First Published: Marxist-Leninist Quarterly Nos. 8 & 9, Autumn/Winter 1974-5.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Sam Richards and Paul Saba
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EROL Note: The book reviewed here is Ian H. Birchall’s “Workers Against the Monolith: The Communist Parties Since 1943” Pluto Press 1974.
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Reading a new Trotskyist interpretation of the last 30 years is a reminder of Lenin’s criticism of Trotsky in 1920.
“All his theses”, said Lenin in an important debate on the role of trade unions, “are based on a ’general principle’, an approach which is in itself fundamentally wrong. (Lenin, “On the Trade Unions”, Collected Works, 32.22)
This reliance on “general principles”, using these “principles” to deduce solutions to problems, is not only a fault of Trotsky and his followers but more generally of many “Leftists” In fighting Trotskyism we are also fighting a tendency in the Marxist-Leninist Movement.
Early in Birchall’s book we are given the approach which is to characterise his method throughout:
The fundamental question that faced workers in the 1944/45 situation was: is there a revolutionary situation? Can the mass upsurge taking place be transformed into world socialist revolution? The Communist Parties’ answer was an unambiguous ’no’. They were, of course, implementing Stalin’s policy for the carve up of Europe... If a revolutionary leadership had existed the picture might have been different. In Greece, and probably also in France and Italy, it would have been possible to overthrow the bourgeois State. (p. 37 Stress mine – S.M.)
First of all it will be noted there is an equation of revolution with world revolution. Yet where attention is drawn to the specific and national pictures only one “possibility” (Greece), and two “probable” “possibilities” (France and Italy) are mentioned. So, Birchall’s answer regarding the chances of “world” revolution seems to be what we could call an ambiguous “no”. It should be said that at no time during the book does Birchall support his assessments of even these three countries with an analysis of the balance of forces there. He is content to blame the external force that solves all Trotskyist mysteries – Stalin. But the actual situation at the end of the war was that with the defeat of fascist Germany and Italy most countries in Europe were occupied either by the Red Army or by the armies of the Western Allies. A “carve up” of some kind was therefore inevitable, unless the Trotskyists are posing that Stalin should have declared war on the Western Allies.
As to the policies of the Soviet party towards the Communist parties in Western Europe, there is very little reliable evidence available, and certainly none is provided by Birchall. It is fairly clear that Stalin was not optimistic about the chances of the Greek revolution at that time, if only because of the strategic importance attached to Greece by the United States and Britain. But that is quite different from placing the responsibility for the defeat of the Greek revolution on the Soviet party.
It is certainly true that the Communist parties of France and Italy in giving up arms and their independent position, joining bourgeois governments, and preaching the need for peaceful transition to socialism, as well as launching productivity drives and opposing strikes, were following revisionist policies. Duclos of the French CP was forced into a self-criticism for these errors at the first conference of the Cominform in September 1947, where he admitted to “opportunism, legalism and parliamentary illusions”. The key responsibility for these errors must, however, be placed on the Communist parties concerned, and especially their leaderships. To explain it through the evil influence of the Soviet party as part of its desire to build socialism in one country, etc. etc., does nothing to explain the Soviet support for the Albanian party and the revolution it led, or Soviet support for the armed struggles in India, in Burma, Indonesia, Malaya, Vietnam and, even taking into account certain important errors, for the Chinese revolution.
Birchall, however, is unconcerned about his own ambiguity, and indeed deliberately avoids the responsibility of his assessment of the likelihood of revolutionary success.
“With one bound he was free”, as the Boys’ Own used to put it. Every revolutionary act is a gamble: no victory is assured in advance, but every act of working class self-activity, even if it ends in defeat is part of the process that will eventually lead to workers’ power. (p. 38)
With that principle you can “deduce” the advantages of any act of Left opportunism and adventurism.
If Birchall is bad at explaining failure, he is worse at explaining success. How do the Trotskyists explain the victorious progress of the Vietnamese revolution? After all, says Birchall, the leading Trotskyists were purged, the Vietminh “did not attempt to define itself in class let alone socialist terms” (p. 54), and the Vietnamese comrades continue to earn the anger of the Trotskyists by the repeated explanation that theirs is a national democratic revolution carried through by the “four revolutionary forces” including “the national bourgeoisie” (See Truong Chinh, “Forward along the Path Charted by Karl Marx”, p. 41.) Only when the anti-imperialist and democratic tasks have been completed and the workers and peasants are ready, can the revolution carry through to the socialist stage. But, of course, for Trotskyists
there is no intermediate road between the rule of capital and the dictatorship of the proletariat. (Quoted in “On Anti-Trotskyism” Albania Today, No.5 1972)
Or
Any perspective of collaborating with the national bourgeoisie... must be rejected”, says one of the Fourth Internationals in 1968. (Quoted in “Left in Form, Right in Essence”, p.13.)
Birchall, however seems to lose his ideological bearings at this point and simply explains the Vietnamese people’s success in terms of
the real mass base which developed in the course of the struggle. (p. 54)
So, with the wrong policies the Vietnamese revolutionaries won a “real mass base”, defeated the French and later the U.S. imperialists and started building socialism in the North. One wonders what might have been achieved if the policies has been ’correct’.
We should note that for Birchall, as for other Trotskyists, the term “people” has no class significance. For Marxists, however, the “people” is that class alliance fighting against the main enemy. Certainly that has meant, in the era of imperialism, that the working class must take the lead in such an alliance. But as we shall see later the Trotskyists do not understand how that alliance, and therefore “the people”, must be differently composed as the struggle develops and as the composition of the enemy changes.
For Birchall, the Chinese Revolution cannot even be explained in terms of the “peasant base” of the Chinese Communist Party, for, according to him, it was no longer a workers party, no more was it a peasant party...(p. 55), but “it manoeuvred between different classes in the countryside”. The Chinese Communist Party apparently protected the landlords and failed to rouse the workers. The Japanese were defeated by a policy of “class collaboration” with the Kuomintang (more of this later), and the Kuomintang were defeated when
“Chiang’s corrupt regime disintegrated about his ears as runaway inflation crippled the economy”. “The Civil War”, we are told rather disapprovingly, “was no longer a guerrilla war relying on local bases, but a competition for territory.” (p.56).
He modestly fails to draw attention to Trotsky’s record with regard to China. (Lest there should be any misunderstanding about the attachment of the International Socialist group to Trotsky’s memory and method their recent pamphlet on Trotsky concludes, “his contribution to revolutionary socialism and to the working class movement was unsurpassed.’ Trotsky, p. 14).
In 1929 Trotsky forecast that the struggle to build guerrilla bases would produce “a perspective of a terrific debacle and of an adventurist degeneration of the remnants of the Communist Party”. The Kiangsi Soviet, encompassing about six million people, was “absolutely impossible” according to Trotsky in 1930 and the soviet government “could only make its appearance on the basis of the cities.” (“Problems of the Chinese Revolution”, p. 247) For Trotsky the policy was to concentrate on the factories and politically it was, “quite possible that China has to go through a relatively long phase of parliamentarianism” (Problems of the Chinese Revolution, p.7) He could only see the option of a ’bourgeois regime’, or the dictatorship of the proletariat and progress from one to the other would depend on “the world revolution”.
He opposed the revolutionary war against Japanese imperialism because he said it would help the Anglo-Franco-U.S. imperialists. He was unable to see the Japanese imperialists as the main enemy of the Chinese people. In fact the victory of the Chinese Revolution was a shattering blow to the pretences of Trotskyism to understand revolution.
One key reason for this failure is the way in which Trotsky repeatedly came down on the side of the simplest economic determinism. Lenin had made this point strongly to Trotsky (and Bukharin) in 1921 where he stated that their “economic approach” threatened to “ruin Soviet power and topple the dictatorship of the proletariat”.
Politics must take precedence over economics. To argue otherwise is to forget the ABC of Marxism. (’Once again On the Trade Unions’ Collected Works, 32, 83.)
Trotsky himself underlined this error in stating in “In Defence of Marxism”,
In the last analysis a workers state is a trade union which has conquered power. (Quoted in “On Trotskyism”, by the Irish Communist Organisation, 1970.)
As this deviation suits perfectly the economism of ’International Socialism’ it is not surprising that there should be many echoes of it in Birchall’s book. Thus, attacking the French Communist Party of the early 1950s, he writes
In general the CP put the emphasis in this period on ’political’ rather than “economic activities thus accentuating the tendency to cut itself off from the real concerns and problems of the workers. (p. 64.)
The example given is the campaign against the imperialist war in Indo-China. Politics, with or without inverted commas, are not supposed to concern workers!
“Politics”, continues Birchall, “was not seen as something that developed within the industrial struggle but as something that could be injected bureaucratically from outside”.
Thus for Birchall the politics of the class struggle in the factories is to be posed against the politics that develops in all other spheres of the struggle against capitalism. We must contrast this with the Leninist criticism of economism
The conception of the economic struggle as the most widely applicable means of drawing the masses into the political movement which our Economists preach is extremely harmful and reactionary in its practical significance. (“What is to be Done”, Collected Works 5.413)
It seems therefore that the French CP was not economist enough for Birchall. Similarly Trotsky’s belief in the determinant nature of the ’development of technique’ is revealed in Birchall’s accusation that Stalin played down the nuclear question. Revolutionaries, such as Mao and Stalin, see people and not weapons as the determining factor in warfare. The revisionists and reformists take the opposite view, and argue that warfare has been “fundamentally” changed by nuclear weapons. Birchall joins their ranks and praises Khrushchev for being “more sensitive to the importance of the nuclear balance of terror that had now been established.” (p. 82) Stalin should have apparently recognised that nuclear weapons could “transform political strategy”. What Birchall suggests however, is that war between the United States and the USSR is either unlikely or impossible because of nuclear weapons. So for him such wars are not ended by ending imperialism but by the creation of a system of “mutually assured destruction”. This is a direct departure from Leninism into the revisionist belief of those who, like Kautsky, state that imperialism can be contained and civilised.
The fact that Birchall’s suggestion is not consistent with other statements by Trotskyists about imperialism is one of the many examples of an inconsistency bred by theoretical opportunism.
The same determinism is evident in his reflection of the battle between the two lines about whether to build socialism in China or whether to carry out policies that would lead to capitalism (pp. 144-146). Mao’s line of politics commanding economics is dismissed as “moralism”, while Birchall in fact sides with the “capitalist road” line of Liu Shao-chih in stating for example, that agricultural mechanisation is a prerequisite for building socialism. Having attacked piece-work bonuses in the book, Birchall tries to illustrate the alleged anti-working class nature of the Cultural Revolution by pointing out that these bonuses were ended at that time. He attempts to wield the cumbersome Trotskyist concept of “bureaucracy”, into which he bundles both Party and Army, and infers that Mao was to some extent against these institutions. The political battle about the maintenance of working-class power in China, central to the Cultural Revolution, is therefore ignored completely. Thus, a political struggle between two lines is transformed into an unexplained manoeuvre between Mao and ’the bureaucracy’. It is not surprising that Birchall is unable to explain the planned growth of both industry and agriculture (’taking agriculture as the base and industry as the leading factor’), the development of industry in the countryside and, taken together with the educational reforms, the continuing process of overcoming the contradictions between town and country and between mental and manual labour. All this movement is summed up by Birchall as the “continued diversion of resources from industry into agriculture”!
Trotsky’s policies in the 1920s supporting the militarisation of labour, squeezing agriculture for industrial investment and advocating the working class “giving its blood and nerves”, are presumably regarded as the real socialist alternative, This defence of what has been defined and supported by Trotsky among others as “primitive socialist accumulation” (see Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, p. 44), was attacked by Lenin as a “very unfortunate” expression and “a copy of schoolboy terms”, exactly because it regarded the building of socialism in the early stages to be directly comparable with Marx’s analysis of building capitalism in its early stages. Trotsky himself in The New Course advocated overcoming the contradiction between industry and agriculture through “the market”, adding that this would need “an exact knowledge of market conditions”. But perhaps “market socialism” is too notorious now for Birchall to want to openly side with his mentor. On the other hand Birchall seems to be denying that the productive forces in China could be significantly developed, He says “There is no solution in sight” to “the debate on economic strategy” (p, 146), in the same way as Trotsky said that the attempt to build socialism in one country would “pull the productive forces backward even as compared with capitalism”. (Permanent Revolution, p.22) The fact that both Soviet economic development under Stalin and Chinese development up to the present day, have been remarkably successful does not disturb those who understand the grandeur of Trotsky’s “general principles”.
Isaac Deutcher, faced with this problem, wavered in his explanation of the success of the Chinese Revolution between attributing it to Mao’s “genius” and claiming that it was the result of “an adventurers desperate gamble”; he tended towards the latter. The idealism of both explanations is instructive as to the Trotskyist method, Pierre Naville, a leading French Trotskyist, is reduced to saying that the success of the strategy of the Chinese Communist Party was the “unconscious application” of the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution. Birchall remains silent.
A central feature of “Leftism” is its failure to understand real united front policies: a consistent opposition to the Marxist approach of “uniting all those who can be united against the main enemy”. Birchall quotes from the 1943 statement to the Communist International in an attempt to ridicule it.
In the countries of the Hitlerite bloc the fundamental task for the working class, the toilers, and all honest people consists in giving all help for the defeat of this bloc by sabotage of the Hitlerite military machine from within and by helping to overthrow the governments who are guilty of the war. In the countries of the anti-Hitlerite coalition the sacred duty of the widest masses of the people and in the first place of the foremost workers consists in aiding by every means the military efforts of the governments of those countries, aimed at the speediest defeat of the Hitlerite bloc and the assurance of the friendship of nations based on their equality.
This clear policy, supporting the interests of the Socialist Soviet Union on the one hand, and of the working class in both Fascist countries and the Western democracies on the other, is supposed merely by Birchall’s comment:
Here even the pretence of an analysis based on class struggle is abandoned; the line of the CP is to be determined on the basis of the foreign policy of its national government. (p.13)
As so often, the Trotskyist alternative was based not on a concrete analysis of the situation but on a mere comparison, an analogy; in this case with the First World War. So, copying Lenin’s slogan, the Trotskyists called for the war to be turned against the capitalist class in each country (whether Fascist or bourgeois-democrat), “turning the imperialist war into a civil war”. The general absurdity of this position is well exposed in the US Guardian pamphlet already referred to (Left in Form, Right in Essence, pp. 16-18). In fact, of course, the Comintern’s statement is quite correct; recognizing as it did the Fascist powers as the principal enemy which had to be defeated by the Soviet Union in alliance with the bourgeois-democratic powers, backed by the working class in those countries.
Birchall’s own application of the Trotskyist approach to this question is perhaps the most breathtaking in the whole book. He quotes approvingly from a French Trotskyist group, who described Gaullism as “the cleverest, most demagogic, and consequently the most dangerous political faction of French capitalism” (p. 19 Stress mine – S.M.). This in 1943 when De Gaulle was leading the sole section of the bourgeoisie actively fighting Fascism, together with the French Communist Party. Meanwhile, Trotskyism, Birchall admits, was unable
to offer any alternative leadership to the French workers, but at least” – he continues – “on the level of propaganda it offered an alternative to the CP Nationalists.
And what was that propaganda?
A killed German soldier will no longer fight for Hitler... but won’t be able to fight against him either. A German soldier won for Communism is not one enemy less, but one ally more. (p. 20)
In short, they conducted public propaganda in opposition to the attacks by the heroic French Resistance against the German Army.
In those specific circumstances this policy, insofar as it was effective, was inevitably a direct help to the Fascist war machine. It is therefore quite understandable that some Trotskyists were treated as German agents by the Communist Movement. As always we must judge people by their practical role, over and above their subjective motivation. At a theoretical level it is a glaring example of the abstract nature of the Trotskyists’ policies that they should ask French workers firstly to fight, at one and the same time, both the German Fascist ruling class in its dominance of France and the French bourgeoisie, including those sections opposing Fascist occupation; secondly, that they should simultaneously propagandise for socialism at that stage, and thirdly, that they should do all this without killing the German soldiers who were mercilessly wiping out any attempt at resistance from whatever direction. On top of this they had a fourth enemy, according to Birchall: the French Communist Party with its “nationalist rhetoric”.
It is hardly surprising that Birchall should attack the British Communist Party for leading productivity drives during the war in order to increase military production to fight Fascism, and should extol the Trotskyists who supported and organised every strike just as if the main enemy continued to be the British ruling class and not the Fascist aggressors. It is this kind of leftism that obscured the real issue that developed once the Fascists had been defeated, when the alliance between the working class and the British bourgeoisie should have been severed by the Communist Parties in Western Europe. But both the leftists – the Trotskyists and the right – the revisionists – were unable to make distinctions between the different stages in the revolutionary struggle.
Similarly, the National Liberation Front of south Vietnam is attacked for making “purely nationalist demands” in the 1960s (p. 160). Birchall cannot understand how the NLF could pledge itself to ”protect the right of ownership of the means of production and other property rights of citizens”. The NLF, he alleges, did not try to win support among the south Vietnamese working class, although he admits that the frequent strikes impeded the US military effort. Again, the US defeat is left without explanation – only equivocation of the most startling kind. Thus this
was not in itself a major defeat for United States imperialism; it had no particular vested interest in Vietnam and certainly spent more on the war than any economic advantage it may have hoped to draw from the territory. But in political and psychological terms it was an enormous victory for the liberation forces which sent tremors round the world. (p. 62 Stress mine – S.M.).
Again, for I.S., a real “in itself” defeat has to be an “economic” defeat. “Political” defeats are less important! And yet, what he admits is an “enormous victory” can, be won by a force that fails to grasp the theory of Permanent Revolution: that socialist demands should have been put forward as well as the democratic demands and that the “Stalinist” stages theory should have been smashed because of the way it hold back revolution. In 1972, Birchall wrote about the prospect of an NLF victory over the US-Thieu regime that it would mean
merely a change of rulers. Socialists who have been chanting, ’Victory to the NLF’ for the last eight years will have to look very carefully which way the rifles are pointing. (Socialist Worker, 4th November, 1972).
He does not dare to be so open in his slanders in the book under review. In short, Birchall has no understanding of correct united front policies because of a leftist error of believing that the only progressive force at any time is the working class, that all enemies can be fought at once, and that any other approach is to compromise “principles”.
Idealism and mechanical materialism, opportunism and adventurism, are all characterised by the breach between the subjective and the objective, by the separation of knowledge from practice. The Marxist-Leninist theory of knowledge, characterised as it is by scientific social practice, cannot but resolutely oppose these wrong ideologies. (Mao Tse-tung, On Practice, 1938.)
A key feature of idealism and mechanical materialism is that the cause for change is primarily sought and found outside the thing to be explained, and exactly because the internal contradiction is not seen as the source of self movement the results are to a large extent predetermined and externally motivated.
It is precisely this gross error which characterises Birchall’s overall line. For example he gives three reasons for what he calls the “transformation of the CPs since the Second World War” (p. 13). The first is because of “nuclear stalemate”, where Russia did not need the CPs either “to lead struggles or even contain them’, the second is the split in the international Communist movement which resulted in “those who wanted a foreign power to identify with having only too many to choose form”; the third – “the experience of prolonged full employment and relatively high wages in the post war West meant a change in working class consciousness.”
The shallowness of the reasoning here is self-evident, even in its own terms. The first because it has it both ways – Russian plots both to whip up and dampen down struggles – and is therefore quite untenable, explaining everything and therefore nothing. The second equates internationalism with identification with ’a foreign power”; The third argues a change in Western class consciousness resulting from short-term economic conditions as if the late 20s and 30s had been times of revolutionary fervour.
But more generally it shows how Trotskyism needs to explain the development of things; not as Marxists do primarily in terms of the internal contradictions, but by external causes preferably by the position of some mystical “on-off” switch in the Kremlin. The only “’cause” of importance which in any way relates to the internal development in Birchall’s schema is the last one, which only applies to the West. He ignores completely the development of imperialism in relationship to the colonial and neo-colonial countries; and the actual internal class struggle in these countries, He ignores the concrete developments within many of the parties which became revisionist: their policies and their relationship with the masses. The main question which Birchall cannot face is why in general the revolution in colonial and neo-colonial countries developed much more successfully than those in the West. He cannot face this question because the Trotskyists see the major contradiction in the world today as between the working class and the ruling class in the advanced West, that is when they take the risk of making such a distinction. They dogmatically repeat Marx long after the situation has been changed by the growth of imperialism over 70 years or so.
At another point Birchall scoffs at the Stalin thesis of 1930 that State power has to be strengthened under the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to prepare for its “withering away” (p. 224). He fails to explain his own views on this and certainly does not understand that proletarian power is needed to protect the Socialist system from the bourgeoisie internally and externally. Indeed, had Stalin not built up a powerful State, the fascist powers undeterred by Trotskyist propaganda would have caused even greater destruction. It is an idealist conception that State power is a “thing-in-itself” and not to be judged in relationship to the concrete situation of its enemies.
This example occurs in a chapter whose title Birchall takes from the French revisionist, Lefebvre – “Marxism is Dying of Boredom”. Later in the chapter we find Birchall is particularly ’bored’ by the idea that the dialectical laws of the relationship between internal and external contradictions apply to the physical world as well as to political practice. He quotes from a CP textbook an everyday example of Marxist philosophy in practice – the relationship between internal causes being the basis for change in the hatching of eggs, while external causes are the conditions for change. He comments when the comparison is made with the conditions necessary for socialism that,
this may be illuminating for a chicken breeder but it is hard to see how it can assist a Socialist.
Unfortunately he appears to believe that this remark is so profound as to require no further explanation. But as it stands it is a rejection of dialectical materialism to deny that the material world develops through contradictions in the same way as does social practice.
The book should be treated as an excellent teacher by negative example. It shows again how a leftist approach is in essence identical with that of the right, reformist and revisionist attacks on Marxism. The timeless dogmatism of Trotskyism has often been compared with that of a stopped clock. Like that clock it can hardly help being right on occasions. The period covered is of key importance to Marxist-Leninists, but in our work to more fully understand it, far from receiving help from the Trotskyists, we will have to continuously combat their errors.
I. Birchall: Workers Against the Monolith. Pluto Press. 1974
L. Trotsky: Problems of the Chinese Revolution. New Park Publications. 1969
K. Mavrakis: On Trotskyism – Problems of Theory and History Maspero. 1973. (This book, published in French has been translated but not yet published in English.)
C. Davidson: “Left in Form, Right in Essence”, U.S. Guardian Pamphlet. (25p from New Era Books.)