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Source: Revolutionary History, Vol. 4 No. 4, 1993.
Prepared for the Marxists’ Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Robert J. Alexander
International Trotskyism 1929–1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement,
Duke University Press, Durham NC, 1991, pp. 1125, $165.00
This massive tome is the result of an astonishing amount of labour. It begins with a clear and surprisingly objective historical introduction to Trotskyism, and then goes through its various international alignments and the histories of the movement in different countries. A picture emerges of a movement that assumes protean forms depending on its national settings, casting considerable doubts on its being a unitary international movement at all. An honest and in many ways a valuable attempt is made to summarise key political statements, and to sketch out a few of the main forms of activity of their supporters. That makes it a considerable advance upon Pierre Frank’s book The Fourth International, once parodied by Ken Coates as ‘resolutionary socialism’, eliciting the comment that if Frank’s description was anything to go by, most of ‘the Long March of the Trotskyists’ had been spent on their backsides in some conference or other. So this reviewer can only repeat Joseph Hansen’s verdict on Alexander’s previous book, that ‘for a social democrat, he’s done a pretty good job’. But in the end, Trotskyism’s complex history can only be understood from inside, for only in this way can obvious mistakes be avoided (even if bias can create others). Examples of this appear when he talks about the criticism of the USFI by ‘the Morenoist tendency’ without being aware that the ‘Darioush Karim’ whose book he quotes at such length is Nahuel Moreno himself (pp. 19–20), or about the ‘Icelandic section’ (p. 14), a longstanding joke in the movement.
That does not mean that some parts of the book are not of considerable value. As was to be expected, the section on the movement in the USA is one of the best. From it we learn officially for the first time on the authority of Emmanuel Geltman that despite the repeated disclaimers of Burnham and Shachtman, ‘the SWP leaders were aware’ of Bruno Rizzi’s ‘new class’ views on the Soviet Union (p. 795; see Revolutionary History, Vol. 2 No. 2, Summer 1989, p. 37; Vol. 4 No. 3, Summer 1992, pp. 90–92). On the lighter side, the long piece on Lynn Marcus (pp. 944–52) makes up in entertainment value what it lacks in relevancy. The Vietnamese section is considerably more honest than anything produced by the ‘official’ Trotskyists, and the British and French entries are worthwhile attempts, given the complexity of the material involved. If the book is less successful than it deserves to be, this is probably because writing the history of international Trotskyism is beyond the powers of any single man.
For the sheer hard work of bringing together and making a synthesis of so much material has meant inevitable errors. Apart from incidental slips (such as Mussolini’s invasion of Albania in ‘1938’, or Bert Cochran’s expulsion from the SWP in ‘1963’) and the uneven quality of the name spelling, the author also had to depend on correspondents in each country to read through his chapters. Where there have been a number of them, such as in Britain or the USA, it has been possible to check their statements against each other and arrive at an approximation to reality. But where he has only one or two in a given country this is a dangerous method to use, given the faction-ridden world of the Trotskyist movement. Many of the obvious economies with the truth are due to his informants, and should not be laid to Alexander’s charge at all. In this category we might place Mandel’s statement that his group in Bolivia is at present ‘a force in the political life of the country’ (p. 23), John Archer’s opinion that in Britain the intervention of ‘the Club’ into the fight between the ‘Blue’ and ‘White’ unions was ‘a success’ (p. 473), and John Callaghan’s remark that ‘from its origin in the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s no factions were expelled from the IMG’ (p. 496).
Quite the worst examples of all occur in the Irish chapter, where the narrative is largely dependent upon O’Connor Lysaght. First we are told that Bob Armstrong went to Ireland with the 1939 WIL delegation, and that Johnny Byrne stayed in Ireland after the delegation had recruited him (p. 568). Then follows a sanitised account of modern Irish Trotskyism which does not even mention that Peter Graham, one of the IMG’s major activists, was horribly murdered by one of the extreme terrorist factions at the time his group was supporting nationalist terrorism as a method of struggle, apart from the fact that an account that does not even mention Matty Merrigan and Liam Daltoun hardly qualifies as a description of Trotskyism in Ireland at all.
Remarks such as ‘what remained of the Revolutionary Communist Group seems to have disappeared’ (p. 498) can probably be put down to wish fulfilment rather than any intent to mislead, but other errors must be ascribed to factional bias, or to the paucity of information. In this category belong such remarks as that the British Militant in the 1980s ‘had no international affiliation’ (p. 21), that Pablo thought that ‘entrism might be a matter of centuries-long duration’ (p. 28), that José Aguirre Gainsborg was killed in ‘an auto accident’ (p. 118), or that the Bolivian POR regarded Paz Estenssoro as ‘the Bolivian Kerensky’ (p. 120) (would that they had!). Alexander’s informants did not tell him that Bracegirdle (p. 164) was probably operating in Ceylon for the Comintern to pull into line the LSSP’s leaders, whose orthodoxy was already under suspicion, that the minutes of the founding conference of the Fourth International have been tampered with to exclude the Austrian delegation, which opposed its formation along with the Poles and Craipeau (pp. 271–72), that Haston and Goffe attended the 1946 Paris pre-conference (pp. 305–06), that Charlie Van Gelderen had never been in the WIL, nor had John Lawrence supported the RCP majority in 1945 (p. 470). Similarly, Ajit Roy could hardly have gone to Britain ‘to maintain liaison with the FI’ during the war (p. 518), since he was in the WIL for the whole of that time.
There is less excuse, however, for Alexander’s failure to make a closer inspection of the Greek movement, where at least five separate groups exist today (p. 509), or for the poor quality of his sections on Turkey (p. 739) and Japan (pp. 599–601), especially when we remember that Larry Moyes’ account of the Japanese movement came out in California as long ago as 1971. He does not even appear to know that Trotskyist groups existed in Egypt in the 1940s and in Yugoslavia since the early 1970s. And I can only account for his extraordinary remark that Indalecio Prieto was the leader of the ‘centre’ of Spanish socialism (p. 680) by the relatively far-right position occupied by American social democracy itself in the political spectrum.
Some of these types of mistakes could easily have been avoided if Alexander had checked his material for internal consistency. Here I will restrict myself to two examples. On page 496 Alexander quotes Callaghan’s British Trotskyism (a very bad book) about the IMG having ‘no expulsions’, that its ‘political culture is genuinely democratic’, and then tells us only three pages later that this reviewer ‘broke away’ from it ‘over the issue of its abandonment of entrism in the Labour Party’ (p. 499). By what criteria of ‘democracy’ an opposition amounting to a third of the group, and a majority of its London membership, can be expelled from a Trotskyist organisation for suggesting its members join trades unions (!) and working-class parties, where conference votes are fiddled when they don’t turn out the way they should, and purge trials are held in snowbound conditions, remains a mystery to me. A similar conflict of evidence involves the International Communist League, which is described on page 496 as having been ‘expelled’ from the International Socialists, an event that had already been covered 11 pages earlier with the polite euphemism of ‘each went its own way’ (p. 485).
Other infelicities probably stem from a lack of understanding of the thought world the writer is trying to interpret. Over and over again Trotskyism is discussed as if it were a religious, not a political, phenomenon, and different factions within it are measured against some supposed ‘orthodoxy’, often with ludicrous results. After five pages describing Healy’s antics in the 1970s and 1980s, Callaghan is quoted as saying that ‘the WRP really does defend orthodox Trotskyism’ (p. 480). The United Secretariat is defined as ‘orthodox’ (p. 21), yet less than a hundred pages later its Senegalese leader is quoted as rejecting ‘a certain scholastic understanding of Marxism or of a Trotskyism centred primarily on the proletariat’ (pp. 115–16). As an introduction to a period in which the USFI deliberately turned its back on the working class and advocated ‘Red Bases in the Universities’ and foquismo in Latin America, we are solemnly informed that ‘in the realm of ideas it tended to stick closer to the basic notions put forward by Trotsky than did most of its rivals’ (p. 755). The inability to apply class criteria to a supposedly Marxist movement becomes quite exasperating, at times seriously affecting the focus of the entries. Thus eight pages (pp. 53–60) cover the pre-war period when Australian Trotskyism gained a vital following within the working class, and 18 pages the history of the middle-class sectlets since the mid-1960s (pp. 62–79), an imbalance that also affects the British and other entries, but not to the same glaring extent.
This absence of Marxist philosophical methodology is also reflected in the sources and structure of the book. The heavy use of secondary material, the concentration upon official statements, and the scant attention to what the rank and file were actually doing, gives this history a top-heavy aspect, apart from the fact that Trotskyist internal documents have always been a lot more revealing about what was really going on than official literature. Added to that there is the arrangement of the book, which is most confusing, listing its subjects mechanically by alphabetic progression. Grandizo Munis’ ‘FOR’ appears before the Fourth International of which it was an offshoot, the OCRFI between Norway and Panama, and Posadas between Portugal and Puerto Rico. It would have been far better if all the general material dealing with the various ‘Fourth Internationals’ had been grouped in some sort of chronological order at the beginning, leaving the countries to follow in their alphabetical order. As it is, both text and index are very difficult to follow.
But the main reason that this book fails in its brave endeavour is surely that it is premature, attempting a task that is still impossible. The plain fact of the matter is that sufficient material does not yet exist of the quality required to write it. A few examples that have lately come to light are sufficient to establish this. Although the book bears the publisher’s imprint of 1991, it left the writer’s hand as long ago as 1986, and work that has been done since has already rendered large parts of it obsolete. Apart from the Irish chapter, the most unsatisfactory section of all is that on Greece (pp. 500–09), where the entire period of 1946 to 1967 is missed. It would have been so much better if Stinas’ memoirs and the multi-volume history of Loukas Karliaftis (whose name appears reversed on page 504) had been consulted (see Revolutionary History, Vol. 3 No. 3, Spring 1991). At least Alexander would then have been spared such remarks as that Bartzotas’ boast that he had killed ‘600’ Trotskyists is ‘manifestly exaggerated’ (p. 506), for we know that the KKE regarded Archeiomarxists and any other dissidents as ‘Trotskyists’, making the figure a very plausible one indeed. A perusal of the newly published history of Swiss Trotskyism, David Vogelsanger’s Trotskismus in der Schweiz, a very serious work, would have similarly transformed his Swiss section out of all recognition. None of Lora’s full-length historical works on the Bolivian crisis of 1952 appear to have been consulted, the books of Craipeau and Roussell were not used in the French chapters, nor Leslie Goonewardene’s The History of the LSSP in Perspective in the Sri Lankan. Sam Bornstein’s and my Against the Stream is listed in the bibliography on page 1057, but has evidently not been used in the text, and Alexander appears not to know of the following War and the International at all. The work of this magazine has rendered outmoded several other sections, such as those on Albania (pp. 32–33), where he is evidently dependent on Rene Dazy’s book alone (see Revolutionary History, Vol. 3 No. 1, Summer 1990, pp. 21–26; Vol. 3 No. 4, Autumn 1991, pp. 37–39), and on Spain, where the oft-quoted Pravda declaration about the intention to murder Trotskyists and anarchists (p. 700) would now seem to be apocryphal (Revolutionary History, Vol. 2 No. 1, Spring, 1989, p. 47). Worse still, Vereeken’s suspicion that ‘the new Spanish Trotskyist group during the Civil War had in all likelihood been heavily infiltrated by the GPU’, dismissed by Alexander on page 104 as having ‘little basis’, now seems all too true with the evidence at our disposal (Revolutionary History, Vol. 4 Nos. 1–2).
So much that is inferior that is written on the history of Trotskyism obviously intends to be inferior, so it is a cause for real disappointment that a scholarly work that sets out in all honesty to attempt such a mammoth task should fail so disastrously. All we can do is to shrug our shoulders, recalling Cervantes’ remark that ‘heaven favours good intentions’, while reminding ourselves that the road to Hell is paved with them.
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Last updated: 9 February 2015