Party and class

Stalinism and Bolshevism, by Leon Trotsky

By Leon Trotsky (August 1937) Reactionary epochs like ours not only disintegrate and weaken the working class and isolate its vanguard but also lower the general ideological level of the movement and throw political thinking back to stages long since passed through. In these conditions the task of the vanguard is, above all, not to let itself be carried along by the backward flow: it must swim against the current. If an unfavourable relation of forces prevents it from holding political positions it has won, it must at least retain its ideological positions, because in them is expressed the...

Rediscovering workers’ control

Marx’s aim of transforming society into a “free association of producers” has long been ignored by large swathes of the “Marxist” left. Not only Stalinists and social democrats, but also avowedly Trotskyist organisations such as the Militant Tendency (forerunner of the Socialist Party) have equated nationalisation with socialism, with the state bureaucracy substituted for the working class as the vanguard of social transformation. Sometimes with gestures made towards democracy through formulations such as “public ownership”, the dominant trend of the left in recent decades has been to move...

Inequality and how to end it

Between fifty and sixty per cent of the population identify as “working class”. Despite the term “working class” vanishing completely from the language of the Labour Party, the proportion claiming this now-unspoken identity has been fairly stable since the 1950s. To be “working-class”, whether you know it or not, is to be at one pole of a pair. The other pole is the capitalist class. The picture is blurred by what Marx called “the constantly growing number of the middle classes, those who stand between the workman on the one hand and the capitalist and landlord on the other. The middle classes...

LRC Conference: We need a Workers' Representation Committee

The national conference of the Labour Representation Committee on 17 November will provide an opportunity for socialist and trade unionists who want turn the tide of retrogression in the labour movement. The significant effort by the left to re-assert itself through the campaign for John McDonnell MP for leader of the Labour Party was unable to surmount the bureaucratic obstacles bolstered by the Parliamentary Labour Party and the union hierarchy. At Labour’s conference in Bournemouth, the union leaders allowed the abolition of conference’s ability to make policy and at a stroke...

How revolutionaries are formed

A letter by Trotsky to a French sympathiser, Maurice Paz: 11 July 1929. Dear Comrade Paz, To the joint letter - which I do not have to characterise as would be proper in my reply since I am sure I will be collaborating with the majority of the signers, who signed by mistake - to this letter you add a private letter that gives me the opportunity to reply to you in complete frankness, complete freedom, and even complete brutality. You call me the "boss" and, in making this designation, you take upon yourself the right to instruct and guide me. You point out to me on every occasion how a "boss"...

The history of Bolshevism: did Leninism turn into Stalinism?

Click here for the series on The Roots of Bolshevism of which this article is part The organisation of the party will take the place of the party; the Central Committee will take the place of the organisation; and finally the dictator will take the place of the Central Committee. Leon Trotsky, 1904 Predictions like this, Trotsky's, in a polemic written in 1904, have often been used to “explain” Stalinism as a logical continuation of Bolshevism. In this polemic against the book “Three Who Made A Revolution”, by Bertram D Wolfe (which has been continuously in print since it was first published...

'Apparatus Marxism', Impoverished Twin of 'Academic Marxism'

“You who have really done something, must have noticed yourself how few of the young literary men who attach themselves to the Party take the trouble to study economics, the history of trade, of industry, of agriculture, of the social formations… The self-conceit of the journalist must therefore accomplish everything and the result looks like it…" — Friedrich Engels Introduction Watching the accelerating political and moral degeneration of the Stalinised “Communist International" in the mid-1930s, Leon Trotsky entitled one of his commentaries “Is There No End To The Fall?" Had he been forced...

IS and the revolutionary party

The explosion of political discussion in IS ignited by the sudden change of line by Cliff in favour of building the embryo of a “revolutionary party” seemed six months ago to be the most hopeful thing on the British left. Many, seeing also the new-type IS positions on Vietnam and the Middle East — a radical break with the abstentionist attitude of the Group to this kind of struggle in the first 15 years of its existence — wondered whether the leadership might not even disavow other aspects of its past. But actually the leadership disavowed none of the past. Cliff said he had always advocated a...

Who Are Lutte Ouvriere?

Lutte Ouvriere itself, Laguiller’s organisation, is probably in real terms the strongest avowedly-Trotskyist organisation in the world, thanks to a solid and stable routine. They run 400 regular workplace bulletins. On a series of international questions, from Europe to Afghanistan, they and we have shared views differing from almost all the other would-be Trotskyist groups in the world. However, they tend to reduce politics to bread-and-butter industrial militancy plus socialist propaganda. They have little interest in, for example, specific mobilisation against France’s large fascist...

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