Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency Index | Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Written: 1993.
First Published: May 1993.
Source: Published by the Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency.
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This second issue of In defence of Marxism concentrates on two related themes – the death agony of Stalinism and the problems of revolutionary regroupment. Although the analysis of Stalinism has been at the heart of many of the sharpest conflicts between those who have defined themselves as Trotskyists since the late 1940s, the aftermath of Stalinism’s collapse in Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union and the civil war in Yugoslavia has given such differences a further twist.
All the half-buried disputes of the past concerning the nature of Stalinism, the class character of the state and the national question have re-emerged, with predictable results. The largest groupings (such as the USec, the LIT and the Lambertists) have adapted to bourgeois democracy and capitalist restoration by hailing the ‘democratic revolution’ in Eastern Europe; other smaller groupings (including the Spartacists, the International Bolshevik Tendency and the Liaison Committee of Communists) adopted a range of Stalinophile positions, looking to sections of the disintegrating Stalinist bureaucracies, rather than the working class, to act as the last line of defence of the former workers’ states, and opposing demands for self-determination by national minorities. Still other currents (among them the LRCI and the International Trotskyist Opposition in the USec) have tended to oscillate between these two poles.
Civil war in the former Yugoslavia has drawn a similar picture of the disarray of Trotsky’s epigones, but in even starker contrast. Some have advocated military support to Serbia. Some have remained neutral or dual-defeatist, while others have defended the Bosnian Muslims. The implications for regrouping revolutionary forces are clear. With Trotsky, we see the cohesion of revolutionary Marxists as consisting in ‘a common understanding of the events, of the tasks, and this common understanding – that is the programme of the party.’ Any talk of reuniting the entire ‘Trotskyist family’, and blurring over such fundamental differences is plainly both ridiculous and undesirable. History has long ago proved, in the case of the Second International during the First World War, the impossibility of maintaining an ‘International’ composed of parties lined up in opposing trenches. Revolutionary regroupment – rather than a federation or a rotten bloc – needs a substantial level of agreement on the tasks facing Trotskyists and a common understanding of key events in the international class struggle.
At the same time, real progress towards rebuilding a Trotskyist International will not be made unless there are mechanisms for discussing and resolving differences, based upon the experiences of revolutionaries in different sectors of the world – rather than attempting to clone the experiences of a national group, as is seen in most of the ‘Internationals’. It is with such methods that the Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency has attempted to pursue its work in the first two years of its existence, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. Some of the results are presented in this issue.
In this spirit, it is our intention to encourage debate and discussion in the pages of In defence of Marxism, and we welcome contributions from those seeking to address similar concerns. We aim to challenge the smug self-congratulation, ugly factionalism and theoretical indifference in much of what passes for ‘Trotskyist’ politics.
Since the first issue of In defence of Marxism, the LTT has fused with Comrades for a Workers Government (South Africa), at its founding congress in January this year. This marks an important step, which will be reflected in future issues of this journal.
May 23, 1993
In defence of Marxism Index (1992-1996)
Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency Index | Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive