---
By Phil Hearse In his review of the new editions of Trotsky’s writings in exile Michael Fisher takes its editors Kunal Chattopadhyay and Paul Le Blanc to task for not being more critical of Trotsky in their introductory material( see http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745331485 ). For Fisher this relates to the relevance of Trotsky to contemporary politics: while the editors talk of the relevance of Trotsky for contemporary politics, Fisher counters with: “Many of those radicalised in recent years by climate change, globalisation and financial collapse are more likely to reference David Graeber and Occupy Wall Street than Lenin and the Bolsheviks.” Why, according to Fisher, is the approach of Trotsky (and latter-day Trotskyists) disabled? It all starts with the Old Man himself. Inferring the political situation directly as a function of the economic situation, Trotsky thought that the situation about which he wrote (mainly Europe in the 1930s) was automatically fertile ground for socialist radicalisation, irrespective of the organisation, politics and culture of the working class since the First World War. This overestimation of the possibilities for socialist transformation have been characteristics of Trotskyist organisations ever since. He says: “In common with many revolutionaries of his generation Trotsky developed his ideas within an intellectual climate heavily influenced by the orthodoxies of the Second International. While Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution marked a break with orthodox stagism, and he polemicised in his book on the 1905 revolution against the “pseudo-materialistic geometry” characteristic of speculative philosophies of history, many of his writings (and some of those in the present volume) are suffused with notions that have strong affinities with the forms of “vulgar Marxism” codified by the Second International. “A defining characteristic of this Marxism was its reduction of Marx’s concept of the social relations of production to the economy, taking as given the fetishistic separation between economics and politics characteristic of liberal social theory. In this context Marxism became defined by the ahistorical assertion of the causal primacy of the economic in historical development and the determination of politics. Political consciousness and agency became a function of economic trends, with class radicalism a close correlate of economic inequality and crisis” (Fisher, ibid) A consequence of this type of thinking was a mis-assessment of the possibilities for socialism and the hold of reformism: “However, working with the pre-critical construction that all capitalism is pregnant with socialist transition Trotsky simply asserts that all reformism is an exhausted historical force. It therefore exists as an external and artificial constraint on emergent class radicalism. Through the lens of the ‘transitional epoch’ the fact of working-class support for reformism needs little explanation, beyond the notion that such support is either a function of economic growth or conscious political deception.” (Fisher op cit) Moreover: “In the absence of growth, explanations for the endurance of reformism then tend to assume a quasi-conspiratorial character, the result of an obsolete leadership manoeuvring to preserve capitalism in the face of (what Trotsky terms) “laws” and “wheels” of history that will ultimately condemn it and them to political obscurity. “The weaknesses evident in some of Trotsky’s writings would matter little today if it were not for the fact that since his death in 1940 a number of Trotskyist organisations have reproduced his flawed formulations as a basis for developing their political analysis and strategy. “For example, claims that the objective conditions for mass socialist radicalisation (or even socialist transformation) are present in many leading capitalist countries, regardless of recent historical experience and the dominant forms of political practice within the working class, have been a recurring theme in Trotskyist discourse since World War II.” (Fisher op cit) What is the truth in all this? In Trotsky’s case, it has to be said, not a lot. If we look at what Trotsky’s writings of this period actually were we can see that Fisher’s case is at best a huge exaggeration. Apart from his magisterial History of the Russian Revolution – an amazing application of historical materialism in all its concrete detail – his main writings of the period are his writings on Germany, Russia, Spain and France, all collected in various Pathfinder volumes (http://www.pathfinderpress.com/s.nl/sc.7/category.58/.f?range=26%2C50%2C66). These analyses were written in the middle of a stormy revolutionary decade which was concluded with a world war. Trotsky’s writings on Germany, famously prescient about the dangers of the conquest of fascist reaction, are models of analysis that try to integrate the economic, political and cultural levels into a coherent narrative. A coherent narrative that proved all too true. In this case his writings are finely attuned, within the bounds of the information available to him marooned on the island of Prinkipo, to the changes of mood and morale in the working class. The hold of reformism in the form of the Social Democratic Party, is not underestimated at all. On the contrary his writings are full of warnings to the Communist Party (KPD) that their ultra-left super-revolutionary line was incapable of making inroads into the consciousness of the social democratic mass base. The idea that Trotsky thought “economic crisis, therefore situation for socialism excellent” is a wild exaggeration. But in any case you have to look at Germany in an overall way. We are not talking about the West Germany in the 1960s; we are talking about a situation of economic and political collapse where a fascist counterrevolution actually occurred and where there was a mass communist party with hundreds of thousands of members and millions of voters. An extremely unstable and volatile situation where the ball of history could have been pushed down the slope left or right. Communist leader Ernst Thalmann (front left) with Willy Loew, leader of the Red Fighters Front True, Trotsky did not subscribe to any fatalistic, mechanical, quietest theory that said that in such a situation socialist revolution was absolutely impossible. He was right not to do so. Here is a case incidentally where the role of the subjective factor – the idiocy of the Communist Party and SPD leaderships – played an absolutely crucial role. Trotsky called it betrayal, although Fisher has a point in saying reformists generally behave like reformists. But that is really a terminological point. What about Spain? Trotsky of course spent a lot of his time discussing Catalonia where there was – was there not? – a real socialist revolution in response to the fascist-military uprising in 1936. You don’t have to read Trotsky, you just have to glance through Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia to see what this meant in practice. Collectivisation of the local economy was near total as was the power of the local workers committees. Now of course you can’t have a revolution in one province, but you can’t really accuse Trotsky of a mechanical view of Spain without looking at these facts. Did Trotsky overrate the prospects of Popular Front in Spain and the occupation of the factories in 1936? Maybe. But you won’t find out from what Michael Fisher says because, well he doesn’t mention Germany, Spain or France – or quote a single line from Trotsky. This is the problem with what he says – it is schematic in a quite literal sense. He ascribes a master methodological failing to Trotsky and then just asserts that it’s true – Trotsky was imbued with the Marxism of the 2nd International, he read political analysis directly from economics and therefore was hopelessly over-optimistic about the prospects for socialist advance, QED. The reality is much more complex. It is true that in some of the programmatic declarations that Trotsky wrote – like the transitional programme (1938) and the manifesto of the Fourth International on the imperialist war (1940) there are prophecies and declarations which are insufficiently nuanced and, well, bombastic. The proclamation that imperialist war would result in millions following the banner of the Fourth International is an obvious example. But these did not follow automatically from a ‘Trotskyist’ analysis of the world situation, or at least they should not have done. It’s also true that these types of predictions had a debilitating effect on the Trotskyist movement coming out the second world war. This tiny movement lacking basic resources hung on to Trotsky’s analyses from the 1930s in the much changed situation of the 1950s and ‘60s. Here Michael Fisher has much more going for his argument. For example: the 1963 resolution for the World Congress of the Fourth International, jointly authored by Ernest Mandel and Joe Hansen, was entitled The Dynamics of World Revolution Today (http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/fi/1963-1985/usfi/7thWC/usfi01.htm). Well, of course this was in the wake of the Cuban revolution and the tremendous growth in the struggle in Vietnam. But ‘world revolution’? – hardly. Let’s take another example that gets to the heart of things, the May-June events in France in 1968, which was in numerical terms the biggest general strike in world history. The lesson drawn by much of the the left of Trotskyist origin was that this was a ‘pre-revolutionary’ situation, but that it had been betrayed by the French Communist Party and ...if there had been a mass revolutionary party in France in 1968 there could have been a socialist revolution. But the reality is that if there had been a mass revolutionary party in France in 1968 this would have meant that the whole post-war history of France and Europe was different. Because you can’t have a socialist revolution without a pre-existing mass revolutionary or at least anti-capitalist current inside the working class. It is a spontaneist myth that the working class and its allies can achieve full-blown revolutionary consciousness through moving into action in a matter of weeks, without the pre-existing presence of a strong revolutionary-minded current. This of course is a matter of the culture and consciousness of the working class built up over many years. Ernest Mandel it should be noted never used the counter-factual argument about the non-existence of a revolutionary party; he merely says that the limits of the movement were never fully tested because the Communist Party was so keen to call it off, and get back to the trade unionism and elections it understood (http://newleftreview.org/I/52/ernest-mandel-lessons-of-may). However despite the danger of spontaneism Trotsky and the Trotskyists were always right to stress was the dynamic character of mass consciousness and the way that victories or defeats can change it. For example: you cannot analyse the situation in Britain today, and thus the consciousness of the working class, without knowing that that the existing configuration of class and political forces has its origins in the miners’ strike of 1984-5. This was an historic defeat for the working class and laid the basis for New Labour and neoliberal dominance. The defeat of the strike was not inevitable – the miners’ victories in 1972 and 1974 show it was entirely possible. The actions of the Labour and trade union leaders were absolutely crucial to Thatcher’s victory, and the likes of Neil Kinnock and Norman Willis could have prevented it. It is not wrong to talk about ‘betrayal’ in these circumstances. Defeats and victories change consciousness and defeat does not always mean that working class consciousness was ‘inadequate’. Look at Chile between 1971-3. Look at El Salvador from about 1979-3, or Nicaragua for a decade after 1979. Revolutionary situations, pre-revolutionary situations have existed in our lifetime (well mine at any rate). They were moistly drowned in blood. But Michael Fisher is right to point to a problem in some Trotskyist organisations sometimes of schematically over-estimating the possibilities for socialist radicalisation and transition. Often they underestimated the effects of the cultural superstructure of neoliberalism – intensified individualism, competition within the working class, the dream world of celebrity culture etc – on the working class. Sometimes, not always by any means, they have failed to analyse the changing composition of the working class and how manual working class bastions have been dispersed – and mainly moved to Asia. All that is true. Even more, the types of organisation established by Trotskyists and other revolutionary socialists are often inappropriate to today’s conditions. Sure, this means we have to think hard about the ‘revolutionary subject’, the social configuration of the working class and the oppressed in each country, their culture, forms of organisation and consciousness. We have to be more flexible in our forms of organisation and pedagogy and not act if we can devise revolutionary strategy from a 1930s cookbook. But it doesn’t get us anywhere to argue there was some kind of master failing in Trotsky’s writings. Basic elements of Trotsky’s politics and analysis – the revolutionary road to socialism, workers self-organisation, permanent revolution, the united front, the role of the trade union bureaucracy and reformism, the importance of a revolutionary political party – remain vital elements of analysis although you would have to add ‘mutatis mutandis’ – because inevitably lots has changed since the 1930s. In that sense it is a really good idea to read Lenin and Trotsky, not uncritically, not in a spirit of hagiography, but because there is a universe of political insights in those writings. So when Michael Fisher notes that: “Many of those radicalised in recent years by climate change, globalisation and financial collapse are more likely to reference David Graeber and Occupy Wall Street than Lenin and the Bolsheviks” you have to ask – well is that a good thing? Wouldn’t their reading of Graeber, Negri or Naomi Klein be strengthened and deepened by a knowledge of Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky and the tradition of the Left Opposition. Of course it would. The relationship between the revolutionary left and the activist ‘anti-capitalist’ movement has been interestingly discussed in the recent Beyond Capitalism? by Simon Hardy and Luke Cooper. I recommend their approach. No dialogue between young global justice campaigners and the organised left can be useful if it is in just one direction. Neither will it be furthered by pre-emptory dismissals of some of the gems of revolutionary insight and analysis.