Re: Trotsky, Trotskyism and Beyond

["Einde O'Callaghan" <einde.ocallaghan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Richard Fidler wrote:
>
> As one who occasionally pricks Lou's balloon when I feel he is exaggerating
> or misrepresenting something in his SWP past, I must say that, in his
> criticism of some traditional Trotskyist (and for that matter, 20th century
> Marxist) positions on ecology, Lou is on pretty firm ground.
>
I find the conflation of Trotskyism with the American SWP in any period
to be a bit dubious. While it is true that all sections of the
Trotskyist movement were slow to take up many issues, e.g. gay
liberation or enmvironmental issues, I would put this down, at least
partly, to the effective destruction of the marxist movement by
Stalinism. Whole aspects of the Marxist tradition were lost and had to
be rediscovered by the movement in the course of the struggles of the
1960s and 1970s.

But some traditions were more receptive to influences outside the
Trotskyist tradition than others. My own tradition - that associated
with the British SWP and the IS Tendency - has always been open to
non-Trotskyist theoreticians, e.g. Bukharin's writings on imperialism
and state capitalism, Lukacs' ideas about the relationship of party and
class, Serge's critique of certain aspects of Bolshevism, to name a few,
while sticking steadfastly to the centrality of the working class to teh
transformation to socialism, without descending into the extreme
workerism of the industrialisation drives of organisations like the
American IS or later the American SWP.

I don't have time to develop these ideas at the moment - too much work
to do preparing for an anti-fascist mobilisation this saturday and the
massive demonstration in berlin on teh following Saturday - but I
thought I'd stick my oar in to point out that the SWP (US) tradition
doesn't by any means represent more than a minority of those who
considered (or consider) themselves to be Trotskyists - despite the
presence in this list of a proportionately high number of ex-SWP(US)ers.

Einde O'Callaghan



~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.