Serge and Trotsky – Left Unity in the 1930s
Victor Serge
Liam McNulty shares his analysis of the debates between Trotsky and Victor Serge and others about how to work towards a united left movement in the 1930s.
The ongoing vicious attacks on our class and the crisis of the UK’s largest revolutionary organisation have shaken the comfortable conception of the left as a stable collection of self-contained sects. Both factors have fueled increasing talk about left unity and revolutionary regroupment, and raise issues of sectarianism and lack of open debate which have plagued the left for decades.
All of the revolutionary organizations in the UK, even the largest, are small when measured against the tasks we face in successfully fighting for socialism in difficult circumstances such as the present. It is with this in mind that Tim Nelson wrote an article assessing the legacy of Victor Serge. More specifically, Nelson looked at Serge’s argument that the alleged sectarianism of the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s was a block to creating a united anti-Stalinist revolutionary movement.
It is necessary to adopt a critical attitude towards the Trotskyist tradition, which must be continually renewed and updated in light of the experience of the class struggle. However, Nelson’s article for the IS Network on Trotsky and Victor Serge repeats some unhelpful myths about the arguments in the Fourth International about the POUM in the Spanish Civil War which deserve a reply.
Moreover, Nelson has been one of those in the IS Network most strongly opposed to engagement with Workers’ Liberty’s ideas or participation in our events. It would be interesting to hear how he squares this with his enthusiasm for Victor Serge’s open-minded conduct towards comrades with whom he had strong political differences.
Trotskyists in the 1930s
Nelson frames much of his criticism of the Trotskyist movement in terms of its alleged ‘catastrophism’, a perspective envisaging a final crisis of capitalism that would see workers quickly abandon the Stalinist and social democratic parties to march under the banner of the Fourth International. This, he argues, led to a sectarian attitude towards working-class organisations with inadequate political programmes, such as centrist organisations or libertarian socialists.
Unfortunately, the debate around the POUM is perhaps the worst possible example to illustrate this argument. It was simply not the case that the POUM was an open mass anti-Stalinist party that the Trotskyists, through a sectarian concern for doctrinal purity, refused to intervene in and engage with. Quite the opposite was in fact the case.
First of all, it is not true that the Trotskyist policy in the 1930s was invariably a sectarian one. Undoubtedly some sections were sectarian, and a caricature of late-1930s Trotskyism has lived on in the form of the Healyites and others. However, Nelson’s account is one-sided and what is missing is an account of how, in response to sharp twist and turns, the best of the Trotskyists changed their tactics in order to gain the widest hearing in the working-class and to build their forces.
After Trotsky’s expulsion from the Communist International in late 1927, his followers in the Left Opposition were encouraged to orientate towards the Communist Parties as an external faction and to fight for re-admittance. This policy was carried out energetically, for example, by the small American section led by James P. Cannon, who recognised that ‘the road to the masses leads through the vanguard and not over its head.’
After Hitler’s takeover power, due in no small part to the Stalinist Comintern’s ultra-left “Third Period”, Trotsky declared the need for the Left Opposition to form a new organisation, a Fourth International. Though stressing the need for an independent programme against the Stalinists and Social Democrats, Trotsky recognised that most of the Opposition’s sections were propaganda groups, without a mass base in the working-class, and the International Secretariat drew up its tactics accordingly.
The Spanish section and the ‘French turn’
In some cases the left-wards shift in social democracy meant that the most advanced vanguard workers were now to be found in these organisations. In France, February 1934 saw an intense political crisis saw fascist riots spark the resignation of Edouard Daladier and the Radical Party from government. With fascist forces insurgent in German, Austria and France, a drive for unity in the working-class forced the French Social Democratic and Communist leaders into a united front. In June 1934 Trotsky argued for the French Trotskyists to enter the French social democratic party, the SFIO, in what was known as the ‘French turn’.
This was carried out in other countries, such as the US, where the Trotskyists (now part of the enlarged Workers Party of the United States with A.J. Muste) entered the Socialist Party of America, growing their ranks with great success, and laying the basis for the formation of the Socialist Workers Party in 1938.
Far from cheerleaders of united action as Nelson portrays them, it was the Spanish section (which became the POUM) that acted in a sectarian manner inside the International. It proposed to form a faction to fight the French turn. The plenum of the Spanish Communist Left (ICE), as it was called after 1932, concluded:
‘The guarantee of the future lies in the United Front, but also in the organic independence of the vanguard of the proletariat. In no way can we immerse ourselves in an amorphous conglomerate merely because of circumstantial utilitarianism… However sad and painful it may be for us, we are prepared to maintain the principled positions that we have learnt from our leader, even at the risk of having to separate from him on the road to victory.’
Recalling this dispute later, in January 1936, Trotsky wrote that the Spanish section, “posed on every appropriate occasion as incorruptible revolutionaries. In particular, they thunderously condemned the French Bolshevik-Leninists for entering the Socialist Party. Never! Under no conditions! To enter temporarily into a mass political organisation in order to carry on an uncompromising struggle in its ranks against the reformist leaders for the banner of the proletarian revolution- that is opportunism; but to conclude a political alliance [the Popular Front] with the leaders of a reformist part on the basis of a deliberately dishonest program serving to dupe the masses and cover up for the bourgeoisie- that is valor!”
In other words, it was André Nin’s Spanish section that is guilty of the very sectarianism that Nelson accuses the Trotskyists of. Sectarianism whose flipside was opportunism. The refusal to follow the ‘French turn’ ultimately led to the exit of talented militants such as Esteban Bilbao and Manuel Fernández y Grandizo (alias ‘Munis’) who joined the PSOE as a Trotskyist faction.
It was clear that the left of the PSOE was increasingly receptive to Trotsky’s ideas. The party had moved substantially to the left on account of rank-and-file frustration with the PSOE’s lack of progress in government. A left tendency around Luís Araquistain had emerged around the journal Leviatán, which republished Trotsky’s analyses of fascism.
This left-wards shift, as in France, was especially pronounced in its youth movement, led by the future PCE leader Santiago Carillo. Carillo even wrote to the dissident Communist and Catalan nationalist Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc (BOC) organ, La Batalla, inviting them to join the PSOE to wage a struggle against the party’s Right as a step to creating a revolutionary party to fight fascism. However, its leader, and founder of the POUM, Maurín, refused. The Socialist youth movement eventually fused with the youth wing of the Stalinist PCE, preventing the winning over a whole generation of militant young socialists to genuine revolutionary socialism and providing Stalinism with the activist base it used to crush the Spanish revolution.
Trotskyists and the POUM
In refusing to enter social democracy, Nin stepped up his efforts to join with the BOC, which was in the process of shedding some but not all of its Brandlerite (Right Communist) politics. In March 1935, the BOC brought together the ICE, the official Communists, the Catalan section of the PSOE, and some other minor Catalan leftist parties to discuss Marxist unity. Apart from Nin and Maurín, the others were not interested and later formed the basis of the United Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC) which acted as a de facto branch of the Stalinist PCE.
The International Secretariat of the International Left Opposition initially approved talks with the BOC, as long as the ICE could remain a faction inside any new party. Jean Rous, the Secretariat member sent to Spain in the summer of 1935, was initially optimistic and was assured by the ICE that they would re-establish links with the Munis group inside of the PSOE. This would open up the possibility of a faction inside a new open Marxist party in Catalonia, and entryist work inside the PSOE in areas where the ICE and BOC were both weaker.
However, the BOC was adamant that the Trotskyists dissolve themselves into the new organisation and break of all contact with the International Left Opposition. Nin agreed to this and broke with Trotsky.
What happened next, with the POUM joining the Popular Front electoral list of the Stalinists, Social Democrats and bourgeois republics is well known- as is Nin’s entrance as Minister of Justice into the Catalan bourgeois regional government in the autumn of 1936. What is lesser known is the POUM’s subsequent relationship with the Trotskyists, a point on which much of Nelson’s argument for the Trotskyist’s alleged sectarian abstentionism hinges.
Not only did the International Left Opposition keep an open mind about the idea of a united revolutionary Marxist party during negotiations for the formation of the POUM, the Trotskyists applied for open factional rights on more than one occasion after the POUM’s political shortcomings became. At the height of the social revolution, Jean Rous was sent by the International Secretariat in August 1936 to attempt to reach an agreement with the POUM.
According to Nicola di Bartolomeo (Fosco), aligned with the Molinier group who had split with Trotsky: ‘In his report Rous proposed the incorporation of all the Bolshevik-Leninists into the armed formations of the POUM, the collaboration of the Old Man in La Batalla, and an international campaign by the Bolshevik-Leninists in favour of the workers’ militias of the POUM…’
Mieczyslaw Bortenstein, a Polish member of the French Communist League and editor of the Bolshevik-Leninist paper in Spain, La Voz Leninista, was one of many Trotskyists who fought bravely in the Civil War. In his political memoir, written using the alias ‘M Casanova’, he recounted how the Spanish Trotskyists applied to join the POUM in November 1936, promising to respect party discipline in return for factional rights. Nin, speaking on behalf of the POUM’s Central Committee, told them he required ‘a condemnation of the campaigns of the so-called Fourth International’ among other things, and suspected sympathisers of the Fourth International were later expelled for ‘deviating from the political line of the party.’
Later, in preparation for its congress in 1937, ‘the leadership of the POUM went so far as to expel form its militias the Bolshevik-Leninists, who had held the trenches and exposed their breasts to the Fascist machine gun for eight months.’
In other words, it was not so much that, following a sectarian policy from the start, the Trotskyists in Spain isolated themselves from the ranks and militias of the POUM. It was the heavy-handed bureaucratic practice of the POUM’s leadership which used expulsions and other injunctions to shield itself from those critical of its opportunistic practice.
Conclusions
The experience of the POUM does have lessons for revolutionaries, but not the ones that Nelson draws. It demonstrates firstly that political differences should be thrashed out openly through debate and discussion, rather than by means of administrative decree or sanction. Not only is this necessary for party democracy, but also for the clarity of ideas and the quality of decisions taken.
Moreover, Nin’s behaviour towards the Trotskyists shows that liquidationism, the practice of revolutionaries dissolving their ideas into a vaguer and more broad consensus, is not the binary opposite of sectarianism; in fact, constructing a party on any other basis than its politics more strongly lends itself towards prioritising organizational advantage over political clarity and the needs of the class struggle.
Finally, it is a lesson that there is no basis on which to build a stable, enduring, and effective revolutionary organisation other than on the basis of a clear political programme, and a strategy for winning people over to revolutionary ideas. This is, of course, by no means sufficient and in itself no guarantee of success but it is the beginning of wisdom and a necessary precondition for revolutionary politics. The best of the Trotskyist groups in the 1930s realised this and, in the case of the American Trotskyists, built a much enlarged organisation, on the basis of Trotskyist politics, from their participation in wider parties.
The ability of the divided British revolutionary left to contribute fully to the class struggle requires urgent unity in action where we agree, and vigorous debate and discussion on those issues over which we have differences.
16 comments
16 responses to “Serge and Trotsky – Left Unity in the 1930s”
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`The ability of the divided British revolutionary left to contribute fully to the class struggle requires urgent unity in action where we agree, and vigorous debate and discussion on those issues over which we have differences.’
You contradicted the conclusion you just drew before this final sentence that what is needed for principled unity for effective political intervention in the class struggle is a clear programme for the transition to socialism otherwise what you have is SWP style unity in action by which the membership mimic the actions of a decapitated chicken.
The Manifesto Group attempted to put forward such a programme in opposition to the opportunist sectarianism of the Policy Commissions operating above the heads of a zombie membership but we were thwarted by the left sectarian SP response to the right centrists and neo-Stalinists of the Left Party Platform putsch which ensured a meaningless debate about two barely separable lists of liberal PC platitudes masquerading as principles but actually playing the role of sacred texts keeping criticism of the Policy Commissions and the struggle for a principled programme for use in day to day class struggle and elections off the agenda.
Normally I would agree with Engels that a practical step forward is worth a thousands programmes but this is not a practical step forward. This is a group of opportunists trying to break political class unity albeit behind the opportunist New Labour leadership for the sake of their own parliamentary careers. It is a bunch of jaded refugees from various sects not attempting to offer an alternative to New Labour (try it and you get shot down by the many Alastair Campbell wannabes that infest LU) but to rebuild either the SWP or some anti European Euro Communist Stalinist Sect. Left Unity has fallen at the first hurdle and is no more. The revolutionary socialists that participated in it should now take the opportunity to unify around a programme of its own and maybe take it into the Labour Party or stand independently in elections on its basis or both. Definitely we must take it into the trades unions and the class struggle generally.
**Note of caution for those new to Left Unity.**
Just in the rather unlikely event that any new people interested in Left Unity have actually read the article and this absurd comment this far, I feel obliged to point out that Baton Rouge is by no means a representative voice in the organisation, and indeed appears to be supported by no-one except another blogger who turned out to be himself under a different name.
Please don’t be put off by these kinds of contributions. Most people in LU don’t talk in this obscure ranting jargon, and are actually quite friendly to eachother, and want to work together to form a new party of the left uniting wide strands of those opposed to the appalling attacks of the rich and powerful against the majority of the working population and against the poor in general, and to build a new society based on equality, social justice and democratic control of the economy.
To join our new party it is not necessary to learn to speak or write in this exotic and tedious foreign language, or to pass a degree course in Soviet history or study the minute details of the glorious history of the Trotskyist parties over the last 80 years!
Finally, Mr Rouge seems to be saying that he has given up on Left Unity. I know I speak for many in saying “Thank God!”
Now we can get back to friendly and constructive debate, rather than arrogant trolling polemics.
I’ve been on the planet a long time now, and as time passes so does the optimism that rose to new heights before the disastrous defeat of the miners and all that followed for the working class.
The ruling class and it’s acolytes are attacking our wages and conditions with confidence and a viciousness I have not experienced.
It is this that’s important for us to combat. The sectarian sniping and meaningless jargon spouted in the contribution from Baton Rouge is irrelevant as Ray G pointed out.
Most young people who we need to engage in the struggle have experienced a very different kind of political environment, but they do relate to anti racist struggle, attacks on EMA, housing benefit and the iniquitous poverty stricken future that Cameron outlined.
A new movement and language is needed to pull them and other jaded activists into action. I’m not sure if Left Unity is that movement, but I wish you well progressing your founding conference.
Well said!
Here, Here, Ray G ! Mr Baton Rouge, AKA, “David Ellis” , AKA the “Manifesto Group” has lingered far too long, and often, on these discussion threads. Time he struck out on his own to build that political movement which will be more in tune with his (very) particular perspective;
More to the point on this abstract history lesson is where people stand today.
Lectures about Trotsky’s relationship with Victor Serge or the POUM are all very well, but what practical conclusions are drawn from them? That we should abandon the basic socialist position that the main enemy of the working class in an imperialist country like our own is our own ruling class? That we should declare that the main enemy of the working class over the Iraq war crisis was Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, and not Western imperialism? Ditto for every recent war from Kosovo to Afghanistan to the current Syria crisis. The main enemy for these people is whoever ‘our’ rulers regard as their enemy.
Or that we should embrace Israel as the embodiment of democracy and self-determination, and agitate for international recognition for a Palestinian bantustan as a sop to the victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing?
Spare us the lectures about historical questions that really do not (at this point at least) impinge very much on the issues that the left confronts today. Indeed their very distance from current circumstances may have people scratching their heads as to why this article is being published here, as opposed to in some journal of historical debate.
The reason is pretty simple. The real role of the AWL, in getting involved in Left Unity and the Socialist Platform, is not to engage in historical debate about the ‘French Turn’ or the merits or otherwise of the POUM in the Spanish Civil War, but to promote its pro-imperialist and Zionist politics in the here and now.
Its real aspiration is to found a ‘Friends of Israel’ faction in Left Unity, assuming Left Unity does grow into something significant, a pro-imperialist faction of witchhunters analogous to the Labour Friends of Israel, Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel, Conservative Friends of Israel (80% of Tory MP’s, by the way, are signed up to the latter – which tells you a lot about the ‘anti-racist’ pretentions of such groupings – not!!).
They are in fact racist, pro-imperialist and anti-Arab lobby groups within these parties – the AWL wants to create a similar lobby group in Left Unity or whatever new left party emerges from this situation.
Their support for the Daily Telegraph against George Galloway in the Iraq War period tells you all need to know about the Alliance for Workers Liberty. They endorsed the smears of the publication that lost this case twice, in the High Court and the Court of Appeal. Anyone in Left Unity that is too outspoken against imperialism or Israeli oppression etc can expect similar treatment, complete with the standard mendacious allegations of anti-semitism.
That is the relevance of the above dissembling article to today’s issues. It is meant to provide these witch-hunters with an abstract left image. All the better to act as internal thought-police over more contemporary questions in Left Unity should it actually achieve some real successes.
Dearie me , Ian, yet AGAIN your crudely simplistic sloganizing “anti Imperialist” dogmatism obviously makes it impossible for you to view each and every international crisis on a case by case basis.
So much simpler just to decide that if the Western powers are intervening on one side , a blanket unconditional “anti imperialism” necessitates that “we” on the Left must automatically be unconditionally on the “other side” ! Basic humanitarian considerations of course ,for those not morally bankrupted by their blinkered reductionist politics, sometimes should require the Left to actually concede that intervention by Western (“imperialist”) powers is the least bad option – eg, for masses of people facing imminent mass murder by tyrants, eg, the Iraqi Kurds ,Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya, etc.
Similarly your laughably crude misrepresentation of the AWL’s actually very nuanced, working class interests oriented , stance on the Israel/Palestine tragedy, as uncontestably “pro-imperialist” and “Zionist” , and your apparent support for the incorrigible dictator brown-nosing rogue George Galloway, tells us everything we need to know about your crude ,foaming at the mouth, stalinoid politics.
Hopefully Left Unity will not make its future international politics judgements on the basis of your crude caricature of old Soviet era foreign policy “stalino-Marxism” , whereby every act of the Western powers was automatically tagged as “imperialist aggression” , but the murderous oppression of Soviet client dictators (like the Baathist regimes in Syria and Iraq, and Gaddafi’s family crazed dictatorship in Libya ) of their own peoples was overlooked because they were supposedly “anti-Imperialists” !
For someone who claims to be ‘nuanced’, John is very quick to attribute Stalinist views to people on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. The Daily Mail was recently caught with its pants down saying similar things about Ralph Miliband – without any evidence at all. This is the same method. If you can’t truthfully argue against what someone actually says, invent a ‘Stalinist’ pedigree for them instead.
I have never expressed any admiration for Stalin or Stalinism. I have always been an opponent of Stalinism and its betrayals and crimes. So a nice bit of McCarthyism there. But the semi-neocon types on the left, the laptop bombardiers and their fellow travellers, do have an element of McCarthyism within their political make-up as well, so no surprise there.
At the time of Saddam Hussein’s most notorious act, the gassing of Kurds in Halabja in 1988, he was a client of the Western powers. Which is why the American propaganda machine initially tried to blame Iran for that action. They only decided it was a terrible crime 2 years later when they fell out with Saddam over Kuwait.
It is also a fact that in the ‘war on terror’, the Americans handed over ‘terror suspects’ to Qadaafi, to do what he liked with. Since the semi-neocon ‘lefts’ are soft on the ‘war on terror’, but also need to play up their own chauvinist-tinged take on dictators in the Arab world who the West dislike (as opposed to the ones they like), they have a bit of a problem with this.
The Western powers have ‘form’ for trying to blame others for the crimes of their own allies, including ones involving poison gas, so I would not take for granted their veracity over the Syrian issue today.
That’s the kind of people the ‘humanitarian’ interventionists ally with. Whether they are so keen on the bombing of TV stations, or water-treatment or sewage-treatment plants, or the use of depleted uranium or white phosphorus against civilians that invariably accompanies such ‘humanitarian’ interventions, they are not too keen to say. Or as Madeline Albright said, the death of half-a-million Iraqi children was a ‘price worth paying’ for ‘containing Saddam Hussein’. That is what ‘humanitarian intervention’ means in practice.
If they were around today, one might just as well call on Stalin, Hitler or Tojo to help the oppressed as call on British or US imperialism. In fact in those days that did actually happen, though the people involved, such as Chandra Bose in India for example, were fighting against the oppression of their own people by Britain.
On a more recent level, I remember being on a demonstration in 1983 outside the then-Soviet Embassy, during the massive pogrom that kicked off civil war in Sri-Lanka. Many hundreds of Tamil demonstrators were there, chanting ‘Russia, help the Tamil people’. I remember being one of a small handful of leftists who counterposed the slogan ‘Soviet workers help the Tamils’ in opposition to those calling on the Stalinist regime to intervene in Sri Lanka. So actually, I had a problem with ‘humanitarian intervention’ even then. Mind you, those people were genuinely facing savage oppression, and many of them did also believe that the USSR was ‘socialist’. So they had more excuse than today’s left neocons.
These ‘humanitarian intervention’ type views expressed today are just about softness on the notion that the ‘civilised’ West can bring ‘democracy’ to the supposedly backward peoples with their ‘barbaric’ governments. There’s nothing ‘socialist’ about that – its straight out of Kipling.
I certainly defend George Galloway against jingoes like John, and the AWL.
On this, they show what their politics really mean – hatred of those who show gut level hatred of imperialism and its crimes. Galloway, despite his reformist and Stalinoid politics has sometimes carried out some genuinely heroic acts of defiance against imperialism.
I’ll defend those acts, and political blows struck against imperialism, from his defeat of Oona King (a political blow against Blair’s wars that Left Unity is a long way from equalling) to his defiance of the US senate to also his defence of Julian Assange, without supporting his left-reformist strategy.
And I certainly will defend him, and his often sterling work in the 1990s agitating against the sanctions regime that killed hundred of thousands of Iraqis by depriving them of food, particularly infant supplements, and medicine in the most barbaric manner, against jingoes who are so hostile to the rights of the Arab peoples that they cannot even defend the right of Palestinian refugees and their offspring to live in what is now Israel, the territory from which they were violently expelled within living memory.
(So much for ‘nuance’. A ‘nuance’ that contradicts basic democratic principles and human decency is better called – a betrayal!)
As a reformist, and therefore also ultimately bourgeois, politician Galloway expresses this at times through illusions in nationalist and populist movements and leaders, which are a form of reformist illusions that need to be criticised.
But that has nothing in common with his vilification by reactionaries who are actually, and ironically, similar in mentality with Stalinists and other chauvinists who persecuted those who refused to join the camp of ‘humanitarian’ imperialism (which then included Stalin’s Russia) in WWII. Some of Galloway’s actions have put him at odds with those kinds of people, despite his own flawed background and tradition. That makes him, as far as I am concerned, a flawed but progressive figure – far superior to his semi-neocon critics on the ‘left’.
Finally, for Ray G’s benefit, if you can understand what I am saying, then my English is up to date and relevant. If you could not, I would be doing something wrong. I don’t use obscure language, but I do use Marxist terms in a way that is not (currently) fashionable. The question is whether they are accurate descriptions of reality or not – I am convinced they are, but I’m open to a coherent argument that contradicts that if one comes along (it hasn’t yet). As for hugging people, great idea, only don’t ask me to tone down the arguments for hugs. Cuddly politics is the last thing we need right now!
Oh – I had no idea that the main article, which I thought was a bit abstract and irrelevent but not actually that bad in content (if you like that sort of thing), was produced by someone written by the AWL. As an activist with Palestine Solidarity, I would have perhaps been a bit harsher, as I am no friend of these apologists for Zionism.
Mind you Ian, you are not averse to a bit of savage polemic or obsessing about Soviet history yourself and you also like the stylised rhetoric of the Trotskyist left. I think you should a) try to be a bit nicer, b) talk in plainer, up to date, relevant English and c) hug people more.
Hope to meet up with you at the founding conference.
Well said Roy. The article really should have been submitted to a site which caters for readers interested in the history of Trotskyism.
Trotsky? naah Social Democracy is the true Marxism. Marx hated Lenin, and that other one, the mass murderer.
Stop trying to make Trotskyism happen, it’s not going to happen.
Ian
You may like to know that I broadly agree with your most recent comments re Galloway and ‘humanitarian’ intervention. Galloway is, God knows, a flawed character but I am not going to join in with the establishment’s vilification of him as the embodiment of evil. His record on just about any issue is more consistent and moral than that of the ruling classes of Britain or the US. For clarity I do not think that being against your own imperialist country invading iraq, Syria etc involves you in supporting those countries’ dictators one jot, and I certainly support any of those democratic popular elements in Syria who are fighting the brutality of the Assad dictatorship. My enemy’s enemy is not necessarily my friend.
I did not criticise your use of Marxist terminology, by the way, but your rhetorical flourishes, by which I meant an unneccesarily savage tone of polemic against people who are, after looking at political opinions of society as a whole, not really the enemy. In internecine Trotskyist debates over the decades it always seems impossible to be just wrong, confused, inconsistent or misled. Your opponent has to be either a traitor, an idiot, or a running dog of imperialism.
John P is none of those things, although on the points at issue here he is not as right as you, in my opinion. I find the policies of the AWL very hard to stomach, to be sure, but is JP actually in AWL?? Is he really a “jingoist” – really?? A lot of what he has written on this blog in other threads has been very sensible, though I have not agreed with every word. How can we build left unity if we lay in to eachother in that kind of tone. Why not address the actual points at issue. You might actually convince someone instead of humiliating them.
Big hug.
Just to be fair – some of JP’s attack on you is representative of the same kind of absurd polemical devices – such as “foaming at the mouth stalinoid politics” and any epithet with a hyphen is usually suspect, such as “stalino-marxist”.
What do all those silly shorthand phrases actually mean, not only to the uninitiated readers but even to the author!
I dunno, I tend to adopt a stronger tone with those who take positions knowing they have more powerful forces behind them – i.e. sections of the ruling class, and a softer and more explanatory role to people I judge to be simply confused, even if their confusion means they are in formal terms very far from Marxism. What matters to me is social power, not abstract ideas, and joining in the vilification of George Galloway, for instance, puts someone objectively in the same camp as very dangerous warmongers who do have that kind of power. In that sense I would defend that usage of ‘jingoism’.
That does not mean that Galloway is above criticism, just that particular kinds of criticism have particular implications, and the allegation that he is some kind of ‘stooge’ of ‘dictators’ really does have a jingoistic flavour to it. Phrases about ‘Stalino-Marxism’ etc. really reflect social democratic politics and demonology, and social democrats are quite capable of jingoism. Including even Galloway in the right circumstances – he has a portrait of Churchill is his office by the way – reflecting his very mainstream view of WWII.
Support for ‘humanitarian’ intervention by ‘our’ ruling class is part of a lamentable tradition that goes back to 1914, when German and British reformists helped incite millions of British and German workers to kill each other in an utterly pointless slaughter. So when someone gives support to ‘humanitarian intervention’, and vilifies Galloway (a maverick reformist whose gut hatred of today’s imperialism often contradicts his political tradition), how does that not include elements of jingoism?
Oh dear,After reading the above, I do hope that the People,s Judean Liberaton front will not be allowed to join LU, because as a member of the Liberation front for the people of Judea, I could not possible participate!
Affectionately yours a retired worker.