Re: Small mass party [was: Re: Scottish Socialist Party: ISM leaves CWI]

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From "Leninism, Trotskyism and Socialist Organization Today" by Sebastian Lamb

The rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR and the Stalinization of
the Comintern produced resignations, expulsions and splits in CPs around
the world during the 1920s. The International Left Opposition (from 1930,
International Communist League) formed by Trotsky opposed Stalinism and its
politics of "socialism in one country" from the perspective of the Marxism
of the 1919-1923 Comintern. Although it was the only coherent
anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialist current, it was extremely marginal.
The "Fourth International (World Party of the Socialist Revolution)"
founded prematurely by Trotsky in 1938 had a membership of only a few
thousand. Its largest section, the American Socialist Workers Party
(American SWP), then numbered 1,520. Many of the sections were tiny
internalized grouplets. Few had more than handfuls of worker militants. In
most countries, most workers who considered themselves revolutionaries were
in the Stalinist CPs, despite massive losses of those who had joined in the
1920s. Although there are a few positive and rather more negative lessons
to be learned from the Stalinist CPs in the 1930s, the CPs ceased to be
revolutionary parties in any sense after the Popular Front line of alliance
with the "progressive bourgeoisie" against fascism was adopted in 1935.
Many then grew substantially, recruiting from the working and middle classes.

The strength of the Trotskyist movement lay in Trotsky's political analyses
(of the Russian, Chinese and Spanish Revolutions, the struggle against
fascism in Germany, permanent revolution etc.). But it also had major
political weaknesses. Trotsky's analysis of the USSR as a "degenerated
workers' state" was one. Others, set out in the Transitional Programme in
1938, included the belief that capitalism was in its "death agony" and that
"The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary
leadership." The first claim was not based on any serious Marxist economic
analysis. The second would only have been true if revolutionary situations
existed everywhere but workers were being misled by non-revolutionary
leaderships (as in Spain 1936-37). In 1938, this was a fantasy. It gave
Trotskyism:

--a fixed model of society in which the working classes were continually
straining at the leash, or about to strain at the leash, held back only by
the betrayals of their perfidious leadership...

--from it derived one of the characteristic traits of post-war Trotskyism:
a systematic blindness to the actual consciousness and concerns of the
working class" (Molyneux 180).

To this model was added the belief that tiny Trotskyist groups were
"revolutionary parties" because they and they alone possessed the programme
for revolutionary leadership. Only in Sri Lanka and Bolivia in the 1950s
did Trotskyists come anywhere close to forming mass revolutionary
parties.[2] But in 1946 American SWP leader James Cannon wrote that "The
revolutionary vanguard party destined to lead this tumultuous revolutionary
movement in the US does not have to be created. It already exists, and its
name is the Socialist Workers' Party" (in Wald, 37). At the time, the
American SWP had only 1,470 members.

This kind of ridiculous self-importance and failure to understand the real
tasks for groups with few if any roots among workers generated sectifying
pressures to which many orthodox Trotskyist groups succumbed.[3] The
material basis for this was isolation from the struggles of workers and the
oppressed. But sectification also had a theoretical source inherited from
the pre-Stalinist Comintern.

The problem lay in a confusion between revolutionary socialist groups as
they actually existed and the mass vanguard party required to lead a
socialist revolution. According to the Comintern theses on party
organization discussed earlier, "At every stage of the revolutionary class
struggle... the Communist Party must be the vanguard, the most advanced
section of the proletariat" (234). This equation of party with vanguard led
many a Trotskyist group to consider itself a vanguard party. But what if
the group in question was not in fact the vanguard, a substantial layer of
revolutionary workers? Only a few groups both realized that their
organizations were not and drew the appropriate conclusion. Three years
after Cannon proclaimed the American SWP the party of the American
Revolution, the Workers' Party (the other significant Trotskyist group in
the US) changed its name to Independent Socialist League in recognition of
the fact that it was a propaganda group, not a party (the initiative came
from Hal Draper).

Full article at: http://www.web.net/~newsoc/documents.html

(This is the website of the New Socialist Group in Canada, which is similar
to Solidarity in the USA.)


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/