Re: Louis and Trotskyist tautology

["Alan Bradley" <abradley1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Louis Proyect
> The SWP's opposition to Trotskyism is of little interest to me, since it
> revolves around doctrinal issues such as the two-stage theory, etc. I have
> no interest in using such questions as a litmus test. The SWP expelled
> people for believing in permanent revolution, while the people who were
> expelled would certainly expel people who advocated a 2-stage theory.

Interesting.  The Australian SWP (now the DSP) didn't expel people for
"believing in permanent revolution".  The only people who were eventually
expelled were the Barnesites, who were trying to engineer a split.  There
must have been a bit of a difference in practice even then.

There is a lovely quote in one of the old DSP documents on why they stopped
calling themselves Trotskyists, even before they formally broke with
Trotskyism.  Unfortunately, I can't find it.  But at least there is the DSP
"official history" on their website: http://www.dsp.org.au/

Here are three excerpts outlining their critique of Trotskyism:

"In the early 1980s the organisational degeneration of the US SWP was
becoming increasingly clear, appearing more and more to be run by a clique,
with a cult around one man, their national secretary, Jack Barnes. While the
overwhelming majority of our party had little difficulty in accepting that
Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution was inferior to Lenin's two-stage
strategy, in the US there was considerable opposition and a major factional
struggle. The Barnes leadership resolved it in a fairly undemocratic manner,
by expelling a substantial proportion of the membership who still held to
the traditional Trotskyist positions, and cancelled their 1983 convention.
They had earlier expelled Peter Camejo, who'd developed similar views to us,
and forced out others who subsequently regrouped around Camejo in the North
Star Network."

"Seeing their degeneration at close quarters perhaps some of us reacted a
little like ``there but for the grace of God go us...'' We'd seen the
phenomena of other weird sects laying claim to the mantle of Trotskyism,
both within the Fourth International - Nahuel Moreno of Argentina, and
without - Gerry Healy, Juan Posadas, James Robertson (the Spartacists). Up
close to the US SWP, perhaps we didn't initially see the same phenomenon
developing, just noting bits and pieces. When it struck us that here was
another full-blown example of Trotskyist cultism, we were repulsed.

And perhaps if they hadn't degenerated like that, we would have been more
hopeful of reforming the whole of the Fourth International, and would have
stayed in there longer. But no doubt it was for the better - we'd wasted
enough time on that perspective already."

"So in the founding programmatic document of the Fourth International, the
Transitional Program, Trotsky could state that ``today there is not another
revolutionary current on the face of the planet, worthy of the name.'' Think
what it means to say that in 1938. The few thousand people in the Trotskyist
movement were the ``only revolutionaries'' in the world. And in the
following 10 years there were big revolutions - and they weren't led by the
``only revolutionaries.'' We didn't really lose that sort of view of
ourselves until 1979. Most Trotskyists still have it. The International
Socialists are a bad case of this sectarian madness."

Alan Bradley
abradley1@xxxxxxxxxxx



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