Party and class

Lenin, Trotsky and Soviet Democracy

IMMEDIATELY AFTER the accession of Hitler, Trotsky wrote that the issue presenting itself to the masses was no longer Bolshevism versus Fascism but Fascism versus Democracy. Our subsequent critique of the Popular Front might make it appear that we had perversely abandoned this view when Moscow adopted it. That would be a complete misunderstanding. We rejected the whole conception of the Popular Front precisely because it was impotent to combat fascism. The struggle for the democracy vital to the workers could not be waged in a bourgeois alliance for the maintenance of a corrupt parliamentary...

Does the labour movement need a Marxist educationalist group like the AWL?

An examination of the role of a Marxist “Fighting Educationalist Group” in the class struggle and in the transformation of existing labour movements. Click here for other discussion of the same issue. “It is necessary to find the particular link in the chain which must be grasped with all one’s strength in order to keep the whole chain in place and prepare to move on resolutely to the next link.” V I Lenin What is the role of Marxists such as the supporters of Solidarity and Workers’ Liberty in the labour movement? Is it only to develop the influence of Marxism by making propaganda in the...

Trotsky: The Russian Marxists and Terrorism (1909)

[Note: Evno Azef was head of the military section of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. That party waged a war of systematic individual terrorism against the leading bureaucrats of the Tzarist State. In 1909 Azef was exposed as a long time police agent. Though Marx himself had expressed the greatest admiration for the Narodnik men and women who were hanged for killing Tzar Alexander II, in 1881, the Russian Marxists came to oppose the tactic of individual assassinations. To it they counterposed the education and mobilisation of the working class and, as some of them sometimes put it, an...

Tradition and Living Revolutionary Policy

The question of the relationship of tradition and party policy is far from simple, especially in our epoch. More than once, recently, we have had occasion to speak of the immense importance of the theoretical and practical tradition of our party and have declared that we could in no case permit the breaking of our ideological lineage. It is only necessary to come to an agreement on what is meant by the tradition of the party. To do that, we must begin largely by the inverse method and take some historical examples in order to base our conclusions upon them. Let us take the “classic” party of...

When the Weekly Worker Group ("CPGB") Backed Imperialism in Afghanistan (2004). An Exercise in Political Sanitation.

Introduction. Afghanistan: the Russian Invasion and the Left "The Stalinist April 1978 Coup and the December 1979 Russian Invasion "Workers' Voice", the "CPGB's" Turkish Stalinist Mentors Conrad and Fisher on Afghanistan: The Tankies' Tankies -1 The Tankies' Tankies -2 The Tankies' Tankies -3 The Tankies' Tankies -4 The Tankies' Tankies -5 Stalinist Mind At End Of Its Tether -1 Stalinist Mind At End Of Its Tether -2 Stalinist Mind At End Of Its Tether-3 Stalinist Mind At End Of Its Tether -4 Stalinist Mind At End Of Its Tether-5

When the Weekly Worker Group ("CPGB") Backed Imperialism in Afghanistan. A series of articles.(2004)

Introduction. Afghanistan: the Russian Invasion and the Left "Workers' Voice", the "CPGB's" Turkish Stalinist Mentors Conrad and Fisher on Afghanistan: The Tankies' Tankies -1 The Tankies' Tankies -2 The Tankies' Tankies -3 The Tankies' Tankies -4 The Tankies' Tankies -5 Stalinist Mind At End Of Its Tether -1 Stalinist Mind At End Of Its Tether -2 Stalinist Mind At End Of Its Tether-3 Stalinist Mind At End Of Its Tether -4 Stalinist Mind At End Of Its Tether-5

Leon Trotsky and the (Shachtman) Workers Party (1946)

The infancy and childhood of the movement was fortunate in having the intellectual leadership of one of the greatest minds of all time, Karl Marx. It was doubly fortunate in having in Marx’s collaborator, Friedrich Engels, a genius in his own right, whose true stature always remained obscured in the public mind as a result of his modest subordination to the towering height of Marx. The period of the formation of the Second International under the sound, experienced guidance of Engels, his last great service to the working class, coincided with the rise of the Marxist movement in Russia. The...

The Fourth International was proclaimed 75 years ago, after a 15-year struggle against Stalinism.

Just as the main body of the Communist International came out of the Second International, so the roots of the Fourth International are to be traced to the beginnings of the crisis in the Third. Fifteen years have elapsed since the movement now organized under the banner of the Fourth International first took shape. It arose in the form of the Opposition in the Russian Communist Party, variously called the "Moscow" or "1923" or "Trotskyist" Opposition. Uniting the best elements of the Old Guard and of the youth of the Party, and led by Leon Trotsky, it was the first to sound the alarm against...

A tragedy of the left: Socialist Worker and its splits

Click here to download pamphlet as pdf . Abridged introduction How did the Trotskyist left in Britain come to be scattered and divided into hostile and competing groups? At the root the divisions are a product of the repeated defeats and the continuing marginalisation of revolutionary socialism. Small groups - and the biggest of the groups in Britain, the SWP, is still a small group - groups without implantation in the working class, have little power of cohesion when strong political divisions emerge. When members of a small organisation whose raison d'etre is propaganda for certain ideas...

1940: Max Shachtman's reply to Leon Trotsky - A “petty bourgeois” opposition?

Where Is the Petty Bourgeois Opposition? A Repeated Challenge Remains Unanswered. In his open letter to Comrade Trotsky, Comrade Shachtman, repeating the challenge issued by the Minority since the moment it was accused of representing a petty-bourgeois tendency in the party, declared: “... it is first necessary to prove (a) that the Minority represents a deviation from the proletarian Marxian line, (b) that this deviation is typically petty-bourgeois, and (c) that it is more than an isolated deviation — it is a tendency. That is precisely what has not been proved.” Comrade Trotsky has been the...

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