the views of the Trotskyists are, what their role in history has been, and what role they play in current revolutionary practice.
The most recent position taken by the Trotskyists in relation to Vietnam, in this sense, has one positive aspect: it has served to open the eyes of many activists to the dangers of this particular brand of “left” opportunism and the necessity to struggle against its influence in the mass movement.
The purpose of this pamphlet, then, will be to contribute to that struggle. It will try to assess the historical role of Trotsky and Trotskyism. the main outlines of its theory and its interrelation with practice and the key features of the contemporary Trotskyist movement, including the unity and differences among the various groupings within its ranks.
The history of the Trotskyist movement is bound up with the political career of Leon Trotsky himself. Trotsky’s public role as a spokesman for the October Revolution in Russia and his position as the first head of the Red army during the period of the Civil War has been and still is a source of prestige for his followers.
What is less well known is the erratic movement of Trotsky and his supporters throughout the course of the Russian revolution, his origins as a Menshevik, his initial hostility to Lenin and the Bolshevik party, and his struggles with Lenin after the seizure of power.
The development of the Trotskyist movement, however, both during Trotsky’s lifetime and after his death, has been shaped by events often beyond and in opposition to the subjective intentions of its founders.
Trotskyism originated, for instance, as a tendency within the working-class movement, alternately reflecting in its ranks the outlook of the radical petty bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy. Today, whatever base it once had in the working class has evaporated and it is primarily a movement of the middle class youth in the advanced capitalist countries.
While the general trend of Trotskyism s development has been one of decline, the course has not been even. Periodically, in conjunction with both objective and subjective developments in the class struggle, it experiences a revival, as it has today in many of the advanced capitalist countries.
The contemporary revival of the Trotskyist movement has two key aspects. The objective factor is related to the moribund character of imperialism, which sets itself against not only the class interests of the proletariat, but also increasingly drives into the democratic struggles the masses of the petty bourgeoisie and other radicalized middle strata.
This radicalization of the petty bourgeoisie in opposition to the policies of monopoly capital and in response to the struggles of the proletariat and the oppressed nationalities was one of the key features of the emergence of the ‘new left’ in the 1960s.
It has had a fundamentally progressive, anti-imperialist character while, at the same time, these forces have demonstrated a vacillation typical of their class base and an inability to go on their own, beyond the limits of reformism. Agim Popa, writing in the September-October, 1972 issue of Albania Today, drew the connection between Trotskyism’s revival and the middle class radicalization:
Precisely these vacillations, this petty bourgeois instability, inclinations to go from one extreme to another, from anarchism and unbridled adventurism to extreme right opportunism and defeatism, constitute the favorable ground on which Trotskyism flourishes and speculates for its own counterrevolutionary aims.
There is also a subjective factor contributing to Trotskyism’s periodic revivals. Because of its self-constructed character as a “permanent opposition” within the revolutionary movement, its fortunes are often tied to the relative strength of right opportunism or even to opportunist errors or policies temporarily pursued by revolutionary forces.
The primary and most recent example of this was the 20th Congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union. Under the smokescreen of attacking “Stalin’s crimes,” party chairman Nikita Khrushchev abandoned the Leninist theory of the proletarian dictatorship and projected the “three peacefuls” as the essence of revolutionary strategy: peaceful competition, peaceful coexistence and peaceful transition.
These events of the late 1950s signaled a qualitative change both in the Soviet Union and in the ongoing struggle within the international proletarian movement between Marxism- Leninism and revisionism. For the first time in history, revisionists held state power and the fact that “de-Stalinization” had been the mechanism through which it had achieved its aim gave the Trotskyist movement an entirely new lease on life. As Popa put it:
After the 20th and especially after the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, where the renegade launched the savage campaign of anti-Stalinism, Trotskyism, which had been dealt heavy blows and had lost all influence on the masses, raised its head, resumed its undermining activity on a broad scale, and extended its poisonous roots to many areas and countries of the world. Like mushrooms after a shower, Trotskyist groups and organizations started to crop up in large numbers in Europe, America and in other areas.
These events sharply affected the initial character of the U.S. new left, which saw itself in opposition to the “old left” of the 1930s and, as a result, was isolated from the lessons of the proletarian socialist movement. While it was subjectively opposed to the reformist policies of the revisionists, it also found itself hamstrung in combating the influence of Trotskyism within its ranks.
Despite this temporary revival of Trotskyism, however, Trotskyism’s internal contradictions soon began to rise to the fore and are now again leading to a crisis within its own movement. These internal contradictions are part and parcel of Trotskyist theory itself and will inevitably contribute to its defeat in the course of the class struggle.
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Last updated on 13.11.2002