Re: Jim Higgins

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

What Next? No.22 2002

Trotskyist Bears and Working Class Stars
Jim Higgins

"Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out crude rhythms 
for bears to dance to, when we long to make music that will move the 
stars to tears." Flaubert

AL RICHARDSON and Cyril Smith in their articles on Trotskyism (Cyril 
Smith, "On the Importance of Having Been a Trotskyist", and Al 
Richardson, "The Place of Trotskyism in the Logic of Marxism", both in 
issue No.20) have started a useful and necessary discussion, and What 
Next? is to be commended for providing a forum for that discussion to 
take place. There is always something to be learned from Trotsky, even 
on those occasions when his arguments, eroded by time and experience, 
seem less convincing than once they did. Trotskyism at least is coherent 
and one can appreciate its quality without agreeing with every dot and 
comma or doing damage either to conscience or good sense.

Stalinism, on the other hand, which, especially in Stalin's own hand, 
reads like the pedestrian maunderings of an inattentive seminarist, is 
at one and the same time inconsistent and incoherent. Stalin's most 
inspired wheeze, as Al Richardson points out in his article, was to 
invent a totally spurious Leninism as a weapon with which to beat 
Trotsky, which the unfortunate L.D.T. could only counter by seeming to 
put himself at odds with Lenin. For the rest, Stalinism could 
accommodate contradictions as a dog provides a home for fleas. Today it 
might be let's go left with Zinoviev, tomorrow it could be let's go 
right with the Bukharinites. For Stalin, the ultra-left Third Period 
could give way without a word of explanation to a Popular Front against 
fascism, which in its turn could arbitrarily change to sucking up to 
Hitler, and all as if these were items in a natural progression with a 
brain at work throughout the piece.

Trotsky on substitutionism is brilliant and it is a pity that he did not 
subsequently call this to the attention of those in effective charge of 
the Fourth International in the 1930s. The theory of the Permanent 
Revolution is an astonishingly accurate preview of how the Russian 
Revolution actually took place. Less satisfactory were his later ideas 
on the "Russian question". To follow Trotsky through his 
self-constructed maze, running from Thermidor to Bonapartism, on to the 
counter-revolutionary bureaucracy that maintained state property only 
under the pressure of the masses, and finally in 1940 leaving the answer 
to the question in history's safe hands, results in confusion rather 
than clarity. All this seems to have represented developments in 
Trotsky's head, developments, unfortunately, cut short by Ramón 
Mercader's ice-axe, rather than significant changes in the phenomenon he 
was describing. What we can say with some confidence is that the 
emphasis on the class nature of Russia and all the theories that failed 
to describe it or understand it illuminated nothing, and despite their 
alleged insight into the laws of motion of this new society none of them 
came within a mile of what actually happened.

Paradoxically, one of the most practical and inspired ideas of Trotsky 
was the Transitional Programme that he worked up for the founding 
conference of the Fourth International. Here was a programme, 
beautifully tailored to its time, with which a communist party firmly 
based in the working class could make genuine advances. Alas, there was 
no such party adhering to the FI - indeed, the membership figures quoted 
for the organisations at the founding conference were exaggerated and 
even at that they were in the tens and a few hundreds. The truth is that 
there were not even enough Trotskyists to attempt to promote the 
Transitional Programme in a social democratic party, despite the fact 
that most of them were engaged in some sort of entry tactic.

Regardless of that, however, in the real world the notion of 
transitional demands can be extended far beyond the original items set 
out in Trotsky's 1938 programme. Within the trade unions, it is possible 
to develop a programme of transitional demands that can develop the 
struggle and set the stage for future political struggles. No Trotskyist 
organisation has made any serious attempt to develop such a programme, 
which is sad because the real dynamic of the 1938 founding conference 
was in the transitional method not in the construction of the first of a 
seemingly endless succession of Potemkin Internationals.

Most of us would support the proposition that there is a crying need for 
a World Party of Socialist Revolution. Unfortunately, it was not called 
into being by a handful of delegates in Rosmer's back garden, and it is 
even less likely that it will be called into being from one or the other 
of the fragments from the sundered Pabloite and Healyite Internationals. 
Today as in 1938 there is no justification for building, with not one 
hundredth part of its forces, a tiny copy of the Communist 
International, especially as the CI cannot be said to have been 
overburdened with revolutionary successes, even during the brave early 
days covered by the first four congresses.

full: http://mysite.freeserve.com/whatnext


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