A presentation by C. Bourchier of the Spartacist League of Australia on the ongoing relevance of Trotskyism in the 21st century, for Talking Reds.
Hello comrades,
It is a real pleasure to present today as a member of the SL/A, and hopefully soon, a member of the RCO. Believe it or not, I think the topic today is quite an important one. But why is this so? A lot of comrades are skeptical of these labels people slap on themselves. In some respects, this is completely understandable. You go online and a lot of these tendencies seem more like glorified fandoms stanning whatever historical figure. And supposed Trotskyists are no exception to this rule—ironic since Trotsky would have abhorred that, just as he abhorred the Stalinists turning Lenin from revolutionary leader into a pseudo-religious icon.
Much of this has been inflamed by the fact that a lot of the left differ by shades when it comes to their program today and as such substitute actual programmatic differences with bickering on whatever historical hot-takes. I mean I can ask anyone from the CPA to SAlt what they think about the leaders of the MUA and I promise you it would be hard to tell apart one from another. That’s not to say that there aren’t historical lessons of the past that are imperative to assimilate. But these are only useful insofar as they arm us to fight for revolution today. Which is what I’ll be talking about.
I’m sure comrades have read the latest Partisan. One of the articles that really stuck out to me was comrade Volkova’s “Stalinism: Was there an alternative?” What a wonderful question!
But unfortunately, when reading through this article, the alternative sounds like something in the realm of, to use Volkova’s words, an “alternative history” rather than anything real. Here lies the problem. There actually was an alternative. Not a theoretical one fit for some poorly made alt-history YouTube video, but like a real alternative that drew in thousands of Bolsheviks around the world in a struggle for a revolutionary program—not in retrospect but at the time. I am of course referring to the struggle of the left opposition, who were denounced as “Trotskyists,” a term that those who defend this tradition eventually appropriated for themselves.
As much as I could talk all day on the left opposition’s struggle against Stalinism, I will keep it short. What I will say though is that Trotsky and the left opposition did not invent anything new. To quote James P. Cannon, historic American Trotskyist leader, “Trotskyism is not a new movement, a new doctrine, but the restoration, the revival, of genuine Marxism as it was expounded and practiced in the Russian revolution and in the early days of the Communist International.” To put it simply, Trotskyism is not a bunch of new revelations with a bunch of new shibboleths which one can wave around to ward off Stalinism and rally the masses for world revolution—Trotskyism is revolutionary Marxism applied to new conditions and against new obstacles.
Even this wasn’t something invented by the left opposition. Leninism itself was revolutionary Marxism revived and applied in the imperialist epoch. In the decades before WW1, imperialist powers came to ascendance, which allowed them to bribe an upper stratum of the working class and many of its leaders. When these opportunists showed their true colours, supporting their “own” bourgeoisie at the outbreak of WW1, Kautsky argued that this was inherent and inevitable given the development of events, concluding that we just had to wait things out until everyone comes to their senses and become true revolutionary Marxists again. In practice this meant conciliating these chauvinists and fighting to subordinate the entire workers movement to it. Lenin rejected this, asserted that the fight for revolutionary Marxism was a fight, and that for its victory what needed to happen was to ruthlessly struggle against these new social-democratic roadblocks that split the working class—not papering over differences.
The left opposition fought for this same program in new conditions. The political expression of a growing bureaucracy, Stalinism renounced the Bolsheviks’ fight for international revolution in favour of seeking alliances with the international bourgeoisie and its agents within the workers movement. Applying the lessons of the past, the left opposition concluded that it was necessary to struggle against this bureaucracy and the nationalist program it championed, a new massive roadblock that stood in the way of international revolution. Those who reject this fight and assign the rise of Stalinism to some “structural reasons” that were inevitable given the material conditions do the very same thing as Kautsky did. Whether they like it or not they are resigning themselves to these new roadblocks.
And of course this was not some one and done deal. Even in Trotsky’s time he had to constantly apply Marxism in rapidly changing conditions. Today, the task is the same. We cannot be content with repeating old slogans, but in the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky, we must apply revolutionary Marxism to the new conditions of the 21st century.
To resign ourselves by saying that the massive back steps of the working class was due to “structural changes” or just some automatic backwards retrogression of the working class is simply renouncing the fight for revolutionary leadership, the fight for a revolutionary program. And in fact that is what the Spartacist League did for 30 years before our reorientation, denouncing the workers as hopelessly backwards and disorganised due to the retrogression of consciousness in the post-Soviet period—that the task was to hide in our bunkers for better times. And while much of the left could make fun of this open admission of defeat, in practice they were not much different if not worse.
To break from this course, we had to root ourselves in the material basis of the current world juncture—that the post-Soviet period was defined by American hegemony whose interests was to spearhead globalisation and deindustralisation. It is from this basis that we could demonstrate why the pro-capitalist leaders of the working class (with the left at their tail) dragged us down this path, destroying unionised industry and driving swathes of the working class away from the unions and eventually to the hands of right-wing demagogues.
Yes, the weak and divided nature of the workers movement is, caused by real objective problems, but these issues were paved and engendered by the Laborite leaders of the class who dragged it down this road. If we wanted to even begin to take steps forward, we must wage a ruthless struggle against these leaders and those who conciliate with them. There is no other road to fight for a revolutionary party. Today, this task is even more pressing with Trump tearing down this very liberal order to prepare the US and its imperialist allies for war against China. That is the relevance of Trotskyism today.
Let me touch briefly on some specific tenets considered as typically Trotskyist.
Firstly, the transitional program. What is it? I often hear people trying to argue that the transitional program rejects the minimum-maximum program in place of a special set of Trotskyist demands. Nothing could be further from the truth. I would argue that it is the opportunist social democrats that betray the struggle for the demands of the minimum-maximum program. Those who would every Sunday preach for revolution in the indefinite future before going to their day job of securing at best limited reforms through elections, arbitration, half-hearted strikes, or other means of horse-trading. In a way not too different from how the “Friends of Palestine” Laborites today preach for a free Palestine before going to their day job of supporting the genocide-supporting Labor government.
What the Comintern sought to do, which Trotsky and the Fourth International elaborated on, was to bridge the gap between the struggles today and the question of state power. This meant demonstrating that in this era of imperialist decay the struggle for even the smallest demands cannot be separated from the question of the struggle for state power. What was needed in the fight for the smallest and biggest demands was one and the same: revolutionary leadership.
Now, on Permanent Revolution. This recognises that in the oppressed and neocolonial countries, the democratic and national questions remain the foremost questions that define the destitute conditions of the toiling masses. But fighting to advance these tasks, let alone fighting for their resolution, cannot be left to the leadership of the national bourgeoisie. While they can lean on the masses against imperialism, and that it is even in their own interests to push back against the imperialist yoke in their country, they will ultimately betray this struggle because of their class connections with the imperialists and their fear of the masses which, to quote Trotsky, “threatens to deprive the bourgeoisie of the possibility to exploit altogether.”
Thus, the fight for national liberation must be waged under the leadership of the working class. For this, the proletarian vanguard must champion the struggle against imperialism as central and demonstrate to the toiling masses that the struggle to achieve even the most basic democratic tasks will be betrayed by the national bourgeoisie. Even with the establishment of a workers state, the struggle for victory of socialism cannot be completed in one country but must be connected with international revolution—especially revolution in the imperialist countries.
This in no way was alien to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The Russian revolution alone is testament to this. And later, the lessons of the revolution were applied internationally in the first four congresses of the Comintern, seen for instance with the Theses on the Eastern Question of 1922. Neither is this alien to “advanced” Australia—with all the necessary modifications, Permanent Revolution is just as applicable to the democratic struggles here.
What about bureaucratically deformed/degenerated workers states? What does this actually mean? Much like a union is a working-class organisation which is usurped by a bureaucracy, bureaucratically deformed workers states are workers states, established through the revolutionary destruction of capitalism, which are controlled by a narrow caste of bureaucrats who administer the states not in the interests of world revolution but in the interests of their little clique. And just like with unions, the task is to struggle to oust these bureaucrats, in this case through a fight for workers political revolution. Historically, the classic example was the Soviet Union, but today the biggest example is the People’s Republic of China, as well as Cuba, the DPRK, Vietnam and Laos.
Just like how a militant unionist will never listen to a scab, workers of these countries will never be won over to those who scab or abstain on the struggle to defend the gains of these revolutions. Those supposed revolutionaries who do so will only push workers towards these bureaucrats, who in turn will do everything in their power to subdue the masses and conciliate with imperialists.
I often hear, “what’s the relevance of this in little faraway Australia?” Today American imperialists and their Australian allies are grinding down the global south and preparing for war against China. This is fundamentally against the interests of the Australian working class who will be strangled under the bourgeoisie’s tightening vice as it prepares for this death struggle—the attack on the CFMEU is just the beginning.
The Australian working class must champion the struggles for national liberation and the defence of the gains of the Chinese revolution. If we do not do this, we will be slapping away some of the strongest potential allies of the Australian working class. And let me tell you, Australian workers will never be able to win, let alone hold on to revolution, if it does not forge this alliance with the working class of China, and Asia more generally.
So what is the relevance of Trotskyism today? It is the modern expression of revolutionary doctrine of Marxism. It offers a program to unite the toiling masses in a common struggle against imperialism, the only road to forge a revolutionary party in Australia and the world over.
Thank you.
PARTISAN! 